Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets

by David Simon

  “THERE’S A BODY IN MY BASEMENT!” shouts Garvey, shaking his partner’s shoulders.

  “Not just a body,” says McAllister, laughing. “A motherfucking body.”

  “THERE’S A MOTHERFUCKING BODY IN MY BASEMENT!” shouts Garvey again. “THERE’S A MADMAN ON THE LOOSE!”

  McAllister shakes his head, still laughing. “Don’t you just hate that? You leave the house, you go to work, call your mom, and she tells you there’s a body in your basement…”

  Garvey grips a desk in the annex office with both hands, trying to regain his composure.

  “It was all I could do not to laugh in his face,” he tells McAllister. “God.”

  “You don’t think he’s high or anything like that,” says McAllister dryly.

  “Him? No way. He’s a little high-strung. That’s all it is.”

  “Seriously, should we even bother with a statement?”

  The question is a legal one. Any statement taken now could be mitigated by the fact that Jerry Jackson is somewhat compromised, chemically speaking.

  “What the hell?” says Garvey. “Let’s go back in. We’ve got to charge him. We either talk to him now or not at all…”

  McAllister nods, then leads the way toward the interrogation room. From outside the wire mesh window, the two detectives can see Jerry Jackson dancing a mad samba in his chair. Garvey begins laughing again.

  “Wait a sec,” he tells McAllister.

  Garvey finds his poker face, then loses it, then finds it again. “This motherfucker is killing me.”

  McAllister grips the door handle, fighting hard for his own composure. “Ready?” he asks.

  “Okay.”

  The two detectives return to the room and their seats. Jackson waits for another question but is instead treated to a long monologue by McAllister in which it is explained that he has no reason to be upset or angry at the existing circumstances. None at all. After all, they’re just asking questions and he’s just answering questions, right?

  “We’re not hurting you, are we?”

  No, agrees the suspect.

  “And we’re not treating you badly, are we?”

  No, agrees the suspect.

  “You’re being treated fairly, right?”

  Yes, agrees the suspect.

  “Okay then, Jerry. Why don’t you tell us-calmly-why don’t you calmly tell us why there was this body in your basement?”

  Not that it matters what he says, because by daylight Garvey, McAllister and Roger Nolan have also obtained a complete statement from Jackson’s wife. They’ve also interviewed the nephew who helped Jerry Jackson plan the robbery and then ditch Plumer’s car. They’ve even interviewed the neighborhood dealer from whom Jackson bought $200 worth of cocaine, using the money he took off the old man’s body. All in all, the Preston Street call is definitely not what comes to mind when a detective is asked to think of the perfect murder. Presumably, Jackson planned to show up for work so as not to arouse suspicion, then remove the body from his basement and dump it somewhere else in the early morning hours. That’s assuming the man had any plan at all beyond robbing and killing a man in his living room for enough money to stay high all day.

  Just before the morning shift change, Garvey is at his desk in the main office, battling the paperwork to a draw and listening to Nolan philosophize on just what it was that cracked this case. When we went back out and picked up the dealer who sold to Jackson, says Nolan, that’s when we really cracked it wide open.

  At which point Garvey and McAllister both drop their pens and look at their sergeant as if he’s just stepped off the last Greyhound from Mars.

  “Uh, Rog,” says McAllister, “what cracked this case was the fact that the killer left the dead guy in his house.”

  “Well, yeah,” says Nolan, laughing but a little disappointed. “That too.”

  So Rich Garvey’s Perfect Year marches ever onward, a divine crusade seemingly impervious to the touch of reality, a campaign unfettered by the rules of homicide that somehow manage to afflict every other detective. Garvey is getting witnesses, he’s getting fingerprint hits, he’s getting the license tags off getaway cars. You do a murder in Baltimore when Rich Garvey’s working and you may as well have a lawyer meet you at the district lockup an hour later.

  Not long after Jerry Jackson returns to earth and a city jail tier, Garvey again picks up a telephone extension and writes down an East Baltimore address. This time it is the worst kind of call a murder police can get. Garvey is so certain of unanimity on this opinion that he actually puts down the phone and asks the other detectives in the office to name the call they least like to handle. McAllister and Kincaid need about a half second to say “arson.”

