Homicide

by David Simon

  Above the cross-tab charts on the bulletin board, Pellegrini has fixed a blue line zoning map of the Reservoir Hill area, with between eighty and one hundred structures highlighted in yellow—each noting the location of a fire call within the past five years. The Fish Man’s store on Whitelock Street, however, is marked in darker orange. The map is in every real sense a lie—a deception that Pellegrini can use without any fear of discovery. In truth, he has been unable to eliminate the vast majority of those yellow marks on the map; any one of them can theoretically have been the site at which the little girl’s pants had been smudged. And yet, for the purpose of this interrogation, nothing like that can possibly be true. For this interrogation, Pellegrini will tell the Fish Man that the chemical analysis has left no doubt: The black smudges on the dead girl’s pants came from the darker orange square at the elbow of Whitelock Street.

  The chemical analysis—the linchpin of this interrogation—gave them real leverage, but it also gave them the Out. Maybe you didn’t kill her, Foster can tell him. Maybe you didn’t touch her and violate her and then choke the life from her. Maybe you weren’t the one who took a kitchen knife to her afterward, emptying her until you were sure she was dead. But, Foster can say, you know who did do it. You know because she was killed on that Tuesday night and then left in your burned-out fish store all day Wednesday. She was left there to wait for the rainy darkness of early Thursday morning. She was in that store and the soot and burned wood on her pants proves it. If you didn’t kill her, maybe someone else—someone you know, or someone whose name you don’t remember—hid the little girl inside your store.

  Beyond the snare of the chemical analysis, Pellegrini has little else: the failed polygraph, the acknowledged prior relationship with the dead girl, the absence of any verifiable alibi. The case is motive, opportunity and apparent deception, coupled with one lonely piece of physical evidence. A final trump card to be played at a key moment lies deep in Pellegrini’s jacket pocket, where he carries one last photograph. But that old picture can’t be called evidence; it is, the detective knows, no better than a hunch.

  Foster meanders through the opening monologue. After spending half an hour establishing his own expertise, the veteran interrogator proceeds to lionize Pellegrini as well. Foster acknowledges that the Fish Man and his principal pursuer have met in the past, but, he explains, Pellegrini did not give up on this case after those earlier confrontations. No, Foster says, he continued to work on you. He continued to gather evidence.

  The Fish Man remains impassive.

  “What’s going to happen here today is different from what happened when you talked to Detective Pellegrini before,” says Foster.

  The store owner nods slightly. A strange gesture, thinks Pellegrini.

  “You’ve been here before, but you didn’t tell the truth,” says Foster, turning the corner and launching into the first confrontation. “We know that.”

  The Fish Man shakes his head.

  “I’m telling you we know that.”

  “I don’t know anything.”

  “Yes,” says Foster quietly. “You do.”

  Very slowly and very deliberately, Foster begins to explain the chemical comparison of the dead girl’s pants and the samples from the Whitelock Street store. At the appropriate moment, Pellegrini reaches down and pulls the soiled pants from a brown evidence bag, then lays the garment on the table, pointing to the black smudges near the knees.

  The Fish Man doesn’t react.

  Foster presses on, pointing to a photograph of the dead girl behind Newington Avenue, showing the store owner that the black smudges were there on the pants when they found her.

  “Now look at this,” he says, pointing to the ATF report. “These lines here show what these stains are made of, and these over here, they show what it is that Detective Pellegrini took from your store.”

  Nothing. No reaction.

  “See this map,” says Pellegrini, pointing to the bulletin board. “We checked every building in Reservoir Hill where there has ever been a fire and none of them match these stains.”

  “None of them except yours,” adds Foster.

  The Fish Man shakes his head. He is not angry. He is not even defensive. To Pellegrini, his lack of response is unnerving.

  “She was in your store and she got that stuff on her pants,” says Foster. “Either just before or just after she was killed, she got that stuff on her pants in your store.”

  “I don’t know nothing about that,” says the Fish Man.

