Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets Page 13

  And where the hell is that scene? Where the hell did this bastard keep that girl for a day and a half without anyone knowing? With every passing hour, Pellegrini tells himself, the scene is deteriorating. Pellegrini is certain that the site is somewhere up in Reservoir Hill, a veritable treasure house of physical evidence waiting for him in some bedroom or basement. Where, he wonders, haven’t they looked?

  By late afternoon, Jay Landsman, Eddie Brown and other detail officers are once again up in Reservoir Hill, checking the vacant houses and garages on Newington, Callow and Park for the murder site. Tactical units supposedly went through every vacant property in the area on the previous night, but Landsman wants to be sure. After one such search, the men go for a soda at a Whitelock Street carryout, where they fall into conversation with the owner, a young, light-skinned woman who waves away the detectives’ pocket change.

  “How’s it going?” Landsman asks.

  The woman smiles, but says nothing.

  “Have you heard anything?”

  “You all are up here about the little girl, right?”

  Landsman nods. The woman seems anxious to say something, glancing at both detectives, then looking out at the street.

  “What’s up?”

  “Well… I heard…”

  “Wait a sec.”

  Landsman closes the front door of the carryout, then leans back across the front counter. The woman catches her breath.

  “This might be nothing…”

  “Hey, that’s all right.”

  “There’s this man lives over on Newington, across the street from where they say it happened. He drinks, you know, and he came in that same morning saying a little girl got, you know, raped and murdered.”

  “What time was this?”

  “Had to be about nine or so.”

  “Nine in the morning? Are you sure?”

  The woman nods.

  “What did he say exactly? Did he say how the girl was murdered?”

  The woman shakes her head. “He just said she got killed. I just wondered ’cause no one up here had heard about it yet and he was acting, like, strange…”

  “Strange, like nervous?”

  “Nervous, yeah.”

  “And this guy drinks?”

  “He drinks a lot. He’s old. He’s always been, you know, a little strange.”

  “What’s his name?”

  The woman bites her bottom lip.

  “Hey, no one’s going to find out it came from you.”

  She gives it up in a whisper.

  “Thanks. We won’t mention you at all.”

  The woman smiles. “Please… I don’t wanna get people up here against me.”

  Landsman slides back into the passenger seat of the Cavalier before writing the name-a new name-in his notebook. And when Edgerton punches it up on the computer that afternoon he does indeed find a man with that same name and a Newington Avenue address. And damned if the guy’s sheet doesn’t show a couple of old rape charges.

  Another corridor.

  MONDAY, FEBRUARY 8

  They arrive in two cars-Edgerton, Pellegrini, Eddie Brown, Ceruti, Bertina Silver from Stanton’s shift and two of the detail officers-an exaggerated escort for one old smokehound, but just about the right number of people to perform a plain-view search of the man’s apartment.

  For that they have no legal authority; their reasons for suspecting the old man fall far short of the legal requirements of probable cause, and without a search and seizure warrant signed by a judge, the detectives can’t take any items or conduct a thorough search, upending mattresses or opening drawers. On the other hand, if the old man allows them to enter the apartment, they can look around at what is plainly visible. For that purpose, the more eyes, the better.

  Bert Silver takes charge of their suspect as soon as the front door opens, addressing him by name and making it clear, in a single declarative sentence, that half the police department has come to request the honor of his presence at headquarters. The other detectives slide past the two and begin moving slowly through a fetid, cluttered three-room apartment.

  The old man moans and shakes his head, then tries to formulate an argument from a series of seemingly unrelated syllables. It takes a few minutes for Bert Silver to get the hang of it.

  “Nuh gago t’nite.”

  “Yeah, you do. We need to talk to you. Where are your pants? Are these your pants?”

  “Dunwanna go.”

  “Well, we have to talk to you.”

  “Nuh… dunwanna.”

  “Well, that’s the way it’s got to be. You don’t want us to have to arrest you, do you? Are these your pants?”

  “Blackuns.”

  “You want the black ones?”

