by David Simon
Kincaid nodded, understanding. “I know what you’re saying,” he said finally. “But I’ll tell you, if I was his sergeant, I’d bust his ass so quick he wouldn’t know what hit him.”
“I know you would, Donald.”
The lunch discussion helped establish a temporary truce; there would be no additional scenes in front of the admin lieutenant or any other boss. But Garvey and Nolan both knew that with Edgerton and Kincaid as the players, the problem wasn’t really solved. Sure enough, things are ugly again today, with the admin lieutenant asking questions about Edgerton’s performance on the Payson Street murder. By Nolan’s reckoning, the lieutenant wouldn’t even know to ask about Edgerton’s questioning of that witness at the scene. Not unless some other detective mentioned it.
Edgerton is still fuming about the lieutenant’s comment: “I’d like to hear what it is that he knows about investigating a murder. He wasn’t even there and he’s going to come out of that office and tell me how to do my job.”
“Harry…”
“I got more out of that guy out on the street than he’d get if he brought him in here and talked to him for two days.”
“I know, Harry, just …”
Nolan spends another five minutes trying to placate his detective, but to little effect. When Edgerton goes ballistic, nothing can bring him back down for a few hours, at the minimum. Reaching a pause in his rant, Edgerton wanders off to a typewriter, where he begins pecking brutally at his search warrants.
It doesn’t matter that the PC in both warrants will be strong enough to obtain a judge’s signature. It doesn’t matter that the house on Laurens Street will yield .22 cartridges of a similar make and composition to those found at the scene. It doesn’t matter that when Edgerton and Nolan confront the young man living at that address and take out a pair of handcuffs, the suspect will nod knowingly and say, “I was wondering when you’d come.”
It doesn’t even matter when the same young man breaks down after three hours’ interrogation, implicating himself as the shooter in a full, seven-page statement. Somehow, none of that matters.
Because less than a week after Edgerton’s arrests in the Payson Street murder, the same argument is still raging on. This time it’s Bob Bowman, who shares Kincaid’s opinions when it comes to Edgerton, sitting in the coffee room, telling five or six other detectives that Harry’s case isn’t going to court.
“He has one murder that’s gone down this whole year,” he says. “And I heard from Don Giblin that the case is so weak they’re not even going to take it into a grand jury.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“That’s what I heard from Giblin.”
Only it isn’t true. The grand jury does indeed indict two men for shooting down Gregory Taylor on Payson Street, even after he tried to compensate them for the burn bags. And a prosecutor from the trial division is assigned to bring the case into court. And come fall, a circuit court judge will accept a twenty-year sentence and second-degree plea from the shooter, along with five years and fifteen suspended from the codefendant.
Even so, all of that is irrelevant to the politics. Because in the homicide unit, in his own squad especially, Harry Edgerton has become the accepted target. For the captain, he is ammunition; for D’Addario, a potential liability; for his fellow detectives, an aloof, enigmatic pain in the ass.
On the same morning that the Taylor case goes into the black, Edgerton arrives for roll call to find that his lieutenant has posted a new sheet of yellow legal paper next to the board.
“Hey, Harry,” says Worden, pointing to the slip of paper. “Guess what?”
“Aw no,” moans Edgerton. “Say it ain’t so.”
“It’s so, Harry. You’re still up.”
SIX
THURSDAY, MAY 26
By measured steps, Patti Cassidy walks her husband into the crowded courtroom, where all is suddenly silence. The jury, the judge, the lawyers—the entire assembly sits transfixed as Police Agent Gene Cassidy stretches his right hand, touches a wooden beam, then guides himself into the witness stand. Patti touches his shoulder, whispers, then retreats to a seat behind the prosecution table.
The clerk rises. “Do you swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth?”
“I do,” says Cassidy, his voice clear.
