Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets

by David Simon

  A similar logic applies in Billyland.

  You may come from the same mountain stock as the rest of Pigtown, but by a detective’s reasoning, that alone doesn’t make you a true billy. Maybe you’re just another white boy; maybe you finished twelfth grade at Southern High and nailed down a decent job and moved out to Glen Burnie or Linthicum. Or maybe you’re like Donald Worden, who grew up in Hampden, or like Donald Kincaid, speaking in a mountain drawl and sporting that tattoo on the back of one hand. On the other hand, if you’ve spent half your life drinking at the B &O Tavern on West Pratt Street and the other half shuttling back and forth from the Southern District Court for theft, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and possession of phencyclidine, then to a Baltimore detective you most certainly are a billy boy, a white-trash redneck, a city goat, a dead-brained cul-de-sac of heredity, spawned in the shallow end of a diminishing gene pool. And if you happen to get in the way of a Baltimore cop, he’ll probably be happy to tell you as much.

  Whatever their views on billy culture, the Baltimore detectives all agree that the best thing about working a murder on the white side of the tracks-aside from the sheer novelty-is that the billies talk. They talk at the scene, they talk in the interrogation rooms, they actually look up the number for the homicide office and then talk on the phone. And when asked whether he wants to remain anonymous, a good billy asks what the hell for. He gives up his real name, his correct address. He offers his work number, his girlfriend’s name and phone number, his girlfriend’s mother’s phone number and every thought he’s had in his head since the ninth grade. The code of the street-the ghetto rule that says a man never talks to a police under any conceivable circumstance-just doesn’t mean as much in Billyland. Maybe it’s because the cops have a little good ol’ boy in them, maybe it’s because the high-spirited Baltimore billy never managed to incorporate lying as an art form. Whichever, a detective working a white murder in the Southern or Southwestern District usually has more information than he knows what to do with.

  Dave Brown knows all this, of course. As he takes in the swirl of blue-tops surrounding his crime scene, he also knows that he needs a clearance to balance some nasty red on the board. He’s been carrying a couple of open ones, most notably the Clayvon Jones killing, which can’t be put down without a witness no matter how many anonymous callers offer up the suspect’s name. Ordinarily, he might have shrugged young Clayvon off as a hard luck case, but the return of Corey Belt from the Western District for the Geraldine Parrish detail was, in Brown’s mind, a reason for genuine angst. No doubt, Belt had obviously impressed McLarney in the Cassidy investigation, and now Belt was happily teamed with Donald Waltemeyer, Brown’s usual partner, in a probe of the Parrish insurance killings that might take months.

  Only last night, Brown had gone so far as to joke weakly about his status. Sitting at an admin office typewriter at the beginning of the overnight shift, he concocted a short, plaintive memorandum to McLarney, which he left in the sergeant’s mailbox:

  With Officer Corey (I’m a superstar) Belt looming on the horizon, I thought I’d take just a moment to reintroduce myself to you.

  Until I came to your squad, I was just another long-haired, drug-infested, raving homosexual. Working under your knowledge, talent, skill, kindness and love I have become a detective of barely questionable means. Keeping this in mind, and to include the great feelings of my squad toward me (Worden: “He’s a useless fuck”… James: “He never pays his fucking bar tab”… Ed Brown: “I doesn’t even know the motherfucker”) I was wondering what plans you had in mind for my CONTINUED service to you.

  I will remain ever vigilant, awaiting your response. Respectfully (everyone takes advantage of me),

  David John Brown, Detective.

  CID? Homicide? (Forever, Please God)

  McLarney found the memo about an hour into the midnight shift and read it aloud in the coffee room, giggling at the more obsequious passages.

  “Amusing,” he declared in conclusion. “Inatrulypatheticsortof way.”

  Fred Ceruti’s troubles had not gone unnoticed, and Dave Brown, in his own, feverish brain at least, was feeling a little of the same heat. Driving out to Johnson Street, he had reasoned that an investigative sortie into Billyland might be just the cure.

