Homicide (39 page)

“Hey, Frazier,” says Garvey, smiling, “remember how you promised to bring me that thirty-eight? What ever happened to that gun anyway?”

“That’s right,” says Kincaid, picking up on it. “If you’re so fuckin’ honest, how come you never brought that gun in for us?”

Frazier says nothing.

“You ain’t got the truth in you, son,” says Kincaid again. “No sir. It ain’t in you.”

Frazier simply shakes his head, seeming to gather his thoughts for a moment or two. Then he looks up at Garvey, genuinely curious. “Officer Garvey,” he asks, “am I the only one charged?”

The only one. If ever Garvey wondered whether Vincent Booker had anything to do with these murders, that utterance alone was enough to answer the question.

“Yeah, Frazier. You’re it.”

Vincent was involved, no doubt about it. But Vincent wasn’t the triggerman—not for Lena, not for his father. And in the end, it was a hell of a lot better to keep Vincent Booker as a witness than give him a charge and let Frazier use him in front of a jury. Garvey saw no point in providing Frazier’s attorney with an alternative suspect, a living, breathing piece of reasonable doubt. No, thought Garvey, for once they had told the truth in the interrogation room: You can either be a witness or a suspect, Vincent. One or the other.

Vincent Booker gave it up—or at least gave as much of it as he dared—and went home as a result. Robert Frazier lied his ass off and now he’s going to the Western District lockup. In Garvey’s mind, there is a certain symmetry to all this.

At the booking desk of the Western, the contents of Frazier’s pockets are arrayed on the counter, then catalogued by the desk sergeant. From a front pocket comes a thick roll of drug money.

“Christ,” says the sergeant, “there’s more than fifteen hundred dollars here.”

“Big fuckin’ deal,” says Garvey. “I make that in a week.”

Kincaid shoots Garvey a look. The governor, the mayor and half of the British royal family would have to be bludgeoned to death in the men’s room of the Fayette Street bus station before a Baltimore detective would see that kind of money. The desk sergeant understands.

“Yeah,” he tells Garvey, loud enough for Frazier to hear. “And you didn’t have to sell no dope for your paycheck, did you?”

Garvey nods.

“Officer Garvey …”

“Hey, Donald,” says Garvey to Kincaid. “How ’bout I buy you a beer.”

“Officer Garvey …”

“I might just have one tonight,” says Kincaid. “I might just take you up on that.”

“Officer Garvey, I ain’t lied to you.”

Garvey wheels around, but the turnkey is leading Frazier toward the rear cage door of the Western lockup.

“Officer Garvey, I ain’t lied.”

Garvey looks impassively at his suspect. “Bye, Frazier. See you ’round.”

For a few moments, Robert Frazier is framed by the cage door, waiting at the edge of the lockup as the turnkey prepares a fingerprint card.
Garvey finishes playing with the paperwork on the booking desk and walks toward the back door of the station house. He glides past the lockup without looking inside, and so doesn’t see the final, unmistakable expression on Robert Frazier’s face.

Pure, murderous hate.

S
ATURDAY
, A
PRIL 2

A detective’s prayer: Blessed be the truly unwise, for they bring hope to those obligated to pursue them. Blessed be those of dim understanding, for by their very ignorance they bring light to those who labor in darkness. Blessed be Dennis Wahls, for though he believes otherwise, he is cooperating fully in the campaign to put him in prison for the month-old murder of Karen Renee Smith, the cab driver beaten to death in Northwest Baltimore.

“This house right here?” says Eddie Brown.

“Next one.”

Brown nods and Wahls tries to open the back door of the Cavalier. The detective, sitting next to him in the rear seat, reaches over and pulls the door shut. Harris, one of the officers assigned to the Northwest detail, walks from his own car to Brown’s window.

“We’ll stay here,” says Brown. “You and Sergeant Nolan go up and get him to come out.”

