Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets Part 39

"Whhhhooooaaaaaa."

Geraldine stays down on the floor, whimpering loudly, as Landsman strolls back into the main office like a conquering hero.

"So," he says, smiling wickedly, "I guess we're probably looking at an insanity defense."

Probably so, although everyone watching Geraldine Parrish's performance is now utterly convinced of her sanity. This writhing-on-the-floor nonsense is a calculated and naive version of the real thing, an altogether embarra.s.sing performance, particularly when everything else about her suggests a woman vying for a special advantage, a manipulator measuring every angle. Her relatives have already told detectives how she would boast about being untouchable, about being able to kill with impunity because four doctors would testify toher insanity if need be. The musings of a sociopath? Perhaps. The mind of a child? Probably so. But a mind genuinely unhinged?

A week ago, before the search warrants were even typed, someone showed Waltemeyer an FBI psychological profile of the cla.s.sic black widow serial killer. Prepared by the behavioral sciences unit at the Quantico Academy, the profile suggested that the woman would be thirty years or older, would not necessarily be attractive, yet at the same time would make great efforts to exaggerate her s.e.xual prowess and manipulate her physical appearance. The woman would probably be a hypochondriac and would more likely than not enjoy portraying herself as a victim. She would expect special treatment, then pout if it was not forthcoming. She would greatly overestimate her ability to sway other people, men in particular. Measured against the profile, Geraldine Parrish seemed to be the product of Central Casting.

After the interrogation, Roger Nolan and Terry McLarney are both escorting Geraldine Parrish to the City Jail, following her down the sixth-floor hallway, with Nolan walking directly behind the woman.

"Just before the elevators, she stops suddenly and bends over," Nolan later tells the other detectives, "as if she's trying to make me run into her fat a.s.s. I tell you, that's what she's really about ... In her mind, she really believes that if I get a good feel of her a.s.s, I'm gonna fall in love with her and shoot Terry McLarney with his own gun and ride off into the sunset in an unmarked Chevrolet."

Nolan's psychoa.n.a.lysis may be sufficient to the occasion, but for Waltemeyer, the long journey into the mind and soul of Geraldine Parrish is just beginning. And while every other detective in the room is content to believe that they already know everything there is to know about this woman, it is now up to Waltemeyer to determine just how many people she killed, how she killed them and how many of those cases can be successfully prosecuted in court.

For Waltemeyer, it will be an investigation unlike any other, a career case that only a seasoned detective could contemplate. Bank statements, insurance records, grand jury proceedings, exhumations-these are things that no patrolman ever worries about. A street cop rarely takes the work beyond a single s.h.i.+ft; one night's calls have nothing to do with those of the next. And even in homicide, a detective never has to worry the cases beyond the point of arrest. But in this investigation, the arrest is just the beginning of a long, labored effort.

Two weeks from now, Donald Waltemeyer, Corey Belt and Marc Cohen, an a.s.sistant state's attorney, will be in Plainfield, New Jersey, interviewing the friends and relatives of Albert Robinson, finding one of Geraldine's surviving husbands and delivering subpoenas for bank and insurance records. Much of the evidence involves an interstate paper trail, the kind of detail work that usually inspires a street cop to nothing more than tedium. But the three men will return to Baltimore with the explanation for the migration of Albert Robinson to East Baltimore and his subsequent murder.

Brought once again to the interrogation room from her jail cell, Miss Geraldine will once again confront a detective who lays the insurance policies in front of her and once again explains the truth about criminal culpability.

"You not makin' any sense," Geraldine will tell Waltemeyer. "I didn't shoot no one."

"Fine with me, Geraldine," the detective says. "It doesn't matter to me whether you tell the truth or not. We just brought you here to charge you with another murder. Albert Robinson."

"Who's he?"

"He's the man from New Jersey you had killed for ten thousand dollars of insurance money."

"I didn't murder no one."

"Okay, Geraldine. Fine."

Once again, Geraldine Parrish leaves the homicide unit in handcuffs and, once again, Waltemeyer goes back to working the case, expanding it further, searching this time for answers in the death of the Reverend Gilliard. It is a deliberate, often tedious process, this prolonged investigation of a woman who has already been arrested and charged with four murders. More than a string of fresh street shootings, it demands a professional investigator. A detective.

Months into the Parrish investigation, McLarney will walk by Waltemeyer's desk and overhear a lecture that the detective is delivering with calm sincerity. The beneficiary of Waltemeyer's newfound wisdom will be Corey Belt, the prodigy from the districts whose detail to homicide was extended for the Parrish investigation. At that moment, Belt wants very much to respond to a lying, recalcitrant witness in the Western District way.

"Back in the Western," Belt tells Waltemeyer, "we'd just throw the a.s.shole against a wall and put some sense into him."

