by David Simon
“Naw, not tonight,” Kincaid says, pulling the tie from his collar and stretching himself across the sofa. “Too damn hot for that.”
Every man in the room sends up the same prayer: Lord, let the telephone ring. Let that 2100 extension light up with death and mayhem before we all drown in our own sweat and stink. Every man in the room would take a drug murder right now. A double even, with two bleached skeletons in a basement somewhere and not a witness or suspect to be found. They don’t care what the call is as long as they can get out on the street where, incredibly, it’s ten degrees cooler.
Out in the main office, Roger Nolan has the video recorder wired up so that half the squad can watch some godawful movie in which everyone is chasing one another in automobiles. The first movie in Nolan’s midnight shift triple feature is generally excellent, and the second is usually tolerable. But by three o’clock, Nolan always manages to come up with something guaranteed to induce sleep, and at that point, sleep begins to acquire a certain appeal.
The VCR is Nolan’s concession to the hell of midnight shift, to the absurdity of six grown men spending a week of overnights together in a downtown office building. In Baltimore, a homicide detective works three weeks of eight-to-four, then two weeks of four-to-twelve, then one week of midnight. Which leads to a strange inversion: at any given moment, an entire shift of three squads is working daywork, two squads are working four-to-twelve, and the squad working midnight is on its own in those hours when nearly half of all homicides occur. On a jumping midnight tour, no one has time for movies or anything else. On a shift with two murders and a police shooting, for example, no one even presumes to think about sleep. But on the slow nights, on a night like this, the detectives learn what rigor mortis is all about.
“My back is killing me,” says Garvey.
Of course it is. After all, he’s trying to sleep sitting in a metal desk chair, his head horizontal to the top of the chair back. The sixth floor is hotter than the inside of a Weber grill on a Fourth of July weekend and Garvey still has his tie on. The man is not real.
Kincaid is now snoring on the green couch. Bowman is around the corner, out of sight, but when last seen he was also nodding, his chair propped against the wall, his short legs barely touching the floor. Edgerton is who the hell knows where, probably down on Baltimore Street blasting space critters on a video game.
“Hey, Rich,” says Nolan, a foot and a half from the TV screen, “check this part out. This almost makes the movie.”
Garvey lifts his head in time to see one tough guy blow another apart with something that appears to be a rocket launcher.
“That was great, Rog.”
Nolan senses the ennui and slowly glides over to the television, using his legs to propel the wheeled chair. He scans the side of another videotape box. “How about a John Wayne movie?”
Garvey yawns, then shrugs. “Whatever,” he says finally.
“I’ve got two on this tape where the Duke actually dies,” says Nolan, still wide awake. “Trivia question: In how many movies did John Wayne’s character actually die?”
Garvey looks at Nolan and sees, not his squad sergeant, but a large black man with a pitchfork and horns on his head. The innermost circle of hell, Garvey now knows, is a steaming municipal building with no beds, bile green walls and trivia questions from a superior at three in the morning.
“Thirteen,” says Nolan, answering his own question. “Or is it fourteen? We figured it out last night … I think it’s fourteen. The one everyone always forgets is Wake of the Red Witch.”
Nolan knows. He knows everything. Ask him about the 1939 Academy Awards and he’ll tell you about the catfight for Best Supporting Actress. Ask him about the Peloponnesian War and he’ll explain the essentials of hoplite infantry tactics. Mention the western coast of Borneo and … well, Terry McLarney once made that mistake.
“You know,” he blurted during one four-to-twelve shift. “I understand that the beaches in Borneo are made of black sand.”
At the time, the statement might have seemed like a lonely non sequitur, but McLarney had recently read a five-hundred-page tome on the island of Borneo, his first conquest of a Howard County library book in perhaps three years. A fact is a fact, and McLarney had been trying to work this one into conversation for maybe a month.
“That’s right,” said Nolan. “They’re black from the volcanic ash. Krakatoa did a number on all the islands around there …”
McLarney looked as though his dog had just died.
“… but only on the western part of the island is it completely black. We practiced amphibious landings there when I was in the Corps.”
“You were there?”
