by David Simon
“Who was the old man?” Childs asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Then why did you believe him?”
“I don’t know.”
It was not to be believed—a murder case with cosmic insanity as the only common frame of reference. When the detectives tell Milton Baines that the old man living in the basement is also Geraldine’s husband, he is stupefied. When they explain to him that both he and his rival were living in that house like hogs waiting for the slaughter, corralled by a madwoman who would eventually trade them in for a few thousand dollars of insurance benefits, the man’s mouth drops in abject wonder.
“Look at him,” says Childs from the other side of the office. “He was the next victim. You can almost see the H-file number stenciled on his forehead.”
Waltemeyer guesses by the marriage licenses and other documents that husband number three is probably in Plainfield, New Jersey, though whether he is dead or alive isn’t immediately clear. Husband number four is doing a five-year bit at Hagerstown on a gun charge. Husband number five is somebody by the name of the Reverend Rayfield Gilliard, whom Geraldine married this past January. The good reverend’s whereabouts are uncertain until Childs goes to the blue looseleaf binder that lists unattended deaths for the year. Sure enough, the seventy-nine-year-old Gilliard’s marriage to Miss Geraldine had lasted little more than a month; his sudden departure had been attributed by the medical examiner’s office to natural causes, though no autopsy had been performed.
There are also the photo albums, in which Miss Geraldine had saved not only the Reverend Gilliard’s death certificate but also that of her thirteen-year-old niece, Geraldine Cannon, who, according to an accompanying newspaper clipping, had been in her aunt Geraldine’s care when she succumbed to an overdose of Freon in 1975—an overdose ruled accidental, though pathologists attributed it to a possible injection of Ban deodorant. On the following page of the album, the detectives find a $2,000 insurance policy in the child’s name.
In the same album, they locate more recent pictures of Geraldine with an infant girl and soon learn that she had purchased that child from a niece. The baby would be found later that week at a relative’s house and would be taken into custody by the Department of Social Services after the detectives match that infant to at least three life insurance policies totaling $60,000 in double-indemnity benefits.
The list of potential victims has no end. An insurance policy is found for aman who had been beaten and left to die in a wooded section of Northeast Baltimore; however, he survived the attack and was later located in a rehabilitative hospital. Another policy is found for Geraldine’s younger sister, who died of unexplained causes several years back. And from one page of another album, Childs pulls out a death certificate, dated October 1986, for a man named Albert Robinson. The manner of death is listed as homicide.
Childs takes the document and walks to another blue binder that contains a chronological list of Baltimore homicides. He opens the binder to the ’86 cases and scans the column of victims:
Robinson, Albert B/M/48
10/6/86, shot, NED, 4J-16884
Nearly two years later, the case is still open, with Rick James as the primary detective. Childs takes the death certificate back into the main office, where James is at his desk, absently poking at a chef’s salad.
“This mean anything to you?” Childs says.
James scans the death certificate. “Where’d you get this?”
“Out of the Black Widow’s photo album.”
“Are you shittin’ me?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Hot damn,” says James, jumping up to grip the sergeant’s hand. “Gary Childs done solved my murder.”
“Yeah, well, someone had to.”
A smokehound from Plainfield, New Jersey, Albert Robinson had been found dead by the B&O railbed at the foot of Clifton Park, shot once in the head. The man’s blood-alcohol level at the time of death was 4.0, four times the legal standard in drunk driving cases. Working on that murder, James never did figure out why an alcoholic from north Jersey was dead in East Baltimore. Perhaps, he had reasoned, the man was a hobo who had hitched a southbound freight only to be shot to death for some unknown reason as the train meandered through Baltimore.
“How does she connect with Albert?” asks James, suddenly fascinated.
“I don’t know,” says Childs, “but we know she used to live up in Plainfield …”
“No shit.”
“… and I got a feeling that somewhere in that pile of papers we’re gonna find an insurance policy on your man.”
