“Detective,” he asked Worden in front of the group, “can you tell me if those are entrance wounds or exit wounds?”looked down at the dead man’s chest. Small entrance-big exit is the rule of thumb for gunshot wounds, but with a 12-gauge, the entrances can also be pretty fearsome. At close range, it’s never easy to say for sure.
“Entrance wounds.”
“Those,” said Smialek, turning to the residents with proof of a police detective’s fallibility, “are exit wounds.”watched the Big Man go into a slow boil. It was, after all, Smialek’s job to know any and all entrances from any and all exits, whereas it was Worden’s to find out who put the holes there in the first place. Given the divergence in perspectives, several months and a dozen or so bodies are often required before a detective and a pathologist can work well together. After that initial encounter, for example, it took quite a while before Worden could see Smialek as a good cutter and investigator. Likewise, it took that long before the doctor began to regard Worden as something more than a poor dumb white boy from Hampden.a medical examiner’s report is required on any case in which murder is probable, the autopsy room has long been part of a Baltimore detective’s daily routine. On any given day, the morning rounds may bring to Penn Street a state trooper handling a Western Maryland drowning or a Prince George’s County detective with a drug murder from the D.C. suburbs. But the sheer volume of city violence has established the Baltimore cops as fixtures at the ME’s office, and as a result, the relationship between veteran detectives and the more experienced pathologists has grown close with time. Too close, to Smialek’s way of thinking.arrived in Baltimore with the belief that the natural ties to the homicide unit had allowed the medical examiner’s office to sacrifice some of its status as an independent agency. Detectives, particularly those from the city, had too much influence over the manner-of-death rulings, too much say in whether something would be called a murder or a natural death.Smialek’s arrival, the autopsy room was indeed a less formal place. Coffee and cigarettes were bartered and shared in the cutting room and a few detectives had been known to show up on Saturday mornings with a six-pack or two, treating the cutters to some early relief from the weekend rush that always began with Friday night’s violence. Those were the days when practical jokes and raw banter were an established part of morning rounds. Donald Steinhice, a detective on Stanton’s shift who long ago had learned to throw his voice, was responsible for some notable feats, and many an ME or assistant began an autopsy by pausing for what seemed to be a dead man’s complaint about cold hands., the casual ease of these years also had a down side. Worden, for one, could remember visiting the autopsy room and noticing the clutter and disorganization; sometimes, when the weekend rush used up all the metal gurneys, bodies were even laid out on the floor. Nor was it uncommon for evidence to get lost, and the integrity of trace evidence was often suspect, with the detectives unsure whether hairs and fibers found on the bodies were from the crime scene or from the ME’s own freezer. Most important, to Worden’s way of thinking, there had simply been a lot less respect for the dead.a campaign for investigative independence and better conditions, Smialek ended all that, although he did so in a way that damaged the camaraderie of Penn Street and made the place a hell of a lot less fun in the process. As if to emphasize the professionalism of the office, he insisted on being addressed as a doctor and would not tolerate even a passing reference to his office as a “morgue.” To avoid acrimony, detectives learned to call the place-in Smialek’s presence, at least-the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Subordinates who were used to less formal arrangements, many of them talented pathologists, soon ran afoul of the new chief, as did those detectives who couldn’t sense the change in the weather.into the autopsy room on one occasion, Donald Waltemeyer made the mistake of wishing all the ghouls in the chopshop a fine good morning. Whereupon Smialek told other detectives that if Waltemeyer continued on that path, he would do so with a new and larger asshole. They were not ghouls, he declared, they were doctors; it was not a chopshop, it was the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. And the sooner Waltemeyer learned these things, the happier a warrior he’d be. Ultimately, the detectives’ verdict on the Smialek regime was divided: the ME’s office certainly seemed to be better organized and more professional in some respects; on the other hand, it was a fine morning when you could share a cold one with Dr. Smyth while listening to Steinhice speak for the dead.course, the application of criteria such as comfort and amusement to the autopsy room is-in and of itself-ample proof of a homicide man’s peculiar and sustaining psychology. But for the detectives, the most appalling visions have always demanded the greatest detachment, and Penn Street, even on a good day, was one hell of a vision. In fact, quite a few detectives came close to being ill the first couple times around, and two or three aren’t ashamed to say they still have a