Homicide (98 page)

If the shift had been quiet, they might have gone straight home, eaten a little supper and slept until morning. But now it won’t be an early night; you’ve killed two people and lied about it, proving to Donald Worden that he was born into this life to be nothing more or less than a homicide detective. You’re the first step in Tom Pellegrini’s long road back, the first opportunity for a young detective’s redemption. You’ve become two black names beneath Jay Landsman’s nameplate, the last entries of the year for a veteran sergeant who once again has the best rate on his shift.

And now, with the paperwork done, they might just head for Kavanaugh’s or the Market Bar or some other hole where a cop can drink a murder down. It’s New Year’s Eve and they might raise a glass or two and toast themselves, or each other, or whatever remains of the one true brotherhood. But they won’t raise a glass for you tonight. You’re a murdering piece of shit; why would they want to drink to that? And yet they will think of you. They’ll think about how perfectly they read the crime scene, how they had you backing up on your story at the hospital, how they even came up with the photo of the Jake you tried to put it on and how they made you eat that story too. They’ll think of you and know, as only a detective can, that police work done well can be a fine and beautiful thing. They’ll think of you and
drink a little more, maybe laugh a little louder when Landsman tells the stories about his oatmeal box radar gun or Phyllis Pellegrini on Riker’s Island.

Hell, they might even close Kavanaugh’s and spend the rest of the night out on the parking lot, matching war stories, trying to sober themselves before daybreak and the drive home to a wife already up and putting on her makeup, to the sound of kids already bouncing around the house. Home to the smell of breakfast in the kitchen, to a bedroom with the shades pulled tight and the sheets disturbed by someone else’s night. Another morning when the world spins along without them, another day of another year, measured for those who walk in light and deal with the living.

They sleep until dark.

The boundaries of this narrative—January 1, 1988, and December 31, 1988—are necessarily arbitrary, an artificial grid of days, weeks and months imposed on the long and true arc of men’s lives. The homicide detectives of Gary D’Addario’s shift were traveling their collective arc when this account began; they are traveling it still. The names, the faces, the scenes, the case files, the verdicts—these change. Yet the daily violence in any large American city provides a constant background against which a homicide detective seems to labor with timeless defiance. A few men transfer, a few retire, a few latch on to an extended investigation, but the homicide unit remains essentially the same.

The bodies still fall. The phone still bleats. The boys in the back office fill out the daily run sheets and argue about overtime. The admin lieutenant still calculates the clearance rate daily. The board still oozes red and black names. Long after the cases blur or fade entirely from a detective’s memory, the job itself somehow retains a special luster.

Every year, the Baltimore homicide unit stages an alumni dinner at the firefighters’ union hall in Canton, where a hundred or more current and former homicide detectives eat, drink and carouse with one another in celebration and remembrance of everything seen and done and said by men who spend the best part of their lives working murders. Jimmy Oz, Howard Corbin, Rod Brandner, Jake Coleman—every year the auditorium is filled with men who cling to memories of the hardest job they’ll ever have. Not that all of those gathered were great detectives; in fact, some were pretty mediocre in their day. But even the worst of them belongs to a special brotherhood, has a special standing for having lived for a time in the darkest corner of the American experience.

Strangely, they don’t talk much about the cases, and when they do, the murders themselves are little more than scenery. Instead, the stories they tell are about each other—about jokes cracked at crime scenes and things
seen through the windshields of unmarked cars; about this asinine colonel, or that legendary, never-say-die prosecutor, or some long-legged blonde nursing supervisor at Hopkins, the young one who had this thing for police. What the hell ever happened to her anyway?

At the homicide reunion of 1988, the stories were about Joe Segretti, who at a crime scene in the east side projects of Waddy Court once pulled a bloody rag from a victim’s head and, noticing an impression of the dead man’s face, declared it the Shroud of Waddy: “A miracle for Baltimore,” he assured his partner. “We gotta call the pope.”

There were stories about Ed Halligan, once Terry McLarney’s partner, who on one occasion got so drunk he dropped a pending case file into a rain-soaked gutter while walking home. When McLarney went to rescue him the following morning, he found the entire file laid out in perfect order on Halligan’s living room floor, each page drying slowly. And everybody remembered the legendary Jimmy Ozazewski— “Jimmy Oz”—a true character, who once solved a red-ball case and proceeded to give television interviews from his own den while wearing a smoking jacket and puffing on an imported pipe.

And they remembered, too, the men no longer there, like John Kurinij, the mad Ukrainian who never did learn to curse properly, calling his suspects “sons-of-bitch-bitch” and bemoaning his “fuck-fuck” job. It was Jay Landsman and Gary D’Addario who got the call to go to Kurinij’s house in the county, where they found his badge and holster arranged neatly on the table. Kurinij was in the bathroom, kneeling over the tub with the bath mat doubled beneath him, his blood seeping into the drain. A detective’s suicide, clean and methodical: Landsman needed only to turn the spigot for the water to wash away the blood, leaving the bullet.