“Oooooo, you makin’ me feel all warm an’ happy inside,” says James, laughing. “Keep talkin’ that nice talk.”
Inside the large interrogation room, Geraldine Parrish adjusts her wig and applies another coat of makeup, using a small mirror. None of this has made her any less conscious of her appearance, such as it is. Nor has she lost her appetite; when detectives bring her a tuna sub from Crazy John’s, she puts away the entire thing, chewing slowly, pinkies raised as she holds the ends of the sandwich to her mouth.
Twenty minutes later, she demands to use the ladies’ room and Eddie Brown walks her as far as the door, shaking his head and smiling when his prisoner asks if he would be coming inside.
“You go on ahead,” he tells her.
She is in there for a good five minutes, and when she steps back into the hallway, it’s with a fresh coat of lipstick. “I need my medicines,” she says.
“Well, which medicines do you need?” asks Brown. “You had about two dozen different ones in your purse.”
“I need all of them.”
Visions of an interrogation room overdose dance through Eddie Brown’s head. “Well, you ain’t getting all of them,” he says, walking her back down the hallway. “I’ll let you pick three pills.”
“I got rights,” she says bitterly. “Constitutional rights to my medicines.”
Brown smiles, shaking his head.
“Who you laughing at? What you need to get is some religion … stand there laughing at people.”
“You gonna give me religion, huh?”
Geraldine saunters back into the interrogation room, followed by Childs and Waltemeyer. In the end, four detectives will take a crack at this woman, laying the insurance policies on the long table and explaining over and over that it doesn’t matter whether she actually pulled the trigger.
“If you caused someone to be shot, then you’re guilty of murder, Geraldine,” says Waltemeyer.
“Can I have my medicines?”
“Geraldine, listen to me. You’re charged with three murders already, and before this is over you’re probably going to be charged with some others. Now’s the time to tell us what happened …”
Geraldine Parrish stares up at the ceiling, then begins babbling incoherently.
“Geraldine …”
“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ ’bout, Mistah Poh-leeces,” she says suddenly. “I didn’t shoot no one.”
Later, when the detectives have given up on the notion of a coherent statement, Geraldine sits alone in the interrogation room, waiting for the paperwork to catch up with her before she is transferred to the City Jail. She is leaning forward, her head resting on the table, when Jay Landsman walks by the one-way window and glances inside.
“Is that her?” says Landsman, who has just come on the four-to-twelve shift.
“Yeah,” says Eddie Brown. “That’s her.”
Landsman’s face creases into an evil grin as he slams an open palm hard against the metal door. Geraldine jumps in her seat.
“Whhhhooooaaaaaaaaaaa,” wails Landsman in his best approximation of a ghost. “Whhhhooooaa, mmuuurrder … MMMUUURRDER …”
“Aw Christ, Jay. Now you fuckin’ did it.”
Sure enough, Geraldine Parrish dives under the table on all fours and begins bleating like a crazed goat. Delighted with himself, Landsman keeps at it until Geraldine is prone on the floor
, bellowing at the metal table legs.
“Whhhhhoooaaaaa,” moans Landsman.
“Aaaaaaaaahhhhhh,” screams Geraldine.
“Whhhhooooaaaaaa.”
Geraldine stays down on the floor, whimpering loudly, as Landsman strolls back into the main office like a conquering hero.
“So,” he says, smiling wickedly, “I guess we’re probably looking at an insanity defense.”
Probably so, although everyone watching Geraldine Parrish’s performance is now utterly convinced of her sanity. This writhing-on-the-floor nonsense is a calculated and naive version of the real thing, an altogether embarrassing performance, particularly when everything else about her suggests a woman vying for a special advantage, a manipulator measuring every angle. Her relatives have already told detectives how she would boast about being untouchable, about being able to kill with impunity because four doctors would testify toher insanity if need be. The musings of a sociopath? Perhaps. The mind of a child? Probably so. But a mind genuinely unhinged?
