Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets

by David Simon

  McLarney pauses, hoping that some of this-any of it-will touch a nerve. God knows he means every word of it. Worden was struggling, true, but even the man’s most mediocre year is worth any aggravation. For a squad sergeant, having Worden working for you was like having sex: When it was good it was great, and even when it wasn’t so hot, it was still pretty damn good.

  In the last week alone, Worden proved as much by clearing two murders on nothing less than instinct and talent. He made it all look effortless and elegant, even as the stink of the Larry Young debacle was still hanging in the air.

  Six days ago, Worden and Rick James caught a stabbing up on Jasper Street, a twenty-three-year-old black kid half-naked under bloody sheets in a second-floor bedroom. The two detectives took one look at their victim and knew immediately that they were dealing with a dispute between homosexual lovers. The depth and number of the stab wounds told them that much; no motive other than sex produces that kind of overkill, and no woman can make those kinds of holes in a man.

  The body was already coming out of rigor. It was a humid night, and the temperature in that rowhouse had to be 110 on the upper floors: still, the two men refused to rush their scene. Several times, when the heat became too much for him, Worden stepped out onto the street and sat for a moment on the corner bench, sipping quietly on a convenience store soda. They stayed with that scene for hours, with James working the second floor and the area immediately surrounding the body. Worden wandered through the rest of the house, looking for anything out of place. In the third-floor bedroom, the killer had apparently yanked a VCR off its table and pushed the appliance halfway into a plastic garbage bag before giving up on the theft and fleeing. Was it really a robbery? Or was someone trying to make it look like a robbery?

  Eventually, Worden got down to the kitchen, where he found the sink half-filled with dirty water. Reaching down gingerly, he pulled the drain and the sink emptied slowly, revealing a cutting knife with its blade broken. Lying next to the murder weapon was a hand towel still pink from the blood; the killer had washed up before leaving. Worden looked down the kitchen counter at a dozen or so unwashed dishes, glasses and utensils-jetsam, it seemed, from the previous night’s dinner. One glass, however, stood on the far edge of the counter, alone and distinct. Worden called the lab tech over and told him to check that glass in particular for prints. Hot as it was, Worden figured the killer might have wanted a drink of water before leaving.

  The Jasper Street scene took five hours, after which James headed for the morgue and Worden locked himself in an interrogation room with the roommate of the victim, who also owned the house. The roommate had discovered the body after returning from his night job and told Worden that when he left to go to work, the victim was entertaining a friend he had met at a bar. He had never seen the guy before and didn’t know his name.

  Worden rode the roommate hard, seizing on the fact that he was out working while his bunky was lazing around the house with some new man.

  “You didn’t like that, did you?”

  “I didn’t care.”

  “You didn’t care?”

  “No.”

  “I know that would make me angry.”

  “I wasn’t angry.”

  The man held firm to his story and Worden was left with nothing, or so it seemed until later that afternoon, when the Printrak got a solid hit off the drinking glass. The latent print matched that of a twenty-three-year-old west-sider with a long sheet of priors. With considerable reluctance, the owner of the house returned once again to the homicide unit and made the ID of the suspect from a photo array. For that clearance, Worden’s eye-his ability to see that separate drinking glass as precious evidence-got the credit.

  Four nights later, his remarkable memory sent another murder into the black when a tactical section officer locked up two east side men on auto theft charges and found that one of them, Anthony Cunningham, was wanted on a murder warrant written by Worden a month earlier. The warrant had been typed and signed shortly after detectives from the robbery unit locked up a crew of east-siders for a series of holdups centered around the Douglass Homes. Lew Davis, a long-time colleague of Worden’s in robbery, had wandered across the hall with the news.

  “We’ve got one of them in there now going for a whole bunch of holdups,” Davis asked Worden. “You all have anything up there that might match up to these guys?”

  Standing in front of the board, Worden needed exactly fifteen seconds before his elephantine memory settled on one name among fifty: Charles Lehman, the fifty-one-year-old killed on Fayette Street as he walked to his car with a Kentucky Fried Chicken dinner. Kincaid’s whodunit from February.

