Homicide (75 page)

And yet he moved on, seemingly oblivious of the hostility until, at the corner of Edmondson and Brice, he watched a young kid, fourteen or fifteen years old, pass a paper bag to an older boy who ran around the block. For Edgerton, it was opportunity knocking. With the rest of the street watching coldly, he grabbed the kid by a shoulder and dragged him to a Cavalier around the corner, pressing the boy for details about the murder.

A Western uniform, watching from the crime scene two blocks away, later cautioned the detective.

“You shouldn’t have gone down there alone,” he told Edgerton. “What if some shit had started?”

To which Edgerton could only shake his head.

“I’m serious, man,” the uniform said. “You only got six bullets.”

“I don’t even have that.” Edgerton laughed. “I forgot my gun.”

“YOU WHAT?”

“Yeah. I left my gun in my desk.”

A cop at Edmondson and Brice with no gun. The Western uniforms were stunned; Edgerton was indifferent: “This job,” he told them, “is ninety percent attitude.”

Now, working the Andrea Perry murder, Edgerton is back in another West Baltimore neighborhood, mixing with the locals as few police can. He talks to the occupants of every rowhouse that backs up to his alley, he chats up the hangers-on at the carryouts and bars. Working from the bus stop toward his victim’s home on Fayette Street, he checks every address for a witness who may have seen the child walking with someone. When nothing comes from that effort, he begins checking other sexual assault reports from the Southern and Western districts.

In fact, Edgerton makes a point early on in the investigation of calling the operations unit officers from the Southern, Southwestern and Western districts downtown and briefing them on the case. He tells them to be looking for anyone involved in anything sexual with underage girls, or any report involving an abduction or a .32-caliber weapon. Edgerton urges the ops unit officers in all three districts to call him with information that seems even remotely related. That, too, differs from the approach taken in the Latonya Wallace case, where district officers had been detailed downtown to help with the investigation. For this little girl, Edgerton decides, the districts will not come to CID; CID will go into the districts.

Only once, on the day after the body’s discovery, is there any hint of the communal effort that normally accompanies a red-ball case, and it is prompted by Nolan, who for the sake of appearances asks McAllister, Kincaid and Bowman to give them a day’s help to expand the canvass.

Looking through the case file that day, the other detectives in the squad wonder aloud why Edgerton hadn’t immediately followed up on the anonymous call. At the very least, they argue, he should go out and grab the woman whom the male caller allegedly saw running from the alley.

“That’s the last thing I want to do,” says Edgerton, explaining his strategy to Nolan. “If I get her down here, what am I going to do? I have one question to ask her, and after that I’ve got nothing.”

To Edgerton’s way of thinking, it is another mistake that too many detectives make too often—the same mistake that they had made with the Fish Man in the Latonya Wallace case. You bring someone down and go at them in the interrogation room with no real ammunition. They walk out an hour later, more confident than before, and if you ever do get any leverage on them, you’ve only made it harder to come back and break them the second time.

“I ask her why she was running out of the alley, and she tells me she doesn’t know what I’m talking about,” Edgerton explains to Nolan. “And she’s right. I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

He still doesn’t believe that the woman named by the caller actually ran from the alley after the murder. But even if he did believe it, he would not risk an interrogation until it had at least a chance of success.

“If all else fails, then I bring her down here and ask my one question,” the detective says, “and not before.”

Nolan agrees. “It’s your case,” he tells Edgerton. “Do it your way.”

Beyond his squad’s limited help with the expanded canvass, Edgerton’s isolation on the case is complete. Even D’Addario keeps his distance: He asks Nolan for regular progress reports and offers help if help is needed, but otherwise he is content to let Edgerton and his sergeant set their own pace.

The contrast with D’Addario’s response to the Latonya Wallace investigation is striking. Edgerton hopes that the lieutenant’s hands-off approach is, at least in part, a display of confidence in his investigator. More likely, the detective reasons, D’Addario has himself soured on the full-blown red-ball treatment. Throwing troops and money at a case had accomplished so little in Reservoir Hill that maybe the lieutenant is
reluctant to travel the same road a second time. Or maybe, like everyone else on the shift, LTD is just too damn tired for another all-out campaign.

