David Simon - Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets

Near the dead woman’s head are a pillow and pillowcase blackened with what looks like gunpowder residue. But it isn’t until the ME’s people arrive to roll the body that Garvey finds the small, irregular lump of dull gray metal, surrounded on the carpet by a small amount of blood spatter where the victim’s head came to rest. The coup de grâce was no doubt delivered with the victim prone on the bedroom floor and with the pillow wrapped around the gun to muffle the shot.

The bullet itself is a strange piece of work. Garvey looks at it closely: medium-caliber, probably a.32 or.38, but it’s some ass-backwards type of semi-wadcutter design he hasn’t seen before. The projectile is pretty much intact, with little evidence of splintering or mutilation, and therefore suitable for ballistics comparisons. Garvey drops the slug into a manila evidence envelope and hands it over to Wilson. In the kitchen, the utensil drawer containing the knives is pulled partly open. Otherwise, little outside the bedroom is disturbed. The living room and the bathroom appear untouched.

Garvey has the lab tech concentrate on lifting latent prints from the rear bedroom, as well as the apartment and bedroom doors. The tech also spreads the sooty print dust along the kitchen counters and the open utensil drawer, then across the sink tops in the kitchen and bathroom, on the chance that the killer touched something while trying to wash his hands. Whenever the black dust reveals the outline of a usable print, the tech presses an ordinary piece of transparent tape against the print and backs the tape against a white 3-by-5 card. The collection of lift cards begins to grow as the tech moves from the bedroom to the kitchen. After finishing the counters, he gestures to the other end of the hallway.

“You want me to do anything with the front room?”

“I don’t think so. It looks like he left that alone.”

“I don’t mind…”

“Nah, fuck it,” says Garvey. “If it’s somebody who has access to the apartment, the prints aren’t going to mean much to us anyway.”

In his mind, the detective catalogues the evidence that needs to go downtown: The bullet. The knife. The nested pile of clothes. The dope. The gelatin capsules. A small purse, now marred by print dust, that probably held the cocaine, the rice and the capsules. The pillow and pillowcase, stained with gunpowder residue. The bedsheet, lifted carefully off the mattress and folded slowly so as to keep any loose hairs or fibers intact. And, of course, the photos of the apartment rooms, of the death scene, of the bed with the damage to the headboard, of each piece of evidence in its original location.

News travels fast in a city neighborhood and the dead woman’s family-mother, brother, uncle, young daughters-shows up on Gilmor Street even before the ME’s attendants load the body litter into the black van. Garvey sends the crowd down to homicide in radio cars; other detectives will compile the necessary background information.

Two hours later, some of Lena Lucas’s family begin drifting back to the murder scene. Nearly finished there, Garvey walks downstairs to find the dead woman’s younger daughter leaning against a radio car. She is a thin, wiry thing, not yet twenty-three, but level-headed and shrewd. Experience teaches a homicide detective that there is always one member of the victim’s family who can be trusted to keep calm, to listen, to answer questions correctly, to deal with the raw details of a murder when everyone else is wailing with grief or arguing over who should get the victim’s ten-speed blender. Garvey had talked with Jackie Lucas before sending the family downtown and that brief conversation marked the young woman as the detective’s best and brightest family contact.

“Hey, Jackie,” says Garvey, motioning for her to follow him down the sidewalk a respectable distance from the crowd outside the apartment house.

Jackie Lucas catches up to the detective, who then walks a few more yards down the pavement.

The conversation begins where such conversations always do, with the dead woman’s boyfriend, habits and vices. Garvey has already learned some things about his victim and the people in her life from earlier conversations with family members; the details from the crime scene-the absence of forced entry, the pile of clothes, the rice and gelatin caps-add to the knowledge. As he begins asking questions, Garvey touches the young woman’s elbow lightly, as if to emphasize that only the truth should pass between them.

“Your mother’s boyfriend, this boy Frazier, he’s selling drugs…”

Jackie Lucas hesitates.

“Did your mom deal for Frazier?”

“I don’t…”

“Listen, nobody cares about that now. I just need to know this if I’m going to find out who killed her.”

“She just held the drugs for him,” she says. “She didn’t sell none, not that I know about anyway.”

“Did she use?”

“Marijuana. Now and then.”

“Cocaine?”

“Not really. Not that I know of.”

“Does Frazier use?”

“Yeah, he do.”

“You think Frazier could have killed your mother?”

Jackie Lucas pauses, focusing the image in her mind. Slowly, she shakes her head sideways.

“I don’t think he did it,” she says. “He always treated her nice, you know, never beat her or anything.”

“Jackie, I have to ask this…”

The daughter says nothing.

“Was your mother, you know, kind of loose about men?”

“No, she wasn’t.”

“I mean, did she have a lot of boyfriends?”

“Jus’ Frazier.”

“Just Frazier?”

“Jus’ him,” she says, insistent. “She was seeing another man a while back, but only Frazier for a long time since.”

Garvey nods, lost for a moment in thought.

Jackie breaks the silence. “The policeman downtown say we shouldn’t say nothing to Frazier,’ cause if we do he might run.”

Garvey smiles. “If he runs, then at least I know who did it, right?”

The young woman takes in the logic.

“I don’t think he’s your man,” she says finally.

Garvey tries a different tack. “Did your mom let anyone else up into her apartment? If she was alone, would she let anyone besides Frazier come up?”

“Only this boy named Vincent,” she says. “He works for Frazier, and he been up there before for the drugs.”

Garvey lowers his voice. “You think she would fool around with this Vincent?”

“No, she wouldn’t. I don’t think Vincent ever been up there without Frazier being there, too. I don’t think she would let him in,” she adds, changing her mind.

“You know Vincent’s name?”

“Booker, I think.”

“Jackie,” says Garvey, turning to one last detail. “You told me before about Frazier keeping a gun in the bedroom.”

The daughter nods. “She has a twenty-five, and sometimes Frazier keeps a thirty-eight there.”

“We can’t find them.”

“She keeps them in that cabinet,” the daughter says. “Up on the back of the shelf.”

“Listen,” says Garvey, “if I let you go up there and look for the guns, do you think you’ll be able to find them?”

Jackie nods, then falls in behind him.

“Is it bad?” she asks on the way upstairs.

“Is what bad?”

“The room…”

“Oh,” says Garvey. “Well, she’s gone… but there’s some blood.”

The detective leads the young woman into the rear bedroom. Jackie looks briefly at the red stain, then walks to the metal dressing cabinet and pulls the.25 from the rear of the top shelf.

“The other one ain’t here.”

From a shelf in the closet directly behind the bed, she also produces a case containing a little more than $1,200 in cash, money that her mother had collected from a recent insurance settlement.