“Fuck him,” said D’Addario, when Landsman began to lose control. “He knew when he did it that we’d find him like this.”

Tales from the sanctum of the station house, back pages from a Book of Mayhem that has no beginning or end. In 1988, thirty detectives, six sergeants and two lieutenants wrote a few fresh stories of their own—comedy, tragedy, melodrama, satire—stories to be heard at many a reunion to come.

The jump in the clearance rate ended any substantive threat to Gary D’Addario’s tenure as a homicide shift lieutenant, but the political intrigue in 1988 still took a toll. To save himself and his men from any real damage, he swallowed just enough to please the bosses. He squeezed out
a little overtime, he pressed a few detectives to work more cases, he wrote some memos calling for follow-ups in several files. Most of that could be classified under the heading of necessary and normal evil.

True, D’Addario’s relationship with the captain had never been close, but the events of 1988 left both men with few illusions. To D’Addario, it seemed that the captain was looking for unequivocal loyalty in his subordinates while offering little of the same. He hinted at an unwillingness to protect Donald Worden during the Larry Young mess, and he was unwilling to protect D’Addario when every fresh murder was coming in open. In the lieutenant’s mind, the pattern had become all too familiar.

D’Addario survived it: Eight years as a homicide commander makes any man a connoisseur of survival. Along the way, he managed to get good and sometimes superb police work from his men. But D’Addario was a proud man, and the cost of remaining in homicide was finally too high. One night in 1989, when D’Addario was called downtown in the early morning hours for a police shooting, he heard about an opening for a lieutenant in vice enforcement, and the longer he thought about the idea, the better he liked it. Vice would give him nine-to-five hours, his own car, his own command. He went to the colonel that same week and the transfer was immediately approved. A month later, the homicide unit had a new shift lieutenant—a decent guy, too, fair and sympathetic to the men. But he had a tough act to follow. As one detective put it succinctly, “He ain’t no Dee.”

At this writing, D’Addario is the commander of the BPD’s vice enforcement section. One of his best detectives there is Fred Ceruti, who still harbors some resentment about the events of 1988, but promises that he will be returning to homicide. “Hey,” he says, smiling. “I’m still young.”

Technically, Harry Edgerton remains a homicide detective, although the last two years might suggest otherwise.

Ed Burns, the only detective Edgerton was ever willing to call a partner, briefly returned to the homicide unit in early 1989 after completing his two-year FBI probe of the Warren Boardley drug organization in the Lexington Terrace projects. As chief protagonists in a bloody 1986 turf war in the projects, Boardley and his lieutenants were believed responsible for seven unsolved homicides and fourteen shootings. The federal probe eventually sent the key players to prison for terms ranging from double life to eighteen years without the possibility of parole. Edgerton, who had been removed from the probe because of a budget dispute between federal
and local agencies, marked the November 1988 arrest of Boardley and his men by joining Burns and other agents in the raiding parties.

Almost immediately after the Boardley case was closed, Burns and Edgerton were both detailed to the Drug Enforcement Administration for a probe of yet another violent narcotics trafficker. Linwood “Rudy” Williams had already beaten two murder charges, a machine-gun possession charge and two drug charges in state courts, when the DEA began its investigation in mid-1989; he was also suspected in four Baltimore-area homicides in 1989 and 1990 alone. In March 1991, Williams and six codefendants were convicted in U.S. District Court as part of a federal drug conspiracy indictment. The primary investigator in the yearlong probe was Ed Burns; Edgerton was one of two chief prosecution witnesses.

The success of the Williams investigation, which involved wiretaps, room mikes, assets probes and the extensive use of a federal grand jury, was such that even Harry Edgerton’s critics in the homicide unit had to sit up and take notice. The general opinion was that with Rudy Williams in federal detention, city homicide detectives were being spared three or four case files a year. But within the Baltimore department, a debate over the value of protracted investigation continues; both Edgerton and Burns have been told that after the Williams trial, they are to return to the homicide unit and the regular rotation.

Edgerton did get some satisfaction from the Andrea Perry case. His suspect in the rape-murder, Eugene Dale, became the only one of two hundred homicide defendants in 1988 to be tried under the death penalty statute in Baltimore. (Prosecutors made the decision to pursue capital punishment when the results of DNA testing on Dale’s blood confirmed that the semen found inside the twelve-year-old’s body was his own.) Although the effort to pursue the death penalty failed, Dale was convicted of first-degree murder and second-degree rape, and he has been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

If and when Edgerton does return to the homicide unit, his assignment is uncertain; the squad he left in 1989—Roger Nolan’s—no longer exists.

