But days became weeks and the detectives-even those cautious souls who would change their very tone when I walked up on their conversations-soon lost the will to perform, to pretend to be someone other than who they were.
I learned to drink. I dropped my Amex card now and then, whereupon the detectives more than matched me round for round, showing me I still had a lot to learn. Staggering from the Market Bar at closing one night, Donald Worden-who had allowed me to follow him on calls and through cases, but always with a certain veiled contempt-glared at me as if for the first time and drawled, “All right, Simon. What the hell do you wanna see? What the fuck do you think we’re gonna show you?”
I had no answer. Notepads were stacked on my desk, a dog-eared tower of random detail that confused and intimidated me. I tried to work six days a week, but my marriage was ending and sometimes I worked seven. If the detectives went drinking after work, I was often in tow.
On night shifts, I would work doubles, coming in at four and staying through the midnight shift until early morning. Sometimes, coming off midnight, we drank at dawn, and I would stagger home to sleep until night. I learned to my amazement that if you forced yourself to drink the morning after a bad drunk, it somehow felt better.
On one February morning, I was hungover and late for morning roll call when Worden phoned to wake me with the news that a dead girl had been found in a Reservoir Hill alley. I was at the crime scene ten minutes later, staring at the eviscerated body of Latonya Wallace and the beginning of an investigation that would become the spine of the book.
I began to focus on that case. On Pellegrini, the new man. On Edgerton, the lone-wolf secondary on the case, and on Worden, the gruff conscience of the unit. I talked less, listened more and learned to pull out the pen and notepad discreetly, so as not to upset the delicate moments of ordinary squadroom life.
In time, because I read the casework voraciously and sat through multiple shifts to note the comings and goings of detectives, I became in some small way a clearinghouse of basic information:
“Where’s Barlow?”
“He’s in court. Part eighteen.”
“Is Kevin with him?”
“No, he’s at the bar.”
“With who?”
“Rick James and Linda. And Garvey went, too.”
“Who caught the one on Payson last night?”
“Edgerton. He went home after the morgue and he’s coming back at six.”
But mostly, I was comic to these men, an amusing twenty-something distraction- “a mouse tossed into a room full of cats,” by Terry McLarney’s description. “You’re lucky we’re so bored with each other.”
If I went to a morning autopsy, Donald Steinhice would throw his voice and watch me eye the cadavers warily, just as Dave Brown would drag me to the Penn Restaurant to eat that nasty chorizo-and-egg platter so as to measure the fortitude of a novice. If I sat through a successful interrogation, Rich Garvey would turn to me at the end to ask if I had questions of my own, then laugh at whatever reportorial impulse resulted. And if I feel asleep on midnight shift, I would wake to find Polaroid photos of myself, head back in a chair, mouth open, flanked by smiling detectives imitating fellatio, their thumbs stuck through open zippers.
McLarney wrote my green sheet, the semi-annual evaluation so detested by working police in Baltimore. “Professional kibbitzer,” he wrote in summation of my standing. “It’s unclear what Intern Simon’s actual responsibilities are, however his hygiene is satisfactory and he seems to know a good deal about our activities. His sexual appetites remain suspect, however.”
At home, with a mattress on the bedroom floor and most of the furnishings in the possession of my ex-wife, I spent hours filling a computer with stream-of-consciousness rambling, emptying the notepads, trying to organize what I was witnessing into separate casefiles, biographies and chronologies.
The Latonya Wallace murder stayed open. I was mortified by this-and not because a killer roamed free and the destruction of a child was unavenged. No, I was too overawed by the manuscript I would soon have to write to waste a moment thinking in moral terms. Instead, I worried that the book would have no climax, that its conclusion would be open and empty and flawed.
I drank some more, though by summer the detectives, feeling sorry for me perhaps, were buying as many rounds as they put to my credit card. To avoid the heart of the matter-actually writing-I wasted a week or two interviewing the detectives at length with a tape recorder, producing the kind of interviews in which people who have for months been candid and open suddenly talk into a microphone with the certain knowledge that posterity is at stake.
Edgerton caught a second child-murder and solved it, and, without knowing it, I met in the mother of the dead girl one of the central characters of my next book, The Corner. Ella Thompson began for me at the door of her Fayette Street rowhouse, a mother’s face contorted in grief. Four years later, I would wander into the recreation center on Vincent Street and encounter her again-by accident-as I began reporting a different narrative, one that even the best detectives can only glimpse.
During that year in the homicide unit, I never actually felt I’d gone native. Not in any way that seemed to matter. Not in my own mind, anyway. I dressed the part, and at crime scenes and in courtrooms I did what the supervisors and investigators told me to do. Ultimately, I enjoyed myself and the company of the detectives immensely. For four years I had written city murders in a cramped, two-dimensional way-filling the back columns of the metro section with the kind of journalism that reduces all human tragedy, especially those with black or brown victims, to bland, bite-sized morsels:
A 22-year-old West Baltimore man was gunned down yesterday at an intersection near his home in an apparent drug-related incident. De tectives have no motive or suspects in the case, police said.
Antwon Thompson, of the 1400 block of Stricker Street, was found by patrol officers called to the scene of…
Suddenly, I had been granted access to a world hidden, if not willfully ignored, by all of that dispassionate journalism. These weren’t murders as benchmarks of a day’s events. Nor were they the stuff of pristine, perfectly rendered morality plays. By summer, with the body count rising in the Baltimore heat, I came to realize that I was standing on the factory floor. This was death investigation as an assembly-line process, a growth industry for a rust-belt America that had long ceased to mass manufacture much of anything, save for heartbreak itself. Perhaps, I told myself, it was the ordinariness of it all that made it, well, extraordinary.
They went after the Fish Man for the last time in December. He didn’t break. Latonya Wallace would not be avenged. But by then I had seen enough to know that the empty, ambiguous ending was the correct one. I called John Sterling, my editor in New York, and told him it was better this way.
“It’s real,” I said. “It’s how the world works, or doesn’t.”
He agreed. In fact, he’d seen it before I did. He told me to start writing, and after staring at the computer screen for a couple weeks, wondering how you type the first fucking sentence of a fucking book, I found myself back at the Market Bar with McLarney, who swayed to the rhythm of a ninth Miller Lite and eyed me, much amused at my predicament.
“Isn’t this what you actually do for a living?”
Sort of. Except not something so big as a book.
“I know what you’re gonna write.”
Do tell.
“It’s not about the cases. The murders. I mean, you’ll write about the murders so you have stuff to write about. But that’s all just the bullshit.”
I listened. Carefully.