David Simon - Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets

“Okay, Fred. Gimme a call when you finish up at the scene.”

Ceruti slams the receiver into its cradle, cursing his sergeant bitterly. The brief conversation has left him with no doubt that Landsman is trying to fuck him, sending him out on calls alone and holding back when he calls for help. It was the same thing on the Stokes homicide last month and on the beating in the Southwest back in April. Those are the last two homicides handled by Landsman’s squad and Ceruti was the primary on both; this guy here on Whittier makes three in a row. Landsman reads the board, Ceruti tells himself. He knows what’s up. So why the hell doesn’t he get on Dunnigan and send his ass out here to pick up this murder?

Ceruti knows the answer. At least he thinks he does. He isn’t the golden boy of Landsman’s squad, not by a long shot. He and Pellegrini arrived at the same time, but it was Pellegrini who caught the interest of the sergeant, Pellegrini with whom Landsman preferred to handle calls. Tom is not only a prospect but a sidekick for his sergeant, a straight man for the situation comedy in which Landsman lives. Two or three good cases and Tom is suddenly a prodigy, a candidate for rookie of the year. Ceruti is simply the other one, the dime-a-dozen new kid from the districts. And now he is alone.

Ceruti makes his way back from the pay phone just as the ambo is pulling away. He tries to forget the conversation with Landsman and do what he needs to do, working what little there is of this murder-to-be. One of the uniforms manages to find a spent bullet on a nearby stoop, a.38 or.32 from the look of it, but too badly mutilated to be of any use in a ballistics comparison. A lab tech arrives a few minutes later to bag the bullet and take scene photos. Ceruti wanders back to the pay phone to tell Landsman that he’s on his way in.

That’s his intention, anyway, until he spots a heavyset woman on an Orem Avenue porch, watching him strangely as he walks toward the phone. He changes direction and saunters up to the house as casually as possible, given that it’s four in the morning.

Incredibly, she saw them. More incredible still, she is willing to tell Ceruti what she saw. There were three of them running after the sound of shots, sprinting down the street toward one of the houses at the other end of Orem. No, she didn’t recognize them, but she saw them. Ceruti asks several more questions and the woman becomes nervous-understandably, since she still has to live in this neighborhood. If he takes her off the porch now, Ceruti tells the whole street that she’s a witness. Instead, he leaves with a name and phone number.

Back at the homicide office, Landsman is watching the overnight news channel when Ceruti returns and throws the notepad down on a desk.

“Hey, Fred,” says Landsman coolly. “How’d it go out there?”

Ceruti glares at him, then shrugs.

Landsman turns back to the television. “Maybe you’ll get a call on it.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

From Ceruti’s point of view, his sergeant is being senselessly cruel. But for Landsman, the equation is simple. A new man comes up and you show him the ropes, carrying him along on a few cases until he knows the game. If you can, you may even throw him a few dunkers to feed his confidence. But up in homicide, that’s about it for the orientation program. After that, it’s sink or swim.

It is true that Landsman thinks the world of Pellegrini; it is also true that he would rather work a murder with Pellegrini than with anyone else in the squad. But Ceruti has had a year of handling calls with Dunnigan or Requer watching over him; he isn’t exactly being thrown naked to the wolves here. In that sense, he is right to find meaning in the fact that he has worked the squad’s last three murders and worked them alone. They were homicides and he’s a homicide detective and, in Landsman’s mind, now is the time to see if Ceruti can find the meaning in that.

Fred Ceruti is a good cop, brought to homicide by the captain after four years’ experience in the Eastern District. He did some respectable plainclothes work in the ops unit there, and in a department where affirmative action is a standing policy, a good black plainclothesman is going to get noticed. But still, CID homicide after only four years of experience is a hard road for anyone to walk, and the other sixth-floor units were littered with detectives who had been bounced from the Crimes Against Persons section. At crime scenes and during interrogations, things that could never slip past a more experienced investigator could still elude Ceruti. Such limitations weren’t immediately noticeable when he was working cases as a secondary investigator with Dunnigan or Requer. Nor did they become immediately apparent when Landsman began sending him out alone on calls four months ago.

Many of Ceruti’s first solo flights were successes, but those cases were largely stone dunkers-the February stabbing death of a Block prostitute came complete with three witnesses, and the suspect in the April bludgeoning from the Southwest was identified by patrol officers well before any detective’s arrival.

But a double murder from January, a pair of drug killings at an east side stash house, had been cleared only after some acrimony between Ceruti and his sergeant. In that case, Ceruti had been reluctant to charge a suspect with a case that consisted of one reluctant witness. Landsman, however, needed to get those two murders off the board, and when Dunnigan was later able to pressure the witness into a full statement, the case was sent to the grand jury over Ceruti’s objections. Substantively, Ceruti had been right-the weak case was ultimately dismissed before trial by prosecutors-but in practical, political terms, the late clearance made the new detective appear unaggressive. Likewise, the Stokes case, the back alley drug slaying from the Western, did not go well either. There, too, Ceruti had to his credit found a woman who had seen the fleeing gunmen, but he elected not to bring her downtown at the time. Considering the risk to a known witness, this was not the worst decision; Edgerton, for example, left his witness at the scene of that Payson Street shooting last month. The difference was that Edgerton put his case in the black, and in the real world, a detective can do anything he wants as long as the cases go down.

The fact that a new detective such as Ceruti was now looking at two consecutive open murders did not in itself constitute a threat. After all, neither Joseph Stokes nor Raymond Hawkins, the dying man on Whittier Street, was going to be mistaken for a taxpayer, and in practice, a homicide detective could go a fairly long time without typing a prosecution report so long as none of the cases was a red ball. In the end, therefore, Ceruti’s sin would not be that two drug murders stayed open. The sin was more basic. Ceruti would be brought down by willful neglect of the police department’s First Commandment: Cover Thine Ass.

A little more than a month from now, Ceruti will be down on the captain’s carpet for the Stokes murder, in particular. Taxpayer or no, the thirty-two-year-old victim in that case turns out to be the brother of a civilian communications clerk for the department. By virtue of that position, she knows enough about the police department to find the homicide unit and make repeated inquiries about the status of the investigation. In truth, the status of the investigation is that it has no status. There are no fresh leads and the woman who witnessed the flight of the shooters can identify no one. Ceruti puts the clerk off for a time, but eventually the woman directs a complaint to his superiors. And when those superiors pull the case file, they find nothing. No office report, no follow-ups, no paper trail documenting either progress or lack of it. And when the captain learns that Ceruti left breathing witnesses at his last two murder scenes, things go from bad to worse.