  “Well, Brown,” says Worden, getting out of the passenger seat, “let’s see what you’ve got.”

  She is face down in the hard mud and stone, a pale figure framed by a semicircle of radio cars. A short woman with straight reddish-brown hair, her red-and-white-striped tank top is pulled up to expose most of her back; her white corduroy cutoffs are torn at one side, revealing the buttocks. A pair of cream-colored panties, also torn from the left side, are down between her knees, and a single sandal rests a few feet from her right foot. Around her neck is a thin gold necklace and a pair of gold hoop earrings lie in the gravel on either side of her head. On closer inspection, one of the earrings is bloody, apparently because it was torn from the woman’s left earlobe, which shows a laceration and some dried blood. Scattered near the body are a few coins; working carefully, Worden manages to liberate $27 in bills from a back pocket. Jewelry, money-if it was a robbery, it didn’t get far.

  Dave Brown looks at Worden, conscious of the fact that the Big Man is participating in this scene reluctantly.

  “How old would you say, Donald?”

  “Twenty-five. Maybe a little older. Can’t really say until we roll her.”

  “I’d say twenty-five might be high.”

  “Maybe,” says Worden, bending over the woman. “But I’ll tell you what my first question is.”

  “Lemme guess. You want to know where that other sandal is.”

  “You got it.”

  The scene is a gravel lot that serves as a tractor-trailer turn-around and loading dock for an aging, red brick warehouse at the edge of the Chessie System railbed. Three trucks are parked at the eastern edge of the lot, but their drivers were sleeping in the rear of their cabs before the warehouse opened and they heard and saw nothing; whatever happened on the lot happened quickly or quietly enough that they stayed asleep. The body is on the western side of the lot, near the warehouse itself, perhaps ten or fifteen feet from the concrete wall of the loading dock. At the edge of the dock is a truck trailer that blocks any view of the body from Johnson Street.

  She was found by two teenagers who live a few blocks away and were out running a dog at dawn. Both of them have already been sent downtown by uniforms, and McLarney will soon be busy taking statements. Both are billies tried and true, with Harley-Davidson tattoos and minor police records, but nothing about their story will arouse any suspicion.

  While Worden deals with the lab tech, Dave Brown begins walking the length of the gravel lot, from the loading dock to the overgrown grass at the edge of the railbed. He jumps up on the concrete dock, then walks around both sides of the warehouse. No sandal. Brown walks a block and a half down Johnson Street, checking the gutter, then walks back to the southern boundary of the lot, where he jumps down to the railbed and searches a few hundred feet of the tracks. Nothing.

  By the time he returns, the lab tech has recovered the money and jewelry, photographed the body in its original position and sketched the scene. The ME’s attendants have also arrived and taken their Polaroids, followed by two television news cameras that are perched at the lot’s entrance, shooting a few seconds of tape for the noon broadcasts.

  “Can they see the body from up there?” asks Worden, turning to the sector sergeant.

  “No. The trailer blocks the view.”

  Worden nods.

  “We ready?” Brown asks.

  “Let’s do it,” says the ME’s lead attendant, putting on his gloves. “Slow and steady.”

  Gingerly, the two attendants roll the corpse, turning the dead woman slowly onto her back. The face reveals itself as a bloody, fleshy pulp. More surprising, black treadmarks cross the left upper torso and head in a consistent diagonal.

&nb
sp; “Whoa,” says Dave Brown. “Road kill.”

  “Well, what do you know,” says Worden. “I guess it’s a whole new ball game now.”

  The older detective walks back to the Cavalier for one of the handheld radios and opens the citywide channel.

  “Sixty-four forty,” says Worden.

  “Sixty-four forty.”

  “I’m down at this homicide scene on Johnson Street and I need to get a supervisor in the traffic investigation section down here.”

  “Ten-four.”

  Half a minute later, a TIS sergeant is on the wire, explaining to the dispatcher that he is not needed on Johnson Street because the incident is a homicide, not an automobile accident. Worden listens to the conversation with growing irritation.

