by David Simon
The Fish Man, as durable a murder suspect as ever existed, once again returns to center stage.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 28
Donald Waltemeyer grabs the dead girl by both arms, feeling for any tension in the hands and fingers. The girl’s hands follow his freely, giving the appearance of a bizarre, horizontal dance.
“She’s wet,” he says.
Milton, the junkie on the sofa, nods.
“What’d you do? Put her in cold water?”
Milton nods again.
“Where? In the bath?”
“No. I just splashed her with water.”
“From where? That bathtub?”
“Yeah.”
Waltemeyer walks into the bathroom, where he satisfies himself that the tub is still covered with droplets. It is an old wives’ tale among the junkies: Overdoses can be brought back by putting them in cold water, as if a bath can somehow rid them of whatever they’ve put in their veins.
“Lemme ask you this, Milton,” says Waltemeyer. “Did you and her use the same works or did you fire your shit using something else?”
Milton gets up and moves toward the closet.
“Don’t fucking show it to me,” says Waltemeyer. “If you show it to me, I gotta lock you up.”
“Oh.”
“Just answer the question. Did you use the same needle?”
“No. I got my own.”
“Okay then. Sit down and tell me again what happened.”
Milton runs down the tale again, leaving nothing out. Waltemeyer hears again about how the white girl came by to fire up, about how she often came up here to shoot because her husband didn’t like her using.
“Like I said, she brought me that box of noodles ’cause she used some last time she was here.”
“This macaroni here?”
“Yeah. She brought that with her.”
“She had her own dope?”
“Yeah. I had mine and then she came with hers.”
“Where was she sitting when she fired?”
“This chair here. She fired up and then fell asleep. I looked over after a while and she wasn’t breathing.”
Waltemeyer nods. The call is straight up, and for that reason alone he feels good. After three months of tracking Geraldine Parrish and her missing relatives, even a simple overdose can be something of a reprieve. Waltemeyer had told himself that if he didn’t get back into the rotation on this midnight shift, he would lose his mind. McLarney had agreed.
“Your run sheets have been getting messier and messier,” the sergeant told him a week ago. “It’s like a cry for help.”
Maybe so. Waltemeyer had taken the Parrish case as far as he could, though there would be more work to come as trial preparation got under way. And he still hadn’t figured out exactly what had happened to Geraldine’s last husband, the aged Reverend Rayfield Gilliard, who died after a few weeks of marriage. A relative was now telling them that Miss Geraldine had ground two dozen Valium into the Reverend Gilliard’s tuna salad, then watched as the old man slowly succumbed to a seizure. The story was solid enough that Doc Smialek and Marc Cohen, the assistant state’s attorney handling the case, were willing to try for an exhumation order. Some days, Waltemeyer truly believed that the case had no end.
All of which makes this little overdose quite pleasing. One body, one witness, one page of a 24-hour report on the admin lieutenant’s desk—police work as Waltemeyer remembers it. The lab tech is hard at work and the ME is on the way. The witness is even cooperative and apparently truthful. All is flowing gracefully toward a resolution until the first officer appears in the doorway to say that the dead girl’s husband is downstairs.
“Do we need him for an ID?” asks the uniform.
“Yeah,” says Waltemeyer, “but not if he’s going to come up here and lose it. I don’t want that.”
“I’ll warn him about that.”
The husband comes to the bottom of the stairs, wearing an expression of incredible grief. He is a good-looking man, thirty or so, tall with long sandy brown hair.
“If you’re going to go up there, you have to be calm,” says the officer.
“I understand.”
Hearing footsteps on the stairs, Waltemeyer turns back toward the young woman and notices that the left bra strap and part of the cup are exposed, with the sweater pulled back down the arm in the search for the fresh track. Leaning over at the last second, he pulls the sweater gently over her shoulder.
