Homicide

by David Simon

  “Why you got to make her watch?”

  “Hey, that the mother, yo.”

  “They don’t care. That’s some cold poh-leece shit there, yo.”

  McAllister gets to the woman first, blocking her view of the street and imploring the relatives with her to go back home.

  “There’s nothing you can do here, really,” he says over the mother’s screams. “As soon as we can, we’ll be down to the house.”

  “He was shot?” asks an uncle.

  McAllister nods.

  “Dead?”

  McAllister nods again and the mother goes into a half-faint, leaning heavily against another woman, who helps her back into the family’s double-parked Pontiac.

  “Take her home,” McAllister says again. “That’s really the best thing right now.”

  At the other end of Woodland, closer to Park Heights, the spectators provide even more dramatics. A young kid points to a tall, gangly bystander and blurts out a vague accusation.

  “He was there,” the kid tells a friend, loud enough for a uniform to overhear. “He was right there and broke running when they shot the boy.”

  The uniform takes half a step toward the man, who turns and runs down the sidewalk. Two other uniforms join the chase and catch up to their quarry at the corner of Park Heights. A body search produces a small amount of heroin and a wagon is called.

  Half a block away, Garvey is told of the arrest and shrugs. No, not the shooter, he reasons. Why would the shooter be hanging around an hour after the body hits the pavement? A witness, perhaps. Or maybe just a bystander after all.

  “Yeah, okay, have the wagon take him on down to our office,” says the detective. “Thanks.”

  Ordinarily, the routine lockup of a drug addict on Woodland Avenue—Pimlico’s grand boulevard of drug addicts—would mean nothing to a detective’s case. Ordinarily, Garvey would have every reason to stand over his latest body feeling a little like a lost ball in tall grass. But in the context of his summer, a sudden shout and a foot chase and a little bit of dope in a glassine bag are all it takes. It’s everything required to make even the weakest sister get up and dance.

  It began with the Lena Lucas case back in February and continued with a couple of misdemeanor homicides in April—one whodunit, two dunkers, but all of them cleared by arrest within a week or two. No deeper meanings there; every detective can expect a run of good luck now and then. But when the Winchester Street killing went down in late June, a pattern began to emerge.

  Winchester Street was nothing more than a couple of blood smears and a mutilated bullet when Garvey and McAllister reached the scene, and undoubtedly there would have been little else if the first uniform there hadn’t been Bobby Biemiller, McLarney’s drinking buddy from the Western.

  “I sent two down to your office,” Biemiller told the arriving detectives.

  “Witnesses?”

  “I dunno. They were here when I showed up, so I fuckin’ grabbed ’em.”

  Bob Biemiller, friend of the little man, hero to the unwashed masses, and the patrolman voted Most Desirable First Officer for a Ghetto Shooting by three out of five Baltimore homicide detectives. That cabbie slaying on School Street a few years back—Garvey’s first case as a primary—also starred Biemiller as first officer. A happy memory for Garvey, too, because the case went down. Good man, Biemiller.

  “So tell me,” said McAllister, amused, “who are these unfortunate citizens that you’ve managed to deprive of their liberty?”

  “One is your guy’s girlfriend, I think.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. She was hysterical.”

  “Well, that’s a start,” said Garvey, a man of faint praise. “So where’s our boy?”

  “University.”

  Down at the emergency room entrance, the ambo was still backed up to the door. Garvey looked inside and nodded to a black medic who was washing blood from the floor of Medic 15.

  “How we doing?”

  “I’m fine,” said the medic.

  “I know you’re fine. How’s he?”

  The medic shook his head, smiling.

  “You ain’t makin’ my night.”

  Dead on arrival, but the surgeons had cracked the chest anyway in an attempt to massage a spark or two into the guy’s heart. Garvey stayed long enough to watch an intern yell for a charge nurse to move the dead man from the triage area.

  “Right now,” yelled the doctor. “We got a guy coming in eviscerated.”

  Saturday night in Bawlmer.

  “Eviscerated,” said Garvey, enjoying the sound of the word. “Is this a great city or what?”

