Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets

by David Simon

  The accused shuffle into the office and listen impassively as Landsman tells them they were seen assaulting this or that guard. Each inmate listens with practiced boredom, glancing back and forth among the faces of the detectives, searching for anything that seems familiar. You can almost hear them thinking aloud: That one I don’t remember, but that one was there for my lineup, and that one in the corner took the stand on me in court.

  “You want to say anything?” asks Landsman.

  “I don’t got shit to say to you.”

  “Okay,” says Landsman, smiling. “See ya.”

  One of the last men to saunter down memory lane is a thick-framed nineteen-year-old monster, a kid with the kind of prize-fighter physique that can only come from a prison weight room. Ransom Watkins begins shaking his head halfway through Landsman’s speech.

  “I got nothin’ to say.”

  “Okay then.”

  “But I want to know one thing from this man here,” he says, looking hard across the room at Kincaid. “I bet you don’t even remember me.”

  “Sure I do,” says the detective. “I got a good memory.”

  Ransom Watkins was all of fifteen when Kincaid locked him up for the Dewitt Duckett murder in ’83. Watkins was a smaller piece of a man then, but just as hard. He was one of three west side boys who shot a fourteen-year-old in a hallway at Harlem Park Junior High, then yanked a Georgetown athletic jacket off the dying kid’s back. Other students recognized the trio as they ran from the school, and Kincaid discovered the missing jacket in a suspect’s bedroom closet. The next morning, Watkins and the others were cracking jokes in the Western District lockup, charged as adults.

  “You remember me, detective?” Watkins says now.

  “I remember you.”

  “If you remember who I am, then how the hell do you sleep at night?”

  “I sleep pretty good,” says Kincaid. “How do you sleep?”

  “How do you think I sleep? How do I sleep when you put me here for something I didn’t do?”

  Kincaid shakes his head, then picks a piece of lint from his pants cuff.

  “You did it,” he tells the kid.

  “The hell I did,” Watkins wails at him, his voice cracking. “You lied then and you lyin’ now.”

  “No,” says Kincaid quietly. “You killed him.”

  Watkins curses him again and Kincaid looks back placidly. Landsman calls to the outer room for the escorting guards even as Watkins begins to argue his case.

  “We’re done with this asshole,” he says. “Send in the next guy.”

  It’s another two hours before the detectives begin making their way back through the labyrinth of steel grates and metal detectors and checkpoints, back upstairs to the visiting area and the lockers in which their service revolvers have been stored.

  Outside the main gate, the television reporters are doing standups for the early afternoon broadcasts, just as representatives of the guards’ union show up to criticize prison administrators and demand yet another investigation of conditions at the Pen. Halfway down Eager Street, a young boy on a ten-speed stops at the wrought-iron gate to listen to the shouts coming from the inmates in the west wing tiers. He stays for a minute or two, soaking up the catcalls and obscenities, before punching the Play button on a tape machine wedged beneath his handlebars and pedaling toward Greenmount.

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

  Beat, scream, beat, scream. A mindless liturgy of another Baltimore summer, a theme song for a city that bleeds.

  “It takes two to make it outta sight…”

  Landsman and Fahlteich climb into the dry heat of a Cavalier’s interior and roll slowly toward the expressway with the windows down, waiting on a breeze that just won’t come. Fahlteich flips the AM radio dial to 1100 for the all-news station, where these and other stories are coming up on the hour. Twelve seriously injured in today’s disturbance at the Maryland Penitentiary. Night watchman found slain in North Howard Street store. And tomorrow’s WBAL forecast calls for partly cloudy and hot, with highs in the mid-90s.

  Another day for bagging bent blades and chalking sidewalks. Another day for pulling semi-wadcutter projectiles from drywall, for photographing blood at the broken edge of the bottle. Another day’s pay on the killing streets.

  FRIDAY, JULY 8

  Another hot, humid night wears out its welcome in a South Baltimore rowhouse, where violence takes as its servant a lovers’ quarrel. Edgerton walks the crime scene and sends a couple of witnesses downtown before jumping into the crowded rear of the ambulance.

