Homicide

by David Simon

  “We pull up to a corner and I get out of the car,” mused McLarney after a day’s adventures on the west side. “The criminals just look at me and figure, ‘No problem, I can outrun this derelict.’ Then these two get out of the car and automatically everyone just turns and puts their hands against the wall.”

  McLarney, Belt, Tuggle—since the first of the month, the trio had spent every working day on the streets of the Western, canvassing the streets near the shooting scene, jacking up witnesses, running down even the vaguest rumor.

  But now, after nine days, McLarney and his detail have nothing to show for the effort. No fresh witnesses. Still no weapon. Nothing beyond what they learned in October. There wasn’t even talk on the street about a shooting now four months old.

  Preparing to go back into the district again this morning, McLarney can feel his fear grow a little bit larger. Having once served as Cassidy’s sergeant, having called him a friend, he can regard the case as nothing less than a crusade. Not only because of what the case means to Cassidy, but because of what it means to McLarney, a man defined and obsessed by the badge as few men are anymore, a true believer in the brotherhood of cops, as pagan a religion as an honest Irishman may find.

  Terrence Patrick McLarney recognized his obsession years ago, the day he was working a Central District radio car and drew a bank alarm at Eutaw and North. Was there any greater feeling than racing up Pennsylvania Avenue with that blue strobe light show on top of the car and “Theme from Shaft” blasting from a tape player on the front seat? Was there a bigger kick than charging past stunned patrons into the bank lobby, a twenty-six-year-old centurion living by the big stick and the .38 bouncing around on his belt? Never mind that the alarm was sounded in error; it was the sheer spectacle of the thing. In a world of gray, weightless equivocation, McLarney was a good man in a city besieged by bad men. What other job could offer anything as pure as that?

  In time, McLarney grew into the part in a way that few men do, becoming a street-worn, self-mocking, hard-drinking cop of almost mythic proportions. He looked, laughed, drank and swore like some retrograde Irish patrolman whose waistline was losing a rearguard action against the weighty properties of domestic beer. Before his form congealed into that of a 230-pound detective sergeant, McLarney had played college football, and only over a period of years had the muscular contours of an offensive lineman succumbed to a daily regimen of radio car, barstool and bed.

  His wardrobe accelerated the suggestion of physical decline, and among his detectives there was a consensus that McLarney wouldn’t come to work until the family dog had a chance to drag his shirt and sport coat across the front lawn. McLarney repeatedly claimed to have no understanding of the phenomenon, insisting that his wife had ventured into a well-kept suburban mall and emerged with acceptable menswear. Within the confines of his Howard County home and for the first few miles of Interstate 95, the garments would appear attractive and well tailored. But somewhere between the Route 175 interchange and the city line, a sort of spontaneous explosion would occur. McLarney’s shirt collar would crease at an unspeakable angle, causing the knot of his tie to execute a contorted half twist. The cuffs of the sport coat would suddenly fray and jettison buttons. The jacket lining above the right hip would catch the butt of his revolver and begin tearing itself free. An ulcer would form on the bottom of one shoe.

  “I can’t control it,” McLarney would insist, acknowledging no dereliction except on those days when he was late for work and had ironed only the front of his shirt, confident that “it’s the only part that people are gonna look at anyhow.”

  Stout, fair-haired and possessed of a quick, chipped-tooth smile, Terry McLarney didn’t look like much of a thinker or even much of a wit. Yet to those who knew him well, McLarney’s appearance and behavior often seemed calculated to obscure his true character. He was a product of the middle-class suburbs of Washington, the son of a Defense Department analyst with a high GS rating. As a patrolman, McLarney had studied for a law degree out of the passenger seat of a Central District radio car, yet he had never bothered to take the Maryland bar exam. Among cops, some vague taint has always been attached to the title of lawyer, some grounded ethic that believes even the best and most devoted attorneys to be little more than well-paid monkey wrenches hurled into the criminal justice machine. Despite his legal training, McLarney adhered to that ethic: He was a cop, not a lawyer.

