David Simon - Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets

“Hey,” says Dennis Wahls.

“Hey,” says his brother.

“I told them about the watch-”

“What watch?”

“Hey,” Brown interrupts. “Your ass is going to be in this if you don’t listen to your brother.”

“Man, c’mon,” says Dennis Wahls. “You got to give it up. They gonna let me go if you give it to him. If you don’t, they gonna put a murder charge on me.”

“Hmm,” says the kid, obviously wondering how this can be. If they don’t get the evidence, they charge you, but if they get the evidence, you go free. Yeah. Right.

“Go on,” says Roger Nolan, standing beside the car.

The boy looks at his brother. Dennis Wahls nods and the young boy races back into the red brick building, returning three minutes later with a woman’s timepiece on a black leather band. The boy tries to hand the watch to his brother, but Brown interjects his own hand. The boy takes a step away from the car.

“See you soon, yo,” says Dennis Wahls.

The boy nods again.

They proceed to Reservoir Hill, where the two cars pull to the curb outside the Section 8 housing on Lennox Avenue. Again Brown and Wahls wait in the Cavalier; this time, Nolan pays a visit to Wahls’s young girlfriend, who received a gift of Karen Smith’s gold necklace.

In the driver’s seat, McCarter plays with the radio. Eddie Brown, still in the back seat with his prisoner, watches Nolan bullshitting with the girlfriend’s mother in the project parking lot. When Nolan gets wound up, he can talk your ear off.

“C’mon, Roger,” mutters Brown. “What the fuck are you doing there anyway?”

A minute or two more and the girl returns from her apartment with the jewelry, walking across the lot to Nolan waving nervously at Wahls, who is peering out the rear passenger window.

“Man, I wish she hadn’t seen me like this.”

The detective grunts.

“Her momma’s gonna be upset with me now.”

McCarter pushes the radio buttons until rock ’n’ roll spills out in a crackling AM static: the Bobby Fuller Four from about a dozen years back. The detail officer listens to the song for a moment; suddenly, he’s dying in the front seat, trying hard not to laugh aloud.

“Oh man,” says McCarter.

“Breakin’ rocks in the hot sun…”

McCarter starts snapping two fingers, mugging for Brown and Harris, who is standing at the driver’s window.

“… I fought the law and the law won.”

Brown steals a look at Wahls, but the kid is oblivious.

“Robbin’ people with a six-gun…”

McCarter keeps time on the steering wheel.

“… I fought the law and the law won.”

“Can you believe it?” says McCarter.

“Believe what?” asks Wahls.

McCarter shakes his head. On the night when he has greatest need of a functioning mind, Dennis Wahls is suddenly struck deaf, dumb and blind. The radio could be playing back his own confession and he wouldn’t notice.

Which is not to say that Wahls, at the age of nineteen, has a deep reservoir of intelligence from which to draw. First of all, he let some other brain-dead talk him into killing a woman cabbie for a few dollars and some jewelry, and then he settled for the jewelry, letting his partner keep the cash. Next, he gave away the jewelry and began bragging about being right there when the woman was pulled into the woods and beaten to death. He didn’t kill her, no sir. He watched.

The first few people within earshot didn’t believe it; either that or they didn’t much care. But eventually some young thing that Dennis Wahls tried hard to impress went to school and told a friend, who told someone else, who finally decided that maybe some sort of authority figure ought to hear about it. And when line 2100 lit up in the homicide unit, Rick James was there to take the call.

“I did one thing right in this whole investigation,” James, the primary for the Smith murder, will later declare. “I picked up the phone.”

In truth, he did a lot more than that. With the detail officers to help him, James ran down every lead that came in, checking and rechecking the stories provided by Karen Smith’s coworkers, boyfriends and relatives. He spent days going over the cab company’s service logs, looking for fares or locations that seemed out of the ordinary. He sat at his desk for hours, listening to tapes of the cab dispatcher’s calls, trying to pick up a location where Karen Smith may have gone before she disappeared into the woods of Northwest Baltimore. He checked every recent robbery or assault report involving a taxi driver anywhere in the city or county, as well as the robbery reports from anywhere close to the Northwest. When he found out that one of the victim’s boyfriends had a cocaine habit, he went at him hard in a series of interviews. The alibi was checked. The boyfriend’s acquaintances were all interviewed. Then they brought the man downtown and went at him again: Things weren’t so good between you two, right? She made a lot of money, didn’t she? You spend a lot of money, don’t you?

Even Donald Worden, as harsh a judge of the younger detectives as any, was impressed with his partner’s effort.

“James is learning,” Worden said, watching the case from a distance, “what it means to be a detective.”

Rick James did everything conceivable to solve the case, yet when the phone finally rang, the two binders of office reports from the cabbie killing contained not a single mention of Dennis Frank Wahls. Nor was Clinton Butler, the twenty-two-year-old wonder who conceived the slaying and struck the fatal blow, a name in the file. There was nothing new to that kind of twist, no lesson to be learned by the detective. It was merely a textbook example of Rule Five in the homicide lexicon, which states:

It’s good to be good; it’s better to be lucky.

James was actually on his way to the airport, waiting for a morning flight and a week’s vacation, when detectives finally located Wahls and brought him downtown. Wahls gave up the murder in little more than an hour of interrogation, during which Eddie Brown and two detail officers offered him the most obvious out. You didn’t hit her; Clinton did, they assured him, and Wahls went for the whole apple. No sir, he didn’t even want to do the robbery. That was Clinton’s idea, and Clinton called him names when he didn’t initially agree. He didn’t even get any of the money; Clinton took that, arguing that he was the one who had done all the work, leaving Wahls only the jewelry. After she fainted from fear, it was Clinton who dragged the cabbie out of her taxi and down the wooded path, Clinton who found the tree branch, Clinton who challenged him to do it, then teased him when he did not. So it was Clinton Butler who finally smashed the wooden limb against the woman’s head.

In the end, the only thing that Wahls would admit was that it was he, not Clinton, who pulled off the woman’s pants and attempted oral sex with their unconscious victim. Clinton was homosexual, Wahls assured the detectives. He didn’t want none of that.

When Wahls had signed and initialed the statement, the detectives asked about the jewelry. We believe what you’re telling us, Brown said, but we need a show of good faith. Something that proves you’re telling us the truth. And Wahls nodded his understanding, suddenly confident that the return of the dead woman’s watch and necklace would buy his freedom.

Solved by chance rather than perseverance, the Karen Smith case was as much a message for Tom Pellegrini as anything else. Just as he was replaying the Latonya Wallace murder in his mind like a tape loop, James had lost himself in the details of the cabbie slaying. And to what end? Sweat and logic can solve a case in those precious days that follow a murder, but after that, who the hell knows? Sometimes a late phone call can break a case. Sometimes a fresh connection to another crime-a ballistics match or print hit-can change the outcome. More often, however, a case that stays open a month will stay open forever. Of the six female slayings that provoked the department brass to create the Northwest detail, the Karen Smith case would be only one of two to end in arrest and the only case to reach trial. By the end of March, the detail officers in the other five cases had returned to their districts; the case files were back in the cabinets-a little thicker than before, perhaps, but no better for all the effort.