Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets

by David Simon

  The sergeant couldn’t argue with the logic behind Edgerton’s rooftop theory, its explanation for the placement of the child’s body. But he never believed that the warrant on 702 Newington would yield anything. For one thing, there were nearly two dozen people living in that shithole. Even if one homicidal child molester managed to lure the kid into the house, kill her and keep the body in his room for a prolonged period of time, how could he have kept eighteen other occupants from knowing about it? Landsman was certain that the murder was the work of one man, acting alone, but the house at 702 Newington looked as though it were hosting the citywide convention for Baltimore’s underclass. Landsman wasn’t surprised when the lab reports on the clothing and sheets from the raid came back positive for blood, but negative for the victim’s blood type, just as none of the latent prints taken from the house matched those of the victim.

  The outcome of the raid on 702 Newington left both Landsman and Tom Pellegrini wishing that they had spent more time searching the Fish Man’s store and apartment. Their haste at the Whitelock Street addresses-like everything else with this case-was particularly upsetting to Pellegrini, who worried about what may have been missed. Edgerton’s theory had been so sound, so sensible, and given the earlier child abuse report from 702 Newington, Pellegrini had been convinced. With the raid a bust, he had returned with Landsman to the old store owner.

  Their interest in the Fish Man had increased since the raids, not only because of the outcome on Newington Avenue, but also because of a profile of Latonya Wallace’s killer prepared by the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crimes, the FBI’s behavioral analysis unit. On the day after the raids, Rich Garvey and Bob Bowman had been dispatched to the FBI academy in Quantico, Virginia, where they provided raw data from the crime scene and autopsy to federal agents trained in psychological profiling.

  The FBI’s characterization of a likely suspect had considerable detail. He would be “a nocturnal individual who will feel more comfortable at night… the offender will be known to young kids in the neighborhood and will be considered strange but nice to children. The offender may have already been interviewed by investigators or he may interject himself into the investigation… In most cases the offender will follow press accounts of the investigation and will make some effort to establish an alibi. The offender, who probably has been involved in similar crimes previously, will show no remorse over having killed the victim, but will be concerned over the possibility of being apprehended.”

  The analysis further noted that “offenders of this type are difficult to interview and as time goes on, the events which occurred will be altered in the offender’s mind, making it difficult for him to relate to the crime. It is possible that the offender killed the victim within a short period of time of coming in contact with her… The victim in this instance may not have responded to the offender as he thought initially she would have responded. His difficulty in controlling her may have led to the victim’s death. Possibly the victim may have initially felt safe or comfortable with the offender and gone willingly with him into a residence or building.”

  The profile described the probable offender as fifty years of age, probably unmarried and with a history of problems involving female relationships: “The offender most likely had earlier encounters with young girls in this neighborhood. The death of Latonya Wallace is not believed to be a stranger murder.”

  To Landsman and Pellegrini, the FBI profile seems to match the Fish Man. But without any substantive evidence, the only option is to hammer on the old man in another long interrogation in the hope that something new will be revealed. For this very reason, Edgerton and Pellegrini are still at the office as Landsman drives home; they plan to work late into the night preparing for a second confrontation with the Fish Man scheduled for the weekend.

  But Landsman isn’t optimistic about the coming interrogation either. The FBI analysis also made it clear that a violent sex offender is among the most difficult suspects to break. There was no Out to offer such people, no reasonable suggestion that the murder could be mitigated in some way. Moreover, the crime was genuinely sociopathic: An absence of remorse would probably be coupled with rationalizations in the suspect’s mind. All that had to be coupled with the fact that the Fish Man had previously walked out a free man after one interrogation; he would be less intimidated by a second attempt. And still there is the missing crime scene, the absence of any physical evidence with which to link a suspect to the crime. The detectives have rumors, suspicions, and now a psychological profile. But working without a scene, they have nothing that can argue against the Fish Man’s story, nothing that can be used as leverage in an interrogation.