  For a homicide detective, an arson murder is a special type of torture because the police department is essentially stuck with whatever the fire department’s investigator says is arson. To this day, Donald Kincaid is still carrying an open murder for a fatal fire that almost certainly began with nothing more sinister than an electrical short. At the scene, Kincaid could see the burn pattern running up the rowhouse wall where the wiring was, but some goof from FIB insisted on calling it arson. So what was he going to do then, arrest the goddamn fuse box? Not only that, but when a detective gets a genuine arson murder in front of a jury, he can never convince them that the fire wasn’t an accident, not without a six-pack of witnesses, at least. Even if there’s a pour pattern from gasoline or some other accelerant, a good lawyer can suggest that someone spilled the stuff by mistake and then accidentally dropped a cigarette. Juries like dead people who have bulletholes or steak knives attached to them; anything less is not convincing.

  Knowing all this, Garvey and McAllister once again steer an unmarked car to a crime scene with fear and loathing in their hearts. It’s a two-story dump on North Bond Street and, of course, there are no witnesses-just a bunch of burned furniture and one crispy critter in the middle room. Some smokehound, an old guy, maybe sixty.

  The poor bastard is lying there like a piece of chicken that someone forgot to turn over, and the FIB investigator is showing Garvey a dark splotch on the other side of the room and calling it a textbook example of a pour pattern. Sure enough, when they clear all the soot away, the splotch really does look darker than the surrounding area. So Garvey has a dead guy and a pour pattern and some drunk woman who jumped out the rear window when the fire started and is now up at Union Memorial breathing from an oxygen tank. From the fire investigator, the detectives learn that the woman is supposedly the dead guy’s girlfriend.

  Having satisfied themselves that North Bond Street is indeed their worst nightmare come true, Garvey and McAllister drive to the hospital with the understanding that this blessed year of his has finally reached its terminus. They walk into the Union Memorial ER and greet two detectives from the arson squad who are standing out at the nurses station like a pair of bookends, telling them the injured woman’s story is all bullshit. She’s got the fire starting by accident in an ashtray or some nonsense like that.

  The woman told the arson guys that much while she was being treated in the ER, but now she can’t be interviewed further because she inhaled a lot of smoke and talking is a problem. Garvey may have his arsonist, but there’s absolutely no way to prove the case. Given that conflict, the idea of getting an assistant medical examiner to pend the case for a little while-like maybe a decade-becomes more and more appealing in the minds of both detectives. At the following morning’s autopsy, Garvey manages to accomplish this feat, whereupon he and McAllister return to the office with the sincere hope that if they just click their heels three times, the entire case will go away.

  Given recent events, such thoughts in the mind of Rich Garvey can only suggest a certain lack of faith, a certain disregard for his own destiny. Because two weeks later, the woman at Union Memorial succumbs to smoke inhalation and related injuries; two days after that, Garvey pays a second visit to Penn Street and assures the good doctors that they can go ahead and
rule the case a homicide. That done, he can immediately show the case as cleared due to the rather timely death of his solitary suspect. A good detective, after all, is never too proud to take a paper clearance.

  The arson case makes it ten out of ten since February and the Lena Lucas murder. Drug murders, neighborhood disputes, street robberies, unprosecutable arson deaths-it matters not to Rich Garvey, the luckiest sonofabitch on D’Addario’s shift of fifteen. Apparently the Perfect Year, like any force of nature, cannot be denied.

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1

  Up and down the stoops he goes, a homicide detective banging on North Durham Street doors in search of a little cooperation, a little civic responsibility.

  “Didn’t see it,” says the young girl at 1615.

  “I heard a loud bang,” says the man at 1617.

  No answer at 1619.

  “Lord,” says the woman at 1621, “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout it.”

  Tom Pellegrini presses a few additional questions on these people, trying hard to get himself interested in this case, to find something that might make a detective care about the bloodstain in the center of the 1600 block.

  “Were you home when it happened?” he asks another girl, at the door of 1616.

  “I’m not sure.”

