Homicide (93 page)

“What the fuck is this bullshit I’ve been listening to?” he mutters, storming back down the hall.

Squirrel No. 1 looks up in dismay as Landsman bursts into the small interrogation room.

“Hey, what the hell are you telling us?”

“What?”

“This is a robbery.”

“What is?”

“This fucking murder. The cashbox is missing.”

The employee shakes his head. Not me, he assures Landsman, though you might want to talk to that other boy who works in the kitchen. He was always talking about stealing that money. He tried to talk me into it.

Landsman takes that in, pivots, then charges past the large interrogation room, where the dead girl’s suitor—now suddenly forgotten—is banging on the door, asking to go to the bathroom.

“Hey officer …”

“One minute,” yells Landsman, turning the corner into the fishbowl, where the second cafeteria employee has been sitting between interviews.

“You,” he tells Squirrel No. 2. “Get up.”

The man follows Landsman back down the corridor and into the small interrogation room, now vacant because Graul has returned the first employee to the fishbowl through the main office. Musical witnesses.

“What happened to the money?” says Landsman, full of menace.

“What money?”

Wrong question. Landsman jumps in the face of Squirrel No. 2, railing on about how much they know about the robbery, about how serious a crime this is, about how they’ve already heard about how he wanted to steal that strongbox, about how Ernestine Haskins discovered the theft and confronted the thief in the men’s room and was killed for the trouble.

“I didn’t take the money.”

“That’s not what your friend says.”

The man looks around the room for comfort. Kincaid and Graul stare back, impassive.

“What are you, stupid?” asks Landsman. “He put you in.”

“What?”

“He’s telling us you killed her.”

“I … what?”

What the fuck, thinks Landsman. Do we need some kind of visual aid in here? Slowly, painfully, Squirrel No. 2 catches on.

“He’s telling you that?”

“Sure is,” says Kincaid.

“He’s the one did it,” says the man angrily. “He’s the one.”

Fine, thinks Landsman, storming back down the hall. I can live with
this. After all, a stone whodunit has just been reduced to a simple either-or proposition. Now there’s nothing better for a detective to do than put Squirrels No. 1 and 2 into the same cage.

But turning the corner into the aquarium, Landsman comes up too quickly on the Number One Squirrel, arriving just as the man is stuffing wad after wad of greenbacks inside the lining of his fellow employee’s winter jacket.

“WHAT … WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?”

The young man freezes, his hand caught very deep inside one very big cookie jar.

“WHAT THE FUCK … GIMME THAT!” sputters Landsman, grabbing the guy by the arm and tossing him out into the corridor.

The jacket lining is fat with fives and tens and twenties; the rest of the money is still in the man’s own jacket pockets. He looks at Landsman sheepishly as Graul and Kincaid come running, having heard the commotion.

Landsman shakes his head, amazed. “While we’re in there talking to one guy, this goofy motherfucker is sitting here on the couch stuffing the money into the other guy’s coat. I just walked in, and he’s shoving the fucking money into the lining like this …”

“Just now?” says Kincaid.

“Yeah, I walk up and he’s shoving bills into the lining.”

“I’ll be damned.”

“Yeah,” says Landsman, laughing for the first time all night. “Can you believe it?”

Hours later, after the guilty man has confessed to murder in his fashion (“I had the knife to her throat, but I didn’t cut her. She must have moved or something”), Landsman sits in the main office and dissects the case as Graul types his warrant.

“All that bullshit he was telling us about this guy and that guy,” Landsman tells Kincaid. “I should have jumped on that earlier.”

Maybe so, and maybe there’s a lesson in that. When you’re working murders, preparation and patience and subtlety take you only so far; sometimes anything more than the usual amount of conscientious precision becomes its own crippling burden. Witness Tom Pellegrini, who spends the night of Ernestine Haskins’s murder as he has spent so many others in the last two months—searching for a rational approach to that which is unapproachable, for scientific exactitude in places where nothing is ever exact. The method to Landsman’s madness is a hard, tight logic formed in a crucible of impulse and sudden anger. Pellegrini’s mad
ness, on the other hand, takes the form of an obsessively rational pursuit of the Answer.