  University Hospital couldn’t save the victim, so the rulebook called for a case in which no reliable witnesses or evidence would be recovered. And yet back at the homicide unit, the dead man’s girlfriend readily gave up most of the murder and its origins in an $8 debt. No, she didn’t see it, she claimed, but she begged the boy Tydee not to use his gun. The next morning, McAllister and Garvey both canvassed the 1500 block of Winchester Street and turned up a pair of eyewitnesses.

  At that moment, Garvey did not immediately pause and go directly to the altar of the nearest Roman Catholic church. He should have, but he didn’t. Instead, he merely typed out an arrest warrant and put himself back into the rotation, thinking that this happy little streak was merely a synthesis of investigative skill and random luck.

  It took another week before Rich Garvey began to realize that the hand of God was truly upon him. It took a July tavern robbery in Fairfield, with an elderly bartender dead behind the bar of Paul’s Case and every living occupant of the establishment too drunk to identify their own house keys, much less the four men who robbed the place. All except the kid in the parking lot, who happened to get the license tag of the gold Ford seen speeding off the bar’s dirt lot.

  Hail Mary, mother of God.

  A quick records check on the tag came back with the name of Roosevelt Smith and an address in Northeast Baltimore; right as rain, the officers arrived at the suspect’s home to find the automobile parked in front, its engine still hot. The very braindead Roosevelt Smith needed about two hours in the large interrogation room before making his first down payment on Out Number 3:

  “Here’s what I believe,” offered Garvey, working without the benefit of his power suit. “This man was shot in the leg and bled out from his artery. I don’t think anyone intended this man to die.”

  “I swear to God,” wailed Roosevelt Smith. “I swear to God I didn’t shoot anyone. Do I look like a killer?”

  “I dunno,” answered Garvey. “What does a killer look like?”

  An hour more and Roosevelt Smith was admitting to having driven the getaway car for $50 of the robbery money. He also gave up the name of his nephew, who had been inside the bar during the holdup. He didn’t know the names of the other two guys, he told Garvey, but his nephew did. As if he understood that it was up to him to keep the investigation neat and orderly, the nephew turned himself in that same morning and responded immediately to McAllister’s classic interrogative technique, the Matriarchal Appeal to Guilt.

  “My mm-mother is really sick,” the nephew told the detectives in a bad stutter. “I n-need to g-g-go home.”

  “Well, I’ll bet your mother would be real proud to see you now, wouldn’t she? Wouldn’t she?”

  Ten more minutes and the nephew was crying tears and banging on the interrogation room door for the detectives. He did his mother a good turn by giving up the names of the other two men in the stickup crew. Working around the clock, Garvey, McAllister and Bob Bowman wrote warrants for two East Baltimore addresses and hit the houses just before dawn. The house on Milton Avenue yielded one suspect and a.45-caliber rifle that witnesses said was used in the robbery; the second address produced the shooter, a sawed-off little sociopath named Westley Branch.

  The murder weapon, a .38 revolver, was still missing and, unlike his codefendants, Branch refused to make any statement in the interroga
tion room, leaving the case against him a weak one. But three days later, the trace evidence lab made up the difference by matching Branch’s fingerprints with those found on a Colt 45 malt liquor can near the Fairfield bar’s cash register.

  Print hits, license tag numbers, cooperating witnesses—Garvey had indeed been touched. Hands had been laid upon him as he bounced an unmarked car back and forth across the city, turning every criminal act into an arrest warrant. The fingerprint match on the Fairfield bar murder alone demanded some kind of Old Testament offering. At the very least, Garvey should have sacrificed a virgin or a police cadet or anything else that could be the Baltimore equivalent of an unblemished heifer. A few priestly blessings, a little lighter fluid, and the Big Shift Commander in the Sky might have been appeased.

  Instead, Garvey simply went back to his desk and answered the phone—the impulsive act of a man ignorant of the demands of karma.

  Now, standing over the shell of a Pimlico drug dealer, he has no right to invoke the gods. He has no right to believe that the thin man now wagonbound for homicide will know anything about this murder. He has no right to expect that this same man will be looking at a five-year parole backup for that small bag of dope in his possession. He certainly has no reason to think that this man will actually know one of the shooters by name, having served some time in the Jessup Cut with the gunman.

