Later that night, at Helen’s on Broadway, the two detectives get little more from the regular patrons and night employees. The guy had blond hair, kind of long and stringy, but with a little curl to it. And a mustache, too. Kind of thin.

“How tall?” Brown asks the bartendress. “My height?”

“No,” she says. “Shorter.”

“About his height?” he says, pointing to a customer.

“Maybe a little shorter than that.”

“What about the car?”

The car. Nothing is more frustrating for Brown and Worden than to listen to these people try to describe the automobile that ran over Carol Ann Wright. The woman on Stricker Street says it was a blue or green compact. The manager of the bar says it was black and sporty, with a T-top and a round insignia on the front of the hood, like a 280Z. No, says the bartendress, it had those doors that open upward, like wings.

“Winged doors?” says Brown, incredulous. “Like a Lotus?”

“I don’t know what you call it.”

“Are you sure?”

“I think so.”

It’s hard to dismiss the employee because she actually went outside at closing time and listened to this guy talk about how he’s a mechanic, a transmission expert, and does his own work on the car.

“He was real proud of it,” she tells Brown.

But it’s harder to believe her when she says that some greasy motor-head named Rick is running around South Baltimore in a custom $60,000 Lotus, giving billy girls a ride down to the Southern District. Yeah, right, thinks Brown, and Donald Worden is my personal love slave.

What’s especially aggravating to the detectives is that if these witnesses can’t get the car right-the car being a definite object with its make and model number displayed in chrome on its exterior-then they sure as hell can’t be trusted to come anywhere close on the guy’s description. Everyone mentions the shoulder-length blond hair, but some are saying stringy and others, curly. Only half of them have the thin mustache, and they’re all over the map on the guy’s height and weight. Eye color? Forget it. Distinctive features? Oh yeah, he was driving a Lotus.

Ordinarily, a bad description is par for the course. Any good detective or prosecutor knows that stranger-to-stranger identification is the weakest kind of evidence; in a crowded world, people just don’t have the facility to commit a new face to memory. Many veteran detectives don’t bother to include preliminary descriptions in their reports for that reason: A description of a six-foot-two, 220-pound suspect will hurt you in court when the guy turns out to be five-seven and 150. True to the stereotype, law enforcement studies have also shown that interracial identifications-blacks of whites, whites of blacks-tend to be the weakest because at first glance, both races have trouble distinguishing between members of the other. In Baltimore, at least, the reputation for the most ineffectual identifications goes to the Koreans, who run every other corner store in the inner city. “All rook arike” is the only credo they ever offer to a robbery detective.

But this case should have been different. For one thing, the identification is white-on-white. For another, the guy was in the bar for over an hour, hovering around Carol, making conversation with the other patrons and employees. Collectively, these people remember that the guy claimed to be a mechanic, a transmission expert actually, that he drank Budweiser, that he mentioned that a particular bar up in Parkville was for sale and that his uncle owned some bar in Highlandtown with a German-sounding name that no one can recall. They even remember that the guy got mad when Carol got up to dance to the jukebox with another girl. All of that has been committed to memory by the regulars at Helen’s, and yet Brown is left with nothing better than a partial description.

Frustrated, Brown works the bartendress through her story a second time, then communes with Worden at the back of the tavern, near the pool table.

“These are our best witnesses?” says Brown. “We don’t have dick.”

Leaning against the pay phone on the back wall, Worden gives Brown a what-you-mean-we-Kemosabe look.

“The problem is that it was closing time and they were all shitfaced,” Brown continues. “They’re not going to remember this guy well enough for a composite.”

Worden says nothing.

“You don’t think there’s any point in calling an artist, right?”

Worden looks at him skeptically. Even with good eyewitnesses, the composite sketches never manage to look like the suspect. Somehow, all the black guys resemble Eddie Brown and, depending on hair color, all the white guys are dead ringers for either Dunnigan or Landsman.

Brown persists. “There’s not enough here for a composite, right?”

Worden holds out his hand. “Gimme a quarter.”

Brown fishes up a twenty-five-cent piece, presuming that Worden wants to use the phone or maybe punch a song on the juke.

“Brown, you’re a piece of shit,” says Worden, pocketing the coin. “Finish your beer and let’s go.”

They are left with the worst kind of investigation, a needle-in-a-haystack search for blond-haired Rick and his black or maybe blue-green sports car. Reluctantly, Worden puts a description out on a teletype to the districts. He had hoped to keep that information from floating around too freely, because if word somehow gets back to the suspect that they have a partial description of the car, he’ll paint it or ditch it or hide it in a garage somewhere for about four months. The car, both detectives understand, is essential evidence.

Ideally, the teletypes are read at every roll call citywide and maybe elsewhere in the state if a detective uses the MILES computer system. Hell, if an investigator thinks his man has gone on the wing interstate, he can go whole hog and put the thing on NCIC. But both the local and national teletype networks-like most everything else in the criminal justice system-are flooded to the point of absurdity. Usually, the only items a cop remembers from roll call will be red-ball items-cop killings, child murders-and the occasional punch line. At the beginning of a recent 8-to-4 shift, Jay Landsman made a point of reading a burglary teletype from Baltimore County in which the stolen property consisted of 522 gallons of ice cream.

“The suspects are believed to be a lot fatter than they were…”

In the Baltimore precincts, at least, a homicide lookout stands a good chance of being read at roll call, but whether anyone’s actually listening or not is open to debate. In Brown and Worden’s favor, however, is the fact that the girl was run over in the Southern District. In a detective’s mind, the street police in certain districts are known for certain things: The Eastern cops protect a crime scene better than anyone, the Western operations unit has decent informants, and in the Southern and the Southeast, there are still some guys out on the street who will actually work a lookout.

Over the next several days, uniforms in those districts make traffic stops on anything close to the description. The paperwork comes downtown to Brown’s desk, where names and license numbers are matched with motor vehicle registrations and BPI photos. There’s a lot of data and Brown looks at each report carefully. Nothing seems to match: This guy’s got a black 280Z with a T-top, but he’s got thinning brown hair. This one’s got a Mustang with some front end damage, but his long hair is jet black. This one’s got long blond hair, but his Trans Am is a light copper color.

In addition to the district car stops, Brown and Worden spend the days and nights after the murder wedged into a Cavalier, following up on everything that the victim’s family tells them. And with each passing day, the family comes up with a new suspect. First, there is the guy out in Middle River whose name is most definitely Rick and who had called for Carol about a week before she was killed. The family still has the guy’s phone number.