  Yet McLarney was also one of the most intelligent, self-aware men in homicide. He was the unit’s Falstaff, its true comedic chorus. Elaborate practical jokes and bizarre profanity were Jay Landsman’s steady contributions, but McLarney’s humor, subtle and self-effacing, often caught the peculiar camaraderie that results from police work. Generations from now, homicide detectives in Baltimore will still be telling T. P. McLarney stories. McLarney, who as a sergeant spent a single day sharing an office with Landsman before deadpanning a confidential memo to D’Addario: “Sgt. Landsman stares at me strangely. I am concerned that he views me as a sex object.” McLarney, who after four beers spoke in football metaphors and would always offer his detectives the same shred of advice: “My men should go into the game with a plan. I don’t want to know what it is, but they should have one.” McLarney, who once drove home on a busy shift to rescue his wife and son by using his .38 to shoot a rampaging mouse in the bedroom closet. (“I cleaned it up,” he explained on his return to the office. “But I thought about leaving it there as a warning to others.”)

  At the same time, McLarney was also a tireless investigator who worked cases with care and precision. His best moment came in 1982, as the lead investigator on the Bronstein murders, an unspeakable crime in which an elderly Jewish couple was repeatedly stabbed and left on the living room floor of their Pimlico home. The two killers, their girlfriends, even a thirteen-year-old cousin, returned to the house time and again to step over the bodies and carry off another armful of valuables. McLarney worked the case for weeks, tracing some of the stolen items to a fence in the Perkins Homes housing project, where he learned the names of two suspects who would later be sentenced to death and life without parole, respectively.

  As in the Bronstein investigation, McLarney’s best efforts came in those cases where a woman was the victim. It was a prejudice that endured long after he returned to homicide as a sergeant. In McLarney’s squad, detectives who caught a case with a female victim were routinely prodded and henpecked by their sergeant, a cop governed by the traditional, sentimental judgment that while men might violate the law by killing each other, the murder of a woman constituted real tragedy.

  “This one,” he would say, staring at the scene photos and oblivious of the melodrama, “has got to be avenged.”

  He graduated from the academy in March 1976 and went to the Central, but even then he was thinking seriously about a law degree, maybe even a prosecutor’s salary—an alternative that Catherine, his wife, readily encouraged. McLarney enrolled in the University of Baltimore law program about the same time that his sector sergeant paired him with Bob McAllister in a two-man car on the Pennsylvania Avenue post. It was a bizarre, schizophrenic existence: days spent in a freshman law class discussing torts and contracts, nights spent handling calls in the Lexington Terrace and Murphy Homes, the city’s worst high-rise projects. On a post where every other incident seemed to call for nightsticks, both men learned that they could fight when fighting was the order of the day. The west side high-rises were a world unto themselves, eight towers of decay and despair that served as the city’s twenty-four-hour supermarket for heroin and cocaine. And, as if the terrain wasn’t bad enough, the two men were together throughout the ’79 riots, an event known to BPD veterans as simply the Winter Olympics, when a snowbound Baltimore was robustly looted by its inhabitants. It was McAllister who kept them on an even keel; more often than not he was the calming influence, the voice of reason. In the early morning hours, the two would park the car in a Central hole, where McAllister would read McLarney questions from a leg
al text, bringing him back to earth after a long night in the projects. Quiet, sensible and self-mocking, Mac was the bridge between worlds, the only thing that stopped McLarney from getting up in a second-year law class to explain that Plaintiff A was trying to fuck over Defendant B and that Judge C should have both of them locked up if they don’t cut the shit.

  Both men eventually took the entrance test for the Criminal Investigations Division. McAllister was sick of the projects and wanted, more than anything else, to get to homicide, but death investigation held little appeal for McLarney. He wanted simply to be a robbery detective, for the childlike reason that even after two years on the street, he viewed armed robbery— “You’re short on cash, so you go to a bank with a gun and just take it?”—as truly amazing, a comic book concept.

