Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets

by David Simon

  “Thank you,” says Cassidy to the girl. “You know you did the right thing.”

  “I know it,” she says, a little unnerved. “Good luck to you, with the baby and all.”

  McLarney listens to the exchange and smiles from the bar, already a little bit drunk. The gathering plays out until it is soon a little after one in the morning and Nicky comes out from behind the bar to begin cleaning tables. Cassidy is gone, followed by Belt and Tuggle and Gersh. McLarney, Moulter, Biemiller and a few others remain as the young juror finally gathers up her things.

  “We’re going down to Clinton Street after we close this place,” McLarney tells her. “You’re welcome to come.”

  “What’s Clinton Street?”

  “Hallowed ground,” jokes another cop.

  Even before the girl can answer, McLarney feels the awkwardness of his own suggestion. The end of Clinton Street is the best hole in the Southeastern District, but it’s nothing more than a rotting wharf. This girl here is normal. A civilian.

  “Clinton Street is this pier a few minutes from here,” McLarney explains, embarrassed. “Vince is going to go get some beer and we’re going to meet him there. It’s no big deal.”

  “I’ve got to get home,” she says, uncomfortably. “Really.”

  “Okay, then,” says McLarney, relieved in a way. “Vince can drive you to your car.”

  “Thanks for the beer,” she says. “I’ve got to say, I wouldn’t want to go through it again, but it’s been an interesting experience. Thanks.”

  “No,” says McLarney. “Thank you.”

  Vince Moulter leaves with the girl. McLarney finishes his beer and drops a tip on the bar for Nicky. He checks himself for car keys, wallet, badge, gun-the usual barroom inventory that tells McLarney he’s good to go.

  “You thought she’d want to go to Clinton Street?” asks Biemiller, looking at him with raised eyebrows.

  “You don’t get it,” McLarney tells him, irritated. “She’s a hero.”

  Biemiller smiles.

  “Who’s coming?” asks McLarney.

  “You, me, Vince, maybe a couple of the others. I told Vince to get a couple cases.”

  They leave in separate cars, driving east and south through the rowhouse neighborhoods of Fells Point and Canton. They pick up Clinton Street at the harbor’s edge, then drive south for a quarter mile, where the road dead-ends in the shadow of the Lehigh Cement towers. To the right, as they spill from their cars, is a corrugated iron warehouse. To the left, a battered shipping terminal. The night is warm and the harbor water gives off a slight, garbage scow stench.

  Ten minutes behind the others, Moulter shows up with two cases of Coors Light. McLarney and the other Western hands pick up where they left off, their voices growing louder, less restrained, in the warm spring night. Moulter finds an FM station and cranks the car stereo. An hour passes with nothing more than shop talk and station house humor; McLarney does his bit, tossing a few amusing homicide tales into the kitty.

  Soon there are two dozen silver empties bobbing in the harbor waters or lying dead against the metal side of the warehouse.

  “A toast,” says Biemiller.

  “To the Western.”

  “No. To Gene.”

  “To Gene.”

  They drink and Moulter cranks the radio higher. It is several minutes before they notice a lone figure, a foreman perhaps, near the warehouse gate.

  Biemiller sees him first.

  “Sarge. Over there.”

  McLarney pushes his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. The foreman is just standing there, staring at them.

  “Don’t worry about it,” McLarney tells them. “I’ll handle this.”

  McLarney grabs a fresh can-a peace offering of sorts-and walks toward the warehouse gate. Leaning over the railing of a metal landing, the foreman stares down with undisguised contempt. McLarney smiles back apologetically. “How’s it going?” he says.

  The man spits. “Ain’t you assholes got nothing better to do than come down here all drunk and raising hell? Who the hell you think you are?”

  McLarney looks down at his shoes, then back up at the foreman’s face. His voice is only a little bit better than a whisper. “I don’t suppose,” he says, “that you’d want to come down here and say that.”

  The foreman doesn’t move.

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “Fuck you,” the man replies, turning back through the gate. “I’m calling the cops.”

  McLarney saunters back to the end of the pier, where the other revelers look at him quizzically.

  “What’d he say?” asks Moulter.

