Homicide. David Simon
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says Pellegrini. “Why don’t we take some guys and hit Newington while you go across the street and do the store.”
Landsman nods. Newington Avenue is the second of two raids planned for this night. The separate warrants for separate addresses reflect a divergence of opinion in the Latonya Wallace case. Earlier this afternoon, the lead investigators were at opposite ends of the admin office, playing at dueling typewriters—Pellegrini and Edgerton collecting their probable cause for a new set of suspects at 702 Newington; Landsman putting everything he knew about the store owner into a pair of warrants for the Fish Man’s apartment and the shell of his Whitelock Street store, which had been gutted by fire shortly before the child’s disappearance. It was a little bit ironic: Landsman had come back to the Fish Man even as Pellegrini and Edgerton—who a few days earlier had argued that the store owner was their best hope—had come around to the new theory.
Landsman’s refusal to give up on the Fish Man was also a marked change from his earlier arguments, when his own estimates on the time of death had seemingly eliminated the store owner. But in a later consultation with the medical examiners, Landsman and Pellegrini went through the calculations one more time: body still coming out of rigor, eyes moist and no signs of decomposition; twelve to eighteen hours. Most probably, agreed the MEs, unless, of course, the killer was able to store the body in a cool place, which, given the season, could be a vacant rowhouse, a garage, an unheated basement. That might delay the postmortem processes.
How much of a delay? Landsman asked.
Up to twenty-four hours. Maybe more.
Damned if Edgerton hadn’t been right in arguing the time-of-death estimates two nights ago. With twenty-four to thirty-six hours to work with, the detectives could consider the possibility of a Tuesday abduction followed by a murder that night or early Wednesday morning. The Fish Man still had no alibi for that period of time. Assuming he had a way to keep the body cool, the new calculation left him exposed. Pellegrini’s legwork dislodged the other fact that had led the detectives to assume a prolonged abduction and Wednesday night murder: the extra meal of hot dogs and sauerkraut in the child’s stomach. That disappeared when Pellegrini happened to interview a Reservoir Hill local who worked in the Eutaw-Marshburn school cafeteria. Taking the opportunity to double-check the material in the case file, the detective asked the employee if the meal on February 2 was, in fact, spaghetti and meatballs. The employee checked the old menus and called Pellegrini the following day; the February 2 lunch was actually hot dogs and sauerkraut. The spaghetti was a previous night’s meal. Somehow, the detectives had been misinformed; now, too, the victim’s stomach contents suggested a Tuesday night murder.
To Pellegrini, it was unnerving that such basic assumptions made in the earliest hours of the case were still being questioned or knocked down by new information. It was as if they had pulled on a single thread and half the case file had unraveled. In Pellegrini’s mind, the quickest way for a case to become a quagmire was for the investigators to be sure of nothing, to feel compelled to question everything. The time-of-death estimate, the stomach contents—what else was waiting in that file to turn on them?
At least, in this instance, the changing scenario allowed them to keep one of their best suspects. While it was true that the Fish Man’s apartment and store were a long block and a half from Newington Avenue—contradicting Landsman’s theories about the proximity of the crime scene—it was also true that the store owner had access to at least one vehicle, a pickup truck that he routinely borrowed from another Whitelock Street merchant. In checking his Wednesday alibi, the detectives learned that he was in possession of the truck on the night the body had been dumped behind Newington Avenue. So far, the working theory had been that if the killer had the body in a vehicle, he’d drive to an isolated spot rather than a nearby alley. But what if he was scared? And what if the body was covered in the back of a pickup truck, relatively exposed?
And why the hell didn’t the Fish Man make any attempt in that first interrogation to account for his whereabouts on Tuesday and early Wednesday? Was he merely a marginally employed merchant unable to distinguish one day from the next? Or was he making a conscious effort to avoid a false alibi that detectives would be able to knock down? In the first interrogation, the Fish Man had mentioned the errands he ran with a friend on Wednesday as an alibi. Was that a simple failure of memory or a conscious effort to mislead investigators?
In the weeks since the murder, the rumors of the Fish Man’s interest in young girls had pervaded Reservoir Hill to the point where the detectives were regularly receiving fresh allegations of past molestation attempts. The allegations were largely unsubstantiated. But when the detectives ran the store owner’s name through the National Crime Index Computer they did come up with a relevant charge that predated his record in the Baltimore computer: a statutory rape charge from 1957, when the Fish Man was in his early twenties. The charge involved a fourteen-year-old girl.
Pellegrini pulled the microfilm of the police reports from storage, and the records showed a conviction and a sentence of nothing more than a year. The ancient history offered little more detail, but it gave the detectives some hope that they were dealing with a sex offender. More than that, it gave Landsman a little more meat to hang on the dry bones of his search warrants.
That afternoon, Landsman had shown his affidavits to Howard Gersh, a veteran prosecutor who had wandered into the homicide unit earlier that day. “Hey, Howard, take a look at this.”
Gersh scanned the probable cause in less than a minute.
“It’ll fly,” he said, “but aren’t you giving up a hell of a lot?”
The question was one of tactics. When the warrant was served, the Fish Man would see the affidavit and would learn what detectives believed linked him to the crime. He could also learn where his alibi was weakest. Landsman pointed out that at least the affidavit withheld the identity of those who were contradicting the suspect’s initial story.
“We’re not giving up any witnesses.”
Gersh shrugged and handed the document back. “Good hunting.”
“Thanks, Howard.”
At ten that evening, Landsman had hurried the warrants to the home of the duty judge, and the detectives and detail officers gathered in the parking lot of the Park Avenue library, where Latonya Wallace had last been seen alive. The plan was to hit the Fish Man’s apartment and store first, but now, after finding so little on Whitelock Street, Pellegrini and Edgerton are suddenly impatient to pursue the new theory. They leave Landsman and a detail officer to finish the search of the Fish Man’s gutted store while they lead a second group a block and a half east to Newington Avenue.
Two Cavaliers and two radio cars pull in front of a three-story stone rowhouse on the north side of the street, where police tumble out and take the house in rough approximation of a Green Bay Packer sweep. Eddie Brown is through the door first with the lead block, followed by two of the Central District uniforms. Then Pellegrini and Edgerton, then Fred Ceruti and more uniforms.
A seventeen-year-old who meandered down the front hallway to answer the loud banging on the door frame is now pressed against the flaking plaster, a uniform shouting at him to shut the fuck up and keep still for the body search. A second kid in a gray sweatsuit steps through the doorway of the first floor’s middle room, assesses the interlopers for what they are, then races back across the threshold.
“Poh-leece,” he shouts. “Yo, man, yo, po-leeces comin’…”
Eddie Brown yanks Paul Revere out of the doorway and pushes him against an inside wall as Ceruti and more uniforms shove their way down the dark hall toward the light of the center room.
There are four of them in there, crowded around an aerosol cleaning product and a small box of plastic sandwich bags. Only one of them bothers to look up at the intruders and for that kid, there is a moment or two of nonrecognition before the gray ether parts and he begins shouting wildly, running for the rear door. One of the detail officers from the Southern catches him by the shirt in the kitchen, then bends him over the sink. The other three are lost to the world and make no effort to move. The oldest expresses his indifference by pressing the plastic bag to his face and sucking down