  Not sure. How can you not be sure? Theodore Johnson was hit by a shotgun blast fired at point-blank range, blown apart in the center of a narrow rowhouse street. The sound itself had to be audible all the way up to North Avenue.

  “You don’t know if you were home?”

  “I might have been.”

  So much for the door-to-door canvass. Not that Pellegrini can blame the neighborhood for its reluctance to volunteer information. Word is out that the dead man crossed a local dealer on a drug debt and the dealer has just proven to everyone within earshot that he’s a man to be reckoned with. The people behind these doors have got to live on Durham Street; Pellegrini is no more than an occasional tourist.

  With nothing on the horizon even remotely resembling a witness, Pellegrini has a body on the way to Penn Street and a bloodstain on dirty asphalt. He’s got a spent shotgun shell ejected by the shooter in the alley around the corner. He’s got a street so dark that the emergency vehicle unit has been called to light up his scene for the photographs. An hour or so later, Pellegrini will have the sister of his victim sitting in Jay Landsman’s office, feeding him a bit of rumor about some people that may or may not have had something to do with the shooting. He will have a headache, too.

  Theodore Johnson joins Stevie Braxton and Barney Erely on the white rectangle in the coffee room. Braxton, the kid with a long sheet found stabbed up off Pennsylvania Avenue. Erely, the homeless man bludgeoned to death on Clay Street. Red names riding the board with Pellegrini’s initial near them, casualties in the year-long campaign to close the Latonya Wallace murder. It’s triage, plain and simple, but Pellegrini can live with that. After all, he’s got an eleven-year-old raped and murdered, and neither Theodore Johnson nor a drug debt that has now been paid has any real weight when hung in the balance. Tonight’s dead man will get one or two shakes from the homicide unit, one or two go-rounds in the interrogation rooms with a few reluctant witnesses. But then the primary investigator will set the file aside.

  Months later, Pellegrini will feel some guilt about this, some concern about the number of cases sacrificed for the sake of one child. With much the same sort of self-recrimination that governs his thoughts on the Latonya Wallace murder, Pellegrini will wonder whether he should have pressed harder on that kid in the Western District lockup back in January, the one who claimed to know one of the shooters from Gold and Etting. He’ll wonder about whether he should have gone harder at Braxton’s girlfriend, who didn’t seem all that upset about the murder. And he’ll wonder, too, about the rumors that Theodore Johnson’s sister is now feeding him-information that will never be fully checked.

  True, he could dump this case on the secondary. Vernon Holley handled the scene with him and he would probably understand if Pellegrini ducked the call to stay focused on Latonya Wallace. Still, Holley is new to the squad, a veteran black detective transferred from the robbery unit to replace Fred Ceruti. He’d been out on one murder with Rick Requer a couple of weeks ago, but that wasn’t enough to qualify as an orientation, even for an investigator as experienced as Holley. And the squad was a man short to begin with: Dick Fahlteich had voluntarily transferred to sex offense after six years in homicide. The body count had finally got to Fahlteich, a talented detective who nonetheless was handling fewer calls each year, working at a pace that others in Landsman’s squad were quick to compare to Harry Edgerton’s. The workload and the hours-coupled with a gnawing aggravation about his being passed over several times on the sergeant’s lists-had at last pushed Fahlteich down to the other end of the sixth-floor hallway at about the same time that Ceruti traveled the same route. At least with Fahlteich it was a matter of choice.

  No, Pellegrini reasons, with the squad down to three regulars and a fresh transfer, the Theodore Johnson case is his to eat. At the very least, he owes it to Holley to stay with the thing for a few days. A graphic display of job-related burnout isn’t exactly the best lesson to be teaching a new man.

  Bravely, Pellegrini fights his own impulses, doing a competent crime scene out on Durham Street, then canvassing the entire block for witnesses that he knows in his heart will never come forward. Holley peels off early, heading back to the homicide office to begin interviewing family members and a couple of kids at the scene who were sent downtown only because they were out there acting like squirrels when the first uniforms arrived.

