David Simon - Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets

No, Geraldine hadn’t exactly gone all out for her last husband, but then again, she had two more like him living with her over on Kennedy Street. The Black Widow’s last conquest got a cheap coffin, no vault and no headstone. Still, the cemetery manager seemed to have no problem finding the spot a half an hour ago, walking across the barren plain with an air of practiced certainty.

“Right here,” he said.

Row 78, grave 17.

“You sure it’s him?” asked Waltemeyer.

“It oughta be,” said the manager, surprised at the question. “Once you put ’em down there, they supposed to stay put.”

If, in fact, the grave held the remains of the right Reverend Rayfield Gilliard, age seventy-eight, then the doctors on Penn Street could still do something with this case. Even with a body that had been in the ground for ten months, an adulterant could still be detectable. Twenty prescription Valium, ground into a last meal of tunafish-yes indeed, Smialek told Waltemeyer as they agreed to get the exhumation order, if that’s what we’re looking for, that’s what we’ll find.

Still, the Reverend Gilliard had been in the ground since February and Waltemeyer has to wonder what’s even left down there. The cemetery manager said the winter burials would freeze in the ground, then decomp slower than those buried in warmer weather. It made some sense to the detective, but who even thinks about such things? Not Waltemeyer if he can help it. However much he enjoyed watching Mark Cohen squirm, he had to admit a private truth: This bothered him.

You find a body in the street and it’s a murder. You sketch him, take his picture, check his pockets, roll him over. In that instant and for a few hours afterward, he’s all yours, so much so that after a couple of years you don’t think about it anymore. But once he’s in the ground, once a preacher says some words and the dirt is on top of him, it’s just different. Never mind that this is nothing more than a muddy field, never mind that the exhumation is a necessary investigative act-for Waltemeyer, it’s still hard to believe that he has any right messing with a body in its final repose.

Naturally, his colleagues reacted to such doubts with all the warm sincerity for which Baltimore cops are known and admired. All the way through roll call this morning they had piled it on: Christ, Waltemeyer, what the fuck kind of asshole are you? We don’t have enough murders to deal with in this fucking town, you got to go prancing around the goddamn cemeteries like Bela fucking Lugosi, digging up skeletons?

And Waltemeyer knew they had a point: In terms of criminal culpability, the exhumation seemed a bit redundant. They had Geraldine and her contract killer, Edwin, on three homicides and the repeated attempts on Dollie Brown. They had Geraldine and another triggerman charged with a fourth murder in the death of Albert Robinson, the old drunk from New Jersey found by the Clifton Park railbed back in ’86. Waltemeyer had driven Corey Belt and Mark Cohen up to Bergen County for a few days to interview witnesses and nail down that charge. Four murders, five murders-at what point does another charge no longer matter?

Watching the gravediggers pry at the broken pieces of the casket top, Waltemeyer wonders whether it’s worth it. Miss Geraldine will be going to prison in any case, and what happens today certainly isn’t going to give Gilliard’s family any peace of mind. On the other hand, the detective has to concede that, like the doctors on Penn Street, he, too, is a little curious.

Tossing the curled, rotting wood out of the hole, the gravediggers stand against the edges of the box. Waltemeyer leans over and looks down.

“Well?” says the manager.

Waltemeyer looks at the photograph of Gilliard, then down at the coffin. The dead man looks pretty good, considering the circumstances.

“He’s a little small,” says the detective. “The photo looks like a bigger man.”

“They thin out when they in the ground,” says the manager, impatient. “You know the motherfuckers don’t stay too fat down there.”

No, thinks Waltemeyer. I guess they don’t.

It’s hell trying to lift the bottom of the box out of the mud, and after ten minutes, the gravediggers give up, deferring instead to the ME’s attendants, who simply lift the remains up and out using a plastic tarp.

“Way to go, Waltemeyer,” the attendant says as he climbs from the grave, covered in mud. “You just went to the top of my list.”

The body claimed, Waltemeyer and the gravediggers begin the slow, muddy trek back to the dirt road that divides Mount Zion. Stepping carefully toward the Cavalier, the detective watches the attendants load the black van, then looks through the car windshield at Mark Cohen. The prosecutor is looking down, seemingly preoccupied.

“You see him?” he asks Cohen in the car.

Cohen barely looks up, his face buried deep inside his briefcase, his hands working through the files inside.

“Mark, did you see him?”

“Yeah,” says Cohen. “I saw him.”

“Pretty ghoulish, huh?” says Waltemeyer. “I feel like I’m in a horror movie or something.”

“Let’s get downtown,” says Cohen. “I’ve got to get back to the office.”

Oh yeah, thinks Waltemeyer. He saw him.

The detective chooses to skip the actual autopsy, but it goes without a hitch-the cutters gathering tissue and organ samples for the toxicology, then checking the remains for any other overt signs of trauma. A perfectly straightforward piece of medical work, the examination could be a case study for the forensic pathology tests. At least it seems that way until an attendant is sewing up the chest cavity and notices the hospital identification bracelet on the cadaver’s wrist. The ink is faded, but the name, clearly legible, is not Rayfield Gilliard.

Twenty minutes later, the telephone in the homicide unit bleats. A detective answers and then yells into the coffee room: “Waltemeyer, medical examiner on line one.”

Sitting at Dave Brown’s desk, Waltemeyer picks up the receiver and leans forward. After a second or two, his hand goes to his head and his fingers pinch the skin at the bridge of his nose.

“You’re not kidding me, are you?” He leans back in the chair and stares up at the yellowing ceiling tile. His face is contorted, comical in its cartoon-like approximation of woe. He pulls a pencil from Brown’s desk and begins writing on the back of a pawn shop card, sounding each word as he writes: “Hospitalbracelet… Eugene… Dale… black, male…”

Great.

“No one noticed it until after the autopsy?” asks the detective.

Just great.

Waltemeyer hangs up the phone and gives himself half a minute before punching the intercom button on the phone extension.

“Captain?”

“Yes,” says the voice on the phone.

“This is Waltemeyer, sir,” says the detective, still holding the bridge of his nose. “Captain, are you sitting down?”

“Why?”

“Captain, I got goods news and bad news.”

“Good news first.”

“The autopsy went well.”

“And the bad news?”

“We dug up the wrong guy.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Oh, I’m serious.”

“Jesus.”

Eugene Dale. Some poor soul who had the misfortune to be chucked into the same potter’s field at about the same time as the Reverend Gilliard. Now he’s down on a gurney on Penn Street, looking a little worse for the day’s events. Not much in this world can truly upset a homicide detective, but for Waltemeyer, disturbing the slumber of the innocent dead comes damn close. Waltemeyer wonders whether this Dale has relatives. And that name: Why does it sound familiar?

“You got the wrong guy?” asks a detective from Stanton’s shift, working overtime on a court appearance. “Who’d you get?”