David Simon - Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets

The dead man is Henry Plumer, and it’s immediately obvious to Garvey and Bob McAllister that the old man has encountered something very big-a.44 or.45 probably, and fired at point-blank range, too, judging from the powder burns. Plumer was in his late sixties and had for at least half his life been collecting for Littlepage’s Furniture in the city, wandering around the ghetto all day long, calling in the monthly payments on furniture and appliances. It was mostly no-money-down credit stuff, which lures poor folk into paying $10 a week until their living room set ends up costing more than a college education, but old Mr. Plumer had been at it for so long that the people on his route all knew and liked him. He’d become something of a neighborhood institution in East Baltimore, riding around all day with that little collection book of his. Donald Kincaid actually knew the man, since his mother still lived in the 900 block of Collington, refusing to quit her east side home even as the neighborhood around her fell into ruin.

Garvey already knows all about Mr. Plumer, or at least he knows everything that was in a missing person’s teletype sent out by county police yesterday, when the old man and his car disappeared into the wilds of Baltimore and his family began to panic. Garvey’s already fairly certain that he knows who killed Mr. Plumer-knowledge that comes easily when the owner of the basement in question is a drug user with a long sheet.

From what he has gleaned thus far, an addict by the name of Jerry Jackson owns this two-story brick pile, was one of the last people to see a living Henry Plumer, and apparently left for his housecleaning job at Rosewood Hospital with Plumer’s body still bleeding on his basement floor. As clues, these facts are decidedly unsubtle and suggest a certain lack of intellect on the part of the homeowner in question-a suggestion that is all but confirmed when the phone on the first floor suddenly begins ringing twenty minutes after the detectives’ arrival. Garvey bounds up the stairs and picks up on the third ring.

“Hello?”

“Who’s this?” asks the male caller.

“This is Detective Garvey from the homicide unit,” he says. “Who’s this?”

“This is Jerry,” says the voice.

How considerate, thinks Garvey. A suspect who calls his own crime scene.

“Jerry,” says Garvey, “how fast can you get over here?”

“About twenty minutes or so.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

In his first statement on the matter at hand, Jerry Jackson doesn’t even bother to ask what a homicide detective is doing at his house, doesn’t think about denying anything or demonstrating shock and dismay. He hangs up the phone without ever expressing amazement or distress that a dead body is being examined in his basement. Nor does he express any immediate curiosity about why that body is there. Garvey hangs on until the phone line goes dead, delighted to be dealing with such an earnest, cooperative brain-dead.

“Hey Mac,” says Garvey, hanging up the receiver and walking back to the top of the basement stairs. “That was Jerry calling.”

“Oh really,” says McAllister from the basement.

“Yeah. He’s on his way over.”

“That’s nice,” says McAllister, deadpan.

The detectives continue to work the crime scene. Two hours later, they stop waiting for Jerry Jackson, who, for all his seeming cooperation, has still not made an appearance. Late that night, with a county detective in tow, they drive out to Fullerton and break the news to the Plumer family, whereupon the elderly widow goes white and faints. By morning, she is dead of a heart attack, as much a homicide victim as her husband.

It’s in the early morning hours that Jerry Jackson finally returns to the house on Preston Street, where he is greeted with some consternation by his own wife, a woman not at all pleased to be finding bodies in her basement. It was the wife who had located Henry Plumer and called police after hearing from friends in the neighborhood that the old bill collector was missing and had last been seen making his regular stop at the Jackson home. Rumors of the murder had been around the block a couple of times by then and a friend had urged Mrs. Jackson to check her basement carefully. The two got halfway down the stairs when they saw the shoes sticking out from under the tarp. The wife went no farther, but the friend managed to step forward and lift the plastic enough to convince herself that it was Mr. Plumer and that he’d definitely looked better. At that point, Jerry Jackson’s wife saw where things were going; without waiting for her husband to return from work, she went to the phone and dialed 911.

And so, by the time Jerry Jackson returns home and confers with his wife, it’s abundantly clear-even to him-that whatever the plan for this murder was, it definitely isn’t working. He does not, however, disappear into the bowels of East Baltimore. Nor does he try to scrape together some cash for a bus ticket to Carolina. No, sir. For his last act as a free man, Jerry Jackson elects to call the homicide unit and ask for Rich Garvey. He’d like to talk about the body in his basement. Perhaps, he offers, he could be of some help to the investigation.

But when Jackson arrives in the large interrogation room, his pupils are the size of purely theoretical particles. Cocaine, thinks Garvey, but he decides his suspect may just be able to manage a few intelligible sentences. After negotiating the Miranda, the detectives’ first question is the obvious one, of course.

“Ah, Jerry,” asks Garvey, scratching the top of his head in feigned confusion, “why was Mr. Plumer’s body in your house?”

Quietly, almost casually, Jackson tells the detectives that he made his monthly payment to Mr. Plumer yesterday afternoon; then the old man took the money and drove away.

“And I don’t know nothing about no murder,” he continues, his voice breaking, “until I called my mother’s house from work and was told THAT THERE’S A MOTHERFUCKING BODY IN MY BASEMENT!”

The first half of the sentence is tense but quiet, but the last part is a wild rant, a shout that pierces the interrogation room doors and can be heard clear down at the other end of the sixth-floor hall.

Seated on either side of the suspect, the detectives look at each other for a moment, then down at the table. Garvey is biting his lip.

“Could, ah, you excuse us for just a moment,” says McAllister, addressing the suspect as if he were Emily Post and the man had just used the wrong salad fork. “We just need to discuss something and we’ll be right back with you in just a second, okay?”

Jackson nods, twitching.

The two detectives walk silently out of the room and close the metal door behind them. They manage to make it to the annex office before they both double over, convulsed by the force of suppressed laughter.

“THERE’S A BODY IN MY BASEMENT!” shouts Garvey, shaking his partner’s shoulders.

“Not just a body,” says McAllister, laughing. “A motherfucking body.”

“THERE’S A MOTHERFUCKING BODY IN MY BASEMENT!” shouts Garvey again. “THERE’S A MADMAN ON THE LOOSE!”

McAllister shakes his head, still laughing. “Don’t you just hate that? You leave the house, you go to work, call your mom, and she tells you there’s a body in your basement…”

Garvey grips a desk in the annex office with both hands, trying to regain his composure.

“It was all I could do not to laugh in his face,” he tells McAllister. “God.”

“You don’t think he’s high or anything like that,” says McAllister dryly.

“Him? No way. He’s a little high-strung. That’s all it is.”

“Seriously, should we even bother with a statement?”

The question is a legal one. Any statement taken now could be mitigated by the fact that Jerry Jackson is somewhat compromised, chemically speaking.