  Both scored high on the CID exam for two years running, but when positions finally opened up, Mac had to settle for burglary while McLarney eventually landed in the homicide unit by way of the police academy, where he did a brief stint as a legal instructor. To his surprise, he immediately fell in love with homicide—the work, the people. It was an elite unit, an investigative unit—the best in the department—and McLarney had always imagined himself as an investigator. The Maryland bar exam and a legal career were both dim memories from the moment he was handed a detective’s shield and assigned a desk.

  Then, after two of the happiest years of his life, McLarney made what he later considered his gravest mistake: He passed the sergeant’s test. The stripes on his sleeve brought a slightly better pay scale and a transfer to the Western, where they gave him Sector 2 and a squad of fresh-faced, healthy kids to fill the radio cars, twenty-three- and twenty-four-year-old specimens who made him feel like a fossil at the advanced age of thirty-one. Suddenly it was McLarney who had to be the calm, reasoned one. Every night for his two years as a sector sergeant, he would assign the cars and send his flock out into a violent, unforgiving section of the city, a district where a man trusted no one but himself and the others on his shift. Too much happened too quickly in the Western, where every uniform spent the shift alone in a one-man car, dependent on his side partners to hear his call, to get there in time, to keep control.

  McLarney came to differentiate the weak from the strong, those who would fight and those who would not, those who knew the street and those who were casualties waiting to happen. Pope, a good man. Cassidy, very good. Hendrix, a fighter. But McLarney knew others shouldn’t be out there, and yet the same post cars had to be filled. Every night he would spend an hour or two racing through the required paperwork, then take his own car out into the sector and roam for the rest of the shift, trying to back every call. McLarney spent those two years wondering, not whether one of his men would fall, but how it would happen. In the Western, a cop didn’t have to screw up to get hurt, and McLarney wondered if that was how it would be. Or would that godawful moment involve a man who lacked the training, who couldn’t control his post, who should never have been in the goddamn car. Above all, McLarney wondered whether it would be something he could live with.

  The day, when it came, was beautiful, the first day of September in fact. McLarney remembered the weather because it marked the end of another Baltimore summer, and he hated wearing the Kevlar vest in higher temperatures. He heard the radio call while checking the city pumps on Calverton, several blocks farther west, and he hit the bluetop and raced across Edmondson, arriving in the neighborhood about the same time as a second call for a sighting of the suspect on Bentalou. McLarney tried the first cross street north, rolling slowly. On a shaded porch in the middle of the block, an old couple sat quietly, and when McLarney looked at them, they both turned their eyes to the ground. Maybe they just didn’t want to talk to a police; then again, maybe they had seen something. McLarney got out of the car and walked to the porch, where the old man greeted him with a strange, pensive expression.

  “You didn’t see a man run by here, did you? The gas station got robbed.”

  The old man seemed to know about the gas station and mentioned almost casually that he had seen a man run down the street, fall, get up again and dart around the corner into a thick clump of bushes.

  “Those bushes there?”

  From the porch, McLarney couldn’t see very much at all. He called for a backup; Reggie Hendrix showed first. McLarney watched his officer walk up an incline into the corner lot and yelled for him to be careful, the suspect might still be in the bushes. Both men had their revolvers out as another resident came off his front porch to ask what was going on, and McLarney turned away to order the man back inside.

  “There he is,” shouted Hendrix.

  McLarney couldn’t see. He ran up the small incline toward the other officer, figuring that the best thing to do was to stay close to Hendrix so that the suspect couldn’t get between them.

