Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets Part 37

"Well," said McLarney, stalking away, "that's the last time I ever bother reading a book."

For a career cop, Roger Nolan is positively scary and a force to be reckoned with in any game of trivia. Still trying to find comfort in that metal chair, Garvey succ.u.mbs to his sergeant's academic dissertation on the John Wayne mystique. He listens quietly because what else can he do. It's too hot to type that prosecution report. Too hot to read the Evening Evening Sun Sun sitting on Sydnor's desk. Too hot to go down to Baltimore Street and pay for a cheesesteak. Too G.o.dd.a.m.n hot. sitting on Sydnor's desk. Too hot to go down to Baltimore Street and pay for a cheesesteak. Too G.o.dd.a.m.n hot.

Whoa. Incoming.

Garvey pushes the chair toward Edgerton's desk and grabs the receiver on the first bleat, fastest on the draw. His call. His moneymaker. His ticket out.

"Homicide."

"Northwest district, six-A-twelve unit."

"Yeah, whatcha got?"

"It's an old man in a house. No sign of wounds or anything like that."

"Forced entry?"

"Ah, no, nothing like that."

Garvey's disappointment seeps into his voice. "How'd you get in?"

"Front door was open. The neighbor came over to check on him and then found him in the bedroom."

"He live alone?"

"Yeah."

"And he's in bed?"

"Uh-huh."

"How old is he?"

"Seventy-one."

Garvey gives up his name and sequence number, knowing that if this officer has misread the scene and the case comes back from the ME as a murder, Garvey will have to eat it. Still, it sounds straight enough.

"Do I need anything else for the report?" the cop asks.

"No. You called for the medical examiner, right?"

"Yeah."

"That's everything then."

He drops the receiver back onto the phone and separates the sticky wetness that is his s.h.i.+rt from the back of the chair. Twenty minutes later, the phone rings again with a west side cutting-cheap stuff, too, with one kid in the University Hospital ER and the other in the Western lockup, staring out of his cell at Garvey and Kincaid through a cocaine haze.

"He just walked in here and said he stabbed his brother," says the Western turnkey.

Garvey snorts. "You don't think he's on drugs, do you, Donald?"

"Him?" says Kincaid, deadpan. "No way."

The cutting call keeps them on the street for no more than twenty minutes, and when they return to the office, Nolan is dismantling the VCR; all else is three-part snoring so regular that it takes on a hypnotic quality.

Edgerton has returned from videoland and the squad soon settles in for the worst kind of sleep, the kind where a detective wakes up more exhausted than before, covered by a layer of liquid homicide office that can only be sc.r.a.ped away by a twenty-minute shower. Still, they sleep. On a slow night, everyone sleeps.

At five, the telephone finally rings again, although now everyone is two hours past the desire to get a call-the general reasoning being that anyone inconsiderate enough to relinquish his life after the hour of three A.M A.M. does not deserve to be avenged.

"Homicide," says Kincaid.

"G'morning. Irwin from the Evening Sun Evening Sun. What'd you have last night?"

d.i.c.k Irwin. The only man in Baltimore with a work schedule more miserable than that of a homicide detective. Five A.M A.M. calls for seven A.M A.M. deadlines, five nights a week.

"All quiet."

Back to sleep for a half hour or so. And then a moment of pure terror: some sort of thunderous machine, some kind of battering ram, is heaving against the hallway door. Metal hitting metal in the darkness to Garvey's immediate right. Shrill, high-pitched noises as a violent, nocturnal beast clatters toward a sleeping squad, bulling its way through the dark portal. Edgerton remembers the .38 in his top left drawer, a firearm fully stocked with 158-grain hollow-points. And thank G.o.d for that, because the beast is now entering the room, its steel lance projected, its leaden armor clanging against the bulkhead on the far side of the coffee room. Kill it, says the voice in Edgerton's head. Kill it now.

A sheet of light falls upon them.

"What the ..."

"Aw, h.e.l.l, I'm sorry," says the beast, surveying a room full of cowering, bleary-eyed men. "I didn't see you all in there where you was sleepin'."

Irene. The monster is a cleaning woman with an East Bawlmer accent and yellow-white hair. The steel lance is a mop handle; the clanging armor, the larger half of the floor buffer. They are alive. Blind, but alive.

"Turn out the light," Garvey manages to say.

"I will, hon. I'm sorry," she says. "You go back to sleep. I'll start out here 'n leave you alone. You get on back to sleep an' I'll tell when the lieutenant comes in ..."

"Thank you, Irene."

She is the ancient janitress with a heart of gold and a vocabulary that could make a turnkey blush. She lives alone in an unheated rowhouse, earns a fifth of what they do and never arrives later than 5:30 A.M A.M. to begin s.h.i.+ning the sixth-floor linoleum. Last Christmas, she took what little money didn't go for food and bought a pressed-wood television table as her gift to the homicide unit. No amount of pain or aggravation could cause them to yell at this woman.

They will, however, flirt with her.

"Irene, honey," says Garvey, before she can shut the door. "Better watch out now. Kincaid had his pants off tonight and he was dreamin' about you ..."

"You're a liar."

"Ask Bowman."

"It's true," says Bowman, picking it up from the rear of the office. "He had his pants off and he was calling your name ..."

"You can kiss my a.s.s, Bowman."

"You better not say that to Kincaid."

"He can kiss my a.s.s too," says Irene.

As if on cue, Kincaid returns from the bathroom, albeit fully dressed, and requires only a little prodding from Bowman before he's once again wooing the hired help.

