Homicide (45 page)

The colonel was convicted, then granted a retrial on appeal, then acquitted. The verdict on Nolan’s career was equally divided: before his testimony, he had been a sergeant assigned directly to the state’s attorney’s investigative unit; afterward, he was running a patrol sector in the Northwest with no hope of seeing the headquarters building for as long as the current department administration held office. The exile, the political machinations, the unwarranted taint of other men’s corruption—all of that shaped Nolan, so much so that the men in his squad would groan in unison whenever their sergeant began another retelling of the missing heroin story.

That Nolan had made his way back to CID after so many years in the trenches was something of a personal testament to human perseverance. And although he had no experience with death investigation, it made sense that his ultimate destination would be homicide, where organized
corruption was never much of an issue. Over the last fifteen years, the Baltimore department had stayed generally clean—remarkably so when compared to its counterparts in New York, Philadelphia and Miami. But even if a cop had it in mind to make real money, the place to do that was CID narcotics or gambling enforcement or any other unit in which a detective might kick in a door and find $100,000 under a mattress. In homicide, the only recognized scam was overtime pay; no one ever figured out how to make dead bodies pay serious money.

More than anything else, Nolan was a survivor, proud of his rank and his position in the homicide unit. Consequently, he took the supervisory aspects of his job seriously and was frustrated when Landsman, McLarney or D’Addario seemed less interested in the rituals of command. Supervisors’ meetings on the shift inevitably began with Nolan proposing new ideas for the operation of the shift—some good, some bad, but all of them involving a more formal process of supervision. The meetings would never last long: Landsman would respond to Nolan’s ideas by recommending either serious psychological help or a better grade of marijuana. Then McLarney would make a joke about something completely unrelated to the topic at hand and, to Nolan’s dismay, D’Addario would adjourn the session. Basically, Landsman and McLarney would rather be working the cases; Nolan preferred the role of full-time supervisor.

As a result, D’Addario’s sudden tactical shift toward closer supervision was, from Nolan’s vantage point, both correct and belated. The lieutenant, he reasoned, should take control of his sergeants, and the sergeants, in turn, should get a rein on the men. In Nolan’s mind, D’Addario had not only abdicated much of his own authority, but that of his sergeants as well.

And yet Nolan’s detectives—Garvey, Edgerton, Kincaid, McAllister, Bowman—were operating with as much or more freedom than the men in the other squads. Documentation, administrative issues, personnel problems—Nolan held sway over such matters. But the essential purpose of CID homicide was to solve murders, and for that, chain of command mattered no more to Nolan and his men than anyone else. Nolan’s detectives worked their cases in their own speed and fashion, and Nolan would never demand otherwise. Edgerton’s personality required that kind of approach, but even the methodical Garvey would respond to a hovering, micromanaging sergeant by delivering twelve clearances a year. With no sergeant at all, he’d manage an even dozen.

“I wouldn’t want to work for any other sergeant up there,” conceded
Garvey, explaining the squad dynamics to another detective. “It’s just that every now and then, you’ve got to slap the shit out of Roger and bring him back down to earth.”

For the detectives themselves, the OT cutbacks and scheduling changes were tolerable only because they, too, understood D’Addario’s predicament. And when D’Addario began trailing behind the detectives, checking the case files and asking for additional paperwork, no one took any real offense. Working a midnight shift one man short, Rick Requer summed up the sentiment sweetly:

“If it wasn’t for Dee,” he told two other detectives, “we wouldn’t be putting up with any of this fuckin’ bullshit.”

Yet they continued to put up with it all through April and into May as D’Addario tried to come to terms with the required pain-in-the-ass persona. The extra paperwork and scheduling changes were cosmetic and could be suffered for as long as it took the lieutenant to weather the storm. As for the overtime, that would flow again in mid-June, when the new budget year began. They cursed, they grumbled, but they played out D’Addario’s string. Most important, they continued to do the one thing absolutely essential to their lieutenant’s future: They solved murders.

Ceruti contributed with a lockup on a fatal beating from the Southwestern, and Waltemeyer put down a shooting in a house on North Wolfe Street, near the Hopkins hospital complex. On Stanton’s shift, Tomlin caught a cutting that ended with the arrest of a new police cadet, a man scheduled to attend the academy the following month.

