Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets

by David Simon

  And yet on this case the Nightmare owns Pellegrini. It ordered him to write the second warrant for the Fish Man’s apartment, it demanded that he collect enough probable cause to get back inside a door that had been opened to him once before. Not surprisingly, the September raid left the Fish Man as bored and indifferent as its predecessor. Nor did it produce a red cloth carpet fiber: Pellegrini found the remnant he remembered on the bedroom floor, but it proved to be plastic, an outdoor Astro-Turf carpet. Nor did a small blue pin earring found in a corner of the living room mean anything to the investigation. Contacted by detectives a few days later, Latonya Wallace’s family members explained that they never recalled the young girl wearing a mixed set of earrings. If she had a star-shaped pin in one lobe, it was safe to assume that a star-shaped pin was missing from the other. To be sure, Pellegrini borrowed a Cavalier and drove the blue pin earring up to the little girl’s mother; she seemed a little surprised that the case was still being worked after seven months, but confirmed that the blue earring did not belong to her daughter.

  Around every corner of the maze, a fresh corridor began. A week after the second search of Whitelock Street, Pellegrini found himself tangled in a prolonged encounter with an auto thief arrested by Baltimore County police back in July. A disturbed young man with a history of mental illness, the thief had attempted suicide at the county detention center on three separate occasions, then blurted out to a county officer that he knew who had committed two murders in the city. One was a drug killing at a Northwest Baltimore bar. The other involved the death of a little girl in Reservoir Hill.

  Howard Corbin went out to the county for the initial interview and came back with a story about a chance encounter in the alley behind the 800 block of Newington, where the auto thief said he had been snorting cocaine with his cousin. A little girl happened by the alley and the auto thief heard his cousin say something to the child. The girl-who carried a bookbag and wore her hair braided-said something back, and it seemed to the auto thief that they knew each other. But when his cousin jumped up and grabbed the girl, the auto thief became frightened and fled. Shown a picture of Latonya Wallace, the young man began crying.

  Slowly, the scenario took on real life. The auto thief did indeed have a cousin at 820 Newington and the cousin did indeed have a substantial record, though nothing on it screamed sex offender. Still, Corbin was impressed that the young man had apparently remembered that the girl had her hair up in braids and was carrying a satchel. Those details had been released to the public early in the investigation, of course, but they helped establish some credibility for the thief ’s story.

  Pellegrini and Corbin dutifully rechecked the vacant rowhouses in the 800 block of Newington and then towed a derelict Chevy Nova from the rear of an occupied house in that same block. The car had once belonged to the thief’s cousin, and the thief claimed that his relative routinely kept a buck knife and a switchblade in the trunk of the car. That car and another vehicle belonging to the cousin’s sister were both processed by lab techs at headquarters with negative results. Likewise, the auto thief was brought downtown for lengthy interviews.

  Eventually, as facts began to get in his way, the thief’s story changed. He suddenly remembered, for instance, that his cousin had at one point opened the trunk of his sister’s car and shown him a zippered plastic bag. And then his cousin opened the zipper to reveal the face of the little girl. And then…

  The auto thief was a mental case, no question about it. But his tale had been constructed with just enough detail to require a full investigation. The cousin would have to be confronted, and the story would have to be corroborated or knocked down. Eventually, the auto thief would have to be polygraphed.

  Beyond that piece of business, Pellegrini also had another manila file on his desk with the name of a Park Avenue man on the heading-a raw mix of fact and rumor regarding a potential suspect known to have behaved strangely in recent months and on one occasion to have exposed himself to a schoolgirl. There were a few rape reports from the Central, too, along with notes from another five or six interviews with friends and former friends of the Fish Man.

  All of that waits for Pellegrini as he pauses to work the shotgun murder of Theodore Johnson on Durham Street. And when that pause is over, he continues to wonder whether he should have kept working the drug killing rather than returning to obsess over Latonya Wallace. He tells himself that if he works the Durham Street murder hard, it might just go down. On the other hand, if he keeps on the dead little girl, there could be no telling when the case might break.

  To every other detective on the shift, this is the worst kind of optimism. Latonya Wallace is history; Theodore Johnson is fresh. And in the minds of most of his colleagues, Pellegrini has gone over the hill on this one. Repeat warrants on a suspect’s apartment, prolonged background investigations, protracted statements from suicidal shitbirds-all of it is understandable of a young detective, they concede. Hell, with a dead little girl it may even be required, in a way. But, they tell each other, let’s not kid ourselves: Tom Pellegrini has lost it.

  Then, a week after the murder of Theodore Johnson, this widely held opinion undergoes a sudden revision when a fresh lab report arrives on Pellegrini’s desk and its contents become known to the shift.

  The author of the report: Van Gelder in the trace section. The subject: black smudge marks on the dead girl’s pants. The verdict: tar and soot with burned wood chips mixed in. Fire debris, plain and simple.

  Taking its own sweet time, the trace lab has finally compared the black smudges on Latonya Wallace’s pants to the samples that Pellegrini lifted from the Fish Man’s burned-out store two months earlier. The report declares the two samples to be consistent, if not identical.

