No one is happy about the schedule, but Dave Brown, for one, has found a way around its rigors. He always makes a point of putting in early for vacation on the holidays, and this year, with a one-year-old daughter and fervent dreams of domestic bliss, he plans to be nowhere near headquarters on Christmas morning. Naturally, this absurd notion of Brown’s becomes yet another item on Donald Worden’s list of things for which the younger detective requires abuse, to wit:
1. Brown hasn’t done shit with the Carol Wright case, which is still nothing more than a questionable death by automobile.
2. He has just finished five weeks of medical for a leg operation at Hopkins, a procedure allegedly made necessary by some sort of mysterious nerve damage or muscle spasms that any real man would ignore after a second beer.
3. His abilities as a homicide detective have yet to be truly tested.
4. He won’t be around to drive to Pikesville for garlic bagels on the Sunday dayshift, since that happens to be Christmas Day.
5. Worse, he now has the nerve to be off on holiday while the rest of his squad has to work both ends of a shift change.
6. He’s a piece of shit to begin with.
Worden, with his remarkable memory, has no need to write down this healthy little list. Instead, he keeps it on the tip of his tongue, so as to better reacquaint the younger man with the essential facts of life.
“Brown, you are a piece of shit,” Worden declared on the elevator one evening a week ago. “As long as I’ve been on, do you know how many days I missed on medical?”
“Yes, you miserable bastard, I know,” answered Brown, his voice rising. “You’ve never missed one lousy, stinking day for medical. You only told me about a thousand times, you…”
“Not one day,” said Worden, smiling.
“Not one day,” said Brown in falsetto imitation. “Give me a fuckin’ break already, will you?”
“But your leg hurt a little so you-”
“It was a serious medical condition,” yelled Brown, losing all patience. “There was an operation-a dangerous, life-threatening operation…”
Worden only smiled. He had the poor boy right where he wanted him; in fact, he’d had him there for weeks. Worden had become so utterly insufferable that the day after the encounter on the elevator, the Carol Wright folder suddenly and magically returned from the oblivion of the file cabinets to occupy a more prominent place on David Brown’s desk.
“It has nothing to do with Worden,” Brown insisted at the time. “This case has bothered the shit out of me for months and I always planned to come back on it as soon as I came off medical.”
Probably so. But now, from the other side of the coffee room, Worden watches with a measure of personal satisfaction as the younger detective spends another day reacquainting himself with the dead billy girl on the gravel lot.
Brown picks through the pieces of the file, reacclimating himself to the office reports, scene photos, follow-ups and BPI shots of a dozen suspects who never panned out. Once again he reads the witness statements from Helen’s Hollywood Bar, the woozy statements of drunks who wanted to believe that the killer was driving a Lotus custom through the streets of Baltimore. Once again he glances through the reports from all those random car stops of black sports cars and compacts in the southern districts of the city.
There is nothing worse than a billy murder, thinks Brown, contradicting any earlier assessments. I hate billies: They talk when they’re not supposed to, they fuck up your investigation, they waste your time by prattling on about everything they know. Fuck this case, he tells himself. Gimme a drug murder in the projects where nobody saw a thing, he muses. Gimme something I can work with.
Brown rereads the various descriptions of the suspect provided by bar patrons, the contradictory statements about hair length and style and eye color and everything else. He lines up the ident photos collected from every old lead and looks for anything that comes close to matching, but without better descriptions it’s hopeless. Not only that, but the ident photos all seem disturbingly similar. Every billy boy seems to stare out at the camera with one of those oh-so-this-is-my-mug-shot expressions; every one seems to sport tattoos, bad teeth and a tanktop shirt so dirty it could stand up on its own.
Look at this piece of work, thinks Brown, pulling one photo from the pile-a billy if ever there was one. The kid is an obvious motorhead, his shag of jet black hair parted in the middle and running halfway down to his ass. He’s got fucked-up teeth-big surprise there-and weird blond eyebrows. Christ, the kid’s got an expression so vacant that it qualifies as probable cause for a drug warrant…
Whoa. He’s got blond eyebrows. Blond as can be, thinks Brown, stunned.
The detective holds the ident photo close, his eyes bouncing back and forth between the kid’s hair and eyebrows. Black, blond. Black, blond. Gimme a fucking break here; they’re right there in the photograph, plain as day. How the hell did I miss that the first time? he wonders, searching for the report that was once stapled to the photo.
Sure enough, the kid’s name came from a car stop over by Pigtown, a follow-up by a Southern District officer on that lookout they had teletyped to patrol back in August. Brown finds the report and remembers it immediately: The guy was driving a black Mustang with a sunroof. Not exactly a T-top, not exactly a Lotus. But it was in the ballpark. A Mustang could have those low-to-the-ground performance tires, just as the traffic man had described. But the first time Brown read the report he had discounted it. The district officer stated unequivocally that the driver of the car had dark hair, and the one thing every witness agreed on was that Carol Wright’s companion was blond. Only a week ago, after reopening the file, did he bother to ask the ident section to send him photos of the long shots like this one. And only now was he noticing the mismatched eyebrows.
“Donald, look at this.”
Worden steps over, expecting something lame.
“This photo is from an arrest a couple weeks after my murder. Check out his eyebrows.”
The older detective scans the ident photo and raises an eyebrow of his own. Why in hell would a blond billy boy dye his hair black? You might go the other way, but blond to black? How often does a kid do that?
A good catch, Worden admits to himself. A helluva good catch.
Given the four-month delay, there isn’t a lot of hope for recovering any physical evidence, and it will be after the holidays before Brown and Worden get back on the street to chase this one. But when they do pluck the kid from his girlfriend’s house in Pigtown on a January morning, Jimmy Lee Shrout’s hair will be dyed red and he will act as though he’s been waiting for them since August. The battered Mustang, found in front of the girlfriend’s house that same day, will be towed to the Fallsway garage, where Worden is waiting with a lab tech. With the car up on a jack, the detective and tech begin by pulling greasy debris from the bottom, and for the first ten minutes or so they find dirt and shards of paper and pieces of leaves, until the lab tech is scoffing at the idea that anything will be left on the undercarriage after all this time.
“Well,” Worden replies, pulling at the edge of a thin strand, trying to pry it from the front crossbar, “what do we call this, then?”
“I’ll be damned.”
Worden gently unwraps the strand from the crossbar, traversing the metal three times. Finally, a long, reddish hair slides into his hand.
“What color hair did she have?” the tech asks.
“Red,” says Worden. “She had red hair.”
Later that day, Jimmy Lee Shrout will wait for the detectives in the large interrogation room, and when the wait gets a little long, he will go to sleep. Later still, he will be shown a picture of Carol Wright and he will tell Brown and Worden that he remembers picking her up as she hitchhiked on Hanover Street. He also remembers that she went to see someone at the Southern District and afterward he took her to a bar in Fell’s Point. Yeah, Helen’s-that was the name. They drank a little, she danced. Then he offered to drive her home, but she took him instead to this parking lot in South Baltimore, where she smoked his dope. He wanted to go home and sleep and he told her so. She got mad and left thecar, after which he fell asleep behind the wheel. He woke up a short time later and drove away.