by David Simon
“So let’s not find any,” says the first officer’s side partner.
“Well, I wanna take it if it’s there, just to have something on the guy,” says Garvey. “Normally, I wouldn’t care—”
“I’ll take the dope,” says the second patrolman. “I gotta run by headquarters anyway.”
“You’re a gentleman and a scholar,” says a third uniform, smiling. “I don’t care what them other guys say about you.”
“Which house is it?” asks the first officer.
“Fifth house in. North side of the street.”
“Three-seven?”
“Yeah, one family in there. Mother, daughter and a young boy named Vincent. He’s the only one we might have to worry about.”
“Is he getting locked up?”
“No, but if he’s there, he’s going downtown. We’re here for search and seizure.”
“Gotcha.”
“Which one of you is taking the back of the house?” Garvey asks.
“I got the back.”
“Okay, then you two go in the front with us.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Let’s do it.”
And then the district men are back in their cars, wheeling around the corner and onto Fayette. The first car rolls around the block and into the back alley that leads to the rear of the rowhouse; the other two screech to a halt in front of the stoop, with the Cavalier in between. Garvey and Kincaid race the younger patrolmen up to the marble stoop.
If this were an arrest warrant, if Vincent Booker were now charged with the murders of his father and Lena Lucas, the detectives would be wearing their vests, their guns drawn, and the front door to Vincent’s home would be answered on the first knock or it would come down hard under a steel maul or patrolman’s boot. So, too, would the raid be an act of controlled violence if the warrant had been written by a narcotics detective. But at this moment there is no reason to think Vincent Booker will play the role of desperado. Nor is the evidence sought in this warrant likely to be swallowed or flushed down a toilet.
Loud knocking brings a young girl to the door.
“Police. Open up.”
“Who’s there?”
“Police officers. Open this door now.”
“What you want here?” asks the girl angrily, opening the door halfway. The first uniform pushes the door full open and a crowd rushes past the girl.
“Where’s Vincent?”
“Upstairs.”
The uniforms race up the center steps to meet a lanky, wide-eyed young man at the second-floor landing. Vincent Booker says nothing and takes the handcuffs without protest, as if he long ago readied himself for this moment.
“What you want to arrest him for?” shouts the girl. “You supposed to be arresting the man done killed his father.”
“Calm down,” says Garvey.
“Why you lockin’ him up?”
“Just take it easy. Where’s your mother?”
Kincaid gestures toward the middle room on the first floor. The matriarch of the Booker clan is a fragile, diminutive woman sitting in one corner of a worn, flower-print sofa. She is watching beautiful people coupling and uncoupling on a black-and-white television. Against the background noise of a soap opera, Garvey introduces himself, shows the warrant and explains that Vincent is going downtown.
“I don’t know nothing about all that,” she says, waving the paper away.
“This just says that we can search the house.”
“Why you want to search my house?”
“It’s here in the warrant.”
The woman shrugs. “I don’t see why you got to search my house for anything.”
Garvey gives up, leaving a target copy on an endtable. Upstairs, in Vincent Booker’s room, drawers are jerked open and mattresses upended. By now, Dave Brown, the primary on the Booker murder, has arrived, and the three detectives move slowly, methodically, through the room. Brown guts the boy’s dresser as Garvey begins pushing each ceiling tile upward, probing for any objects hidden above. Kincaid takes apart the closet, pausing only to leaf through a skin magazine hidden on the top shelf.
“This thing didn’t get much use,” says Kincaid, laughing. “Ain’t but a couple pages stuck together.”
They strike gold after a little less than fifteen minutes, lifting the box spring of the double bed and shoving it against the long wall to reveal a locked metal tackle box. Garvey and Brown begin scanning every key ring discovered in the search, looking for anything that might match the small padlock.
“This one here.”
“No, that’s too big.”
“How ’bout the brown one next to it?”
“Shit on this,” says Brown. “I’m about to open this bitch up with a thirty-eight bullet.”