  “Yes, you do,” says Foster.

  The Fish Man shakes his head.

  “Well, then what is this stuff from your store doing on her pants?”

  “It can’t be. I don’t know how that can be.”

  Somehow they’re not getting through. The interrogators return to their visual aids, covering the same ground a second time. Foster leads the store owner through it slowly enough so that there can be no mistaking the logic.

  “Look at these lines here,” says Foster, pointing to the ATF report. “It’s exactly the same. How do you explain that?”

  “I can’t … I don’t know.”

  “You do know,” says Foster. “Don’t lie to me.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  “Well then how do you explain it?”

  The Fish Man shrugs.

  “Maybe,” suggests Foster, “maybe you didn’t kill her. But maybe you know who did. Maybe you let someone else hide her in your store. Is that what you’re hiding?”

  The Fish Man looks up from the floor.

  “Maybe someone else asked to put something in your store and you didn’t even know what it was,” says Foster, probing. “There’s got to be some explanation because Latonya was in your store.”

  The Fish Man shakes his head, a little at first, then firmly. He backs up in his chair, folding his arms. He isn’t buying. “She couldn’t be in my store.”

  “But she was. Did someone else put her there?”

  The Fish Man hesitates.

  “What’s his name?”

  “No. No one put her there.”

  “Well, she was there. This report says that.”

  “No,” says the Fish Man.

  A dead end. Instinctively, Foster veers away from the confrontation and the two detectives begin leading their suspect through a complete statement. Pellegrini, in particular, probes for even the faintest suggestion of an alibi and asks all the requisite background questions once again. Slowly, painfully, the same answers—about his relationship with Latonya, his vague alibi, his feeling about women—come back across the table, and for the first time in ten months the Fish Man begins to show some impatience. And his answer to one question changes.

  “When did you last see Latonya?” asks Pellegrini for perhaps the tenth time.

  “When did I last see her?”

  “Before she was killed.”

  “On Sunday. She came by the store.”

  “Sunday?” asks Pellegrini, startled.

  The Fish Man nods.

  “The Sunday before she disappeared?”

  The Fish Man nods again.

  It is a crack in the wall. In the earlier interrogations, the store owner swore that he hadn’t seen the little girl for two weeks before the murder and Pellegrini had found no witness who could refute the claim definitively. Now, on his own, the Fish Man is putting the little girl in his store two days before the murder and only days after the fire that gutted the Whitelock Street shop.

  “What did she come to the store about?”

  “She came to see if she could help after the fire.”

  Pellegrini wonders. Is he lying to compensate for the chemical evidence, thinking that an earlier visit to the burned-out store could explain the stains on the pants? Or was he lying in the earlier interviews, when he was trying to distance himself from any contact with the dead girl? Is he telling the truth now with no memory of his earlier answers? Is he confused? Is he remembering this for the first time?<
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  “When we talked to you before, you said you hadn’t seen Latonya for two weeks before she disappeared,” says Pellegrini. “Now you say you saw her the Sunday before.”

  “Two weeks?”

  “You said you hadn’t seen her for two weeks.”

  The Fish Man shakes his head.

  “That’s what you told us every other time. We wrote it down.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Something is happening here. Slowly, carefully, Foster leads the store owner back to the edge of the cliff, back to the ATF report and the insistent logic of the chemical samples.

  “If you didn’t have her in the store,” asks the interrogator, “then who did?”

  The Fish Man shakes his head. Pellegrini looks at his watch and realizes that they’ve been going at it for five full hours. Time matters here: A confession obtained within six or seven hours is of far greater evidentiary value than one produced in ten or twelve hours of interrogation.

  Now or never, thinks Pellegrini as he pulls the last trick from his sleeve. From a jacket pocket comes the photograph of the little girl from Montpelier Street, the look-alike to Latonya who disappeared in the late 1970s. He has saved a copy of the photo he found in the newspaper library months earlier; he has saved it for just this moment.