  As Bertina Silver assembles their suspect, the other detectives move carefully through the rooms, looking for blood spatter, for serrated knives, for a small, star-shaped gold earring. Harry Edgerton checks the kitchen for hot dogs or sauerkraut, then returns to the bedroom, where he finds a thick red stain by the old man’s bed.

  “Whoa. What the fuck is this?”

  Edgerton and Eddie Brown bend down. The color is purple-red, but with a high gloss. Edgerton puts his finger to the edge.

  “Sticky,” he says.

  “Probably wine,” says Brown, turning to the old man. “Hey, my man, did you drop your bottle here?”

  The old man grunts.

  “That ain’t blood,” says Brown, laughing softly. “That be Thunderbird.”

  Edgerton agrees, but pulls out a pocket knife and pries up a small piece of the substance, then drops it into a small glassine bag. In the front hall, the detective does the same thing with a red-brown smear that runs across the plasterboard for about four feet. If either sample comes back blood, they’ll have to return with a warrant and take fresh samples for evidence, but Edgerton believes that the possibility is remote. Better to let the lab techs test a sample tonight and be done with it.

  The old man looks around, suddenly aware of the crowd.

  “Whaterey doin’?”

  “They’re waiting for you. You need a jacket? Where’s your jacket?”

  The old man points to a black ski jacket on a closet door. Silver grabs the garment and holds it up for the old man, who slowly negotiates his arms into the sleeves.

  Brown shakes his head. “This ain’t the guy,” he says softly. “No way.”

  Fifteen minutes later, in the hall outside the sixth-floor interrogation room, Jay Landsman comes to the same conclusion. He stares through the small, wire mesh window of the door to the large room. The window is a one-way affair: Landsman’s face cannot be seen from inside the eight-by-six-foot cubicle; the window itself appears to be almost metallic, something between steel plate and dull mirror.

  Framed in the small window is the old man from the south side of Newington -the old man who supposedly knew about this murder before anyone else in the neighborhood. Yet here he sits, their latest suspect, a stone-cold smokehound apprehended somewhere on that well-traveled road between Thunderbird and Colt 45, his zipper down, the buttons of his soiled work shirt secured in the wrong buttonholes. Bert Silver didn’t exactly waste time worrying about wardrobe.

  The sergeant watches the old man rub his eyes and slump against the metal chair, then lean forward to scratch himself in buried, forbidden places that even Landsman doesn’t want to think about. Though he was roused from stupor and squalor less than an hour before, the old man is now fully awake and waiting patiently in the empty cubicle, his breath wheezing at regular intervals.

  This in itself is a bad sign, clearly contradicting Rule Number Four in the homicide lexicon, which states that an innocent man left alone in an interrogation room will remain fully awake, rubbing his eyes, staring at the cubicle walls and scratching himself in the dark, forbidden places. A guilty man left alone in an interrogation room goes to sleep.

  Like most theories involving the interrogation room, the Sleeping Suspect Rule cannot be invoke
d across the board. Some novices not yet accustomed to the inherent stress of crime and punishment are prone to babbling, sweating and generally making themselves sick before and during an interrogation. But Landsman can hardly be encouraged when he sees that the old man from Newington Avenue, drunk and disheveled and hauled from his bed in the middle of the night, is still unwilling to take his present condition as an anesthetic. The sergeant shakes his head and walks back into the office.

  “Geez, Tom, this guy looked a lot better before we got him down here,” Landsman says. “I can’t see him being anything but a smokehound.”

  Pellegrini agrees. The old man’s appearance in the homicide unit and his almost immediate dismissal as a suspect by Landsman mark the last stage in the transformation from aging alcoholic to suspected child killer and back to harmless drunk. For the old man, it was a frenetic, three-day metamorphosis of which he had remained blissfully unaware.

  From the moment that the Whitelock Street carryout owner first uttered the old man’s name to Landsman and Brown, everything looked good.

  First of all, he told the woman at the carryout about the child’s murder at 9:00 A.M. on Thursday-even before the detectives had cleared the crime scene-and he behaved strangely while doing so. But how could he have known about the little girl’s murder at that time? Although the elderly couple living at 718 Newington had told several neighbors of the discovery before calling the police, there was no indication that they had talked to the old man across the street. Moreover, the detectives had almost immediately barred onlookers from the alley behind Newington; because the old man lived on the south side of the street, he should not have been able to see the body.

