Homicide (31 page)

The girl comes up screaming with her forearms extended, both palms covered with blood. Sensing an ugly dry cleaning bill, Garvey steps back, then moves toward the door.

“All right, Jackie,” he says. “Thank you, honey. You’ve got my phone number, right?”

Jackie Lucas nods, then turns away to comfort her sister. As the screaming reaches a still higher pitch, Garvey makes his escape, following the lab tech down the steps and crawling into the cold interior of the Cavalier. He has spent a little less than four hours working the scene.

Before returning to the homicide office, Garvey makes a point of driving another twelve blocks north to see if an extra hand is needed on a suspicious death call that came in three hours after the call for Gilmor. Earlier, Garvey telephoned the office and heard from Dave Brown that the second call might also be a murder and might in some way be related to Gilmor Street. Garvey arrives on the second floor of a Lafayette Avenue rowhouse to find Rick James and Dave Brown working the murder of a fifty-year-old man.

Like Lena Lucas, the Lafayette Avenue victim has been shot in the head and stabbed repeatedly, this time in the chest. And like Lena Lucas, there is a pillow near the victim’s head, marred by a large amount of gunshot residue. Moreover, the face of this victim is also covered by the same
series of shallow cuts—more than twenty this time. Obviously dead for some time, the victim was found by several family members who had become concerned and entered through an unlocked rear door. Here, too, there was no sign of forced entry, but this time the room where the victim was found had been ransacked.

The two cases become unequivocally joined when Garvey learns that the dead man is Purnell Hampton Booker, the father of one Vincent Booker, who is the same entrepreneurial lad who works for Robert Frazier, who sells dope and sleeps with Lena Lucas. Standing in the dead man’s bedroom, Garvey knows that the same hand almost certainly took both lives.

Leaving Brown and James to work their scene, Garvey returns to the homicide office and buries himself in paperwork at a back desk. He’s still there when the detectives return from Lafayette Avenue.

As if the immediate similarities between both crime scenes aren’t enough to link the killings, the spent bullet pulled from Purnell Booker’s brain at the next morning’s autopsy is a .38 ass-backward wadcutter. Later that evening, Dave Brown, the primary on Lafayette Avenue, saunters over to Garvey’s desk with an ident photo of young Vincent Booker.

“Yo bunk, looks like we be working together.”

“Looks like.”

As it happens, already that afternoon Garvey has heard from an anonymous tipster, a woman who called the homicide office to say she heard talk at a West Pratt Street bar. One man was telling another that the same gun was used to kill Lena Lucas and the old man on Lafayette.

Interesting rumor. A day later, ballistics says the same thing.

M
ONDAY
, F
EBRUARY 29

A week has passed since Lena Lucas and Purnell Booker were found dead on the same night, yet the two cases are still moving slowly, inexorably, forward. Fresh reports clutter both files, and in the Baltimore homicide unit, where one day’s violence is overwhelmed by that of the next, a thick file is regarded as a healthy sign. Time itself mocks the most careful investigations, and a detective—conscious of that fact—spends his precious hours working the best angles, bringing the likely witnesses and suspects downtown, hoping that something will fall. For he knows that well before he has a chance to play long shots or, better still, to embark on a prolonged, detailed investigation, another case folder will arrive on his desk.
But somehow, in some special way, the law of diminishing returns has never applied to Rich Garvey.

“He’s like a dog with a bone,” Roger Nolan once told another sergeant with pride. “If he gets a case and there’s anything there at all, he won’t let go of it.”

Of course, Nolan only says that to other sergeants; to Garvey he says nothing of the sort, cleaving instead to the fiction that it’s normal for a detective to drop a case only when there’s nothing left to give up on. It is, in truth, anything but normal. Because after fifty or sixty or seventy homicides, the reality is that the dead-yo-in-the-alley scenario begins to wear thin. And nothing deflates a detective more than going back to the office, punching a victim’s name into the admin office terminal and pulling out five or six computer pages of misbehavior, a criminal history that reaches from eye level to the office floor. Burnout is more than an occupational hazard in the homicide unit, it is a psychological certainty. A contagion that spreads from one detective to his partner to a whole squad, the who-really-gives-a-shit attitude threatens not those investigations involving genuine victims—such cases are, more often than not, the cure for burnout—but rather those murders in which the dead man is indistinguishable from his killer. An American detective’s philosophical cul-de-sac: If a drug dealer falls in West Baltimore and no one is there to hear him, does he make a sound?