  “Tell me,” says Pellegrini, handing the old picture to his suspect, “do you know who this is?”

  Already in some distress from Foster’s challenges, the Fish Man looks down at the photograph and suddenly seems to crumble. Pellegrini watches him pitch forward; his head drops, his hands grip the edges of the conference table.

  “You know this girl?”

  “Yes,” says the Fish Man quietly, “I know her.” He nods, his pain visible. He is falling apart in front of them, this man who had been nothing more than stone in every prior encounter. Now he is at the cliff’s edge, looking over, ready to leap.

  “How do you know this girl?”

  The Fish Man hesitates for a moment, his hands still gripping the edges of the table.

  “How do you know her?”

  Then, just as suddenly, the moment passes. Whatever shock comes from that old photograph is abruptly gone. The Fish Man sits back in his chair and crosses his arms, and for just a moment he meets Pellegrini’s eyes with a look of unmistakable menace. If you want me, the look seems to say, you’re going to need more. If you want me, you’re going to have to take me all the way.

  “I thought,” says the Fish Man, “you were showing me a picture of Latonya.”

  Like hell you did, thinks Pellegrini. Both interrogators share a look and Foster launches into another assault, this one delivered in nothing more than a whisper, his face only inches from the store owner.

  “Listen to me. Are you listening to me?” says Foster. “I’m going to tell you the truth now. I’m going to tell you what I know …”

  The Fish Man stares back intently.

  “I’ve seen your kind before—many, many times before. I know what you’re about; we all know what you’re about. Tom over here knows you. Every one of us knows you because we’ve seen your kind before. You like the young girls and they like you, don’t they? And that’s fine as far as it goes, and as long as they can keep quiet about things, then you don’t have any problem …”

  Pellegrini looks at his suspect, stunned. The Fish Man is slowly nodding his head in seeming agreement.

  “But you’ve got this one rule, don’t you? You’ve got this one rule that you have to follow, this one rule that has to be obeyed, and we both know what that rule is, don’t we?”

  Again, the Fish Man nods his head.

  “If you cry, you die,” says Foster. “If you cry, you die.”

  The Fish Man is silent.

  “That’s the one rule you have, isn’t it? If they cry out, then they’ve got to die. You like them a lot and you like it when they like you, but if they cry, they die. That’s what happened with Latonya, and that’s what happened with this girl right here,” says Foster, pointing to the old photograph. “She cried and she died.”

  To Pellegrini, it seems an eternity before the suspect regains his composure, before he manages to stop nodding his head and respond. When at last he does, it is definitive, unshakable.

  “No,” says the man firmly. “I didn’t hurt Latonya.”

  The steel in the Fish Man’s voice forces Pellegrini to make his own confession: It’s gone. They’ve lost him. They had come close; Pellegrini knew that. Foster’s methods and talents and secrets were powerful and their plan had been carefully drawn and executed, but in the end, the case file is what it is. There exists, Pellegrini now knows, no magic bullet, no hidden science yet to be learned. Ultimately, the Answer is always evidence, plain and simple.

  Before the interrogation began, in fact, Foster had tried to get Tim Doory to charge the murder on the basis of the ATF report alone, arguing that with the charge already on him, the Fish Man would be more inclined to confess. Possibly, but what if he didn’t confess? What would they do with the charge then? Dismiss it prior to indictment? Issue a stet? This was a high-profile case, the kind that no prosecutor wants to lose. No, Doory told him, we charge when the evidence is there. Foster accepted the decision, but the question itself had unnerved both Pellegrini and Landsman; it was the first suggestion that their interrogator couldn’t walk on water. Now, Doory paces in the hall outside the conference room with Landsman, periodically checking his watch. Six hours and counting.

  “Hey, Jay,” says the prosecutor. “It’s been more than six. I’ll hang around for another hour or so, but after that I don’t know what we can do with it even if he does break.”

