Homicide (97 page)

There is no final scene for Tom Pellegrini and the Fish Man, no last words, no parting shots. In victory, a detective can be amusing and gracious, even generous; in defeat, he will try his damnedest to make believe you’re no longer there. The long day ends as separate scenes in separate rooms. In one, a man celebrates freedom by changing channels on a television set and stuffing a pipe with cheap tobacco. In another, a detective clears his desk of a bloated, dog-eared file, gathers up his gun, briefcase and overcoat, and steps heavily into a corridor that leads only to an elevator and a dark city street.

S
ATURDAY
, D
ECEMBER 31

They own you.

From the moment you thought the thought, you were their property. You don’t believe it; hell, you didn’t even imagine it. You were sure they’d never catch you, sure you could draw heart’s blood twice and just walk away. But you should have saved yourself some trouble, called 911 yourself. Right from the start, you were a gift.

But hey, it looked like a good move when you made it, didn’t it now? You got Ronnie in the back bedroom, stuck him good in a dozen places with that kitchen blade before he knew what was what. Ronnie did some screaming, but his brother didn’t hear a thing with that box beat going so
loud in the other bedroom. Yeah, you had Ronnie all to yourself, and when you came down the hallway toward the other bedroom, you figured Ronnie’s brother deserved more of the same. The boy was still in bed when you walked in on him, looking up at the blade like he didn’t know what it was for.

So you got them both. You got Ronnie and Ronnie’s brother and getting them meant getting the package. Yeah, you got that shit the old-fashioned way, yo, you killed for it, and right now you should be out the door and halfway across Pimlico and smoking some of that hard-won product.

But no, you’re still right here, staring at your killing hand. You fucked it up, cut the hand bad when Ronnie was oozing life and your knife got wet and slippery. You were sticking it to him when your hand just rode up over the hilt and the blade went deep into your palm. So now, when you should be across town practicing your don’t-know-nothin’ speech, you’re sitting here in a house full of dead men, waiting for your hand to stop bleeding.

You try cleaning up in the bathroom, running cold water in the wound. But that doesn’t really help, just makes you bleed a little slower is all. You try wrapping your hand in a bath towel, but the towel becomes a wet crimson mess on the bathroom floor. You walk down to the living room, your hand smearing red on the stairway wall, the banister and the downstairs light switch. Then you wrap your right hand in the sleeve of your sweatshirt, shrug on your winter coat and run.

All the way to your girlfriend’s place, the throbbing in your hand tells you that there’s no choice, that you’re just going to keep bleeding unless you take the risk. You stash the package and even change your clothes, but the blood still keeps coming. When you hit West Belvedere just before daylight, you start running toward the hospital, trying to think your story through.

But it doesn’t matter. They own you, bunk.

You don’t know it, but you were theirs when they came in early to relieve the Friday overnight shift as daylight broke on the last day of this godforsaken year. They hadn’t changed the coffeepot when the phone rang, and it was the older one, the white-haired police, who scrawled out the particulars on a used pawn shop card. A double, the dispatcher told them, so all three decided to ride up to Pimlico to look over your handiwork.

To the pale, dark-haired Italian, the younger one, you’re a blessing. He works your crime scene the way he wishes he had worked another: He follows every blood trail and pulls samples from every room; he takes his time with the bodies before having each wrapped in sheets, preserving the
trace evidence. He works that scene like it’s the last one on earth, like these aren’t the Fullard brothers but two victims who matter. He’s hungry again, bunk, and he needs a clearance the same way you needed that cocaine.

You’re about to become the property of that other one, too, the bear of a police with the white hair and the blue eyes. He hires on as a secondary, helps with the crime scene before wandering off to work the crowd. He’s glad to be working murders, content to be back in the Northwest on a case. The Big Man began this year in a hole and then clawed his way out, so it’s your bad luck to be on the wrong side of the curve.

And don’t forget that sergeant, the joker in the leather jacket, who’s been riding a streak since late October. He stalks all over your murder scene, sizing up your deeds and fitting together the first pieces of your sad little puzzle. He takes it personal, declaring that there is no way in hell his squad will end the year with an open double.

