The ballistic evidence is tinged with irony. Not only is November 9 election day in Maryland, it also happens to be the same day the state’s vaunted Saturday Night Special law takes effect. Passed by the state legislature in the spring despite a $6.7 million lobbying effort backed by the National Rifle Association, the law set up a review board to identify and prohibit the sale of cheap handguns in Maryland. Touted as a victory over gun control opponents and a counterweight to handgun violence, the law is in truth a largely meaningless exercise. Not since the 1970s have cheap handguns been responsible for more than a handful of the city’s homicides; nowadays even teenagers are walking around with semiautomatics tucked into their sweatpants. Smith & Wesson, Glock, Baretta, Sig Sauer-even the dickheads of the world, Warren Waddell included, are carrying quality weapons. And though Maryland’s landmark gun control law is the pride of its political leaders, it has arrived about fifteen years too late.
On the day after Carlton Robinson’s murder, Warren Waddell calls the manager to say he won’t be coming to work. He also asks if his employer can pick up tomorrow’s paycheck and meet him across town. Anticipating such a request, the detectives told supervisors at the construction company to explain to Waddell that he has to come to the office in Essex and sign for the check in person. The manager gives him that story and then asks if he really killed Carlton.
“I can’t talk right now,” Waddell says.
Then, to the amazement of all concerned, Waddell shows up the next morning to claim his paycheck, eyes the secretaries suspiciously, then leaves abruptly. He and the friend who drove him are arrested at a county police roadblock a mile or two away. Searched by the county officers, Waddell is found to be carrying a large amount of cash, an American Express card and a U.S. passport. Upon his arrest, he makes no statement, then further endears himself to Garvey and McAllister by faking a stomach ailment on the trip downtown, wasting two hours of the detectives’ time at Sinai Hospital.
Everything about the case puts Waddell’s signature on the murder-the victim’s dying words, the fight and threats at work the previous day, the mixture of hollow-point and standard ammo, the suspect’s behavior after the murder. Yet when Garvey brings the case into the state’s attorney’s office, he’s told that it’s an easy indictment but a loser in court.
The centerpiece of the case-Carlton Robinson’s dying words-may prove inadmissible simply because the officers at the scene did not inform the victim that he was dying. Nor did Robinson specifically tell the officers that he believed his life was ending. Instead, the officers did the natural thing. They called for the ambo and leaned close to the victim, telling Robinson to hang on, assuring him that if he remained conscious he would make it.
Without an acknowledgment of imminent death by either the victim or his attendants, Robinson’s accusation could well be knocked down by a defense attorney who knows his Maryland code.
And without the dying declaration, they have weak circumstance and little more. Having been through the murder mill once before, Waddell shows no interest in the interrogation process, nor does a subsequent search warrant produce the murder weapon.
Garvey, of course, has no choice but to charge the murder. For one thing, he knows that Warren Waddell murdered Carlton Robinson. For another, he owes it to himself to close the case in this Perfect Year. But even as Waddell is trundled off to city jail for pretrial detention, the detective knows that this is one case for the lawyers to salvage.
Frustrated by the initial reaction from the state’s attorney’s office, Garvey asks Don Giblin, his golfing buddy in the violent crimes unit, to shop around for a veteran prosecutor. Garvey has seen enough of the trial division to know that half the ASAs in the office will look at a file like this and immediately pronounce the legal problem insurmountable. As with the Lena Lucas murder, he needs a fighter.
“Get me a good one, Don,” he tells Giblin over the telephone. “That’s all I’m asking.”
TEN
Deck the halls with boughs of holly,
Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!
Throw that stiff up on the dolly,
Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!
Talk to us and if you’re willing,
Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!
Tell us who did all this killing,
Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!
Tell us how you want forgiveness,
Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!
You don’t know we’ve got a witness,
Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la,
Talk to us, you’ve nothing to lose,
Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!
Why is blood upon your gym shoes?
Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!
Want to make a good impression?
Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!
Make yourself a fast confession,
Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!
– Homicide unit Christmas song
Mostly for his own amusement, Donald Waltemeyer watches Mark Cohen watching the hole get deeper. The process-such as it is-consists of two distinct stages and Cohen’s disposition changes noticeably between the two. The first four feet with the backhoe are quick and painless, and Cohen barely squirms; the next eighteen inches require hand shovels, and Waltemeyer sees the lawyer’s face crease with something more than expectation.
Pale and wire-thin, with spectacles and curly blond locks, Cohen looks like an innocent straight man standing next to the side of beef that is Waltemeyer, a professorial, three-piece Hardy propped up beside a muscular, working-class Laurel. Cohen is a good man, among the best of the city prosecutors, and Waltemeyer can’t think of a better trial attorney for the sprawling colossus that began as the Geraldine Parrish murder-for-hire case. But Cohen is a lawyer, not a cop, and as the shovels work deeper into clay, he begins to look less and less comfortable. Mercifully, Waltemeyer gives him his out.
“Kinda cold out here,” the detective says.
“Sure is,” agrees Cohen, his collar turned up to the winter wind. “I’m going back to the car awhile.”
“You want the keys for the heater?”
“No, I’ll be okay.”
Waltemeyer watches Cohen negotiate his way across the muddy field, made worse by an inch or two of recently melted snow. The lawyer steps lightly in his L. L. Bean duck boots, both hands hiking up the seams of his slacks an extra couple of inches. Waltemeyer knows the cold isn’t the only thing the man is feeling: The stench-faint but foul in the frigid air-was there from about four feet down. Cohen couldn’t help but get a whiff of it.
At the sound of something solid, the detective turns back toward the hole, taking a step forward to peer down over the edge. “What was that?”
“That’s the top,” says the cemetery manager. “You got the top of the box right there.”
The two men in the hole concentrated their shovels on the edges of the wood, trying to free the top of the casket from the surrounding dirt. But at the first real stress, the pressed wood cracks and collapses.
“Just pull that shit up,” says the manager. “Don’t even mess with it.”
“Not much of a casket,” says Waltemeyer.
“I’m telling you,” agrees the manager, a gravel-voiced, pear-shaped man. “She buried the man cheap as she could.”
I’ll bet she did, thinks Waltemeyer. Miss Geraldine wasn’t about to be spending hard-won money on funerals, what with all the dearly departed she had to contend with. Even now, from inside the city jail, Geraldine Parrish was fighting hard to remain the sole heir of the Reverend Rayfield Gilliard’s money and property, with a civil suit by the reverend’s family still to be decided by a circuit court judge.