  Landsman nods, then walks to the conference room to listen for voices. He can tell by the long silences that things are no longer going well.

  After seven straight hours of interrogation, Pellegrini and Foster slide out for a cigarette and a twenty-minute break. Doory grabs his overcoat and walks Pellegrini toward the elevator, telling the detective to call him at home if anything develops.

  Landsman and the ATF analyst replace the two primary interrogators in the conference room, trying hard to pick up the thread.

  “Let me ask you something,” says Landsman.

  “What’s that?”

  “Do you believe in God?”

  “Do I believe in God?” asks the Fish Man.

  “Yeah. I don’t mean are you religious. I mean do you believe there’s a God?”

  “Oh yeah. I believe there’s a God.”

  “Yeah,” says Landsman. “Me, too.”

  The Fish Man nods in agreement.

  “What do you think God might do to the person who killed Latonya?”

  A shot in the dark from Landsman, but the Fish Man is now a veteran of the interrogation room and the ploy seems thin and transparent.

  “I don’t know,” says the Fish Man.

  “Do you think he feels like God will punish him for what he did to that girl?”

  “I don’t know,” says the Fish Man coldly. “You’d have to ask him.”

  When Pellegrini and Foster return to the conference room, Landsman is still firing random salvos. But whatever tension had been created in the first six hours is now completely dissipated. Pellegrini is chagrined to see that Landsman is dragging on a cigarette; worse, the Fish Man is smoking his pipe.

  Still, they give it the rest of the afternoon and early evening—fourteen hours in all—pressing their suspect longer and harder than most judges would permit. They know this, but in frustration, in anger, in certainty that there will be no further chance, they do it nonetheless. When the interrogation finally grinds to a halt, the Fish Man is sent at first to the fishbowl, then to a desk in the homicide office, where he watches the television screen blankly while waiting for a Central District radio car to return him to Whitelock Street.

  “Are you watching this?” he asks Howard Corbin, who looks up to see a sitcom.

  “No, I’m not,” says Corbin.
/>   “Is it all right if I change the channel then?” says the store owner.

  “Sure,” says Corbin. “Go ’head.”

  Corbin is comfortable with the man; he always was. Through the long months of working on the Latonya Wallace file, the aging detective never believed that the Fish Man had anything to do with the murder. Neither did Eddie Brown, and even Landsman had for a time shared their doubts. In the end, the Fish Man was Pellegrini’s obsession alone.

  “Is it all right if I smoke my pipe?” the store owner asks.

  “I don’t mind,” says Corbin, turning to Jack Barrick across the room. “Sergeant, do you mind if he smokes?”

  “Naw,” says Barrick. “I don’t give a damn.”

  There is no final scene for Tom Pellegrini and the Fish Man, no last words, no parting shots. In victory, a detective can be amusing and gracious, even generous; in defeat, he will try his damnedest to make believe you’re no longer there. The long day ends as separate scenes in separate rooms. In one, a man celebrates freedom by changing channels on a television set and stuffing a pipe with cheap tobacco. In another, a detective clears his desk of a bloated, dog-eared file, gathers up his gun, briefcase and overcoat, and steps heavily into a corridor that leads only to an elevator and a dark city street.

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 31

  They own you.

  From the moment you thought the thought, you were their property. You don’t believe it; hell, you didn’t even imagine it. You were sure they’d never catch you, sure you could draw heart’s blood twice and just walk away. But you should have saved yourself some trouble, called 911 yourself. Right from the start, you were a gift.

  But hey, it looked like a good move when you made it, didn’t it now? You got Ronnie in the back bedroom, stuck him good in a dozen places with that kitchen blade before he knew what was what. Ronnie did some screaming, but his brother didn’t hear a thing with that box beat going so loud in the other bedroom. Yeah, you had Ronnie all to yourself, and when you came down the hallway toward the other bedroom, you figured Ronnie’s brother deserved more of the same. The boy was still in bed when you walked in on him, looking up at the blade like he didn’t know what it was for.