  Then there were the rape charges-old ones to be sure-with no indication of conviction or sentence on the sheet. But when detectives pull the reports from Central Records they find one of the victims to be a young girl. Also, the old man appears to live alone and his first-floor rowhouse apartment is in the 700 block of Newington, a short run from where the body was dumped.

  A bit thin, perhaps. But Landsman and Pellegrini both know that four days have passed since the discovery of the body and at this moment, there is nothing better on the horizon. The first and seemingly best suspect developed thus far-the Fish Man-was brought downtown for an interview two days ago, but that interrogation had led them nowhere.

  The Fish Man showed little interest in talking about the death of a child who had once worked in his store. Nor did he seem at all interested in accurately establishing his own whereabouts on Tuesday and Wednesday. After overcoming a general loss of memory, he came up with an alibi for the Tuesday of Latonya Wallace’s disappearance-an errand across town that he had run with a friend. Checking on the alibi, Pellegrini and Edgerton found that the trip had in fact occurred on Wednesday, leaving them to wonder whether the man had lied intentionally or had simply confused the days. Moreover, in checking the alibi, the detectives learned that the Fish Man had invited two friends up to his apartment to eat chicken on Wednesday evening. That, of course, left an obvious problem: If, as the autopsy seemed to indicate, Latonya Wallace was abducted on Tuesday, killed on Wednesday night and then dumped in the early morning hours of Thursday, then what was the Fish Man doing running errands on Wednesday afternoon or cooking a chicken dinner on Wednesday night? A full statement was taken from the Fish Man at the Saturday interrogation and, given the number of unanswered questions, both Edgerton and Pellegrini considered him a suspect. Still, the problems with apparent time of death-based on the extra, partially digested meal and the lack of decomposition-had to be overcome.

  But as with everything else in this case, even the time of death remained a moving target. Earlier in the evening before the raid on the old man’s rowhouse, Edgerton had argued briefly against the prevailing opinion: “What if she was killed on Tuesday night? Could she have been killed late Tuesday or early Wednesday morning?”

  “Can’t be,” said Landsman. “She’s just starting to come out of rigor. And the eyes are still moist.”

  “She could be coming out of rigor after twenty-four hours.”

  “No fucking way, Harry.”

  “Yeah she could.”

  “No fucking way. It’s gonna happen faster for her because she’s smaller…”

  “But it’s also cold out.”

  “But we know the guy has her inside somewhere until he can dump her that morning.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “No, Harry, you’re fucked up on this,” said Landsman, producing the office medical text on death investigation and turning to the section on rigor mortis. “Eyes not dry, no decomp. Twelve to eighteen hours, Harry.”

  Edgerton scanned the page. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Twelve to eighteen. And if she’s dumped at three or four… that’s…”

  “Middle of the day on Wednesday.”

  Edgerton nodded. If she was killed on Wednesday, then the Fish Man was out and there was every reason to move Landsman’s candidate, the old drunk from across the street, to the top of the list.

  “Hey, fuck it,” said Landsman finally. “We got no reason not to pick this guy up.”

  No reason save that their suspect can barely hang on to his bottle, much less lure a young girl off the street and hold her captive for a day and a half. The interrogation lasts only long enough to establish that the old drunk had only heard of the murder on that Thursday morning from a neighbor who had heard it from the woman who lived at 718 Newington. He doesn’t know about the murder. He doesn’t know the little girl. He can’t remember much about his old charges except that whatever they were, he was innocent. He wants to go home.

  A lab tech takes Edgerton’s samples to a detective’s desk and subjects each to a leuco malachite test, a chemical examination in which items are daubed with a cotton-tipped applicator that will turn blue if blood-animal or human-is present. Edgerton watches as each applicator turns a dull gray, an indication of dirt and nothing more.

  A few hours before dawn, as the old man is returned to anonymity in a Central District radio car and the detectives collate and copy another day’s reports, Pellegrini dryly offers a fresh alternative.