  McLarney shrugs. “We reached an understanding. He’s calling the police and we’re getting the hell out of here.”

  “Where to?”

  “Somewhere close.”

  “Calverton?”

  “Calverton.”

  The beers are quickly divided and they pile into three cars. At the sound of the engines, the foreman runs back to the gate, checking license tags. They race up Clinton Street with their headlights out, fugitives in their own city.

  “Terry, maybe we ought to go home,” says a younger officer in McLarney’s car. “We keep going like this and we’ll get an IID number. Hell, we might even get locked up at this rate.”

  McLarney offers a look of contempt. “No one’s gonna get locked up,” he says, wheeling his Honda Civic west along the Boston Street waterfront. “Have you forgotten that you’re in Baltimore? Nobody ever gets locked up in this fucking city. Why should we get treated different than any other criminal?”

  McLarney laughs at his own logic, then guns the Civic through the streets just south of Little Italy, then west across the early morning vacancy of the city’s downtown. Street cleaners and newspaper delivery trucks own the streets now, and the traffic signals have gone from green and red to flashing yellow. Across from the Omni on Fayette, a lone derelict is dissecting the contents of a trashcan.

  “It’s four A.M., Terry.”

  “Yes,” says McLarney, checking his watch. “It is.”

  “Where the hell are we going?”

  “Where every wanted criminal goes to hide.”

  “The Western?”

  “The Western District,” says McLarney, triumphant. “They’ll never find us there.”

  And soon enough, it is 5:00 A.M. and eight or nine more 16-ounce cans are lying spent in a Calverton Road gutter. The party is down to a foursome now, the others having fled before the threat of sunrise. Of the group, only Bob Biemiller is still a Western man. McLarney has been downtown in homicide ever since he took that bullet on Arunah Avenue; Moulter has transferred to Southeastern patrol. But they are together again on Calverton Road because it is the morning after the night after a city jury brought the Cassidy case to an end. And even after being chased off the Clinton Street pier, they still cannot go home.

  McLarney rolls another empty into the pile, where it clatters against its brethren. Biemiller grabs a replacement from the back seat and hands it to McLarney, who shifts his weight against the car’s front fender.

  “So, So, Vince, what do you think?” McLarney says, pulling the metal tab. White foam races around the rim of the can and down its sides. The sergeant mumbles an obscenity and shakes the wetness from his hand.

  Moulter smiles vaguely. “What do I think?”

  “About Gene.”

  About Gene. All this drinking, all this bullshitting, all this riding around Baltimore like a pack of motorized Gypsies but McLarney still isn’t satisfied. Somehow the damn thing is still there to be reckoned with. At this moment, Appleton Street is the only station house story worth telling, and at this moment it demands some kind of moral.

  Moulter shrugs, staring at the undergrowth and trash that mark the dead end of Calverton Road and the edge of the Amtrak railbed. The place has long been the favored hole in Sector 2 of the Western-a deserted spot to drink coffee and write reports, or share a six-pack, or maybe get a littl
e sleep if you were scheduled for court in the morning.

  McLarney turns to Biemiller. “What do you think?”

  “What do I think?” asks Biemiller.

  “Yeah. We won it for him, didn’t we?”

  “No,” says Biemiller. “We didn’t win.”

  Moulter nods his head in agreement.

  “I don’t mean it like that,” McLarney says, backing up. “I mean we got the verdict. Gene’s got to be pleased with that.”

  Biemiller says nothing; Moulter heaves an empty can into the underbrush. From the railbed comes a sudden flourish of noise and light as a metroliner races east along the center track. The train disappears in a long wail that sounds very much like a human voice.

  “It’s fucked up, isn’t it?” says McLarney after a time.

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “I mean here’s a guy that’s like a war hero,” says McLarney. “This is a war and he’s a hero. You know what I mean?”

  “No.”

  “Vince, you see what I’m saying?”

  “What do you mean, Terry?”

  “Lemme tell you something,” says McLarney, his voice catching up to his anger, “and this is something that I told Gene. I told him he has to see that he didn’t get shot for Appleton Street. Fuck Appleton Street. Fuck that. Fuck Baltimore. He didn’t get shot for Baltimore.”