But Edgerton also knows that nothing happens in a vacuum. He is being left alone to work his case largely because D’Addario can afford to leave him alone. On the day that Andrea Perry was discovered, the clearance rate stood at a fat 74 percent, with five outstanding murder warrants still on the street—a rate that compares favorably to both the previous year’s totals and the national average. As a result, D’Addario can once again make decisions without worrying about public consumption or the perceptions of the command staff. From talking with Pellegrini, Edgerton knows that the lieutenant has already expressed some dissatisfaction with the tidal wave of investigation that followed Latonya Wallace’s death. At various stages in that probe, D’Addario had listened to Landsman and Pellegrini both argue that less could be more, and the lieutenant seemed to agree. If the clearance rate had been higher, if the department hadn’t also been publicly sweating the murders of all those women in the Northwest, then the case might have gone differently. Now, with the board showing more black than red, the homicide unit’s political equilibrium has been fully restored. Thanks to some hard work, some skillful maneuvering and not a little luck, D’Addario’s reign has survived the threat and been returned to its rightful glory. And if the rise in the clearance rate and D’Addario’s true feelings about the red-ball treatment aren’t reasons enough for Edgerton to be granted his distance, then Edgerton also understands that he is alone on this case simply because the murder has fallen to Nolan’s squad.

Not only does Nolan have absolute confidence in Edgerton’s methods, but he is the sergeant least likely to ask for help from the rest of the shift and from D’Addario in particular. Of the three sergeants, only McLarney and Landsman are now counted among LTD’s true disciples; Nolan had stayed on the fence during D’Addario’s year-long conflict with the captain. Lately, the lieutenant has taken some pleasure in bringing that out.

Two nights ago, all three squad sergeants were in the coffee room as D’Addario prepared to leave at the end of a four-to-twelve shift.

“I note by my watch that it’s nigh on twelve o’clock,” he declared dramatically. “And I know that before the cock crows thrice, one of you shall betray me …”

The sergeants laughed nervously.

“… but it’s okay, Roger, I understand. You gotta do what you gotta do.”

As Nolan’s man, Edgerton couldn’t really be sure exactly why he was being isolated on the Andrea Perry case. It may well be Dee’s faith in him, or it may be the lieutenant’s new philosophy about leaving red balls to the primary investigator. Then again, it may just be that Roger Nolan is the one sergeant who is not about to ask his lieutenant for anything. Maybe, Edgerton thinks, it’s a little of all three. For an outsider like himself, it’s always harder to get a handle on the office politics.

But whatever the reasons for D’Addario’s distance from the investigation, Edgerton understands that the effect is the same: He is on the longest possible leash. As a result, Andrea Perry will not become Latonya Wallace, just as Edgerton will not become another Pellegrini. Good-bye to the detail officers, to the FBI psych profiles, to the aerial photographs of the crime scene, to a hundred endless debates among a full squad of homicide detectives. Instead, this child’s murder will be one man out in the street, with time enough and room enough to solve his murder. Or, perhaps, hang himself.

Whichever comes first.

It is a beautiful courthouse, truly impressive in its classical form. The bronze doors, the varied Italian marbles, the deep redwoods and gilded ceilings—the Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. Courthouse on North Calvert Street is a work of great architecture, as fine and glorious as any structure ever built in the city of Baltimore.

If justice itself were measured by the grandeur of its house, then a Baltimore detective would have little to fear. If well-cut stone and hand-carved woods could guarantee a righteous vengeance, then the Mitchell Courthouse and its companion across the street—the old post office building now known as Courthouse East—might be places of sanctuary for a Baltimore law officer.

The city fathers spared little when they created these two exquisite buildings in the heart of downtown, and in the last several years their descendants have been equally generous in their ongoing effort to renovate and preserve the beauty of both structures. From the arraignment courts to the jury rooms, from front lobbies to back corridors, the courthouse complex exists so that generations of law officers and lawyers could walk the halls of justice and feel their spirits soar. Stepping lightly down the restored portico of the post office building, or walking into the elegance of
Judge Hammerman’s paneled palace, a detective has every reason to hold his head high in the knowledge that he has arrived at a place where society can exact its price. Justice will be done here; all the hard, dirty work performed in the city’s rotten core will no doubt be gracefully shaped into a clean and solemn judgment of guilty. A jury of twelve respectable, thoughtful men and women will rise as one to render that verdict, imposing the law of a good and valiant people on an evil man.

