Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets

by David Simon

  The two men leave the bar, walking through the restaurant and out the double doors on the Water Street side. In three months, the Market Bar and Seafood Restaurant will become Dominique’s, a French restaurant of considerable means. The clientele will be dressed better, the food more expensive, the menu a little less comprehensible to the average homicide detective. Nicky will be gone, the price of a drink will climb into the four-dollar range and the departmental crowd that frequents the bar will be told that their patronage no longer suits the restaurant’s image. But for now, the Market Bar is as much BPD territory as Kavanaugh’s or the FOP lodge.

  Pellegrini and Requer turn on Frederick Street and saunter down the same stretch of pavement where Bob Bowman made his legendary midnight ride. No homicide detective can pass the spot without smiling at the thought of a drunken Bowman, borrowing a mounted man’s horse long enough to parade back and forth in front of the Market Bar’s plate glass windows, through which a half-dozen other detectives could be seen losing control. On a good day, Bo was five-foot-six. Perched on that stallion, he looked like a cross between Napoleon Bonaparte and Willie Shoemaker.

  “You all right to drive?” asks Pellegrini.

  “Yeah, bunk, I’m good.”

  “You sure?”

  “Fuck yes.”

  “Okay then.”

  “Hey, Tom,” says Requer before crossing to the Hamilton Street lot, “if the case is gonna go, then it’s gonna go. Don’t let it get you down.”

  Pellegrini smiles.

  “I mean that,” says Requer.

  “Okay, Rick.”

  “Really.”

  Pellegrini smiles again, but with the look of a drowning man no longer willing to fight against the current.

  “Really, bunk. You do what you can do and that’s it. If the evidence ain’t there, you know, it ain’t there. You do what you can…”

  Requer hits the younger detective’s shoulder with an open hand, then fishes in a pants pocket for his car keys. “You know what I mean, bunk.”

  Pellegrini nods, smiles, then nods again. But he keeps his silence.

  FRIDAY, APRIL 8

  “Brown, you piece of shit.”

  “Sir?”

  “I called you a piece of shit.”

  Dave Brown looks up from the current issue of Rolling Stone and sighs. Donald Worden is on a tear, and nothing good can come from that.

  “Gimme a quarter,” says Worden, palm open.

  “Let me understand this,” says Brown. “I’m here at my desk reading a magazine-”

  “One of them art school magazines,” Worden interjects.

  Brown shakes his head wearily. Although his most recent creations have been limited to renderings of dead stickmen in his crime scene sketches, David John Brown is indeed the product of the Maryland Institute of Art. In Worden’s mind, this fact alone makes suspect his credentials as a homicide detective.

  “Reading a magazine of rock ’n’ roll and popular culture,” Brown continues, “interfering with no one, and you walk through the door and address me as fecal matter.”

  “Fecal matter. What the hell is that? I didn’t go to college. I’m just a poor dumb white boy from Hampden.”

  Brown rolls his eyes.

  “Gimme a quarter, bitch.”

  This has been going on ever since Dave Brown arrived in homicide. Time and time again, Worden demands 25-cent pieces from younger detectives, then simply pockets the money. No trip to the Macke machines downstairs, no donation to the coffee fund-the money is taken as tribute, plain and simple. Brown digs in his pocket, then tosses a quarter at the older detective.

  “What a piece of shit,” Worden repeats, catching the coin. “Why don’t you start handling some calls, Brown?”

  “I just handled a murder.”

  “Yeah?” says Worden, strutting over to Brown’s desk. “Well, handle this.”

  The Big Man leans over Brown’s chair, his crotch even with the younger detective’s mouth. Brown screams in mock hysteria, bringing Terry McLarney into the room.

  “Sergeant McLarney, sir,” shouts Brown, with Worden now almost on top of him. “Detective Worden is forcing me to engage in sexual acts prohibited by law. As my immediate supervisor, I appeal to your…”

  McLarney smiles, salutes, then turns on his heel. “Carry on, men,” he says, walking back into the main office.

  “Get off me, goddammit,” yells Brown, tiring of the joke. “Leave me alone, you polar-bear-looking bitch.”