Here’s the morning line, bunk: The three of them have their hooks into you deep and they haven’t even met you yet. By now, they’ve marked your blood trail out of the bathroom and down the second-floor stairs. They’re already on a Northwest patrolman’s radio, asking citywide to have area hospital admissions checked for stabbing and cutting victims. They’re working back on the Fullard brothers, learning who they hang with and who hangs with them. They got your number good.

If you understood that, if you understood anything about how they work, you might have caught a cab and gone to a hospital out in the county. At the very least, you might have come up with some story a little better than that garbage you gave the admitting nurse. Cut your hand climbing a fence, you told her. One of those chain-link jobs over by the middle school off Park Heights. Yeah, right: You slipped.

But anyone can see that the cut didn’t come from no fence. Not when it’s that deep and that straight. You think that’ll play? You think the police who has just walked up to the nurses station is going to believe such weak shit?

“Landsman, from homicide,” the cop tells the charge nurse, looking your way. “Is this the one?”

You’re not about to panic or anything. They still don’t know shit: You made sure both those bad boys were dead. You ditched the knife. You didn’t leave witnesses. You’re good to go.

“Lemme see your hand,” says the cop in the leather jacket.

“Cut it on a fence.”

He checks your palm for a good ten seconds. Then he looks at the blood on your coat sleeve.

“The fuck you did.”

“I ain’t lyin’.”

“You cut it on a fence?”

“Yeah.”

“What fence?”

You tell him what fence. Motherfucker, you think, he don’t believe I got brains enough to think of a fence.

“Yeah,” he says, looking right at you. “I know where that is. Let’s go there and see.”

See? See what?

“You’re bleeding like a stuck pig,” he tells you. “There better be some blood around the fence, right?”

Blood around the fence? You didn’t think of that and he knows you didn’t think of it.

“No,” you hear yourself say. “Wait.”

Yeah, he’s waiting. He’s standing there in the Sinai emergency room listening to your little world crumble. Now he’s calling you a lying motherfucker, telling you that it won’t take but a couple hours before they match the blood stains on that stairwell to the blood staining the new bandage on your hand. You didn’t think of that either, did you?

“Okay, I was there,” you say. “But I didn’t kill them.”

“Oh yeah?” says the cop. “Who did?”

“A Jamaican.”

“What’s his name?”

Think it through, bunk. Think it through. “I don’t know his name. But he cut me, too. He said he’d kill me too if I said anything about him.”

“He told you that. When did he tell you that?”

“He drove me to the hospital.”

“He drove you here?” he asks. “He kills them, but he only cuts you and then gives you a lift to the hospital.”

“Yeah. I ran away at first, but …”

He looks away, asking the resident if he’s ready to discharge you. The cop looks back at you, smiling strangely. If you knew him, if you knew anything, then you’d know that he’s already laughing at you. He’s made you for a murdering little shitbird, tossing you into this year’s pile with about a hundred others. The Fullard brothers, crimson and rigored in the morning light of their bedrooms, are already black names on Jay Landsman’s section of the board.

You ride downtown to headquarters in a cage car, clinging to that story of yours, thinking that you can still pull this off. You’re thinking—if it can be called thinking—that you can somehow get them to believe in a mystery Jake who cut your hand and drove you to Sinai.

“Tell me about this Jamaican,” says the older, white-haired detective after dumping you in one of the lockboxes. “What’s his name?”

He sits across the table from you, staring at you with those blue eyes like some kind of walrus.

“I only know his street name.”

“So? What is it?”

And you give it up. A real street name for a real Jake, a homeboy in his late twenties who you know lives maybe a block or so from the Fullards. Yeah, you’re thinking now, bunk. You’re giving them just enough to be real, not enough for them to work with.

“Hey, Tom,” says the white-haired detective, talking to the younger cop who came into the box with him. “Let me get with you for a second.”

You can see their shadows on the other side of the one-way window in the interrogation room, watch them talking in the corridor outside. The old walrus walks away. The doorknob turns and the younger police, the Italian, comes back with pen and paper.

