Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets

by David Simon

  “Who? Me?”

  Every day for three months, Pellegrini had come dragass into the office to stare at the same photographs and read the same office reports. And every day the thing looked exactly the same. Every other day he was out wandering the streets of Reservoir Hill, checking the basement of a vacant rowhouse or the back of an abandoned car or truck, searching for his lost crime scene. He worked back on every significant suspect, interviewing friends, relatives and acquaintances of the Fish Man; and Ronald Carter, who tried to implicate the Fish Man; and Andrew, who parked his car in the back alley and admitted to having been out there on the night the body was dumped. He worked the fresh leads, too, checking out this sex offender locked up for a child rape in Baltimore County, or that pedophile caught playing with himself outside an elementary school. He went to the polygraph examinations at the State Police barracks in Pikesville, where each successive test of a potential suspect seemed to leave him with only a little more ambiguity. And when everything else failed, he went downstairs to the trace lab and argued with Van Gelder, the chief analyst. What about those black smudges on the dead girl’s pants? Roofing tar? Road tar? Can’t we narrow the field a little bit?

  Meanwhile, Pellegrini tried to keep up with the rotation, working those calls that came his way and struggling to stay interested in the cheap shootings and domestic cuttings. Once, while interviewing a witness to one particularly unimportant bit of violence, he found that he had to force himself to ask even the requisite questions. It was scary. At that moment, he had been in homicide for less than two years and yet, for all practical purposes, he’d become a genuine case of burnout. The well is dry, Pellegrini had to concede. There is no more.

  In early June, he took himself out on sick leave for more than two weeks, trying to recover whatever it was that had brought him to homicide in the first place. He slept and ate and played with the baby. Then he slept some more. He did not go downtown, he did not call the office and he tried, for the most part, not to think about dead little girls.

  And when the print hit lands on Gary D’Addario’s desk, Tom Pellegrini is still on leave and the lieutenant decides-for reasons more humanitarian than tactical-not to call him back in. To the other detectives, it seems at first sad, and a little ironic, that the primary investigator is not there as they swarm into Kevin Lawrence’s life, learning everything they can about this nonentity who has somehow fallen upon them like manna from heaven. More than any man in the unit that year, Pellegrini has earned a shred of hope, and his absence is very much noticed when Donald Kincaid and Howard Corbin begin tracing the new suspect’s movements, trying to link him to friends or relatives in the Reservoir Hill area. Others on the shift tell themselves and one another that Pellegrini should be here as they’re running the NCIC check on the new man, or when they search the city computer for a criminal history that can’t be found, though they feel sure that it exists under some other name or alias. Pellegrini should be here, too, when they talk to Lawrence’s family and friends. In the hours after the print hit, they tell themselves that Pellegrini deserves to be on hand for that righteous moment when this bastard case finally falls.

  Instead, the case file is transferred to Kincaid and Corbin: Kincaid, because he arrived early for the dayshift and D’Addario grabbed him first with a fresh copy of the Printrak report; Corbin, one of the true ancients on the detectives’ floor, because the Latonya Wallace murder has become an obsession for him as well.

  An aging, snaggle-toothed wonder, Corbin is the product of twenty years in the homicide unit and another fifteen in the department. The man is edging away from sixty-five years, well beyond the point at which most cops see retirement as the reasoned alternative, yet he refuses to miss so much as a day of work. A veteran of perhaps three thousand crime scenes, Corbin is a walking piece of history. Older detectives remember a time when Corbin and Fury Cousins, two of the earliest black recruits to the homicide unit, knew everyone and anyone in Baltimore’s inner city and could put that knowledge to use on any kind of case. It was a smaller, tighter city back then, and Corbin owned most of it. If your shooter went by the street name of Mac, Corbin could ask you whether you meant the east side Mac or the west side Mac, or whether you were talking about Big Mac Richardson or maybe Racetrack Mac, from up on the Avenue. And your answer wouldn’t matter, because Corbin had two or three addresses for every one of them. In his time, he was that good.

  But twenty years has transformed the city and Howard Corbin both, pushing Corbin to the career criminals unit at the other end of the sixth floor: For the last several years, in fact, Corbin has been fighting a rear-guard action against change itself, trying to prove to the chain of command that age and a diabetic condition have done nothing to slow him down. It is a noble fight, but in some ways painful to watch. And in the mind of any younger detective, Corbin has become a living, breathing reminder of the price you can be made to pay for giving too much of your life to a police department. He still shows up early every morning, still fills out his run sheets, still works a case or two, but the truth is that career criminals is a paper unit with half an office and a handful of men. Corbin knows it, too, and he doesn’t work a day there without wearing his heart on his sleeve. For him, the homicide unit will always be the promised land, and the Latonya Wallace case is his chance for an exodus.

  A month into the case, Corbin asked Colonel Lanham if he could look at the case file, and the colonel couldn’t come up with any reason to deny the request, though he and everyone else could plainly see the motive behind it. But so what? Lanham reasoned that it couldn’t hurt to have an experienced detective review the file. You never knew what a fresh mind might notice. And if, by some chance. Corbin actually managed to solve the case, then maybe he had every right to come back to the other end of the hall.