  “Oooooooo,” says Worden, backing off. “Now I know what you really think of me.”

  Brown says nothing, trying hard to return to the magazine.

  The Big Man won’t let him. “Piece… of…”

  Brown glares at the older detective, his right hand making a furtive move toward a shoulder holster burdened by the long barrel.38. “Careful,” says Brown. “I brought the big gun today.”

  Worden shakes his head, then walks to the coat rack, looking for his cigars. “What the hell are you doing with that magazine, Brown?” he says, lighting up. “Why aren’t you out there working on Rodney Tripps?”

  Rodney Tripps. Dead drug dealer in the driver’s seat of his luxury car. No witnesses. No suspects. No physical evidence. What the hell was there to work on?

  “You know, I’m not the only person around here with an open one,” says Brown, exasperated. “I see a couple names up there in red ink that belong to you.”

  Worden says nothing, and for just a second Brown wishes he could take back the last two sentences. The office banter always has an edge, but every now and then the line gets crossed. Brown knows that for the first time in three years the Big Man is truly slumping, carrying two consecutive open cases; more important, the mayhem that is the Monroe Street investigation is dragging on interminably.

  As a consequence, Worden spends his days shepherding two dozen witnesses into the grand jury room on the second floor of the Mitchell Courthouse, then waiting outside while Tim Doory, the lead prosecutor in the case, does his best to recreate the mysterious slaying of John Randolph Scott. Worden, too, has been called before the same panel, with several of the grand jurors asking pointed questions about the actions of the officers involved in the pursuit of Scott-particularly after those jurors listened to the Central District radio tape. And Worden has no answers; the case begins and ends with a young man’s body in a West Baltimore alley and a cast of Western and Central District officers, all claiming no knowledge of the event.

  Not surprisingly, Worden’s only civilian witness-the man identified in newsprint as a potential suspect-has gone before the grand jury and refused to testify, invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Sergeant Wiley, the officer who found the body and who would be made to explain his prior radio transmission canceling the suspect’s description, has not been called as a witness.

  We call Wiley as a last resort, Doory explained to Worden at one point, because if he’s culpable, he’ll also take the Fifth. And at that point, the prosecutor argued, there are few options left: If we let him refuse to testify, he walks out of the grand jury room, leaving us with insufficient evidence for any kind of indictment. But if we offer him immunity to compel his testimony, then what? What if John Wiley, under a grant of immunity, tells us he shot that kid? Then, Doory explained, we’ve solved a crime we can’t prosecute.

  Returning from the courthouse every weekday afternoon, Worden’s nights are spent in the rotation, handling shootings, suicides and, ultimately, fresh murders. And for the first time since his transfer to homicide, Worden has no answers for those either.

  Given that his squad is built around Worden, even McLarney is a little unnerved by the trend. Every detective gets his share of unsolved cases, but for Worden, two consecutive open files simply don’t happen.

  During a recent midnight shift, McLarney pointed to the red names on the board and announced: “One of those is going down,” adding, as much to hear himself say it as to convince anyone else, �
�Donald won’t stand for two in a row like that.”

  The first case was a drug murder from Edmondson Avenue back in March, a street shooting in which the only potential witness was a fourteen-year-old runaway from a juvenile detention center. Whether the kid could be found and whether he would tell his story was uncertain. But the second murder, an argument up on Ellamont which escalated into the slaying of a thirty-year-old man-that one ordinarily should have been a dunker. Dwayne Dickerson had been shot once in the back of the head when he tried to intervene in a street dispute, and when everyone involved had been shipped downtown and interviewed, Worden was left with one depressing truth: No one seemed to know the shooter or, for that matter, what he was doing in Baltimore with a gun in his hand. By all accounts-and the witnesses were consistent-the shooter had nothing to do with the original argument.