  “I got one right in that area,” said Worden. “You’re talking to this guy now?”

  “Yeah, he’s in the big interrogation room. Christ, Donald, he’s already gone for about a dozen robberies.”

  After a brief parley with the kid in the large box, Worden knew that the kid could indeed put the Lehman murder down. The duty prosecutor that night, Don Giblin, was called down and the negotiations began. The prosecutor’s bottom-line offer: for identifying and testifying against the shooter on the Lehman murder, eleven years on one of the robberies and no immunity if you’re linked to any other murders or shootings.

  Worden watched the kid mull over the deal, then attempt a counteroffer: “Five years.”

  “You’re no good to me with five years,” the prosecutor told the kid. “A jury won’t believe you unless you get at least ten.”

  “Too much,” said the kid.

  “Oh, you don’t think you should get any time,” said Worden, disgusted. “What about all them people you robbed? What about that old lady you all shot on Monument Street?”

  “We’re not talkin’ about them,” the kid snapped. “This is me we’re talkin’ about.”

  Worden shook his head and walked from the room, leaving Giblin to cement the deal. It was ugly, all right, but the warrant for twenty-five-year-old Anthony Cunningham went to a court commissioner that same night. Now, with Cunningham locked up, that case, too, was down.

  Four nights, two murders. McLarney has to wonder how many other detectives would have noticed that one drinking glass was a little too far from the others? And how many detectives would have made the connection between the Lehman case and the other east side robberies? Hell, McLarney tells himself, most detectives can’t remember the cases worked by their own squad, much less those handled by some other squad five months back.

  “You can’t leave,” McLarney tells Worden, renewing his appeal.

  Worden shakes his head.

  “You can’t,” says McLarney, laughing. “I won’t let you.”

  “You’re just talking like this ’cause you’re losing a detective. That’s what you’re worried about, right? You just don’t want to have to spend the time to break in a new guy.”

  McLarney laughs again and leans back against the front of his car. He reaches into the paper bag for the last can. “If you leave, there’ll be no one around to fuck with Dave Brown and he’ll go all derelict.”

  Worden gives back a half-smile.

  “If you quit, Donald, he’ll start thinking he knows what he’s doing. It’ll be dangerous. I’ll be writing long reports for the captain every other week.”

  “Waltemeyer will keep on him.”

  McLarney shakes his head. “I can’t believe we’re even talking about this…”

  Worden shrugs. “You’re the one talking.”

  “Donald, you…” says McLarney, pausing to stare down the cross street toward Monument. Worden fidgets, rolling the keys to his truck back and forth on their ring.

  “You see him?” asks McLarney suddenly.

  “The boy in the gray?”

  “Yeah, the sweatshirt.”

  “Yeah I seen him. He’s only walked by here four times now.”

  “He’s marking us.”

  “Yeah, he is.”

  McLarney stares back up the cross street
. The kid is wiry and dark-skinned, sixteen or seventeen, wearing spandex bike shorts and a hooded sweatshirt. It’s still eighty degrees or better and the kid has both hands in his pockets and the hoody zipped tight.

  “He thinks we’re victims,” says McLarney, laughing under his breath.

  “Two old white guys hanging in an empty lot at this hour,” snorts Worden. “I’m not surprised.”

  “We’re not old,” says McLarney, objecting. “I’m not old anyway.”

  Worden smiles, tosses the key ring and catches it with the other hand. He told himself that he would be going straight home after the four-to-twelve shift; instead, he spent two hours on a Kavanaugh’s barstool, hurting himself with Jack Black. But the last hour’s temperance-Worden had no taste for the Miller Lite that McLarney bought carryout-was bringing him back down to earth.

  “I got to get up early,” he says.

  McLarney shakes his head. “I don’t want to hear this, Donald. You’ve had a bad year, all right, so what? So you get back in the saddle on another case and things change. You know how it is.”

  “I don’t like being used.”

  “You weren’t used.”

  “Yes,” says Worden. “I was.”

  “You’re still angry about Monroe Street, right? We disagreed about that and that’s okay, but that’s-”

  “No. This isn’t about Monroe Street.”

