Homicide (61 page)

Veteran detectives left the courthouse with their heads spinning. Three murders, three attempted murders—and that was just what Vice happened to know about. On their return to the homicide office, open murder files dating back as many as three years were suddenly being yanked from the oblivion of the filing cabinets.

Incredibly, everything in those files conformed exactly to Rodney Vice’s account. The November 1985 murder of Frank Lee Ross, the common-law husband of Geraldine’s sister, had been handled by Gary Dunnigan, who at that time could find no motive for the slaying. Likewise, Marvin Sydnor had worked the fatal shooting of Helen Wright, sixty-five, who had been boarding with Geraldine on Kennedy Street; lacking any solid information about the murder, he had presumed that the old lady had been killed in a robbery attempt gone awry. Not that Sydnor hadn’t found a few loose ends in a routine interview with Geraldine Parrish; he even tried to polygraph the landlady, but he gave up
when she produced a cardiologist’s note saying that her health could not stand the stress of a lie detector test. True to Vice’s account, the old woman had been shot in the head several weeks before being murdered but had survived the first assault—a redundancy that had also been written off as inner-city coincidence.

The sheer amount of new information made clear the need for a special detail, and Waltemeyer—because he had handled the original March extortion complaint as well as the initial shooting of Dollie Brown—soon found himself reassigned to Gary Childs’s squad on Stanton’s shift. He was joined by Mike Crutchfield, the primary detective on the Bernadette Barnes case, and later by Corey Belt, the bulldog from the Western District who had done so well on the Cassidy investigation. At Stanton’s request, Belt had been returned to homicide from the Western ops unit specifically for the investigation of Geraldine Parrish.

They began with detailed interviews of Dollie Brown and other relatives of Miss Geraldine’s, and what they heard became more incredible with each telling. Everyone in the family seemed to know what Geraldine had been doing, yet everyone seemed to have regarded her campaign to trade human lives for insurance benefits as an inevitable, routine bit of family business. No one ever bothered to call the police—Dollie, for one, had said nothing about her aunt during the extortion probe—but worse than that, many family members had signed insurance policies for which Geraldine was the beneficiary. Nieces, nephews, sisters, brothers-in-law, tenants, friends and neighbors—the detectives began learning of hundreds of thousands of dollars in double-indemnity policies. Yet when people were being shot, no one who knew anything about it had bothered to voice so much as mild apprehension.

They feared her. At least they said they feared her—and not just because they knew of the sociopaths that Geraldine Parrish employed for her insurance killings. They feared her because they believed that she had a special power, that she knew voodoo and hexes and all kinds of Carolina backwoods garbage. She could bend a man to her will, make one marry her or make one kill for her. She told them that stuff and, after a time, when people began dying, they actually took to believing it.

But Aunt Geraldine’s power wasn’t at all obvious to anyone outside the family circle. She was a semiliterate lay preacher with a gray Cadillac and a white stone rowhouse with fake paneling and dropped tile ceilings. She was heavyset, and ugly, too—a thoroughly unattractive woman whose penchant for wigs and fire engine red lipstick suggested a $20
Pennsylvania Avenue prostitute. Geraldine was a hard fifty-five years old when the city homicide unit finally kicked in her front door and that of her mother’s house on Division Street.

The search of both addresses takes hours, as Childs, Keller and Waltemeyer find policy binders and other papers strewn throughout the two rowhouses. Long before the search at Kennedy Avenue is complete, Geraldine departs in the back of an Eastern District wagon, arriving at the homicide office well before the investigators. She sits stoically in the large interrogation room as Childs and Waltemeyer arrive and spend another hour or so in the coffee room scanning the insurance policies, photo albums and documents seized in the two houses.

The two detectives immediately notice a proliferation of marriage licenses. As far as they can tell, the woman is married to five men simultaneously, two of whom were living with her on Kennedy Avenue and were taken downtown as witnesses following the raid. The two men sit together like bookends on the fishbowl sofa, each believing the other to be nothing more than a tenant at the East Baltimore home. Each is confident of his own place in the household. Each has signed a life insurance policy naming Geraldine Parrish or her mother as the beneficiary.