“In sixty-three or so.”
“Well,” said McLarney, stalking away, “that’s the last time I ever bother reading a book.”
For a career cop, Roger Nolan is positively scary and a force to be reckoned with in any game of trivia. Still trying to find comfort in that metal chair, Garvey succumbs to his sergeant’s academic dissertation on the John Wayne mystique. He listens quietly because what else can he do. It’s too hot to type that prosecution report. Too hot to read the Evening Sun sitting on Sydnor’s desk. Too hot to go down to Baltimore Street and pay for a cheesesteak. Too goddamn hot.
Whoa. Incoming.
Garvey pushes the chair toward Edgerton’s desk and grabs the receiver on the first bleat, fastest on the draw. His call. His moneymaker. His ticket out.
“Homicide.”
“Northwest district, six-A-twelve unit.”
“Yeah, whatcha got?”
“It’s an old man in a house. No sign of wounds or anything like that.”
“Forced entry?”
“Ah, no, nothing like that.”
Garvey’s disappointment seeps into his voice. “How’d you get in?”
“Front door was open. The neighbor came over to check on him and then found him in the bedroom.”
“He live alone?”
“Yeah.”
“And he’s in bed?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How old is he?”
“Seventy-one.”
Garvey gives up his name and sequence number, knowing that if this officer has misread the scene and the case comes back from the ME as a murder, Garvey will have to eat it. Still, it sounds straight enough.
“Do I need anything else for the report?” the cop asks.
“No. You called for the medical examiner, right?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s everything then.”
He drops the receiver back onto the phone and separates the sticky wetness that is his shirt from the back of the chair. Twenty minutes later, the phone rings again with a west side cutting—cheap stuff, too, with one kid in the University Hospital ER and the other in the Western lockup, staring out of his cell at Garvey and Kincaid through a cocaine haze.
“He just walked in here and said he stabbed his brother,” says the Western turnkey.
Garvey snorts. “You don’t think he’s on drugs, do you, Donald?”
“Him?” says Kincaid, deadpan. “No way.”
The cutting call keeps them on the street for no more than twenty minutes, and when they return to the office, Nolan is dismantling the VCR; all else is three-part snoring so regular that it takes on a hypnotic quality.
Edgerton has returned from videoland and the squad soon settles in for the worst kind of sleep, the kind where a detective wakes up more exhausted than before, covered by a layer of liquid homicide office that can only be scraped away by a twenty-minute shower. Still, they sleep. On a slow night, everyone sleeps.
At five, the telephone finally rings again, although now everyone is two hours past the desire to get a call—the general reasoning being that anyone inconsiderate enough to relinquish his life after the hour of three A.M. does not deserve to be avenged.
“Homicide,” says Kincaid.
“G’morning. Irwin from the Evening Sun. What’d you hav
e last night?”
Dick Irwin. The only man in Baltimore with a work schedule more miserable than that of a homicide detective. Five A.M. calls for seven A.M. deadlines, five nights a week.
“All quiet.”
Back to sleep for a half hour or so. And then a moment of pure terror: some sort of thunderous machine, some kind of battering ram, is heaving against the hallway door. Metal hitting metal in the darkness to Garvey’s immediate right. Shrill, high-pitched noises as a violent, nocturnal beast clatters toward a sleeping squad, bulling its way through the dark portal. Edgerton remembers the .38 in his top left drawer, a firearm fully stocked with 158-grain hollow-points. And thank God for that, because the beast is now entering the room, its steel lance projected, its leaden armor clanging against the bulkhead on the far side of the coffee room. Kill it, says the voice in Edgerton’s head. Kill it now.
A sheet of light falls upon them.
“What the …”
“Aw, hell, I’m sorry,” says the beast, surveying a room full of cowering, bleary-eyed men. “I didn’t see you all in there where you was sleepin’.”
Irene. The monster is a cleaning woman with an East Bawlmer accent and yellow-white hair. The steel lance is a mop handle; the clanging armor, the larger half of the floor buffer. They are alive. Blind, but alive.
“Turn out the light,” Garvey manages to say.
