Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets Part 3

"If this is a murder," he says, "I'll be the primary."

Worden looks at him. "You don't want to see if someone's been locked up first?"

"No, babe. I need the money."

"You're a wh.o.r.e."

"Yeah, babe."

James rolls the car down the garage ramp, over to Fayette, then north on Gay Street to Greenmount, preoccupied with the complex computations of antic.i.p.ated overtime. Two hours at the scene, three hours of interrogation, another three for paperwork, four more for the autopsy; James thinks about how sweet twelve hours of time-and-a-half will look on his pay stub.

But it is not a murder on Greenmount; it isn't even a straight shooting. Both detectives know that after listening to a sixteen-year-old witness rattle through an incoherent three-minute monologue.

"Whoa, start from the beginning. Slowly."

"Derrick came running in ..."

"Derrick who?"

"That's my brother."

"How old is he?"

"Seventeen. He come running through the front door and upstairs. My older brother went up and found him shot and called nine-one-one. Derrick said he was at the bus stop and got shot. That's all he said."

"He didn't know who shot him?"

"No, he say he just got shot."

Worden takes the flashlight from James and walks outside with a patrolman.

"Are you the first officer?"

"No," says the uniform. "That's Rodriguez."

"Where is he?"

"He went to shock-trauma with your victim."

Worden shoots the patrolman a look, then walks back toward the front door of the house and turns the flashlight on the floor of the porch. No blood trail. No blood on the door handle. The detective scans the brick front of the rowhouse with the light. No blood. No fresh damage. One hole, but too even to be from a bullet. Probably an old drill hole for a light fixture.

Worden takes the flashlight back down the front walk toward the street. He walks back inside the house and checks the rooms upstairs. Still no blood. The detective walks back downstairs and listens to James questioning the sixteen-year-old.

"Where'd your brother run to when he came in the house?" Worden interrupts.

"Upstairs."

"There's no blood upstairs."

The kid looks at his shoes.

"What's going on here?" says Worden, pressing him.

"We cleaned it up," the kid says.

"You cleaned it up?"

"Uh-huh."

"Oh," says Worden, rolling his eyes. "Let's go back upstairs then."

The kid takes the stairs two at a time, then turns into the clutter and disarray of a teenager's room, replete with pinups of models in bikinis and posters of New York rappers in designer sweats. Without further prompting, the sixteen-year-old pulls two bloodstained sheets from a hamper.

"Where were those?"

"On the bed."

"On the bed?"

"We turned over the mattress."

Worden flips the mattress. A red-brown stain covers a good quarter of the fabric.

"What jacket was your brother wearing when he came in?"

"The gray one."

Worden picks up a gray puff jacket from a chair and checks it carefully, inside and out. No blood. He goes to the bedroom closet and checks every other winter coat, throwing each on the bed as James shakes his head slowly.

"Here's what happened," says James. "You were in here playing around with a gun and your brother got shot. Now if you start telling the truth, you're not going to get locked up. Where's the gun?"

"What gun?"

"Jesus Christ. Where's the G.o.dd.a.m.n gun?"

"Don't know about no gun."

"Your brother has a gun. Let's just get the gun out of the way."

"Derrick got shot at the bus stop."

"The f.u.c.k he did," says James, simmering. "He was f.u.c.king around in here and you or your brother or someone else shot him by accident. Where's the f.u.c.king gun?"

"Ain't no gun."

Cla.s.sic, thinks Worden, looking at the kid. Truly cla.s.sic. A prime example of the Rule Number One of the guidebook of death investigation, the page 1 entry in a detective's lexicon: Everyone lies.

Murderers, stickup artists, rapists, drug dealers, drug users, half of all major-crime witnesses, politicians of all persuasions, used car salesmen, girlfriends, wives, ex-wives, line officers above the rank of lieutenant, sixteen-year-old high school students who accidentally shoot their older brother and then hide the gun-to a homicide detective, the earth spins on an axis of denial in an orbit of deceit. h.e.l.l, sometimes the police themselves are no different. For the last six weeks, Donald Worden has listened to a long series of statements by men wearing the uniform in which he has spent a lifetime, listened to them as they tried to get their stories straight and explain how they couldn't possibly have been anywhere near that alley off Monroe Street.

James begins moving toward the bedroom door. "You tell us what you want," he says bitterly. "When your brother dies, we'll be back to charge you with the murder."

The kid remains mute, and the two detectives follow the uniform out the front door. Worden holds his temper until the Cavalier is rolling back down Greenmount.

"Who the h.e.l.l is this guy Rodriguez?"

"I guess you're going to have something to say to him."