  McLarney may like to think that Worden isn’t capable of letting two murders stay red, but unless the phone rings on the Dickerson murder, there isn’t much left for an investigator to do but check other assault-by-shooting reports from the Southwest and hope something matches. Worden has told his sergeant just that, but McLarney heard instead the echo of Monroe Street. To his way of thinking, the department had used his best detective to go after other cops, and God knows that kind of thing has an effect on a man like Worden. For two months, McLarney has been trying to get his best detective away from the Scott murder, easing him back into the rotation. Get the man back on his horse with some fresh murders, McLarney figures. Get him back on the street and he’ll be the same.

  But Worden is not the same. And when Brown lets slip the comment about the red names on the wall, Worden suddenly lapses into cold silence. The banter, the bitching, the locker room humor, give way to brooding.

  Brown senses this and changes tone, trying to bait the Big Man rather than fight him off. “Why are you always fucking with me?” he asks. “Why don’t you ever go after Waltemeyer? Does Waltemeyer go out to Pikesville on Saturday dayshifts to get you bagels?”

  Worden says nothing.

  “Why the hell don’t you ever fuck with Waltemeyer?”

  Brown knows the answer, of course. Worden isn’t going to fuck with Waltemeyer, who has more than two decades in the trenches. He’s going to fuck with Dave Brown, who has a mere thirteen years on the force. And Donald Waltemeyer isn’t going to drive up to Pikesville at seven A.M. to get bagels for the same reason. Brown gets the bagels because Brown is the new man and Worden is breaking him in. And when the likes of Donald Worden wants a dozen bagels and half a pound of veggie spread, the new man gets in a Cavalier and drives to Philadelphia if need be.

  “This is the thanks I get,” says Brown, still goading the older detective.

  “What do you want me to do, kiss you?” says Worden, finally responding. “You didn’t even get garlic for me.”

  Brown rolls his eyes. Garlic bagels. Always with the goddamn garlic bagels. They’re supposed to be better for the Big Man’s blood pressure, and when Brown brings back onion or poppy on weekend dayshifts, he never hears the end of it. Excluding the image of Waltemeyer locked in the large interrogation room with six drunken Greek stevedores, Brown’s most fully formed fantasy delivers him to Worden’s front lawn at five on a Saturday morning to lob sixty or seventy garlic bagels against the master bedroom windows.

  “They didn’t have garlic,” says Brown. “I asked.”

  Worden looks at him with contempt. It is the same expression he carries in that crime scene photograph from Cherry Hill, the one that Brown liberated for his personal collection, the one that said, “Brown, you piece of shit, how can you possibly believe those beer cans have anything to do with your crime scene.” One day, Worden just may retire and Dave Brown just may become the next centerpiece of McLarney’s squad. But until then, the younger man’s life is consigned to any hell of Worden’s choosing.

  For Worden, however, the hell is entirely the creation of his own mind. He has loved this job-loved it too much, perhaps-and now, finally, he seems to be running out of time. That it is hard for Worden to accept this is understandable; for twenty-five years, he came to work every day armed with the knowledge that wherever the department decided to put him, he would shine. It had always been so, beginning with all those years in the Northwest, an extended tour that made working that district second nature to him. Hell, he still can’t work a homicide up there without making some connection to places and people he knew back when. From the beginning, he had never been much on writing the reports, but damned if there was anyone better at reading the street. Nothing happened on his post that escaped Worden’s notice: his memory for faces, for addresses, for incidents that other cops had long forgotten, is simply amazing. Unlike every other detective in the unit, Worden never carries notepaper to his crime scenes for the simple reason that he remembers everything; a standard joke in the unit was that Worden needed a single matchbook to record the particulars of three homicides and a police shooting. On the witness stand, attorneys would often ask to see Worden’s notes, then be incredulous when he claimed to have none.

  “I just remember things,” he told one defense attorney. “Ask your question.”

  On slow nights, Worden would take out a Cavalier and ride through a drug market, or downtown through the Meat Rack on Park Avenue, where hustlers sold themselves outside the gay pickup bars. Each tour provided another four or five faces for his memory bank, another four or five victims or victimizers who might one day matter to a case file. It wasn’t a purely photographic memory but it was mighty close, and when Worden finally brought it downtown to the old escape and apprehension unit, it was clear to everyone that he would never go back to Northwest plainclothes. The man was born to be a detective.

