Authors: David Simon
The lab tech on call is Bernie Magsamen—good man, Bernie is, one of the best—and so they take their time with the scene, pulling fingerprints off the nightstand and the used drinking glasses near the bed and in the bathroom sink. They get a good sketch and several photographs of the body in that bizarre position. They go through the old man’s belongings carefully, looking for what is missing, what may be missing, or what is there that shouldn’t be.
They do this because they know they’ve caught a murder; they know it and act on it with the same resolve by which other men would declare the scene to be a motel room or its occupant to be dead. To Worden and Waltemeyer, the death of Robert Yergin is a murder even though the victim is sixty-five and overweight, fully primed for a heart attack, a stroke or some other natural death. To them it’s a murder, though there isn’t a suggestion of any struggle or any trauma to the body; it’s a murder, though there isn’t a hint of petechial hemorrhaging in the whites of the eyes—the postmortem telltale that so often occasions strangulation. To them it’s a murder even after Worden finds the victim’s wallet still fat with cash and credit cards in a jacket pocket, suggesting that anyone who killed the old man did a lousy job of robbing him. It’s a murder because Robert Yergin, who takes to bed young boys he barely knows, is lying there in a weird position without his 1988 Ford Thunderbird. What else does a good detective need to know?
Little more than three hours later, Donald Worden is standing next to Donald Kincaid on the opposite side of town, staring at a thirty-foot smear of drying blood that ends in a red-purple lake after traveling the full length of a vacant West Lexington Street rowhouse. And although the
man whose carotid artery painted this picture is still clinging to life at Bon Secours, this, too, will come back a murder. Worden knows it, not only because so much blood has been sprayed across the dirty hallway tile, but also because he has no viable suspect.
Two whodunits in one night—the new standard by which a Baltimore detective can be judged. Any professional can work a series of mysteries on successive nights or handle dunkers in tandem on a rough midnight shift. But what prompts a man who inherits one open case file to then answer the telephone three hours later, grab a fresh pair of plastic gloves and a flashlight, and leave out for a West Baltimore shooting call?
“Well, well,” muses McLarney the morning after, as he stares at the fresh names on the board, “I guess it’s finally reached that point where Donald won’t trust anyone else with a murder.”
This is the Donald Worden around whom Terry McLarney built a squad, the Worden that Dave Brown can never please, the Worden that Rick James loves to call his partner. Two crime scenes, two autopsies, two family notifications, two sets of interviews, two batches of paperwork, two trips to the police computer for sheets on two separate sets of players—and not a word of complaint from the Big Man. Not even the barest suggestion that Waltemeyer may want to go it alone on the Eastgate murder, or that Kincaid will have to make do without a secondary for Lexington Street.
No, sir, Worden’s got himself a fresh pack of cigars, a full pot of coffee and McLarney’s signature on the bottom of a departmental overtime slip. He hasn’t slept in twenty-four hours and if he gets a break in either case, he won’t get near a bed for twelve more. It’s a hard road, a long haul—a ridiculous way for a grown man to earn a living. It’s also about as close to a feeling of immortality as a career cop ever gets.
In the end, he resurrected himself. In the end, he simply waited his anger out, waited for that phone line to light up with the cure that was bound to come. Straight murders, one after another, each one a unique variation of that same eternal evil; just crime and punishment, meted out to a working cop in roughly equal shares. God knows Worden had talked enough about quitting; in this job, he liked to tell colleagues, you eat the bear until the bear eats you, and I’m going to walk before that bad boy gets hungry.
Tough-guy talk. But no one really believed that Donald Worden would loosen his grip on that silver shield. It would have to be the other way around.
Three days after Worden picks up two murders on a single shift, both cases are in the black. The break in the Yergin case comes as a direct result of Worden’s prolonged interrogation of the victim’s teenage companion, a conversation that makes it clear enough that in the absence of any other suspect, the old man’s housemate will remain at the top of Worden’s list. Two days later the kid—still frightened—calls the homicide unit to say he’s heard that some white boys are driving the dead man’s Thunderbird around Pigtown and Carroll Park.