"I'm gonna have a lot to say. The first officer to arrive protects the crime scene. And what do they do? They go to the hospital, they go to headquarters, they go to lunch and let the people pick the scene apart. What good he was gonna do at the hospital, I don't know."

But Rodriguez isn't at the hospital. And there is no satisfaction for Worden in a brief discussion with the victim's distracted mother, who sits with two other children in the trauma unit's waiting room, clutching a tissue.

"I don't know, honestly," she tells the detectives. "I was sitting with my other son, watching TV, and I heard a noise, like a firecracker or the sound of gla.s.s breaking. Derrick's brother James went upstairs and said Derrick had been coming home from work and got shot. I told him not to play like that."

Worden interrupts.

"Mrs. Allen, I'm gonna be frank with you. Your son was shot in his room, more than likely by accident. Except for the bed, there was no blood anywhere, not even on the jacket he was wearing when he came in."

The woman looks at the detective blankly. Worden continues, explaining her children's effort to conceal the shooting scene and the probability that the handgun that has sent her son to surgery is still in the house.

"No one is talking about charging anyone. We're from homicide and if it's an accidental shooting, then we're wasting our time and we just need to get it straightened out."

The woman nods in vague agreement. Worden asks if she would be willing to call home and ask her children to turn over the weapon.

"They can leave it on the porch and lock the door if they want," Worden says. "We're just interested in getting the gun out of the house."

The mother abdicates.

"I'd rather you do that," she says.

Worden walks into the hall and finds Rick James, who is talking with a medical technician. Derrick Allen is critical but stable; in all probability, he will live to fight another day. And Officer Rodriguez, says James, is back at homicide, writing his report.

"I'll drop you at the office. If I go back now I'm going to jump in someone's s.h.i.+t," says Worden. "I'll take another trip by the house for the gun. Don't ask me why I should care whether they keep the f.u.c.king thing or not."

A half hour later, Worden is rechecking Derrick Allen's bedroom and finds a hole in a back window and a spent bullet on an outside rear porch. He shows the slug and the window to the sixteen-year-old brother.

The kid shrugs. "I guess Derrick got shot in his room."

"Where's the gun?"

"Don't know about no gun."

It is a G.o.d-given truth: Everyone lies. And this most basic of axioms has three corollaries: A. Murderers lie because they have to.

B. Witnesses and other partic.i.p.ants lie because they think they have to.

C. Everyone else lies for the sheer joy of it, and to uphold a general principle that under no circ.u.mstances do you provide accurate information to a cop.

Derrick's brother is living proof of the second corollary. A witness lies to protect friends and relatives, even those who have wantonly shed blood. He lies to deny his involvement in drugs. He lies to hide the fact that he has prior arrests or that he is secretly h.o.m.os.e.xual, or that he even knew the victim. Most of all, he lies to distance himself from the murder and the possibility that he may one day have to testify in court. In Baltimore, a cop asks you what you saw and the requisite reply, an involuntary motor skill bred into the urban population over generations, is delivered with a slow shake of the head and an averted stare: "I ain't seen nothing."

"You were standing next to the guy."

"I ain't seen nothing."

Everyone lies.

Worden gives the kid one last, steady look.

"Your brother was shot in this room with a gun that he was playing with. Why don't we get that gun out of the house?"

The teenager barely misses a beat.

"I don't know about no gun."

Worden shakes his head. He could call for the crime lab and spend a couple hours tearing the place apart in a search for the d.a.m.n thing; if it were a murder, he'd be doing just that. But for an accidental shooting, what's the point? Pull a gun out of this house and there'll be another in its place by the end of the week.

"Your brother's in the hospital," say Worden. "Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

The kid looks at the floor.

Fine, thinks Worden. I tried. I gave it a shot. So now keep the G.o.dd.a.m.n gun as a souvenir, and when you've shot yourself in the leg or put a round through little sister, you can call us again. Why, thinks Worden, should I waste time on your bulls.h.i.+t when there are people waiting in line to lie to me? Why hunt for your $20 pistol when I've got the quagmire that is Monroe Street on my desk?

Worden drives back to the office empty-handed, his mood even darker than before.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 20.

On the long wall of the coffee room hangs a large rectangle of white paper, running most of the room's length. It is covered by acetate and divided by black rules into six sections.

Above the three right-hand sections is a letterplate bearing the name of Lieutenant Robert Stanton, who commands the homicide unit's second s.h.i.+ft. To the immediate left, below the name of Lieutenant Gary D'Addario, are the three remaining sections. Underneath the nameplates of the two lieutenants, affixed to the top of each section, is the name of a detective sergeant: McLarney, Landsman and Nolan for D'Addario's s.h.i.+ft: Childs, Lamartina and Barrick for Stanton's command.