After four years in homicide and thirteen on the force, Garvey is one of the few residents of the unit still unafflicted with the virus. It is telling that while most detectives can’t keep the cases straight in their minds after a few years in the trenches, Garvey can immediately tell you that out of twenty-five or twenty-six cases in which he was the primary, the number of open files can be counted on one hand.

“How many exactly?”

“Four, I think. No, five.”

Vanity isn’t what prompts Garvey to keep such a statistic in his head; it’s simply his central frame of reference. Determined, aggressive, persistent to a fault, Garvey likes working murders; more than that, he still takes an open murder or a weak plea bargain personally. That alone is enough to make him seem like a relic, a surviving piece of shrapnel from an ethic that crashed and burned a generation or two back, when the “if at first you don’t succeed” platitude was replaced in all Baltimore municipal offices by the more succinct “that’s not my job,” then, later, by the more definitive “shit happens.”

Rich Garvey is an anachronism, a product of a Middle American childhood in which the Little Engine That Could was taken seriously. It’s Garvey who will readily abandon decorum and diplomacy to jump in a prosecutor’s shit when second-degree and twenty just isn’t good enough, telling an assistant state’s attorney that any lawyer with hair on his ass wouldn’t take anything less than first-degree and fifty. It’s Garvey who shows up for work with a raging flu, then works a Pigtown bludgeoning because, what the hell, if he’s on the clock he may as well handle a call. And it’s Garvey who photocopies the “Remember, we work for God” quote by Vernon Geberth, the New York police commander and homicide expert, then posts one above his desk and distributes the rest around the office. Blessed with an acute sense of humor, Garvey is aware that as credos go, Geberth’s is both maudlin and pompous. He can’t help it; in fact, that makes him like it all the more.

He was born in an Irish, working-class neighborhood of Chicago, the only son of a sales executive for the Spiegel catalogue retailing company. At least until the end of his career, when the company judged his position to be expendazble, Garvey’s father had prospered, and his family had enough to escape to the suburbs when the old neighborhood began going bad in the late 1950s. The elder Garvey applied his own ambition to his son, whom he liked to imagine as a future sales executive, maybe even for Spiegel; Garvey thought otherwise.

He spent a couple of years at a small Iowa college, then finished up with a degree in criminology at Kent State. In 1970, when National Guardsmen fired their lethal volley into a crowd of Vietnam protestors on the Ohio campus, Garvey was walking away from the disturbances. Like many students, he had doubts about the war, but he also happened to have a class that day and, if the shootings hadn’t closed the campus, Garvey would have been front and center, taking notes. A young man out of step with his times, he was looking to a police career in an era when law enforcement did not exactly stir the imagination of America’s young. Garvey had his own way of looking at things. Police work would always be interesting, he believed. And even in the worst economic recession, there would always be a job for a cop.

Upon graduation, however, that last bit of logic was not so easily demonstrated. Open positions were hard to come by in the mid-1970s, with many urban police departments retrenching in an inflationary economy. Newly married to his college sweetheart, Garvey fell into a security job with Montgomery Ward. It was nearly a year later, in 1975,
when he heard that the Baltimore department was hiring patrolmen, offering pay and benefit incentives for college graduates. He and his wife drove down to Maryland, then toured the city and surrounding counties. Driving through the gentle, contoured valleys and sprawling horse farms in northern Baltimore County, they fell in love with the Chesapeake region. It was, they reasoned, a fine place to raise a family. Then Garvey took his own tour of the city’s slums—east side, west side, lower Park Heights—scouting the places in which he would earn a living.

He went from the academy to the Central District, where he drew the post at Brookfield and Whitelock. Business was brisk; Reservoir Hill in the late 1970s was as ragged a neighborhood as when Latonya Wallace turned up in an alley there a decade later. McLarney, for one, could remember Garvey from the years when both men were in the Central; he could remember, too, that Garvey was without doubt the best man in his squad. “He answered calls and he would fight,” McLarney would say, commending the two qualities that truly matter in a radio car.