problem every now and then. Kincaid can handle anything unless it’s a decomp, in which case he’s the first one out the loading dock door. Bowman’s okay until they pop the skull to remove the brain; the sight doesn’t bother him so much as the clipped sound of the snapping bone. Rick James still gets a little unnerved when he sees a young child or an infant on the table.beyond those occasional hard moments, the daily routine at the ME’s office is, for a detective, exactly that. Any investigator with more than a year in the unit has witnessed the postmortem examination so often that it has become utterly familiar. If they absolutely had to do it, half the men on the shift could probably pick up a scalpel and break a corpse down to parts, even if they didn’t have any idea what, if anything, they were actually looking for.process begins with the external examination of the body, as important as the autopsy itself. Ideally, the cadavers are supposed to arrive at Penn Street in the same condition as they appeared on the scene. If the victim was dressed when found, he remains dressed, and the clothes themselves will be examined with great care. If there were indications of a struggle, the victim’s hands will have been encased at the scene in paper bags (plastic bags produce condensation when the body is later removed from the freezer) to preserve any hairs, fibers, blood or skin beneath the fingernails or between the fingers. Likewise, if the crime scene was in a house or some other location where trace evidence could be recovered, the ME’s attendants will wrap the body in a clean white sheet before removal, trapping any hairs, fibers or other trace material for later recovery.the beginning of the external examination, each body is removed from the walk-in freezer and weighed, then rolled on a metal gurney to the overhead camera that provides the photographs of record before the autopsy. Next, the body is rolled into the autopsy area, a long expanse of ceramic tile and metal that can accommodate as many as six examinations simultaneously. The Baltimore facility does not have, like many autopsy rooms, overhead microphones that allow the pathologists to record findings for later transcription. Instead, the doctors take notes periodically using clipboards and ball-points left on a nearby shelf.the victim was clothed, the pathologist will try to match the holes and tears in each item of clothing to the corresponding wounds: Not only does this help confirm that the victim was killed in the presumed manner-a good pathologist can spot a body that has been dressed after being shot or stabbed-but in the case of gunshot wounds, the clothes can then be checked visually or chemically tested for ballistic residue.the victim’s clothes have received a preliminary examination, each article is then removed carefully to preserve any trace evidence. As with a crime scene, precision is preferable to speed. Bullets and bullet fragments, for example, often manage to leave the body only to lodge in the victim’s clothing, and often that evidence will be recovered as the body is slowly undressed.cases where sexual assault is suspected, the external examination includes a careful search for any internal trauma, as well as vaginal, oral or anal swabs for ejaculate, because semen recovered at the point of autopsy may be used later for comparison to link a suspect to the crime.trace evidence can be extracted from the victim’s hands. In a murder that follows a struggle or sexual assault, fingernail clippings may produce fragments of skin, hair or even the blood of the assailant. If the struggle involved a knife, defense wounds-a pattern of straight incisions, often relatively small-may be visible on the victim’s hands. Likewise, if at any point the victim fired a weapon, particularly a large-caliber handgun, chemical tests for barium, antimony and lead deposits on the back of each hand might yield proof of that fact. The examination of a victim’s hands may also mean the difference between a ruling of homicide or suicide; in about 10 percent of all self-inflicted gunshot wounds, the shooting hand will be speckled by blood and tissue particles-“blowback” from the wound track.as a detective stares at a crime scene and tries to see those things that are out of place or missing entirely, a pathologist conducts an autopsy with a similar eye. Any mark, any lesion, any unexplained trauma to the body is carefully noted and examined. For that reason, hospital trauma teams are told to leave catheters, shunts and other tools of medical intervention intact so that the pathologist can differentiate between physical alterations that occurred in the effort to save the victim and those that occurred prior to the emergency room.the external examination is complete, the actual autopsy begins: the pathologist makes a Y-shaped incision across the chest with a scalpel, then uses an electric saw to cut through the ribs and remove the breastplate. In the case of penetrating wounds, the doctor will follow the wound track at each level of the body’s infrastructure, noting the trajectory of the bullet or the direction of the blade wound. The process continues until the full extent of the wound is known and, in the case of gunshot wounds, until either the entrance wounds are matched with exits or the spent projectile is