“I will, hon. I’m sorry,” she says. “You go back to sleep. I’ll start out here ’n leave you alone. You get on back to sleep an’ I’ll tell when the lieutenant comes in …”
“Thank you, Irene.”
She is the ancient janitress with a heart of gold and a vocabulary that could make a turnkey blush. She lives alone in an unheated rowhouse, earns a fifth of what they do and never arrives later than 5:30 A.M. to begin shining the sixth-floor linoleum. Last Christmas, she took what little money didn’t go for food and bought a pressed-wood television table as her gift to the homicide unit. No amount of pain or aggravation could cause them to yell at this woman.
They will, however, flirt with her.
“Irene, honey,” says Garvey, before she can shut the door. “Better watch out now. Kincaid had his pants off tonight and he was dreamin’ about you …”
“You’re a liar.”
“Ask Bowman.”
“It’s true,” says Bowman, picking it up from the rear of the office. “He had his pants off and he was calling your name …”
“You can kiss my ass, Bowman.”
“You better not say that to Kincaid.”
“He can kiss my ass too,” says Irene.
As if on cue, Kincaid returns from the bathroom, albeit fully dressed, and requires only a little prodding from Bowman before he’s once again wooing the hired help.
“C’mon, Irene. Gimme a little somethin’.”
“Why should I, Donald?” she says, warming to the game. “You ain’t even got anything I’d want.”
“Oh yeah I do.”
“What?” she says, looking down disdainfully. “That little tiny thing?”
The entire squad cracks up. Twice a midnight shift, Kincaid talks dirty to Irene. Twice a midnight shift, Irene manages to keep up with him.
Beyond the darkness of the main unit office, the coffee room and the outer offices are brightening with the lighter blue of morning. And like it or not, every man in the room is now wide awake, rattled from sleep by Kincaid’s determined courtship.
But the phones stay quiet and Nolan cuts Bowman loose just after six; the rest of the squad sits quietly, trying not to move until the air conditioning kicks up again for the dayshift. The men lean back in their seats in some kind of communal trance. When the elevator bell rings at twenty after, it’s the sweetest sound in the world.
“Relief ’s here,” says Barlow, strutting into the room. “You all look like shit … Not you, Irene. You look as lovely as ever. I was talking to these ugly pieces of shit.”
“Fuck you,” says Garvey.
“Hey, mister, is that any way to talk to the man who’s giving you early relief?”
“Eat me,” says Garvey.
“Sergeant Nolan,” says Barlow, feigning indignation, “did you hear that? I just stated a simple fact by saying that these guys look like pieces of shit, which they do, and I’m subjected to all kinds of abuse. Was it this fuckin’ hot in here all night?”
“Hotter,” says Garvey.
“Proud to know you, mister,” says Barlow. “You know, you’re one of my personal heroes. What’d you have last night? Anything?”
“Nothing at all,” says Edgerton. “It was death up here.”
No, thinks Nolan, listening from the corner of the room. Not death. The absence of death, maybe. Death means being out on the streets of Baltimore, making money.
“You all can take off,” says Barlow. “Charlie’ll be in here in a couple.”
Nolan keeps Garvey and Edgerton waiting for the second dayshift man to arrive, letting Kincaid escape at half past.
“Thanks, Sarge,” he says, shoving a run sheet into Nolan’s mailbox.
Nolan nods, acknowledging his own mercies.
“See you Monday,” says Kincaid.
“Yeah,” says Nolan wistfully. “Daywork.”
FRIDAY, JULY 22
“Aw Christ, another Bible.”
Gary Childs picks the open book up off a bureau and tosses it onto a chair with a dozen others. The bookmark holds the place even as pages flutter in the cool breeze of an air conditioner. Lamentations 2:21:
Young and old lie together
In the dust of the streets;
My young men and maidens
Have fallen by the sword.
You have slain them in the day of your anger;
You have slaughtered them without pity.
One thing about Miss Geraldine, she took her Good Book seriously, a fact confirmed not only by the Bible collection, but also by the framed 8-by-11 photographs of her in her Sunday finest, preaching the good news at storefront churches. If salvation is ours through faith rather than works, then perhaps Geraldine Parrish can find some contentment in the wagon ride downtown. But if works do count for anything in the next world, then Miss Geraldine will be arriving there with a few things charged to her account.
