Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets

by David Simon

  “And I asked one of them, you know, I asked him why they even let Snot Boogie into the game if he always tried to run away with the money.”

  McLarney pauses for effect.

  “And?” asks Brown.

  “He just looked at me real bizarre,” says McLarney. “And then he says, ‘You gotta let him play… This is America.’”

  Brown laughs loudly.

  “I love that,” says McLarney.

  “Great story. Did it really happen?”

  “Fuck yes.”

  Brown laughs again. McLarney’s mood is contagious, even if the reason for tonight’s jaunt was wearing thin.

  “I don’t think she’s out tonight,” says Brown, coasting up Pennsylvania Avenue for the fifth or sixth time.

  “She’s never out,” says McLarney.

  “Fuck this cocksucking bitch,” says Brown, slamming a hand on the steering wheel. “I’m tired of this fucking shit.”

  McLarney looks at his detective with newfound delight, as if to encourage this sudden rant.

  “I mean, we’re the homicide unit, the murder police, the highly trained investigative elite who always get their man…”

  “Careful,” says McLarney. “You’re giving me an erection.”

  “And who the fuck is she? She’s a disease-ridden twenty-dollar-a-fuck junkie from Pennsylvania Avenue who’s managed to elude us for three goddamn months. It’s fucking embarrassing is what it is…”

  Lenore, the Mystery Whore. The lone witness to Worden’s September stabbing on Pennsylvania Avenue; the woman who can close the file by declaring that her now-dead boyfriend killed her then-dead boyfriend in a dispute over her affections. To Brown and Worden and everyone else in the squad, it is getting a bit embarrassing, this charging up and down the Avenue every other night, jacking up whores and addicts and coming nowhere near the elusive Miss Nore, who is always just beyond a detective’s reach. By now, they’ve heard every line:

  “She was out walking last night…”

  “Nore? She down on Division Street not a while ago…”

  “She came out the carryout and went that way…”

  Christ, thinks Brown. It isn’t bad enough that this junkie bitch doesn’t have a permanent address. No, she’s gotta move like the fucking wind. How in the hell do her customers find her?

  “Maybe she’s not real,” says McLarney. “Maybe it’s a hoax and all the derelicts out here made her up. It’s a test to see how long we’ll ride around looking.”

  McLarney smiles, warm with the thought of a $20 cockhound defying every law of metaphysics. A translucent wraith, she walks the streets of West Baltimore immune to the forces of authority. Some paid their $20 and swear her to be real, but to generations of homicide detectives, she is but the stuff of dreams, destined to be Baltimore’s contribution to the treasure chest of American folklore: Paul Bunyan, the Headless Horseman of Tarrytown, the ghost ship Mary Celeste; Lenore, the Mystery Whore.

  “So why does James have her sheet in the file?” counters Brown. “And why do I have her B of I photo in my pocket?”

  “Whoa,” says McLarney. “A clever hoax at that.”

  “Fuck this bitch,” says Brown, still irritated. “She’s not out here.”

  “What the hell,” says McLarney. “Let’s go ’round once more and then call it a night.”

  They don’t have a prayer of finding her, of course. But McLarney loves being out on the street, out in the Western working a case that doesn’t matter to anyone. Not to Worden or James or Brown. Not to the dead man and, in this case, not to the killer either. Not even to McLarney. Tonight is police work with neither pain nor pressure, conducted at no emotional cost by men who have no real stake in the outcome.

  For McLarney especially, the hunt for Lenore is a pleasing distraction, just as the murder he worked last month with Waltemeyer was pleasing. What could matter less than a drug robbery in a Pimlico alley, with the victim a doper and the witness talking bullshit? And then a young suspect, Fat Danny by name, claiming total innocence, crying for justice in his grandparents’ living room as detectives stalked through the house in search of the murder weapon?

  “C’mon, stop crying,” McLarney told the suspect, a bruiser of a kid with at least six inches on him. “Calm down-”

  “I DIDN’T KILL NO ONE!” screams Fat Danny, sliding away until McLarney backs him against the kitchen sink, one hand wrapped around the kid’s throat.