For a detective, it is a small but extraordinary act—extraordinary because the notion of privacy loses most of its meaning after a few months of working murders. What, after all, could be less private than a stranger, an interloper, evaluating a human being’s last moments on earth? What could be less private than a body taken apart at autopsy, or a bedroom emptied of its contents by a search warrant, or a suicide note read and Xeroxed and stapled to the face sheet of a police incident report? After a year or two in the trenches, privacy is something that every detective learns to mock. More than compassion or sincerity or empathy, it is the first casualty of police work.
Two months ago, Mark Tomlin caught the year’s first and only autoerotic death. It was an engineer in his late thirties, trussed up on his bed in leather underwear, suffocated by a plastic bag that the victim had placed on his own head. There were pulleys and levers that controlled the cords by which the victim was bound, and by moving an arm in a certain direction, the man could have freed himself. But long before he could do that, he passed out from lack of oxygen—a consequence of the plastic bag, which he had used to induce hypoxia, an ethereal, oxygen-deprived state in which masturbation supposedly becomes more erotic. That bedroom was a strange sight, and Tomlin, of course, couldn’t help but show Polaroids to a few thousand other cops. After all, the poor guy looked damned silly decomposing in his leather shorts, arms trussed up over his head, toes clamped together by thumbcuffs, bondage magazines scattered across the dresser. Bizarre stuff, and no one would have believed it without the photographs. Neither privacy nor dignity had much of a chance on that one.
Almost every detective has encountered two or three scenes where some relative tried, for reasons of propriety more than deception, to dress a dead body. Likewise, almost every detective has handled a dozen overdoses in which mothers and fathers had felt compelled to hide the needle and cooker before the ambulance arrived. One suicide prompted a parent to painstakingly rewrite the victim’s note in the desire to exclude one especially embarrassing admission. The world never stops insisting on values and standards, although such things no longer matter to the dead. The world never stops calling for a little dignity, a little propriety, but the cops never stop calling for the morgue wagon; between the two lies an abyss that can never be bridged.
In the Baltimore homicide office, privacy is a stillborn idea. The unit, after all, is a locker room of sorts, a male-dominated purgatory in which thirty-six detectives and detective sergeants wander in and out of each other’s lives, cracking jokes as this detective’s marriage implodes and that detective shows the unmistakable signs of alcohol addiction.
A homicide detective isn’t any more or less degenerate than any other middle-aged American male, but since he spends his life prying up other men’s secrets, he has little regard for his own. And in a world where the act of premeditated murder becomes routine, any more subtle sin has trouble competing. Any man can drink too much and wreck his station wagon on an upcounty road, but a homicide detective can tell the rest of his squad the story in a voice that betrays equal shares of bravado and embarrassment. Any man can pick up a woman in a downtown bar, but a homicide detective will later entertain his partner with a comedic soliloquy that describes in detail all the later action at the motel. Any man can lie to his wife, but a homicide detective will sit in the middle of the coffee room yelling into a phone extension that he has to work late on a case and if she doesn’t believe that, she can go to hell. And then, after convincing her, he will slam down the receiver and stalk ov
er to the coat rack.
“I’m down at the Market Bar,” he will tell five other detectives, all of whom are fighting back laughter. “But if she calls back, I’m on the street.”
A detective understands that another world is out there, another universe in which discretion and privacy still have meaning. Somewhere far from Baltimore, he knows, there are taxpayers who hold dear the idea of a good and secret death—a well-lived life, becalmed at its end, extinguished in some private, comfortable place with equal measures of grace and solitude. They’ve heard a lot about that kind of death, but they rarely see it. To them, death is violence and miscalculation, mindlessness and cruelty. And what, a detective can ask, does privacy matter amid that kind of carnage?
Several months ago, Danny Shea from Stanton’s shift drove to a high-rise apartment house near the Hopkins campus for an unattended death. She was an elderly music teacher, fully rigored on her daybed, with the score of a Mozart concerto still open on the piano. The FM radio was playing quietly in the living room, tuned to a classical station at the end of the dial. Shea recognized the piece.
