Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets

by David Simon

  Sharon Henson, he tells the jury. A day later, Sharon Henson is on the stand trying to help her boyfriend. Oh, says Doan, in imitation, he was wearing all beige. Beige trench coat. Beige slacks. Beige shoes. Probably beige underwear and a beige golf cap…

  The prosecutor pauses.

  “… with a snap on it.”

  By now, even the juror in the front row-the one who had Doan worried at the beginning of the trial-is nodding in agreement.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, after seeing and listening to Romaine Jackson and then hearing that description from a woman who is doing her very best to help this defendant, can there be any question that the person that Romaine Jackson says she saw is the defendant?”

  A helluva connect, thinks Garvey, as Doan moves on through the rest of the evidence, urging the jury to use common sense. “When you put it all together, that jigsaw puzzle we talked about will be clear. You will clearly see that this man-”

  Doan wheels and points at the defense table.

  “-despite all his protestations to the contrary is the man who brutally murdered Charlene Lucas in the early morning hours of February 22, 1988.”

  Polansky responds with his strongest stuff, listing the state’s evidence on a nearby drawing board and then crossing off each item as he tries to explain away the circumstances. He does his best to knock down Romaine Jackson and to resurrect Vincent Booker as the logical alternative. He steers clear, however, of Sharon Henson.

  In his final response to the jury, Larry Doan actually has the temerity to go to Polansky’s drawing board and begin writing his own comments above his opponent’s visual aid.

  “Objection, your honor,” says Polansky, tired and angry. “I would appreciate it if Mr. Doan wrote on his own board.”

  Doan shrugs with feigned embarrassment. The jury laughs.

  “Overruled,” says Gordy.

  Polansky shakes his head; he knows the game is up. And no one is surprised when, only two hours after arguments, the courtroom is reconvened and the jurors file back into the box.

  “Mr. Foreman, please stand,” says the clerk. “How do you find the defendant Robert Frazier in indictment number 18809625 as to murder in the first degree, not guilty or guilty?”

  “Guilty,” says the foreman.

  In the gallery, only the Lucas family reacts. Garvey stares blankly as the jury is polled. Doan shoots a look at Polansky, but the defense attorney continues to take notes. Robert Frazier stares straight ahead.

  In the third-floor corridor ten minutes later, Jackie Lucas, the younger daughter, finds Garvey and wraps her arm around his shoulder.

  Garvey is momentarily surprised. There are occasions like this, moments when the survivors and the detectives share whatever kind of belated victory comes from a courtroom. Too often, however, the family doesn’t even show for court, or if they do, they regard the defendant and the authorities with equal shares of contempt.

  “We did it,” says Jackie Lucas, kissing Garvey lightly on the cheek.

  “Yes, we did,” says Garvey, laughing.

  “He’s going to the Pen, right?”

  “Oh yeah,” he says. “Gordy’ll hammer him.”

  Doan follows the family out of the court, and Garvey and Dave Brown both congratulate him again on the closing argument. Writing on Polansky’s board, he tells Doan, that was a nice touch.

  “You liked that?” says Doan.

  “Oh yeah,” says Garvey, laughing. “That was real class.”

  Their voices rattle down the corridor as the highlights are told and retold. For the first time, Garvey and Brown are given a full account of the disaster that befell Sharon Henson. They are laughing loudly when Robert Frazier enters the corridor, his hands cuffed behind him, two sheriff ’s deputies trailing behind.

  “Shhhhh,” says Brown. “The man of the hour.”

  “Are we ready for the ceremonial eyefuck?” asks Garvey. “I definitely think we’ve earned it.”

  Brown nods in agreement.

  Larry Doan shakes his head, then walks quietly to the stairwell and up to his office. The detectives wait a few more seconds as Frazier and the deputies approach. Slowly, silently, the defendant passes them with his head down, his hands gripping a stack of rolled-up court papers behind him. There is no eye contact. There are no angry words.

