Leaving Brown and James to work their scene, Garvey returns to the homicide office and buries himself in paperwork at a back desk. He’s still there when the detectives return from Lafayette Avenue.
As if the immediate similarities between both crime scenes aren’t enough to link the killings, the spent bullet pulled from Purnell Booker’s brain at the next morning’s autopsy is a.38 ass-backward wadcutter. Later that evening, Dave Brown, the primary on Lafayette Avenue, saunters over to Garvey’s desk with an ident photo of young Vincent Booker.
“Yo bunk, looks like we be working together.”
“Looks like.”
As it happens, already that afternoon Garvey has heard from an anonymous tipster, a woman who called the homicide office to say she heard talk at a West Pratt Street bar. One man was telling another that the same gun was used to kill Lena Lucas and the old man on Lafayette.
Interesting rumor. A day later, ballistics says the same thing.
A week has passed since Lena Lucas and Purnell Booker were found dead on the same night, yet the two cases are still moving slowly, inexorably, forward. Fresh reports clutter both files, and in the Baltimore homicide unit, where one day’s violence is overwhelmed by that of the next, a thick file is regarded as a healthy sign. Time itself mocks the most careful investigations, and a detective-conscious of that fact-spends his precious hours working the best angles, bringing the likely witnesses and suspects downtown, hoping that something will fall. For he knows that well before he has a chance to play long shots or, better still, to embark on a prolonged, detailed investigation, another case folder will arrive on his desk. But somehow, in some special way, the law of diminishing returns has never applied to Rich Garvey.
“He’s like a dog with a bone,” Roger Nolan once told another sergeant with pride. “If he gets a case and there’s anything there at all, he won’t let go of it.”
Of course, Nolan only says that to other sergeants; to Garvey he says nothing of the sort, cleaving instead to the fiction that it’s normal for a detective to drop a case only when there’s nothing left to give up on. It is, in truth, anything but normal. Because after fifty or sixty or seventy homicides, the reality is that the dead-yo-in-the-alley scenario begins to wear thin. And nothing deflates a detective more than going back to the office, punching a victim’s name into the admin office terminal and pulling out five or six computer pages of misbehavior, a criminal history that reaches from eye level to the office floor. Burnout is more than an occupational hazard in the homicide unit, it is a psychological certainty. A contagion that spreads from one detective to his partner to a whole squad, the who-really-gives-a-shit attitude threatens not those investigations involving genuine victims-such cases are, more often than not, the cure for burnout-but rather those murders in which the dead man is indistinguishable from his killer. An American detective’s philosophical cul-de-sac: If a drug dealer falls in West Baltimore and no one is there to hear him, does he make a sound?
After four years in homicide and thirteen on the force, Garvey is one of the few residents of the unit still unafflicted with the virus. It is telling that while most detectives can’t keep the cases straight in their minds after a few years in the trenches, Garvey can immediately tell you that out of twenty-five or twenty-six cases in which he was the primary, the number of open files can be counted on one hand.
“How many exactly?”
“Four, I think. No, five.”
Vanity isn’t what prompts Garvey to keep such a statistic in his head; it’s simply his central frame of reference. Determined, aggressive, persistent to a fault, Garvey likes working murders; more than that, he still takes an open murder or a weak plea bargain personally. That alone is enough to make him seem like a relic, a surviving piece of shrapnel from an ethic that crashed and burned a generation or two back, when the “if at first you don’t succeed” platitude was replaced in all Baltimore municipal offices by the more succinct “that’s not my job,” then, later, by the more definitive “shit happens.”
Rich Garvey is an anachronism, a product of a Middle American childhood in which the Little Engine That Could was taken seriously. It’s Garvey who will readily abandon decorum and diplomacy to jump in a prosecutor’s shit when second-degree and twenty just isn’t good enough, telling an assistant state’s attorney that any lawyer with hair on his ass wouldn’t take anything less than first-degree and fifty. It’s Garvey who shows up for work with a raging flu, then works a Pigtown bludgeoning because, what the hell, if he’s on the clock he may as well handle a call. And it’s Garvey who photocopies the “Remember, we work for God” quote by Vernon Geberth, the New York police commander and homicide expert, then posts one above his desk and distributes the rest around the office. Blessed with an acute sense of humor, Garvey is aware that as credos go, Geberth’s is both maudlin and pompous. He can’t help it; in fact, that makes him like it all the more.
He was born in an Irish, working-class neighborhood of Chicago, the only son of a sales executive for the Spiegel catalogue retailing company. At least until the end of his career, when the company judged his position to be expendazble, Garvey’s father had prospered, and his family had enough to escape to the suburbs when the old neighborhood began going bad in the late 1950s. The elder Garvey applied his own ambition to his son, whom he liked to imagine as a future sales executive, maybe even for Spiegel; Garvey thought otherwise.
He spent a couple of years at a small Iowa college, then finished up with a degree in criminology at Kent State. In 1970, when National Guardsmen fired their lethal volley into a crowd of Vietnam protestors on the Ohio campus, Garvey was walking away from the disturbances. Like many students, he had doubts about the war, but he also happened to have a class that day and, if the shootings hadn’t closed the campus, Garvey would have been front and center, taking notes. A young man out of step with his times, he was looking to a police career in an era when law enforcement did not exactly stir the imagination of America’s young. Garvey had his own way of looking at things. Police work would always be interesting, he believed. And even in the worst economic recession, there would always be a job for a cop.
Upon graduation, however, that last bit of logic was not so easily demonstrated. Open positions were hard to come by in the mid-1970s, with many urban police departments retrenching in an inflationary economy. Newly married to his college sweetheart, Garvey fell into a security job with Montgomery Ward. It was nearly a year later, in 1975, when he heard that the Baltimore department was hiring patrolmen, offering pay and benefit incentives for college graduates. He and his wife drove down to Maryland, then toured the city and surrounding counties. Driving through the gentle, contoured valleys and sprawling horse farms in northern Baltimore County, they fell in love with the Chesapeake region. It was, they reasoned, a fine place to raise a family. Then Garvey took his own tour of the city’s slums-east side, west side, lower Park Heights-scouting the places in which he would earn a living.
He went from the academy to the Central District, where he drew the post at Brookfield and Whitelock. Business was brisk; Reservoir Hill in the late 1970s was as ragged a neighborhood as when Latonya Wallace turned up in an alley there a decade later. McLarney, for one, could remember Garvey from the years when both men were in the Central; he could remember, too, that Garvey was without doubt the best man in his squad. “He answered calls and he would fight,” McLarney would say, commending the two qualities that truly matter in a radio car.