“There’s no limit to how many they can kill,” said Worden cynically. “There’s only a limit to how long we can work them.”’Addario played the game as it had to be played, sending warning letters-copied to the colonel and captain-to the detectives approaching the 50 percent cap, then benching those who exceeded the limit. Remarkably, his sergeants and detectives were willing to cooperate in this nonsense. Any one of them could have thwarted the restrictions by calling in more detectives to help with a bad midnight shift and then claiming that events overran policy. Murder, after all, is one of the least predictable things in this world., the sergeants sidelined detectives and juggled the schedules because they understood the risk to D’Addario and, beyond that, to themselves. There were a lot of lieutenants in the department and in the estimate of McLarney and Jay Landsman, at least, a good 80 percent of them had the ability, the will and the ambition to do a superior job of screwing up the CID homicide unit if ever given any chance.if McLarney and Landsman played the game out of genuine loyalty to D’Addario, Roger Nolan’s reasons were altogether different.took seriously his role as a sergeant and he clearly enjoyed working in what was essentially a paramilitary organization. More than most of the men in homicide, he took satisfaction in the protocols of police work-the deference to rank, the institutional loyalty, the chain of command. This peculiarity did not necessarily make him a company man; Nolan protected his detectives as well or better than any other supervisor in homicide, and a detective who worked for him could be assured that only his sergeant would mess with him.so, Nolan was an enigma to his own men. A product of the West Baltimore ghetto with twenty-five years on the force, he was said to be the only practicing black Republican in the city of Baltimore. He repeatedly denied this, to little avail. Heavyset and bald, with wide, expressive features, Nolan looked very much like an aging boxer or perhaps the aging ex-Marine that he truly was. Growing up had not come easy to him; his parents had been tormented by alcoholism, other relatives had become players in the West Baltimore drug trade. To a great extent, it was the Marines that saved Nolan, plucking him off North Carrollton Street and providing him with a surrogate family, a bed of his own and three balanced meals a day. He served in both the Pacific and Mediterranean, but then put in his papers before Vietnam heated up. Semper Fi shaped him: Nolan spent his spare time leading a Boy Scout troop, reading military history and watching reruns of Hopalong Cassidy movies. This was not, to any detective’s thinking, a behavior pattern consistent with that of the average West Baltimore native., Nolan’s perspective was unique to the homicide unit. Unlike Landsman and McLarney, Nolan had never been a homicide detective; in fact, he had spent much of his career in patrol, working as a sector supervisor in the Northwestern and Eastern districts-a lengthy exile from headquarters that began when, as a promising young plainclothesman, he crossed the powers-that-be in a celebrated corruption case in the early 1970s.were the years when the Baltimore department was truly rough-and-tumble. In 1973, almost half of the entire Western District and its commander were either indicted or fired for taking protection for the local gambling action. The CID vice unit met with a similar fate, and in the tactical section, rumors were swirling about the ranking black officer on the force, Major James Watkins, who was otherwise a rising candidate for the commissioner’s post. Watkins had grown up with several of Pennsylvania Avenue’s more notable narcotics dealers and, before the end of the decade, he would stand trial as a full colonel, charged with accepting protection from the drug trade.was working plainclothes under Watkins’s command, and he knew that things weren’t right in the tac unit. On one occasion, when one of his raids netted more than five hundred glassine bags of heroin, other plainclothesmen offered to take the contraband to evidence control. Nolan balked. He counted the bags himself, photographed them, then got his own voucher for the submission. Sure enough, the heroin-$15,000 worth-disappeared from the ECU a short time later and two tac officers were ultimately indicted. But for all of that, Nolan didn’t believe that Watkins knew about the corruption or was in any way involved. Against all advice and the wishes of the police commissioner, he testified as a character witness for Watkins at the subsequent trial.colonel was convicted, then granted a retrial on appeal, then acquitted. The verdict on Nolan’s career was equally divided: before his testimony, he had been a sergeant assigned directly to the state’s attorney’s investigative unit; afterward, he was running a patrol sector in the Northwest with no hope of seeing the headquarters building for as long as the current department administration held office. The exile, the political machinations, the unwarranted taint of other men’s corruption-all of that shaped Nolan, so much so that the men in his squad would groan in unison whenever their sergeant began another retelling of the missing heroin story.Nolan had made his way back to CID after so many