Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets Part 14

"What we need to know is if Andrew had his car parked out there earlier in the week, like on Tuesday or Wednesday?"

"It's a while back now," the old man says.

"Yeah it is, but can you think on it ..."

The old man drops his head back against a pillow and stares at the cracked ceiling. The room waits.

"Think he did, yeah."

"You think so, huh?"

"He park it back there a lot, you know," says the old man.

"Yeah, that's what I remember you telling me," says Landsman. "Listen, what do you know about Andrew?"

"Don't know nuthin', really."

"I mean what kind of a guy is he?"

The old man looks nervously at his wife. "I really don't know ..."

Landsman looks at Ollie and catches something on her face. She has something to say she doesn't want her husband to hear.

"Well, listen, thanks a lot for helping," says Landsman, moving toward the bedroom door. "You take care of yourself now, okay?"

The old man nods and watches his wife follow the detectives out of the room. She closes the door and follows Landsman to the other end of the hall.

"Hey, Ollie," Landsman says to her, "remember what you were saying about Andrew?"

"I don't ..."

"About how he's like a gigolo living off ..."

"Well," says Ollie, a little embarra.s.sed, "I know she bought that car for him and now he uses it to go out on the town. He's gone every night."

"Yeah? Do you know if he likes young girls?"

"Yeah, he likes young girls," she says, disapproving.

"I mean, real young."

"Well, that I can't really say ..."

"Okay, that's all right," Landsman says. "Where's the car now? Do you know?"

"He say the repo man came an' took it."

Pellegrini and Edgerton look at each other. It's almost too perfect.

"It was repossessed?" asks Landsman. "He told you that?"

"She told my husband that."

"Your neighbor did? Andrew's wife?"

"Yeah," she says, wrapping her robe tight in the chill of the front hall. "She say Johnny's Cars came an' got it."

"Johnny's? Up on Harford Road?"

"I guess."

The detectives thank the woman, then head straight to Johnny's in Northeast Baltimore, where they walk the entire lot looking for the car that Andrew's wife said had been repossessed. No Lincoln. Landsman is now completely convinced.

"This motherf.u.c.ker dumps the body, gets rid of his car, and when people ask him, he says it got repo'd. f.u.c.k it, we need to talk to this motherf.u.c.ker tonight."

It is after 11:00 P.M P.M. when they return to Newington Avenue and talk their way into 716. Andrew is a short, balding man with a face that is all hard angles. He is still awake, drinking warm beer and watching the local news in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Three plainclothes detectives walking down the stairs do not seem to surprise him.

"Hey, Andrew, I'm Sergeant Landsman, this is Detective Edgerton and Detective Pellegrini. We're working on the little girl's murder. How you doin' tonight?"

"Awright."

"Listen, we want to ask you a couple questions about your car."

"My car?" asks Andrew, curious.

"Yeah. The Lincoln."

"They took that away," he says, as if that should end any discussion.

"Who did?"

"The car dealer."

"Johnny's?"

"Yeah.' Cause my wife, she didn't make the payment on it," he adds, a little put out.

Landsman steers the conversation toward the parking pad in the back alley. Andrew readily acknowledges his habit of keeping the car in the rear yard to prevent theft or vandalism, then further agrees that the car had been in the rear yard on the Tuesday night of the girl's disappearance.

"I remember it 'cause I went out to the car for something and felt like someone was out there watching me."

Landsman, startled, looks hard at the man.

"How's that again?"

"I went out to the car that night to get something and I felt real nervous, like someone was out there watching me," he repeats.

Landsman gives Pellegrini one of those did-I-hear-what-I-just-thought-I-heard stares. Three minutes into the conversation and the guy is already putting himself out in the alley on the night the child is abducted. h.e.l.l, he probably had reason to be nervous about being watched out there in the alley on Tuesday. Who the f.u.c.k wouldn't be nervous carrying a little girl's body from their back door to a car trunk?

"Why were you nervous?"

Andrew shrugs. "I just got a strange feeling, you know ..."

Edgerton begins walking the length of the bas.e.m.e.nt room, looking for red-brown stains or a child's gold earring. The bas.e.m.e.nt is a poor version of a bachelor's lair, with a sofa and television in the center of the room and, against the long wall, five or six liquor bottles on top of an old dresser being used as a bar. Behind the sofa is a plastic laundry tub containing two to three inches of urine. What the h.e.l.l is it about Newington Avenue that makes people p.i.s.s into buckets?

"This is kind of your place down here, huh?" asks Edgerton.

"Yeah, this is where I hang."

"Your wife don't come down here much?"

"No, she leaves me be."

Landsman brings Andrew back to the night in the alley: "What did you go out to the car for?"

"I can't remember. Something in the glove compartment."

"You didn't go in the trunk?"

