Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets

by David Simon

  First a high wail: “It takes two to make a thing go right…”

  Then the bass lick and another soprano shout: “… it takes two to make it outta sight.”

  Number 1 with a bullet. The song is this summer’s hands-down winner for Sound of the Ghetto, with that deep-bottom bass line and those high-pitched screams on the quarter beat. Thick drum track, def rhythm and some sweet-voiced yoette wailing out the same two-line lyric. East side, west side, and all around the town, the corner boys of Baltimore are fighting and dying to the same soundtrack.

  You think summer’s just another season? Then ask Rich Garvey about the Fourth of July shooting on Madeira Street in the Eastern, where a thirty-five-year-old woman ends a running dispute with her neighbor by firing one shot from a.32 at close range, then walks back to her rowhouse as the other woman lies dying.

  “It takes two to make a thing go right…”

  Ask Kevin Davis about Ernestine Parker, a middle-aged Pimlico resident who decides that it’s not the heat but the humidity, then puts a shotgun to the back of her husband’s head on a July night. And when Davis gets back to the office and punches Ernestine into the computer, he learns it’s her second bite of the apple; she had killed another man twenty years ago.

  “It takes two to make it outta sight…”

  Ask Rick James after a summer morning in the Hollander Ridge housing project, where a resident lies dead on a bloodsoaked mattress, having calmly gone upstairs and put himself to bed after being cut by a ladyfriend the night before. Or ask Constantine at his scene down on Jack Street, half a block from the Brooklyn Homes projects, where the wreck of a ninety-year-old woman waits for him in a bedroom with blood spatter on every wall. Beaten, raped and sodomized, the old woman was then forced to breathe into a pillow, finally ending the ordeal.

  “It takes two…”

  Ask Rick Requer or Gary Dunnigan about that domestic from the Northeast, the one where the dead man has a hole in his throat so deep you can see the whole thorax, and his girlfriend claims that he routinely asked her to come at him with kitchen knives, the better to show off his martial arts skill. Or ask Worden and James about the loser who tries to break into an East Baltimore rowhouse only to have his own pistol used against him by the surprised but otherwise athletic male occupant. A single shot is fired during the struggle and the dying man sits down suddenly on the living room sofa.

  “Get out of here before I blow your head off,” the homeowner shouts, clutching the gun.

  “You already did,” says his assailant, losing consciousness.

  “… to make a thing go right…”

  Summer needs no motive; it’s a reason unto itself. Just ask Eddie Brown about the fifteen-year-old who shoots his friend with a defective.22 on Preakness Saturday night in Cherry Hill, then smugly refuses any statement to police, assured in his mind and in fact that he will only be charged as a juvenile. Then ask Donald Kincaid about Joseph Adams, who bled to death on the way to University Hospital after picking a fight with a fourteen-year-old and getting pushed through a convenience store window, the broken sheet glass falling on his neck like a guillotine.

  “It takes two…”

  Bodies everywhere as June bleeds into July, and even among men for whom a studied indifference to human weakness and misery is a necessary survival skill, summer produces its own special strain of the disease. This is CID homicide, mister, and neither heat nor rain nor gloom of night will stay these men from their rendezvous with callousness. Cruel jokes? The cruelest. Sick humor? The sickest. And, you ask, how can they possibly do it? Volume. That’s right, volume. They won’t be outsold, they won’t be undersold; they will solve no crime before its time.

  Picture Garvey and Worden sharing a smoke outside a second-floor apartment on Lanvale, where an aging alcoholic lies dead on the floor, his bottle empty, his neck cleanly broken. Chances are he was alive when he fell to the floor drunk, but was then killed accidentally by his equally intoxicated wife, who forced the door against his neck as she tried to enter the room.

  “You want to make it a murder?” deadpans Worden, inspecting and then lighting his cigar.

  “We could use the stat,” jokes Garvey, equally dry.

  “Then make it a murder. What do I know? I’m just an ignorant white boy from Hampden.”

  “It’s a dunker…”

  “I don’t think she’s strong enough to kill him.”