  It is a bastard of a case, and again Landsman asks himself: What are we missing? Maneuvering through the evening traffic on Liberty Road, he runs two weeks of investigation through his mind. Every day since February 4, the detectives had marched into Reservoir Hill, questioning locals, checking garages and vacant apartments in an ever-growing radius from Newington Avenue. With the consent of the occupants, detectives had managed to perform plain-view searches of every one of the thirteen occupied rowhouses on the north side of Newington, as well as many of the properties on the Callow and Park Avenue sides of the block. They had checked alibis and living quarters for every male suspect identified in the early canvassing.

  The dead girl’s clothes and belongings were still being checked for trace evidence; but excepting those black smudges on her pants, nothing looked especially promising. The blue satchel and its contents had been sent to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms laboratory, thirty-five miles away in Rockville, Maryland, for laser fingerprinting, an examination that yielded a few latent prints on the library texts. Those prints were now on the fifth floor of headquarters, running through a Printrak computer that electronically searches for possible matches among the fingerprint files of everyone with a previous arrest in Baltimore.

  On the chance that the little girl had left something more than an earring at the crime scene, Edgerton had checked with the library for the titles of the books she checked out that Tuesday afternoon. And when the library system explained that such information could not be released without infringing on the borrower’s privacy, Edgerton actually called the mayor himself; Hizzoner made it easy for the librarians to change their minds. Meanwhile, Pellegrini had gone back more than a decade in the old homicide files, looking for any unsolved murder or disappearance involving young girls. Landsman had checked the sex offense unit for any recent reports in the Reservoir Hill area. Then, with the family’s permission, Pellegrini had walked through the little girl’s room, read through her pink and blue diary, even developed the film in her Polaroid camera in search of a suspect. And all of the detectives and detail officers had spent hours running down the telephone tips that followed any TV broadcast that mentioned the case:

  “I have the killer of Latonya Wallace in my house.”

  “The family was involved with drugs. The little girl was killed as a warning.”

  “My boyfriend killed her.”

  When one ninety-two-year-old woman with failing eyesight claimed to have seen a little girl in a red raincoat enter a Park Avenue church on the afternoon of February 2, Pellegrini dutifully arranged to check inside the building and interview the minister. When a detail officer asked what questions would be put to the clergyman, Pellegrini simply shrugged and offered a Landsman-like deadpan: “How about, ‘Why did you kill her?’”

  Like every corridor in the Latonya Wallace labyrinth, the anonymous calls and false sightings led nowhere. Landsman wonders which part of the maze has been overlooked, which portal has yet to be explored. What the hell are they missing?

  The sergeant is nearly home when a fresh thought forces its way to the surface, suddenly breaking through the thick crust of detail: the car. Right next door. A cool, dry place.

  The neighbor’s goddamn Lincoln, the only fucking car that anyone ever saw in the alley. And it was parke
d just on the other side of the fence from the rear yard of 718 Newington. Hell yes.

  Landsman pulls to the slow lane of Liberty Road, looking for a pay phone so that he can call and tell Pellegrini and Edgerton to stay put. He’s going back in.

  Twenty minutes later the sergeant storms into the annex office, still cursing himself for not seeing it earlier. “It’s right there in front of us,” he tells Pellegrini. “This is it. It’s gonna go down.”

  Landsman lays it out for the two detectives: “If she’s killed Tuesday, he needs to put the body in a cool, dry place or we’re going to have decomp, right? So he gets the body out the back door and into the car trunk, thinking he’s gonna drive it somewhere at night. But for some reason he’s unable to dump the body. Or maybe when he goes out, he gets scared…”

  “This is the guy who lives at seven-sixteen?” asks Edgerton.

  “Yeah, the husband of Ollie’s neighbor. What’s-his-name.”

  “Andrew,” says Pellegrini.

  “Yeah, Andrew. Ollie doesn’t like him a little bit.”