  The sudden role reversal-with Pellegrini now the tired veteran, breaking in the latest prodigy-is accepted without comment by everyone else in Landsman’s squad. Nine months of Latonya Wallace has changed Pellegrini: His metamorphosis from fresh-scrubbed recruit to battered trench rat is complete. To say that he can look at Holley and see himself a couple years ago goes too far: Holley already had the experience of CID robbery behind him; Pellegrini had come to homicide with no investigative background whatsoever. Still, Holley is working this Durham Street case as if it mattered, as if it were the only murder in the history of the world. He is fresh. He is confident. He makes Pellegrini feel one hundred years old.

  The two detectives chase the murder on Durham Street through into late morning, gathering the information from the sister, then trying to check her story against that provided by a former police officer who has family living in the block. His family will not come forward, but the ex-cop, though fired from the force twenty years ago in a corruption case, has enough residual instinct to call in with the name of a possible participant. Pellegrini and Holley find the kid that same morning, go at him in the large box for several hours and emerge with little to show for the effort. Then, slowly, after a few more laps around the case file, Holley accepts the unspoken verdict of his tutor. He drifts away, looking for better pickings with Gary Dunnigan and Requer.

  He finds them, too, hooking up with Requer on a domestic from Bruce Street, a true tragedy in which a young girl has been bludgeoned to death by her cokehead of a boyfriend and her orphaned infant is left crying on a policewoman’s shoulder, wailing at the world as the officer’s hand-held radio squawks out citywide dispatch calls. Holley follows that with another domestic from Cherry Hill that he works to completion with Dunnigan. Both cases are dunkers and both bring a certain confidence. By December, Holley will be handling calls as a primary.

  For Pellegrini, however, the milestones marked by his squad mean little. Ceruti’s fall from grace, Fahlteich’s departure, Holley’s education-they are scenes from a play in which Pellegrini has no real part. Time stands still for one detective, leaving him alone on a stage of his own, trapped there by the same few props and the same few lines from the same sad scene.

  Three weeks ago, Pellegrini and Landsman hit the Fish Man’s Whitelock Street apartment a second time, working through a search warrant
that was written more for Pellegrini’s peace of mind than anything else. Months had passed and the chance of recovering any additional evidence from the apartment was minimal. Yet Pelligrini, now fixated on the store owner as his best suspect, was convinced that in their haste to hit the three-story shithouse on Newington back in February, they had blown off the earlier searches on Whitelock. In particular, Pellegrini vaguely remembered seeing a remnant of red carpeting in the Fish Man’s living room during the February raid; months later, he thought of the hairs and fibers taken from the young girl’s body at the morgue and recalled that one of those fibers was red cloth.

  Red carpet, red fiber: Pellegrini suddenly had another reason to kick himself. For Pellegrini, the contents of file H88021 had become nothing less than an ever-changing landscape in which every tree, rock and bush seems to be moving. And it was no use explaining to him that this could happen to any detective on any case-this pit-of-the-stomach feeling that everything was being missed, that evidence was disappearing faster than an investigator could perceive it. Every detective in the unit had lived through the sensation of seeing something at a crime scene or during a search warrant and then looking twice to see that it was no longer there. Hell, maybe it never was there. Or maybe it’s still there, but now you’ve lost the ability to see it.

  It was the stuff from which the Nightmare was made, the Nightmare being that recurring dream that occasionally ruins the sleep of every good detective. In the throes of the Nightmare, you are moving through the familiar confines of a rowhouse-you’ve got a warrant, perhaps, or maybe it’s just a plain-view search-and from the corner of your eye you glimpse something. What the hell is it? Something important, you know that. Something you need. A blood spatter. A shell casing. A child’s star-shaped earring. You can’t say for sure, but with every fiber of your being you understand that it’s your case lying there. Yet you look away for a moment, and when you look back again, it’s gone. It’s an empty place in your subconscious, a lost opportunity that mocks you. The Nightmare scares the hell out of young detectives; some of them even live the dream at their first crime scenes, convinced that the entire case is evaporating into the ether. As for the veterans, the Nightmare just pisses them off. They’ve gone through it enough not to believe every voice that speaks from the back of the mind.