  To Pellegrini’s dismay, when the request was approved, Corbin immediately moved into the annex office and appropriated the Latonya Wallace case file. A blizzard of follow-up reports came on the heels of Corbin’s arrival as he documented his daily effort in lengthy, typewritten reports about whatever investigative leads he happened to be pursuing. For Pellegrini, the case file soon became unmanageable through sheer bulk, much of it unnecessary, to his mind. More important to Pellegrini, Corbin’s involvement was exactly the opposite of the approach he had argued in his memo to the captain. He had urged a careful, thorough review of the existing evidence, a review to be conducted by the primary and secondary detectives who were most familiar with the case. Instead, the file seemed once again to have become community territory.

  And now Corbin will serve as Pellegrini’s proxy in the pursuit of Kevin Lawrence, or at least for as long as it takes to confirm that the suspect is viable. “If this guy looks good,” Landsman assures the others in his squad, “we’re definitely going to give Tom a call at home.”

  But the next day, no one thinks about calling Pellegrini when the detectives check with the principal at Eutaw-Marshburn Elementary and are told that Kevin Robert Lawrence was enrolled there from 1971 to 1978. Nor do they think of calling when the more comprehensive computer search produces nothing remotely resembling a criminal record. Nor do they think of bothering him when the Wallace family says that they know nothing of this Kevin Lawrence and cannot remember his having anything to do with the victim.

  Eight days after a police computer took his name in vain, Kevin Lawrence is brought down to the homicide unit, where he tells detectives that he knows nothing about any girl named Latonya Wallace. He does, however, remember a book about black American heroes with the title of Pioneers and Patriots. Shown the text itself, he can even recall the school report he prepared long ago using that same book, which he had borrowed from the Eutaw-Marshburn school library. The paper was on great black Americans and, as the young man recalled, it earned him an A. But that, he says, was more than ten years ago. Why are they even asking about it?

  The investigation that exonerates Kevin Lawrence is still wrapping up when Pellegrini re
turns to duty. But by luck or mercy or both, the primary investigator is allowed to watch from the periphery as other detectives slam into a wall. He is, in a very real sense, spared the anguish of seeing a precious piece of physical evidence reduced to fantastic coincidence-a fingerprint that sat undisturbed on a book for more than a decade, waiting for a million-dollar computer to give it life enough to taunt a few homicide detectives for a week and a half.

  Instead of riding the print hit into another psychological trough, Pellegrini manages to come back to work a little stronger. The cough is still there, but the exhaustion, less so. Within a day or two of his return, the manila folder that contains the information gleaned on the Fish Man is back on his desk in the annex office. And at the same time that the detectives are busy returning a blissfully unaware Kevin Lawrence to freedom and anonymity, Pellegrini is back up on Whitelock Street, interviewing other merchants about the habits of the man who still remains his most promising suspect.

  On the same day, in fact, that Lawrence is boring other detectives with his grade school adventures, Pellegrini grabs a set of Cavalier keys and a handful of plastic evidence bags and makes his way inside the burned-out Whitelock Street store where the Fish Man had made a living until perhaps a week before the murder. The detective had been through the derelict property several times before, looking for anything to indicate that the little girl-alive or dead-had ever been inside the place, but to his frustration, the building had always seemed nothing more than a blackened shell. Neighboring merchants had in fact told him that the Fish Man had cleaned most everything out in the day or two before the discovery of the little girl’s body.

  Still, Pellegrini takes another look around before getting down to the business at hand. Satisfied that nothing in the wreckage has gone unnoticed, he sets about prying up blackened soot and debris from several locations. In places, the stuff is thick and oily and mixed, perhaps, with the tar from portions of the collapsed roof.

  The thought had occurred to Pellegrini while he was out on leave and it was, he had to concede, something of a long shot, considering how little the trace lab had so far been able to learn about the black smudges on the dead girl’s pants. But what the hell, he tells himself, if they have something specific with which to compare those smudges, Van Gelder’s people may be able to make something happen.

  Every now and then a long shot does come in, the detective muses, a little hopeful. But even if the samples from the store never amount to anything, they are important to Pellegrini for another reason: It is his idea. It is his own thinking that the stuff on the little girl’s pants may match the soot from the Fish Man’s store. Not Landsman’s. Not Edgerton’s. Not Corbin’s.

  In all probability, Pellegrini tells himself, this will be another dead end in the maze, another single-page report in the folder. But even so, it would be his dead end, his report.

  Pellegrini is the primary and he is thinking like the primary. He drives back from Reservoir Hill with the soot samples beside him on the passenger seat, feeling, for the first time in weeks, like a detective.

  WEDNESDAY, JUNE 22

  Clayvon Jones lies face down in the courtyard of the housing project, his torso covering the loaded 9mm Colt he never had a chance to use. The gun is cocked, with a live round in the chamber. Someone was looking for Clayvon and Clayvon was looking for someone, and Clayvon got rained on first.

  Dave Brown rolls the body and Clayvon stares up at him, white foam at the edges of his mouth.

  “Damn,” says Dave Brown. “That’s a nice gun.”

  “Hey, that is pretty,” says Eddie Brown. “What is that? A forty-five?”