  “Fuck it,” says Garvey, grabbing his briefcase from the hallway bench. “He was no fun at all.”

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21

  Once more across the same stale ground, once more into the breach. Once more into the gaping maw of that alley, that hellacious piece of pavement that had never done right by him in the past.

  Tom Pellegrini parks the car on Newington, then walks down a cross alley cluttered with garbage and dead leaves. Fall has changed the rear of Newington Avenue again, making it seem a little more as it should be. To Pellegrini, the alley only looks right in colder weather-the bleak and pale vision to which he had grown accustomed months ago. The seasons shouldn’t change in this alley, he thinks. Nothing should change until I know what happened here.

  Pellegrini walks down the common alley and through the gate at the rear of 718 Newington. He stands where the body had been, looking yet again at the back of the house, at the kitchen door and the window frame and the metal fire stair running down from the roof.

  Red-orange. Red-orange.

  The colors of the day. Pellegrini checks the wood trim on the rear of the house carefully, looking for something, anything, that can be called red-orange.

  Nothing.

  Looking over the chain-link fence, Pellegrini scans the house next door. The yard of 716 Newington is empty now; Andrew and his shitbrown Lincoln are both long gone, the latter permanently repossessed by the finance company, the former tossed out of the house by his long-suffering churchwoman of a wife.

  Red-orange. Red-orange.

  The back door of 716 is painted red, about the right shade, too. Pellegrini crosses over to the adjacent yard for a closer look. Yes, indeed. Red paint is the outer coat, with orange paint underneath.

  Sonofabitch, thinks Pellegrini, scraping a sample off the door. The combination of the red and orange together is distinctive enough for the detective to believe he’s found a match. Eight months after his original interrogation, Andrew is suddenly back in the running, and no one is more surprised than Pellegrini.

  If not for the paint on the back door of 716 Newington, the detective wouldn’t believe it. Andrew is a piece of work, to be sure, and Jay Landsman’s original theory about the Lincoln being used to store the body had its merits. But there is nothing on Andrew’s sheet that screams sex offender, nor had their lengthy interrogation of the man produced any doubts. For his part, Pellegrini had gone soft on Andrew as soon as the trunk of the Lincoln had come up clean. And later, when Andrew passed a state police polygraph on his statement, Pellegrini had all but put the man out of his mind. But the red-orange chip was physical evidence and somehow had to be explained. On that basis alone, Andrew was back onstage.

  The paint chip was new, a belated bit of evidence that might have seemed comical to Pellegrini if the circumstances hadn’t been so utterly aggravating. The damn thing had been down there in the evidence control unit since day one of the investigation, and it would still be down there if he and Landsman hadn’t gone down to look over the collection of evidence one last time.

  The trip downstairs had been routine. For weeks, Pellegrini had been reviewing the Latonya Wallace case file and the existing evidence, trying to come up with something new. Initially, Pellegrini hoped to find something that would lead to a fresh suspect, something that had been overlooked the first and second times through the file. Then, after the chemical analysis of the smudges on the little girl’s pants had been tenuously linked to the Fish Man’s burned-out store, Pellegrini had returned to the existing evidence in the more concrete hope that something else would link the store owner to the murder.

  Instead, he got the paint chip. He and Landsman had di
scovered it yesterday afternoon after the little girl’s clothes had gone to the trace lab for another examination. Van Gelder from the lab was with them and, in fact, it was he who first noticed the colored flake clinging to the inside of the yellow tights.

  It seemed to be a semigloss paint in separate coats, with the red layered over the orange. A single color would have been harder to track, but how many objects in Reservoir Hill had been painted orange and then red? And what was the paint chip doing inside the dead girl’s hose? And how the hell had they failed to notice it the first couple of times around?

  Even as Pellegrini was elated to have a new piece of evidence, he was angry that it had not been discovered at the outset. Van Gelder offered no explanation, nor did Pellegrini want one. The Latonya Wallace murder was the year’s most important investigation; how could the trace analysis have been anything but flawless?