In the annex office, Pellegrini’s desk is adorned with a dozen or so milestones from this lonely, quixotic campaign. Reading material on new interrogation techniques, résumés of professional interviewers and private companies that specialize in criminal interrogative planning, paperback books on subliminal messages and body language, even a few reports from a meeting with a psychic that Pellegrini arranged in the hope that extrasensory investigative techniques would yield more than the usual strategies—all of that has now joined the paper storm of the Latonya Wallace case file.

In Pellegrini’s mind, the other side of the argument holds sway: Instinct is not enough; emotion defies precision. Twice they had the Fish Man closeted in one of these soundproof boxes, twice they chose to rely on their own talents and instincts, twice he went home in a Central District radio car. Yet without a confession, Pellegrini knows, there is nothing left for this murder investigation. The witnesses will never come forward, or they never existed to begin with. The crime scene will never be found. The physical evidence will never be recovered.

For his last chance at the Fish Man, the primary detective in the Latonya Wallace case places all hope in reason and science. Landsman can break twenty more suspects as he broke the killer of Ernestine Haskins and it won’t matter to Pellegrini. He has read and he has studied and he has carefully reviewed the previous interrogations of his best suspect. And in his heart of hearts, he believes that there ought to be some certainty to the thing, some method by which the confession of a guilty man can be derived from an algebra that the Baltimore detectives have not yet learned.

And yet, a month ago, back when Pellegrini was chewing on the second of those two accidental shootings, Landsman proved again that cautious rationality was often useless to a detective. On that occasion, too, Landsman had held back for a time, waiting quietly in the wings while his detective listened to three witnesses offer separate explanations for a rowhouse shooting that left a Lumbee Indian teenager dead. They were drinking beer and playing video games in the living room, the witnesses claimed. All of a sudden there was a knock on the apartment door. And then a hand coming through the open door. And then a gun in the hand. And then a single, unexplained gunshot.

Pellegrini had the two teenagers repeat their stories over and over, watching each witness for subliminal indications of deceit, the way the
interrogation manuals teach you. He noticed that one guy’s eyes broke right when he answered; according to the textbook, he was probably lying. Another guy backed up when Pellegrini got close to him; by the book, an introvert, a witness who can’t be pressured too quickly.

With his sergeant in tow, Pellegrini worked through the kids’ stories for more than an hour, catching a few contradictions and pursuing them to a few obvious lies. It was patient and it was methodical. It was also getting them nowhere.

Sometime after midnight, Landsman finally decided he’d had enough. He dragged a fat, pimply-faced white kid into his office, slammed the door hard and wheeled around in a rage, knocking his desk lamp to the floor. The fluorescent bulb shattered against the linoleum and the kid covered himself, waiting for a rain of blows that never came.

“I’M DONE FUCKING AROUND WITH YOU!”

The kid looked at the wall, terrified.

“YOU HEAR ME? I’M DONE FUCKING AROUND. WHO SHOT HIM?”

“I don’t know. We couldn’t see—”

“YOU’RE LYING! DON’T LIE TO ME!”

“No …”

“GODDAMN YOU! I’M WARNING YOU!”

“Don’t hit me.”

In the aquarium, the fat boy’s friend and the third witness, a black teenager from the Southeast projects, could hear everything. And when the Landsman blitzkrieg came rolling down the hall, the black kid’s worst fear owned him. The detective grabbed the kid, tossed him into the admin lieutenant’s office and began spitting out profanity. It was all over in thirty seconds.

Returning to his own office a few minutes later, Landsman confronted the fat kid again. “You’re done lying. Your buddy just gave you up.”

And the fat kid simply nodded, almost relieved. “I didn’t mean to shoot Jimmy. The gun just went off in my hand. I swear, it just went off.”

Landsman smiled grimly.

“You broke your lamp,” said the fat kid.

“Yeah,” said Landsman, leaving the room. “How ’bout that?”

Outside, in the annex office, Pellegrini greeted his sergeant with a smile and a look that suggested regret. “Thanks, Sarge.”

Landsman shrugged and smiled.

“You know,” said Pellegrini, “I’d still be talking to them if you hadn’t done that.”

“Fuck it, Tom, you’d have done the same thing eventually,” Landsman told him. “You were getting there.”