Kincaid and Garvey laugh.
“Did he have any keys on him?”
“Those are them right here.”
“How ’bout this one?”
“No, try the silver one.”
The padlock slips open, and the tackle box comes apart to reveal several banded packages of glassine bags, a portable scale, some cash, a small amount of marijuana, a healthy collection of jackknives, and a plastic soap dish. Pried open carefully, the knives show not a sign of red-brown residue, but the soap dish opens to reveal a dozen or more .38-caliber rounds, most of them ass-backward wadcutters.
When the detectives are nearly ready to leave, Garvey takes the knives and the soap dish down to Mother Booker, who remains bathed in the blue-gray glow from the television.
“I just want you to see what we’re taking with us. So there’s no problem later.”
“What is that you got?”
“These knives,” says Garvey, “and these here in the dish are bullets.”
The woman briefly contemplates the contents of the plastic dish, glancing for a second or two at stubby lead lumps of the same sort used not a dozen blocks from here to murder her estranged husband, the father of her children. The same type of bullets that killed a mother of two in a rowhouse just around the corner.
“You takin’ those with you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Why?”
“Evidence.”
“Well,” asks the woman, returning her attention to the television, “he gonna get them back, ain’t he?”
The warrant for the Booker home has brought Garvey to within a step of turning two murders from red to black on D’Addario’s side of the board, but ironically, Vincent Booker—if he plays his cards right—is no longer the target of the last seventeen days of pursuit. Instead, he is the weakest link in Robert Frazier’s jerry-rigged story.
Straight legwork took them half the distance: Garvey and Kincaid have run down every element of Frazier’s statement and found, among other things, that the alibi of the dinner party wasn’t worth much. Frazier’s second girlfriend, Denise, the party’s hostess, was decidedly unwilling to go the distance for her man; she readily recalled that on the night of the murder, Frazier had left the party before eleven o’clock after an argument. She also said that Vincent Booker had come by the projects not once, but twice; the second time Frazier left with the boy and didn’t return until morning. Denise remembered this because she had slept alone that night, upset about the party. She had planned all week, buying lobster and Chesapeake blue crabs and corn on the cob. Frazier had ruined her evening.
Denise even volunteered that Frazier kept his .38 revolver at her Amity Street rowhouse and further appalled the detectives by mentioning that she hid the loaded weapon in her children’s toy box in the back bedroom. The gun wasn’t there now, she assured them; Frazier had come by and taken it a week ago, telling her that he was afraid she would be weak and give it to the police.
The detectives also learned that Frazier hadn’t shown up for work at the Sparrows Point plant on the morning after the murder, although he had claimed that he didn’t bother entering Lena’s open apartment door because he was already late for work that morning. Nor had F
razier carried through on his promise to bring in his .38. Garvey wondered why Frazier would even mention that he owned such a gun or, for that matter, why he would offer the police any story at all. Pop quiz: You’ve just killed two people and there is no physical evidence or witness that can link you directly to either crime. Do you: (A) Shut your mouth or (B) Visit the homicide unit and lie your ass off?
“The only answer,” mused Garvey as he typed the warrant for Vincent Booker’s house, “is that crime makes you stupid.”
Frazier’s story was further shattered by the arrival of one additional piece of evidence, a break that owed as much to luck as to legwork.
On the Sunday night of the murder, a sixteen-year-old high school student in the rowhouse next door to Lena Lucas had been staring out of her third-floor window, watching the traffic on Gilmor Street slow to a trickle in the late evening. At about 11:15—she was sure because she had been watching the local news for several minutes—the girl saw Lena and a tall, dark-skinned man wearing a brimmed cap walking from a red sports car parked on the other side of Gilmor Street. The couple walked toward her, toward Lena’s rowhouse, though the young girl couldn’t see much more than that because of the angle from her window. But she heard Lena’s front door close, and an hour later, through the common wall, she heard what sounded like a brief argument between a man and a woman. The noise sounded as if it was coming from below, perhaps from one of the apartments on the second floor of the adjacent house.