A week ago, before the search warrants were even typed, someone showed Waltemeyer an FBI psychological profile of the classic black widow serial killer. Prepared by the behavioral sciences unit at the Quantico Academy, the profile suggested that the woman would be thirty years or older, would not necessarily be attractive, yet at the same time would make great efforts to exaggerate her sexual prowess and manipulate her physical appearance. The woman would probably be a hypochondriac and would more likely than not enjoy portraying herself as a victim. She would expect special treatment, then pout if it was not forthcoming. She would greatly overestimate her ability to sway other people, men in particular. Measured against the profile, Geraldine Parrish seemed to be the product of Central Casting.
After the interrogation, Roger Nolan and Terry McLarney are both escorting Geraldine Parrish to the City Jail, following her down the sixth-floor hallway, with Nolan walking directly behind the woman.
“Just before the elevators, she stops suddenly and bends over,” Nolan later tells the other detectives, “as if she’s trying to make me run into her fat ass. I tell you, that’s what she’s really about … In her mind, she really believes that if I get a good feel of her ass, I’m gonna fall in love with her and shoot Terry McLarney with his own gun and ride off into the sunset in an unmarked Chevrolet.”
Nolan’s psychoanalysis may be sufficient to the occasion, but for Waltemeyer, the long journey into the mind and soul of Geraldine Parrish is just beginning. And while every other detective in the room is content to believe that they already know everything there is to know about this woman, it is now up to Waltemeyer to determine just how many people she killed, how she killed them and how many of those cases can be successfully prosecuted in court.
For Waltemeyer, it will be an investigation unlike any other, a career case that only a seasoned detective could contemplate. Bank statements, insurance records, grand jury proceedings, exhumations—these are things that no patrolman ever worries about. A street cop rarely takes the work beyond a single shift; one night’s calls have nothing to do with those of the next. And even in homicide, a detective never has to worry the cases beyond the point of arrest. But in this investigation, the arrest is just the beginning of a long, labored effort.
Two weeks from now, Donald Waltemeyer, Corey Belt and Marc Cohen, an assistant state’s attorney, will be in Plainfield, New Jersey, interviewing the friends and relatives of Albert Robinson, finding one of Geraldine’s surviving husbands and delivering subpoenas for bank and insurance records. Much of the evidence involves an interstate paper trail, the kind of detail work that usually inspires a street cop to nothing more than tedium. But the three men will return to Baltimore with the explanation for the migration of Albert Robinson to East Baltimore and his subsequent murder.
Brought once again to the interrogation room from her jail cell, Miss Geraldine will once again confront a detective who lays the insurance policies in front of her and once again explains the truth about criminal culpability.
“You not makin’ any sense,” Geraldine will tell Waltemeyer. “I didn’t shoot no one.”
“Fine with me, Geraldine,” the detective says. “It doesn’t matter to me whether you tell the truth or not. We just brought you here to charge you with another murder. Albert Robinson.”
“Who’s he?”
“He’s the man from New Jersey you had killed for ten thousand dollars of insurance money.”
“I didn’t murder no one.”
“Okay, Geraldine. Fine.”
Once again, Geraldine Parrish leaves the homicide unit in handcuffs and, once again, Waltemeyer goes back to working the case, expanding it further, searching this time for answers in the death of the Reverend Gilliard. It is a deliberate, often tedious process, this prolonged investigation of a woman who has already been arrested and charged with four murders. More than a string of fresh street shootings, it demands a professional investigator. A detective.
Months into the Parrish investigation, McLarney will walk by Waltemeyer’s desk and overhear a lecture that the detective is delivering with calm sincerity. The beneficiary of Waltemeyer’s newfound wisdom will be Corey Belt, the prodigy from the districts whose detail to homicide was extended for the Parrish investigation. At that moment, Belt wants very much to respond to a lying, recalcitrant witness in the Western District way.
“Back in the Western,” Belt tells Waltemeyer, “we’d just throw the asshole against a wall and put some sense into him.”
