Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets

by David Simon

But it’s harder to believe her when she says that some greasy motor-head named Rick is running around South Baltimore in a custom $60,000 Lotus, giving billy girls a ride down to the Southern District. Yeah, right, thinks Brown, and Donald Worden is my personal love slave.

  What’s especially aggravating to the detectives is that if these witnesses can’t get the car right-the car being a definite object with its make and model number displayed in chrome on its exterior-then they sure as hell can’t be trusted to come anywhere close on the guy’s description. Everyone mentions the shoulder-length blond hair, but some are saying stringy and others, curly. Only half of them have the thin mustache, and they’re all over the map on the guy’s height and weight. Eye color? Forget it. Distinctive features? Oh yeah, he was driving a Lotus.

  Ordinarily, a bad description is par for the course. Any good detective or prosecutor knows that stranger-to-stranger identification is the weakest kind of evidence; in a crowded world, people just don’t have the facility to commit a new face to memory. Many veteran detectives don’t bother to include preliminary descriptions in their reports for that reason: A description of a six-foot-two, 220-pound suspect will hurt you in court when the guy turns out to be five-seven and 150. True to the stereotype, law enforcement studies have also shown that interracial identifications-blacks of whites, whites of blacks-tend to be the weakest because at first glance, both races have trouble distinguishing between members of the other. In Baltimore, at least, the reputation for the most ineffectual identifications goes to the Koreans, who run every other corner store in the inner city. “All rook arike” is the only credo they ever offer to a robbery detective.

  But this case should have been different. For one thing, the identification is white-on-white. For another, the guy was in the bar for over an hour, hovering around Carol, making conversation with the other patrons and employees. Collectively, these people remember that the guy claimed to be a mechanic, a transmission expert actually, that he drank Budweiser, that he mentioned that a particular bar up in Parkville was for sale and that his uncle owned some bar in Highlandtown with a German-sounding name that no one can recall. They even remember that the guy got mad when Carol got up to dance to the jukebox with another girl. All of that has been committed to memory by the regulars at Helen’s, and yet Brown is left with nothing better than a partial description.

  Frustrated, Brown works the bartendress through her story a second time, then communes with Worden at the back of the tavern, near the pool table.

  “These are our best witnesses?” says Brown. “We don’t have dick.”

  Leaning against the pay phone on the back wall, Worden gives Brown a what-you-mean-we-Kemosabe look.

  “The problem is that it was closing time and they were all shitfaced,” Brown continues. “They’re not going to remember this guy well enough for a composite.”

  Worden says nothing.

  “You don’t think there’s any point in calling an artist, right?”

  Worden looks at him skeptically. Even with good eyewitnesses, the composite sketches never manage to look like the suspect. Somehow, all the black guys resemble Eddie Brown and, depending on hair color, all the white guys are dead ringers for either Dunnigan or Landsman.

  Brown persists. “There’s not enough here for a composite, right?”

  Worden holds out his hand. “Gimme a quarter.”

  Brown fishes up a twenty-five-cent piece, presuming that Worden wants to use the phone or maybe punch a song on the juke.

  “Brown, you’re a piece of shit,” says Worden, pocketing the coin. “Finish your beer and let’s go.”

  They are left with the worst kind of investigation, a needle-in-a-haystack search for blond-haired Rick and his black or maybe blue-green sports car. Reluctantly, Worden puts a description out on a teletype to the districts. He had hoped to keep that information from floating around too freely, because if word somehow gets back to the suspect that they have a partial description of the car, he’ll paint it or ditch it or hide it in a garage somewhere for about four months. The car, both detectives understand, is essential evidence.

  Ideally, the teletypes are read at every roll call citywide and maybe elsewhere in the state if a detective uses the MILES computer system. Hell, if an investigator thinks his man has gone on the wing interstate, he can go whole hog and put the thing on NCIC. But both the local and national teletype networks-like most everything else in the criminal justice system-are flooded to the point of absurdity. Usually, the only items a cop remembers from roll call will be red-ball items-cop killings, child murders-and the occasional punch line. At the beginning of a recent 8-to-4 shift, Jay Landsman made a point of reading a burglary teletype from Baltimore County in which the stolen property consisted of 522 gallons of ice cream.