  “Sixty-four forty,” says Worden, interrupting.

  “Sixty-four forty.”

  “I know it’s a homicide. I want someone from TIS down here for their expertise.”

  “Ten-four,” says the traffic man, cutting back in. “I’ll be out there in a few minutes.”

  Unbelievable, thinks Worden, a perfect illustration of the not-my-job reflex. Traffic section handles any auto fatalities, including hit-and-runs, so they are reluctant to send a man down if it means they might get stuck with the case. McAllister and Bowman encountered something similar back in March when they called for traffic while working a body found mauled by the shoulder of Bayonne Avenue in the Northeast. The detectives were walking around that scene looking for chrome and paint chips; the traffic man was looking for shell casings.

  “Did you catch that?” asks Worden, almost amused. “That guy wasn’t going to come down here until he heard me say it was a homicide.”

  Dave Brown doesn’t answer, preoccupied with the change in scenario. Death-by-auto requires an entirely different perspective, though neither detective believes that this was an accident. For one thing, the body is on a vacant gravel lot and was run over not ten feet from the concrete wall of the loading dock: It’s hard to imagine a car whirling around in such a confined area for no reason. More important is the missing sandal. If the dead woman was a pedestrian, if she was merely the victim of a hit-and-run, then why wouldn’t that other sandal be somewhere on the lot? No, the detectives reason, she wasn’t a pedestrian; she arrived at the scene in the car that killed her, and chances are she had to get out of that car in a hurry, leaving behind one of her shoes.

  On a closer inspection of the body, Worden also notices bruising in the approximate shape of fingers on both forearms. Was she grabbed? Was she attacked before the killer got back in the car and finished her? And the earrings: Were they pried out by the movement of the tire over her head, or were they pulled from her ears in an earlier struggle?

  Freed from his fears about being saddled with the case, the TIS sergeant arrives a moment later and, after examining the treadmarks on the dead woman, begins waxing eloquent on radial tire design and the myriad distinctions between manufacturers. Before his brain turns to yogurt, Dave Brown interrupts the discourse.

  “What do you think hit her?”

  “Hard to say. But that tread would be most common on a sports car. A Two-eighty Z.A Camaro. Something along those lines.”

  “Nothing bigger?”

  “Maybe a little bigger, but I’m saying it would have to be in that same class of sports cars. Those are like a high-performance tire, like you want for a car that’s riding low to the ground.”

  “Thanks,” says Worden.

  “You got it.”

  Dave Brown squats down on his haunches to scan the treadmarks closely.

  “No question it’s a murder, Donald,” he says. “No question in my mind.”

  Worden nods agreement.

  But the drivers sleeping in the tractor cabs at the opposite end of the lot heard nothing; nor did the railroad workers at the yard office across the tracks remember any noise or headlights. Worden talks to the sector sergeant and learns that at about four A.M.-little more than two hours before the discovery of the body-there was a fire alarm at the warehouse. Trucks and engines from the Fort Avenue and Light Street stations drove right onto the gravel lot, confirmed the absence of any flame or smoke, and then drove off-presumably without noticing the body. Either she was killed after four o’clock or half the fire department all but drove over the corpse. On second thought, Worden muses, maybe they did that, too.

  News of the fire alarm makes both detectives realize that half their crime scene has already been destroyed. If the weapon is an automobile, treadmarks are important, and on a mud and stone lot such marks should be easy enough to find-provided, of course, that a convoy of fire trucks didn’t get a chance to roll across the scene, not to mention a half dozen radio cars, every last one of which made a point of pulling to within feet of the body. Dave Brown could spend a month matching tire prints to eliminate every vehicle that had been on the lot. Hoping for something easier, he checks the white cement of the loading dock and the scarred metal of a Dumpster, looking for fresh scrapes and dents.

  “It’s a tight spot,” he says, hopeful. “Wouldn’t it be great if the guy clipped a fender while rolling around in here?”