In a place where partial victories and gray equivocations always seem to dominate, Gene Cassidy’s appearance on the witness stand is a startling moment. Cassidy did not see Terry McLarney and Corey Belt and the other Western men in the hallway, gripping his shoulders with a few attaboys and go-get-’ems before the courtroom doors opened. He cannot see his wife, primly dressed and eight months’ pregnant, in the gallery’s front row. He cannot see one of the jurors, the young white girl, crying softly in the back tier. He cannot see the cold rage on the judge’s face, and he cannot see Butchie Frazier, the man who blinded him with two .38 rounds, staring with strange fascination from the defense table a few feet away.
The courtroom is crowded, the gallery packed with Western officers in uniform, a show of solidarity that does not extend to the departmental brass. The Western District commander is not in attendance, nor is the chief of patrol or any of the deputy commissioners—a fact noted with some bitterness by the rank and file. Take a bullet for the company and you’re on your own; the bosses may show up at the hospital and they’ll definitely be on hand for the funeral, but the departmental memory is short. Cassidy’s appearance in court will be witnessed by no one above the rank of sergeant. The space remaining in the gallery is occupied by the Cassidy family, a handful of reporters, curious courthouse regulars and a few friends and relatives of Butchie Frazier’s.
At one point during the jury selection, his younger brother, Derrick, appeared in the corridor just outside the courtroom, where prosecution witnesses are seated before their testimony. He eyefucked one, talked trash to another and then was suddenly confronted by McLarney and two Western men, who offered him an opportunity to leave as a free man. Given the alternative of becoming a projectile launched into the rear of a police wagon, Derrick Frazier issued a few more obscenities and then turned on his heel toward the St. Paul Street exit.
“Okay,” said McLarney to a Western officer. “I guess we put him on the list, too.”
The uniform shook his head. “That motherfucker …”
“Fuck him,” said McLarney, unsmiling. “One of these days, we’ll be chalking him off.”
For McLarney, the Cassidy trial was unrelieved agony, an ordeal of empty hours spent in courtroom hallways and prosecutors’ offices. Because he was at the Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. Courthouse as a witness, McLarney was sequestered, and whatever happened behind the thick double doors of that second-floor courtroom was lost to him. As the most important criminal trial of his life lurched toward a verdict, McLarney could only watch a parade of witnesses from a bench in the hall, then buttonhole the prosecutors, Howard Gersh and Gary Schenker, during breaks:
“How’s it going in there?”
“Are we winning?”
“How’d Gene do?”
“Is Butchie gonna testify?”
Yesterday, McLarney spent the hours pacing the length of the second-floor hall and trying to calculate the odds. A 40 percent chance for first-degree, maybe 50 percent if Yolanda sticks to the grand jury testimony she gave against Butchie in February after passing the polygraph. Another 40 percent for second-degree attempted murder or attempted manslaughter. Maybe 20 percent for a hung jury or acquittal. At least, McLarney reasoned, they managed to land a decent judge. If you were a lawyer, Elsbeth Bothe could drive you crazy with her penchant for questioning witnesses from the bench, and, true, she had a few convictions reversed on appeal for commentary from the bench. But more important, from McLarney’s point of view, Bothe never got soft at the point of sentencing. If Butchie Frazier lost on points, Bothe would surely bang him.
Like any other appointee to the Baltimore circuit court, Bothe could judge men with the confid
ence that comes from incumbency and an elective term of fifteen years. Her voice was a quiet rasp, a perfect vehicle to express an undying irritation with prosecutors, attorneys, defendants and the criminal justice system in general.
From the bench, she was master of all she saw, and what she saw was a courtroom carved from the northwestern corner of the ornate courthouse, a paneled courtroom with high ceilings and portraits of long-dead judges glaring down from the walls. At first glance, it was not the sort of place where questions of life and death ought to be decided; whatever dignity was conveyed by the dark woods of the judge’s bench and trial tables was utterly corrupted by the jumble of insulated pipe and metal ventilation work suspended from the ceiling. From certain angles, the judge appeared to preside in a courtroom created from a government office building’s basement.