  “How you doin’, Officer Edgerton?”

  The detective looks down at the gurney to see the bloody face of Janie Vaughn smiling back at him. Janie from the Patch, as the locals call South Baltimore’s Westport. A goodhearted kid, twenty-seven years old, who when Edgerton last knew her was running with a boy by the name of Anthony Felton. Felton’s problem was his propensity for killing people, shooting them for money or drugs, mostly. The boy beat two of those murders, then went down for fifteen years on a third shooting. From the look of things in the ambo, Janie’s new boyfriend wasn’t exactly the epitome of self-control either.

  “How you doin’?”

  “Do I look real bad?”

  “You’ve looked better,” Edgerton tells her. “But if you’re breathing now, you’re gonna make it… They sayin’ your boyfriend Ronnie cut loose.”

  “Yeah he did.”

  “He just went off or what?”

  “I didn’t know he’d go this far.”

  “You really can pick ’em, huh?”

  Janie smiles, her white teeth shining for a moment amid the bloody wreckage. A tough kid, Edgerton thinks, not the kind of girl to go into shock. Stepping deeper in the ambo, Edgerton looks closely at her face and notices the stippling-dirt and metal residue from the gunshot-embedded in her cheek. A contact wound.

  “Did you know he had the gun?”

  “He told me he got rid of it. Sold it.”

  “What kind of gun did you think he sold?”

  “A little cheap one.”

  “What color?”

  “Silver.”

  “Okay, honey, they’re getting ready to head for the hospital. I’ll see you there.”

  The other victim, the twenty-eight-year-old boyfriend of Janie’s older sister, is already dead on arrival at the University ER, a casualty for no other reason than that he tried to intervene when Ronnie Lawis began beating the hell out of Janie. Later, at the hospital, she tells Edgerton that it was over nothing, that it began because Ronnie saw her sitting in a car with another man.

  “How’s Durrell?” she asked Edgerton in the emergency room’s code area, naming her sister’s boyfriend. “He gonna make it?”

  “I don’t know. He’s in another part of the hospital.”

  It’s a lie, of course. At that moment, Durrell Rollins is dead on the gurney to Janie’s immediate right, his mouth clamped around a yellow catheter, his chest pierced by a single shot. If Janie could move her head or see past the facial bandage, she’d know.

  “I’m cold,” she tells Edgerton.

  He nods, stroking the girl’s hand, then stops for a moment to wipe the blood from her left hand with a paper towel. Dark red dots speckle the lighter brown of his trousers.

  “How’m I doin’?”

  “Hey, if they’re leaving you alone in here with me, you’re okay,” Edgerton tells her. “It’s when about eight people are hovering over you that you’re in trouble.”

  Janie smiles.

  “What happened exactly?” Edgerton asks.

  “It happened so fast… Him and Durrell was inside in the kitchen. Durrell had come in ’cause he was fightin’ with me.”

  “Go back to the beginning. What started it?”

  “Like I told you, he saw me in a car with this guy and got mad. He came in and went down, and when he come back he put the gun to my head and starts yellin’ and all, so Durrell comes into the kitc
hen…”

  “Did you see him shoot Durrell?”

  “No, they went into the kitchen, and when I hear the shot I ran…”

  “Did Durrell and him talk?”

  “No. It happened too fast.”

  “No time for any words, huh?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Then he came outside after you?”

  “Uh-huh. Fired the first shot and I tried to duck, but I fell down in the street. He came up and was right over me.”

  “How long you been going together?”

  “Almost a year.”

  “Where’s he stay?”

  “In the house.”

  “That wasn’t all his clothes in there.”

  “No, he got more in the basement. He got another girl he stays with up on Pennsylvania Avenue, too. I seen her once.”

  “You know her?”

  “I just seen her once.”

  “Where’s he hang at? Where’s he likely to go?”

  “Downtown area. Park and Eutaw,’ round there.”

  “Any special place he’d go?”

  “Sportsman’s Lounge.”

  “At Park and Mulberry?”

  “Yeah. He know Randy. The bartender.”

  “Okay, honey,” says Edgerton, closing his notebook. “You rest easy now.”