  “What the hell,” says Garvey, as if sizing up a trout. “We’ll throw this one back.”

  Or Jay Landsman doing another stand-up routine in lower Wyman Park, where the elderly occupant of a senior citizens’ high-rise has done a header from a twentieth-floor balcony. From the look of things, the old woman stayed pretty much intact until she glanced off a second-floor landing, her head and torso staying upstairs, legs and rump falling to street level.

  “She went her separate ways,” Landsman tells the uniform at the scene. “So you’d better write separate incident reports.”

  “Sir?”

  “Never mind.”

  “One guy on the sixth floor said he actually looked out his window and saw her falling,” the patrolman says, reading from his notes.

  “Oh yeah?” says Landsman. “Did she say anything?”

  “Uh, no. I mean maybe. I mean I didn’t ask.”

  “Right,” says Landsman, “but have you found the pogo stick yet?”

  “Pogo stick?” asks the flustered uniform.

  “Pogo stick,” says Landsman firmly. “I think it’s pretty obvious this woman took a bad bounce.”

  Blame it on the heat, because what else can explain that rollercoaster midnight shift in August, when Harry Edgerton takes an unattended death call from a young Southwest uniform, listens for a minute or two, then tells the kid he doesn’t have time to visit the scene.

  “Listen, we’re kinda busy right now,” he says, cradling the phone on his shoulder. “Why don’t you throw the body in the back of your car and bring him on downtown so we can take a look at him?”

  “Right,” says the kid, hanging up.

  “Oh shit,” says Edgerton, fumbling through a directory for the Southwest dispatch phone number. “He actually believed me.”

  A hellacious night it was, too, with a murder, two cuttings and a police-involved shooting. But two nights later, McLarney’s detectives are again tempting fate. Waiting for the first call of the night, Worden, James, and Dave Brown gather around the coffee room desk, concentrating their psychic powers on the phone extensions, trying to will into existence something more than a ghetto homicide, something that will bring unlimited overtime.

  “I feel it.”

  “Shut up. Concentrate.”

  “I feel it.”

  “Yeah, it’s coming.”

  “A big one.”

  “A double,” says Dave Brown.

  “No, a triple,” adds James.

  “Stone whodunit.”

  “At a major tourist attraction…”

  “Fort McHenry!”

  “Memorial Stadium!”

  “No,” says Brown, reaching for the motherlode, “the Harborplace Pavilion.”

  “During lunch hour,” adds Worden.

  “Ooooooh,” says Rick James. “A moneymaker.”

  Bad craziness.

  Or picture Landsman and Pellegrini a week or so later in the Pennington Hotel in Curtis Bay, where refinery storage tanks tower above a battered working-class neighborhood at the harbor’s southern approach.

  “Third floor,” says the desk man. “On the right.”

  The dead man is rigored and jaundiced, obviously diseased, with half a bottle of Mad Dog on the floor by his feet, an empty box of Hostess doughnuts on the facing table. In the last analysis, death at the Pennington Hotel is a sad redundancy.

  A Southern District uniform, a young officer fresh to the street, nonetheless guards the scene with an earnest sincerity.

  “I need you to tell the truth about something,” says Landsman.
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  “Sir?”

  “You ate those doughnuts, didn’t you?”

  “What?”

  “The doughnuts. You finished ’em off, right?”

  “No sir.”

  “You sure?” asks Landsman, deadpan. “You just had one, right?”

  “No sir. They were gone when I got here.”

  “Okay then, good job,” says Landsman, turning to leave. “Whaddaya know, Tom, a cop who doesn’t like doughnuts.”

  More than any other season, summer holds its own special horrors. Consider, for example, Dunnigan and Requer on a 100-degree dayshift and an old man in the clutter of a basement apartment on Eutaw Street. A decomp case with attitude, cooking in there for a week or more until someone caught the scent and noticed a few thousand flies on the inside of a window.

  “If you got ’em, smoke ’em,” says the ME’s attendant, lighting up a cigar. “It’s bad now, but it’s gonna be worse when we get to flippin’ him.”

  “He’ll burst on you,” says Dunnigan.