  “What did he get shot for?”

  “It’s like this,” says McLarney, “and I told this to Gene. I told him that there’s this war going on in America. It’s a fucking war, right? And Gene was a soldier who got shot. He was defending his country and he got shot. Like any other fucking war.”

  Biemiller throws an empty can toward the undergrowth. Moulter rubs his eyes.

  “What I’m saying is that you have to forget it’s Baltimore,” says McLarney, very angry now. “This city is fucked up and it will always be fucked up, but that isn’t normal. Fuck Baltimore. Gene was a police in America who got shot and there are places where he would get treated like a war hero. Do you see that?”

  “No,” says Biemiller. “Not really.”

  McLarney slowly deflates, unable to sustain the rage without help. “Well, Gene does,” he says quietly, staring across the railbed. “That’s the important thing. Gene does and I do, too.”

  McLarney wanders back toward the other side of the car as sunrise streaks the eastern sky red. An early work crew opens the gates to the city yard on Calverton Road; ten minutes later, a public works truck rumbles down to the pumps. At the sound of the truck, Biemiller looks across the asphalt, squinting through an alcohol haze.

  “Who the fuck is that?”

  A lone figure in blue is standing a few feet from the city yard entrance, glaring at them.

  “Security guard,” says McLarney.

  “Christ. Not again.”

  “What the fuck does he want?”

  “He saw the beer.”

  “So what? Why should he give a fuck?”

  The man in blue pulls a notepad and pencil, then begins writing. The cops respond with obscenity.

  “Christ, he’s taking tag numbers.”

  “Well,” says Biemiller. “Party’s over. See you boys around.”

  “No point waiting around for the IID number,” says another. “Let’s get gone.”

  They toss the last few cans in the underbrush, then climb into their cars. Two cars and a pickup peel off and run a gauntlet past the security guard and out onto Edmondson Avenue. Back behind the wheel of his Honda, McLarney gauges the effects of the beer, then calculates the number of state troopers between his current location and his home in Howard County. The resulting odds seem improbable, so he drives east through the scattered Saturday morning traffic, turning south on Martin Luther King Boulevard and arriving minutes later at the South Baltimore rowhouse that is the home of a friend who had been among them on Calverton Road. McLarney stands on the stoop in the new day’s light, the morning paper rolled in his right hand. The friend arrives a few minutes later.

  “Got a beer?” asks McLarney.

  “Jesus, Terry.”

  McLarney laughs, handing the younger man the paper. The two make their way through the door and McLarney wanders into the first-floor living room.

  “What a dump,” says McLarney. “You need to get a maid or something.”

  The younger man comes back from the refrigerator with the paper and two bottles of Rolling Rock. McLarney sits on the sofa and pulls apart the newspaper, looking for a story about the Cassidy verdict. He scatters sections across the table before finding the article on the front of the local section, below the fold. The story is brief, maybe a dozen paragraphs.

  “Kind of short,” he says, reading slowly.

  He finishes the story, then rubs his eyes and takes a long drag on his beer. Suddenly, finally, he is exhausted. Very drunk and very exhausted.

  “It’s so fucked up,” he says. “You know what I’m saying? Does everybody else see how fucked up it is? Does anyone see that? Do normal people see something like this and get pissed off?”

  Normal people. Citizens. Human beings. Even among the believers, there is a pathology to being a cop.

  “Fuck, I’m tired. I got to get home.”

  “You can’t drive.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Terry, you’re fucking blind.”

  McLarney looks up, startled at the word. Again he picks up the local section. Again he scans the story, looking for the things that never manage to find their way into newspaper accounts.

  “I thought they’d do more,” he says finally. McLarney tries to fold the paper, crushing it awkwardly in his left hand.

  “Gene did good though, didn’t he?” he says after a pause. “He was good on the stand.”

  “He was.”

  “He got respect.”

  “He did.”

  “Good,” says McLarney, his leaden eyes closing. “That’s good.”

  The sergeant leans his head back against the wall behind the sofa. His eyes close at last.