  Janie squeezes his hand, then looks up at him.

  “Durrell?” she asks. “He dead, right?”

  He hesitates.

  “It doesn’t look good,” he says.

  Later this night, when Ronnie Lawis returns to the empty Westport rowhouse for his belongings, a neighbor is out on a porch to see him and call police. A responding Southern District uniform corners the man in the basement and, after applying the handcuffs, discovers a.32 Saturday Night Special behind the hot water heater. An NCIC fingerprint check the following day shows that Lawis is, in fact, a man named Fred Lee Tweedy who escaped from a Virginia prison a year ago, having been incarcerated on a previous murder conviction.

  “If my name was Tweedy,” says Edgerton, reading the report, “I’d have an alias, too.”

  Another summer call, another summer clearance. The season has brought out the new and improved Harry Edgerton, at least as far as the rest of his squad is concerned. He’s answering phones. He’s handling calls. He’s writing 24-hour reports. After one police shooting, there was Edgerton in the middle of the coffee room, offering to debrief a witness or two. If not entirely convinced of Edgerton’s character transplant, Donald Kincaid has at least been mollified. And while Edgerton isn’t exactly winning awards for early relief on midnight shift and daywork, he has been getting to the office a little earlier and then, as usual, leaving later than the others.

  Part of the change is Roger Nolan-the sergeant trapped in the middle of it all-who talked to Edgerton about avoiding acrimony and using some practical politics now and then. Part of it is Edgerton himself, who took some of Nolan’s advice because he was getting damn tired of being the focal point for everyone else’s backbiting. And part of it has been the other men in the squad-Kincaid and Bowman, in particular-who are also making some effort to uphold the existing truce.

  Yet everyone in the room knows that it is a temporary and fragile peace, dependent on the goodwill of too many aggravated people. Edgerton is willing to placate his critics to a point, but beyond that, he is what he is and he does what he does. Likewise, Kincaid and Bowman are willing to hold their tongues so long as the lamb doesn’t stray too far from the fold. Given these realities, the friendly banter can’t last, though for now, Nolan’s squad seems to be holding itself together.

  In fact, Nolan’s boys are on something of a roll, handling five or six more cases than either of the other squads on D’Addario’s shift and solving a better percentage of those murders. Not only that, but Nolan’s people have been saddled with nine of the seventeen police-involved shooting incidents this year. And more than the murders, it’s the police shootings-with their incumbent issues of criminal and civil liability-that can bring the bosses down on the squad like a plague of locusts. This year’s crop of shooting reports, however, has so far cleared the command staff without causing so much as a rustle. All in all, from Nolan’s point of view, it’s turning out to be a respectable year.

  Rich Garvey and his eight clearances are, of course, a large share of Nolan’s happiness, but Edgerton, too, is beginning a little streak of his own, one that began with that drug murder on Payson Street back in late May. After putting that case down, he found himself preoccupied with the Joe Edison trial in Judge Hammerman’s court, a successful three-week legal campaign to get a nineteen-year-old sociopath life in prison for one of the four drug murders from 1986 and ’87 in which he was charged. Edgerton returned to the rotation in time for nightwork and the shooting call in Westport, which would be followed by two more clearances before summer’s end-one of them a whodunit street shooting from the Old York Road drug market. In the homicide unit, four clearances in a row is usually enough to mute anyone’s critics, and for a brief time, the tension in Nolan’s squad seems to ease.

  During one four-to-twelve shift in midsummer, Edgerton is sitting at his desk in the main office, a phone receiver braced against a shoulder and a cigarette wedged into the corner of his mouth.

  Worden walks by and Edgerton begins an exaggerated pantomime, causing the older detective to pull a Bic lighter from his pants and produce a flame; Edgerton leans across the desk to ignite the tobacco.

  “Aw Christ,” says Worden, holding the lighter steady. “I hope nobody sees me doing this.”

  Twenty minutes later and still a prisoner of the same phone conversation, Edgerton flags down Garvey for another light and Worden, watching from the coffee room, picks up on it again.