  “Then what?”

  Worden grimaces.

  “This Larry Young thing?”

  “That’s part of it,” says Worden. “That’s definitely part of it.”

  “Well, that was fucked, I have to admit.”

  “They used me,” Worden repeats. “They used me to do their dirty work. I don’t need that.”

  “They used you,” McLarney agrees reluctantly.

  Worden turns his head slightly, catching the kid in the gray hoody out of one eye. Like a shark circling the raft, the kid is once again edging down the opposite side of the cross street, hands still deep in his pockets, watching the two men without seeming to watch them.

  “Enough is enough,” says McLarney. He drains the can in one fluid motion, then reaches into his jacket pocket while starting across the lot. The kid has changed directions again, moving toward the detectives from the other side of the street.

  “Don’t go and shoot him, Terry,” says Worden, mildly amused. “I don’t wanna spend the first day of my vacation writing.”

  At McLarney’s approach, the kid slows, suddenly confused. The sergeant pulls the silver shield out and waves it once in a way that suggests nothing more than irritation. “We’re cops,” he yells at the kid. “Go rob someone else.”

  One flash of silver and the kid is off on a new vector, bounding back to the other side of the street. He throws his hands in the air, palms open, as if to surrender.

  “I ain’t about robbin’ nobody,” the kid yells over his shoulder. “You got it wrong.”

  McLarney waits long enough for the kid to disappear onto Madison, then walks back to the conversation.

  “We’re cops and you’re not,” says Worden, amused. “That was good, Terry.”

  “I guess we pretty much fucked up his night,” says McLarney. “He wasted half an hour on us.”

  Worden yawns. “Awright, sergeant. I think it’s about time to be heading down the road here…”

  “Guess so,” says McLarney. “I’m outta beer.”

  Worden gives his sergeant a light chuck on the arm and begins sorting through the key ring.

  “Where’d you park?”

  “Up on Madison.”

  “I’ll walk you.”

  “What’re you? My date?”

  McLarney laughs. “You could do worse.”

  “Not really.”

  “Listen, Donald,” says McLarney abruptly. “Just give it some time. You’re pissed off now and I don’t blame you, but things will change. You know this is what you want to do, right? You don’t want to do anything else.”

  Worden listens.

  “You know you’re the best man I’ve got.”

  Worden shoots him a look.

  “Really, you are. And I’d hate like hell to lose you, but that’s not why I’m saying this. Really.”

  Worden shoots him another look.

  “Okay, okay, maybe that is why I’m saying it. Maybe I’m full of shit here and I just don’t want to be alone in the office with a mental case like Waltemeyer. But you know what I’m saying. You really should give it some time…”

  “I’m tired,” says Worden. “I’ve had enough.”

  “You’ve had a terrible year. Monroe Street and the cases you got… You definitely haven’t caught the breaks, but that will change. It’ll definitely change. And this Larry Young thing, I mean, who the fuck cares?”

  Worden listens.

  “You’re a cop, Donald. Fuck the bosses, don’t even think about the bosses. They’re always going to be fucked up and that’s all there is to it. So what? So fuck them. But where else are you going to go and be a cop?”

  “Careful driving home,” says Worden.

  “Donald, listen to me.”

  “I heard you, Terry.”

  “Just promise me this. Promise me you won’t do anything without coming to me first.”

  “I’ll tell you first,” says Worden.

  “Okay,” says McLarney. “Then we can have this discussion a second time. I get another chance to practice my speech.”

  Worden smiles.

  “You’re off tomorrow, right?” asks McLarney.

  “For ten days. My vacation.”

  “Oh yeah. Have a good one. You planning on going anywhere?”

  Worden shakes his head.

  “Staying around the house, huh?”

  “I’m doing some work on the basement.”

  McLarney nods, suddenly speechless. Power tools, drywall and all other facets of home improvement have always been a mystery to him.

  “Careful driving home, Terry.”

  “I’m fine,” says McLarney.

  “Okay then.”