  Now, standing in the rear of Newington Avenue, Pellegrini’s frustration is complete. Because from every outward indication the paint chip leads nowhere near the Fish Man-and it is toward the Fish Man that Pellegrini wants to go. It is the Fish Man who failed the polygraph, it is the Fish Man who knew Latonya and had paid her to work in his store, and it is the Fish Man who never managed any kind of alibi for the night of the child’s disappearance. The Fish Man: Who else could the killer be?

  For months, Pellegrini had spent every available moment delving into the old store owner’s life, preparing himself for one last confrontation with his best suspect. In a way that was almost amusing, the Fish Man had long ago become inured to the pursuit. At every corner of his life, there stood an obsessed police detective-learning, gathering, waiting. In every crevice of the man’s quiet little existence, there hovered Tom Pellegrini, rooting around for information.

  They knew each other now. Pellegrini knew more about the Fish Man than he cared to remember, more about this wretched old guy than anyone outside his family. The Fish Man knew his pursuer by name; he knew Pellegrini’s voice and manner, knew the ways in which the detective began a conversation or framed a question. Most of all, he knew-he had to know-exactly what Pellegrini was after.

  Any other man would have raised some hell. Any other man would have called a lawyer who would have called the police department with a harassment complaint. Any other man, Pellegrini reasoned, would have eventually looked him in the eye and delivered the expected message: You and that badge can go fuck yourselves if you think I kill little girls. But none of that had ever happened.

  Since that second interrogation at the homicide office, the two men had gone through a series of strange conversations, each more amiable than the last, each predicated on the Fish Man’s initial assertion that he knew nothing about the murder. Pellegrini ended each discussion by reminding the store owner that the investigation was continuing and that detectives would probably need to speak with him again. Without fail, the Fish Man would assure him of continued cooperation. Earlier this month, Pellegrini had broached the idea of another visit to the homicide office in the near future. The suspect was obviously less than thrilled with the idea, but he didn’t try to decline.

  The more the detective learned about the Fish Man, the more the old man seemed capable of a child’s murder. There was nothing definitive in his history, nothing you could point a finger to as evidence that the man was dangerous, if not psychotic. Instead, the old man’s past revealed a fairly ordinary pattern of failed relationships with women. Over weeks, the detective had located and interviewed relatives and old girlfriends and the Fish Man’s former wife-all of whom agreed that the man had problems relating with women. A few even suggested that he had a thing for younger girls, but the stories were short on specifics. Pellegrini also interviewed Latonya Wallace’s playmates again, as well as the children who had worked for the Fish Man or ventured into his shop after school. Sure enough, they had all talked about the Fish Man’s roving eye. He was fresh, they told the detective, you have to be careful around him.

  The one woman whom Pellegrini had not been able to find was the alleged victim from the Fish Man’s old rape charge in the 1950s. Pellegrini had pulled those reports off the microfilm and digested every page, but the teenage girl who had supposedly been attacked had never testified in court, and the charges had apparently been dropped. Using everything from the telephone book to social service records, Pellegrini mounted a feverish search to locate the woman, who would now be in her late forties and, if she still lived in Baltimore, probably listed under something other than her maiden name. But his search went nowhere, and finally Pellegrini allowed himself to be interviewed on a local television show so that he could mention the woman’s name and last known address and ask anyone with information about her to come forward or call the homicide unit.

  During the broadcast, Pellegrini was careful not to explain the woman’s relationship to the case, nor did he mention the Fish Man by name. But he did acknowledge to the host of the show that he had developed a suspect in the case. Pellegrini immediately realized his mistake when the host turned to the television camera and declared, “City homicide detectives believe they now know who killed little Latonya Wallace…” That brief sortie into the public eye kept Pellegrini writing explanatory memos for days, and the police department was forced to issue a one-paragraph press release noting that while Detective Pellegrini had identified one possible suspect in the murder, other investigators were working on other leads. Worst of all, the long-lost rape victim never did come forward.