Elsbeth Bothe came to the Baltimore bench from the defense bar, where she had been one of the most talented attorneys in what was then a fledgling public defenders office. Many a man walked free of the Baltimore City Jail because Bothe had been his advocate, yet she could recall only one client among the hundreds she had defended whom she actually knew with any certainty to be innocent. It was, on reflection, the most appropriate history for a judge whose courtroom had become a cluttered stage for a large share of Baltimore’s homicide prosecutions. Black, or brown, or on select occasions an occasional white stray, they were brought to the Calvert Street courthouse in dull, dirty jail vans, then led in handcuffs and legchains from lockup to courtroom and back again to lockup. Poor, huddled masses yearning to be free, they were the daily feed for the trough, and whether by plea or verdict, they existed only to be consumed. Day after day, the lawyers were fed, the prisons were filled, the machine rattled forward. By choice and circumstance, Bothe was one of three city judges who, among them, handled more than 60 percent of the hundred and fifty or so murder prosecutions that made their way to circuit court each year. It was a grim, pathetic parade, a chain of human misery for which Bothe was psychologically as well as temperamentally suited.
Her chambers said as much: Amid the Maryland code books and legal texts rested a collection of human skulls—mostly manufactured caricatures, one the real McCoy—to rival any anthropologist’s closet. On the walls were original front pages from old turn-of-the-century Police Gazettes, each one recounting the details of some shocking spasm of violence. To homicide detectives, such a peculiarity was especially comforting, assuring them that Elsbeth Bothe—like any self-respecting cop—was capable of enjoying the best parts of a good murder.
Not that Bothe was some kind of hanging judge. Like everyone else compelled to deal with murder on wholesale basis, she was not above taking a light plea if it helped clear a crowded court docket of a cheap murder or two. This is the reality in Baltimore and every other American jurisdiction, where plea bargaining is the only way to keep the criminal justice system from strangling on its own caseload. The trick—for prosecutors as well as judges—is knowing which cases cannot be pled down.
By any reasoning, the case against Butchie Frazier could not be pled—not for anything that Butchie’s attorney could in good conscience accept. Prosecuting the case in tandem, Gersh and Schenker had offered fifty years, knowing that the maximum for first-degree attempted murder and a handgun charge would be life and twenty, which shakes out to about eighty years in all. Given the state’s parole guidelines, the ultimate difference to Butchie was maybe five years or so, but with any career criminal that kind of margin isn’t worth talking about. Guys like Butchie Frazier hear prosecutors talking double digits and their eyes glaze over.
As a result, the case went to a jury of twelve: eleven women, one man; nine black, three white. It was a fairly typical city panel, which, if it did nothing else of note, had managed to at least stay awake throughout the state’s case—no small accomplishment in a courthouse where judges are occasionally obliged to have a sheriff’s deputy nudge juror number three back into lucidity.
The jurors were downright fascinated by Yolanda Marks, who was a picture of both anger and fear on the witness stand. Yolanda had tried time and again to back away from her grand jury testimony in her pretrial interviews with prosecutors. Her courtroom answers to Schenker’s questions were all cold and monosyllabic and much of her testimony was laced with tears. Still, she gave up Appleton Street as Butchie glared at her from a few feet away.
Yolanda was followed by others, by McLarney testifying about the crime scene and Gary Tuggle, one of the two detail officers, testifying to the search for a suspect. Young, black, attractive, Tuggle was a necessity for this jury—a racial counterweight to Butchie Frazier, a subtle suggestion to black jurors that the system itself wasn’t altogether white. Then came the couple who had been walking south on Appleton Street from the corner bar, both of whom recounted the same shooting scenario as Yolanda, though both testified that they were too far away to identify the gunman. Still, they confirmed Yolanda’s account.
Finally, there was the kid from the City Jail, another murder defendant who had quarreled with Butchie when both were in pretrial detention. Butchie had told him about the shooting, offering details that only the shooter could know.
“What else did the defendant tell you?” asked Schenker.
“He said the police was roughing him up, so he pulled out his gun and shot him in the head. He said he wished he would have killed the bitch.”