years in the trenches was something of a personal testament to human perseverance. And although he had no experience with death investigation, it made sense that his ultimate destination would be homicide, where organized corruption was never much of an issue. Over the last fifteen years, the Baltimore department had stayed generally clean-remarkably so when compared to its counterparts in New York, Philadelphia and Miami. But even if a cop had it in mind to make real money, the place to do that was CID narcotics or gambling enforcement or any other unit in which a detective might kick in a door and find $100,000 under a mattress. In homicide, the only recognized scam was overtime pay; no one ever figured out how to make dead bodies pay serious money.than anything else, Nolan was a survivor, proud of his rank and his position in the homicide unit. Consequently, he took the supervisory aspects of his job seriously and was frustrated when Landsman, McLarney or D’Addario seemed less interested in the rituals of command. Supervisors’ meetings on the shift inevitably began with Nolan proposing new ideas for the operation of the shift-some good, some bad, but all of them involving a more formal process of supervision. The meetings would never last long: Landsman would respond to Nolan’s ideas by recommending either serious psychological help or a better grade of marijuana. Then McLarney would make a joke about something completely unrelated to the topic at hand and, to Nolan’s dismay, D’Addario would adjourn the session. Basically, Landsman and McLarney would rather be working the cases; Nolan preferred the role of full-time supervisor.a result, D’Addario’s sudden tactical shift toward closer supervision was, from Nolan’s vantage point, both correct and belated. The lieutenant, he reasoned, should take control of his sergeants, and the sergeants, in turn, should get a rein on the men. In Nolan’s mind, D’Addario had not only abdicated much of his own authority, but that of his sergeants as well.yet Nolan’s detectives-Garvey, Edgerton, Kincaid, McAllister, Bowman-were operating with as much or more freedom than the men in the other squads. Documentation, administrative issues, personnel problems-Nolan held sway over such matters. But the essential purpose of CID homicide was to solve murders, and for that, chain of command mattered no more to Nolan and his men than anyone else. Nolan’s detectives worked their cases in their own speed and fashion, and Nolan would never demand otherwise. Edgerton’s personality required that kind of approach, but even the methodical Garvey would respond to a hovering, micromanaging sergeant by delivering twelve clearances a year. With no sergeant at all, he’d manage an even dozen.
“I wouldn’t want to work for any other sergeant up there,” conceded Garvey, explaining the squad dynamics to another detective. “It’s just that every now and then, you’ve got to slap the shit out of Roger and bring him back down to earth.”the detectives themselves, the OT cutbacks and scheduling changes were tolerable only because they, too, understood D’Addario’s predicament. And when D’Addario began trailing behind the detectives, checking the case files and asking for additional paperwork, no one took any real offense. Working a midnight shift one man short, Rick Requer summed up the sentiment sweetly:
“If it wasn’t for Dee,” he told two other detectives, “we wouldn’t be putting up with any of this fuckin’ bullshit.”they continued to put up with it all through April and into May as D’Addario tried to come to terms with the required pain-in-the-ass persona. The extra paperwork and scheduling changes were cosmetic and could be suffered for as long as it took the lieutenant to weather the storm. As for the overtime, that would flow again in mid-June, when the new budget year began. They cursed, they grumbled, but they played out D’Addario’s string. Most important, they continued to do the one thing absolutely essential to their lieutenant’s future: They solved murders.contributed with a lockup on a fatal beating from the Southwestern, and Waltemeyer put down a shooting in a house on North Wolfe Street, near the Hopkins hospital complex. On Stanton’s shift, Tomlin caught a cutting that ended with the arrest of a new police cadet, a man scheduled to attend the academy the following month.
“Do you think I should call the personnel office about this?” the man asked after confessing.
“Might be a good idea,” Tomlin told him. “Although I’m sure they’ll hear about it somehow.”and Kincaid caught one up on Harlem Avenue, where they were blessed with witnesses and a suspect still lingering at the scene. Arriving at University Hospital to check on their victim, the two detectives watched surgeons crack the kid’s chest in a desperate effort at open-heart massage. The line on the EKG was irregular, and blood was pouring out of the chest cavity onto the white tile floor. Ten-seven within an hour or two, the ER resident predicted, morning at the latest. No shit, thought the detectives, who weren’t exactly strangers to the medical aspects of violent death. A surgeon who cracks the chest is on the last roll of the dice; any detective knows that 97 percent of all such efforts fail. Rule Six had been upended and Garvey arrived back at the office unable to contain his wonder.