  Beyond everything else Pellegrini had learned about his best suspect, one item in particular stood out in his mind. It was a coincidence perhaps, but a chilling one, and he had stumbled across it while checking back through a decade of open missing persons reports for young girls. In February, the investigators compared the Latonya Wallace case to other open child murders, but only recently did it occur to Pellegrini that missing persons cases should probably be examined as well. Checking the reports from one 1979 case, he found that a nine-year-old girl had disappeared from her parents’ home on Montpelier Street, never to be seen alive again. And Montpelier Street rang a bell: Pellegrini had just been out to interview a man whose family had once been partners with the Fish Man in an earlier grocery store. The family had lived on Montpelier Street for the last twenty years; the Fish Man had visited them often.

  The old missing persons file contained no photographs, but a couple of days later Pellegrini drove over to the Baltimore Sun building and asked permission to check the newspaper’s photo morgue. The paper still had two pictures of the missing child, both black-and-white copies of her grade school portraits. Standing in the newspaper’s library, Pellegrini looked down at the photographs and felt the strangest sensation. From every angle, the child was a dead ringer for Latonya Wallace.

  Maybe that uncanny resemblance was coincidence; maybe each apparently insignificant detail stood alone, unrelated to anything else. But the prolonged research into the Fish Man’s background was enough to convince Pellegrini that he needed to challenge the man one last time. After all, the old man had been given every opportunity to make himself less of a suspect, yet he had failed to do so. Pellegrini reasoned that he owed himself one more crack at the guy. Even as Pellegrini prepared himself for that last interrogation, a tiny paint chip materialized on the dead girl’s stocking, taunting him with another suspect and another direction.

  The taunt grows louder when Pellegrini returns from Reservoir Hill and visits the trace evidence lab with fresh samples from the rear door of 716 Newington. Sure enough, Van Gelder has no trouble matching them to the chip found inside the hose. Suddenly, Andrew elbows the Fish Man aside.

  A short talk that same afternoon with Andrew’s former wife yields the information that his suspect is still working with the city’s Bureau of Highways, so Pellegrini visits the Fallsway garage, arriving just as the suspect’s shift is ending. Asked if he would mind coming down to the homicide office for further questioning, Andrew becomes visibly upset, almost hostile.
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br />   No, he tells Pellegrini. I want a lawyer.

  Later that same week, the detective returns to Reservoir Hill with a lab technician for a three-hour search of 716 Newington, concentrating on the basement room where Andrew had his bar and his television and spent most of his free time. Nine months is a long time for evidence to stay put; in the end, Pellegrini leaves with nothing more than a carpet sample that may or may not have something resembling a bloodstain.

  Still, Andrew has suddenly started behaving like a suspect with things to hide, and that paint chip seems to Pellegrini like a tiny shard of irrevocable truth: Somewhere along the line, Latonya Wallace got a little portion of Andrew’s back door wedged between her leg and her stocking.

  For a brief time, it is hard not to be a little cheered by the developments. But less than a week later Pellegrini makes another trip to Newington Avenue and, as he once again walks that alley, he notices that there are red-orange paint chips from Andrew’s back door all over the adjacent yards. On the last visit, he had noticed right away that the paint on the door had been peeling badly, but now, looking carefully at the pavement behind 716 and 718 and 720 Newington, he sees red-orange chips scattered everywhere by the rain and wind, flashing up at him like fool’s gold. The chip from the tights must have already been on the ground when the little girl’s body was dumped behind 718 Newington. But Pellegrini isn’t quite ready to let go. How, he asks himself, did the chip get inside the stockings? How could it be between the leg and the hose unless it got there after the child had been undressed?

  Van Gelder soon provides the answer. Checking the evidence yet again, the lab analyst notes that the stockings are now insideout, as they surely were during the recent examination by Landsman and Pellegrini. Chances are, the tights were rolled off the little girl’s body at the autopsy and had remained inside-out ever since. Though it seemed for a time otherwise, the paint chip had been on the outside of the hose all along.