Homicide - David Simon

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Pellegrini are not content, and as they work their way to the third floor, they call for more items to be dusted.

      At 5:30 A.M., the adult male occupants of the house are handcuffed together and herded single file into a Central District wagon. They will be taken downtown and dumped in separate rooms, where the same investigators who spent the night picking through the rowhouse will begin an unsuccessful effort to provoke each man into acknowledging a child murder. And though they have not yet been charged with any crime, the suspects from 702 Newington are treated with an almost exaggerated disdain by the detectives. Their contempt is both unspoken and unsubtle, and it has little to do with the murder of Latonya Wallace. Maybe one of the half-dozen men killed the little girl; maybe not. But what the detectives and uniforms know now, after six hours inside 702 Newington, is evidence enough for an indictment of an entirely different sort.

      It isn’t about poverty; every cop with a year on the street has seen plenty of poverty, and some, like Brown and Ceruti, were themselves born into hard times. And it has little to do with criminality, despite the long arrest sheets, the sexual abuse report on the six-year-old and the teenagers huffing cleaning products in the living room. Every cop at 702 Newington has dealt with criminal behavior on a daily basis, until evil men are accepted without any excess of emotion as the necessary clientele, as essential to the morality play as the lawyers and judges, the parole officers and prison guards.

      The contempt shown to the men of 702 Newington comes from a deeper place, and it seems to insist on a standard, to say that some men are poor and some men are criminals, but even in the worst American slum, there are recognizable depths beyond which no one should ever have to fall. For a homicide detective in Baltimore, every other day includes a car ride to some godforsaken twelve-foot-wide pile of brick where no taxpayer will ever again breathe air. The drywall will be rotted and stained, the floorboards warped and splintered, the kitchen filled with roaches that no longer bother to run from the glow of an electric light. And yet more often than not, the deprivation is accompanied by small symbols of human endeavor, of a struggle as old as the ghetto itself: Polaroid snapshots stapled to a bedroom wall showing a young boy in his Halloween costume; a cut-and-paste valentine from a child to his mother; school lunch menus on the ancient, round-top refrigerator; photographs of a dozen grandchildren collected in a single frame; plastic slipcovers on the new living room sofa, which sits alone in a room of battered, soiled remnants; the ubiquitous poster of The Last Supper or Christ with a halo; or the air-brushed portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr., on posterboard, on paper, on black velvet even, his eyes uplifted, his head crowned by excerpts from the March on Washington speech. These are homes where a mother still comes downstairs to cry on the front steps when the police wagon pulls up outside, where the detectives know enough to use formal titles of address, where the uniforms ask the kid if the handcuffs are too tight and put a protective hand on his head when he negotiates his way into the back of a cage car.

      But in one rowhouse on Newington Avenue, two dozen human beings have learned to leave food where it falls, to pile soiled clothes and diapers in a corner of the room, to lie strangely still when parasites crawl across the sheets, to empty a bottle of Mad Dog or T-Bird and then piss its contents into a plastic bucket at the edge of the bed, to regard a bathroom cleaning product and a plastic bag as an evening’s entertainment. Historians note that when the victims of the Nazi holocaust heard that the Allied armies were within a few miles of liberating the camps, some returned to scrub and sweep the barracks and show the world that human beings lived there. But on Newington Avenue the rubicons of human existence have all been crossed. The struggle itself has been mocked, and the unconditional surrender of one generation presses hard upon the next.

      For the detectives inside the rowhouse, contempt and even rage are the only natural emotions. Or so they believe until the early morning hours of the search, when a ten-year-old boy in a stained Orioles sweatshirt and denims emerges from the clutter of humanity in the middle room to tug on Eddie Brown’s coat sleeve, asking permission to get something from his room.

      “What is it you need?”

      “My homework.”

      Brown hesitates, disbelieving. “Homework?”

      “It’s in my room.”

      “Which room is that?”

      “It’s upstairs in the front.”

      “What do you need? I’ll bring it.”

      “My workbook and some papers, but I don’t remember where I left it.”

      And so Brown follows the boy to the largest bedroom on the second floor and watches as the kid pulls a third-grade reader and workbook from the cluttered table.

      “What kind of homework is it?”

      “Spelling.”

      “Spelling?”

      “Yeah.”

      “You a good speller?”

      “I’m okay.”

      They walk back downstairs and the boy is gone, lost in the sweltering mass of the middle room. Eddie Brown stares through the doorway as if it were the other end of a long tunnel.

      “I tell you,” he says, lighting a cigarette, “I’m getting too old for this.”

       THREE

      WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 10

      It has been 111 days since Gene Cassidy was shot down at the corner of Appleton and Mosher streets, and for 111 days Terry McLarney has been walking around with the weight of the Baltimore Police Department on his back. Never has there been an open file in the murder or wounding of a Baltimore police officer; never has there been a failed prosecution. Yet McLarney knows, as does every other cop in the department, that a day of reckoning is coming. For years, city juries have been willing to award second-degree verdicts in the shooting of police officers; the boy who shot Buckman six times in the head got second-degree and was already on parole. The doper who killed Marty Ward, shot him in the chest in a drug raid gone bad, also walked with second-degree. McLarney knows, as does every other detective, that it’s only a matter of time before the unthinkable happens and one gets away. McLarney tells himself it is not going to be on him, and it is not going to be on Cassidy.

      But the days are bleeding away without any fresh leads, without anything to corroborate a case that the prosecutors say is still too weak to give to a jury. The folder for the Cassidy shooting is thick with office reports, but in truth, McLarney has no more on his suspect than he did back in October. In fact, he has less. In October, at least, he was convinced that the man locked up for shooting Gene Cassidy had actually done the crime.

      Now he can’t be sure. Now, as the case edges closer to a May trial date, he has moments when he actually catches himself in silent prayer. The appeals are short, petitional and blunt: prayers offered on street corners or in the back of the office coffee room, prayers to a Roman Catholic God who did not hear from Terry McLarney when he himself was out there bleeding on Arunah Avenue. Now, at odd moments, McLarney finds himself muttering the kind of single-issue requests with which He is forever deluged. Dear God, help me put together a case against the man who shot Gene and, rest assured, you will not be burdened with my problems again. Respectfully submitted, Detective Sergeant T.P. McLarney, CID Homicide, Baltimore, Maryland.

      The late night calls from Gene only added to the pressure. Unaccustomed to a permanent darkness, Cassidy would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night wondering if it was morning or afternoon. Then he would call the homicide unit to learn what was new, what else they had on this boy Owens. McLarney would tell him the truth, tell him that the case against Anthony Owens was still nothing more than two reluctant, underage witnesses.

      “What do you want, Gene?” McLarney asked in one such conversation.

      “I think,” Cassidy replied, “that for every day I’m blind, he should be in prison.”

      “Can you live with fifty?”

      Yes, said Cassidy. If I have

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