  “C’mon, already,” McLarney said. “You’re gonna make it so we have to hurt you.”

  “I DIDN’T-”

  “Look at me,” said McLarney, glaring. “You’re under arrest. Do you want us to hurt you?”

  And then a Northwestern DEU officer, one of the raiders, silenced the frantic, struggling suspect with an offhand remark: “For Chrissakes, kid, you did a man’s crime. Now act like a man.”

  Later that night, after McLarney brought a Coke and candy bar into the interrogation room and made friends with the fat kid, he sat at his desk and thought about how simple and strangely enjoyable it all was. When nothing mattered, McLarney told himself, he could actually love this job.

  Same thing tonight, he muses. If we never find Lenore, if she stays a mystery, then we live forever, rolling across West Baltimore in a four-cylinder go-cart, telling stories and cracking jokes and watching brain-dead homeboys drop their dope. But if we somehow find her, we gotta go back. We gotta go back and pick up the phone on something else, something that might just be real: a woman raped and carved up, an infant beaten, a cop you worked with and called a friend shot twice in the head.

  That one was anything but pleasing. That one was real and brutal and unforgiving. The Cassidy shooting had stayed with McLarney as no other case could, bleeding him a little more every time he thought about it. All of his effort had been repaid with the proper result; Butchie Frazier at a sentencing hearing in Judge Bothe’s courtroom a couple of months ago, cuffed and sneering for the last time at life plus twenty, parole in no less than twenty-five. The verdict and sentence counted for something in McLarney’s mind; God knows where he would be now if the outcome had been different. But life and twenty was a courtroom victory, one that seemed sufficient for only as long as Gene Cassidy was in the courtroom.

  No, in the end it was simply not enough-not for McLarney, certainly not for Gene. After learning to handle his guide dog at a school in New Jersey, Cassidy had returned to his alma matter, enrolling at York College in a graduate teaching program. These were the first sure steps on a long road back, and yet the recovery had been repeatedly, almost routinely, hampered by a city that somehow found it possible to treat a blind police officer as if he were just one among hundreds. Bills for specialists and physical therapy went unpaid for months at a time, with doctors complaining to Cassidy and Cassidy unable to do anything more than refer them to the city. Requests for special equipment-such as a sight-reading computer to aid with Cassidy’s studies-moved through the bureaucracy at an arthritic crawl. At one point, a friend of Patti Cassidy’s actually called a radio talk show to confront the visiting mayor, asking whether or not the computer was going to be purchased before the next semester of classes.

  It took more than a year, in fact, before there was an award ceremony for Cassidy, something that McLarney thought should have happened within weeks of his return from the hospital. A dead cop would have received the splendor of full honors at the funeral-the color guard, the twenty-one-gun salute, the folded flag offered to the widow by the commissioner of police. But a wounded cop seemed to paralyze the department; the brass had a hard time deciding what to say, much less cutting through its own red tape.

  To McLarney, the departmental response to Cassidy’s ordeal was a little bit obscene, and in the months that followed the shooting, he made himself a promise. If I ever get killed line-of-duty, McLarney told several other detectives, there shouldn’t be anyone above the rank of sergeant at the funeral-except maybe D’Addario, who was a friend. Yeah, Dee could be there. But
no color guard, no bagpipes, no command staff, no delegations from a dozen other departments. Just Jay Landsman calling the men to attention by shouting “Present arms,” after which a hundred Baltimore cops would produce cold cans of Miller Lite and simultaneously pull the poptops.

  Gene Cassidy’s ceremony, when it finally occurs, is only a bit more formal. On the night after the latest search for the missing Lenore, McLarney once again finds himself back in the Western District, this time in the roll call room at the Riggs Avenue station house, watching from the edge of the room as the four-to-twelve shift collects in front of two dozen evenly spaced chairs. Gene himself asked that the ceremony be held here at the district, just as his old shift prepared to go out on the street. McLarney scans the uniforms and realizes that most of the men Cassidy worked with are now gone-some to other shifts and other districts, others to better-paying police departments in the surrounding counties. Still, there is some power to the moment when the shift lieutenant barks attention and the entire shift snaps rigid; Cassidy, sitting in a front-row seat with Patti beside him, rises too.