Childs and Scott Keller pull up the bed and begin riffling the stack of papers stuffed beneath it. Grocery notes, telephone numbers, social service forms and six or seven more life insurance policies.
“Damn,” says Keller, genuinely impressed. “Here’s a whole bunch more. How many does that make now?”
Childs shrugs. “Twenty? Twenty-five? Who the hell knows?”
The search warrant for 1902 Kennedy gives them the right to seek a variety of evidentiary items, but in this instance, no one is gutting a room in the hope of finding a gun or knife or bullets or bloody clothes. On this rare occasion, they are looking for the paper trail. And they are finding it.
“I got more of them in here,” says Childs, dumping the contents of a paper grocery bag onto the upended mattress. “Four more.”
“This,” says Keller, “is one murderous bitch.”
An Eastern District patrolman who has been downstairs for an hour, watching Geraldine Parrish and five others in the first-floor living room, knocks softly on the bedroom door.
“Sergeant Childs …”
“Yo.”
“The woman down there, she’s sayin’ she feels faint … You know, she’s sayin’ that she’s got some kind of heart condition.”
Childs looks at Keller, then back at the uniform. “Heart condition, huh?” he says, contemptuous. “She’s having a heart attack? I’ll be down in a minute and you can really watch her fall out of her chair.”
“Okay,” says the patrolman. “I just thought I’d tell you.”
Childs sorts through the jetsam from the grocery bag, then wanders downstairs to the front room. The occupants of the rowhouse are clustered together on a sofa and two chairs, staring up at him, waitin
g for answers. The sergeant stares back at the plump, sad-faced woman with the Loretta Lynn wig and red cotton dress, a genuinely comic vision under the circumstances.
“Geraldine?”
“Yes I am.”
“I know who you are,” says Childs. “Do you want to know why we’re here?”
“I don’t know why you’re here,” she says, patting her chest lightly. “I can’t sit like this. I need my medicine …”
“You don’t have any idea why we’re here?”
Geraldine Parrish shakes her head and pats her chest again, leaning back in her chair.
“Geraldine, this is a search-and-seizure raid. You’re now charged with three counts of first-degree murder and three attempted murders …”
The other occupants of the room stare as deep gurgling noises begin to rise in Geraldine Parrish’s throat. She falls to the carpet, clutching her chest and gasping for air.
Childs looks down, moderately amused, then turns calmly to the Eastern uniform. “I guess you might want to call for that medic now,” he says, “just to be on the safe side.”
The sergeant returns upstairs, where he and Keller continue dumping every document, every insurance policy, every photo album, every slip of paper into a green garbage bag—the better to sort through it all in the relative luxury of the homicide office. Meanwhile, the paramedics arrive and depart within minutes, having judged Geraldine Parrish healthy in body if not in mind. And across town, at the Division Street rowhouse of Geraldine Parrish’s mother, Donald Waltemeyer is executing a second warrant, digging out another thirty insurance policies and related documents.
It is the case to end all cases, the investigation that raises the act of murder to the level of theatrical farce. This case file has so many odd, unlikely characters and so many odd, unlikely crimes that it almost seems tailored for musical comedy.
But for Donald Waltemeyer, in particular, the Geraldine Parrish case is anything but comedic. It is, in effect, a last lesson in his own personal voyage from patrolman to detective. Behind Worden and Eddie Brown, the forty-one-year-old Waltemeyer is Terry McLarney’s most experienced man, having come to homicide in ’86 from the Southern District plainclothes unit, where he was a fixture of large if not legendary proportion. And though the last two years have taught Waltemeyer everything he needs to know about handling the usual run of homicide calls, this case is entirely different. Eventually, Keller and Childs and the other detectives assigned to the case will return to the rotation and it will be Waltemeyer’s lot to serve as primary investigator in the prosecution of Geraldine Parrish—a probe that will consume half a year in the search for victims, suspects and explanations.