"C'mon, Irene. Gimme a little somethin'."

"Why should I, Donald?" she says, warming to the game. "You ain't even got anything I'd want."

"Oh yeah I do."

"What?" she says, looking down disdainfully. "That little tiny thing?"

The entire squad cracks up. Twice a midnight s.h.i.+ft, Kincaid talks dirty to Irene. Twice a midnight s.h.i.+ft, Irene manages to keep up with him.

Beyond the darkness of the main unit office, the coffee room and the outer offices are brightening with the lighter blue of morning. And like it or not, every man in the room is now wide awake, rattled from sleep by Kincaid's determined courts.h.i.+p.

But the phones stay quiet and Nolan cuts Bowman loose just after six; the rest of the squad sits quietly, trying not to move until the air conditioning kicks up again for the days.h.i.+ft. The men lean back in their seats in some kind of communal trance. When the elevator bell rings at twenty after, it's the sweetest sound in the world.

"Relief 's here," says Barlow, strutting into the room. "You all look like s.h.i.+t ... Not you, Irene. You look as lovely as ever. I was talking to these ugly pieces of s.h.i.+t."

"f.u.c.k you," says Garvey.

"Hey, mister, is that any way to talk to the man who's giving you early relief?"

"Eat me," says Garvey.

"Sergeant Nolan," says Barlow, feigning indignation, "did you hear that? I just stated a simple fact by saying that these guys look like pieces of s.h.i.+t, which they do, and I'm subjected to all kinds of abuse. Was it this f.u.c.kin' hot in here all night?"

"Hotter," says Garvey.

"Proud to know you, mister," says Barlow. "You know, you're one of my personal heroes. What'd you have last night? Anything?"

"Nothing at all," says Edgerton. "It was death up here."

No, thinks Nolan, listening from the corner of the room. Not death. The absence of death, maybe. Death means being out on the streets of Baltimore, making money.

"You all can take off," says Barlow. "Charlie'll be in here in a couple."

Nolan keeps Garvey and Edgerton waiting for the second days.h.i.+ft man to arrive, letting Kincaid escape at half past.

"Thanks, Sarge," he says, shoving a run sheet into Nolan's mailbox.

Nolan nods, acknowledging his own mercies.

"See you Monday," says Kincaid.

"Yeah," says Nolan wistfully. "Daywork."

FRIDAY, JULY 22.

"Aw Christ, another Bible."

Gary Childs picks the open book up off a bureau and tosses it onto a chair with a dozen others. The bookmark holds the place even as pages flutter in the cool breeze of an air conditioner. Lamentations 2:21: Young and old lie together Young and old lie together In the dust of the streets; My young men and maidens Have fallen by the sword.

You have slain them in the day of your anger; You have slaughtered them without pity.

One thing about Miss Geraldine, she took her Good Book seriously, a fact confirmed not only by the Bible collection, but also by the framed 8-by-11 photographs of her in her Sunday finest, preaching the good news at storefront churches. If salvation is ours through faith rather than works, then perhaps Geraldine Parrish can find some contentment in the wagon ride downtown. But if works do count for anything in the next world, then Miss Geraldine will be arriving there with a few things charged to her account.

Childs and Scott Keller pull up the bed and begin riffling the stack of papers stuffed beneath it. Grocery notes, telephone numbers, social service forms and six or seven more life insurance policies.

"d.a.m.n," says Keller, genuinely impressed. "Here's a whole bunch more. How many does that make now?"

Childs shrugs. "Twenty? Twenty-five? Who the h.e.l.l knows?"

The search warrant for 1902 Kennedy gives them the right to seek a variety of evidentiary items, but in this instance, no one is gutting a room in the hope of finding a gun or knife or bullets or b.l.o.o.d.y clothes. On this rare occasion, they are looking for the paper trail. And they are finding it.

"I got more of them in here," says Childs, dumping the contents of a paper grocery bag onto the upended mattress. "Four more."

"This," says Keller, "is one murderous b.i.t.c.h."

An Eastern District patrolman who has been downstairs for an hour, watching Geraldine Parrish and five others in the first-floor living room, knocks softly on the bedroom door.

"Sergeant Childs ..."

"Yo."

"The woman down there, she's sayin' she feels faint ... You know, she's sayin' that she's got some kind of heart condition."

Childs looks at Keller, then back at the uniform. "Heart condition, huh?" he says, contemptuous. "She's having a heart attack? I'll be down in a minute and you can really watch her fall out of her chair."

"Okay," says the patrolman. "I just thought I'd tell you."

Childs sorts through the jetsam from the grocery bag, then wanders downstairs to the front room. The occupants of the rowhouse are cl.u.s.tered together on a sofa and two chairs, staring up at him, waiting for answers. The sergeant stares back at the plump, sad-faced woman with the Loretta Lynn wig and red cotton dress, a genuinely comic vision under the circ.u.mstances.

"Geraldine?"

"Yes I am."

"I know who you are," says Childs. "Do you want to know why we're here?"

"I don't know why you're here," she says, patting her chest lightly. "I can't sit like this. I need my medicine ..."

"You don't have any idea why we're here?"

Geraldine Parrish shakes her head and pats her chest again, leaning back in her chair.

"Geraldine, this is a search-and-seizure raid. You're now charged with three counts of first-degree murder and three attempted murders ..."

The other occupants of the room stare as deep gurgling noises begin to rise in Geraldine Parrish's throat. She falls to the carpet, clutching her chest and gasping for air.