Below each sergeant's nameplate are brief listings of dead people, the first homicide victims of the year's first month. The names of victims in closed cases are written in black felt marker; the names of victims in open investigations, in red. To the left of each victim's name is a case number-88001 for the year's first murder, 88002 for the second, and so on. To the right of each victim's name is a letter or letters-A for Bowman, B for Garvey, C for McAllister-which correspond to the names of the a.s.signed detectives listed at the bottom of each section.

A sergeant or lieutenant trying to match a homicide with its primary detective, or the reverse, can scan the sections of the white rectangle and in a matter of moments determine that Tom Pellegrini is working the murder of Rudy Newsome. He can also determine, by noting that Newsome's name is in red ink, that the case is still open. For this reason, supervisors in the homicide unit regard the white rectangle as an instrument necessary to a.s.sure accountability and clerical precision. For this reason, too, detectives in the unit regard the rectangle as an affliction, an unforgiving creation that has endured far beyond the expectations of the now-retired sergeants and long-dead lieutenants who created it. The detectives call it, simply, the board.

In the time that it takes the coffeepot to fill, s.h.i.+ft commander Lieutenant Gary D'Addario-otherwise known to his men as Dee, LTD, or simply as His Eminence-can approach the board as a pagan priest might approach the temple of the sun G.o.d, scan the hieroglyphic scrawl of red and black below his name, and determine who among his three sergeants has kept his commandments and who has gone astray. He can further check the coded letters beside the name of each case and make the same determination about his fifteen detectives. The board reveals all: Upon its acetate is writ the story of past and present. Who has grown fat on domestic murders witnessed by half a dozen family members; who has starved on a drug a.s.sa.s.sination in a vacant rowhouse. Who has reaped the bountiful harvest of a murder-suicide complete with a posthumous note of confession; who has tasted the bitter fruit of an unidentified victim, bound and gagged in the trunk of an airport rental car.

The board that today greets the s.h.i.+ft lieutenant is a wretched, b.l.o.o.d.y piece of work, with most of the names etched beneath D'Addario's sergeants written in red. Stanton's s.h.i.+ft began the new year at midnight, catching five murders in the early hours of January 1. Of those cases, however, all but one were the result of drunken arguments and accidental shootings, and all but one are in the black. Then, a week later, came the s.h.i.+ft change, with Stanton's men going to daywork and D'Addario's crew taking over on the four-to-twelve and midnight s.h.i.+fts and catching their first cases of the year. Nolan's squad took the first murder for the s.h.i.+ft on January 10, a drug-related robbery in which the victim was found stabbed to death in the back seat of a Dodge. McLarney's squad picked up a whodunit the same night when a middle-aged h.o.m.os.e.xual was shotgunned as he opened his apartment door in lower Charles Village. Then Fahlteich caught the first murder of the year for Landsman's squad, a robbery beating in Rognel Heights with no suspects, after which McAllister broke up the red ink with an easy arrest on Dillon Street, where a fifteen-year-old white kid was stabbed in the heart over a $20 drug debt.

But the murders were all wide open the following week, with Eddie Brown and Waltemeyer arriving at a Walbrook Junction apartment house to find Kenny Vines stretched out on his stomach in a first-floor hallway, a red puddle of wetness where his right eye used to be. Brown didn't recognize the corpse at first, though he actually knew the forty-eight-yearold Vines from years back; h.e.l.l, everyone who ever worked the west side knew Kenny Vines. The owner of a Bloomingdale Road body shop, Vines had for years been deep into numbers and stolen auto parts, but it was only when he started to move a lot of cocaine that he began making serious enemies. The Vines case was followed two nights later by Rudy Newsome and Roy Johnson, the split decision for Landsman's crew, which was followed in turn by a double murder on Luzerne Street, where a gunman broke into a stash house in a dispute over drug territory and began firing wildly, killing two and wounding two more. Naturally, the survivors didn't care to remember much.

The grand total came to nine bodies in eight cases, with only one file closed and another on the verge of a warrant, a solve rate so low that D'Addario could be fairly described as one of the police department's least satisfied lieutenants.

"I can't help but note, sir," says McLarney, following his supervisor into the coffee room, "as I'm sure you, in your infinite wisdom, have also noticed ..."

"Go on, my good sergeant."

"... that there is a lot of red ink on our side of the board."

"Yes, quite so," says D'Addario, encouraging this pattern of courtly, cla.s.sical speech, a favored ploy that never fails to amuse his sergeants.