Worden and Waltemeyer drive down to the upper end of the Southern District, where Waltemeyer talks to a few of the older hands with whom he served for so long. The Southern troops are already known for reading homicide teletypes, but for their old bunky Waltemeyer they’ll go so far as to tow every T-bird in the district down to headquarters. An hour after the detectives’ visit, two Southern men stop the right car at Pratt and Carey and take the driver, a seventeen-year-old male prostitute, into custody. Worden and Waltemeyer tag-team the suspect in the large interrogation room until he admits to being in the motel room; unaware that the autopsy proved the death to be suffocation, he claims the old man died of a seizure. When the two detectives complete the statement and leave the room, the kid stands up and uses the two-way window in the door as a mirror, breaking pimples and fretting over his complexion as if he’s still an ordinary teenager, contemplating a Friday night date.
The Lexington Street murder, a dispute over a small narcotics sale, is solved on a recanvass of the shooting scene, when Worden’s photographic memory matches the face of an old man who answers a door in the 1500 block with the face of a bystander he saw hanging out on a corner the night of the murder. Sure enough, the old man admits to being a witness and identifies the shooter from a photo array. But it’s still a weak, one-witness case until the suspect arrives downtown, whereupon Worden lets loose with the full blue-eyed, white-haired father-figure treatment and persuades the shooter to give up everything. So effective is Worden’s method that the suspect actually calls the detective from the city jail two weeks later with secondhand gossip about an unrelated murder.
“Detective Worden, I also just wanted to call and wish you a Merry Christmas,” he tells the man who has jailed him. “For you and your family both.”
“Thank you very much, Timmy,” says Worden, a little touched. “My best to you and yours for the holidays.”
Two up and two down. For Worden, the last weeks of a year that was so utterly frustrating now roll effortlessly onward, as if scripted for some cops-and-robbers television show in which all the crimes will be solved and explained before the last commercial break.
Three days before Christmas, the Big Man and Rick James go out on an East Baltimore shooting call, driving away from headquarters on a December night so unseasonably humid that the city is layered in thick, blinding fog. As the Cavalier lurches up Fayette Street, both detectives squint through the mist at the vaguest outline of rowhouses on either side of the street.
“This is fucking soup,” says James.
“I always wanted to work a murder in fog,” says Worden, almost wistful. “Like Sherlock Holmes.”
“Yeah,” agrees James. “That guy was always finding bodies in this shit …”
“ ’Cause it was London,” says Worden, pulling slowly through the light at Broadway.
“And it was always some motherfucker named Murray who did it. Murray something …”
“Murray?” says Worden, confused.
“Yeah, the killer was always named Murray.”
“Moriarty, you mean. Professor Moriarty.”
“Yeah,” says James. “That’s it. Moriarty. If we get a murder tonight, we gotta try and find a yo boy named Moriarty.”
They do get a murder, a street shooting that stays a whodunit for only as long as it takes Worden to wade into a sea of black faces, a pale wanderer waiting for the crowd’s natural hostility to dissipate, a patient, civil cop listening for the anonymous mention of a criminal’s name.
Just before dawn on that same midnight shift, when the paperwork is complete and the office television offers nothing better than a test pattern, Donald Worden, strangely wired, wanders through the quiet looking for something else to occupy his time. James is asleep in the coffee room; Waltemeyer, pecking away at a 24-hour report in the admin office.
While making a fresh pot of coffee, the Big Man pries the plastic top from an unopened coffee can. Then, with the look of raw science filling his face, he sends the disk spinning through the stagnant air of the main office.
“Watch this,” he says, walking over to pick up his new toy. He sends it back across the room, this time with a perfect ricochet off the tile floor.
“For my next trick,” he says, preparing another launch, “we go off the ceiling.”
Worden sends the plastic soaring. From the admin office, Waltemeyer looks up from the typewriter, momentarily distracted by what appears in the corner of his eye as a sort of thin, airborne blur. He looks over at Worden curiously, then back down at his report, as if dismissing the illusion.
“C’mon, Donald,” yells Worden. “Get your ass out here …”
Waltemeyer looks up.
“C’mon, Donald. C’mon out and play.”
Waltemeyer continues typing.
“Hey, Mrs. Waltemayer, can Donald come out and play today?”
