Homicide. David Simon
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hands and knees in a Reservoir Hill alley.
The detectives divide the recruits into pairs and assign each to a rear yard behind the 700 block of Newington Avenue as well as the yards on Park and Callow avenues, which form the east and west boundaries of the block in which the child was found. There are no yards or open areas behind the block’s northern boundary, Whitelock Street; there, a red brick warehouse backs right up to the alley. The search takes more than an hour, with the trainees recovering three steak knives, one butter knife and one kitchen carving utensil—all marred by more rust than could accumulate on a murder weapon overnight. Also harvested are a variety of hypodermic syringes, an item commonly discarded by the local citizenry and of no particular interest to the detectives, as well as combs, hair braids, assorted pieces of clothing and a child’s dress shoe—none of it related to the crime. One enterprising recruit produces, from the rear yard of 704 Newington, a clear plastic bag half filled with a dull yellow liquid.
“Sir,” he asks, holding the bag up to eye level, “is this important?”
“That appears to be a bag of piss,” says Garvey. “You can put it down anytime you like.”
The search does not produce a child’s small star-shaped gold earring. Nor does it yield a blood trail, the one clue that might point to the murder scene, or at least the direction from which the body was carried to the rear of 718 Newington. Small purple blobs of coagulated blood dot the pavement where the little girl was discovered the morning before, but neither the detectives nor the trainees can locate another droplet anywhere else in the alley. The severity of the child’s wounds and the fact that she was carried to the alley wrapped in nothing more constricting than her little raincoat almost assures that the killer left blood spatters, but the rain that blanketed the city from late Wednesday to Thursday morning has neatly destroyed any such evidence.
As the cadets search, Rich Garvey walks once more through the yard behind 718 Newington. The yard itself, about 12 by 50 feet, is mostly paved, and it is one of the few rear parcels in the 700 block that is enclosed by a chain-link fence. Rather than dump the child’s body in the common alley or in one of the more accessible yards nearby, the murderer inexplicably took the trouble to open the rear gate and carry the body through the yard to the rear entrance of 718 Newington. The body had been found only a few feet from the kitchen door, at the foot of a metal fire stair that runs from the roof to the rear yard.
It made no sense. The killer could have dumped the little girl anywhere in the alley, so why risk taking her body inside the fenced-in yard of an occupied house? Did he want it to be found immediately? Did he want to cast suspicion on the elderly couple that lived at 718? Or did he feel, in the end, some perverse sense of remorse, some human impulse that told him to leave the body inside a fenced yard, protected from the stray dogs and alley rats that roam through Reservoir Hill?
Garvey looks toward the far end of the yard, where the back section of the fence meets the common alley, and notices something silver on the ground behind a dented trash can. He walks over and discovers a small, six-inch piece of hollow metal pipe, which he carefully lifts at one end and holds up to the light. Inside the tube is a thick mass of what appears to be coagulated blood as well as a dark strand of human hair. The pipe looks like a piece of some larger assembly, and Garvey allows himself a hard thought, wondering whether just such an item could have caused the vaginal tear. The detective carefully hands the pipe to a lab tech, who bags it.
A television cameraman, one of several hovering around Newington Avenue this morning, watches the exchange and wanders across the alley.
“What was that?”
“What?”
“That piece of metal you picked up.”
“Listen,” says Garvey, placing a hand on the cameraman’s shoulder. “You gotta do us a favor and keep that out of your film. It might be a piece of evidence, but if you put it on the tube, it could really fuck us. Okay?”
The cameraman nods.
“Thanks. Really.”
“No problem.”
The presence of television cameramen on Newington Avenue that morning—one from each of the three network affiliates—is, in fact, the other reason for the trainee search of the alley. Garvey’s lieutenant, Gary D’Addario, gained a good understanding of the command staff’s priorities in the first hours of the investigation, when his captain ventured out of the admin offices to suggest that detectives should maintain a high profile in Reservoir Hill. Maybe, he said, something could be done for the television cameras. D’Addario had been unable to contain his aggravation. The Latonya Wallace case was only hours old and already the brass was asking his people to jump through hoops for the media.
He responded with an uncharacteristic lack of diplomacy: “I’d rather have them doing something that will solve the case.”
“Of course,” said the captain, with a mixture of anger and embarrassment. “That’s not at all what I was saying.”
The exchange, which took place in the main homicide office, was overheard by several of D’Addario’s detectives, who related it to several others. Before the end of the day, many of the men on both shifts were willing to believe that D’Addario, already frustrated by his exclusion from the Monroe Street probe, had needlessly thrown down a gauntlet. Even if the call to Education & Training had been accompanied by calls to television assignment editors, the trainee search wasn’t exactly the worst idea the brass had ever seized upon. More to the point, the captain was a captain and D’Addario was a lieutenant, and if this case went down in flames, the supervisors with lower rank were more likely to end up as casualties. As the immediate supervisor of all the detectives involved, D’Addario might be crucified on Latonya Wallace alone.
Isolated from the command staff, D’Addario now put his faith—and quite possibly, it seemed to some, his career—in the hands of Jay Landsman, a man who for all his profane and comic impulses was the senior and most experienced sergeant in the homicide unit.
At thirty-seven, Landsman was the last of a line: His father had retired with a lieutenant’s rank as acting commander of the Northwestern District, the first Jewish officer to rise to a district command on a predominantly Irish force; his older brother, Jerry, had left the homicide unit only a year before, going out as a lieutenant after twenty-five years. Jay Landsman signed up for no less of a reason than his father, and the family tradition allowed him to come out of the academy with a veteran’s knowledge of the department’s inner workings. The family name was some help, but Landsman thrived in the department by proving himself to be a smart, aggressive cop. Soon there were three bronze stars, one commendation ribbon, three or four commendatory letters. Landsman was in Southwestern patrol for less than four years before coming downtown to CID; similarly, he was in homicide for only a few months before being bumped to sergeant in 1979, yet in that short time he put down every case to which he was assigned. Then they shipped him to the Central for an eleven-month tour as a sector supervisor before bringing him back to the sixth floor as a detective sergeant. When the Latonya Wallace investigation began, Landsman had been leading a homicide squad for almost seven years.
In his senior sergeant, D’Addario had a supervisor who could be expected to act like a detective, following his own instincts and pressing an investigation over days or weeks. Landsman had managed to limit the effect of gravity on his stocky, 200-pound frame, and after sixteen years of police work, his tousled black hair and mustache were just beginning to show the occasional slivers of gray. Other sergeants in the homicide unit might resemble grocers who consumed too much of the profits, but at an inch over six feet, Landsman still looked like a street police, a hard case who on any given night might take a nightstick and wander down Poplar Grove for that rendezvous with destiny. In fact, he did his best work not as a supervisor, but as a sixth detective in his squad, affixing himself to red balls, police shootings and other sensitive cases, then sharing the crime scenes, the legwork, and the interrogations with the primary detective.
Landsman’s instincts were especially acute: In his time as both a detective and a sergeant, he had broken a good share of cases simply by following his own gut. More often than not, Landsman’s contribution