Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets Read online

  What the hell, he told himself. He didn’t know much about Baltimore, but what he’d seen of Atlanta couldn’t exactly be described as paradise. What the hell.

  After graduation, he was assigned to Sector 4 of the Southern, a white enclave almost evenly divided between affluent urban homesteaders and an ethnic working class. It was hardly the most crime-ridden section of the city, and Pellegrini understood that if he stayed there ten years, he would never learn what he needed to know to rise in the department. If he was going to be any good at this, he told himself, he had to get to one of the rough-and-tumble districts like the Western or, better still, to a citywide unit. After less than two years in a radio car, his ticket out of the hinterlands came in the form of an approved transfer to the Quick Response Team, the heavily armed tactical unit responsible for handling hostage situations and barricades. Working out of headquarters, QRT was considered something of an elite unit, and the officers were divided into four-man teams that trained constantly. Day after day, Pellegrini and the rest of his squad would practice kicking in doors, fanning out across unfamiliar rooms and then mock-firing at cardboard cutouts of gunmen. There were cardboard cutouts of hostages as well, and after enough practice, a team could get to the point where, under optimal conditions, if every man did his job, they might hit a hostage no more than every fourth or fifth time.

  The work was precise and demanding, but Pellegrini felt no more at ease in QRT than he had anywhere else in his life. For one thing, his relationship with the other members of his team was difficult, primarily because the unit was short one sergeant and Pellegrini was selected by the other supervisors to serve as the officer-in-charge. An OIC is accorded a little extra pay, Pellegrini learned, but little extra respect from the men under him. After all, it was one thing for the rest of his team to take orders from a sergeant with real stripes on his sleeve, it was another to have those orders coming from a temporary supervisor with no more rank than the men under him. But more important to Pellegrini than the office politics was his memory of one particular encounter in the spring of 1985, an incident that gave him his first look at the kind of police work that truly appealed to him.

  For almost a week that year, the QRT took its orders directly from the CID homicide unit, hitting several dozen locations in East Baltimore in a search for a wanted man. Those raids came in the wake of a police shooting in which Vince Adolfo, an Eastern District patrolman, was murdered while trying to stop a stolen car. An east side boy was quickly identified as the shooter, but in the hours after the slaying the suspect managed to stay on the wing. As quickly as the homicide detectives identified an address as a possible hideout, the QRT was there with a maul and shield, taking down the front door. It was the first time that Pellegrini got a chance to watch the homicide unit up close, and when the Adolfo detail ended, one thing was certain in his mind: He wanted to be one of the people who live by finding the right door. Some other cop could have the job of kicking it down.

  He acted on that thought by doing something extraordinary-at least by the standards of the average police department. Armed with a carefully prepared résumé and letter of introduction, he took the elevator to the sixth floor of headquarters and walked into the administrative offices next to the homicide unit, where the commander of the Crimes Against Persons section makes his home.

  “Tom Pellegrini,” he said, extending a hand to the captain in charge. “I’d like to be a homicide detective.”

  The captain, of course, looked upon Pellegrini as if he were the citizen of some other planet, and with good cause. In theory, an officer could apply for posted openings in any section; in practice, the appointment process for CID detectives was both subtle and politicized-even more so in the years since the department had abandoned standardized testing for detectives.

  For older hands like Donald Worden and Eddie Brown, and even Terry McLarney, who arrived as late as 1980, there was an entrance examination for CID-a test that managed to weed out those applicants incapable of writing a respectable warrant, but also to promote a good many people who were simply good at taking tests. Moreover, the test results-though they implied a quantitative approach-had always been subject to politics: an applicant’s score on his oral exam was usually only as good as his departmental connections. Then, in the early 1980s, testing was discontinued and appointment to detective became purely political. In theory, police officers were supposed to make homicide by distinguishing themselves elsewhere in the department, preferably in some other investigative unit on the sixth floor. Although most of the applicants did indeed manage that prerequisite, the final decision usually had more to do with other factors. In a decade of affirmative action, it helped to be black; it also helped to have a lieutenant colonel or deputy commissioner as a mentor.

  Pellegrini and the captain had a brief and inconclusive conversation. He was a good cop with a respectable performance sheet, but he was neither black nor the disciple of any particular boss. But Jay Landsman heard about this brief meeting and was impressed with Pellegrini’s approach. To walk into a commander’s office with nothing more than some typewritten pages and a handshake required stones. Landsman told Pellegrini that if he made it to homicide, he’d be welcome as a member of his squad.

  In the end, Pellegrini had only one card to play: a well-connected lawyer for whom he had once done a favor during his time in the Southern. If there’s ever anything I can do, the guy had said. That was a few years earlier, but Pellegrini called in the marker. The lawyer agreed to do what he could, then called him back two days later. There were no openings in Crimes Against Persons, but through a connection with one of the deputy commissioners, he could get Pellegrini into William Donald Schaefer’s security detail. It wasn’t homicide, the lawyer said, but if you can last a year or two in the service of Mayor Annoyed, you can pretty much name your poison.