  “Gotta go,” he says in a slur. “Wake me in ten…”

  He sleeps like a still life, sitting up, his right ankle to his left knee. The crushed newspaper is in his lap, the half-empty beer can is surrounded by the meat of his right hand. The sport coat stays on. The tie is twisted but intact. The wire-frame eyeglasses, bent and battered from a half dozen near-misses, have slipped down his nose. The badge remains in the upper right coat pocket. The gun, a silver.38 snubnose, stays holstered to his belt.

  WEDNESDAY, JUNE 8

  Print hit.

  When the human mind has exhausted itself, technology flexes a muscle and creates a clue of its own. Diodes and transistors and silicon chips produce a connection as the swirl pattern on a right index finger is matched to a name and address. Each ridge, each curve, each imperfection is noted, catalogued and compared until the verdict of the Printrak computer is certain:

  Kevin Robert Lawrence

  D.O.B. 9/25/66

  3409 Park Heights Avenue

  Like any of its species, the Printrak is an unthinking beast. It knows nothing of the case file, nothing of the victim, and virtually nothing of any suspect it happens to identify. And it cannot ask the questions that necessarily follow from its discoveries. That is left to a detective, who stretches his cramped legs across a metal desk and stares at a printout sent upstairs from the lab’s ident section. Why, he wonders, does Kevin Robert Lawrence’s fingerprint appear on the inside cover of a library book on Afro-American heroes, Pioneers and Patriots? And how can it be, he inquires further, that this same book is somehow one of those found in the satchel of a murdered child in Reservoir Hill?

  Good and simple questions, to which a detective can have no immediate response. The name of Kevin Robert Lawrence appears nowhere in the Latonya Wallace case file, nor does it stir the memory of any detective or detail officer involved in the case. And but for the fact that Mr. Lawrence was arrested yesterday for attempting to shoplift some
veal cutlets from a Bolton Hill grocery store, his name would not correlate with any criminal history within easy reach of the Baltimore Police Identification computer.

  This, the detectives must concede, is not a promising fact. Generally speaking, the ideal rape-murder suspect usually manages to post on his BPI sheet something more substantive than a single shoplifting charge. Yet this Lawrence kid managed to get his hands on a dead little girl’s library book without ever acquiring a police record. In fact, if it wasn’t for his little shopping spree, the name of Kevin Robert Lawrence would probably never be uttered by any homicide detective. But Mr. Lawrence wanted veal for dinner and he apparently wanted it on the cheap, and by that limited ambition alone, he is now the leading suspect in the murder of Latonya Wallace.

  Caught by a store security guard and held for a Central District wagon, the twenty-one-year-old Lawrence was taken to the lockup late yesterday, where a turnkey applied the appropriate amount of ink and produced a fingerprint card with a freshly minted BPI number. Overnight, the card traveled the usual route to the fourth-floor records section at headquarters, where it got the requisite run through the Printrak, which can compare a latent print with the hundreds of thousands of print cards on file with the Baltimore department.

  In a perfect world, this wondrous process would produce evidence on a regular and routine basis. But in Baltimore, a city that can in no way be called perfect, the Printrak-like any other technological marvel in the department’s crime laboratory-functions in accordance with Rule Eight in the homicide lexicon:

  In any case where there is no apparent suspect, the crime lab will produce no valuable evidence. In those cases where a suspect has already confessed and been identified by at least two eyewitnesses, the lab will give you print hits, fiber evidence, blood typings and a ballistic match. And yet in the case of Latonya Wallace, a murder that genuinely matters, this rule seems not to apply. For once, the lab work has suddenly propelled a stalled investigation forward.

  Not surprisingly, the sudden print hit found the Latonya Wallace case flat on its back because Tom Pellegrini was in precisely the same condition. His coughing had continued without respite, and the exhaustion seemed to leave him with less and less each day. One morning, trying to get out of bed, he felt as if his legs were barely moving. It was like one of those dreams in which you’re trying to run from something but you just can’t get started. Again, he went to a physician, who diagnosed the respiratory problem as an allergic reaction. But allergic to what? Pellegrini had never had an allergy before in his life. The doctor suggested that stress can sometimes trigger an allergy that might ordinarily be contained by the body’s defenses. Then: Have you been under any particular kind of stress lately?