  It wasn’t just his superb memory that kept him in CID, though that asset alone was formidable enough when someone was trying to track a prison escapee, or match up a string of city and county robberies, or remember which west side shootings involved a.380 automatic. But the elephant’s memory was part and parcel of Worden’s whole approach to police work, his clarity of thought and purpose, his insistence on dealing with people directly and demanding, in a quiet and formidable way, that they do the same.

  Worden had fought his share of battles but his size had never marked him for violence, and his gun-which time and again he threatened to pawn-had been almost irrelevant to his career. His bluster, his taunting insults in the squadroom, were as much an act as anything else, and everyone-from Brown to McLarney-knew it.

  His size could be intimidating, of course, and Worden used that fact on occasion. But ultimately he did the job using his mind, with a thought process as fluid as it was refined. At a crime scene, he absorbed not only the physical evidence, but everything and everyone on the periphery. Often, Rick James would be doing the boilerplate work at a scene only to look up and see Worden standing a block away, a mass of whiteness in a sea of black faces. And damned if he didn’t always come back with some piece of information about the dead man. Any other detective would get eyefucked and maybe cursed, but Worden somehow managed to take the corner boys beyond that, to make it clear that he was there to put something right. If they had any respect for the victim, if they ever even thought about saying anything that a police detective might like to overhear, this was their chance.

  Some of it was Worden’s gruff, paternalistic manner. Those blue eyes, those jowls, that thinning white hair-Worden looked like the father whose respect no man could bear to lose. During interviews and interrogations he spoke softly, wearily, with a look that made lying seem like an inexplicable sin. That held true for black or white, man or woman, gay or straight; Worden carried a credibility that somehow transcended the excesses of his profession. On the street, people who had contempt for every other law officer often made a separate peace with Donald Worden.

  Once, when he was already downtown, working robberies with Ron Grady, the mother of a boy they had arrested was threatening to file a brutality complaint with the internal
affairs division. Grady, she was told, had beat the kid in the district lockup.

  “Grady didn’t hit your boy,” Worden told the mother. “I did.”

  “Awright, Mr. Donald,” the woman declared. “If you had to hit him, then I knowed he needed it.”

  But he rarely hit anyone. He rarely needed to. Unlike many of the cops he came on with-and a good many younger officers, too-he was no racist, though any kid born and raised in the white, working-class enclave of Hampden had ample opportunity to acquire the taste. Nor was the Baltimore department the most tolerant environment in which to come of age; there were cops twenty years younger who reacted to what they saw on the streets by crawling into a psychological cave, damning every nigger and liberal faggot to hell for screwing up the country. Yet somehow, with nothing more than a high school education and his Navy training, Worden grew with the job. His mother had something to do with that; she was not the kind of woman to bring prejudice into a house. His long partnership with Grady also had good effect; he could not, on the one hand, respect and care for a black detective, then go dropping words like nigger and toad as if they meant nothing.

  That sensitivity was another strength. Worden was one of the few white detectives in homicide who could sit across the desk from a fifteen-year-old black kid and make it clear-with nothing more than a look and a word or two-that they were both beginning with a blank page. Respect brought respect, contempt the same. Anyone with eyes could see that the bargain being offered was a fair one.

  It was Worden, for example, who won the gay community’s trust when a series of homosexual murders began plaguing the Mount Vernon neighborhood downtown. The department as a whole was still shunned by many in the gay community for a history of harassment, both real and perceived. But Worden could walk into any Park Avenue club, show a bartender a series of BPI photos and get some truthful answers. His word was his bond and it wasn’t his job to judge or threaten. He didn’t need anyone to come out of any closets or file any official report of crimes. He just needed to know: Is the guy in the photo the same one out hustling in the bars, the same one who’s been beating and robbing the men who pick him up? When the Mount Vernon murders went down, Worden made his point by taking his whole squad to a gay bar on Washington Boulevard, where he bought one round for the place and then, to the delight of the other detectives, drank free for the rest of the night.