“Hey, Donald,” shouted Garvey, bounding across the office and then waltzing Kincaid around a metal desk. “He’s gonna die! He’s gonna die and we know who did it!”
“You,” said Nolan, shaking his head and laughing, “are one cold motherfucker.” Then the sergeant turned crisply on his heel and danced a jig into his own office.week later, Waltemeyer and an assistant state’s attorney caught a flight for Salt Lake City, where an upstanding, pillar-of-the-community type had confessed to his closest friend about being wanted for a murder committed in Baltimore thirteen years earlier. Daniel Eugene Binick, age forty-one, had been in Utah for a dozen years, married for most of that time and working as a drug and alcohol counselor under an assumed name. And though his photograph still adorned the “Wanted for Homicide” poster in the homicide unit’s main office, it was a picture of a much younger, reckless man. The Daniel Binick of 1975 had long, stringy hair, a thick mustache and a respectable police record; the late eighties version wore his hair close-cropped and ran the local AA chapter. Even after a week’s investigation, Waltemeyer found only one living witness to the bar robbery and shooting. But one was enough, and a clearance by any name still smelled as sweet.early May, the clearance rate is a fatter, happier 60 percent. Likewise, the flow of overtime and court pay will be at least temporarily staunched to a point that the brass can’t help notice. If not entirely secure, D’Addario’s position has stabilized, or so it seems to his men.one brief encounter in the homicide office, Landsman acknowledges the lighter mood on the shift by risking a joke at the lieutenant’s expense-something that even Landsman would not have attempted a month earlier.one afternoon, D’Addario, Landsman and McLarney are huddled in front of the television, the lieutenant and McLarney checking the roll book, Landsman absorbing gynecological mysteries from a skin magazine. Wandering across the sixth floor, Colonel Lanham happens to step into his homicide unit and all three supervisors snap to attention.waits a good three seconds before handing the magazine, centerfold splayed open, to Gary D’Addario.
“Here’s your magazine, lieutenant,” he says. “I appreciate you letting me look at it.”’Addario, unthinking, holds out his hand.
“Fucking Jay,” says McLarney, shaking his head.the colonel has to laugh.Edgerton needs a murder.needs a murder today.needs a human body, any human body, still and stiff and void of all life force. He needs that body to fall within the established limits of Baltimore city. He needs that body shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, battered or otherwise rendered inoperative through any act of human intervention. He needs a 24-hour homicide report with his name typed at the bottom, a red-brown case binder that declares Harry Edgerton to be the primary investigator. You say Bowman is handling a shooting call up in the Northeast? Tell him to hang on to that crime scene, because Harry Edgerton, his friend and personal savior, is already in a Cavalier and racing up Harford Road. You say the county police are working a murder in Woodlawn? Well, drag that poor bastard back over the city line and let Edgerton work on him. You got a questionable death in an apartment with no overt trauma or forced entry? No problem. Give the Edge a chance to write on that bad boy and it can be a murder before the next morning’s autopsy.
“If I don’t get one soon,” says Edgerton, jumping red lights on Frederick Road in the early morning darkness, “I’m going to have to kill someone.”two full weeks, Edgerton’s name has been affixed to the board’s wooden frame with a thumbtack, scrawled with a certain infamy on sheets of yellow legal paper that list the squad and detective expected to handle the next homicide call. The daily postings are another indication of D’Addario’s change in demeanor; detectives who have handled fewer murders are now being identified and designated as candidates for the next call. Most especially that means Edgerton. Having handled only two homicides this year, the veteran’s pace is not only a controversy within his squad but a loaded issue for D’Addario as well. For the last two weeks, every one of his postings began and ended with Edgerton’s name. It has become something of a daily joke in the coffee room:
“Who’s up today?”
“Harry’s up.”
