Homicide (84 page)

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.”

T
UESDAY
, N
OVEMBER 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.

The crime was as stupid as it was evil. The girlfriend’s daughter had even seen Dale walking the victim home just before the assault, which may have been why he did not murder the thirteen-year-old after raping
her. He knew there was a witness, yet he abandoned all caution to satisfy his compulsion with another child.

After calling homicide and taking the rape victim’s statement, the Southern plainclothes officers wrote a warrant for Dale’s address on Gilmor Street, no more than a few blocks from the alley in which Andrea Perry had been murdered. The raid had been set for today, and though Edgerton was scheduled to be off, Nolan accompanied the Southern officers to the house and assured Edgerton that if the warrant produced any evidence or a viable suspect, he was back on the clock.

Less than half an hour after arriving at the Gilmor Street address, Nolan was on the phone to his detective, telling him, as he would tell Kopera later, to come back downtown. Eugene Dale wasn’t home when the raiding party came through his front door, but in an upstairs closet the Southern officer found a .32-caliber revolver loaded with automatic shells. That was all Nolan needed to know: Not only was Andrea Perry murdered with a .32, but the ballistics report showed light rifling marks on the bullet, suggesting automatic ammo fired through a revolver. And when Nolan spoke with the other occupants of the Gilmor Street home, they, too, matched with the case file.

Dale’s girlfriend, Rosalind, was strangely cooperative when questioned by Nolan, as was her girlfriend, Michelle, who happened to be dating Rosalind’s ex-boyfriend. Both expressed some initial surprise at the possibility of Eugene being connected to either the rape or the murder; eventually, however, in a later interview with Edgerton, they would agree that Dale just might be the kind of guy who would do something like that. And once the detective learned a little more about Rosalind, they were convinced they were on the right track. Recalling the anonymous call that came into the homicide office right after Andrea Perry’s murder—the call in which a male voice had claimed to see a woman run from the murder scene at the sound of gunshots—Edgerton mentioned the mystery woman’s name to Michelle and Rosalind.

“Loretta?” said Rosalind. “She’s my ex-boyfriend’s sister. We’re good friends.”

But Loretta Langley was not good friends with Eugene Dale; they had disliked each other from the very start, Rosalind explained. At that moment, Edgerton had little doubt that the unidentified caller was none other than Eugene Dale, attempting in the clumsiest fashion to blame his girl’s best friend for a rapemurder.

Days later, to satisfy himself that he had been right not to pick up
Loretta Langley for questioning on the strength of the anonymous call, Edgerton will interview Langley and tell her, for the first time, of the allegation that they had received in the earliest hours of the investigation. Asked if she would have thought of her best friend’s boyfriend if told about the male caller, she will say no. If he’d talked to her three weeks ago, Loretta Langley would have been nothing more than another dead end; now she is yet another link between Eugene Dale and a child’s murder.

Edgerton arrived at the homicide unit well before Nolan and began to go through the Southern district’s paperwork on the rape report. Later that afternoon, well after Nolan had returned to the office from the raid, Eugene Dale sauntered up to the Gilmor Street address. Before he was grabbed by a waiting district operations unit, he had time to learn of the search-and-seizure warrant and to ask his girlfriend one very telling question: “Did they find the gun?”

He came to rest in the large interrogation room and remained there, ignored for hours, as Edgerton proceeded to interview Michelle and Rosalind. He stayed there long after Kopera arrived and took the revolver—an H&R .32, serial number AB 18407, a weapon now caked in fingerprint dust—downstairs to his lab.

Long after Roger Nolan escorts him to the bathroom, Eugene Dale is still sitting in the box, bored and irritated. Enough time passes so that when Edgerton finally enters the room, his suspect—true to the rule—is on the verge of sleep. As the interrogation begins just after 10:00
P.M
., there is no banter and salesmanship; indeed, Edgerton treats his suspect with undisguised contempt.

“You want to talk to me, I’ll listen,” the detective says, pushing the rights form toward Dale. “You don’t want to say anything, I just charge you with the murder and go home. I don’t really care.”

“What do you mean?” says Dale.

Edgerton blows cigarette smoke across the table. With any other murder, all this stupidity might be amusing. With Andrea Perry, it sticks in his throat.

“Look at me,” says Edgerton, raising his voice. “You know that gun in your linen closet, right?”

Dale nods slowly.

“Where do you think that gun is right now?”

Dale says nothing.

“Where is it? Think hard, Eugene.”

“You all got it.”

“We got it,” says Edgerton. “That’s right. And right now, even as I’m talking to you, there are experts downstairs who are matching up that gun to the bullet we took out of that girl’s head.”

Eugene Dale shakes his head at the logic. Suddenly, both men feel a loud thump. A floor below, almost immediately beneath them, Joe Kopera is firing the .32 into a deep canister of water to produce the necessary slugs for comparison.

“That’s your gun right there,” says Edgerton. “Hear it? They’re testing it right now.”

“It’s not my gun.”

“It’s in your fucking closet. Whose gun is it? Rosalind’s? If we show that gun to the other little girl you messed with, she’s going to say it was your gun, isn’t she?”

“It’s not my gun.”

Edgerton stands up, his patience entirely leveled by five minutes in a room with this man. Dale looks up at the detective, his face a mixture of fright and sincerity.

“You’re wasting my fucking time, Eugene.”

“I didn’t—”

“Who do you think you’re fucking dealing with here?” asks Edgerton, his voice rising. “I don’t have the time to listen to your stupid bullshit.”

“Why are you yelling at me?”

Why am I yelling at you? Edgerton is tempted to tell the man the truth, to explain a little of the civilized world to a man living off its fringe. But that would be wasted breath.

“You don’t like people yelling at you?”

Dale says nothing.

Edgerton walks out of the interrogation room with a small kernel of rage growing inside him, a heat that few murderers ever manage to spark inside a detective. Part of it is the stupidity of Dale’s first attempt at a statement, part of it his childlike denial, but in the end what angers Harry Edgerton most is simply the magnitude of the crime. He sees Andrea Perry’s school picture inside the binder and it stokes the rage; how could such a life be destroyed by the likes of Eugene Dale?