  It would be manna from heaven, but even as he speaks, Brown knows that the only physical evidence he has is the body itself. And depending on what happens in the autopsy room in two hours, he may have precious little of that. Contrary to his initial expectations, Johnson Street was turning out to be a stone whodunit; Billyland was turning out to be no fun at all.

  After the body has disappeared into the rear of the black van, the two detectives walk back up to the lot’s Johnson Street entrance, where a crowd of onlookers has collected over the last two hours. A younger woman waves Dave Brown aside and asks for the name of the victim.

  “We don’t know yet. We don’t have any ID.”

  “Was she in her forties?”

  “Younger. Much younger, I think.”

  As the detective fights to remain patient, the woman slowly explains that her aunt left their home on South Light Street late last night and hasn’t been seen since.

  “We don’t know who she is yet,” Brown repeats, handing her his business card. “If you want to call me later in the day, I’ll probably have something more.”

  The woman takes the card and opens her mouth with another question, but Brown is already in the driver’s seat of the Cavalier. If the case was an ordinary shoot-’em-up, one of the detectives would be peeling off to work on the identification and interview relatives. But this case, more than most, hinges on the postmortem.

  Brown guns the motor and races the Cavalier up South Charles Street; fifty miles an hour for no apparent reason. Worden looks at him.

  “What?” asks Brown.

  Worden shakes his head.

  “What’s the matter with you? I’m a police. I’m allowed to drive like that.”

  “Not with me in the car.”

  Brown rolls his eyes.

  “Go by the Rite Aid upon Baltimore Street,” says Worden. “I need cigars.”

  As if to make his point, Brown guns the motor again and catches every light across downtown. At Calvert and Baltimore, he double parks outside the drugstore and gets out of the driver’s side before Worden can react. He waves off the older detective and returns a minute later with his own brand of cigarettes and a soft pack of Backwoods.

  “I even got you one of them pink lighters you like so much. The bigger size.”

  A peace offering. Worden looks at the lighter, then back at Dave Brown. They are both large men, both squeezed beyond all dignity into the cramped interior of a two-door economy sedan. They are flesh under pressure in that car, a vision of cluttered humanity that somehow increases the comedic possibilities.

  “They say it takes a big man to carry a pink lighter,” says Brown. “A big man or a man familiar with alternative lifestyles.”

  “You know why I need the bigger size,” says Worden, lighting a cigar.

  “Because you can’t get them f
at stubby fingers around one of the little ones.”

  “That’s right,” says Worden.

  The Cavalier bumps its way through the potholes and metal plates of Lombard Street in the late morning traffic. Worden blows smoke out the window and watches secretaries and businessmen coming out of office buildings for an early lunch.

  “Thanks for the cigars,” he says after a block or two.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “And the lighter.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I’m still not helping you with this one.”

  “I know, Donald.”

  “And your driving still sucks.”

  “Yes, Donald.”

  “And you’re still a piece of shit.”

  “Thank you, Donald.”

  “Dr. Goodin,” says Worden, pointing to the metal gurney just outside the autopsy room door, “is this one yours?”

  “That one there?” says Julia Goodin. “That’s your case?”

  “Well, actually Detective Brown here is the primary investigator. I’m here for moral support.”

  The doctor smiles. She is a small woman, tiny in fact, with close-cropped blonde hair and wire-rim glasses. And despite the additional authority of a white lab coat, she is a young woman with at least a passing resemblance to Sandy Duncan. To be blunt, Julie Goodin looks nothing like a cutter, and considering the prevailing stereotype, that’s probably something of a compliment.

  “And also,” adds Worden, “because Brown promised to buy me breakfast across the street.”

  Dave Brown shoots Worden a look. Cigars. Lighters. Breakfast. You miserable old bastard, he thinks, why don’t you just bring me your fucking mortgage payments?

  Worden gives back a grin, then turns his attention to the pathologist, who now has her back to the two men. She is at the metal sink, cutting through the organ tree of this hour’s client, a middle-age black man whose empty center yawns at them from the gurney just behind the doctor.