  Hendrix kept shouting, but McLarney saw nothing until the man was already out in the open, moving fast across the yard but still facing them. McLarney saw the gun, saw the man shooting, and began firing back. Hendrix fired as well. This is bizarre, thought McLarney, somehow detached, marveling that they seemed to be just standing there shooting each other—which was, in fact, exactly what they were doing. He felt both bullets hit, each one knocking him a bit, and at almost the same moment watched the other man flinch and stagger down the incline toward the street.

  McLarney turned and tried to run back across the yard, but his leg was useless. He had fired four and was now stumbling toward the street, where he expected to let the last two go in whatever direction the gunman happened to be running. But when McLarney came down the incline, he saw the man stretched out on the sidewalk, silent, his gun on the pavement near him. McLarney staggered down to the sidewalk and lay down on his stomach a few feet away. He kept one arm outstretched, the gunsight aimed at the other man’s head. Next to him on the pavement, the gunman looked over at McLarney and said nothing. Then he lifted his hand enough to manage a weak, waving motion. No more, it said. Enough.

  Half the Western was standing over them by then and McLarney let go of his own gun when he saw Craig Pope’s .38 in the other man’s face. Then came the pain—sharp, shooting pain in his abdomen—and he began to wonder where he’d been hit. The leg was fucked up; but, he thought, what’s a leg? He guessed that the second bullet had caught him in the gut, underneath the edge of the vest. Good again, thought McLarney, nothing vital down there.

  He felt wetness on his back. “Mike, roll me and see if it came through the other side.”

  Hajek pushed up on the shoulder blade. “Yeah, it did.”

  Through and through. A helluva way to find out that the Kevlar vests weren’t worth a shit, but McLarney was at least relieved to know the bullet was out.

  Separate ambulances took both men to the same trauma unit, with McLarney telling the medics in his ambo that he felt as if he was falling, as if he was going to fall off the litter. When he felt that way, the pain seemed to let up.

  “Don’t go out,” they began screaming at him. “Don’t go out.”

  Oh yeah, thought McLarney. Shock.

  In the surgery prep area, he could hear the man he shot making all kinds of noise on the litter beside him and could watch as the trauma team poked at his own body with IVs and catheters. Phillips, another man from his sector, went to tell Catherine, who took it the way any reasonable person would, expressing an unequivocal concern for her husband’s wellbeing and an equally unequivocal conviction that even in a city like Baltimore, most lawyers go through life without being hit by gunfire.

  This is it, she told him later. What other reason do you need? McLarney had no right to argue with her; he knew that. He was thirty-two years old, with a family, making half of what most other college graduates do and getting shot down like a dog in the street for the privilege. Boiled to its core, the truth is always a simple, solid thing, and yeah, McLarney had to admit, there was no percentage in being a cop. None at all. And yet nothing about that shooting could change his mind; things
had somehow gone too far for that.

  He didn’t return to active duty for eight months, and for much of that time he was using a colostomy bag until his digestive system healed enough to permit the reversal surgery. After each operation, the abdominal cramps were so bad that he would get down on the floor at night, and after the reversal surgery, a bout of hepatitis prolonged the recovery. Gene Cassidy came by to visit a couple of times and once took his sergeant out to lunch. And when McLarney attempted to cut corners on his rehabilitation by ordering a proscribed beer, Cassidy chewed ass. Good man, Cassidy.

  A standing tradition in the Baltimore department dictates that a man shot in the line of duty, upon returning to duty, can take any posting for which he is qualified. That summer, as McLarney was preparing to go back into uniform, Rod Brandner was taking his pension, leaving behind a reputation as one of the best sergeants the homicide unit had ever seen. Brandner had put together a good squad and he worked for D’Addario, which meant that McLarney would also be serving under a lieutenant known to be human.

  He returned to the sixth floor expressing little pride at having been shot and little interest in telling and retelling the story. At times, he would express amusement at the status it accorded him. Whenever a shitstorm was breaking, McLarney would simply smile and shake his head. “They have to leave me alone,” he would say. “I’m a sworn member who got shot in the line.”