  “Not me,” says the attendant. “I’m an artist.”

  Requer laughs, then laughs again when the attendants try to roll the bloated wreck gently only to have it explode like a bad melon, the skin sliding away from the chest cavity.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” says the attendant, dropping the dead man’s legs and turning to gag. “Jesus fuck-my-fucking-job Christ.”

  “That ain’t pretty, bunk,” growls Requer, puffing harder on the cigar and looking at a rolling mass of maggots. “His face is moving-pork fried rice. You know what I’m saying?”

  “One of the worst I ever had,” says the attendant, catching his breath. “By the number of flies, I’d say five or six days at least.”

  “A week,” says Requer, closing his notebook.

  Outside in the parking lot, a Central District officer, the first uniform in the apartment, has slipped away to eat lunch in the front of his radio car, a portable tape player on the dash blaring that same summer beat.

  “It takes two to make a thing go right…”

  “How the fuck can you eat after handling this call?” asks Dunnigan, genuinely amazed.

  “Roast beef, rare,” says the cop, displaying the second half of the sandwich with pride. “Hey, you only get one lunch a shift.”

  For summer, you need a scorecard to keep the lineup straight. Put Constantine and Keller in Pigtown, working a bar murder where the suspect turns out to be a kid who beat the robbery-murder of an elderly schoolteacher four years ago. Put Waltemeyer and Worden at a reggae dance club near the Metro tracks in the Northwest, its front walk covered by a dead Jamaican and a dozen spent 9mm casings, its interior cluttered by about seventy other Jakes who swear to Jah himself that they see not a blessed thing, mon. Put Dunnigan down in the Perkins Homes for a body in the closet; Pellegrini in the Central for a body in the gutter; Childs and Sydnor in the Eastern for a female skeleton beneath a rowhouse porch, a skeleton that is finally matched to a missing persons report three weeks later. She was the tiniest thing, barely eighteen and a hundred pounds dripping wet, and her bastard of a stepfather waited only long enough for his wife to go out of town for a week. He brought three friends home for Saturday night and after a six-pack, the four of them took turns on her, then strangled her by wrapping a towel around her neck and pulling in different directions.

  “Why are you doing this?” she asked, pleading.

  “Sorry,” her stepfather told her. “We got to.”

  The shouts and screams and curses rise and fall with the temperature in the stagnant, fetid air. The crescendo comes in the last and hottest week of July, six straight days of boiler room heat that makes the citywide police frequency sound like an endless tape:

  “Forty-five hundred Pimlico, odd side in the rear, for a woman screaming… Thirty-six hundred Howard Park, for an armed person… Twenty-four fifty-one Druid Hill, for an assault in progress… Signal thirteen. Calhoun and Mosher. Signal thirteen… Fourteen-fifteen Key Highway for a man beating a woman…”

  And then, the dispatch call that everyone most fears, the dayshift broadcast that only comes when the heat has truly touched the wrong nerve in the wrong man in the wrong place.

  “Signal thirteen. Seven fifty-four Forrest Street.”

  It begins with one inmate and one guard mixing it up in the security booth at the end of the No. 4 yard. They are joined by another inmate, then another, then a fourth-each one wielding an aluminum softball bat. Riot.

  Detectives fly out of the homicide office in bunches-Landsman, Worden, Fahlteich, Kincaid, Dave Brown, James-heading for the Maryland Penitentiary at the eastern edge of the city’s downtown, the gray stone fortress that has served as the state’s maximum security prison since James Madison was president. The Pen is the end of the line for every lost cause in the state corrections system, the final repository for the men who somehow can’t live within the limits of the prisons at Jessup and Hagerstown. Home to Death Row and the gas chamber, the Maryland Pen warehouses human beings who are facing an average sentence of life imprisonment, and its antiquated south wing has been called “the innermost circle of hell” by a state attorney general’s report. By any reckoning, the population of the Maryland Pen has nothing whatsoever to lose; worst of all, they know it.

