That’s what it’s beginning to look like: Man meets boy, man gets undressed, boy strangles man, steals cash, credit cards and Ford Thunderbird and drives off into the Baltimore sunset. Unless, of course, the kid who lived with him did it. Then it’s man meets boy, man lives with boy, boy finally gets sick of playing grabass and chokes the living shit out of the landlord. That would play, too, thinks Worden.
The lab tech on call is Bernie Magsamen-good man, Bernie is, one of the best-and so they take their time with the scene, pulling fingerprints off the nightstand and the used drinking glasses near the bed and in the bathroom sink. They get a good sketch and several photographs of the body in that bizarre position. They go through the old man’s belongings carefully, looking for what is missing, what may be missing, or what is there that shouldn’t be.
They do this because they know they’ve caught a murder; they know it and act on it with the same resolve by which other men would declare the scene to be a motel room or its occupant to be dead. To Worden and Waltemeyer, the death of Robert Yergin is a murder even though the victim is sixty-five and overweight, fully primed for a heart attack, a stroke or some other natural death. To them it’s a murder, though there isn’t a suggestion of any struggle or any trauma to the body; it’s a murder, though there isn’t a hint of petechial hemorrhaging in the whites of the eyes-the postmortem telltale that so often occasions strangulation. To them it’s a murder even after Worden finds the victim’s wallet still fat with cash and credit cards in a jacket pocket, suggesting that anyone who killed the old man did a lousy job of robbing him. It’s a murder because Robert Yergin, who takes to bed young boys he barely knows, is lying there in a weird position without his 1988 Ford Thunderbird. What else does a good detective need to know?
Little more than three hours later, Donald Worden is standing next to Donald Kincaid on the opposite side of town, staring at a thirty-foot smear of drying blood that ends in a red-purple lake after traveling the full length of a vacant West Lexington Street rowhouse. And although the man whose carotid artery painted this picture is still clinging to life at Bon Secours, this, too, will come back a murder. Worden knows it, not only because so much blood has been sprayed across the dirty hallway tile, but also because he has no viable suspect.
Two whodunits in one night-the new standard by which a Baltimore detective can be judged. Any professional can work a series of mysteries on successive nights or handle dunkers in tandem on a rough midnight shift. But what prompts a man who inherits one open case file to then answer the telephone three hours later, grab a fresh pair of plastic gloves and a flashlight, and leave out for a West Baltimore shooting call?
“Well, well,” muses McLarney the morning after, as he stares at the fresh names on the board, “I guess it’s finally reached that point where Donald won’t trust anyone else with a murder.”
This is the Donald Worden around whom Terry McLarney built a squad, the Worden that Dave Brown can never please, the Worden that Rick James loves to call his partner. Two crime scenes, two autopsies, two family notifications, two sets of interviews, two batches of paperwork, two trips to the police computer for sheets on two separate sets of players-and not a word of complaint from the Big Man. Not even the barest suggestion that Waltemeyer may want to go it alone on the Eastgate murder, or that Kincaid will have to make do without a secondary for Lexington Street.
No, sir, Worden’s got himself a fresh pack of cigars, a full pot of coffee and McLarney’s signature on the bottom of a departmental overtime slip. He hasn’t slept in twenty-four hours and if he gets a break in either case, he won’t get near a bed for twelve more. It’s a hard road, a long haul-a ridiculous way for a grown man to earn a living. It’s also about as close to a feeling of immortality as a career cop ever gets.
In the end, he resurrected himself. In the end, he simply waited his anger out, waited for that phone line to light up with the cure that was bound to come. Straight murders, one after another, each one a unique variation of that same eternal evil; just crime and punishment, meted out to a working cop in roughly equal shares. God knows Worden had talked enough about quitting; in this job, he liked to tell colleagues, you eat the bear until the bear eats you, and I’m going to walk before that bad boy gets hungry.
Tough-guy talk. But no one really believed that Donald Worden would loosen his grip on that silver shield. It would have to be the other way around.
Three days after Worden picks up two murders on a single shift, both cases are in the black. The break in the Yergin case comes as a direct result of Worden’s prolonged interrogation of the victim’s teenage companion, a conversation that makes it clear enough that in the absence of any other suspect, the old man’s housemate will remain at the top of Worden’s list. Two days later the kid-still frightened-calls the homicide unit to say he’s heard that some white boys are driving the dead man’s Thunderbird around Pigtown and Carroll Park.
Worden and Waltemeyer drive down to the upper end of the Southern District, where Waltemeyer talks to a few of the older hands with whom he served for so long. The Southern troops are already known for reading homicide teletypes, but for their old bunky Waltemeyer they’ll go so far as to tow every T-bird in the district down to headquarters. An hour after the detectives’ visit, two Southern men stop the right car at Pratt and Carey and take the driver, a seventeen-year-old male prostitute, into custody. Worden and Waltemeyer tag-team the suspect in the large interrogation room until he admits to being in the motel room; unaware that the autopsy proved the death to be suffocation, he claims the old man died of a seizure. When the two detectives complete the statement and leave the room, the kid stands up and uses the two-way window in the door as a mirror, breaking pimples and fretting over his complexion as if he’s still an ordinary teenager, contemplating a Friday night date.
The Lexington Street murder, a dispute over a small narcotics sale, is solved on a recanvass of the shooting scene, when Worden’s photographic memory matches the face of an old man who answers a door in the 1500 block with the face of a bystander he saw hanging out on a corner the night of the murder. Sure enough, the old man admits to being a witness and identifies the shooter from a photo array. But it’s still a weak, one-witness case until the suspect arrives downtown, whereupon Worden lets loose with the full blue-eyed, white-haired father-figure treatment and persuades the shooter to give up everything. So effective is Worden’s method that the suspect actually calls the detective from the city jail two weeks later with secondhand gossip about an unrelated murder.
“Detective Worden, I also just wanted to call and wish you a Merry Christmas,” he tells the man who has jailed him. “For you and your family both.”
“Thank you very much, Timmy,” says Worden, a little touched. “My best to you and yours for the holidays.”
Two up and two down. For Worden, the last weeks of a year that was so utterly frustrating now roll effortlessly onward, as if scripted for some cops-and-robbers television show in which all the crimes will be solved and explained before the last commercial break.
Three days before Christmas, the Big Man and Rick James go out on an East Baltimore shooting call, driving away from headquarters on a December night so unseasonably humid that the city is layered in thick, blinding fog. As the Cavalier lurches up Fayette Street, both detectives squint through the mist at the vaguest outline of rowhouses on either side of the street.