  What can we say? Pellegrini asks, pressing the lab people. Is it similar or is it exactly the same? Can we say with any certainty that she was in that Whitelock Street store?

  Van Gelder and the others in the trace section are equivocal. The samples can be sent to the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms lab in Rockville-one of the best in the country-and perhaps they can do more. But generally speaking, Van Gelder explains, the smudges on the pants and the samples from the store have the same class characteristics. They are very similar and yes, they could have come from the debris in that store. On the other hand, they could also have come from another fire scene in which the debris had a similar chemical composition.

  A week after the cold depression of Durham Street, Pellegrini finds himself torn between elation and despair. Nine months into the Latonya Wallace investigation, the new lab report provides the first piece of substantive evidence in the file and the only piece of physical evidence to implicate the Fish Man. But if the lab analysts are willing to say only that the two samples are very similar, then that evidence still falls within the realm of reasonable doubt. It is a beginning, but unless the ATF lab can be more definitive, it is nothing more.

  A few days after the lab report arrives on his desk, Pellegrini asks the captain to authorize a mainframe computer run of incident reports dating from January 1, 1978, to February 2, 1988. The information sought is the address for every fire or arson report in the area of Reservoir Hill bounded by North Avenue, Park Avenue, Druid Park Lake Drive and Madison Avenue.

  The theory is simple enough: If the lab can’t say for certain that those smudges come from Whitelock Street, then perhaps a detective, working backward, can prove that they couldn’t have come from anywhere else.

  The detective obsessed with the Latonya Wallace case may seem lost to everyone else in homicide, but to Pellegrini himself, the chaos of H88021 is slowly becoming order. After eight months, the file has fresh evidence, a viable suspect, a plausible theory.

  Best of all, it has some direction.

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 7

  “Well,” says McLarney, admiring the board, “Worden’s back.” And back in black.

  Three straight nights of midnight shift in late September brought three straight murders fo
r the Big Man and Rick James. Two are down, and the chalkboard on the other side of the coffee room is adorned with the evidence of progress on the third case: “Any calls about a prostitute named Lenore who works Pennsylvania Avenue, call Worden or James at home re H88160.”

  Lenore, the mystery whore. By all accounts, she is the lone witness to the fatal stabbing of her ex-boyfriend, who was last seen arguing with Lenore’s current beau in the 2200 block of the Avenue before falling to the ground with an unsightly hole in his upper right chest. Now, two weeks later, the current boyfriend is conveniently dead from cancer, and therefore, if the elusive businesswoman will be so kind as to come downtown and make a truthful statement, case number three will also be black. To that end, McLarney’s squad has spent the last two weeks terrorizing the Avenue hookers, riding up to question every new face and scare away customers. It’s gotten so bad that the girls are waving them off even as they open the car doors.

  “I ain’t Lenore,” one shouted to Worden a week ago, even before the detective had a chance to speak.

  “I know that, hon. But have you seen her?”

  “She’s not out tonight.”

  “Well, tell her if she’ll just come in and talk to us, we’ll stop bothering you and her both. Will you do that for us?”

  “If I see her, I’ll tell her.”

  “Thank you, dear.”

  Straight police work, the kind that keeps you out in the city streets. No oily politicians, no treacherous bosses, no scared young cops saying they don’t know anything about the dead kid in the alley. The street gives you nothing worse than lying, thieving criminals and, hey, Worden has no complaints with that. It’s their job. And his, too.

  The return to routine has allowed Worden a measure of satisfaction, not that the last three cases were exactly brimming with challenge and complexity. The first was pretty much an accidental: three teenage drug dealers in a west side rowhouse, marveling over their host’s new Saturday Night Special when it goes off with the barrel pointed at the youngest kid’s chest. The second was a Highlandtown beating, a manslaughter with a billy boy laid out in an alley behind Lakewood Avenue, dead after he fell back from a punch and hit his head on the cement. The third was the Pennsylvania Avenue stabbing, still waiting for Miss Lenore’s reappearance.

  No, it wasn’t the quality of the cases that announced Worden’s return so much as the volume. Whether or not the case went down, the quality was always there with the Big Man; Monroe Street, in fact, was probably his best work in a long while. But a year ago, Worden had been nothing less than a machine, and McLarney remembered that time like an athlete remembers a championship season. Back then, the squad pretty much operated on the same principle as that cereal commercial: Give it to Worden. He’ll eat anything. Go ahead, give him this one, give him another, and then put him on the file that Dave Brown and Waltemeyer are still struggling with. See? He likes it.

  This year has been very different. Monroe Street, the Larry Young business, the open murders from March and April-the year had unfolded as an agonizing exercise in frustration, and by summer there was nothing to suggest that Worden’s losing streak had an end.

  In late August and early September, the cold, hard slap of reality was a fourteen-year-old shotgun victim by the name of Craig Rideout, stretched out in the early morning light on a Pimlico lawn, dead for hours before anyone found the body or called a cop. Worden labored for days to trace the shooting back to a crew doing shotgun robberies in the Northwest using a red Mazda. Talking to informants in his old district and checking other shotgun robbery reports eventually turned up one badass in particular, a non-taxpayer with a Cherry Hill address and a sheet that included arrests for armed robbery. Not only did Worden tie the kid to a red Mazda that had been seen all over the Northwest, but he learned that the boy was spending a lot of time with people around lower Park Heights near the murder scene.