  “The suspects are believed to be a lot fatter than they were…”

  In the Baltimore precincts, at least, a homicide lookout stands a good chance of being read at roll call, but whether anyone’s actually listening or not is open to debate. In Brown and Worden’s favor, however, is the fact that the girl was run over in the Southern District. In a detective’s mind, the street police in certain districts are known for certain things: The Eastern cops protect a crime scene better than anyone, the Western operations unit has decent informants, and in the Southern and the Southeast, there are still some guys out on the street who will actually work a lookout.

  Over the next several days, uniforms in those districts make traffic stops on anything close to the description. The paperwork comes downtown to Brown’s desk, where names and license numbers are matched with motor vehicle registrations and BPI photos. There’s a lot of data and Brown looks at each report carefully. Nothing seems to match: This guy’s got a black 280Z with a T-top, but he’s got thinning brown hair. This one’s got a Mustang with some front end damage, but his long hair is jet black. This one’s got long blond hair, but his Trans Am is a light copper color.

  In addition to the district car stops, Brown and Worden spend the days and nights after the murder wedged into a Cavalier, following up on everything that the victim’s family tells them. And with each passing day, the family comes up with a new suspect. First, there is the guy out in Middle River whose name is most definitely Rick and who had called for Carol about a week before she was killed. The family still has the guy’s phone number.

  When Brown and McLarney ride out to the Middle River address, a man with short, thinning blond hair answers the door. Hell, thinks Brown, hopeful, he could have cut it. But downtown in the large interrogation room, the detectives learn that he works at the Domino Sugar plant in Locust Point, not as an auto mechanic. Worse than that, his only car is an old yellow Toyota; Brown checks it that day on the company lot. The man readily acknowledges having given Carol Wright a ride down Fort Avenue on his motorcycle, but he’s genuinely surprised to hear about the woman’s death.

  Another kid stopped by the district has blond hair and the right kind of car listed to his mother’s address out on Washington Boulevard, but his alibi seems to hold. A third billy is a mechanic who goes by the name Rick and lives down in Anne Arundel: He even knew some of Carol’s friends, according to the family. Brown sits on the house for two days, looking for that black sports car, only to pick the guy up and learn that the family had already called him first.

  “They told me you might be coming by,” he assures Brown. “What do you want to know?”

  Billyland. Not only do they talk to the police, they babble to one another-so much so that there’s no conceivable way for an investigator to work effectively. As soon as one family member learns about a potential suspect, another family member is asking a friend of a friend to ask the guy whether he has a black sports car and if so, whether he used it to run over Carol Wright. Twice, Brown goes back to South Baltimore to urge the family not to discuss the case with anyone. Twice, they assure him that they will shut up.

  Two days later, Brown is alone in a Cavalier, watching a side stree
t off Dundalk Avenue for yet another suspect. He is there for hours, drinking 7-Eleven coffee and feeding his smoker’s cough and watching the billy boys come and go from their cars. Rarely does a homicide detective have time for this sort of endless surveillance, even if he has the patience. But so far no fresh murders have landed on Brown’s desk, allowing him to sit for hours with the air conditioning running. With white powder from a Hostess doughnut in his mustache and Appalachian bluegrass on the AM radio, it soon occurs to him that he hasn’t spent this long sitting on a house since his tour in narcotics. By the end of the day, in fact, he’s damn proud of himself for being careful, patient and determined-just like any real detective.

  Finally, only after two successive dayshifts in a Cavalier, when it’s clear that there’s no black car anywhere near the house, Brown picks the guy up for an interview. “Yeah,” says his suspect. “They were sayin’ that they gave you my name a few days back. I don’t know why they did that, though.”