But Pellegrini said nothing, uncertain. Then and now, Landsman teaches a truth that is a contradiction, an unnerving counterweight to Pellegrini’s methodical pursuit of empirical answers. Landsman’s lesson says that science, deliberation and precision are not enough. Whether he likes it or not, a good detective eventually has to pull the trigger.

T
HURSDAY
, D
ECEMBER 22

Season’s greetings from the Baltimore homicide unit, where a Styrofoam Santa Claus is taped to the annex office door, its visage marred by a deep, bloody, close-range gunshot wound carved into the old saint’s forehead. The wound track was created with a penknife, the blood with a red felt-tipped pen, but the message is clear: Yo, Santa. This is Baltimore. Watch your back.

Along the metal bulkhead walls of the main office, Kim and Linda and the other sixth-floor secretaries have applied a few lonely strips of red and gold trim, some cardboard reindeer and a few candy canes. In the northeast corner of the office stands the unit’s tree, sparingly decorated this year but otherwise unmarked by the cynical displays of holidays past. A few years back, some of the detectives retrieved a few morgue photos from the files—mostly shots of dead drug dealers and contract killers, a few of whom had beat out murder charges of their own. With some careful cutting, the detectives liberated the bullet-riddled bodies from the photo background and, overcome by the Yule spirit, pasted hand-drawn wings on the shoulders of the dead. In a way it was touching: Hard-core players like Squeaky Jordan and Abraham Partlow looked positively angelic hanging from those polyurethane branches.

Even the decorations that began as sincere gestures seem small and defeated in this place, where phrases such as “peace on earth” and “goodwill towardmen” have no apparent connection to the work at hand. Onthe anniversary of their savior’s birth, the men who work homicides are decidedly unsaved, stuck as they are in the usual rotation of shootings and cuttings and overdose cases. Still, the holiday will be acknowledged if not celebrated by the squads working the four-to-twelve and overnight on Christmas Eve. What the hell, this much irony ought to be marked in some meaningful way.

A year ago, there wasn’t much Christmas mayhem at all, a shooting or
two on the west side. But two years ago, the phone lines were all lit up, and the year before that was also a hellacious piece of work, with two domestic homicides and a serious shooting that kept Nolan’s squad running until the light of day. On that Christmas, the early relief arrived to find Nolan’s men suffering from a strange holiday fever, acting out a series of holiday homicides in the main office.

“Bitch,” yelled Nolan, pointing his finger at Hollingsworth. “You got me the same thing last year … BANG!”

“You bastard, I already got a toaster,” said Hollingsworth, turning his finger on Requer. “POW!”

“Oh yeah?” says Requer, firing a round in Nolan’s direction. “Well, you burned the stuffing again this year.”

Their little dramas weren’t all that farfetched, either: On a legendary Christmas shift back in the early 1970s, a father killed his son in a dark meat–light meat argument at the family dinner table, plunging the carving knife into the kid’s chest to assure himself of the first crack at the serving plate.

True, the captain always remembers to have a respectable deli spread brought up for the night crew. True, also, that the Christmas shift is the one night of the year when a detective can pull a bottle out of his desk without worrying about being caught by a roving duty officer. Even so, the holiday shift in homicide remains the most depressing duty imaginable. And as luck would have it this year, the three-week shift change for D’Addario’s men falls on the morning of December 25. Landsman and McLarney will work their squads on the Christmas Eve four-to-twelve shift, followed by Nolan’s men on midnight, followed by McLarney’s men again for the Christmas dayshift relief.

No one is happy about the schedule, but Dave Brown, for one, has found a way around its rigors. He always makes a point of putting in early for vacation on the holidays, and this year, with a one-year-old daughter and fervent dreams of domestic bliss, he plans to be nowhere near headquarters on Christmas morning. Naturally, this absurd notion of Brown’s becomes yet another item on Donald Worden’s list of things for which the younger detective requires abuse, to wit:

1. Brown hasn’t done shit with the Carol Wright case, which is still nothing more than a questionable death by automobile.

2. He has just finished five weeks of medical for a leg operation at Hopkins, a procedure allegedly made necessary by some sort of mysteri
ous nerve damage or muscle spasms that any real man would ignore after a second beer.