  Landsman recalls the first hours of the investigation, when Ollie’s husband, the old man who lives at 718 Newington and found the child’s body, was asked whether anyone parked a car in the alley. The man had mentioned his neighbor, a middle-aged man who had recently married the churchgoing woman who lived at 716 and often left his Lincoln Continental in the back yard. In fact, the car had been out back for most of the previous week.

  “When he told me, he even walked to his back window and looked out, like he expected it to be there.” Landsman cuts to the chase: “The motherfucker moved it. He parks back there all the time. Why all of a sudden, on that morning, is the Lincoln parked out in front of the house on Newington?”

  Edgerton finds the arrest sheet for the man who lives at 716 Newington: no sex offenses, but someone who at certain points in his life would not have been mistaken for a civic asset.

  “That’s the other thing,” says Landsman. “This guy Andrew, he don’t fit. What’s a guy with a record doing married to a churchgoing woman? It’s fucked up.”

  It is closing on nine o’clock, but Landsman is now too wired to call it a night. Instead, the trio barter the keys to a Cavalier and drive back up to Newington Avenue. They check front and back, but the Lincoln isn’t on the block. Landsman knocks on the front door of 718, where a sad-faced woman answers the door in a worn cotton nightgown.

  “Hey, Ollie,” says Landsman, “is your husband around? We just need to check a couple things.”

  “He’s lying down.”

  “We just need a minute or two.”

  The woman shrugs and leads the way to the rear bedroom on the first floor. Stretched out on his back beneath a gray sheet, the old man who found the little girl’s body in his back yard watches the parade of detectives with mild curiosity.

  “He got sick this week,” says the woman, retreating to the corner of the room.

  “Sorry to hear that. What’re you sick with?”

  “Cold or somethin’,” the old man says in a low mumble. “Y’know the hawk’s been out.”

  “Yeah it has, um, hey, listen,” says Landsman, shifting gears suddenly. “You remember that day you found the body and we were talking? You remember when I asked you if anyone parked in the alley and you told me about Andrew next door?”

  The old man nods.

  “I remember you even walked over to the kitchen window, like you were gonna show me his car, but it wasn’t there that morning, remember?”

  “Yeah, I thought he had it there.”

  “What we need to know is if Andrew had his car parked out there earlier in the week, like on Tuesday or Wednesday?”

  “It’s a while back now,” the old man says.

  “Yeah it is, but can you think on it…”

  The old man drops his head back against a pillow and stares at the cracked ceiling. The room waits.

  “Think he did, yeah.”

  “You think so, huh?”

  “He park it back there a lot, you know,” says the old man.

  “Yeah, that’s what I remember you telling me,” says Landsman. “Listen, what do you know about Andrew?”

  “Don’t know nuthin’, really.”

  “I mean what kind of a guy is he?”

  The old man looks nervously at his wife. “I really don’t know…”

  Landsman looks at Ollie and catches something on her face. She has something to say she doesn’t want her husband to hear.

  “Well, listen, thanks a lot for helping,” says Landsman, moving toward the bedroom door. “You take care of yourself now, okay?”

  The old man nods and watches his wife follow the detectives out of the room. She closes the door and follows Landsman to the other end of the hall.

  “Hey, Ollie,” Landsman says to her, “remember what you were saying about Andrew?”

  “I don’t…”

  “About how he’s like a gigolo living off…”

  “Well,” says Ollie, a little embarrassed, “I know she bought that car for him and now he uses it to go out on the town. He’s gone every night.”

  “Yeah? Do you know if he likes young girls?”

  “Yeah, he likes young girls,” she says, disapproving.

  “I mean, real young.”

  “Well, that I can’t really say…”

  “Okay, that’s all right,” Landsman says. “Where’s the car now? Do you know?”

  “He say the repo man came an’ took it.”

  Pellegrini and Edgerton look at each other. It’s almost too perfect.

  “It was repossessed?” asks Landsman. “He told you that?”