  “Hey, Harry, you’re getting awfully used to havin’ white guys light your cigarette for you.”

  “What can I say?” says Edgerton, covering the mouthpiece of the phone with his hand.

  “You tryin’ to make a point, Harry?”

  “What can I say?” repeats Edgerton, hanging up the phone. “I like how it looks.”

  “Hey,” says Kincaid, cutting in. “As long as Harry keeps handling calls, we can light his cigarettes, right, Harry? You keep answering that phone and I’ll start carrying a book of matches.”

  “Fair enough,” says Edgerton, almost amused.

  “We’re bringing Harry along, ain’t we?” says Kincaid. “We’re breakin’ him back into homicide. As long as we can keep him away from Ed Burns, he’ll be all right.”

  “That’s right,” says Edgerton, smiling. “It was that nasty Ed Burns that messed me up, talking me into all these long investigations, telling me not to listen to you guys… It was all Burns. You should blame him.”

  “And where is he now?” adds Kincaid. “He’s still over with the FBI and you’re back here with us.”

  “He used you, Harry,” says Eddie Brown.

  “Yeah,” says Harry, dragging on his cigarette. “I guess ol’ Eduardo did a number on me.”

  “Used and abused and tossed away like a dirty condom,” says Garvey, from the back of the room.

  “You talkin’ ’bout Special Agent Burns,” says Ed Brown. “Hey, Harry, I hear Burns already has his own desk over at the FBI office. I hear he’s all moved in.”

  “His own desk, his own car,” adds Kincaid.

  “Hey, Harry,” says Ed Brown. “You ever hear from your partner? Does he callyou up and tell you how things are going over there in Woodlawn?”

  “Yeah, he sent me a postcard once,” says Edgerton. “It said, ‘Wish you were here’ on the back.”

  “You stick with us, Harry,” says Kincaid dryly. “We’ll take good care of you.”

  “Yeah,” says Edgerton. “I know you will.”

  Considering it’s Edgerton, the banter is easy and almost affectionate. After all, this is the same homicide unit in which the diagnosis of Gene Constantine’s diabetes was greeted by a coffee room chalkboard divided by two h
eadings: “Those who give a shit if Constantine dies” and “Those who don’t.” Sergeant Childs, Lieutenant Stanton, Mother Teresa and Barbara Constantine topped the latter list. The shorter column featured Gene himself, followed by the city employees’ credit union. By that standard of camaraderie, Edgerton isn’t putting up with anything out of the ordinary on this slow four-to-twelve shift. In fact, the scene being played out in the main office is a rare performance of Harry Edgerton as Just One of the Guys, a homicide man among homicide men. Never mind that Edgerton still thinks the world of Ed Burns and the ongoing Board-ley investigation. And never mind that Kincaid and Eddie Brown don’t really believe that Edgerton wants to be working straight murders when his bunky is over at the FBI field office fleshing out a two-year conspiracy probe. Never mind all that bitching earlier in the year, because right now Edgerton is handling murders.

  It’s the new Harry who laughs when his colleagues assure him that they’re going to make something out of him, the changed man who makes a point of announcing to the office that he’s getting ready to answer a ringing phone.

  “Go for it, Harry.”

  “Don’t hurt yourself there, Harry.”

  “He got it on three rings. Someone call a fuckin’ press conference.”

  Edgerton chuckles, the picture of tolerance. He cups one hand over the receiver, then turns in his chair, feigning confusion.

  “What do I do?” he asks in mock earnest. “Just talk into this part?”

  “Yeah, put the top to your ear and talk into the bottom.”

  “Homicide unit. Edgerton.”

  “Way to go, Harry, babe.”

  SATURDAY, JULY 9

  Hotter than hell up here.

  It’s three in the morning and the coffee room is 90 degrees or better. Apparently, some bean counter in fiscal services decided that the midnight shift doesn’t need any heat before February or air conditioning before August, and now Donald Kincaid is out in the main office, stalking back and forth in his shirttails, Jockey shorts and socks, threatening total nudity if the temperature doesn’t fall before morning. And Kincaid without clothes on an overnight shift is a dangerous thing.