Harris nods, then walks with Roger Nolan to the front of the red brick building. The Madison Avenue address is a downtown group home for those charged with delinquency, which in Baltimore means anything up to and including armed robbery and manslaughter. Inside that home is Dennis Wahls’s younger brother, on whose person is a wristwatch that belonged to Karen Smith.

“How do you know he still has the watch?” asks Brown as he watches Nolan and the detail officer make their way up the front steps.

“I saw him yesterday and he had it then,” says Wahls.

Thank God, thinks Brown. Thank God they’re so stupid. If they were smart, if they regarded murder as a secret and heinous act, if they told no one, if they got rid of the clothing and the weapon and the possessions taken from the victim, if they refused to listen to bullshit in the interrogation rooms, what the hell would a detective do?

“This is giving me a headache,” says Wahls.

Brown nods.

“I’m going to need a lift home after we get finished with this.”

A lift home. This kid actually thinks he’s going to go home and sleep it off, as if it were some kind of hangover. O.B. McCarter, another detail officer from the Southwest, bites his tongue in the driver’s seat, trying hard not to laugh.

“You think you all could get me a lift home?”

“We’ll see what happens,” says Brown.

What happens is this: The younger brother of Dennis Wahls, a fourteen-year-old urchin with twice the sense of his sibling, comes out of the group home and is escorted to the side of the Chevrolet. He looks into the car, looks at his brother, looks at Eddie Brown and manages to assess the situation for what it really is. He nods.

“Hey,” says Dennis Wahls.

“Hey,” says his brother.

“I told them about the watch—”

“What watch?”

“Hey,” Brown interrupts. “Your ass is going to be in this if you don’t listen to your brother.”

“Man, c’mon,” says Dennis Wahls. “You got to give it up. They gonna let me go if you give it to him. If you don’t, they gonna put a murder charge on me.”

“Hmm,” says the kid, obviously wondering how this can be. If they don’t get the evidence, they charge you, but if they get the evidence, you go free. Yeah. Right.

“Go on,” says Roger Nolan, standing beside the car.

The boy looks at his brother. Dennis Wahls nods and the young boy races back into the red brick building, returning three minutes later with a woman’s timepiece on a black leather band. The boy tries to hand the watch to his brother, but Brown interjects his own hand. The boy takes a step away from the car.

“See you soon, yo,” says Dennis Wahls.

The boy nods again.

They proceed to Reservoir Hill, where the two cars pull to the curb outside the Section 8 housing on Lennox Avenue. Again Brown and Wahls wait in the Cavalier; this time, Nolan pays a visit to Wahls’s young girlfriend, who received a gift of Karen Smith’s gold necklace.

In the driver’s seat, McCarter plays with the radio. Eddie Brown, still
in the back seat with his prisoner, watches Nolan bullshitting with the girlfriend’s mother in the project parking lot. When Nolan gets wound up, he can talk your ear off.

“C’mon, Roger,” mutters Brown. “What the fuck are you doing there anyway?”

A minute or two more and the girl returns from her apartment with the jewelry, walking across the lot to Nolan waving nervously at Wahls, who is peering out the rear passenger window.

“Man, I wish she hadn’t seen me like this.”

The detective grunts.

“Her momma’s gonna be upset with me now.”

McCarter pushes the radio buttons until rock ’n’ roll spills out in a crackling AM static: the Bobby Fuller Four from about a dozen years back. The detail officer listens to the song for a moment; suddenly, he’s dying in the front seat, trying hard not to laugh aloud.

“Oh man,” says McCarter.

“
Breakin’ rocks in the hot sun
…”

McCarter starts snapping two fingers, mugging for Brown and Harris, who is standing at the driver’s window.

“…
I fought the law and the law won
.”

Brown steals a look at Wahls, but the kid is oblivious.

“
Robbin’ people with a six-
gun
…”

McCarter keeps time on the steering wheel.

“…
I fought the law and the law won
.”

“Can you believe it?” says McCarter.

“Believe what?” asks Wahls.