The ultimate ghetto insult, it hung there in the courtroom for a moment and then fell on dead silence. A young man, blind for life, so casually denigrated by the man who had held the gun. Cassidy. A bitch.
Gary Schenker paused for effect as two jurors shook their heads and Bothe lifted a hand to her mouth. Asked whether he was offered a reduced sentence in exchange for his testimony, the kid shook his head. This, he told the jury, was personal.
“I showed him a picture of my girl,” the kid explained. “He said when he got out he was going to have her.”
That was their case. Everything that could be done had been done before Gene Cassidy made his way to the stand. Cassidy was the emotional kicker, the unspoken appeal to a jury of Butchie Frazier’s peers, a jury that now sits staring at the young man on the witness stand, a young man who cannot stare back. Gene Cassidy is the psychological culmination of the state’s case, the last tug on the jury’s heartstring before the defense takes over.
Already the jury has heard the University of Maryland surgeon describe the path of each bullet in clinical detail and assess the slim chance of anyone’s surviving such wounds. Yet here is Cassidy, back from the grave in his dark blue suit to face the man who failed to kill him.
“Agent Cassidy,” says Bothe, solicitous, “there’s a microphone in front of you … if you could speak into it.”
Cassidy reaches forward and touches the metal.
Schenker then asks the preliminary questions. “Agent Cassidy, how long have you been a Baltimore city police officer …”
As Schenker continues, the eyes of several jurors bounce from Cassidy to Frazier, then back to Cassidy. The two men are close to each other, separated by no more than six feet, and Frazier is staring with genuine curiosity at the side of Cassidy’s head. Jet black hair covers the temple wound, and the facial injuries have healed perfectly. Only the eyes reveal the damage: one blue and vacant, the other translucent and distorted.
“And you are totally blind, correct?” asks Schenker.
“Yes, I am,” says Cassidy. “I’ve also lost my senses of smell and taste.”
It is the most precious kind of testimony. In every murder trial, the victim exists for the jury as an abstract entity, as a part of the process represented by nothing more than an autopsy report and some 3-by-5 crime scene photographs. The defendant, however, remains flesh and blood for the duration of the trial. In the hands of a competent defense attorney, his humanity is better displayed than the inhumanity of the crime, his ordinariness is more apparent than the extraordinary acts of which he is accused. A good defense attorn
ey sits close to his client, touches him on the shoulder to get his attention, puts an arm around him to show the jurors that he likes this man, that he believes in him. Some lawyers go so far as to give defendants mints or hard candies, telling clients to pull them out at a quiet moment and offer one to the lawyer, perhaps even to the prosecutor, seated a few feet away. See, ladies and gentlemen, he’s human. He likes mints. He can share.
But Gene Cassidy denies Butchie Frazier the advantage. In this courtroom he, too, is flesh and blood.
Schenker continues: “On that particular evening, what if anything do you recall …”
Cassidy grimaces slightly before answering. “I have no recollection of the incident … the shooting,” he says slowly. “The last thing I remember is being at my father-in-law’s house in Pennsylvania earlier that afternoon.”
“Can you recall going to work that day?”
“I know that I must have,” says Cassidy. “But I can’t remember anything after my father-in-law’s house. They tell me that’s pretty common with these kinds of injuries—”
“Officer Cassidy,” asks Bothe, interrupting. “I take it that’s your wife who escorted you to the stand.”
“Yes, your honor.”
“And by the look of things,” the judge says, unwilling to let the moment pass, “I would say that she’s expecting …”
“Yes. Due on the Fourth of July.”
The Fourth of July. The defense attorney shakes his head.
“Is this your first child?” asks the judge, glancing toward the jury box.
“Yes it is.”
“Thank you, Officer Cassidy. I was curious.”
The beleaguered defense counsel has nowhere to go. What do you do with the testimony of a blinded police officer whose pregnant wife waits on a nearby bench? What do you ask on cross examination? Where do you make your points? Where, in such a scene, do you find a place for your client to breathe?