recovered from the body.wounds are further evaluated in terms of their likely effect on the victim. A through-and-through wound to the head no doubt caused immediate collapse, but another wound, a chest shot that pierced a lung and the vena cava, might not have resulted in death for perhaps five to ten minutes, though it would have ultimately proven just as lethal. By this process, a pathologist can speculate about what actions may have been physiologically possible after a wound was inflicted. This is always a difficult guessing game, however, because shooting victims do not demonstrate the same reliable and consistent behavior depicted in television and film. Unfortunately for homicide detectives, a badly wounded person often refuses to limit the crime scene by simply falling down at the first wound and then waiting for the ambulance or morgue wagon.distortion of television and popular culture is nowhere more apparent than in the intimate relationship of bullets and bodies. Hollywood tells us that a Saturday Night Special can put a man on the pavement, yet ballistic experts know that no bullet short of an artillery shell is capable of knocking a human being off his feet. Regardless of a bullet’s weight, shape and velocity and regardless of the size of the handgun from which it was fired, it is too small a projectile to topple a person by the impact of its own mass. If bullets truly had such power, the laws of physics would require that the shooter would also be knocked off his feet in similar fashion when he discharged the weapon. Even with the largest firearms, this doesn’t occur.fact, a bullet stops a human being by doing one of two things: striking the brain, brain stem or spinal cord, causing immediate damage to the central nervous system; or damaging enough of the cardiovascular system to cause massive blood loss to the brain and eventual collapse. The first scenario has an immediate result, though the average shooter’s ability to intentionally strike the brain or spinal cord of a target is largely limited to luck. The second scenario takes longer to play out because there is an awful lot of blood for a human body to lose. Even a gunshot wound that effectively destroys the victim’s heart leaves enough blood to supply the brain with oxygen for ten to fifteen seconds. Although the popular belief that many people fall down upon being shot is generally accurate, experts have determined that this occurs not for physiological reasons, but as a learned response. People who have been shot believe they are supposed to fall immediately to the ground, so they do. Proof of the phenomenon is evident in its opposite: There are countless cases in which people-often people whose mental processes are impaired by drugs or alcohol-are shot repeatedly, sustaining lethal wounds; yet despite the severity of their injuries, they continue to flee or resist for long periods of time. An example is the 1986 shootout between FBI agents and two bank robbery suspects in Miami, a prolonged gun battle in which both suspects and two federal agents were killed and five other agents wounded. Pathologists later discovered that one of the gunmen sustained a lethal heart wound in the first minutes of the incident yet managed to remain ambulatory for close to fifteen minutes, firing at agents and attempting to escape by restarting two cars before finally collapsing. People with bullets in them, even a considerable number of bullets, do not always perform to expectations., for that matter, do the bullets themselves. Once loosed upon the innards of a human being, these little lead bits also tend toward the unpredictable. For one thing, bullets often lose their shape. Hollow-point and wadcutter rounds tend to flatten out against tissue, and all ammunition can shatter against bone. Likewise, most projectiles do a lot less spinning and drilling after encountering resistance inside the body; instead, they yaw and tumble, battering tissue and organs along the way. As bullets enter a body, they also become less directional, glancing off bone and sinew and following the altered trajectories of their own changing shape. This is as true for the smallest slugs as for the larger ones. Out on the street, the big guns-the.38s,.44s and.45s-still get the greatest respect, but the lowly.22 pistol has acquired a reputation all its own. Any West Baltimore homeboy can tell you that when a.22 roundnose gets under a man’s skin, it bounces around like a pinball. And every pathologist seems to have a story about a.22 slug that entered the lower left back, clipped both lungs, the aorta and the liver, then cracked an upper rib or two before finding its way out the upper right shoulder. It’s true that a man who gets hit with a.45 bullet has to worry about a larger piece of lead cleaving through him, but with a good.22 round, he has to worry that the little bugger is in there for the grand tour.big-city medical examiners employ a fluoroscope or X-ray to hunt down the tiny shards of metal alloy that travel to all sorts of unexpected destinations. In Baltimore, that technology is readily available and is occasionally used by a cutter in situations where multiple gunshot wounds or shattered bullets have complicated the recovery effort. For the most part, however, the veterans on Penn Street take pride in being able to locate