“You know what that is?” he asked a uniform, a young man writing his report at the kitchen table.
“What’s what?”
“The piece on the radio.”
“Uh-uh.”
“Ravel,” said Shea. “‘Pavane to a Dead Princess.’”
It was a beautiful, natural death, quite startling in its perfection. Shea suddenly felt himself an intruder in the old woman’s apartment, a violator of a genuinely private act.
A similar feeling now comes over Donald Waltemeyer when he looks at a dead addict and listens to her husband walking up the stairs. There is nothing beautiful or poignant in the death of Lisa Turner: Waltemeyer knows that she was twenty-eight years old, that she was from North Carolina and that she was married. And for reasons beyond his comprehension, she came up to this second-floor shithole to fire heroin until it killed her. End of story.
And still, something clicks for just a moment, some long-lost switch in Waltemeyer’s brain is suddenly thrown to overload. Perhaps it’s because she was young, perhaps because she looks pretty in the light blue sweater. Perhaps it’s because a price must be paid for all this privacy, because you can only be a bystander for so long without paying some of the cost yourself.
Waltemeyer looks down at the girl, listens to the husband struggle up the stairs, and suddenly, almost without thinking, reaches for the falling shoulder of a dead woman’s sweater.
When the husband appears at the door, Waltemeyer asks the question immediately: “Is that her?”
“Oh God,” the man says. “Oh my God.”
“Okay, that’s it,” says Waltemeyer, motioning to the uniform. “Thank you, sir.”
“Who the hell is he?” says the husband, glaring at Milton. “What the hell is he doing here?”
“Get him out of here,” says Waltemeyer, blocking the husband’s view. “Take him downstairs now.”
“Just tell me who he is, goddammit.”
Both uniforms grab the husband and begin pushing him out of the apartment. Easy, they tell him. Take it easy.
“I’m okay. I’m all right,” he tells them in the hallway. “I’m okay.”
They guide him to the other end of the hall, standing with him as he leans into the plasterboard and catches his breath.
“I just want to know what that guy was doing in there with her.”
“It’s his apartment,” says one of the uniforms.
The husband shows his pain, and the uniform volunteers the obvious information: “She just went in there to fire up. She wasn’t fucking the guy or anything like that.”
Another small act of charity, but the husband shakes it off.
“I know that,” says the husband quickly. “I just wanted to know if he was the guy that got her the drugs, that’s all.”
“No. She brought hers with her.”
The husband nods. “I couldn’t get her to stop,” he tells the cop. “I loved her, but I couldn’t get her to stop it. She wouldn’t listen. She told me where she was going tonight because she knew I couldn’t stop her …”
“Yeah,” says the cop, uncomfortable.
“She was such a beautiful girl.”
The cop says nothing.
“I loved her.”
“Uh-huh,” says the cop.
Waltemeyer finishes the scene and drives back to the office in silence, the entire event now confined to a page and a half of his notebook. He catches every light on St. Paul Street.
“What did you get?” asks McLarney.
“Nothing much. An OD.”
“Junkie?”
“It was a young girl.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Pretty.”
Very pretty, thinks Waltemeyer. You could see how, if she had cleaned herself up, she would have been special. Long dark hair. Big traffic-light eyes.
“How old?” asks McLarney.
“Twenty-eight. She was married. I thought she was a lot younger at first.”
Waltemeyer walks to a typewriter. In five minutes, it will all be just another 24-hour report. In five minutes, you can ask him about that loose sweater and he won’t know what you’re talking about. But now, right now, it’s real.
“You know,” he tells his sergeant. “The other day my boy comes home from school, and he’s sitting there in the living room with me and he says, ‘Hey, Dad, someone offered me coke in school today…’”
McLarney nods.
“And I’m thinking, aw shit, here it comes. And then he just smiles and tells me, ‘But I asked for Pepsi instead.’”
McLarney laughs softly.