“Do you think I should call the personnel office about this?” the man asked after confessing.

“Might be a good idea,” Tomlin told him. “Although I’m sure they’ll hear about it somehow.”

Garvey and Kincaid caught one up on Harlem Avenue, where they were blessed with witnesses and a suspect still lingering at the scene. Arriving at University Hospital to check on their victim, the two detectives watched surgeons crack the kid’s chest in a desperate effort at open-heart massage. The line on the EKG was irregular, and blood was pouring out of the chest cavity onto the white tile floor. Ten-seven within an hour or two, the ER resident predicted, morning at the latest. No shit, thought the detectives, who weren’t exactly strangers to the medical aspects of violent death. A surgeon who cracks the chest is on the last roll of the dice; any detective knows that 97 percent of all such efforts fail. Rule Six had been up
ended and Garvey arrived back at the office unable to contain his wonder.

“Hey, Donald,” shouted Garvey, bounding across the office and then waltzing Kincaid around a metal desk. “He’s gonna die! He’s gonna die and we know who did it!”

“You,” said Nolan, shaking his head and laughing, “are one cold motherfucker.” Then the sergeant turned crisply on his heel and danced a jig into his own office.

A week later, Waltemeyer and an assistant state’s attorney caught a flight for Salt Lake City, where an upstanding, pillar-of-the-community type had confessed to his closest friend about being wanted for a murder committed in Baltimore thirteen years earlier. Daniel Eugene Binick, age forty-one, had been in Utah for a dozen years, married for most of that time and working as a drug and alcohol counselor under an assumed name. And though his photograph still adorned the “Wanted for Homicide” poster in the homicide unit’s main office, it was a picture of a much younger, reckless man. The Daniel Binick of 1975 had long, stringy hair, a thick mustache and a respectable police record; the late eighties version wore his hair close-cropped and ran the local AA chapter. Even after a week’s investigation, Waltemeyer found only one living witness to the bar robbery and shooting. But one was enough, and a clearance by any name still smelled as sweet.

By early May, the clearance rate is a fatter, happier 60 percent. Likewise, the flow of overtime and court pay will be at least temporarily staunched to a point that the brass can’t help notice. If not entirely secure, D’Addario’s position has stabilized, or so it seems to his men.

During one brief encounter in the homicide office, Landsman acknowledges the lighter mood on the shift by risking a joke at the lieutenant’s expense—something that even Landsman would not have attempted a month earlier.

Late one afternoon, D’Addario, Landsman and McLarney are huddled in front of the television, the lieutenant and McLarney checking the roll book, Landsman absorbing gynecological mysteries from a skin magazine. Wandering across the sixth floor, Colonel Lanham happens to step into his homicide unit and all three supervisors snap to attention.

Landsman waits a good three seconds before handing the magazine, centerfold splayed open, to Gary D’Addario.

“Here’s your magazine, lieutenant,” he says. “I appreciate you letting me look at it.”

D’Addario, unthinking, holds out his hand.

“Fucking Jay,” says McLarney, shaking his head.

Even the colonel has to laugh.

M
ONDAY
, M
AY 9

Harry Edgerton needs a murder.

He needs a murder today.

Edgerton needs a human body, any human body, still and stiff and void of all life force. He needs that body to fall within the established limits of Baltimore city. He needs that body shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, battered or otherwise rendered inoperative through any act of human intervention. He needs a 24-hour homicide report with his name typed at the bottom, a red-brown case binder that declares Harry Edgerton to be the primary investigator. You say Bowman is handling a shooting call up in the Northeast? Tell him to hang on to that crime scene, because Harry Edgerton, his friend and personal savior, is already in a Cavalier and racing up Harford Road. You say the county police are working a murder in Woodlawn? Well, drag that poor bastard back over the city line and let Edgerton work on him. You got a questionable death in an apartment with no overt trauma or forced entry? No problem. Give the Edge a chance to write on that bad boy and it can be a murder before the next morning’s autopsy.

“If I don’t get one soon,” says Edgerton, jumping red lights on Frederick Road in the early morning darkness, “I’m going to have to kill someone.”