The squad began to dissolve in early 1989, beginning with the loss of Edgerton to the Williams probe. Soon afterward, Donald Kincaid departed in a four-squad trade that brought two of Stanton’s men to Nolan’s crew. Kincaid then went to work for Jay Landsman, and for a time, at least, he was content—and Landsman was pleased enough to have acquired an experienced detective. But within months Kincaid had a fresh argument going—this time with the new lieutenant, who tried to
hold some of the unit’s veterans, Kincaid included, to a shorter leash. Kincaid’s anger finally won out, and in the summer of 1990 he took his pension and retired after twenty-four years with the department.

His war with Edgerton, and then with the lieutenant, points to one of the real truths about life in any police department. For a detective or street police, the only real satisfaction is the work itself; when a cop spends more and more time getting aggravated with the details, he’s finished. The attitude of co-workers, the indifference of superiors, the poor quality of the equipment—all of it pales if you still love the job; all of it matters if you don’t.

The murder of Latonya Kim Wallace—the Angel of Reservoir Hill, as she became known in Baltimore—remains unsolved. The case folders have been returned to a file drawer; detectives in Landsman’s squad are no longer actively investigating the death, though they continue to pursue any fresh information that comes in.

For Tom Pellegrini, the case left a legacy of frustration and doubt that took another year to overcome. Well into 1989, he continued to work around the edges of the file at the expense of other cases. In the end, he found little solace in the fact that the investigation had been pursued with greater diligence and perseverance than any other in recent memory; the greater the effort, in fact, the greater his frustration.

Months after his last interrogation of the Fish Man, Pellegrini came back to the file once more, scanning the existing evidence, compiling information, then typing an elaborate memorandum to the state’s attorney’s office. In it he argued that a circumstantial case existed against the old store owner—a case strong enough to put before a grand jury. But it didn’t surprise Pellegrini when Tim Doory declined to prosecute the case. The little girl’s murder was far too prominent, far too newsworthy, to risk a court trial on a thin web of evidence, or to bluff by charging a suspect in the hope of provoking a confession. And several detectives who had also worked on the case still didn’t believe the old man was the killer. If he was truly guilty, they reasoned, three long interrogations would have, at the very least, punched some larger holes in his story.

Pellegrini learned to live with the ambiguity. Two years after walking into that rear yard on Newington Avenue, he could finally say that he had put the worst part of the Latonya Wallace case behind him—and it didn’t hurt. He began 1990 with eight straight clearances.

Early this year, he undertook a small but telling task. Slowly,
methodically, he began organizing the contents of the Latonya Wallace files, making them more accessible and understandable to any detective who may later have use for them. It was a quiet but necessary acknowledgment that Tom Pellegrini might be years gone before the truth is known, if indeed it is ever known.

Rich Garvey remains Rich Garvey, a detective for whom one year is much the same as the last. His 1989 campaign was as successful as his 1988 effort, and his clearance rate in 1990 was top-of-the-line.

But a look back at the 1988 case files reveals that the Perfect Year was an illusion in more ways than one. For example, the summer murder of the bartender in Fairfield, the robbery case that began when one patron remembered the license tag of the getaway car, ended disastrously. Despite the testimony of two codefendants, who confessed and accepted pleas of twenty and thirty years, the remaining two defendants were acquitted by a jury after two mistrials. The accused shooter, Westley Branch, was acquitted even though his fingerprint had been recovered from a Colt 45 can near the register. Garvey wasn’t in the courtroom the day the jury verdict was read, which was just as well: The acquitted defendants marked the occasion with cheers and high-fives.

It was Garvey’s first loss to a trial verdict, and other frustrations followed. Another murder case that he had worked with Bob Bowman in December 1988 suddenly collapsed in court when a member of the victim’s own family took the stand to exonerate the killer; Garvey later learned that the family had been in contact with the defendant before the trial and some money had changed hands. Likewise, the death of Cornelius Langley, the victim of the daylight drug shooting on Woodland Avenue in August, was also unavenged. That case was dropped after Michael Langley, the state’s chief witness and brother of the victim, was himself killed in an unrelated 1989 drug murder.

But there were victories, too. The conviction of Robert Frazier for the murder of Lena Lucas resulted in a life-without-parole sentence; so did the prosecution of Jerry Jackson, the east-sider who murdered Henry Plumer, then left the body in his basement. Perhaps the most gratifying outcome came in the case of Carlton Robinson, the young construction worker gunned down as he left the house to go to work on an icy November morning, killed because his friend and co-worker, Warren Waddell, had been called a dickhead at work the day before. The centerpiece of that prosecution was Robinson’s dying words to the first officers at the
scene, his final declaration in which he named Waddell as the shooter. And yet it was unclear whether Robinson believed that he was dying or whether the officers or paramedics had told him so—throwing the legal validity of the declaration into doubt.