most of the bullets and fragments without resorting to the scope, relying instead on a careful examination of the wound track and an understanding of a bullet’s dynamics inside the body. For example, a bullet fired into the skull of a victim might not leave the head but instead ricochet off the inside of the skull at a point roughly opposite from the entrance wound; that much would be obvious from the absence of any exit wound. But an experienced pathologist begins his search knowing that projectiles bouncing off the interior skull rarely ricochet at acute angles. On the contrary, such a slug is more apt to strike the bone and then skate along the inside of the skull in a long arc, often coming to rest just inside the bone and a good distance from any point along the original trajectory. It’s esoteric stuff and, in a perfect world, nothing that a human being should ever need to know. Such is the cumulative knowledge of the autopsy room.process continues with the removal of the breastplate and the examination of the internal organs. Linked together in the body’s central cavity, the organ tree is lifted out as a single entity and placed on the steel sinks at the other end of the room. A careful vivisection of the heart, lungs, liver and other organs is then conducted, with the pathologist checking for any signs of disease or deformity while continuing to follow wound paths through the affected organs. With the organs removed, the remaining wound tracks can be followed into the posterior tissue of the body, and projectiles that have lodged in those muscles can also be removed. Bullets and bullet fragments, a critical category of physical evidence, are of course handled with great care, and they are removed by hand or with soft implements that cannot scratch the outer surface and thereby interfere with later ballistic comparisons of rifling marks.the final phase of the internal exam, the pathologist uses the electric saw to cut the circumference of the skull, the top of which is then popped upward with a lever-like tool. Pulling from behind the ears, the skin of the victim’s scalp is then folded forward across the face so that any head wound can be tracked and the brain itself can be removed, weighed and examined for disease. For observers, the detectives included, this last stage of the autopsy is perhaps the hardest. The sound of the saw, the cranial pop from the lever, the image of the facial skin being covered by scalp-nothing makes the dead seem quite so anonymous as when the visage of every individual is folded in upon itself in a rubbery contortion, as if we’ve all been wandering this earth wearing dimestore Halloween masks, so easily and indifferently removed.examination concludes with a sampling of bodily fluids-blood from the heart, bile from the liver, urine from the bladder-to be used for toxicology tests that can identify poisons or measure alcohol and drug consumption. More often than not, a detective will request a second blood sample as well in order to identify blood at the crime scene or any bloodstained items that are seized in a later search warrant. Toxicology results take several weeks, as does neutron activation testing for gunshot residue, which is analyzed at the FBI lab in Washington. DNA testing, another aid to identification that was introduced in the late 1980s, can credibly match samples of the human genetic code using blood, skin or hair samples and has therefore become the new frontier for trace forensics. But the process is beyond the lab capabilities of both the medical examiner’s office and the Baltimore department. When relevant to a case and requested by a detective, samples are instead sent to one of a handful of private labs used by Maryland authorities, but the backlog can be as bad as six months-a long time to wait for critical evidence.single autopsy can take less than an hour, depending on the complexity of the case and the extent of the wounds or injuries. When it is finished, an assistant returns the internal organs to the chest cavity, replaces the brain and skull top and closes the incisions. The body is then returned to the freezer to await a funeral home’s hearse. The gathered evidence-blood samples, swabs, nail clippings, bullets, bullet fragments-is then marked and bagged for the detective, who will take it to the evidence control unit or the ballistics lab, ensuring a clear chain of custody.its very efficiency, the process manages somehow to become less and less extraordinary. But what still has emotional force for even veteran detectives is the autopsy room as a panoramic vision, a sort of Grand Central Station of lifelessness in which human bodies are at varying stops along the disassembly line. On a busy Sunday morning, the hallway outside the cutting room might be filled with eight or nine metal tables and the freezer may hold a half dozen more. To stand amid the overnight accumulation of homicides and auto accidents, drownings and burnings, electrocutions and suicides, overdoses and seizures-that is always a little overwhelming. White and black, male and female, old and young, all come to Penn Street with no common denominator save that their deaths are officially unexplained occurrences within the geographic confines of the Old Line State. More than any other visual image, the weekend display in the