“Christ. Harry’s gonna be up ’til October.”days now, Edgerton has bounced from shootings to stabbings to questionable deaths to overdoses, waiting earnestly for something-anything-to come back as a murder.it hasn’t worked. On days when he has handled three or four calls, running from one end of the city to the other looking at bodies, other detectives have picked up the phone and been blessed with double-dunker massacres. Edgerton handles a shooting call and the victim is guaranteed to survive. He works an apparent bludgeoning and the ME is guaranteed to rule the cause of death an overdose, followed by injuries sustained when the victim collapsed on the cement floor. Edgerton goes to the scene of an unattended death and it’s A-1-guaranteed to be an eighty-eight-year-old retiree with a chronic heart condition. None of which means a thing to D’Addario. Edgerton is up until he gets a murder, the lieutenant repeats. If it takes the rest of his career, fine.makes for one very irritable homicide detective. It’s one thing, after all, to be considered the resident flake on the shift and the problem child in the squad. And to have Kincaid and Bowman and God knows who else bitching about sharing the workload-normally Edgerton can handle that, too. But, he thinks, normal can be tossed out a window when I’m being made to handle three calls a day every goddamn day for what is beginning to seem like the rest of my life.’s urgent need for a murder was evident a week ago, when he began cursing at an overdose victim in the Murphy Homes, demanding from the cadaver a little more cooperation and consideration than had thus far been shown to him.
“You degenerate motherfucker,” Edgerton said, berating the dead man as two housing authority cops stared on in amazement. “Where the fuck did you fire up? I don’t have all fucking day to look at your fucking arms. Where the fuck is that fresh track?”wasn’t just the aggravation of a missing needle mark, but the frustration that had been building with each successive call. And at that moment, standing over yet another body in a Murphy Homes stairwell, Edgerton was deeply disturbed that the dead man had done nothing more than kill himself with heroin. What the hell, he pleaded silently, was a murder too much to ask anymore? This was Baltimore, for Chrissakes. This was a dead man in a stairwell at the George B. Murphy Homes housing project. What better place to be shot down with a high-caliber weapon like a dog? What the fuck is this asshole doing with a syringe by his left hand, staring up from the cement floor with that ridiculous half-grin on his face?
“What are you, left-handed?” said Edgerton, rechecking the right arm. “Where the fuck did you shoot your shit?”dead man answered with his grin.
“Why,” Edgerton asked the corpse, “are you doing this to me?”week later and Edgerton is still the point man for D’Addario’s shift, racing across Southwest Baltimore to yet another shooting call that will, if bad luck holds, be nothing more than a grazing. There will be no crime scene, no suspect, no dead man sprawled at the intersection of Hollins and Payson. Edgerton conjures up not a corpse, but an eighteen-year-old sitting on a gurney in the ER at Bon Secours, fully alert, talking, with nothing more than an Ace bandage wrapped around one arm.
“The El Supremo’s gonna have to give me a break already,” he says, weaving between two lanes in the emptiness of Frederick Avenue. “I just can’t buy a murder.”does a Texas stop at the Monroe Street signal, then wheels right onto Payson. Blue strobes from the radio cars greet him, but Edgerton immediately notices the absence of fire department cherry tops. No body on the ground, either. If there was an ambo, Edgerton tells himself, it’s long gone.detective marks his time of arrival and slams the driver’s door. A Southwest uniform, a young white kid, sidles up with an earnest look on his face.
“He’s alive, right?” Edgerton says.
“Who? The victim?”, thinks Edgerton, Elvis fucking Presley. Of course the victim. The detective nods.
“I don’t think so,” says the uniform. “Not for long anyway. He looked pretty bad in the ambo.”detective shakes his head. The kid doesn’t understand what he’s dealing with. I don’t do murders, Edgerton wants to tell him. I just handle calls.
“We got you a witness, though.”witness. Now it’s definitely not a murder.
“Where’s this witness?”
“Over there by my car.”looks across the intersection at a short, wire-thin doper who stares back and nods with what appears to be mild interest. This strikes Edgerton immediately, because eyewitnesses forced to remain at the scene of a murder are generally uncooperative and sullen.
“I’ll be over there in a minute. Where’s the victim?”
“Bon Secours. I think.”
“This is the scene right here?”