For two full weeks, Edgerton’s name has been affixed to the board’s wooden frame with a thumbtack, scrawled with a certain infamy on sheets of yellow legal paper that list the squad and detective expected to handle the next homicide call. The daily postings are another indication of D’Addario’s change in demeanor; detectives who have handled fewer murders are now being identified and designated as candidates for the next call. Most especially that means Edgerton. Having handled only two homicides this year, the veteran’s pace is not only a controversy within his squad but a loaded issue for D’Addario as well. For the last two weeks, every one of his postings began and ended with Edgerton’s name. It has become something of a daily joke in the coffee room:

“Who’s up today?”

“Harry’s up.”

“Christ. Harry’s gonna be up ’til October.”

For days now, Edgerton has bounced from shootings to stabbings to questionable deaths to overdoses, waiting earnestly for something—anything—to come back as a murder.

And it hasn’t worked. On days when he has handled three or four calls, running from one end of the city to the other looking at bodies, other detectives have picked up the phone and been blessed with double-dunker massacres. Edgerton handles a shooting call and the victim is guaranteed to survive. He works an apparent bludgeoning and the ME is guaranteed to rule the cause of death an overdose, followed by injuries sustained when the victim collapsed on the cement floor. Edgerton goes to the scene of an unattended death and it’s A-1-guaranteed to be an eighty-eight-year-old retiree with a chronic heart condition. None of which means a thing to D’Addario. Edgerton is up until he gets a murder, the lieutenant repeats. If it takes the rest of his career, fine.

This makes for one very irritable homicide detective. It’s one thing, after all, to be considered the resident flake on the shift and the problem child in the squad. And to have Kincaid and Bowman and God knows who else bitching about sharing the workload—normally Edgerton can handle that, too. But, he thinks, normal can be tossed out a window when I’m being made to handle three calls a day every goddamn day for what is beginning to seem like the rest of my life.

Edgerton’s urgent need for a murder was evident a week ago, when he began cursing at an overdose victim in the Murphy Homes, demanding from the cadaver a little more cooperation and consideration than had thus far been shown to him.

“You degenerate motherfucker,” Edgerton said, berating the dead man as two housing authority cops stared on in amazement. “Where the fuck did you fire up? I don’t have all fucking day to look at your fucking arms. Where the fuck is that fresh track?”

It wasn’t just the aggravation of a missing needle mark, but the frustration that had been building with each successive call. And at that moment, standing over yet another body in a Murphy Homes stairwell, Edgerton was deeply disturbed that the dead man had done nothing more than kill himself with heroin. What the hell, he pleaded silently, was a murder too much to ask anymore? This was Baltimore, for Chrissakes. This was a dead man in a stairwell at the George B. Murphy Homes housing project. What better place to be shot down with a high-caliber
weapon like a dog? What the fuck is this asshole doing with a syringe by his left hand, staring up from the cement floor with that ridiculous half-grin on his face?

“What are you, left-handed?” said Edgerton, rechecking the right arm. “Where the fuck did you shoot your shit?”

The dead man answered with his grin.

“Why,” Edgerton asked the corpse, “are you doing this to me?”

A week later and Edgerton is still the point man for D’Addario’s shift, racing across Southwest Baltimore to yet another shooting call that will, if bad luck holds, be nothing more than a grazing. There will be no crime scene, no suspect, no dead man sprawled at the intersection of Hollins and Payson. Edgerton conjures up not a corpse, but an eighteen-year-old sitting on a gurney in the ER at Bon Secours, fully alert, talking, with nothing more than an Ace bandage wrapped around one arm.

“The El Supremo’s gonna have to give me a break already,” he says, weaving between two lanes in the emptiness of Frederick Avenue. “I just can’t buy a murder.”

He does a Texas stop at the Monroe Street signal, then wheels right onto Payson. Blue strobes from the radio cars greet him, but Edgerton immediately notices the absence of fire department cherry tops. No body on the ground, either. If there was an ambo, Edgerton tells himself, it’s long gone.

The detective marks his time of arrival and slams the driver’s door. A Southwest uniform, a young white kid, sidles up with an earnest look on his face.