  Yet an hour after clearing the Woodland Avenue crime scene, Garvey and McAllister are writing furiously in the large interrogation room, playing host to a truly cooperative informant named Reds.

  “I’m on parole,” the guy reminds Garvey. “Any kinda charge is going to back me up.”

  “Reds, I need to see how you’re gonna do by us on this thing.”

  The thin man nods, accepting the unspoken agreement. With a felony, it takes a downtown prosecutor to cut the deal; with a misdemeanor like drug possession, any detective can maneuver on his own, killing the charge with a quick call to the state’s attorney out at the district court. Even as Reds lays out the Woodland Avenue murder, a homicide detective is talking the Northwest District court commissioner into approving a pretrial release without bail.

  “How many were there?” asks Garvey.

  “Three, I’d say. But I only know two.”

  “Who were they?”

  “The one’s name is Stony. He’s my rap buddy.”

  “What’s his real name?”

  “I dunno that,” says Red.

  Garvey stares at him, disbelieving. “He’s your rap buddy and you don’t know his real name?”

  Reds smiles, caught in a stupid lie.

  “McKesson,” he says. “Walter McKesson.”

  “And the other guy?”

  “I only know him by Glen. He’s one of them boys from North and Pulaski. I think Stony be working for him now.”

  Little Glen Alexander, an up-and-comer in the shooting galleries along West North Avenue. McKesson is no slouch either; he beat a murder charge back in ’81. Garvey knows all that and more after a half an hour on the BPI computer. Alexander and McKesson were up in Pimlico on business, putting out free testers for all the Park Heights fiends, trying to expand their market share at the expense of someone else’s territory. A minion of one of the local Pimlico dealers, Cornelius Langley, took exception and there were some words on Woodland Avenue between Langley and Alexander that same morning. Like MacArthur, little Glen left the neighborhood declaring that he would return, and like MacArthur, he surely did.

  When the gold Volvo pulled up on Woodland Avenue, Reds was walking through the alley from the Palmer Court apartments, where he had gone to score his dope. He came out on Woodland just as McKesson was taking aim at Cornelius Langley.

  “Where was Glen?” asks Garvey.

  “Behind McKesson.”

  “Did he have a gun?”

  “I think so. But it was McKesson who I seen shoot the boy.”

  Langley stood his ground, a true stoic, refusing to run even when the men poured from the Volvo. The victim’s younger brother, Michael, was with him when the shooting started, but ran screaming when Cornelius hit the pavement.

  “Did Langley have a gun?”

  “Not that I seen,” says Reds, shaking his head. “He should’ve though. Them boys from North and Pulaski don’t play.”

  Garvey runs through the scenario a second time slowly, picking up a few more details and committing the story to eight or nine sheets of interview paper. Even if they weren’t going to get rid of his dope charge, Reds wouldn’t make much of a court witness, not with his long arrest sheet and the HO-scale tracks running up and down each arm. Michael Langley, however, will be another story. McAllister goes downstairs and brings Reds a soda, and the man stretches his thin frame back from the table, his chair scraping across the tile floor.

  “All this dopin’ is running me down,” he says. “You all took my shit and now I got to deal with that. Hard life, you know?”

  Garvey smiles. In a half hour, the papers come downtown from the Northwest District Court and Reds signs the personal recog sheet and squeezes his gangly body into the cramped back seat of a Cavalier for the short trip up the Jones Falls Expressway. At Cold Spring and Pall Mall, he slumps down, head below the window’s edge, so as not to be seen in an unmarked car.

  “You want to get out at Pimlico Road or somewhere else?” Garvey asks, solicitous. “Is this safe for you?”

  “I’m fine right here. Ain’t nobody around. Just pull up on that side of the street.”

  “Take care, Reds.”

  “You too, man.”

  And then he is gone, sliding out of the car so quickly that he is a half block away and moving fast before the traffic light changes. He does not look back.