  For fifteen minutes, the Pen correctional officers lose complete control of the recreation yards to more than three hundred inmates armed with homemade knives, clubs and every other available weapon. Two guards are beaten with bats in the No. 4 yard, another is bludgeoned with a metal cross bar from the weight room. A fourth is chased into the prison shop building only to find that the security area gate is locked shut. Unwilling to risk unlocking the metal gate, a female correctional officer watches, terrified, from the other side of the partition as six or seven inmates beat and stab the guard to within an inch of his life. Twenty other inmates drag another female officer out of a counseling clinic at the southern edge of the recreation yard, beating her badly, then rush into the clinic to batter a prison psychologist. Before being repulsed by a detachment of guards rushed through the Madison Street entrance, the inmates set fire to the clinic, torching as many psychological evaluations as they can find. Led by a deputy warden, the reinforcements arrive to retake the clinic and rescue the female officer and the psychologist, who has fallen to the floor of his office beneath a rain of blows from a metal pipe. The prisoners are pushed slowly back toward the yard-a retreat that only becomes a rout after two guards fire their shotguns from the clinic door. Two inmates fall wounded on the asphalt.

  On the towers at the penitentiary’s east and west walls, guards try to fire their shotguns over the heads of the rioters-which only adds to the carnage by striking several guards as well as rioters. Just outside a west wall tower, yet another correctional officer is felled by shotgun pellets fired by an east wall guard two hundred yards away. There are no attempts to escape, no effort to take hostages, no demands, no negotiations. It is violence for its own sake, the mirror image of the summer that exists in the city that surrounds the penitentiary walls. You can lock them up and you can lose the key, but the men inside the fortress on Forrest Street still march to the rhythm of the streets.

  Fifteen minutes after the last prisoner has been hauled out of the yard and dragged to a tier for lockdown, Jay Landsman walks across the No. 3 and 4 yards, mentally noting the bloodstains that represent a half-dozen crime scenes. From the south wing tiers immediately above him, the focused rage of the prison comes down on him like rain. Walking alone in the open yard, Landsman is made for a city detective immediately, perhaps by prisoners who have been among his clientele.

  “Yo, you white bitch, bring yo’ tight ass up here and drop them trousers.”

  “Get out my yard, you fuckhead cop.”

  “Don’t be down there after dark, yo, we’ll fuck you good.”

  “Eat my shit, cop. Eat my shit.”

  The last comment catches Landsman’s ear; for just a moment he pauses, staring up a
t the south wing tiers.

  “C’mon up here, faggot. We’ll fuck you like we fucked them bitch guards.”

  “Bring yo’ white ass up here, faggot.”

  Landsman lights a cigarette and waves cheerfully at the stone facade, as if it were some kind of cruise ship pulling away from its moorings. In its moment, the perfect gesture-better than a hard look or the standard finger-and the catcalls fall away. Smiling maniacally, Landsman waves again and the message becomes clear: Yo, assholes. My white bitch ass is going home tonight to an air-conditioned rancher and a woman and a dozen steamed crabs and a six-pack of beer. You’re going to a 98-degree prison cell for a steaming week of lockdown. Bon voyage, you simple motherfuckers.

  Landsman finishes his tour of the yard and confers with the deputy warden. Nine correctional officers are hospitalized; three inmates have also been sent to emergency rooms. The prison authorities are responsible for security, but homicide will handle the prosecution of those inmates named as being part of the riot. That’s the theory anyway. But it’s hard for any guard to remember a single face when a crowd of men is beating on him with aluminum bats; after an hour, the tentative list of suspects stands at only thirteen inmates positively identified by authorities.

  Landsman and Dick Fahlteich, the primary detective for the riot, have those suspects brought to the deputy warden’s office. They come in one by one, shackled and cuffed and devoid of expression. A quick survey reveals that every last one is a product of Baltimore, and all but four are down on a city murder charge. In fact, every other name on the list manages to trigger a memory in some detective’s mind. Clarence Mouzone? That crazy bastard beat three or four murders before Willis finally got him on one. Wyman Ushery? Didn’t he kill that boy at the Crown station on Charles Street back in ’81? Litzinger’s case, I think. Fuck yeah, that was him.