tiled room reminds a homicide detective that he deals in a wholesale market.visit to the autopsy room reaffirms a detective’s need for a psychological buffer between life and death, between the horizontal forms on the gurneys and the vertical forms moving between the metal. The detectives’ strategy is simple and it can be presented as an argument: We are alive; you are not.is a philosophy unto itself, a religion worthy of its own rites and rituals. Yea, though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we are breathing and laughing and sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup, while you are stripped bare and emptied of vital pieces. We are wearing blue and brown and arguing with the attendant about last night’s Orioles game, insisting that the Birds can’t win without another RBI man in the lineup. Your clothes are torn and soaked with blood and you are refreshingly free of all opinion. We are contemplating a late breakfast on company time; you are having the contents of your stomach examined.that logic alone, we are entitled to a little arrogance, a little distance, even within the close confines of the autopsy room. We are entitled to walk among the dead with a false confidence, with a deceitful wit, with the self-sustaining assurance that it’s still the greatest of chasms that separates us from them. We will not mock the shells of the dead, sprawled on their wheeled alloy cots; but neither will we humanize them, growing solemn and mortal at the very sight. We can laugh and joke and bear witness in this place only because we will live forever, and if we don’t live forever, we will at least manage to avoid leaving this vale as an unattended death in the state of Maryland. In the safety of our imagination, we will only depart in wrinkled skin and a soft bed, with a signed death certificate from a licensed physician. We will not be bagged and weighed and photographed from above so that Kim or Linda or some other secretary in the Crimes Against Persons section can glance at the 8-by-10 glossy and remark that Landsman looked better with his clothes on. We will not be split and spliced and sampled only to have a civil servant note on a government-issue clipboard that our heart was moderately enlarged, our gastrointestinal system, unremarkable.
“Table for one,” says an attendant, sliding a cadaver into an empty slot in the autopsy room. An old joke, but he, too, is alive and therefore entitled to an old joke or two.for Rich Garvey, taking note of a rather well-endowed male cadaver: “Oh, my goodness, I’d hate to see that thing angry.”Roger Nolan, noticing a random racial configuration: “Hey Doc, how is that the white guys got their tables right away and the black guys are all waiting in the hall?”
“I think this is one time,” muses an attendant, “when the black guys would rather see the white guys go first.”on rare occasions is the veil lifted, with the living compelled to acknowledge the dead honestly. It happened to McAllister five years back, when the body on the metal table was Marty Ward, a narcotics detective killed in a Frederick Street drug front when a hand-to-hand sale went bad. Ward was Gary Childs’s partner back then and one of the most popular detectives on the sixth floor. McAllister was chosen to work that autopsy because someone in the unit had to do it, and the other homicide detectives had been closer to Ward. None of that made it easier, of course.the detectives, the rule of thumb is that if you think about it, if you allow the imagery to be about human beings rather than evidence, you will be led to some strange and depressing places. Insisting on this distance is an acquired skill, and for new detectives, an established rite of passage. New men are measured by their willingness to watch a body disassembled and then adjourn to the Penn Restaurant, on the other side of Pratt Street, for the three-egg special and a beer.
“The real test of a man,” says Donald Worden, reading the menu one morning, “is whether or not he’s willing to substitute that nasty pork roll for the bacon.”Terry McLarney, the closest thing to a philosopher in the homicide unit, has trouble finding anything more than black comedy in the autopsy room. When it is his turn to walk in that small space between the living and the dead, his empathy for the forms on the metal tables is largely limited to his ongoing and thoroughly unscientific survey of livers.
“I like to look for the more derelict-looking guys, the ones who look like they’ve had a hard life,” explains McLarney, deadpan. “If they open ’em up and the liver is all hard and gray, I get depressed. But if it’s pink and puffy, hey, I’m happy all day.”one discomfiting occasion, McLarney was in the autopsy room when one case appeared on the rounds sheet with the explanation that although the victim had no medical history, he was known to drink beer every day. “I read that and figured, What the fuck,” McLarney mused. “I might as well just find an empty table, lie down and unbutton my shirt.”course, McLarney knows better than to think it can all be laughed off. The line between life and death isn’t so thick and straight that a man can stand on it every morning, cracking jokes with impunity as the doctors wield scalpel and knife. Once, in a rare moment, McLarney even tries to find words for something deeper.