For a time, the girl told no one about what she had seen. And when she did finally speak, it was not to the police but to an employee at her school’s cafeteria who she happened to know was Lena’s sister. Upon hearing the story, the woman urged the young girl to call the police. But the witness was reluctant and so, the following day, the woman herself called the homicide unit. The young girl was named Romaine Jackson, and for all her fear, she needed only a little prodding to do the right thing. When the detectives showed her the array of six photographs, she hesitated for only a moment or two before picking out Robert Frazier. Then, after the young girl read and signed her statement, Rich Garvey drove her back to West Baltimore, letting her out of the Cavalier a block or two from Gilmor Street so that no one would see her with a detective. The following day, Garvey and Kincaid cruised the streets near Frazier’s Fayette Street home and found a red car similar to the one described by Romaine. It was registered to Frazier’s mother.
Even with the arrival of a living witness, however, Vincent Booker remained an open door, an escape hatch for Robert Frazier. As much as he was now convinced of Frazier’s guilt, Garvey had to admit that any good defense lawyer could take Vincent’s connections to the case and run wild in front of a city jury. Vincent was somehow involved—the .38 wadcutters in the soap dish made that clear—but as the killer, he simply didn’t add up.
For one thing, there were the nested clothes and the blade marks on the headboard above the bed in Lena’s room; the woman would not have undressed casually and stretched out on the bed for anyone but a lover. That played not to Vincent, but to Frazier. On the other hand, the same gun used to shoot Lena also killed Purnell Booker. What possible connection was there between Frazier and the father of a boy who sold Frazier’s cocaine? Why would anyone want to kill old man Booker? The man who killed Lena took cocaine from that bag of rice hidden in the bureau, but for what did he ransack Purnell Booker’s apartment?
Vincent is the key, and Garvey, looking at the boy beneath the barren white light of the large interrogation room, doesn’t see someone capable of the act. No way did this kid do what was done to his father. Murder, maybe. But not the dozen or more superficial blade wounds to the old man’s face. Even if Vincent could manage something like that with Lena, Garvey is certain that the kid doesn’t have ice enough in his veins to conduct a prolonged torture of his father. Few people do.
Vincent has been stewing in the cubicle for more than an hour when Garvey and Kincaid finally walk into the room and begin the monologue. Wadcutters in the soap dish, drug paraphernalia, jackknives, and your man Frazier’s putting you in for both these murders. Deep shit, Vincent, deep shit. Five minutes of this talk produce the desired level of fear, ten minutes produce a completed rights form, signed and witnessed.
The detectives carry the form out of the room and confer briefly in the hall.
“Hey, Rich.”
“Hmm?”
“That boy don’t stand a chance,” says Kincaid in a stage whisper. “You’re wearing your power suit.”
“That’s right. I am.”
Kincaid laughs.
“The dark blue pinstripe,” says Garvey, lifting one lapel. “He won’t know what the fuck hit him.”
Kincaid shakes his head and gives Garvey’s attire a last look. A Kentucky native, Donald Kincaid addresses the world in a loud, backwoods drawl and sports a tattoo of his initials above his left wrist. Garvey plays golf at Hilton Head and speaks of power suits; Kincaid trains hunting dogs and dreams of deer season in West Virginia. Same squad, different world.
“You want to have a go at him alone?” asks Kincaid as the two move back toward the interrogation room.
“Nah,” says Garvey, “we’ll gang-bang him.”
Vincent Booker waits for the second round with his back against the near wall, his hands cupped in the folds of his sweatshirt. Kincaid takes the far seat, facing the kid. Garvey sits between the two, closer to Vincent’s end of the table.
“Son, lemme tell you something,” says Garvey in a tone that suggests the interrogation is already over. “You have one shot here. You can tell us what you know about these murders and we’ll see what we can do. I know you’re involved in some way, but I don’t know how much, and the thing for you to think about is whether you want to become a witness or a defendant.”