  Brown drove back to the homicide office, ready to chuck the case file into the nearest empty drawer. “Get me a murder in West Baltimore,” he tells Worden. “I can’t deal with these fucking white people anymore.”

  For his part, Worden has stayed with the case, but he has preserved a certain distance. Alongside the younger detective, he has cruised Highlandtown looking for a bar with anything resembling a German name. And he has also spent hours sitting with Brown on many of those same houses and parking lots, looking for that black mystery car. And yet there is a message to Worden’s presence on this case, something that Brown understands instinctively.

  “You want to go?” Brown asks him after three long hours of watching a garden apartment down in Marley Neck.

  “It’s your case,” says Worden, masking the Socratic method with indifference. “What do you want to do?”

  “We’ll wait,” says Brown.

  Still, after a week they are no closer to a killer, and the Carol Ann Wright case remains an undetermined death, not even a murder. And both men know that without a fresh lead, their task is Herculean. Three days ago, a DMV printout arrived at the homicide unit with the names and addresses of the owners of 280Zs in central Maryland. Even if their best witnesses are right about that particular make of car, and even if their man happens to be the registered owner of record, the computer list is more than a hundred pages long.

  On August 30, Worden inherits a true red ball, a fourteen-year-old kid shotgunned to death in the Northwest, killed without any apparent motive as he walked home from his job at a fast-food restaurant. Five days after that, Dave Brown and McLarney are working on the disappearance of a twenty-six-year-old west side woman who has not been seen for a week, though two dopers have been locked up for driving her car.

  Fresh bodies. Fresh leads. From Brown’s desk, you can listen close and hear a slow, grinding noise as the Carol Wright case slips out of gear.

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 15

  The scene is a rowhouse basement, a dank, unfurnished place on East Preston Street, where an elderly white man is stretched across the floor in full rigor, covered by a few sheets of plastic tarp and a trio of die-cast, two-foot-tall Magi. Yessiree: the three wise men, those good souls who carry around myrrh and frankincense and visit blessed mangers on church lawns every Christmas. A nice, bizarre touch, thinks Rich Garvey. Someone blew a very big hole in this old man’s head, stole his money, dragged the body downstairs and then threw a plastic wrap and three wise men over the corpse. A nativity scene, East Baltimore style.

  The dead man is Henry Plumer, and it’s immediately obvious to Garvey and Bob McAllister that the old man has encountered something very big-a.44 or.45 probably, and fired at point-blank range, too, judging from the powder burns. Plumer was in his late sixties and had for at least half his life been collecting for Littlepage’s Furniture in the city, wandering around the ghetto all day long, calling in the monthly payments on furniture and appliances. It was mostly no-money-down credit stuff, which lures poor folk into paying $10 a week until their living room set ends up costing more than a college education, but old Mr. Plumer had been at it for so long that the people on his route all knew and liked him. He’d become something of a neighborhood institution in East Baltimore, riding around all day with that little collection book of his. Donald Kincaid actually knew the man, since his mother still lived in the 900 block of Collington, refusing to quit her east side home even as the neighborhood around her fell into ruin.

  Garvey already knows all about Mr. Plumer, or at least he knows everything that was in a missing person’s teletype sent out by county police yesterday, when the old man and his car disappeared into the wilds of Baltimore and his family began to panic. Garvey’s already fairly certain that he knows who killed Mr. Plumer-knowledge that comes easily when the owner of the basement in question is a drug user with a long sheet.

  From what he has gleaned thus far, an addict by the name of Jerry Jackson owns this two-story brick pile, was one of the last people to see a living Henry Plumer, and apparently left for his housecleaning job at Rosewood Hospital with Plumer’s body still bleeding on his basement floor. As clues, these facts are decidedly unsubtle and suggest a certain lack of intellect on the part of the homeowner in question-a suggestion that is all but confirmed when the phone on the first floor suddenly begins ringing twenty minutes after the detectives’ arrival. Garvey bounds up the stairs and picks up on the third ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Who’s this?” asks the male caller.

  “This is Detective Garvey from the homicide unit,” he says. “Who’s this?”