McCarter shakes his head. On the night when he has greatest need of a functioning mind, Dennis Wahls is suddenly struck deaf, dumb and blind. The radio could be playing back his own confession and he wouldn’t notice.

Which is not to say that Wahls, at the age of nineteen, has a deep reservoir of intelligence from which to draw. First of all, he let some other brain-dead talk him into killing a woman cabbie for a few dollars and some jewelry, and then he settled for the jewelry, letting his partner keep the cash. Next, he gave away the jewelry and began bragging about being right there when the woman was pulled into the woods and beaten to death. He didn’t kill her, no sir. He watched.

The first few people within earshot didn’t believe it; either that or
they didn’t much care. But eventually some young thing that Dennis Wahls tried hard to impress went to school and told a friend, who told someone else, who finally decided that maybe some sort of authority figure ought to hear about it. And when line 2100 lit up in the homicide unit, Rick James was there to take the call.

“I did one thing right in this whole investigation,” James, the primary for the Smith murder, will later declare. “I picked up the phone.”

In truth, he did a lot more than that. With the detail officers to help him, James ran down every lead that came in, checking and rechecking the stories provided by Karen Smith’s coworkers, boyfriends and relatives. He spent days going over the cab company’s service logs, looking for fares or locations that seemed out of the ordinary. He sat at his desk for hours, listening to tapes of the cab dispatcher’s calls, trying to pick up a location where Karen Smith may have gone before she disappeared into the woods of Northwest Baltimore. He checked every recent robbery or assault report involving a taxi driver anywhere in the city or county, as well as the robbery reports from anywhere close to the Northwest. When he found out that one of the victim’s boyfriends had a cocaine habit, he went at him hard in a series of interviews. The alibi was checked. The boyfriend’s acquaintances were all interviewed. Then they brought the man downtown and went at him again: Things weren’t so good between you two, right? She made a lot of money, didn’t she? You spend a lot of money, don’t you?

Even Donald Worden, as harsh a judge of the younger detectives as any, was impressed with his partner’s effort.

“James is learning,” Worden said, watching the case from a distance, “what it means to be a detective.”

Rick James did everything conceivable to solve the case, yet when the phone finally rang, the two binders of office reports from the cabbie killing contained not a single mention of Dennis Frank Wahls. Nor was Clinton Butler, the twenty-two-year-old wonder who conceived the slaying and struck the fatal blow, a name in the file. There was nothing new to that kind of twist, no lesson to be learned by the detective. It was merely a textbook example of Rule Five in the homicide lexicon, which states:

It’s good to be good; it’s better to be lucky.

James was actually on his way to the airport, waiting for a morning flight and a week’s vacation, when detectives finally located Wahls and
brought him downtown. Wahls gave up the murder in little more than an hour of interrogation, during which Eddie Brown and two detail officers offered him the most obvious out. You didn’t hit her; Clinton did, they assured him, and Wahls went for the whole apple. No sir, he didn’t even want to do the robbery. That was Clinton’s idea, and Clinton called him names when he didn’t initially agree. He didn’t even get any of the money; Clinton took that, arguing that he was the one who had done all the work, leaving Wahls only the jewelry. After she fainted from fear, it was Clinton who dragged the cabbie out of her taxi and down the wooded path, Clinton who found the tree branch, Clinton who challenged him to do it, then teased him when he did not. So it was Clinton Butler who finally smashed the wooden limb against the woman’s head.

In the end, the only thing that Wahls would admit was that it was he, not Clinton, who pulled off the woman’s pants and attempted oral sex with their unconscious victim. Clinton was homosexual, Wahls assured the detectives. He didn’t want none of that.

When Wahls had signed and initialed the statement, the detectives asked about the jewelry. We believe what you’re telling us, Brown said, but we need a show of good faith. Something that proves you’re telling us the truth. And Wahls nodded his understanding, suddenly confident that the return of the dead woman’s watch and necklace would buy his freedom.