  Reluctantly, Pellegrini took the transfer and thereafter spent nearly two years following Hizzoner from community meetings to fund-raisers to Preakness Parades. Schaefer was a tough man to work for, a machine-bred politician who prized loyalty and a willingness to eat shit above all other human attributes. There were several days when Pellegrini left work with mayoral insults ringing in his ears, and several more when he went home suppressing an almost overwhelming desire to cuff the city’s highest elected official to a radio car bumper.

  Once, at a March of Dimes event where Schaefer was serving as master of ceremonies, Pellegrini made the mistake of intervening in the mayor’s performance. As Schaefer waxed prolific on everything from birth defects to Baltimore ’s new aquarium, an event organizer pointed out that the March of Dimes poster child, a little girl confined to her wheelchair, was not being included. Sensing disaster, Pellegrini reluctantly wheeled the child closer to the mayor, speaking in a soft stage whisper.

  “Uh, Mr. Mayor.”

  Schaefer ignored him.

  “Mr. Mayor, sir.”

  Schaefer waved him away.

  “Mr. Mayor…”

  When the mayor finished his speech, he wasted no time wheeling around on the plainclothes detective.

  “Get the fuck away from me,” said Schaefer.

  Still, Pellegrini played the good soldier, knowing that in Baltimore a machine politician’s word is gold. Sure enough, when Schaefer was elected Maryland ’s governor in 1986, the people in his entourage got their pick of the lot. Within days of each other, there were two appointments to CID homicide: Fred Ceruti, a black plainclothesman from the Eastern, and Tom Pellegrini. Both men went to Jay Landsman’s squad.

  Once there, Pellegrini surprised everyone, including himself, by doing the job. Handling those early calls, he could not yet rely on natural instinct or experience; the City Hall detail wasn’t exactly a noted breeding ground for competent homicide detectives. But what he lacked in savvy, he made up for in a willingness to learn. He enjoyed the work, and more important, he began to feel as though there was something in this world that suited him. Landsman and Fahlteich led him
through the early calls, just as Dunnigan and Requer tried to break in Ceruti by sharing their cases.

  Orientation to CID homicide wasn’t all that sophisticated. There was no training manual; instead, a veteran detective would hold your hand for a few calls and then, suddenly, let go to see if you could walk on your own. Nothing was more terrifying than your first time as primary, with the body stretched out on the pavement and the corner boys eyefucking you and the uniforms and ME’s attendants and lab techs all wondering if you know half of what you should. For Pellegrini, the turning point was the George Green case from the projects, the one where no one else in his squad expected a suspect, much less an arrest. Ceruti and Pellegrini handled that call together, with Ceruti off for a long weekend the following day. When Ceruti returned on Monday, he asked casually if anything was new on their homicide.

  “It’s down,” Pellegrini told him.

  “What?”

  “I locked up two suspects over the weekend.”

  Ceruti couldn’t believe it. The Green case was nothing out of the ordinary, a straight drug murder with no initial witnesses or physical evidence. Given a new detective as a primary, it was precisely the kind of case that everyone expected to stay open.

  Pellegrini solved it by legwork alone, by bringing in people and talking to them for hours on end. He soon found that he had the temperament for long interrogations, a patience that even the other detectives found exasperating. With his slow, laconic manner, Pellegrini could spend three minutes recounting what he had for breakfast that morning or a full five minutes telling the joke about the priest, the minister and the rabbi. While that might drive the likes of Jay Landsman to distraction, it was perfectly suited to interviewing criminals. Slowly, methodically, Pellegrini mastered more and more of the job, and he began to close a healthy majority of his cases. His success, he realized, was important to him only. His second wife, a former trauma unit nurse, had no problem with the morbidity that surrounded homicide work, but she had little interest in the intricacies of the cases. His mother expressed only general pride in her son’s success; his father was lost to him entirely. In the end, Pellegrini had to accept that this victory was something that he would celebrate alone.

  He thought it was a victory, at least, until Latonya Wallace showed up dead in that alley. For the first time in a long while, Pellegrini began to question his own ability, deferring to Landsman and Edgerton, allowing the more experienced investigators to chart the course.

  This was understandable; after all, he had never handled a true red ball. But the blend of personalities, of individual styles, also contributed to Pellegrini’s doubt. Landsman was not only loud and aggressive but supremely confident as well, and when he worked a case he tended to become its center, drawing other detectives toward him by centripetal force. Edgerton, too, was the picture of confidence, quick to put his ideas forward or argue with Landsman about one theory or another. Edgerton had the New York attitude, the inner sense that tells a city boy to speak first in a crowded room, before someone else opens his mouth and the opportunity is gone.