Johnnie Davis, the older of the two husbands, tells detectives that he met Miss Geraldine in New York and had, over his own objection, been intimidated into marriage and brought to Baltimore to live in the basement of the Kennedy Avenue rowhouse. Without fail, Miss Geraldine confiscated his disability checks at the beginning of every month, then returned a few dollars so that he could buy food. The other husband, a man by the name of Milton Baines, was in fact Miss Geraldine’s nephew and had rightly objected on grounds of incest when his aunt insisted on marriage during a trip back home to Carolina.

“So why did you marry her?” Childs asks him.

“I had to,” he explains. “She put a voodoo curse on me and I had to do what she said.”

“How did she do that?”

Baines recalls that his aunt had cooked him a meal using her own menstrual discharge and watched as he ate. Afterward, she told him what she had done and explained that she now had power over him.

Childs and Waltemeyer exchange glances.

Baines rambles on, explaining that when he continued to express concern about marrying his mother’s sister, Miss Geraldine took him to an
old man in a neighboring town who spoke briefly with the bride-to-be, then assured Baines that he was not, in fact, related to Geraldine.

“Who was the old man?” Childs asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Then why did you believe him?”

“I don’t know.”

It was not to be believed—a murder case with cosmic insanity as the only common frame of reference. When the detectives tell Milton Baines that the old man living in the basement is also Geraldine’s husband, he is stupefied. When they explain to him that both he and his rival were living in that house like hogs waiting for the slaughter, corralled by a madwoman who would eventually trade them in for a few thousand dollars of insurance benefits, the man’s mouth drops in abject wonder.

“Look at him,” says Childs from the other side of the office. “He was the next victim. You can almost see the H-file number stenciled on his forehead.”

Waltemeyer guesses by the marriage licenses and other documents that husband number three is probably in Plainfield, New Jersey, though whether he is dead or alive isn’t immediately clear. Husband number four is doing a five-year bit at Hagerstown on a gun charge. Husband number five is somebody by the name of the Reverend Rayfield Gilliard, whom Geraldine married this past January. The good reverend’s whereabouts are uncertain until Childs goes to the blue looseleaf binder that lists unattended deaths for the year. Sure enough, the seventy-nine-year-old Gilliard’s marriage to Miss Geraldine had lasted little more than a month; his sudden departure had been attributed by the medical examiner’s office to natural causes, though no autopsy had been performed.

There are also the photo albums, in which Miss Geraldine had saved not only the Reverend Gilliard’s death certificate but also that of her thirteen-year-old niece, Geraldine Cannon, who, according to an accompanying newspaper clipping, had been in her aunt Geraldine’s care when she succumbed to an overdose of Freon in 1975—an overdose ruled accidental, though pathologists attributed it to a possible injection of Ban deodorant. On the following page of the album, the detectives find a $2,000 insurance policy in the child’s name.

In the same album, they locate more recent pictures of Geraldine with an infant girl and soon learn that she had purchased that child from a niece. The baby would be found later that week at a relative’s house and would be taken into custody by the Department of Social Services after
the detectives match that infant to at least three life insurance policies totaling $60,000 in double-indemnity benefits.

The list of potential victims has no end. An insurance policy is found for aman who had been beaten and left to die in a wooded section of Northeast Baltimore; however, he survived the attack and was later located in a rehabilitative hospital. Another policy is found for Geraldine’s younger sister, who died of unexplained causes several years back. And from one page of another album, Childs pulls out a death certificate, dated October 1986, for a man named Albert Robinson. The manner of death is listed as homicide.

Childs takes the document and walks to another blue binder that contains a chronological list of Baltimore homicides. He opens the binder to the ’86 cases and scans the column of victims:

Robinson, Albert B/M/48

10/6/86, shot, NED, 4J-16884

Nearly two years later, the case is still open, with Rick James as the primary detective. Childs takes the death certificate back into the main office, where James is at his desk, absently poking at a chef’s salad.

“This mean anything to you?” Childs says.

James scans the death certificate. “Where’d you get this?”

“Out of the Black Widow’s photo album.”

“Are you shittin’ me?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Hot damn,” says James, jumping up to grip the sergeant’s hand. “Gary Childs done solved my murder.”