Solved by chance rather than perseverance, the Karen Smith case was as much a message for Tom Pellegrini as anything else. Just as he was replaying the Latonya Wallace murder in his mind like a tape loop, James had lost himself in the details of the cabbie slaying. And to what end? Sweat and logic can solve a case in those precious days that follow a murder, but after that, who the hell knows? Sometimes a late phone call can break a case. Sometimes a fresh connection to another crime—a ballistics match or print hit—can change the outcome. More often, however, a case that stays open a month will stay open forever. Of the six female slayings that provoked the department brass to create the Northwest detail, the Karen Smith case would be only one of two to end in arrest and the only case to reach trial. By the end of March, the detail officers in the other five cases had returned to their districts; the case files were back in the cabinets—a little thicker than before, perhaps, but no better for all the effort.

But Pellegrini has no time for any lesson offered by the Northwest cases. He spends the night of Dennis Wahls’s confession handling shoot
ing calls and rereading portions of the Latonya Wallace office reports. In fact, he is out on a call when they bring Wahls back into the homicide unit and begin typing the warrant for Clinton Butler. And he is long gone in the early hours of the morning when Eddie Brown, flush with the victory, sends the recovered jewelry down to the ECU and offers up for bid the opportunity to tell Dennis Wahls that he, too, will be charged with first-degree murder.

“Hey,” says Brown, standing at the interrogation room door, “someone’s got to go in there and tell this fool he ain’t leaving. He’s still asking about a ride home.”

“Let me do it,” says McCarter, smiling.

“Go ’head.”

McCarter walks into the large interrogation room and closes the door. From the wire mesh window, the scene becomes a perfect pantomime: McCarter’s mouth moving, his hands on his hips. Wahls, shaking his head, crying, pleading. McCarter waving one arm in the air, reaching for the door handle, smiling, turning back into the hallway.

“Ignorant motherfucker,” he says, closing the door behind him.

T
UESDAY
, A
PRIL 5

Two months after the murder of Latonya Wallace, only Tom Pellegrini remains.

Harry Edgerton, the secondary investigator, left to help Bertina Silver pursue another interrogation of his best suspect in the January murder of Brenda Thompson, the woman found stabbed in the car on Garrison Boulevard. Eddie Brown was swallowed up by the sudden break in the Karen Smith case and has now moved on to fresh murders. And Jay Landsman, as much an investigator on the Latonya Wallace murder as any of them, he’s gone too. No one expected otherwise: Landsman has a squad to run, and come the next three weeks of nightwork, all of his detectives are working a fresh spate of murders.

The detail men are also gone, back to the tactical section or to the district commanders who loaned them to homicide for the murder of a little girl. First the tac units were sent down, then the youth section detectives, then the Central men, and then, finally, the two plainclothesmen on loan from Southern District operations. Slowly, inexorably, the Latonya Wallace investigation has become the exclusive preserve of one detective.

Beached by the ebbing tide, Pellegrini sits at his desk in the annex
office, surrounded by three cardboard crates of office reports and photographs, lab examinations and witness statements. Against the wall behind his desk is the bulletin board that the men on the detail created but never found the time to hang on a wall. Pinned to its center is the best and most recent photograph of the child. On the left is Edgerton’s rooftop diagram of Newington Avenue. On the right, a map of the Reservoir Hill area and a series of aerial photographs taken from the police helicopter.

On this dayshift as on two dozen others, Pellegrini moves slowly through one of the bound case folders, reading reports that are weeks old, searching for any loose fragment of information that he failed to digest the first time around. Some of the reports are his own, others are signed by Edgerton or Eddie Brown, Landsman or the detail men. That’s the trouble with the red-ball treatment, Pellegrini tells himself, scanning one typewritten page after another. By virtue of their importance, red balls have the potential to become David O. Selznick productions, four-star departmental clusterfucks beyond the control of any single investigator. From almost the moment the body was found, the Latonya Wallace case became the property of the entire police department, until door-to-door canvasses were being done by patrolmen and witness statements were being taken by detail officers with no more than a few days’ experience in death investigation. Knowledge of the case file was soon scattered among two dozen people.