“This here, and over that way you’ve got some more shell casings. Twenty-twos, I think.”moves slowly into the street, carefully gauging his own steps. Ten shell casings-.22 rifle by the look of them-are scattered across the asphalt, each circled by a yellow chalk mark. The pattern of the spent shells seems to travel west across the center of the intersection, with most of the casings lying near the southwest corner. And at that corner, two more chalk marks note the location of the body when the paramedics arrived. Head east. Feet west at the curb’s edge.detective walks the scene for another ten minutes, looking for anything out of the ordinary. No blood trail. No fresh scuff marks. No tire patches. Truly an unremarkable crime scene. In the gutter near the northeast corner, he finds a broken gelatin cap with traces of white powder. No surprise here-the intersection of Hollins and Payson is a drug market after dark. Moreover, the capsule is yellowed and dirty enough to make Edgerton believe it’s been in the street for several days and has nothing to do with his shooting.
“Do you have this post?” he asks the uniform.
“Not usually. But I’m in the sector, so I know this corner pretty well. What do you need to know?”do I need to know. Edgerton is beginning to like this kid, who not only knows enough to grab hold of anything at the scene that resembles a witness but is also talking like he knows the area he’s working. In the Baltimore department, this is a situation worthy of nostalgia. Ten or fifteen years ago, a homicide detective could ask a uniform a question and expect an answer. Those were the days when a good man owned his post and one dog couldn’t fuck another at Hollins and Payson without word getting back to the Southwest station house. In that era, a patrolman who worked a post and caught a murder could expect to be asked who hung on that corner and where they could be located. And if he didn’t know, he found out in a hurry. Nowadays, Edgerton tells himself, we’re lucky if the post man can get the street names right. This kid here is a real police. A throwback.
“Who lives in that corner house there?”
“Bunch of drug dealers. It’s a fucking shooting gallery is what it is. Our DEU hit it last week and locked up about a dozen of those fuckers.”that. No likely witnesses there.
“What about that corner?”
“Corner house has junkies. Junkies and an old wino. No, the wino lives one house down.”, Edgerton thinks. The kid is priceless.
“What about over there?”uniform shrugs. “I’m not sure on that one. That might be a real person living there.”
“Did you canvass?”
“Yeah, we did half the block. No answer at that house, and the assholes over there say they didn’t see shit. We can lock ’em up if you want.”shakes his head, writing a few lines in his notepad. The uniform leans over to get a look, just a little bit curious.
“You know this guy you grabbed?” Edgerton asks.
“Not by name, but I’ve seen him around. He sells off this corner and he’s been locked up, I know that. He’s a piece of shit, if that’s what you’re asking.”smiles briefly, then crosses the intersection. The wire-thin dealer is leaning against the radio car, a black beret pulled down straight across his forehead. High-top Air Jordans, Jordache jeans, Nike sweatshirt-a walking pile of ghetto status. He actually smiles when Edgerton walks up to the car.
“I guess I hung too long,” the dealer says.smiles. A homeboy who knows the drill.
“I guess you did. What’s your name?”dealer gives it up in a mumble.
“Any ID?”dealer shrugs, then pulls out a state proof-of-age card. The name checks.
“This your right address?”dealer nods.
“What was the shooting about?”
“I can probably say what it’s about. And I can say what it looked like from down the street, but I didn’t see who it was did it.”
“What do you mean you didn’t see them?”
“I mean I was too far. I was down in the middle of the block when they came up shooting. I didn’t-”cuts him off as another radio car, cruising south on Payson, pulls to the curb. O.B. McCarter, having returned to Southwest patrol after being detailed to homicide for the Karen Smith case, leans out the driver’s window and laughs.
“Harry Edgerton,” he says, unable to contain himself, “is this your call, man?”
“Yeah,’ fraid so. You been to the hospital?”
“Yeah, I been there.”McCarter, thinks Edgerton. He’s been gone from homicide three weeks and I haven’t missed him even a little bit.
“So? Is he dead?”
“You got a suspect?”
“No.”laughs. “He’s dead. You got yourself a murder, Harry.”turns back to the dealer, who is shaking his head at the news. The detective wonders whether his witness is putting on appearances or is genuinely upset about the murder.
“Did you know the guy?”
“Pete? Yeah, I knew him.”
“I got his name as Greg Taylor,” says Edgerton, checking his notes.
“Naw man,’ round here, he was Pete. I just talked to him a couple hours ago. This is some shit.”