“Some nights you go out and see shit that’s no good for you,” says Waltemeyer suddenly. “You know what I mean? No fucking good at all.”
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 1
Roger Nolan picks up the phone and begins shuffling through the admin office card file for Joe Kopera’s home number. The department’s best ballistics man will be working late tonight.
From the hallway comes the sound of loud banging on the large interrogation room door.
“Hey, Rog,” says one of Stanton’s detectives, “is that your man making all that noise?”
“Yeah. I’ll be there in a second.”
Nolan finds the number and reaches Kopera, explaining the situation quickly. He finishes the call to even louder banging.
“Hey, Rog, shut this motherfucker up, will you?”
Nolan walks through the fishbowl and out into the hallway. The devil himself has his face pressed against the window in the door, hands cupped around his eyes, trying to peer through the one-way glass.
“What’s your problem?”
“I gotta go to the bathroom.”
“The bathroom, huh? I bet you want a drink of water too.”
The devil needs to take a leak. Evil incarnate wants a drink of water. Nolan shakes his head and opens the metal door. “I’ll be damned,” he tells the suspect. “Every time you put one of these motherfuckers in the box, they lose control of their bladder and start getting dizzy from thirst … Okay, c’mon, let’s get it over with …”
The suspect steps slowly from the room, a thirty-one-year-old black man, thinly built, with receding, close-cropped hair and deep brown eyes. His face is rounded, his wide mouth marked by gap teeth and a long overbite. His sweatsuit is a size too big, his high-top tennis shoes well worn. Nothing in his appearance gives truth to his abominable deed: There is nothing in the face to inspire fear, nothing in the eyes to call extraordinary. He is altogether ordinary, and for that reason, too, he inspires contempt.
His name is Eugene Dale, and the computer sheet on Harry Edgerton’s desk provides enough history for two murderers. Most of the arrests involve rape, attempted rape and handgun violations; in fact, Dale is now on parole, having just been released by the state corrections department after serving nine years for sexual assault.
“If you’re not out here
in three minutes,” Nolan tells him at the men’s room door, “I gotta come in there after you. Understand?”
Eugene Dale walks out of the men’s room two minutes later, looking sheepish. Nolan points him back down the hallway.
“My drink,” says the suspect.
“So?” says Nolan. “Drink.”
Dale stops at the water cooler, then wipes the wetness from his face with his sleeve. The suspect is returned to his cubicle, where he waits for Edgerton, who is at this moment in another interview room, talking with the people who know Dale best, absorbing all of the available background for the coming interrogation.
It would have been a better piece of drama if an act of rare investigative genius had produced Eugene Dale. For the detectives who suffered through Latonya Wallace, it would have been a perfectly righteous moment if some subtle connection in the Andrea Perry case file had caused this man to materialize in an interrogation room. And for Harry Edgerton, it would have been pure vindication if some brilliant discovery during his lonely and methodical pursuit had given them the name.
But, as usual, poetic justice has no place here. Edgerton did everything possible to find his suspect, but in the end, the suspect found him. Wanted for the cold-blooded murder of one child, the man fidgeting in the large interrogation room waited all of two weeks before he went out and raped another.
Still, when the second rape report came in, everyone in the unit knew immediately what it meant. Edgerton had laid the groundwork for that, meeting with the operations people in three districts and warning them to be looking for anything sexual or anything involving a .32-caliber firearm. So when the second rape report was copied to the Southern District’s operations unit, a female officer there, Rita Cohen, knew exactly what was what. The second victim was a thirteen-year-old who had been lured by Dale to a vacant rowhouse on South Mount Street, then threatened with a “silver-looking” handgun and raped. Dale let this girl live, though he warned her that if she told anyone about the attack he would find her again and shoot her in the back of the head. The young victim promised not to tell, but did precisely the opposite when she returned home to her mother. As it happened, she knew her attacker by name and address both—her best friend was the young daughter of Dale’s girlfriend.
