Homicide. David Simon
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accusation against a seemingly cooperative witness, a spur-of-the-moment consent search of a witness’s bedroom. As police work, it often appeared random and idiosyncratic, but then again, it often worked. And with two fresh murders every three days, the Baltimore Police Department’s homicide unit was not exactly the best place to hone an exacting, meticulous approach. Landsman’s damn-the-torpedoes method had its share of adherents among the detectives, but even the men who worked for Landsman would admit that it wasn’t always pretty. Most of those on D’Addario’s shift could remember nights when Landsman had shouted his throat raw, accusing three separate suspects in three separate rooms of murdering the same man, then offering two an apology an hour later while handcuffing the third.
The Landsman blitzkrieg often succeeded simply because of its speed. Landsman worked fast and gave free rein to his impulses, and he held a firm belief in Rule Number Three in the homicide manual, which declares that the initial ten or twelve hours after a murder are the most critical to the success of an investigation. In that time, bloody clothes are being dumped or burned, stolen cars or tags ditched, weapons melted or thrown into the harbor. Accomplices are consolidating their stories, agreeing on places and times and shedding wayward and conflicting details. Coherent and reliable alibis are being established. And in the neighborhood where the murder took place, the locals are mixing rumor and fact into one thick, homogeneous gruel, until it becomes almost impossible for a detective to know whether a potential witness is expressing firsthand knowledge or barroom talk. The process begins when the body hits the pavement and continues unabated until even the best witnesses have forgotten critical details. When Landsman’s squad was handling calls, however, the process of deterioration would never be far along before someone, somewhere, was locked in a soundproof cubicle and forced to endure the heat from a detective sergeant in the throes of spontaneous combustion.
But this methodology was often in conflict with an opposite truth in homicide work: Speed is a risk as well as an ally. If Landsman’s tactical onslaught carried a weakness, it was its decidedly linear progression, its preference for immediate depth over widening scope. The decision to pursue a single-minded plan of attack was always a gamble and a detective charging down one corridor in a labyrinth had no assurance that he wasn’t rushing toward a dead end. Nor could he be sure that other, unopened doors would still be there when he tried to retrace his steps.
Up on Reservoir Hill, the labyrinth seems to grow in size and complexity with each passing hour. Even as the trainee class is returning to its bus, other detectives and detail officers are extending the previous day’s canvass to the rowhouses on Park and Callow avenues, east and west of the alley where the body was discovered. Others check the carryouts and corner stores on Whitelock and nearby North Avenue, asking about which businesses sold hot dogs with sauerkraut and whether those items had been sold to anyone on Tuesday or Wednesday. Still others are at the homes of Latonya Wallace’s playmates, asking about her daily routine, her habits, her interest in boys, their interest in her—necessary questions that nonetheless seem stilted when asked about so young a child.
The lead investigators, Tom Pellegrini and Harry Edgerton, spend some of the day on the computer, feeding new names into the data base, pumping out another spate of criminal histories. Edgerton has still not solved the Brenda Thompson murder, but the case file, containing page after page of handwritten notes from his last interview with a potential suspect, has disappeared from his desk, replaced by white manila folders that divide the criminal histories of Reservoir Hill residents by street and block number. Likewise, the two-week-old Rudy Newsome case no longer plagues Tom Pellegrini; as the primary on a child murder, he isn’t expected to work on anything else. Forced priorities are a truth about homicide work that every detective learns to accept. In life, Rudy Newsome was a faceless drone in Baltimore’s million-dollar-a-day drug trade, a street-corner entrepreneur who proved himself entirely expendable. In death, he is again supplanted, this time by a greater tragedy, one that cries louder for vengeance.
Later that second day, Pellegrini slips out of the office to spend a few hours on Whitelock Street, talking to merchants and residents, asking background questions about the Fish Man, who remains at the top of his list of suspects. Pellegrini asks everyone he encounters about the store owner’s apartment, his whereabouts earlier in the week, his seeming interest in young girls, his relationship to the victim. The plan is to bring the Fish Man downtown tomorrow, after Pellegrini and the other detectives have a chance to do some checking into his background. And with any luck at all, someone on Whitelock Street knows a little something about the old man, something that can be used as leverage in the interrogation room.
Pellegrini works the street and comes up with a little more innuendo, a little more rumor. There is a lot of talk about the Fish Man and young girls, but nothing that can be called a smoking gun, and for now, Pellegrini can only consider him the first of many suspects.
After his interviewing on the street, Pellegrini returns to the office to check in with Edgerton, who is still collating the criminal histories of residents near Newington by street and block number. Pellegrini picks up one file for the Callow Avenue addresses and shuffles through a dozen computer printouts. The sheets with sex offense arrests are marked by a red grease pencil.
“That’s a lot of perverts for one city block,” says Pellegrini wearily.
“Yeah,” agrees Edgerton, “there must be some kinda special zoning up there.”
The weakest prospects are parceled out to the detail officers, with the detectives themselves running down alibis for the more promising suspects. Edgerton takes a young addict over on Lindin; Pellegrini, in turn, checks the background on a Callow Avenue man. It is a little like trying to draw to an inside straight, but without a murder scene—a primary site where the little girl was actually killed—there is no way to limit the prospects.
And where the hell is that scene? Where the hell did this bastard keep that girl for a day and a half without anyone knowing? With every passing hour, Pellegrini tells himself, the scene is deteriorating. Pellegrini is certain that the site is somewhere up in Reservoir Hill, a veritable treasure house of physical evidence waiting for him in some bedroom or basement. Where, he wonders, haven’t they looked?
By late afternoon, Jay Landsman, Eddie Brown and other detail officers are once again up in Reservoir Hill, checking the vacant houses and garages on Newington, Callow and Park for the murder site. Tactical units supposedly went through every vacant property in the area on the previous night, but Landsman wants to be sure. After one such search, the men go for a soda at a Whitelock Street carryout, where they fall into conversation with the owner, a young, light-skinned woman who waves away the detectives’ pocket change.
“How’s it going?” Landsman asks.
The woman smiles, but says nothing.
“Have you heard anything?”
“You all are up here about the little girl, right?”
Landsman nods. The woman seems anxious to say something, glancing at both detectives, then looking out at the street.
“What’s up?”
“Well … I heard …”
“Wait a sec.”
Landsman closes the front door of the carryout, then leans back across the front counter. The woman catches her breath.
“This might be nothing …”
“Hey, that’s all right.”
“There’s this man lives over on Newington, across the street from where they say it happened. He drinks, you know, and he came in that same morning saying a little girl got, you know, raped and murdered.”
“What time was this?”
“Had to be about nine or so.”
“Nine in the morning? Are you sure?”
The woman nods.
“What did he say exactly? Did he say how the girl was murdered?”
The woman shakes her head. “He just said she got killed. I just wondered ’cause no one up here had heard about it yet and he was