“I don’t know about anyone else,” he says, serving up a platitude to the others in the homicide office one afternoon, “but whenever I’m down there for an autopsy, I can pretty much convince myself that there is a God and there is a heaven.”
“The morgue makes you believe in God?” asks Nolan, incredulous.
“Yeah, well, if not heaven, then someplace where your mind or your soul goes after you die.”
“Ain’t no heaven,” says Nolan to the rest of the group. “You look around that room down there and you know we’re all just meat.”
“No,” says McLarney, shaking his head. “I believe we go somewhere.”
“Why’s that?” asks Nolan.
“Because when the bodies are all laid out like that, all the life is just gone and you know that there’s nothing left. They’re so empty. You can look at their faces and know they’re completely empty…”
“So?”
“So, it’s got to go somewhere, right? It doesn’t just disappear. They’ve all got to have somewhere else to go.”
“So their souls go to heaven?”
“Hey,” says McLarney, laughing, “why not?”Nolan smiles and shakes his head, giving McLarney time to wander off with his seminal theologies intact. After all, only the living can argue for the dead, and McLarney is alive; they are not. By virtue of that one undeniable fact, he is entitled to win with the weakest argument.Brown pilots the Cavalier to within a block of the blue emergency lights, close enough to observe the general outline of the scene.
“I’ll take this one,” he says.
“You really are a piece of shit,” says Worden from the passenger seat. “Why don’t you just drive up and take a look at it first before deciding?”
“Hey, I’m deciding now.”
“Maybe you want to see if there’s a lockup first?”
“Hey,” says Brown again, “I’m deciding now.”shakes his head. Protocol demands that when two detectives are in a car and heading for a scene, one detective signs on as the primary before anything about the murder is known. By this unspoken agreement, those unseemly arguments in which one detective accuses another of grabbing dunkers and dumping whodunits are kept to a minimum. By waiting until the scene is within sight, Dave Brown is trampling around the edges of the rule, and Worden, true to form, is letting him know it.
“Whatever happens,” Worden says, “I’m not helping you with this case.”
“Did I ask for your fucking help?”shrugs.
“It’s not like I got a look at the body.”
“Good luck,” says Worden.wants this murder for no other reason than the location of the crime scene, but as reasons go, it’s pretty good. For one thing, the Cavalier is now parked in the 1900 block of Johnson Street in South Baltimore’s bottom, and South Baltimore’s bottom is deep in the bowels of Billyland. Stretching from Curtis Bay to Brooklyn and from South Baltimore on through Pigtown and Morrell Park, Billyland is a recognized geographic entity among Baltimore cops, a subculture that serves as the natural habitat for the descendants of West Virginians and Virginians who left the coal mines and the mountains to man Baltimore’s factories during the Second World War. To the chagrin of the established white ethnic groups, the billies swarmed into the red brick and Formstone rowhouses in the southern reaches of the city-an exodus that defined Baltimore as much as the northern movement of blacks from Virginia and the Carolinas during the same era. Billyland has its own language and logic, its own social framework. Billies don’t reside in Baltimore, they live in Bawlmer; it is the Appalachian influence that gives the language in the white sections of the city much of its twang. And although the advent of fluoride has allowed even the truest of billies to retain more of their teeth with each passing generation, nothing prevents their allowing their bodies to be treated like virgin canvas by the East Baltimore Street tattoo artists. Similarly, a billy girl might feel compelled to call police when her boyfriend throws a National Premium bottle at her head, but she will just as surely leap with claws bared on a Southern District uniform’s back the moment he arrives to take her man away.Baltimore’s cops, hard-core billyness is generally regarded with as much disdain and humor as the hard-core ghetto culture. If nothing else, this attitude provides some proof that it is class consciousness, more than racism, that propels a cop toward a contempt for the huddled masses. And in the homicide unit in particular, the working coalition of black and white detectives tends to drive home the point. Just as Bert Silver is excepted from the general dislike of female officers, so are Eddie Brown and Harry Edgerton and Roger Nolan regarded as special