“I’m going to take your statement,” he says. “But first, I need to advise you of these rights …”

The cop talks and writes slowly, giving you time to get the story straight. You were over there getting high with Ronnie and his brother, you tell him. Then they invited the Jamaican in, and a little later there was an argument. No one saw the Jake go into the kitchen and come out with a knife. But you saw him use that knife to kill Ronnie, then Ronnie’s brother. You tried to grab the knife but got cut and ran away. Later, when you were walking home, the Jamaican drove up and told you to get in his car. He told you his beef was with the other two, that he wouldn’t mess with you as long as you kept your mouth shut.

“That’s why I lied about the fence at first,” you tell him, looking at the floor.

“Hmmm,” the young cop says, still writing.

And then the white-haired walrus is back in the room, carrying a black-and-white mug shot—a photograph of the Jamaican kid whose street name you gave up not ten minutes earlier.

“Is this the guy?” he asks you.

Christ. Goddamn. You can’t believe it.

“That’s him, ain’t it?”

“No.”

“You’re a lying piece of shit,” says the walrus. “That’s the guy you described and he lives right at the corner house you described. You’re pissing up my leg here.”

“No, that’s not him. It’s another guy looks like him …”

“You thought we wouldn’t even know who you were talking about, didn’t you?” he says. “But I used to work that area. I’ve known the family you’re talking about for years.”

The man gets a street name and comes back ten minutes later with a fucking photograph. You can’t believe it, but you don’t know about the walrus, about the memory he carries around like a weapon. You don’t know or you wouldn’t have said a word.

Months from now, when an assistant state’s attorney gets her hands on this case, she’ll be told by the head of her trial team that it’s a sure loser, that it’s a circumstantial prospect. Which might give you a little hope if the names on the prosecution report were anything other than Worden and Landsman and Pellegrini. Because Worden will pull rank to make a direct appeal to the head of the trial division, and Pellegrini will brief the ASA on just how this case can be won. And in the end it will be Landsman on the stand in Bothe’s court, sliding everything but the kitchen sink past your public defender, packing every answer with so much background and speculation and hearsay that at one point you’ll actually turn and look at your own lawyer in dismay. In the end, it won’t matter that the trace lab let every blood sample putrefy before the trial, and it won’t matter that the prosecutors argued against taking the case, and it won’t matter when you take the stand to tell the jury that horseshit about your murdering Jamaican. It won’t matter, because from the very moment you picked up that kitchen knife, they owned you. And if you don’t know that now, then you’ll know it when your lawyer snaps his briefcase shut and tells you to stand and swallow double-life consecutive from an irritated Elsbeth Bothe.

But now, right now, you’re still fighting it; you’re working hard to remain the very picture of tormented innocence in that lockbox. You didn’t kill them, you plead when the wagon man comes with the cuffs, the Jamaican did it. He killed them both; he cut your hand. On the way to the elevators, you scan the hallway and the office inside, staring at the men who are doing this to you: the white-haired cop; the younger, dark-haired one; the sergeant who leaned on you at the hospital—all three of them now certain and sure. You’re still shaking your head, pleading, trying
hard to look like a victim. But what could you possibly know about being a victim?

In four months, you’ll be a trivia question to these men. In four months, when the carbon-sheet court notices show up in their mailboxes, the men who took your freedom will look down at your name in computer-embossed type and wonder who the hell you are: Wilson, David. Jury trial in part six. Christ, they’ll think, which one is Wilson? Oh yeah, the double from Pimlico. Yeah, that brain-dead with the story about the Jake.

In time, your tragedy will be consigned to an admin office file drawer, and later to a strip of microfilm somewhere in the bowels of the headquarters building. In time, you will be nothing more than a 3-by-5 index card in the suspect name file, packed into the T-Z drawer with about ten thousand others. In time, you will mean nothing.

But today, as the wagon man checks your cuffs and checks his paperwork, you are the precious spoils of one day’s war, the Holy Grail of one more ghetto crusade. To the detectives watching you leave, you are living, breathing testimony to a devotion that the world never sees. To them, you are validation for honorable lives spent in service of a lost cause. On this fading December afternoon, you are pride itself.