Given his hunger for work, Garvey’s career ran a steady course: six years in the Central, then another four as one of the most reliable burglary detectives in CID’s property crimes section, then the transfer to homicide. Arriving in June 1985, Garvey soon became the centerpiece of Roger Nolan’s squad. Kincaid was the veteran, Edgerton the artful loner, but it was Garvey who worked the lion’s share of the calls, readily teaming himself with McAllister, Kincaid, Bowman or any other warm body that happened on a fresh murder. Tellingly, when other detectives in the squad began ranting about Edgerton’s workload, Garvey would often remind everyone, without any sarcasm, that he had no complaint.

“Harry’s going to do what he’s going to do,” Garvey would offer, as if murder had somehow become a precious commodity in Baltimore. “That just means there’s more for me.”

Garvey genuinely loved being a murder police. He loved the scenes, he loved the feeling of pursuit, the adolescent rush of hearing handcuffs click. He even loved the sound of the word itself; that much was evident every time he returned from a scene.

“What’d you have out there?” Nolan would ask.

“Murder, mister.”

Give the man a fresh one every three weeks and he’s content. Give him more than that, he’s downright pleased. During one midnight tour in the summer of 1987, Garvey and Donald Worden worked five murders in five days, three of them on a single night. It was the sort of midnight shift
when a detective has trouble remembering which witnesses came downtown from which homicide. (“Okay now, everyone who’s here from Etting Street raise your right hand.”) Still, four of the five went down, and both Garvey and the Big Man relished that week as a pleasant memory.

Yet ask other detectives to name the best men at a crime scene and they’ll mention Terry McLarney, Eddie Brown, Kevin Davis from Stanton’s shift, and Garvey’s partner, Bob McAllister. Ask about the best interrogators and the list will include Donald Kincaid, Kevin Davis, Jay Landsman and maybe Harry Edgerton if his co-workers are feeling generous enough to include known subversives in the balloting. The best men to testify in open court? Landsman, Worden, McAllister and Edgerton are the usual nominees. The best man out on the street? Worden, hands down, with Edgerton a close second.

So what about Garvey?

“Oh Christ, yeah,” his colleagues will say, suddenly reminded. “He’s a helluva detective.”

Why?

“He stays with them.”

For a homicide detective, staying with them is half the battle, and tonight, with the arrival of Robert Frazier in the homicide office, the battle over Lena Lucas and Purnell Booker is yet another step closer to being won.

Frazier is tall and thin, dark complected, with deep-set brown eyes beneath a high, sloping forehead, above which a layer of close-cropped hair is just beginning to recede. He moves like a man who has spent his years on street corners, gliding down the sixth-floor corridor toward the interrogation rooms in a practiced pimp roll, shoulders and hips pushing the body forward in a slow, locomotive fashion. Frazier’s face rarely breaks from an unsettling stare, a gaze all the more unnerving because he rarely blinks his eyes. His voice is a deep monotone, and his sentences are braced by an economy of language that suggests words being chosen with care or, perhaps, few words from which to choose. At thirty-six, Robert Frazier is a part-time steelworker and state parolee who can look upon his shoestring cocaine enterprise as a second career of sorts; a previous apprenticeship at armed robbery was curtailed abruptly by a six-year sentence.

The total package pleases Garvey immensely, for the simple reason that Robert Frazier looks exactly like a murderer.

It is a small satisfaction, but one that always makes the chase seem a little more worthwhile. By and large, what sits at the defendant’s table in a Baltimore circuit court rarely seems at first glance to be sufficient to the
wanton destruction of human life, and even after forty or fifty cases, there is still something in the heart of every detective that registers disappointment when the person responsible for an extraordinary act of evil turns out to resemble nothing more sinister than the counterman at a midtown 7-Eleven. Alcoholics, dopers, welfare mothers, borderline mental cases, adolescent yos and yoettes in designer sweatsuits—with only a handful of exceptions, those who claim a place on Baltimore’s murderers row aren’t the most visually threatening crew ever assembled. But with a low rumble to his voice and that thousand-yard stare, Frazier adds a little something to the melodrama. Here is a man for whom large-caliber handguns were created.