  The next morning, after the autopsy, McAllister gives his patented do-right-by-the-victim speech to the dead man’s mother, delivering it with so much apparent sincerity that as usual it makes Garvey want to throw up and has him wondering whether McAllister is going to finish by falling to one knee. No doubt about it, Mac is an artist with a grieving mother.

  This time, the plea is for Michael Langley, who has not stopped running since the gunshots on Woodland Avenue. Rather than stand up as the eyewitness to his brother’s murder, the boy raced two blocks to his room, packed a bag and headed south for the Langley ancestral lands in Carolina. Bring him back to us, McAllister will ask the mother. Bring him back and avenge your son’s death.

  And it works. A week later, Michael Langley returns to the city of Baltimore and its homicide unit, where he wastes no time identifying Glen Alexander and Walter McKesson from two photo arrays. Soon Garvey is back in the admin office, pecking out two more warrants on a secretary’s IBM Selectric.

  Eight cases, eight clearances. While summer bleeds the rest of the shift dry, Rich Garvey is once again communing with an electric typewriter, building the Perfect Year.

  TUESDAY, AUGUST 9

  Hell Night is three men on a midnight shift that never ends, with the office phones bleating and the witnesses lying and the bodies stacking up in the ME’s freezer like commuter flights over La Guardia. It arrives without pity at a quarter before midnight, little more than a half hour after Roger Nolan’s crew started walking through the door. Kincaid showed up first, then McAllister, and then Nolan himself. Edgerton is late, as usual. But before anyone can finish even one cup of coffee, the first call is on them. And this time it’s a little more than the usual corpse. This time it’s a police-involved shooting from the Central.

  Nolan calls Gary D’Addario at home; protocol dictates that regardless of the hour, the shift lieutenant is to return to the office to supervise the investigation of any police-involved shooting. Then he calls Kim Cord-well, one of two secretaries assigned to the homicide unit. She, too, will have to come in on overtime so that the 24-hour report will be typed to perfection and copied for every boss by morning.

  The sergeant and his two detectives then head for the shooting scene, leaving the phones to be answered d
ownstairs in the communications center until Edgerton arrives to staff the office. No sense holding a man back, Nolan reasons. A police-involved shooting is by definition a red ball and, by definition, a red ball requires every warm body.

  They take two Cavaliers, arriving at a vacant parking lot off Druid Hill Avenue, where half the Western District’s plainclothes vice unit is standing around a parked Oldsmobile Cutlass. McAllister takes in the scene and experiences a moment of déjà vu.

  “Maybe it’s just me,” he tells Nolan. “But this looks a little bit too familiar.”

  “I know what you mean,” says the sergeant.

  Following a brief conversation with the Western’s vice sergeant, McAllister walks back to Nolan, quietly wrestling with the humor of it all.

  “It’s another ten seventy-eight,” says McAllister, dryly creating a new 10 code for the occasion. “Your basic blowjob-in-progress interrupted by police gunfire.”

  “Damn,” says Kincaid. “It’s gettin’ so a man can’t even get blowed without gettin’ himself shot.”

  “This is one tough town,” agrees Nolan.

  Three months ago, the same scene was played out on Stricker Street; McAllister was the primary detective for that one as well. The scenario in each case is the same: Suspect picks up a Pennsylvania Avenue prostitute; suspect parks at isolated spot, drops his pants and consigns his nether regions to $20 worth of fellatio. Suspect is approached by plainclothes vice officers from the Western District; suspect panics, doing something that seems to threaten the arresting officers; suspect is hit with a .38-caliber bullet and ends the evening in a downtown ER, reflecting on the relative joys of marital fidelity.

  As law enforcement goes, it’s downright ugly. And yet with the right amount of talent and finesse, both incidents will be ruled justifiable by the state’s attorney’s office. In a strictly legal sense, they can certainly be justified; before firing their weapons at the two men, both officers may well have believed they were in jeopardy. When ordered to surrender, the suspect on Stricker Street reached for something in the back of his truck and a plainclothes officer fired one shot into his face, fearing that he was trying to grab a weapon. The officer in tonight’s incident fired one shot through the windshield after the suspect, attempting to drive away from the plainclothesmen, struck one of the officers with the car’s bumper.