  “This is Jerry,” says the voice.

  How considerate, thinks Garvey. A suspect who calls his own crime scene.

  “Jerry,” says Garvey, “how fast can you get over here?”

  “About twenty minutes or so.”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  In his first statement on the matter at hand, Jerry Jackson doesn’t even bother to ask what a homicide detective is doing at his house, doesn’t think about denying anything or demonstrating shock and dismay. He hangs up the phone without ever expressing amazement or distress that a dead body is being examined in his basement. Nor does he express any immediate curiosity about why that body is there. Garvey hangs on until the phone line goes dead, delighted to be dealing with such an earnest, cooperative brain-dead.

  “Hey Mac,” says Garvey, hanging up the receiver and walking back to the top of the basement stairs. “That was Jerry calling.”

  “Oh really,” says McAllister from the basement.

  “Yeah. He’s on his way over.”

  “That’s nice,” says McAllister, deadpan.

  The detectives continue to work the crime scene. Two hours later, they stop waiting for Jerry Jackson, who, for all his seeming cooperation, has still not made an appearance. Late that night, with a county detective in tow, they drive out to Fullerton and break the news to the Plumer family, whereupon the elderly widow goes white and faints. By morning, she is dead of a heart attack, as much a homicide victim as her husband.

  It’s in the early morning hours that Jerry Jackson finally returns to the house on Preston Street, where he is greeted with some consternation by his own wife, a woman not at all pleased to be finding bodies in her basement. It was the wife who had located Henry Plumer and called police after hearing from friends in the neighborhood that the old bill collector was missing and had last been seen making his regular stop at the Jackson home. Rumors of the murder had been around the block a couple of times by then and a friend had urged Mrs. Jackson to check her basement carefully. The two got halfway down the stairs when they saw the shoes sticking out from under the tarp. The wife went no farther, but the friend managed to step forward and lift the plastic enough to convince herself that it was Mr. Plumer and that he’d definitely looked better. At that point, Jerry Jackson’s wife saw where things were going; without waiting for her husband to return from work, she went to the phone and dialed 911. />
  And so, by the time Jerry Jackson returns home and confers with his wife, it’s abundantly clear-even to him-that whatever the plan for this murder was, it definitely isn’t working. He does not, however, disappear into the bowels of East Baltimore. Nor does he try to scrape together some cash for a bus ticket to Carolina. No, sir. For his last act as a free man, Jerry Jackson elects to call the homicide unit and ask for Rich Garvey. He’d like to talk about the body in his basement. Perhaps, he offers, he could be of some help to the investigation.

  But when Jackson arrives in the large interrogation room, his pupils are the size of purely theoretical particles. Cocaine, thinks Garvey, but he decides his suspect may just be able to manage a few intelligible sentences. After negotiating the Miranda, the detectives’ first question is the obvious one, of course.

  “Ah, Jerry,” asks Garvey, scratching the top of his head in feigned confusion, “why was Mr. Plumer’s body in your house?”

  Quietly, almost casually, Jackson tells the detectives that he made his monthly payment to Mr. Plumer yesterday afternoon; then the old man took the money and drove away.

  “And I don’t know nothing about no murder,” he continues, his voice breaking, “until I called my mother’s house from work and was told THAT THERE’S A MOTHERFUCKING BODY IN MY BASEMENT!”

  The first half of the sentence is tense but quiet, but the last part is a wild rant, a shout that pierces the interrogation room doors and can be heard clear down at the other end of the sixth-floor hall.

  Seated on either side of the suspect, the detectives look at each other for a moment, then down at the table. Garvey is biting his lip.

  “Could, ah, you excuse us for just a moment,” says McAllister, addressing the suspect as if he were Emily Post and the man had just used the wrong salad fork. “We just need to discuss something and we’ll be right back with you in just a second, okay?”

  Jackson nods, twitching.

  The two detectives walk silently out of the room and close the metal door behind them. They manage to make it to the annex office before they both double over, convulsed by the force of suppressed laughter.