David Simon - Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets

Vincent has been stewing in the cubicle for more than an hour when Garvey and Kincaid finally walk into the room and begin the monologue. Wadcutters in the soap dish, drug paraphernalia, jackknives, and your man Frazier’s putting you in for both these murders. Deep shit, Vincent, deep shit. Five minutes of this talk produce the desired level of fear, ten minutes produce a completed rights form, signed and witnessed.

The detectives carry the form out of the room and confer briefly in the hall.

“Hey, Rich.”

“Hmm?”

“That boy don’t stand a chance,” says Kincaid in a stage whisper. “You’re wearing your power suit.”

“That’s right. I am.”

Kincaid laughs.

“The dark blue pinstripe,” says Garvey, lifting one lapel. “He won’t know what the fuck hit him.”

Kincaid shakes his head and gives Garvey’s attire a last look. A Kentucky native, Donald Kincaid addresses the world in a loud, backwoods drawl and sports a tattoo of his initials above his left wrist. Garvey plays golf at Hilton Head and speaks of power suits; Kincaid trains hunting dogs and dreams of deer season in West Virginia. Same squad, different world.

“You want to have a go at him alone?” asks Kincaid as the two move back toward the interrogation room.

“Nah,” says Garvey, “we’ll gang-bang him.”

Vincent Booker waits for the second round with his back against the near wall, his hands cupped in the folds of his sweatshirt. Kincaid takes the far seat, facing the kid. Garvey sits between the two, closer to Vincent’s end of the table.

“Son, lemme tell you something,” says Garvey in a tone that suggests the interrogation is already over. “You have one shot here. You can tell us what you know about these murders and we’ll see what we can do. I know you’re involved in some way, but I don’t know how much, and the thing for you to think about is whether you want to become a witness or a defendant.”

Vincent says nothing.

“Are you listening to me, Vincent? You better start thinking about every fucking thing I’m saying here because a lot of shit is going to be coming down.”

Silence.

“Are you worried about Frazier? Listen to me, son, you better start worrying about yourself. Frazier’s been in here already. He’s trying to fuck you. He’s telling us about you.”

That gets it. Vincent looks up. “What’s Frazier sayin’?”

“What do you think?” says Kincaid. “He’s trying to put you in for these murders.”

“I didn’t…”

“Vincent, I don’t believe this motherfucker Frazier,” says Garvey. “Even if you’re involved in one or the other, I don’t believe you killed your father.”

Garvey pushes his chair closer to Vincent’s corner of the room and drops his voice to little more than a whisper. “Look, son, I’m just trying to give you a chance on this. But you’ve got to tell us the truth now and we’ll see what we can do with that. You can be at the defense table, or you can be on the prosecution side. That’s what we can do. We do a few favors now and then and we’re doing you one right now. Are you smart enough to see that?”

Probably not, thinks Garvey. And so the two detectives begin to lay it out to young Vincent Booker. They remind him that his father and Lena were both shot with the same kind of ammunition, that both murder scenes are identical. They explain that right now, he’s the only suspect who was known to both victims. After all, they ask him, what was your father to Robert Frazier?

At this, the boy looks up, puzzled, and Garvey stops talking long enough to reduce this abstraction to paper. On the back of a lined statement sheet, he draws one circle on the left-hand side of the page, then writes “Lena” inside the circle. On the right-hand side he draws a second circle with “Purnell Booker” written inside. Garvey then draws a third circle that intersects the circles of the two victims. Inside that third circle he writes “Vincent.” It’s a crude little creation, something any algebra teacher would know as a Venn Diagram, but it gets Garvey’s point across.

“This is our case. Look at it,” he says, pushing the sheet in front of the boy. “Lena and your father are killed by the same gun, and right now the only person who has any connection to both of the victims is Vincent Booker. You’re right in the fuckin’ middle of this thing. You think about that.”

Vincent says nothing and the two detectives leave the room long enough to allow the geometry to sink in. Garvey lights a cigarette and watches through the one-way window in the door as Vincent holds the crudely drawn diagram to his face and traces the three circles with his finger. Garvey shakes his head, watching Vincent turn the diagram upside down, then right side up, then upside down again.

“Look at this fuckin’ Einstein in here, will you?” he says to Kincaid. “He’s about the dumbest motherfucker I ever seen.”

“You ready?” says Kincaid.

“Yeah. Let’s do it.”

Vincent doesn’t look up from the diagram when the door opens, but his body gives an involuntary shake when Garvey enters and immediately begins another rant, his voice louder this time. Vincent can no longer manage eye contact; he grows smaller, more vulnerable with each accusation, a bleeder in the corner of the shark tank. Garvey sees his opening.

“You’ve got a knot in your fuckin’ stomach, don’t you?” Garvey asks abruptly. “You’re feeling like you’re going to be sick. I’ve seen a hundred or so just like that in here.”

“I seen ’em throw up,” says Kincaid. “You ain’t gonna throw up in here, are you?”

“No,” says Vincent, shaking his head. He is sweating now, one hand clutching the end of the table, the other wrapped tight in the hem of his sweatshirt. Part of the sickness is the fear of being pegged for two murders; part is the fear of Robert Frazier. But the greater share of what’s holding Vincent Booker on the precipice is a fear of his own family. Right here and now, Garvey can look at Vincent Booker and know, with even greater certainty than before, that there is no way this boy killed his father. He doesn’t have that in him. Yet the bullets connect him to the crime, and his rapid reduction to a speechless wreck in less than an hour of interrogation testifies to guilty knowledge. Vincent Booker is no killer, but he played a role in the death of his father, or at the very least, he knew the murderer and said nothing. Either way, there is something that cannot be faced.

Sensing that the boy needs one more good shove, Garvey walks out of the interrogation room and grabs the plastic soap dish from Vincent’s bedroom.

“Gimme one of these,” he says, taking a.38 cartridge from the dish. “This motherfucker needs some show-and-tell.”

Garvey walks back into the cubicle and deposits the.38 round in Kincaid’s left hand. The older detective needs no further prompting; he stands the round on its end in the center of the table.

“See this here bullet?” Kincaid asks.

Vincent looks at the cartridge.

“This isn’t your ordinary thirty-eight ammunition, is it? Now we can get them to type this for us at the FBI lab, and it usually takes ’em two or three months, but on a rush job they can have it back in two days. And they’re gonna be able to tell us which box of fifty this bullet came from,” says Kincaid, pushing the round slowly toward the boy. “So, you tell me, is it going to be just coincidence if the FBI says this bullet comes from the same box as the one that killed your daddy and Lena both? You tell me.”

Vincent looks away, his hands clasped tightly in his lap. A perfect deceit: even if the FBI could narrow the.38 ammunition to the same manufacturer’s lot number of a couple hundred thousand boxes or more, the process would probably take half a year.