“Yeah, well, someone had to.”

A smokehound from Plainfield, New Jersey, Albert Robinson had been found dead by the B&O railbed at the foot of Clifton Park, shot once in the head. The man’s blood-alcohol level at the time of death was 4.0, four times the legal standard in drunk driving cases. Working on that murder, James never did figure out why an alcoholic from north Jersey was dead in East Baltimore. Perhaps, he had reasoned, the man was a hobo who had hitched a southbound freight only to be shot to death for some unknown reason as the train meandered through Baltimore.

“How does she connect with Albert?” asks James, suddenly fascinated.

“I don’t know,” says Childs, “but we know she used to live up in Plainfield …”

“No shit.”

“… and I got a feeling that somewhere in that pile of papers we’re gonna find an insurance policy on your man.”

“Oooooo, you makin’ me feel all warm an’ happy inside,” says James, laughing. “Keep talkin’ that nice talk.”

Inside the large interrogation room, Geraldine Parrish adjusts her wig and applies another coat of makeup, using a small mirror. None of this has made her any less conscious of her appearance, such as it is. Nor has she lost her appetite; when detectives bring her a tuna sub from Crazy John’s, she puts away the entire thing, chewing slowly, pinkies raised as she holds the ends of the sandwich to her mouth.

Twenty minutes later, she demands to use the ladies’ room and Eddie Brown walks her as far as the door, shaking his head and smiling when his prisoner asks if he would be coming inside.

“You go on ahead,” he tells her.

She is in there for a good five minutes, and when she steps back into the hallway, it’s with a fresh coat of lipstick. “I need my medicines,” she says.

“Well, which medicines do you need?” asks Brown. “You had about two dozen different ones in your purse.”

“I need all of them.”

Visions of an interrogation room overdose dance through Eddie Brown’s head. “Well, you ain’t getting all of them,” he says, walking her back down the hallway. “I’ll let you pick three pills.”

“I got rights,” she says bitterly. “Constitutional rights to my medicines.”

Brown smiles, shaking his head.

“Who you laughing at? What you need to get is some religion … stand there laughing at people.”

“You gonna give me religion, huh?”

Geraldine saunters back into the interrogation room, followed by Childs and Waltemeyer. In the end, four detectives will take a crack at this woman, laying the insurance policies on the long table and explaining over and over that it doesn’t matter whether she actually pulled the trigger.

“If you caused someone to be shot, then you’re guilty of murder, Geraldine,” says Waltemeyer.

“Can I have my medicines?”

“Geraldine, listen to me. You’re charged with three murders already, and before this is over you’re probably going to be charged with some others. Now’s the time to tell us what happened …”

Geraldine Parrish stares up at the ceiling, then begins babbling incoherently.

“Geraldine …”

“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ ’bout, Mistah Poh-leeces,” she says suddenly. “I didn’t shoot no one.”

Later, when the detectives have given up on the notion of a coherent statement, Geraldine sits alone in the interrogation room, waiting for the paperwork to catch up with her before she is transferred to the City Jail. She is leaning forward, her head resting on the table, when Jay Landsman walks by the one-way window and glances inside.

“Is that her?” says Landsman, who has just come on the four-to-twelve shift.

“Yeah,” says Eddie Brown. “That’s her.”

Landsman’s face creases into an evil grin as he slams an open palm hard against the metal door. Geraldine jumps in her seat.

“Whhhhooooaaaaaaaaaaa,” wails Landsman in his best approximation of a ghost. “Whhhhooooaa, mmuuurrder … MMMUUURRDER …”

“Aw Christ, Jay. Now you fuckin’ did it.”

Sure enough, Geraldine Parrish dives under the table on all fours and begins bleating like a crazed goat. Delighted with himself, Landsman keeps at it until Geraldine is prone on the floor, bellowing at the metal table legs.

“Whhhhhoooaaaaa,” moans Landsman.

“Aaaaaaaaahhhhhh,” screams Geraldine.

“Whhhhooooaaaaaa.”

Geraldine stays down on the floor, whimpering loudly, as Landsman strolls back into the main office like a conquering hero.

“So,” he says, smiling wickedly, “I guess we’re probably looking at an insanity defense.”