So how is it that every Baltimore detective of this epoch enters his courthouse with his head down, his badge drawn with practiced boredom for the sheriff’s deputies who man the metal detector in the first-floor lobby? How can those detectives step so heavily toward the elevators, oblivious of the beauty all around them? How can they crush their cigarette butts into the stone with such seeming indifference, then knock on a prosecutor’s office door as if it were the very gate of purgatory? How can a homicide detective bring his best work to this, his final destination, wearing a look of utter resignation?

Well, for one thing, he’s probably been up all night working two fresh shootings and a cutting on the midnight shift. No doubt the same detective scheduled to testify in Bothe’s court this afternoon just finished his overnight paperwork in time to listen to a dayshift’s roll call. No doubt he then spent another hour downing four cups of black coffee and an Egg McMuffin. Now he’s probably lugging paper evidence bags from the ECU to some lawyer’s cubbyhole on the third floor, where he will be informed that his best witness hasn’t yet shown up for court and isn’t answering a sheriff deputy’s phone calls. Beyond those worldly concerns, this same detective—if he knows his business—is obligated to arrive in the legal arena with a mind clouded by something other than transcendent visions of moral victory. In his heart of hearts, a veteran detective is inspired not by the glories of the courthouse, but by Rule Number Nine in the lexicon, to wit:

And, in addition to rules 9A and 9B:

A detective who ventures into the corridors of justice with anything less than a firm and familiar skepticism for the American legal process is a man leaning into the punches. It’s one thing, after all, to see some of your best work torn to shreds by twelve of Baltimore’s finest citizens, but it’s another thing entirely to watch it happen from a state of naive incredulity. Better to check your expectations at the courthouse doors and enter its glistening corridors in full, willful anticipation of the debacle to follow.

The rock—and it’s a fine, honorable rock—upon which our legal system is built states that a defendant is innocent until found guilty by the unanimous vote of a dozen peers. Better that a hundred guilty men should walk free before one innocent man is punished. Well, by that standard, the Baltimore court system is pretty much working to code.

Consider: In this particular year in the life of Baltimore’s criminal justice system, the names of 200 perpetrators will be brought to the state’s attorney’s office in connection with 170 solved homicides.

Of those 200 suspects:

• Five cases will still be pending trial two years later. (In two of those instances, suspects were charged in warrants but never apprehended by detectives.)
  
• Five will die before trial or in the course of arrest. (Three of these are suicides, one the victim of a fire she set to kill someone else, one the victim in a police shootout.)
  
• Six will not be tried when prosecutors determine the killings to be justifiable by self-defense or a result of accidental causes.
  
• Two defendants will be declared not criminally responsible and sent to a state mental hospital.
  
• Three defendants age sixteen and younger will have their homicide charges remanded to juvenile court.
  
• Sixteen will have their charges dismissed prior to indictment due to lack of evidence. (On occasion, an aggressive homicide detective with insufficient evidence to prove a case will play a long shot and nonetheless charge his best suspect in the hope that the incarceration will provide sufficient leverage to provoke a confession in subsequent interrogations.)
  
• Twenty-four defendants will have their charges nol prossed or stetted by prosecutors after indictment. (A nol prosse represents the unequivocal dismissal of a grand jury indictment; a stet places the case on an
  inactive docket, though the prosecution can be revived within a year if additional evidence is forthcoming. In time, most stet cases become dismissals.)
  
• Three defendants will have their charges dismissed or stetted when it becomes clear that they are, in fact, innocent of the crimes for which they have been accused. (The innocent-until-proven-guilty standard does indeed have some real meaning in Maryland’s largest city, where it’s not uncommon for the wrong man to be charged or even indicted for a violent crime. It happened, for example, in the shooting of Gene Cassidy, and it happened again in three separate murders handled by detectives on Stanton’s shift. In those cases, the wrong man was charged as a result of faulty witness identifications—one from the dying victim, the other two from bystanders—and the defendants were subsequently cleared through additional investigation. Charging the wrong man on mediocre evidence is not difficult, and getting a grand jury to indict him is only a little harder. But after that, the chances of putting the wrong man into prison become minimal. It is, after all, hard enough for prosecutors in Baltimore to convict the guilty; the only scenario by which an innocent man could be successfully prosecuted on weak evidence would be one in which a defense attorney failed to evaluate the case and force-fed a plea to a client.)