  “No, I think it’s one of those Colt replicas. They’re making nine-millimeters with that classic forty-five mold.”

  “That’s a nine-millimeter?”

  “Either that or a three-eighty. I saw an ad for one of these bad boys in the FBI magazine.”

  “Uh-huh,” says Eddie Brown, giving the gun a last look. “She does look nice.”

  It is daylight now, a little before six on a day that promises to be hot. In addition to having been the proud owner of a 9mm Colt replica, the dead man is a twenty-two-year-old east-sider with a thin, athletic frame. The corpse has already got a decent rigor to it, with the lone gunshot wound visible at the top of the head.

  “Like he was duckin’ down and didn’t get low enough,” says Eddie Brown, a little bored.

  A crowd has already gathered at both ends of the courtyard, and though a canvass of the neighboring rowhouses will produce not a single witness, half the neighborhood seems to be out bright and early for a glimpse of the body. Within hours there will be four anonymous calls-“I want to remain monogamous,” one caller will insist-as well as a report from one of Harry Edgerton’s paid informants on the east side. Together they will provide a full chronicle of the death of Clayvon Jones. Classify it as scenario number 34 in the catalogue of life-and-death ghetto drama: an argument between two dopers over a girl; a fistfight in the street; threats back and forth; young kid paid in cocaine to go shoot Clayvon in the head.

  To Dave Brown’s amusement, three of the callers will insist that the shooter placed a white flower on Clayvon’s mouth after the murder. The flower, Brown will realize, was nothing more than the foam at the corners of the dead man’s mouth, which was undoubtedly visible to the crowd that greeted the detectives on their arrival at the scene.

  At this moment, however, all of that is still to come. At this moment, Clayvon Jones is simply a dead yo with a quality weapon he never got to use. No witnesses, no motive, no suspects-the standard whodunit mantra.

  “Hey, guy.”

  Dave Brown turns around to see a familiar face on one of the Eastern uniforms. Martini, isn’t that it? Yeah, the kid who took a bullet for the company in a drug raid at the Perkins Homes last year. Good man, Martini.

  “Hey, how you doing, bunk?”

  “Okay,” says Martini, pointing to another uniform. “My buddy here needs a sequence number for his report.”

  “You’re Detective Brown, right?” asks the other uniform.

  “We both be Detective Brown,” says Dave Brown, wrapping his arm around Eddie Brown’s shoulder. “This here’s my daddy.”

  Eddie Brown smiles, his gold tooth shining in the morning sun. Smiling back, the uniform takes in the salt-and-pepper family portrait.

  “He looks like me, don’t he?” says Eddie Brown.

  “A little bit,” says the uniform, laughing now. “What’s your sequence?”

  “B as in boy, nine-six-nine.”

  The patrolman nods and steps away as the ME’s van pulls to the edge of the courtyard.

  “We done here?” asks Dave Brown.

  Eddie Brown nods.

  “Okay,” says Dave Brown, walking back toward the Cavalier. “But we can’t forget the most important thing about this case.”

  “What’s that?” says Eddie Brown, following.

  “The most important thing about this case is that when we left the office, the Big Man told us to bring him back an egg sandwich.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  Back in the homicide unit’s coffee room. Donald Worden waits for his sandwich in a cloud of Backwoods cigar smoke, nursing a rage that has been his for a week and a half. He does this silently, stoically, but with such energy and determination that no other man dares approach him with so much as a platitude during the morning shift change.

  And what, in truth, can anyone really say? What do you tell a man who has tailored a career to his own sense of honor, his own code, when that honor is being bartered back and forth by politicians? What do you say to a man for whom institutional loyalty is a way of life when the police department in which he has spent twenty-five years is now offering fresh lessons in betrayal?

  Three weeks ago, the brass had gone first to Rich Garvey. They went to him with a 24-hour report and some notes and a manila folder without a name or case number. State senator, they explain. Threats. Mysterious assailan
ts. A possible abduction.

  Garvey listened patiently. Then he looked at the initial report from two detectives on Stanton’s shift. It was not pretty.

  “Just one question,” asked Garvey. “Can I polygraph the senator?”

  No, the supervisors told themselves, perhaps Rich Garvey isn’t the best man for this case. They excused themselves quickly, taking the report and the manila folder to Worden.

  The Big Man let them talk, then arrayed the facts in his mind: State senator Larry Young. A Democrat from West Baltimore’s 39th legislative district. A product of the Mitchell family’s west side political machine and the chairman of the General Assembly’s influential House Environmental Matters Committee. A leader of the Black Legislative Caucus with ties to City Hall as well as some of the police department’s ranking blacks. A forty-two-year-old bachelor living alone on McCulloh Street.

  That much made sense, the rest was bizarre. Senator Young had called a friend, a highly respected black physician, and told of being abducted by three men. He had been leaving McCulloh Street alone and they had a van, he explained. He was forced inside, blindfolded, threatened. Stay away from Michael and his fiancée, they told him, referring to a longtime political aide who was planning to marry. Then these unnamed assailants dumped him out of the rear doors, up near Druid Hill Park. He had hitched a ride back home.