Worden sends the disk soaring toward the plate glass that separates the two offices just as the admin lieutenant, an hour early for the coming dayshift, walks through the fishbowl toward his office. The plastic glances off the outer glass and sails gracefully past a wall column and into the open door of Nolan’s office. The lieutenant stops in the doorway, marveling at the rare and extraordinary sight of Donald Worden, happy.
“Well?” asks the lieutenant, mystified.
“It’s in the wrists, lieutenant,” says Worden, smiling. “It’s all in the wrists.”
F
RIDAY
, D
ECEMBER 9
Rule Ten in the homicide handbook: There is too such a thing as a perfect murder. Always has been, and whoever tries to claim otherwise merely proves himself naive and romantic, a fool who is ignorant of rules one through nine.
A case in point: Here lies a black male by the name of Anthony Morris, twenty-one years of age, shot dead in the western half of Baltimore, Maryland. A young man of suddenly declining status in the local drug trade, Mr. Morris is found by Western uniforms in an empty courtyard of the Gilmor Homes, where a person or persons repeatedly compressed the trigger of a .38-caliber weapon and thus caused several small pieces of metal alloy to rip holes in Mr. Morris’s body.
When removed from the corpse tomorrow morning, every one of these metal pieces will be splintered and mutilated, rendering them useless for comparison purposes. And because the weapon is a revolver, there aren’t any spent casings lying around either. Even then, without a recovered weapon or a bullet or casing from a related crime—anything to which ballistic evidence might be compared—these problems are academic. Moreover, the crime scene is an asphalt courtyard in dead winter,
barren of fingerprints, hairs, synthetic fibers, footprints, or anything else that could be mistaken as physical evidence. Nor is there anything in the pockets of the victim that constitutes a clue. Nor did Mr. Morris have anything illuminating to say to the first officers and paramedics—hardly surprising given that he was dead upon discovery.
Witnesses? On this midnight shift, in fact, there are no human beings whatsoever in this section of the Gilmor Homes projects. Emptied of its inhabitants for a pending renewal project, the courtyard into which Anthony Morris wandered is dark, cold and utterly devoid of human endeavor. No lights on the street, no lights in the boarded-up units, no pedestrians, no neighbors, no corner groceries or bars.
A helluva place to kill someone, thinks Rich Garvey, staring up and down the deserted courtyard. A perfect place, in fact. Anthony Morris is gunned down in a city of 730,000 and for all practical purposes, the crime scene could be the Nevada desert or the Arctic tundra or some other uncharted wilderness.
The original, anonymous call was for shots fired. Not even the report of a shooting or a body, not even a chance to talk to some people who found the victim. No passersby, no grieving relatives, no homeboys signifying from the corners. With McAllister working the crime scene, Garvey stands there shivering in the early hours of a winter morning, waiting, for any remote suggestion of life from the surrounding city—any warm, lighted place where a detective’s first question could be asked.
Nothing. The silence is complete; the scene, vacant. There is only Garvey and his partner and the usual Western District faces in a swirl of blue-top emergency lights, alone with a corpse in a sleeping city. Garvey tells himself that it doesn’t matter, that someone, somewhere, is ready and waiting to talk to him, to tell him about Anthony Morris and his enemies. Maybe the family, or a girlfriend, or some childhood buddy from the other end of the projects. Maybe an anonymous call to the homicide office, or a letter from some informant locked up on some pissant charge.
Because when you’re the man with the perfect year, no scene can be too bleak. After all, what would he have been left with on Winchester Street if Biemiller hadn’t grabbed the girlfriend at the scene? Or with the Fairfield bar robbery if the kid on the parking lot hadn’t remembered the tag on that getaway car? Or the Langley murder up in Pimlico, the one where the uniforms made a drug arrest a half-block away and the guy turned out to be an eyeball witness?
Yeah, Garney tells himself, I don’t have shit on this one. So what else is new? Except for the simplest kind of dunkers, they all look like weak sisters when you first get to the scene.
“Maybe you’ll get a call on this one,” says a Western uniform.
“Maybe,” says Garvey, agreeable.
True to that hope, he and McAllister are in a rowhouse living room an hour later, a room brimming with survivors. The victim’s mother, sisters, brothers and cousins are all arrayed at the edges of the room while the detectives stand in the center, exerting a certain centripetal force.