  “Ed, you wanna break this case?”

  Brown and Ceruti both look up in surprise. Other detectives glance over as well, their curiosity piqued.

  “Then I’ll tell you what you do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Ed, you go prepare a statement of charges.”

  “Yeah?”

  “And Fred, you read me my rights…”

  The room breaks up.

  “Hey,” says Landsman, laughing. “What do you guys think? Is this case getting to Tom? I mean, he kinda looks like he’s beginning to molt.” Pellegrini laughs sheepishly; in truth, he is beginning to look a little played out. His features are almost classically Italian: dark eyes, sharp facial lines, stocky build, thick mustache, jet black hair cresting in a pompadour that on a good day seems an affront to gravity itself. But this is not a good day; his eyes are glazed, his hair a dark, unruly cascade over his pale forehead. His words come drag-ass out of his mouth in a mountain drawl slowed by lack of sleep.

  Every man in the room has been there before, working 120-hour weeks as the primary investigator on a case that simply doesn’t add up, a set of facts that won’t solidify into a suspect no matter how long you stare at them. An open red ball is a torture tour, a ball-busting, blood-draining ordeal that always seems to shape and mark a detective more than the ones that go down. And for Pellegrini, still new to Landsman’s squad, the Latonya Wallace murder is proving to be the hardest rite of passage.

  Tom Pellegrini had nine years on the force when his transfer to homicide was finally approved, nine years of wondering whether police work was truly a calling or merely the latest meandering in what had become a lifetime of detours.

  He was born to a coal miner in the mountains of western Pennsylvania, but his father-himself the son of a miner-left the family when Pellegrini was a boy. Af
ter that, there was nothing to bind them. Once, as an adult, he had gone to see his father for a weekend, but the connections he had been looking for simply weren’t there. His father was uncomfortable, his father’s second wife unwelcoming, and Pellegrini left that Sunday knowing that the visit had been a mistake. His mother offered little solace. She had never expected much of him and from time to time she actually came right out and said so. For the most part, Pellegrini was raised by a grandmother and spent summers with an aunt, who took him down to Maryland to see his cousins.

  His first choices in life seemed-like his childhood-uncertain, perhaps even random. Unlike most of the men in the homicide unit, Pellegrini had no prior connection to Baltimore and little in law enforcement when he joined the department in 1979. He arrived as something close to a blank tablet, as rootless and unclaimed as a man can be. In his past, Pellegrini could count a couple of frustrating years at Youngstown College in Ohio, where a few semesters were enough to convince him that he was not at all suited for academics. There was a failed marriage as well, along with six months in a Pennsylvania coal mine-enough for Pellegrini to know that the family tradition was something to walk away from. He signed on for a couple of years as the manager of a carnival, where he worked the towns and state fairs and kept the amusement rides running. Eventually, that job led to a more permanent position as manager of an amusement park on a lakeshore island between Detroit and Windsor, Canada, where he spent most of his time trying to keep the joyrides from rusting during the northern winters. When the amusement park owners refused to pay for better, safer maintenance, Pellegrini quit, convinced that he wanted to be nowhere near the place when the Tilt-A-Whirl altered its usual orbit.

  The want ads led south-first to Baltimore, where he visited the aunt who had taken him in during those childhood summers. He stayed in Maryland for a week, long enough to answer a newspaper ad encouraging applications to the Baltimore Police Department. He had once worked for a brief time at a private security firm, and though the job offered nothing even remotely resembling police work, it left him with the vague feeling that he might enjoy being a cop. In the late 1970s, however, the prospects for a law enforcement career were uncertain; most every city department was dealing with budgetary retrenchment and hiring freezes. Still, Pellegrini was intrigued enough to attend the interview for the Baltimore department. But rather than wait for a reply, he pushed on to Atlanta, where he had been led to believe that the Sun Belt’s economic boom was a better guarantee of employment. He stayed overnight in Atlanta, reading the classifieds at a depressing diner in a ragged section of the city, then returning to the motel to hear from his aunt, who called to say he had been accepted by the Baltimore academy.