David Simon - Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets

“I’m on parole,” he reminds Edgerton.

As dawn arrives in the homicide office, Edgerton is at an admin office typewriter, working up the two-page charging documents for his suspect. But when he takes the papers into the interrogation room to show Dale, the suspect reads them quickly and then tears them to pieces, further endearing himself to Edgerton, whose typing skills are less than stellar.

“You don’t need this,” Dale says, “because I’m going to tell you the truth. I didn’t kill that girl. In fact, I don’t know who it was that killed her.”

Edgerton listens to version number three.

“I don’t know who really killed her. The reason I told you the other things was to protect my girlfriend and her family. I work every day while her relatives are always in and out of the apartment all hours. All of her sisters and brothers use the apartment while I’m sleeping in the bedroom.”

Edgerton says nothing. At this point, why bother to say anything at all?

“One of them must have kept the gun in the linen closet. One of them must have killed that girl.”

“Did you know the gun was kept in your linen closet?” asks Edgerton, almost bored.

“No I didn’t. I know you can get five years for having a gun. I don’t know who had that gun in the house. I really don’t.”

Edgerton nods, then walks out of the interrogation room and back to the admin office typewriter.

“Hey, Roger, look at what this asshole did,” he says, holding up the shreds of the charging papers. “This took me forty minutes.”

“He did that?”

“Yeah,” says Edgerton, laughing. “He said I didn’t need them ’cause he was going to tell me the truth.”

Nolan shakes his head. “That’s what you get for letting him hold on to the paperwork.”

“Maybe I can tape it together,” says Edgerton, more tired than hopeful.

The last statement by Eugene Dale concludes as the dayshift detectives are taking roll call in the main office, and many of those men are out on the street before Edgerton can retype the arrest sheets.

The Southern District wagon arrives an hour or so later, and Dale is cuffed for the ride back to the district bail hearing. Walking down the corridor, he asks again for Edgerton and the chance to make another statement. This time he is ignored.

But there will be one last encounter. A week or so after the arrest, Edgerton checks his gun at the Eager Street entrance of the Baltimore City Jail and follows a guard to the second-floor hellhole that prison administrators call an infirmary. It is a long walk up a set of metal stairs and down a hall cluttered with human failure. The inmates fall silent, staring as Edgerton passes through to the medical unit’s administrative area.

A heavyset nurse waves him down. “He’s on the way up from the tier.”

Edgerton shows her the warrant, but she barely bothers to look at it. “Head hairs, chest hairs, pubic hairs and blood,” he says. “I guess you’ve done this before.”

“Mmm-hmmm.”

Eugene Dale rounds the corner slowly, then stops at the sight of Edgerton. As the nurse waves the inmate toward an examination room, Dale moves close enough for Edgerton to notice the bruises and contusions, obvious signs of a bad beating. Even inside the city jail, the man’s crimes merit special attention.

Edgerton follows his suspect into the examination room and watches as the nurse prepares a needle.

Dale looks at the syringe, then back at Edgerton. “What’s this for?”

“A search-and-seizure warrant for your person,” says Edgerton. “We’re going to match your blood and hairs to semen and hairs we got from the girl.”

“I already gave them blood.”

“This is different. This is a court order for evidence.”

“I don’t want to.”

“You don’t have a choice.”

“I want to talk to a lawyer.”

Edgerton shoves the paper into Dale’s hands, then points to the judge’s signature at the bottom of the page. “You don’t get to talk to a lawyer for this. It’s signed by a judge-see that? We have a right to your blood and your hair.”

Eugene Dale shakes his head. “Why do you need my blood?”

“For DNA testing. We’re going to match it to the girl,” says Edgerton.

“I want to talk to a lawyer.”

Edgerton moves closer to his suspect, his voice low. “Either you let her take some blood and some hairs the easy way or I’m going to take it myself, because that warrant says I can. And I can tell you that you’d definitely rather have her do it.”

Eugene Dale sits silently, almost in tears as the nurse brings the needle up to his right arm. Edgerton watches from the opposite wall as blood is drawn and then hairs plucked from his suspect’s head and body. The detective is on the way out the door, samples in hand, when Eugene Dale speaks again.

“Don’t you want to talk to me again?” he asks. “I want to tell the truth.”

Edgerton ignores him.

“You want to hear the truth?”

“No,” says Edgerton. “Not from you.”

Rich Garvey stands shivering in the predawn emptiness of Fremont Avenue, staring at a pile of blood-soaked clothing, two spent.38 casings and a blue plastic lunch pail containing two submarine sandwiches wrapped in tin foil. So much for physical evidence.

Robert McAllister stands shivering next to Garvey, scanning the length of Fremont Avenue and its tributaries for any trace of human endeavor. It’s not bad enough that the streets are empty, there aren’t even any lights in the rowhouse windows. So much for witnesses.

In the few seconds before anyone speaks, Garvey looks at McAllister and McAllister looks at Garvey, each of them wordlessly communicating the same thought:

Hell of a case you got, Mac.

Whoa, you caught a tough one here, Garv.

And yet before anything unseemly can pass between two partners, the first officer-a kid by the name of Miranda, an earnest young soldier still basking in the wonder of it all-approaches them to offer up one little detail: “He was talking when we got here.”

“He was talking?”

“Oh yeah.”

“What did he say?”

“Well, he told us who shot him…”

If this universe is truly balanced, if there is a negative and positive to the order of things, then somewhere exists a yin to balance Rich Garvey’s yang. Somewhere there exists another career cop, an Irishman no doubt, with wire-rim glasses and a dark mustache and a back problem. He is standing over his eleventh straight drug murder in silent suffering, bargaining with an indifferent God for one shred of physical evidence, for one ignorant, evasive witness. The anti-Garvey is a good cop, a good detective, but lately he has entertained a few doubts about his abilities, as has his sergeant. He is drinking a little too much and he is yelling at his kids. He knows nothing of balance and order, of Tao logic, of his alter ego in the city of Baltimore who is wantonly solving homicides with the good fortune of two men.

“Oh do tell,” says Garvey.

“He said Warren Waddell shot him.”

“Warren Waddell?”

“Yeah, he said his buddy Warren shot him in the back for no reason. He kept saying, ‘I can’t believe he shot me. I can’t believe it.’”

“You heard all this?”

“I was standing right over him. Me and my side partner heard it all. He said this guy Warren works with him at a place called Precision Concrete.”

Way to go, my man, way to go. Everything was going from gray to black in the rear of Medic 15, but you got it done, you said what had to be said. You left a little something behind for a homicide detective to remember you by, and for that Rich Garvey thanks you.

A dying declaration, the lawyers call it-admissible evidence in a Maryland courtroom if the victim is informed by competent medical personnel that he is dying or otherwise indicates that he believes himself to be dying. And while it’s not uncommon for homicide victims to make dying declarations, it is a rare and special moment when those utterances are at all helpful to a detective, not to mention relevant.