  McLarney watches the brass and the television reporters crowd around the edge of the room as the police commissioner says some words and steps from the podium to give Cassidy the Medal of Valor and the Medal of Honor, the department’s highest honors.

  Then the majors and colonels drift away until Gene is alone in the recreation room with his family and his friends from the Western. McLarney, Belt, Biemiller, Tuggle, Wilhelm, Bowen, Lieutenant Bennett, maybe a dozen others hovering around two trays of cold cuts, listening to old rock ’n’ roll on a tape player. Jokes are told and stories exchanged and soon Cassidy and his dog are wandering from the party, leading a young niece on an impromptu tour of the station house that ends, strangely enough, in the holding cells.

  “Hey, Gene,” says the turnkey, opening the front cage, “how you doing?”

  “I’m all right. You busy tonight?”

  “Not really.”

  Cassidy stands with his dog just inside the lockup while the turnkey fingerprints his niece and shows her an empty cell. The demonstration is interrupted by a rattle from the last row of cages.

  “Yo, somebody take mah handcuffs off!”

  “Who’s that?” yells Cassidy, turning his head toward the sound.

  “Why the fuck I need to be cuffed if I’m in the fuckin’ cell?”

  “Who’s talking?”

  “I’m talking, yo.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m a fucking prisoner.”

  “What’d you do?” asks Cassidy, amused.

  “I ain’t done shit. Who are you?”

  “I’m Gene Cassidy. I used to work here.”

  “Fuck you then.”

  And Gene Cassidy laughs loudly. For one last moment, he is home.

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 15

  They ring the tiled room in crisp blue uniforms, their faces still smooth and unmarked. They are nineteen, twenty, maybe twenty-two years old at the outside. Their devotion is complete, their virginity, uncompromised. Protect and Serve still rattles around in the uncluttered expanse of their minds. They are cadets, a class from nearby Anne Arundel County. Twenty-five police-to-bes, primed and polished for this morning’s field trip from an academy classroom to hell’s innermost circle.

  “You all like what you see?” says Rick James, acknowledging the gallery. The cadets laugh nervously from the edges of the autopsy room-some watching, others trying not to watch, a few watching but not believing.

  “You a detective?” asks a kid in the front row.

  James nods.

  “Homicide?”

  “Yep. Baltimore city.”

  “Do you have a case down here?”

  No, thinks James, I spend every morning in the autopsy room. The sights, the sounds, the ambiance-I love it all. James is tempted to have some fun with the class, but lets it drop.

  “Yep,” he says. “One of ’em’s mine.”

  “Which one?” asks the kid.

  “He’s out in the hall.”

  An attendant, finishing with one cadaver, looks up. “Who you here for, Rick?”

  “The little one.”

  The attendant looks out into the corridor, then turns his attention back to the work at hand. “We get to him next. Okay?”

  “Hey, no problem.”

  James walks between two open bodies to say hello to Ann Dixon, the deputy ME and a hero to working detectives everywhere. Dixie comes complete with a clipped British accent and an American detective’s view of the world. Not only that, she can hold her own at Cher’s or Kavanaugh’s. You got a body that needs cutting in the state of Maryland, you can’t do any better than Dixie.

  “Dr. Dixon, how are you this fine morning?”

  “Fine, thank you,” she says from the vivisection table.

  “What’s up with you?”

  Dixie turns around holding a long-blade knife in one hand and a metal sharpening roll in the other. “You know me,” she says, scraping one against the other. “I’m just looking for Mr. Right.”

  James smiles and wanders back to a rear office for coffee. He returns to find his victim’s gurney in the center of the autopsy room, the body naked and stiff on the center tray.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” says the attendant, putting scalpel to skin. “I’d like to take a knife to the motherfucker that did this.”