“What was he about?”
“He was selling burn bags, you know. He was selling people shit. I told him that shit would get his ass killed…”
“You told him, huh?”
“Yeah. You know.”
“You kind of liked the guy, didn’t you?”dealer smiles. “Yeah, Pete was okay.”despite himself, Edgerton is amused. His victim was working out on Payson Street, selling baking soda to junkies at $10 a cap-an act of unrestrained capitalism guaranteed to bring a man more enemies than can ever be put to good use. Christ, Edgerton tells himself, my luck is turning. Every doper along Frederick Avenue must have hated this sonofabitch and I find the one guy who’s a little sorry to see him dead.
“Was he out here tonight selling burn bags?” Edgerton asks.
“Yeah. Off an’ on, you know.”
“Who’d he sell to?”
“Boy named Moochie bought some. And a girl with Moochie, she lives over on Pulaski. And then these other two came by in a car. I didn’t know them. Quite a few people paid money for that shit.”
“What happened with the shooting?”
“I was down the block. Didn’t really see from where I was at, you know.”shakes his head, then gestures to the back seat of the radio car. The dealer climbs in and Edgerton follows, slamming the right rear door behind him. The detective cracks the window, lights one cigarette and offers another to the dealer. The kid takes the offering with a soft grunt.
“You been doing all right with me so far,” says Edgerton. “Don’t start fucking up now.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you’ve been straight with me up to this point, so I haven’t dragged your ass downtown like I normally would. But if you’re gonna hold back…”
“No, man, no,” says the dealer. “It’s not like that. I told you I saw the shooting, but I was down the street coming up from where my girl lives. I saw them chasing Pete and I heard the shots, but I can’t tell you who they were.”
“How many were there?”
“I saw two. But only one was shooting.”
“Was it a handgun?”
“No,” says the dealer, stretching his arms to the length of a long gun. “It was one of these.”
“A rifle?”
“Yeah.”
“Where’d he come from?”
“I don’t know. He was right there when I first seen him.”
“Where’d he go afterward?”
“After?”
“After Pete got shot. Where’d the boy with the rifle run?”
“Back down Payson.”
“South? That way? What’d he look like? What was he wearing?”
“Dark coat and hat, I think.”
“What kind of hat?”
“You know, like with a brim.”
“Baseball cap?”dealer nods.
“How was he built?”
“Average. Six feet, you know.”throws the last third of his cigarette out the window and reads through the last two pages in his notepad. The dealer breathes deep, then sighs.
“Ain’t this some shit.”grunts. “What?”
“I just talked to him a couple hours back. I told him that this shit was gonna get his ass killed. He just laughed, you know? He laughed and said he was gonna make a little money and then go buy his own shit.”
“Well,” says Edgerton, “you were right.”the sound of voices on the adjacent sidewalk, the dealer slumps down inside the car, suddenly aware that he has been talking on the street with a police detective for a quarter of an hour. Two young boys glide past the car and turn the corner onto Hollins Street, eyefucking the uniforms but never bothering to look into the back seat. Except for the uniforms, the intersection is once again empty.
“Let’s hurry this up,” the dealer says, suddenly uncomfortable. “A lot of people know me around here and this don’t look right.”
“Tell me this,” says Edgerton, still scanning his notes. “There had to be some people out on that corner, right?”dealer nods almost gratefully, content to know the price of his own noninvolvement.
“There were five or six people around,” he tells the detective. “A couple girls that live over that way on Hollins with some other boy I don’t know. I don’t know their names but I see them around. And there was another guy who I do know. He was right there when it happened.”flips to a fresh page of his notepad and clicks the top of his city-issue pen. With nothing else said, both men understand that the price of anonymity will be another witness’s identity. The dealer asks for another cigarette, then a light, then expels both the smoke and the name.
“John Nathan,” Edgerton repeats, writing it down. “Where’s he live?”
“I think Catherine Street, right off Frederick.”
“He deals?”
“Yeah. You all have locked him up.”detective nods, then closes the notepad. There is only so much cooperation that a detective can expect at the scene of a drug murder, and this kid has just exceeded Edgerton’s monthly quota. Instinctively, the dealer reaches over to close the bargain with a handshake. A strange gesture. Edgerton responds, then offers a last warning before opening the car door.
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