cases by white detectives. If you are poor and black and your name is floating around somewhere in the BPI computer, then you are a yo and a toad and-depending on how unreconstructed the mind of the cop-maybe even a brain-dead nigger. If, however, you are Eddie Brown at the next desk over, or Greg Gaskins down at the state’s attorney’s office, or Cliff Gordy on the circuit court bench, or any other member of the taxpaying classes, then you are a black man.similar logic applies in Billyland.may come from the same mountain stock as the rest of Pigtown, but by a detective’s reasoning, that alone doesn’t make you a true billy. Maybe you’re just another white boy; maybe you finished twelfth grade at Southern High and nailed down a decent job and moved out to Glen Burnie or Linthicum. Or maybe you’re like Donald Worden, who grew up in Hampden, or like Donald Kincaid, speaking in a mountain drawl and sporting that tattoo on the back of one hand. On the other hand, if you’ve spent half your life drinking at the B &O Tavern on West Pratt Street and the other half shuttling back and forth from the Southern District Court for theft, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and possession of phencyclidine, then to a Baltimore detective you most certainly are a billy boy, a white-trash redneck, a city goat, a dead-brained cul-de-sac of heredity, spawned in the shallow end of a diminishing gene pool. And if you happen to get in the way of a Baltimore cop, he’ll probably be happy to tell you as much.their views on billy culture, the Baltimore detectives all agree that the best thing about working a murder on the white side of the tracks-aside from the sheer novelty-is that the billies talk. They talk at the scene, they talk in the interrogation rooms, they actually look up the number for the homicide office and then talk on the phone. And when asked whether he wants to remain anonymous, a good billy asks what the hell for. He gives up his real name, his correct address. He offers his work number, his girlfriend’s name and phone number, his girlfriend’s mother’s phone number and every thought he’s had in his head since the ninth grade. The code of the street-the ghetto rule that says a man never talks to a police under any conceivable circumstance-just doesn’t mean as much in Billyland. Maybe it’s because the cops have a little good ol’ boy in them, maybe it’s because the high-spirited Baltimore billy never managed to incorporate lying as an art form. Whichever, a detective working a white murder in the Southern or Southwestern District usually has more information than he knows what to do with.Brown knows all this, of course. As he takes in the swirl of blue-tops surrounding his crime scene, he also knows that he needs a clearance to balance some nasty red on the board. He’s been carrying a couple of open ones, most notably the Clayvon Jones killing, which can’t be put down without a witness no matter how many anonymous callers offer up the suspect’s name. Ordinarily, he might have shrugged young Clayvon off as a hard luck case, but the return of Corey Belt from the Western District for the Geraldine Parrish detail was, in Brown’s mind, a reason for genuine angst. No doubt, Belt had obviously impressed McLarney in the Cassidy investigation, and now Belt was happily teamed with Donald Waltemeyer, Brown’s usual partner, in a probe of the Parrish insurance killings that might take months.last night, Brown had gone so far as to joke weakly about his status. Sitting at an admin office typewriter at the beginning of the overnight shift, he concocted a short, plaintive memorandum to McLarney, which he left in the sergeant’s mailbox:Officer Corey (I’m a superstar) Belt looming on the horizon, I thought I’d take just a moment to reintroduce myself to you.I came to your squad, I was just another long-haired, drug-infested, raving homosexual. Working under your knowledge, talent, skill, kindness and love I have become a detective of barely questionable means. Keeping this in mind, and to include the great feelings of my squad toward me (Worden: “He’s a useless fuck”… James: “He never pays his fucking bar tab”… Ed Brown: “I doesn’t even know the motherfucker”) I was wondering what plans you had in mind for my CONTINUED service to you.will remain ever vigilant, awaiting your response. Respectfully (everyone takes advantage of me),John Brown, Detective.? Homicide? (Forever, Please God)found the memo about an hour into the midnight shift and read it aloud in the coffee room, giggling at the more obsequious passages.
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