Vincent says nothing.
“Are you listening to me, Vincent? You better start thinking about every fucking thing I’m saying here because a lot of shit is going to be coming down.”
Silence.
“Are you worried about Frazier? Listen to me, son, you better start worrying about yourself. Frazier’s been in here already. He’s trying to fuck you. He’s telling us about you.”
That gets it. Vincent looks up. “What’s Frazier sayin’?”
“What do you think?” says Kincaid. “He’s trying to put you in for these murders.”
“I didn’t …”
“Vincent, I don’t believe this motherfucker Frazier,” says Garvey. “Even if you’re involved in one or the other, I don’t believe you killed your father.”
Garvey pushes his chair closer to Vincent’s corner of the room and drops his voice to little more than a whisper. “Look, son, I’m just trying to give you a chance on this. But you’ve got to tell us the truth now and we’ll see what we can do with that. You can be at the defense table, or you can be on the prosecution side. That’s what we can do. We do a few favors now and then and we’re doing you one right now. Are you smart enough to see that?”
Probably not, thinks Garvey. And so the two detectives begin to lay it out to young Vincent Booker. They remind him that his father and Lena were both shot with the same kind of ammunition, that both murder scenes are identical. They explain that right now, he’s the only suspect who was known to both victims. After all, they ask him, what was your father to Robert Frazier?
At this, the boy looks up, puzzled, and Garvey stops talking long enough to reduce this abstraction to paper. On the back of a lined statement sheet, he draws one circle on the left-hand side of the page, then writes “Lena” inside the circle. On the right-hand side he draws a second circle with “Purnell Booker” written inside. Garvey then draws a third circle that intersects the circles of the two victims. Inside that third circle he writes “Vincent.” It’s a crude little creation, something any algebra teacher would know as a Venn Diagram, but it gets Garvey’s point across.
“This is our case. Look at it,” he says, pushing the sheet in front of the b
oy. “Lena and your father are killed by the same gun, and right now the only person who has any connection to both of the victims is Vincent Booker. You’re right in the fuckin’ middle of this thing. You think about that.”
Vincent says nothing and the two detectives leave the room long enough to allow the geometry to sink in. Garvey lights a cigarette and watches through the one-way window in the door as Vincent holds the crudely drawn diagram to his face and traces the three circles with his finger. Garvey shakes his head, watching Vincent turn the diagram upside down, then right side up, then upside down again.
“Look at this fuckin’ Einstein in here, will you?” he says to Kincaid. “He’s about the dumbest motherfucker I ever seen.”
“You ready?” says Kincaid.
“Yeah. Let’s do it.”
Vincent doesn’t look up from the diagram when the door opens, but his body gives an involuntary shake when Garvey enters and immediately begins another rant, his voice louder this time. Vincent can no longer manage eye contact; he grows smaller, more vulnerable with each accusation, a bleeder in the corner of the shark tank. Garvey sees his opening.
“You’ve got a knot in your fuckin’ stomach, don’t you?” Garvey asks abruptly. “You’re feeling like you’re going to be sick. I’ve seen a hundred or so just like that in here.”
“I seen ’em throw up,” says Kincaid. “You ain’t gonna throw up in here, are you?”
“No,” says Vincent, shaking his head. He is sweating now, one hand clutching the end of the table, the other wrapped tight in the hem of his sweatshirt. Part of the sickness is the fear of being pegged for two murders; part is the fear of Robert Frazier. But the greater share of what’s holding Vincent Booker on the precipice is a fear of his own family. Right here and now, Garvey can look at Vincent Booker and know, with even greater certainty than before, that there is no way this boy killed his father. He doesn’t have that in him. Yet the bullets connect him to the crime, and his rapid reduction to a speechless wreck in less than an hour of interrogation testifies to guilty knowledge. Vincent Booker is no killer, but he played a role in the death of his father, or at the very least, he knew the murderer and said nothing. Either way, there is something that cannot be faced.
