Strangely, the defendants rarely take it personally. They come into the courtroom from the heat of the basement lockup; shackled and cuffed, they look around and catch the eye of the detective. More often than not, they nod or acknowledge the loyal opposition in some small way. In the course of a long trial, a few actually reach out and shake the detective’s hand or mutter a senseless thank-you for no reason that can be discerned, as if the detective was doing them some kind of favor by showing up.

But on rare occasion, when a defendant is talking shit-performing in the courtroom, signifying, passing wolf tickets to the judge and prosecutor-a detective will step through the psychological barrier. Only then will the defendant be acknowledged in any real way; only then does a detective let anyone suspect that he may actually care about the legal outcome.

Earlier in the year, Dave Brown happened to be in a courtroom for the jury’s verdict on two of his defendants-west-siders, age twenty-two and fourteen, charged with murdering an elderly minister in a street robbery near University Hospital the previous spring. Brown remained silent as the jury forewoman read out first-degree verdicts, but the older defendant suddenly lost his chill.

“You happy now, bitch?” he shouted, turning to glare at the detective.

The gallery fell into silence.

“Yes,” said Brown quietly. “I’m pleased.”

Inside a courtroom, it’s as much as a detective allows himself.

At his cluttered desk on the fourth floor of Courthouse West, Lawrence C. Doan rearranges a stack of legal pads and runs one finger along the bottom of his dark bangs and then back over the top, carefully reassuring himself that all is in place. No cowlicks today. No antigravitational shift in the tie’s Windsor. No lint on the lapels. No problem whatsoever, save for the fact that today he’s going to try to prosecute a murder in the city of Baltimore, which is a little like trying to drive a Winnebago through the eye of a needle.

And now, when Doan wishes only to be left alone to review notes and prepare his opening, a homicide detective bounds through the door to yank his prosecutor’s chain over matters large and small-a deliberate act of sadism, born of the same impulse that causes small children to pull the wings off flies.

“Are we ready?” asks Garvey.

“Are we ready,” says Doan. “You come in here ten minutes before court and ask me that?”

“Just don’t fuck up my case, Larry.”

“How can I?” asks Doan. “It came to me prefucked.”

Garvey ignores him. “The photos come in with me, right?” he asks, wondering about evidentiary order.

“No,” says Doan, trying to think bigger thoughts, “I’ll get those in with Wilson. Where’s Wilson? Did you call the crime lab?”

“And the bullets?” asks Garvey, ignoring him. “Do you need the bullets today?”

“Which bullets? Where’s Wilson, does he-”

“The bullets from the trunk of the car.”

“Um, no. Not today. You can take those back to evidence control,” says Doan, preoccupied. “Does Wilson know he’s on this afternoon?”

“I think so.”

“You think so?” says Doan. “You think so? What about Kopera?”

“What about him?”

Doan begins to change colors.

“You’re not going to get to Kopera this afternoon, right?” asks Garvey.

Doan buries his head in his hands, contemplating the known realities. The federal budget deficit is out of control, the ozone layer is being depleted, twenty pissant countries have nuclear weapons and I, Lawrence Doan, am trapped in a small room with Rich Garvey, ten minutes away from opening arguments.

“No, I don’t need Kopera,” says Doan, regaining his calm. “I’ll need Wilson probably.”

“You want me to call him?” asks Garvey, now playful.

“Yes,” says Doan. “Yes. Please. Call him.”

“Well, Larry, if it’ll help you relax…”

Doan shoots Garvey a look.

“Don’t you look at me that way, motherfucker,” says the detective, pushing back the suit jacket to reach his waist holster and grab the butt of his gun. “I’ll shoot you full of holes right here and now and everyone in this courthouse will rule it justifiable.”

The prosecutor responds with his middle finger, and the detective lifts the gun a few inches from the holster, then laughs.

“F. Lee Doan,” says Garvey, smiling. “You better not lose this case, motherfucker.”

“Well, if you’d do your fucking job and get me some witnesses…”

The standard prosecutorial lament, heard a thousand times a day by a thousand police officers in a thousand distant courthouses.

“You’ve got witnesses,” counters Garvey. “Romaine Jackson, Sharon Henson, Vincent Booker…”

At the mention of Booker’s name, Doan gives the detective another look.

“Well,” says Garvey, shrugging, “he’s definitely a witness…”

“We’ve been through this, goddammit,” says Doan, growing irritated. “I do not want to put Vincent Booker on the witness stand. That’s the last thing I want to do.”

“Okay,” says Garvey, shrugging. “But I think you’re making a mistake.”

“Yeah,” says Doan, “I know you do. And I’m sure when we lose this case you’ll be the first one to say I told you so.”

“I sure as shit will be,” says Garvey.

The prosecutor rubs his temples, then looks down at the pile of paper on his desk that represents the state’s case against Robert Frazier in the murder of Lena Lucas. For the sake of giving Garvey grief, he has overstated the matter just a bit: The case against Frazier is solid and he does indeed have witnesses. But it is nonetheless a circumstantial prosecution, and therefore-as prosecutors enjoy pointing out-it is subject to circumstances beyond control. Without an eyeball witness or the murder weapon, without a full confession or an obvious motive, the web that connects Frazier to the death of his lover will be thin. To Garvey, who has built the case, Vincent Booker is part of that web; to avoid his testimony as a trial tactic is to weaken the case. But to Doan, Vincent Booker is a loose cannon rolling around on the deck of the ship, a witness who might be seen as an alternate suspect by the jurors.

After all, Vincent did sell Frazier’s cocaine. He knew Lena Lucas and already admitted to his knowledge of the events that preceded his father’s murder. Garvey himself believed that Vincent was probably present when Frazier demanded that old man Booker return the drugs he had taken from his son’s room. Vincent probably stood there dumbstruck as Frazier used that knife to cut his father repeatedly in the face, demanding to know where the package was. He could still have been standing there when Frazier finally used the gun. Given those probable truths, no one could say where Vincent’s trial testimony might lead.

No, thinks Doan again, the risks of Vincent Booker’s testimony are greater than the benefits, though trying to argue the point with Garvey is futile. The detective is convinced that Frazier’s attorney, Paul Polansky, will use Vincent Booker as an alternate suspect in any event. In Garvey’s view, keeping Booker in the background will only play into the opposition’s strategy.

That difference of opinion, coupled with the usual concerns about all the logistics involving evidence and witnesses, is enough to ruin whatever quiet reflection Doan had hoped for before this morning’s arguments. Instead, a detective and his prosecutor begin the day in each other’s faces.

Doan smiles, then waves his tormentor out of the cubicle for a few moments of silence. A veteran of the Baltimore courthouse, Larry Doan is short and stocky, with dark hair, pale skin, wire-rims, and an eye that wanders just enough to deny his face symmetry. In the courtroom, Doan’s appearance and demeanor often suggest a near-permanent state of woe; at times he seems to embody every stereotype about the underpaid, overworked big-city prosecutor, his briefcase crammed with motions, answers to motions and stipulations, his values crowded by the rising tide of human despair. If the Baltimore state’s attorney’s office ever needed a poster boy, Doan would be the odds-on favorite.