  “She told my husband that.”

  “Your neighbor did? Andrew’s wife?”

  “Yeah,” she says, wrapping her robe tight in the chill of the front hall. “She say Johnny’s Cars came an’ got it.”

  “Johnny’s? Up on Harford Road?”

  “I guess.”

  The detectives thank the woman, then head straight to Johnny’s in Northeast Baltimore, where they walk the entire lot looking for the car that Andrew’s wife said had been repossessed. No Lincoln. Landsman is now completely convinced.

  “This motherfucker dumps the body, gets rid of his car, and when people ask him, he says it got repo’d. Fuck it, we need to talk to this motherfucker tonight.”

  It is after 11:00 P.M. when they return to Newington Avenue and talk their way into 716. Andrew is a short, balding man with a face that is all hard angles. He is still awake, drinking warm beer and watching the local news in the basement. Three plainclothes detectives walking down the stairs do not seem to surprise him.

  “Hey, Andrew, I’m Sergeant Landsman, this is Detective Edgerton and Detective Pellegrini. We’re working on the little girl’s murder. How you doin’ tonight?”

  “Awright.”

  “Listen, we want to ask you a couple questions about your car.”

  “My car?” asks Andrew, curious.

  “Yeah. The Lincoln.”

  “They took that away,” he says, as if that should end any discussion.

  “Who did?”

  “The car dealer.”

  “Johnny’s?”

  “Yeah.’ Cause my wife, she didn’t make the payment on it,” he adds, a little put out.

  Landsman steers the conversation toward the parking pad in the back alley. Andrew readily acknowledges his habit of keeping the car in the rear yard to prevent theft or vandalism, then further agrees that the car had been in the rear yard on the Tuesday night of the girl’s disappearance.

  “I remember it ’cause I went out to the car for something and felt like someone was out there watching me.”

  Landsman, startled, looks hard at the man.

  “How’s that again?”

  “I went out to the car that night to get something and I felt real nervous, like someone was out there watching me,” he repeats.

  Landsman gives Pellegrini one of those did-I-hear-wh
at-I-just-thought-I-heard stares. Three minutes into the conversation and the guy is already putting himself out in the alley on the night the child is abducted. Hell, he probably had reason to be nervous about being watched out there in the alley on Tuesday. Who the fuck wouldn’t be nervous carrying a little girl’s body from their back door to a car trunk?

  “Why were you nervous?”

  Andrew shrugs. “I just got a strange feeling, you know…”

  Edgerton begins walking the length of the basement room, looking for red-brown stains or a child’s gold earring. The basement is a poor version of a bachelor’s lair, with a sofa and television in the center of the room and, against the long wall, five or six liquor bottles on top of an old dresser being used as a bar. Behind the sofa is a plastic laundry tub containing two to three inches of urine. What the hell is it about Newington Avenue that makes people piss into buckets?

  “This is kind of your place down here, huh?” asks Edgerton.

  “Yeah, this is where I hang.”

  “Your wife don’t come down here much?”

  “No, she leaves me be.”

  Landsman brings Andrew back to the night in the alley: “What did you go out to the car for?”

  “I can’t remember. Something in the glove compartment.”

  “You didn’t go in the trunk?”

  “The trunk? No, the glove compartment… I had the car doors open and I just felt like I was being watched. I was, you know, a little scared about it and said, well, damn, I’ll get whatever I need to get tomorrow morning. So I went back inside.”

  Landsman looks at Pellegrini, then back at Andrew. “Did you know the little girl?”

  “Me?” The question startles him. “The girl that got killed? I haven’t been here that long, you know. I don’t know most people around here.”

  “What do you think they should do to the guy that killed her?” asks Landsman, smiling strangely.

  “Hey,” says Andrew, “do what you have to do. Make sure it’s the right guy and then you don’t even need a trial. I have a daughter, and if it were her, I’d take care of it myself… I have friends who would help me take care of it.”