  For a couple of nights, Worden sat on the kid’s house, waiting for anything that looked like a robbery crew to assemble near that Mazda. With no physical evidence, Worden could only hope that his man would go back out on the street with the shotgun to try another robbery. But then an inexplicable act by another detective blew the case apart: Two weeks after the Rideout murder, Worden came into work on a four-to-twelve shift and learned that Dave Hollingsworth, the detective on Stanton’s shift handling another shotgun murder in the Northwest, had gone out to Cherry Hill and interviewed his suspect. Immediately the shotgun robberies in the Northwest came to an abrupt halt. No more red Mazdas, no more sightings of his suspect up around Park Heights.

  Only several months later would Worden hear from his best suspect once more. On that occasion, the boy from Cherry Hill is on the other end of a 24-hour report. On that occasion, he’s the body on the pavement, shot down by persons unknown on a street off the Martin Luther King Boulevard. The Rideout murder stayed red, and in Worden’s mind it became a metaphor. Like everything else he touched, it was good police work with a bad ending, and like everything else in his year, it was unresolved.

  But the Rideout case was only one jab in a left-right combination. In mid-September, the sucker punch landed in a crowded Central District courtroom, where state senator Larry Young went to trial for his well-publicized misdemeanor.

  Trial is perhaps the wrong word for what actually happened. It was more of a spectacle, really, a public display by prosecutors and detectives who had no real interest in seeing the case pursued aggressively. Instead, Tim Doory of the state’s attorney’s office tried the case personally and with just enough vigor to lose by a judge’s verdict. In laying out the scenario by which the senator had falsely reported his own abduction, Doory made a point of not calling the politician’s aide as a witness, intentionally depriving the state’s case of any motive for the false report and thereby avoiding any on-the-stand revelations about the senator’s private life.

  It was a gracious, honorable act and one that Worden understood and accepted. What he didn’t accept was that this public demonstration was even necessary; it infuriated him that the prosecutors’ office and police department were so eager to appear earnest in their pursuit of public misdeed that Larry Young had to be charged and tried and acquitted of a meaningless stupidity. Even so, when it came to his testimony, Worden fell on his sword with seeming indifference. Asked by the senator’s attorney about the key conversation in which Young admitted that no crime had occurred, the detective didn’t hesitate to punch the biggest possible hole in the prosecution’s case.

  “So let me understand, detective, you told the senator that he would not be charged if he admitted to you that no crime had occurred?”

  “I told him he would not be charged by me.”

  “But he has been charged.”

  “Not by me.”

  Worden then acknowledged that the senator only admitted to the false report after being told that no investigation would proceed if he did just that. Worden also accurately described the conclusion of his conversation with Young, in which the senator declared that no crime had occurred and that he would look into the matter privately.

  The senator’s attorney finished his cross-examination with a tight smile of satisfaction. “Thank you, Detective Worden.”

  Thank you, indeed. With the senator’s admission portrayed as a coerced act and with the prosecutor reluctant to pursue the motive behind the false report, the District Court judge needed little time to arrive at the expected verdict.

  Leaving the courtroom, Larry Young approached Donald Worden and offered his hand. “Thank you for not lying,” the senator said.

  Worden looked up, surprised. “Why would I lie?”

  In context, it was an extraordinary insult. After all, why would a detective lie? Why would he perjure himself? Why would he risk his own integrity, not to mention his job and his pension, to win a case like this? To nail some politician’s pelt to a wall? To earn the undying respect of Larry Young’s political enemies?

  Like every cop, Worden had
his cynical streak, but he wasn’t really much of a stoic. Open murders and open deceit-the two operant themes of this godforsaken year-still seemed to bother him more than many younger detectives. It didn’t often show, but there had always been a core of insistent anger inside Worden, a quiet rebellion against the inertia and politics of his own police department. Rarely were those emotions allowed to surface; instead, they festered deep inside, feeding his elevated and insubordinate hypertension. Only once, in fact, did Worden vent his rage during the Larry Young business, and that was a brief exchange in the coffee room, when Rick James tried to lighten his partner’s mood.

  “Hey, it’s out of your hands,” said James. “What the fuck are you gonna do?”

  “I’ll tell you what I’m ready to do,” growled Worden. “I’m ready to stick my gun inside somebody’s mouth, and that somebody is inside this headquarters building.”

  James left it alone after that. What, after all, remained to be said?

  At the same time, Terry McLarney went into a clinical depression after hearing a rumor that Worden had expressed interest in an open posting for an investigator with the medical examiner’s office. Worden’s gone, he told others in the squad. We’re losing him to this fucked-up year of his.

  “Right now he just looks tired,” McLarney told others in the squad. “I’ve never seen Donald looking so tired.”

  McLarney held tight to a slim thread of hope: Get Worden back out on the street with new murders. Good murders, good calls. McLarney believed that if anything could wipe the slate clean for a guy like Worden, it would be real police work.