Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets Read online

  “What gun?”

  “Jesus Christ. Where’s the goddamn 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 fuck he did,” says James, simmering. “He was fucking around in here and you or your brother or someone else shot him by accident. Where’s the fucking gun?”

  “Ain’t no gun.”

  Classic, thinks Worden, looking at the kid. Truly classic. 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. Hell, 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 hell 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 glass 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 shit,” 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 fucking 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 God-given truth: Everyone lies. And this most basic of axioms has three corollaries:

  A. Murderers lie because they have to.

  B. Witnesses and other participants 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 circumstances 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 homosexual, 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 damn 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 goddamn 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 bullshit 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 shift. 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 shift: 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 assigned detectives listed at the bottom of each section.
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  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 assure 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, shift 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 god, 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 assassination 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 shift lieutenant is a wretched, bloody piece of work, with most of the names etched beneath D’Addario’s sergeants written in red. Stanton ’s shift 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 shift change, with Stanton ’s men going to daywork and D’Addario’s crew taking over on the four-to-twelve and midnight shifts and catching their first cases of the year. Nolan’s squad took the first murder for the shift 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 homosexual 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; hell, 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, classical speech, a favored ploy that never fails to amuse his sergeants.

  “A suggestion, sir?”

  “You have my undivided attention, Sergeant McLarney.”

  “Maybe it would look better if we put the open cases in black and the closed ones in red,” McLarney says. “That would fool the bosses for a while.”

  “That’s one solution.”

  “Of course,” adds McLarney, “we could also go out and lock some people up.”

  “That’s also a solution.”

  McLarney laughs, but not too much. As a supervisor, Gary D’Addario is generally regarded by his sergeants and detectives as a prince, a benevolent autocrat who asks only competence and loyalty. In return, he provides his shift with unstinting support and sanctuary from the worst whims and fancies of the command staff. A tall man with thinning tufts of silver-gray hair and a quietly dignified manner, D’Addario is one of the last survivors of the Italian caliphate that briefly ruled the department after a long Irish dynasty. It was a respite that began with Frank Battaglia’s ascension to the commissioner’s post and continued until membership in the Sons of Italy was as much a prerequisite for elevation as the sergeant’s test. But the Holy Roman Empire lasted less than four years; in 1985, the mayor acknowledged the city’s changing demographics by dragging Battaglia into a well-paid consultant’s position and giving the black community a firm lock on the upper tiers of the police department.

  If the outgoing tide stranded D’Addario in homicide as a lieutenant, then the men under him owed much to affirmative action. Soft-spoken and introspective, D’Addario was a rare breed of supervisor for a paramilitary organization. He had learned long ago to suppress the first impulse of command that calls for a supervisor to intimidate his men, charting their every movement and riding them through investigations. In the districts, that sort of behavior usually resulted from a new supervisor’s primitive conclusion that the best way to avoid being perceived as weak was to behave like a petty tyrant. Every district had a shift lieutenant or sector sergeant who would demand explanatory Form 95s from people ten minutes late to roll call, or scour the district’s holes at 4:00 A.M. in the hope of finding some poor post officer sleeping in his radio car. Supervisors like that either grew into their jobs or their best men ducked and covered long enough to transfer to another sector.

  Up in homicide, an authoritarian shift commander is even more likely to be held in contempt by his detectives-men who would not, in fact, be on the sixth floor of headquarters if they weren’t eighteen of the most self-motivated cops in the department. In homicide, the laws of natural selection apply: A cop who puts down enough cases stays, a cop who doesn’t is gone. Given that basic truth, there isn’t much respect for the notion that a cop shrewd enough to maneuver his way into homicide and then put together forty or fifty cases somehow needs to have a shift commander’s finger in his eye. Rank, of course, has it privileges, but a homicide supervisor who exercises his divine right to chew ass on every conceivable occasion will in the end create a shift of alienated sergeants and overly cautious detectives, unwilling or incapable of acting on their own instincts.

  Instead, and at some cost to his own career, Gary D’Addario gave his men room to maneuver, providing a buffer against the captain and those above him in the chain of command. His method carried considerable risk, and the relationship between D’Addario and his captain had frayed around the edges during the last four years. By contrast, Bob Stanton, the other shift lieutenant, was a supervisor more to the captain’s liking. A buttoned-down veteran of the narcotics unit handpicked by the captain to command the second shift, Stanton ran a tighter ship, with sergeants exerting more overt control over their men and detectives pressured to hold down the overtime and court pay that lubricates the entire system. Stant
on was a good lieutenant and a sharp cop, but when compared with the alternative, his frugality and by-the-book style were such that more than a few veterans on his shift expressed an eagerness to join D’Addario’s crusade at the first opportunity.

  For the sergeants and detectives blessed by D’Addario’s benevolence, the quid pro quo was both simple and obvious. They had to solve murders. They had to solve enough murders to produce a clearance rate that would vindicate His Eminence and his methods and thereby justify his benign and glorious rule. In homicide, the clearance rate is the litmus test, the beginning and end of all debate.

  Which is reason enough for D’Addario to stare long and hard at the red ink on his side of the board. Not only does the white rectangle offer ready comparisons between detectives, it offers the same superficial comparison between shifts. In that sense, the board-and the clearance rate it represents-has divided Baltimore ’s homicide guard into separate units, each shift functioning independently of the other. Detectives old enough to have experienced life before the board remember the homicide unit as more of a single entity; detectives were willing to work cases that began or ended on another shift, knowing that credit for clearances would be shared by the entire unit. Created to promote cohesion and accountability, the board instead left the two shifts-and each of the six squads-to compete against each other in red and black ink for clearances, as if they were a pack of double-knit salesmen moving marked-down cars for Luby’s Chevrolet.

  The trend began long before Stanton ’s arrival, but the lieutenants’ different styles helped to highlight the competition. And for the last several years, detectives from one shift had interacted with those from the other only at the half-hour shift changes or on rare occasions when a detective pulling overtime on a case needed an extra body from the working shift to witness an interrogation or help kick down a door. The competition was always understated, but soon even individual detectives found themselves contemplating the white rectangle, silently computing clearance rates for opposing squads or shifts. That, too, was ironic, because every detective in the unit was willing to concede that the board was itself a flawed measurement, as it represented only the number of homicides for the year. A squad could spend three weeks of nightwork knee deep in police shootings, questionable deaths, serious assaults, kidnappings, overdose cases and every other kind of death investigation. Yet none of that would be reflected in black and red ink.