  Worden climbs in the cab, pumps the ignition and edges the truck into the empty lanes of Madison Street. McLarney walks back to his own car, hoping against hope, wondering whether anything said tonight will make even the least bit of difference.

  

  SEVEN

  Summertime and the living is easy, says Gershwin. But he never had to work murders in Baltimore, where summer steams and swelters and splits open wide like a mile of the devil’s sidewalk. From Milton to Poplar Grove, visible heat wriggles up from the asphalt in waves, and by noon, the brick and Formstone is hot to the touch. No lawn chairs, no sprinklers, no piña coladas in a ten-speed Waring; summer in the city is sweat and stink and $29 box fans slapping bad air from the second-floor windows of every other rowhouse. Baltimore is a swamp of a city, too, built on a Chesapeake Bay backwater by God-fearing Catholic refugees who should have thought twice after the first Patapsco River mosquito began chewing on the first pale patch of European skin. Summer in Baltimore is its own unyielding argument, its own critical mass.

  The season is an endless street parade, with half the city out fanning itself on marble and stone stoops, waiting for a harbor breeze that never seems to make it across town. Summer is a four-to-twelve shift of night-sticks and Western District wagon runs, with three hundred hard cases on the Edmondson Avenue sidewalk between Payson and Pulaski, eyefucking each other and every passing radio car. Summer is a ninety-minute backup in the Hopkins emergency room, an animal chorus of curses and pleas from the denizens of every district lockup, a nightly promise of yet another pool of blood on the dirty linoleum in yet another Federal Street carryout. Summer is a barroom cutting up on Druid Hill, a ten-minute gun battle in the Terrace, a daylong domestic dispute that ends with the husband and wife both fighting the cops. Summer is the season of motiveless murder, of broken-blade steak knives and bent tire irons; it’s the time for truly dangerous living, the season of massive
and immediate retaliation, the 96-degree natural habitat of the Argument That Will Be Won. A drunk switches off the Orioles game in a Pigtown bar; a west side kid dances with an east-sider’s girl at the rec center off Aisquith Street; a fourteen-year-old bumps an older kid getting on the number 2 bus-every one of them becomes a life in the balance.

  In a detective’s mind, the beginning of the summer can be marked with precision by the year’s first warm weather disrespect murder. Respect being the rarest of commodities in the inner city, its defense by homicidal assault on an 85-degree-or-better day can suddenly seem required. This year, summer begins on a warm Sunday night in May, when a sixteen-year-old Walbrook High School student dies of a gunshot wound to the stomach, sustained during a fight that began when his friend was punched and forced to relinquish a 15-cent cherry Popsicle.

  “This had nothing to do with drugs,” says Dave Hollingsworth, one of Stanton’s detectives, in a statement meant to reassure reporters and, through them, the sweltering masses. “This was over an ice cream.”

  Summertime.

  True, the statistics show only a mild increase in the homicide rate during the hot months, at least if you consider a 10 or 20 percent jump worthy of the term mild. But in the mind of any homicide detective, the statistics can’t say a goddamn thing until they get out in an Eastern District radio car for a Fourth of July weekend. Out in the streets, summer is something to be reckoned with no matter how much meat the shock-trauma units manage to salvage. To hell with the ones who die, a veteran detective will tell you, it’s the assault-by-shootings and cuttings and beatings that can keep a squad running all summer long. Beyond that there are the suicides and overdoses and unattended deaths-routine garbage detail duty that suddenly becomes unbearable when the cadavers are going ripe in 90-degree weather. Don’t even bother showing a homicide detective the charts and graphs because he’ll shake them off. Summer is a war.

  Just ask Eddie Brown on a hot July afternoon in Pimlico as the neighborhood girls dance with each other on rowhouse porches while lab techs and detectives clean up a crime scene. A young man is dead, shot while sitting in the passenger seat of a stolen car as he rode down Pimlico toward Greenspring in search of another homeboy who managed to find him first. A daylight murder on a main drag, but the driver of the car has fled and no one else saw a thing. Brown pulls a loaded.32 from the wrecked car as the girls move to a beat that has been brought to distortion by unlimited volume.