David Simon - Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets

He nods, stroking the girl’s hand, then stops for a moment to wipe the blood from her left hand with a paper towel. Dark red dots speckle the lighter brown of his trousers.

“How’m I doin’?”

“Hey, if they’re leaving you alone in here with me, you’re okay,” Edgerton tells her. “It’s when about eight people are hovering over you that you’re in trouble.”

Janie smiles.

“What happened exactly?” Edgerton asks.

“It happened so fast… Him and Durrell was inside in the kitchen. Durrell had come in ’cause he was fightin’ with me.”

“Go back to the beginning. What started it?”

“Like I told you, he saw me in a car with this guy and got mad. He came in and went down, and when he come back he put the gun to my head and starts yellin’ and all, so Durrell comes into the kitchen…”

“Did you see him shoot Durrell?”

“No, they went into the kitchen, and when I hear the shot I ran…”

“Did Durrell and him talk?”

“No. It happened too fast.”

“No time for any words, huh?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Then he came outside after you?”

“Uh-huh. Fired the first shot and I tried to duck, but I fell down in the street. He came up and was right over me.”

“How long you been going together?”

“Almost a year.”

“Where’s he stay?”

“In the house.”

“That wasn’t all his clothes in there.”

“No, he got more in the basement. He got another girl he stays with up on Pennsylvania Avenue, too. I seen her once.”

“You know her?”

“I just seen her once.”

“Where’s he hang at? Where’s he likely to go?”

“Downtown area. Park and Eutaw,’ round there.”

“Any special place he’d go?”

“Sportsman’s Lounge.”

“At Park and Mulberry?”

“Yeah. He know Randy. The bartender.”

“Okay, honey,” says Edgerton, closing his notebook. “You rest easy now.”

Janie squeezes his hand, then looks up at him.

“Durrell?” she asks. “He dead, right?”

He hesitates.

“It doesn’t look good,” he says.

Later this night, when Ronnie Lawis returns to the empty Westport rowhouse for his belongings, a neighbor is out on a porch to see him and call police. A responding Southern District uniform corners the man in the basement and, after applying the handcuffs, discovers a.32 Saturday Night Special behind the hot water heater. An NCIC fingerprint check the following day shows that Lawis is, in fact, a man named Fred Lee Tweedy who escaped from a Virginia prison a year ago, having been incarcerated on a previous murder conviction.

“If my name was Tweedy,” says Edgerton, reading the report, “I’d have an alias, too.”

Another summer call, another summer clearance. The season has brought out the new and improved Harry Edgerton, at least as far as the rest of his squad is concerned. He’s answering phones. He’s handling calls. He’s writing 24-hour reports. After one police shooting, there was Edgerton in the middle of the coffee room, offering to debrief a witness or two. If not entirely convinced of Edgerton’s character transplant, Donald Kincaid has at least been mollified. And while Edgerton isn’t exactly winning awards for early relief on midnight shift and daywork, he has been getting to the office a little earlier and then, as usual, leaving later than the others.

Part of the change is Roger Nolan-the sergeant trapped in the middle of it all-who talked to Edgerton about avoiding acrimony and using some practical politics now and then. Part of it is Edgerton himself, who took some of Nolan’s advice because he was getting damn tired of being the focal point for everyone else’s backbiting. And part of it has been the other men in the squad-Kincaid and Bowman, in particular-who are also making some effort to uphold the existing truce.

Yet everyone in the room knows that it is a temporary and fragile peace, dependent on the goodwill of too many aggravated people. Edgerton is willing to placate his critics to a point, but beyond that, he is what he is and he does what he does. Likewise, Kincaid and Bowman are willing to hold their tongues so long as the lamb doesn’t stray too far from the fold. Given these realities, the friendly banter can’t last, though for now, Nolan’s squad seems to be holding itself together.

In fact, Nolan’s boys are on something of a roll, handling five or six more cases than either of the other squads on D’Addario’s shift and solving a better percentage of those murders. Not only that, but Nolan’s people have been saddled with nine of the seventeen police-involved shooting incidents this year. And more than the murders, it’s the police shootings-with their incumbent issues of criminal and civil liability-that can bring the bosses down on the squad like a plague of locusts. This year’s crop of shooting reports, however, has so far cleared the command staff without causing so much as a rustle. All in all, from Nolan’s point of view, it’s turning out to be a respectable year.

Rich Garvey and his eight clearances are, of course, a large share of Nolan’s happiness, but Edgerton, too, is beginning a little streak of his own, one that began with that drug murder on Payson Street back in late May. After putting that case down, he found himself preoccupied with the Joe Edison trial in Judge Hammerman’s court, a successful three-week legal campaign to get a nineteen-year-old sociopath life in prison for one of the four drug murders from 1986 and ’87 in which he was charged. Edgerton returned to the rotation in time for nightwork and the shooting call in Westport, which would be followed by two more clearances before summer’s end-one of them a whodunit street shooting from the Old York Road drug market. In the homicide unit, four clearances in a row is usually enough to mute anyone’s critics, and for a brief time, the tension in Nolan’s squad seems to ease.

During one four-to-twelve shift in midsummer, Edgerton is sitting at his desk in the main office, a phone receiver braced against a shoulder and a cigarette wedged into the corner of his mouth.

Worden walks by and Edgerton begins an exaggerated pantomime, causing the older detective to pull a Bic lighter from his pants and produce a flame; Edgerton leans across the desk to ignite the tobacco.

“Aw Christ,” says Worden, holding the lighter steady. “I hope nobody sees me doing this.”

Twenty minutes later and still a prisoner of the same phone conversation, Edgerton flags down Garvey for another light and Worden, watching from the coffee room, picks up on it again.

“Hey, Harry, you’re getting awfully used to havin’ white guys light your cigarette for you.”

“What can I say?” says Edgerton, covering the mouthpiece of the phone with his hand.

“You tryin’ to make a point, Harry?”

“What can I say?” repeats Edgerton, hanging up the phone. “I like how it looks.”

“Hey,” says Kincaid, cutting in. “As long as Harry keeps handling calls, we can light his cigarettes, right, Harry? You keep answering that phone and I’ll start carrying a book of matches.”

“Fair enough,” says Edgerton, almost amused.

“We’re bringing Harry along, ain’t we?” says Kincaid. “We’re breakin’ him back into homicide. As long as we can keep him away from Ed Burns, he’ll be all right.”

“That’s right,” says Edgerton, smiling. “It was that nasty Ed Burns that messed me up, talking me into all these long investigations, telling me not to listen to you guys… It was all Burns. You should blame him.”

“And where is he now?” adds Kincaid. “He’s still over with the FBI and you’re back here with us.”

“He used you, Harry,” says Eddie Brown.