  Pellegrini was different. He had his ideas about the case, to be sure, but his manner was so restrained, his speech so casual and slow, that in any debate the veteran detectives tended to run over him. At first, it was only moderately irritating, and how much did it matter, anyway? He really didn’t disagree with either Landsman or Edgerton in his choice of direction. He had been with them when they first focused on the Fish Man as a suspect and he had been with them when Landsman offered the theory that the killer had to live in that same block of Newington. He agreed with them when they had jumped on the old drunk living across the street. It all sounded reasoned, and whatever else you could say about Jay and Harry, you had to admit that they knew their business.

  It will be months before Pellegrini begins to chastise himself for being so unassertive. But eventually the same thoughts that plagued him at the crime scene-the feeling that he is not completely in control of his case-will bother him again. Latonya Wallace was a red ball, and a red ball brings the whole shift into a case for better or worse. Landsman, Edgerton, Garvey, McAllister, Eddie Brown-all of them had a hand in the pie, all of them were intent on turning over the stone that would reveal a child killer. True, they were covering a lot of ground that way, but in the end, it wouldn’t have Landsman’s or Edgerton’s or Garvey’s name on the case file.

  Landsman is definitely right about one thing: Pellegrini is tired. They all are. That night, as the fifth day of the investigation ends, every one of them leaves the office at 3:00 A.M. knowing they will be back in five hours and knowing, too, that the sixteen-and twenty-hour shifts they have been working since Thursday are not going to end soon. The obvious, unspoken question is how long can they keep it up. Dark ridges have already become fixed below Pellegrini’s eyes, and whatever sleep the detective does get is often punctuated by nocturnal declarations from his second son, now three months old. Never much on appearances as a plainclothesman, Landsman is now shaving every other day, and his attire has spiraled down from sport coats to wool sweaters to leather jackets and denims.

  “Hey, Jaybird,” McLarney tells Landsman the following morning, “you look a little beat.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “How’s it going? Anything new?”

  “This one’ll go down,” says Landsman.

  But in truth, there is little cause for optimism. The red binder on Pellegrini’s desk, number 88021, has grown thick with canvass reports, criminal histories, office reports, evidence submission slips and handwritten statements. The detectives have canvassed the entire block surrounding the alley and are beginning to cover adjacent blocks; most of those identified in the first canvass as having any criminal history have already been eliminated. Other detectives and detail officers are checking out every report in which an adult male so much as looks at any girl under the age of fifteen. And though several phone calls have come in with tips about possible suspects-Landsman himself spent half a day tracking one mental case mentioned by a Reservoir Hill mother-no one has come forward to say they saw the little girl walking home from the library. As for the Fish Man, he is accounted for on the critical Wednesday. And the old drunk is now, in fact, an old drunk. Worst of all, Landsman pointed out, they still haven’t found their murder scene.

  “That’s what’s killing us,” Landsman tells them. “He knows more than we do.”

  Edgerton, for one, is aware of the long odds.

  On Tuesday, the night after they jack up the old drunk, Edgerton finds himself at a red brick Baptist church on upper Park Avenue, around the corner from Newington, walking slowly through the stifling heat of a packed sanctuary. The small coffin, off-white with gold trim, is at the far end of the center aisle. The detective makes his way to the front of the church, then hesitates for a moment, touching the corner of the casket with his hand before turning to face the front row of mourners. He takes the mother’s hand and bends down, his voice a whisper.

  “When you pray tonight, please say a prayer for me,” he tells her. “We’re going to need it.”

  But the woman’s face is broken, empty. She nods abstractedly, her eyes washing over the detective to fix again on the floral arrangement in front of her. Edgerton walks to the side of the church and stands with his back to the wall, eyes closed more from fatigue than spiritual conviction, listening to the deep, gospel tones of the young minister:

  “… though I walk through the valley of the shadow… and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying… no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

  Listening to the city’s mayor, whose voice breaks as he stumbles through his words:

  “To the family and friends… I, uh… this is a terrible tragedy, not only for your family… for the entire city… Latonya was Baltimore ’s child.”

  Listening to the U.S. Senator:

  “… the poverty, the ignorance, the greed… all the things that kill lit
tle girls… she was an angel to us all, the angel of Reservoir Hill.”

  Listening to small, brief details of a child’s life:

  “… attended this school from age three until the present time with a perfect attendance record… such involvements as student council, school choir, modern dance, majorette… Latonya’s goal was to become a great dancer.”

  Listening to a eulogy, to reasons that never sounded more hollow, more empty:

  “She is home now… because we are not judged by the fleetest of foot or the strongest, but those that endure.”

  Edgerton follows the crowd that gathers behind the white casket as it is carried toward the front door. Already back at work, he corners a white-gloved usher to ask about obtaining a copy of the mourners’ book, signed by those in attendance. From a surveillance van on the opposite side of Park Avenue, a technician begins discreetly taking photographs of the departing crowd in the hope that the killer might muster enough remorse to risk an appearance. Edgerton stands at the base of the church steps, scanning the male faces as the crowd files slowly into the street.

  “‘Not the fleetest of foot or the strongest, but those that endure,’” he says, pulling out a cigarette. “I like that part… I hope he was talking about us.”

  Edgerton watches the last of the mourners leave the church before walking back to his car.