  James looks over at the cadet class to see two dozen stunned, silent faces. After a half-hour or so in the autopsy room, they probably thought that they were ready, that they were slowly acclimating to the sights and sounds and smells of Penn Street. Then the cutters wheel this one out of the freezer, and they realize they aren’t even close. From the center of the room, James can see some of the kids trying hard not to look, others trying to watch and then failing to contain their horror. In the corner of the room, a female cadet hides her face in the back of a taller companion, unwilling to look out for even a moment.

  And no wonder. The body is little more than a small, brown island floating on a sea of stainless steel, a child’s form with tiny hands reaching up, fingers curled. A two-year-old, beaten to death by a mother’s boyfriend, who found it in himself to dress the swollen, lifeless body and then carry it to the ER at Bon Secours.

  “What happened?” the hospital doctors asked the boyfriend.

  “He was playing in the bathtub and fell.”

  He said it with a calm that bordered on bravado, and he kept on saying it when James and Eddie Brown arrived at the hospital. All that night, he repeated it like a mantra in the interrogation room. Michael was in the tub. Michael fell.

  “Why did you dress him? Why didn’t you rush him to the hospital?”

  I didn’t want him to be cold.

  “If he was taking a bath, how come there was no water in the tub?”

  I let it out.

  “You let it out? The baby is unconscious, but you stop to let the water out of the tub?”

  Yes.

  “You beat him to death.”

  No. Michael fell.

  But the doctors at Bon Secours weren’t fooled; Michael Shaw’s tiny body was more black and blue than brown, his injuries equivalent to those that a child might sustain if struck by an automobile traveling at thirty miles per hour. Nor do the examiners on Penn Street have any doubt: death by repeated blunt force trauma. The child literally had the life punched out of him.

  Yet only when the pathologists begin their external examination of the child is Rick James completely revulsed.

  “Did you see this?” asks the doctor, lifting the tiny legs. “He’s split wide.”

  A true horror. The two-year-old boy had bled internally, his anus ripped apart by his twenty-year-old babysitter, his mother’s lover.

  Mouths open, eyes glazed, the Anne Arundel cadets are trapped, forced to watch the child disassembled from the corner of the autopsy room. A day’s lesson.

  On the ride back to headquarters, James says nothing; wh
at in God’s name is there to say? It ain’t my kid, he tries to tell himself. It ain’t where I live. It ain’t nothing to me.

  The standard defense, a homicide detective’s established refuge. Only this time it isn’t quite enough. This time, there is no dark hole in which to bury the anger.

  Returning to the homicide office, James walks down the long blue hall away from the elevators, then peers through the wire mesh window in the door of the large interrogation room. The boyfriend is alone in there, leaning back in the middle chair, his sneakers up against the edge of the table.

  “Look at him,” James says to a nearby uniform, called downtown for prisoner transport. “Just look at him.”

  The boyfriend is whistling softly, replacing one tennis shoe after the other with elaborate precision, his reach limited by silver bracelets. He works with new laces-yellow and green-two for each high-top, inner-city style. Two hours from now, the turnkey at the Southwest lockup will pull out the same laces as a suicide precaution, but at the moment they are the sole focus of the boyfriend’s shrinking universe.

  “Look at him,” says James. “Don’t it just make you want to kick his ass?”

  “Hey,” says the uniform. “I’m with you.”

  James looks at the patrolman, then peers back into the interrogation room. The boyfriend notices the shadow on the one-way glass and turns in the chair.

  “Eh mon,” he says in a West Indian lilt. “I need gon to d’bathroom, yah know.”

  “Look at him,” says James again.

  He could beat him. He could beat this piece of shit until he was raw and bloody and no one in the office would say a damn thing. The uniforms would stay with their paperwork, the other detectives would block the hallway or maybe take a few shots themselves. And if the colonel came down the corridor to check on the commotion, he would only need to be told about little Michael Shaw, alone and silent on that long expanse of steel.

  And could anyone really call it wrong? Could anyone believe that retribution so simple and swift could be less than just? Honor to a cop means that you don’t hit a man who’s wearing cuffs or is unable to fight back, you don’t hit a man to obtain a statement, and you don’t hit a man who doesn’t deserve it. Police brutality? To hell with that. Police work has always been brutal; good police work, discreetly so.