"The trunk? No, the glove compartment ... I had the car doors open and I just felt like I was being watched. I was, you know, a little scared about it and said, well, d.a.m.n, I'll get whatever I need to get tomorrow morning. So I went back inside."

Landsman looks at Pellegrini, then back at Andrew. "Did you know the little girl?"

"Me?" The question startles him. "The girl that got killed? I haven't been here that long, you know. I don't know most people around here."

"What do you think they should do to the guy that killed her?" asks Landsman, smiling strangely.

"Hey," says Andrew, "do what you have to do. Make sure it's the right guy and then you don't even need a trial. I have a daughter, and if it were her, I'd take care of it myself ... I have friends who would help me take care of it."

Edgerton takes Pellegrini out of earshot to ask if the detectives and detail officers doing the consent searches on Newington Avenue have checked the bas.e.m.e.nts. Pellegrini doesn't know. That was the trouble with a sprawling red ball; between five detectives and a dozen detail officers, progress is dependent on too many people.

"Andrew," says Landsman, "we're gonna need to talk to you downtown."

"Tonight?"

"Yeah. We'll bring you back up when we're done."

"I been sick. I can't really leave the house."

"We really need to talk to you. It could help us out with the little girl's murder."

"Yeah, well, I don't know nothing about that, you know. I'm sick ..."

Landsman ignores the protestations. Short of arrest, which requires both a crime and probable cause, there is no law that can make a man go against his will to an interrogation room in the middle of the night. It's one of the small joys of American police work that few people ever argue the point.

Andrew comes to rest in the large interrogation room fifteen minutes later, with Landsman standing on the other side of the door in the sixth-floor corridor, telling Pellegrini and Edgerton to find that Lincoln.

"I'll take a long statement and keep him here," says the sergeant. "We gotta know if his car was really repo'd."

Pellegrini's call to old Johnny wakes him up. It's now the middle of the night, but the detective asks the auto dealer to go down to the sales office and dig out the paperwork. Johnny and Mrs. Johnny are already there when the two detectives get to Harford Road. The dealer finds a record of the sale and the payment schedule, but nothing to indicate a repossession order. Maybe, he suggests, the paperwork hasn't yet come from the finance company.

"If it was repossessed, where would they tow it?"

"They got one lot over on Belair Road."

"Can you show us?"

Johnny and Mrs. Johnny pile back into their Cadillac Brougham and pull out of the lot. The detectives follow them to a fenced impound lot near the city's northeastern edge. The car isn't there. Nor is it at a second lot out in Rosedale, in eastern Baltimore County. And at 3:00 A.M A.M., when the two detectives learn of a third lot in the northeast county near the Parkville police precinct, they head north with growing confidence that no one has towed Andrew's s.h.i.+t-brown Lincoln Continental anywhere, that the lying b.a.s.t.a.r.d ditched the car somewhere on his own.

The third impound lot is protected by a ten-foot chain-link fence. Pellegrini walks up to one corner and stares through the metal mesh at a row of cars parked along the far end, hopeful that Andrew's car isn't among them. But the next to the last car in the row is a Lincoln Continental.

"There it is," he says, his voice flat with disappointment.

"Where?" asks Edgerton.

"Near the end there. The brown one."

"Is that it?"

"Well, it's a brown Lincoln."

Pellegrini scans the lot for any sign of life. They do not need a warrant for the car; Andrew no longer has any claim to owners.h.i.+p. But the front gate is chained and padlocked.

"Well," says Pellegrini, "here goes nothing." The detective digs the tip of one black Florsheim into the metal links and begins pus.h.i.+ng himself up the front of the fence. Two large Dobermans race the length of the impound lot, yelping and growling and baring their teeth. Pellegrini jumps down.

"Go on, Tom," says Edgerton, laughing. "You can take 'em."

"No, that's all right."

"They're just animals. You're a man with a gun."

Pellegrini smiles.

"Go on. Show 'em your badge."

"I think we can wait," says Pellegrini, walking back to the car.

Four hours later, Pellegrini is headed back toward the lot with Landsman, who finished taking Andrew's statement a little before 6:00 A.M A.M. Although neither detective has slept in twenty-eight hours, there is little sign of fatigue when they roll out Perring Parkway toward the county, or when they follow a bored attendant across the dirt lot to the Lincoln. So it really was repo'd, thinks Pellegrini, so what. Maybe Andrew gave up the car figuring that it was clean, that there was nothing to link him to the murder.

"This the one?"

"Yeah. Thanks."

The two detectives check the car's interior first, searching the upholstery and carpeting for red-brown stains, hairs or fibers. Landsman finds a piece of imitation gold chain, a woman's bracelet, above the dashboard. Pellegrini points to a small dark brown stain on the pa.s.senger seat.

"Blood?"

"Nah. I don't think so."