David Simon - Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets

“What the hell?” says Garvey. “Let’s go back in. We’ve got to charge him. We either talk to him now or not at all…”

McAllister nods, then leads the way toward the interrogation room. From outside the wire mesh window, the two detectives can see Jerry Jackson dancing a mad samba in his chair. Garvey begins laughing again.

“Wait a sec,” he tells McAllister.

Garvey finds his poker face, then loses it, then finds it again. “This motherfucker is killing me.”

McAllister grips the door handle, fighting hard for his own composure. “Ready?” he asks.

“Okay.”

The two detectives return to the room and their seats. Jackson waits for another question but is instead treated to a long monologue by McAllister in which it is explained that he has no reason to be upset or angry at the existing circumstances. None at all. After all, they’re just asking questions and he’s just answering questions, right?

“We’re not hurting you, are we?”

No, agrees the suspect.

“And we’re not treating you badly, are we?”

No, agrees the suspect.

“You’re being treated fairly, right?”

Yes, agrees the suspect.

“Okay then, Jerry. Why don’t you tell us-calmly-why don’t you calmly tell us why there was this body in your basement?”

Not that it matters what he says, because by daylight Garvey, McAllister and Roger Nolan have also obtained a complete statement from Jackson’s wife. They’ve also interviewed the nephew who helped Jerry Jackson plan the robbery and then ditch Plumer’s car. They’ve even interviewed the neighborhood dealer from whom Jackson bought $200 worth of cocaine, using the money he took off the old man’s body. All in all, the Preston Street call is definitely not what comes to mind when a detective is asked to think of the perfect murder. Presumably, Jackson planned to show up for work so as not to arouse suspicion, then remove the body from his basement and dump it somewhere else in the early morning hours. That’s assuming the man had any plan at all beyond robbing and killing a man in his living room for enough money to stay high all day.

Just before the morning shift change, Garvey is at his desk in the main office, battling the paperwork to a draw and listening to Nolan philosophize on just what it was that cracked this case. When we went back out and picked up the dealer who sold to Jackson, says Nolan, that’s when we really cracked it wide open.

At which point Garvey and McAllister both drop their pens and look at their sergeant as if he’s just stepped off the last Greyhound from Mars.

“Uh, Rog,” says McAllister, “what cracked this case was the fact that the killer left the dead guy in his house.”

“Well, yeah,” says Nolan, laughing but a little disappointed. “That too.”

So Rich Garvey’s Perfect Year marches ever onward, a divine crusade seemingly impervious to the touch of reality, a campaign unfettered by the rules of homicide that somehow manage to afflict every other detective. Garvey is getting witnesses, he’s getting fingerprint hits, he’s getting the license tags off getaway cars. You do a murder in Baltimore when Rich Garvey’s working and you may as well have a lawyer meet you at the district lockup an hour later.

Not long after Jerry Jackson returns to earth and a city jail tier, Garvey again picks up a telephone extension and writes down an East Baltimore address. This time it is the worst kind of call a murder police can get. Garvey is so certain of unanimity on this opinion that he actually puts down the phone and asks the other detectives in the office to name the call they least like to handle. McAllister and Kincaid need about a half second to say “arson.”

For a homicide detective, an arson murder is a special type of torture because the police department is essentially stuck with whatever the fire department’s investigator says is arson. To this day, Donald Kincaid is still carrying an open murder for a fatal fire that almost certainly began with nothing more sinister than an electrical short. At the scene, Kincaid could see the burn pattern running up the rowhouse wall where the wiring was, but some goof from FIB insisted on calling it arson. So what was he going to do then, arrest the goddamn fuse box? Not only that, but when a detective gets a genuine arson murder in front of a jury, he can never convince them that the fire wasn’t an accident, not without a six-pack of witnesses, at least. Even if there’s a pour pattern from gasoline or some other accelerant, a good lawyer can suggest that someone spilled the stuff by mistake and then accidentally dropped a cigarette. Juries like dead people who have bulletholes or steak knives attached to them; anything less is not convincing.

Knowing all this, Garvey and McAllister once again steer an unmarked car to a crime scene with fear and loathing in their hearts. It’s a two-story dump on North Bond Street and, of course, there are no witnesses-just a bunch of burned furniture and one crispy critter in the middle room. Some smokehound, an old guy, maybe sixty.

The poor bastard is lying there like a piece of chicken that someone forgot to turn over, and the FIB investigator is showing Garvey a dark splotch on the other side of the room and calling it a textbook example of a pour pattern. Sure enough, when they clear all the soot away, the splotch really does look darker than the surrounding area. So Garvey has a dead guy and a pour pattern and some drunk woman who jumped out the rear window when the fire started and is now up at Union Memorial breathing from an oxygen tank. From the fire investigator, the detectives learn that the woman is supposedly the dead guy’s girlfriend.

Having satisfied themselves that North Bond Street is indeed their worst nightmare come true, Garvey and McAllister drive to the hospital with the understanding that this blessed year of his has finally reached its terminus. They walk into the Union Memorial ER and greet two detectives from the arson squad who are standing out at the nurses station like a pair of bookends, telling them the injured woman’s story is all bullshit. She’s got the fire starting by accident in an ashtray or some nonsense like that.

The woman told the arson guys that much while she was being treated in the ER, but now she can’t be interviewed further because she inhaled a lot of smoke and talking is a problem. Garvey may have his arsonist, but there’s absolutely no way to prove the case. Given that conflict, the idea of getting an assistant medical examiner to pend the case for a little while-like maybe a decade-becomes more and more appealing in the minds of both detectives. At the following morning’s autopsy, Garvey manages to accomplish this feat, whereupon he and McAllister return to the office with the sincere hope that if they just click their heels three times, the entire case will go away.

Given recent events, such thoughts in the mind of Rich Garvey can only suggest a certain lack of faith, a certain disregard for his own destiny. Because two weeks later, the woman at Union Memorial succumbs to smoke inhalation and related injuries; two days after that, Garvey pays a second visit to Penn Street and assures the good doctors that they can go ahead and rule the case a homicide. That done, he can immediately show the case as cleared due to the rather timely death of his solitary suspect. A good detective, after all, is never too proud to take a paper clearance.

The arson case makes it ten out of ten since February and the Lena Lucas murder. Drug murders, neighborhood disputes, street robberies, unprosecutable arson deaths-it matters not to Rich Garvey, the luckiest sonofabitch on D’Addario’s shift of fifteen. Apparently the Perfect Year, like any force of nature, cannot be denied.