"No, listen to me. This isn't patrol. That kind of stuff doesn't work up here."

"That stuff always works."

"No, I'm telling you. Up here you got to be patient. You got to use your head."

And McLarney will stand there, listen a little longer, and then move on, delighted and amused at the notion of Donald Waltemeyer telling another man to shake off the lessons of the street. If there was nothing else to her credit, the Black Widow had at least taken a patrolman and turned him into a detective.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 2.

It's a summer afternoon in the Woodland Avenue drug market, and suddenly, with a body on the ground, race becomes the dominant theme. The dead kid is decidedly black and the police, standing over their daylight scene, are decidedly white. The crowd grows restless.

"This could get out of hand in a hurry," says a young lieutenant, scanning the sea of angry faces on the other side of the police line. "I'd like to get that body outta here as soon as possible."

"Don't even worry about it," says Rich Garvey.

"I only got about six guys here," the lieutenant says. "I'd call for more, but I don't want to empty the other sector."

Garvey rolls his eyes. "f.u.c.k them," he says softly. "They're not going to do s.h.i.+t."

They never do. And after a few hundred crime scenes, Garvey doesn't even hear the trash that gets thrown out from the crowd. The way a detective sees it, you just let the a.s.sholes run their mouths as long as they keep out of your way. And if one actually jumps into your scene, you throw his a.s.s against a radio car and call for the wagon. No problem whatsoever.

"Why don't you cover that boy up and show some respect for the dead," shouts a fat girl on the other side of the Cavalier.

The crowd shouts its approval and the girl, encouraged, presses the point. "He just another dead n.i.g.g.e.r to you, right?"

Garvey turns to Bob McAllister, glowering, as a uniform pulls a white plastic sheet over the head and torso.

"Now, now," says McAllister, antic.i.p.ating his partner's anger. "Let's have a little decorum here."

The body stays on the pavement, stranded there by the delayed arrival of a lab tech, who is rus.h.i.+ng from another call on the other side of the city. A hot summer day in August and only four techs are working, one consequence of a munic.i.p.al pay scale that doesn't exactly encourage careers in the fast-growing field of evidentiary processing. And though this fifty-minute delay is being regarded as yet another public display of the white racist police conspiracy that runs rampant on the streets of Baltimore, Garvey is somehow unrepentant. f.u.c.k them all, he thinks. The kid is dead and he ain't getting any better and that's all there is to it. And if they think a trained homicide detective is going to dismantle a crime scene to satisfy a half a block's worth of agitated Pimlico squirrels, they don't know the game.

"How long you gonna leave a black man out in the street?" shouts an older resident. "You don't care who sees him like that, do you?"

The young lieutenant listens to all of this nervously, checking his watch, but Garvey says nothing. He takes his eyegla.s.ses off, rubs both eyes and walks over to the body, slowly lifting the white sheet from the dead man's face. He stares down for half a minute or so, then drops the cloth and walks away. A proprietary act.

"Where the h.e.l.l is the crime lab?" says the lieutenant, fingering his radio mike.

"f.u.c.k these a.s.sholes," says Garvey, irritated that this is even being mistaken for an issue. "This is our scene."

And not much of a scene at that. A young drug dealer by the name of Cornelius Langley has been gunned down in a daylight shooting on the sidewalk in the 3100 block of Woodland, and no one in this crowd is rus.h.i.+ng forward to provide any information. Nonetheless, it's the only crime scene around, and as such, it's real estate that now belongs to Garvey and McAllister. What the h.e.l.l else does anyone need to be told?

The lab tech is another twenty minutes in arriving, but true to form, the crowd eventually loses interest in the confrontation well before that. By the time the tech gets busy taking photos and bagging spent .32 auto casings, the locals on Woodland Avenue are back to signifying, staring down the proceedings with nothing more than casual curiosity.

But just as the detectives are putting the finis.h.i.+ng touches on the scene, the crowd on the far side of the street parts for the hysterical mother, who is already wailing inconsolably even before glimpsing her son's body. Her arrival ends the truce and gets the crowd going again.

"Why you got to make her watch?"

"Hey, that the mother, yo."

"They don't care. That's some cold poh-leece s.h.i.+t 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 gra.s.s. But in the context of his summer, a sudden shout and a foot chase and a little bit of dope in a gla.s.sine 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 f.u.c.kin' grabbed 'em."

Bob Biemiller, friend of the little man, hero to the unwashed ma.s.ses, 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 was.h.i.+ng 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 ma.s.sage 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."

Sat.u.r.day 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 canva.s.sed 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d.

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 G.o.d," wailed Roosevelt Smith. "I swear to G.o.d 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 cla.s.sic 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 interrogation 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 s.h.i.+ft 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 sh.e.l.l of a Pimlico drug dealer, he has no right to invoke the G.o.ds. 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.