“No, listen to me. This isn’t patrol. That kind of stuff doesn’t work up here.”
“That stuff always works.”
“No, I’m telling you. Up here you got to be patient. You got to use your head.”
And McLarney will stand there, listen a little longer, and then move on, delighted and amused at the notion of Donald Waltemeyer telling another man to shake off the lessons of the street. If there was nothing else to her credit, the Black Widow had at least taken a patrolman and turned him into a detective.
TUESDAY, AUGUST 2
It’s a summer afternoon in the Woodland Avenue drug market, and suddenly, with a body on the ground, race becomes the dominant theme. The dead kid is decidedly black and the police, standing over their daylight scene, are decidedly white. The crowd grows restless.
“This could get out of hand in a hurry,” says a young lieutenant, scanning the sea of angry faces on the other side of the police line. “I’d like to get that body outta here as soon as possible.”
“Don’t even worry about it,” says Rich Garvey.
“I only got about six guys here,” the lieutenant says. “I’d call for more, but I don’t want to empty the other sector.”
Garvey rolls his eyes. “Fuck them,” he says softly. “They’re not going to do shit.”
They never do. And after a few hundred crime scenes, Garvey doesn’t even hear the trash that gets thrown out from the crowd. The way a detective sees it, you just let the assholes run their mouths as long as they keep out of your way. And if one actually jumps into your scene, you throw his ass against a radio car and call for the wagon. No problem whatsoever.
“Why don’t you cover that boy up and show some respect for the dead,” shouts a fat girl on the other side of the Cavalier.
The crowd shouts its approval and the girl, encouraged, presses the point. “He just another dead nigger to you, right?”
Garvey turns to Bob McAllister, glowering, as a uniform pulls a white plastic sheet over the head and torso.
“Now, now,” says McAllister, anticipating his partner’s anger. “Let’s have a little decorum here.”
The body stays on the pavement, stranded there by the delayed arrival of a lab tech, who is rushing from another call on the other side of the city. A hot summer day in August and only four techs are working, one consequence of a municipal pay scale that doesn’t exactly encourage careers in the fast-growing field of evidentiary processing. And though this fifty-minute
delay is being regarded as yet another public display of the white racist police conspiracy that runs rampant on the streets of Baltimore, Garvey is somehow unrepentant. Fuck them all, he thinks. The kid is dead and he ain’t getting any better and that’s all there is to it. And if they think a trained homicide detective is going to dismantle a crime scene to satisfy a half a block’s worth of agitated Pimlico squirrels, they don’t know the game.
“How long you gonna leave a black man out in the street?” shouts an older resident. “You don’t care who sees him like that, do you?”
The young lieutenant listens to all of this nervously, checking his watch, but Garvey says nothing. He takes his eyeglasses off, rubs both eyes and walks over to the body, slowly lifting the white sheet from the dead man’s face. He stares down for half a minute or so, then drops the cloth and walks away. A proprietary act.
“Where the hell is the crime lab?” says the lieutenant, fingering his radio mike.
“Fuck these assholes,” says Garvey, irritated that this is even being mistaken for an issue. “This is our scene.”
And not much of a scene at that. A young drug dealer by the name of Cornelius Langley has been gunned down in a daylight shooting on the sidewalk in the 3100 block of Woodland, and no one in this crowd is rushing forward to provide any information. Nonetheless, it’s the only crime scene around, and as such, it’s real estate that now belongs to Garvey and McAllister. What the hell else does anyone need to be told?
The lab tech is another twenty minutes in arriving, but true to form, the crowd eventually loses interest in the confrontation well before that. By the time the tech gets busy taking photos and bagging spent .32 auto casings, the locals on Woodland Avenue are back to signifying, staring down the proceedings with nothing more than casual curiosity.
But just as the detectives are putting the finishing touches on the scene, the crowd on the far side of the street parts for the hysterical mother, who is already wailing inconsolably even before glimpsing her son’s body. Her arrival ends the truce and gets the crowd going again.
