In four months, you’ll be a trivia question to these men. In four months, when the carbon-sheet court notices show up in their mailboxes, the men who took your freedom will look down at your name in computer-embossed type and wonder who the hell you are: Wilson, David. Jury trial in part six. Christ, they’ll think, which one is Wilson? Oh yeah, the double from Pimlico. Yeah, that brain-dead with the story about the Jake.
In time, your tragedy will be consigned to an admin office file drawer, and later to a strip of microfilm somewhere in the bowels of the headquarters building. In time, you will be nothing more than a 3-by-5 index card in the suspect name file, packed into the T-Z drawer with about ten thousand others. In time, you will mean nothing.
But today, as the wagon man checks your cuffs and checks his paperwork, you are the precious spoils of one day’s war, the Holy Grail of one more ghetto crusade. To the detectives watching you leave, you are living, breathing testimony to a devotion that the world never sees. To them, you are validation for honorable lives spent in service of a lost cause. On this fading December afternoon, you are pride itself.
If the shift had been quiet, they might have gone straight home, eaten a little supper and slept until morning. But now it won’t be an early night; you’ve killed two people and lied about it, proving to Donald Worden that he was born into this life to be nothing more or less than a homicide detective. You’re the first step in Tom Pellegrini’s long road back, the first opportunity for a young detective’s redemption. You’ve become two black names beneath Jay Landsman’s nameplate, the last entries of the year for a veteran sergeant who once again has the best rate on his shift.
And now, with the paperwork done, they might just head for Kavanaugh’s or the Market Bar or some other hole where a cop can drink a murder down. It’s New Year’s Eve and they might raise a glass or two and toast themselves, or each other, or whatever remains of the one true brotherhood. But they won’t raise a glass for you tonight. You’re a murdering piece of shit; why would they want to drink to that? And yet they will think of you. They’ll think about how perfectly they read the crime scene, how they had you backing up on your story at the hospital, how they even came up with the photo of the Jake you tried to put it on and how they made you eat that story too. They’ll think of you and know, as only a detective can, that police work done well can be a fine and beautiful thing. They’ll think of you and drink a little more, maybe laugh a little louder when Landsman tells the stories about his oatmeal box radar gun or Phyllis Pellegrini on Riker’s Island.
Hell, they might even close Kavanaugh’s and spend the rest of the night out on the parking lot, matching war stories, trying to sober themselves before daybreak and the drive home to a wife already up and putting on her makeup, to the sound of kids already bouncing around the house. Home to the smell of breakfast in the kitchen, to a bedroom with the shades pulled tight and the sheets disturbed by someone else’s night. Another morning when the world spins along without them, another day of another year, measured for those who walk in light and deal with the living.
They sleep until dark.
EPILOGUE
The boundaries of this narrative-January 1, 1988, and December 31, 1988-are necessarily arbitrary, an artificial grid of days, weeks and months imposed on the long and true arc of men’s lives. The homicide detectives of Gary D’Addario’s shift were traveling their collective arc when this account began; they are traveling it still. The names, the faces, the scenes, the case files, the verdicts-these change. Yet the daily violence in any large American city provides a constant background against which a homicide detective seems to labor with timeless defiance. A few men transfer, a few retire, a few latch on to an extended investigation, but the homicide unit remains essentially the same.
The bodies still fall. The phone still bleats. The boys in the back office fill out the daily run sheets and argue about overtime. The admin lieutenant still calculates the clearance rate daily. The board still oozes red and black names. Long after the cases blur or fade entirely from a detective’s memory, the job itself somehow retains a special luster.
Every year, the Baltimore homicide unit stages an alumni dinner at the firefighters’ union hall in Canton, where a hundred or more current and former homicide detectives eat, drink and carouse with one another in celebration and remembrance of everything seen and done and said by men who spend the best part of their lives working murders. Jimmy Oz, Howard Corbin, Rod Brandner, Jake Coleman-every year the auditorium is filled with men who cling to memories of the hardest job they’ll ever have. Not that all of those gathered were great detectives; in fact, some were pretty mediocre in their day. But even the worst of them belongs to a special brotherhood, has a special standing for having lived for a time in the darkest corner of the American experience.
Strangely, they don’t talk much about the cases, and when they do, the murders themselves are little more than scenery. Instead, the stories they tell are about each other-about jokes cracked at crime scenes and things seen through the windshields of unmarked cars; about this asinine colonel, or that legendary, never-say-die prosecutor, or some long-legged blonde nursing supervisor at Hopkins, the young one who had this thing for police. What the hell ever happened to her anyway?
At the homicide reunion of 1988, the stories were about Joe Segretti, who at a crime scene in the east side projects of Waddy Court once pulled a bloody rag from a victim’s head and, noticing an impression of the dead man’s face, declared it the Shroud of Waddy: “A miracle for Baltimore,” he assured his partner. “We gotta call the pope.”
There were stories about Ed Halligan, once Terry McLarney’s partner, who on one occasion got so drunk he dropped a pending case file into a rain-soaked gutter while walking home. When McLarney went to rescue him the following morning, he found the entire file laid out in perfect order on Halligan’s living room floor, each page drying slowly. And everybody remembered the legendary Jimmy Ozazewski- “Jimmy Oz”-a true character, who once solved a red-ball case and proceeded to give television interviews from his own den while wearing a smoking jacket and puffing on an imported pipe.
And they remembered, too, the men no longer there, like John Kurinij, the mad Ukrainian who never did learn to curse properly, calling his suspects “sons-of-bitch-bitch” and bemoaning his “fuck-fuck” job. It was Jay Landsman and Gary D’Addario who got the call to go to Kurinij’s house in the county, where they found his badge and holster arranged neatly on the table. Kurinij was in the bathroom, kneeling over the tub with the bath mat doubled beneath him, his blood seeping into the drain. A detective’s suicide, clean and methodical: Landsman needed only to turn the spigot for the water to wash away the blood, leaving the bullet.
“Fuck him,” said D’Addario, when Landsman began to lose control. “He knew when he did it that we’d find him like this.”
Tales from the sanctum of the station house, back pages from a Book of Mayhem that has no beginning or end. In 1988, thirty detectives, six sergeants and two lieutenants wrote a few fresh stories of their own-comedy, tragedy, melodrama, satire-stories to be heard at many a reunion to come.
The jump in the clearance rate ended any substantive threat to Gary D’Addario’s tenure as a homicide shift lieutenant, but the political intrigue in 1988 still took a toll. To save himself and his men from any real damage, he swallowed just enough to please the bosses. He squeezed out a little overtime, he pressed a few detectives to work more cases, he wrote some memos calling for follow-ups in several files. Most of that could be classified under the heading of necessary and normal evil.