David Simon - Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets

Ideally, the teletypes are read at every roll call citywide and maybe elsewhere in the state if a detective uses the MILES computer system. Hell, if an investigator thinks his man has gone on the wing interstate, he can go whole hog and put the thing on NCIC. But both the local and national teletype networks-like most everything else in the criminal justice system-are flooded to the point of absurdity. Usually, the only items a cop remembers from roll call will be red-ball items-cop killings, child murders-and the occasional punch line. At the beginning of a recent 8-to-4 shift, Jay Landsman made a point of reading a burglary teletype from Baltimore County in which the stolen property consisted of 522 gallons of ice cream.

“The suspects are believed to be a lot fatter than they were…”

In the Baltimore precincts, at least, a homicide lookout stands a good chance of being read at roll call, but whether anyone’s actually listening or not is open to debate. In Brown and Worden’s favor, however, is the fact that the girl was run over in the Southern District. In a detective’s mind, the street police in certain districts are known for certain things: The Eastern cops protect a crime scene better than anyone, the Western operations unit has decent informants, and in the Southern and the Southeast, there are still some guys out on the street who will actually work a lookout.

Over the next several days, uniforms in those districts make traffic stops on anything close to the description. The paperwork comes downtown to Brown’s desk, where names and license numbers are matched with motor vehicle registrations and BPI photos. There’s a lot of data and Brown looks at each report carefully. Nothing seems to match: This guy’s got a black 280Z with a T-top, but he’s got thinning brown hair. This one’s got a Mustang with some front end damage, but his long hair is jet black. This one’s got long blond hair, but his Trans Am is a light copper color.

In addition to the district car stops, Brown and Worden spend the days and nights after the murder wedged into a Cavalier, following up on everything that the victim’s family tells them. And with each passing day, the family comes up with a new suspect. First, there is the guy out in Middle River whose name is most definitely Rick and who had called for Carol about a week before she was killed. The family still has the guy’s phone number.

When Brown and McLarney ride out to the Middle River address, a man with short, thinning blond hair answers the door. Hell, thinks Brown, hopeful, he could have cut it. But downtown in the large interrogation room, the detectives learn that he works at the Domino Sugar plant in Locust Point, not as an auto mechanic. Worse than that, his only car is an old yellow Toyota; Brown checks it that day on the company lot. The man readily acknowledges having given Carol Wright a ride down Fort Avenue on his motorcycle, but he’s genuinely surprised to hear about the woman’s death.

Another kid stopped by the district has blond hair and the right kind of car listed to his mother’s address out on Washington Boulevard, but his alibi seems to hold. A third billy is a mechanic who goes by the name Rick and lives down in Anne Arundel: He even knew some of Carol’s friends, according to the family. Brown sits on the house for two days, looking for that black sports car, only to pick the guy up and learn that the family had already called him first.

“They told me you might be coming by,” he assures Brown. “What do you want to know?”

Billyland. Not only do they talk to the police, they babble to one another-so much so that there’s no conceivable way for an investigator to work effectively. As soon as one family member learns about a potential suspect, another family member is asking a friend of a friend to ask the guy whether he has a black sports car and if so, whether he used it to run over Carol Wright. Twice, Brown goes back to South Baltimore to urge the family not to discuss the case with anyone. Twice, they assure him that they will shut up.

Two days later, Brown is alone in a Cavalier, watching a side street off Dundalk Avenue for yet another suspect. He is there for hours, drinking 7-Eleven coffee and feeding his smoker’s cough and watching the billy boys come and go from their cars. Rarely does a homicide detective have time for this sort of endless surveillance, even if he has the patience. But so far no fresh murders have landed on Brown’s desk, allowing him to sit for hours with the air conditioning running. With white powder from a Hostess doughnut in his mustache and Appalachian bluegrass on the AM radio, it soon occurs to him that he hasn’t spent this long sitting on a house since his tour in narcotics. By the end of the day, in fact, he’s damn proud of himself for being careful, patient and determined-just like any real detective.

Finally, only after two successive dayshifts in a Cavalier, when it’s clear that there’s no black car anywhere near the house, Brown picks the guy up for an interview. “Yeah,” says his suspect. “They were sayin’ that they gave you my name a few days back. I don’t know why they did that, though.”

Brown drove back to the homicide office, ready to chuck the case file into the nearest empty drawer. “Get me a murder in West Baltimore,” he tells Worden. “I can’t deal with these fucking white people anymore.”

For his part, Worden has stayed with the case, but he has preserved a certain distance. Alongside the younger detective, he has cruised Highlandtown looking for a bar with anything resembling a German name. And he has also spent hours sitting with Brown on many of those same houses and parking lots, looking for that black mystery car. And yet there is a message to Worden’s presence on this case, something that Brown understands instinctively.

“You want to go?” Brown asks him after three long hours of watching a garden apartment down in Marley Neck.

“It’s your case,” says Worden, masking the Socratic method with indifference. “What do you want to do?”

“We’ll wait,” says Brown.

Still, after a week they are no closer to a killer, and the Carol Ann Wright case remains an undetermined death, not even a murder. And both men know that without a fresh lead, their task is Herculean. Three days ago, a DMV printout arrived at the homicide unit with the names and addresses of the owners of 280Zs in central Maryland. Even if their best witnesses are right about that particular make of car, and even if their man happens to be the registered owner of record, the computer list is more than a hundred pages long.

On August 30, Worden inherits a true red ball, a fourteen-year-old kid shotgunned to death in the Northwest, killed without any apparent motive as he walked home from his job at a fast-food restaurant. Five days after that, Dave Brown and McLarney are working on the disappearance of a twenty-six-year-old west side woman who has not been seen for a week, though two dopers have been locked up for driving her car.

Fresh bodies. Fresh leads. From Brown’s desk, you can listen close and hear a slow, grinding noise as the Carol Wright case slips out of gear.

The scene is a rowhouse basement, a dank, unfurnished place on East Preston Street, where an elderly white man is stretched across the floor in full rigor, covered by a few sheets of plastic tarp and a trio of die-cast, two-foot-tall Magi. Yessiree: the three wise men, those good souls who carry around myrrh and frankincense and visit blessed mangers on church lawns every Christmas. A nice, bizarre touch, thinks Rich Garvey. Someone blew a very big hole in this old man’s head, stole his money, dragged the body downstairs and then threw a plastic wrap and three wise men over the corpse. A nativity scene, East Baltimore style.