Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets Part 17

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" plat.i.tude was replaced in all Baltimore munic.i.p.al offices by the more succinct "that's not my job," then, later, by the more definitive "s.h.i.+t 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 s.h.i.+t when second-degree and twenty just isn't good enough, telling an a.s.sistant state's attorney that any lawyer with hair on his a.s.s 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 h.e.l.l, if he's on the clock he may as well handle a call. And it's Garvey who photocopies the "Remember, we work for G.o.d" 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-cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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.

Given his hunger for work, Garvey's career ran a steady course: six years in the Central, then another four as one of the most reliable burglary detectives in CID's property crimes section, then the transfer to homicide. Arriving in June 1985, Garvey soon became the centerpiece of Roger Nolan's squad. Kincaid was the veteran, Edgerton the artful loner, but it was Garvey who worked the lion's share of the calls, readily teaming himself with McAllister, Kincaid, Bowman or any other warm body that happened on a fresh murder. Tellingly, when other detectives in the squad began ranting about Edgerton's workload, Garvey would often remind everyone, without any sarcasm, that he had no complaint.

"Harry's going to do what he's going to do," Garvey would offer, as if murder had somehow become a precious commodity in Baltimore. "That just means there's more for me."

Garvey genuinely loved being a murder police. He loved the scenes, he loved the feeling of pursuit, the adolescent rush of hearing handcuffs click. He even loved the sound of the word itself; that much was evident every time he returned from a scene.

"What'd you have out there?" Nolan would ask.

"Murder, mister."

Give the man a fresh one every three weeks and he's content. Give him more than that, he's downright pleased. During one midnight tour in the summer of 1987, Garvey and Donald Worden worked five murders in five days, three of them on a single night. It was the sort of midnight s.h.i.+ft when a detective has trouble remembering which witnesses came downtown from which homicide. ("Okay now, everyone who's here from Etting Street raise your right hand.") Still, four of the five went down, and both Garvey and the Big Man relished that week as a pleasant memory.

Yet ask other detectives to name the best men at a crime scene and they'll mention Terry McLarney, Eddie Brown, Kevin Davis from Stanton's s.h.i.+ft, and Garvey's partner, Bob McAllister. Ask about the best interrogators and the list will include Donald Kincaid, Kevin Davis, Jay Landsman and maybe Harry Edgerton if his co-workers are feeling generous enough to include known subversives in the balloting. The best men to testify in open court? Landsman, Worden, McAllister and Edgerton are the usual nominees. The best man out on the street? Worden, hands down, with Edgerton a close second.

So what about Garvey?

"Oh Christ, yeah," his colleagues will say, suddenly reminded. "He's a h.e.l.luva detective."

Why?

"He stays with them."

For a homicide detective, staying with them is half the battle, and tonight, with the arrival of Robert Frazier in the homicide office, the battle over Lena Lucas and Purnell Booker is yet another step closer to being won.

Frazier is tall and thin, dark complected, with deep-set brown eyes beneath a high, sloping forehead, above which a layer of close-cropped hair is just beginning to recede. He moves like a man who has spent his years on street corners, gliding down the sixth-floor corridor toward the interrogation rooms in a practiced pimp roll, shoulders and hips pus.h.i.+ng the body forward in a slow, locomotive fas.h.i.+on. Frazier's face rarely breaks from an unsettling stare, a gaze all the more unnerving because he rarely blinks his eyes. His voice is a deep monotone, and his sentences are braced by an economy of language that suggests words being chosen with care or, perhaps, few words from which to choose. At thirty-six, Robert Frazier is a part-time steelworker and state parolee who can look upon his shoestring cocaine enterprise as a second career of sorts; a previous apprentices.h.i.+p at armed robbery was curtailed abruptly by a six-year sentence.

The total package pleases Garvey immensely, for the simple reason that Robert Frazier looks exactly like a murderer.

It is a small satisfaction, but one that always makes the chase seem a little more worthwhile. By and large, what sits at the defendant's table in a Baltimore circuit court rarely seems at first glance to be sufficient to the wanton destruction of human life, and even after forty or fifty cases, there is still something in the heart of every detective that registers disappointment when the person responsible for an extraordinary act of evil turns out to resemble nothing more sinister than the counterman at a midtown 7-Eleven. Alcoholics, dopers, welfare mothers, borderline mental cases, adolescent yos and yoettes in designer sweatsuits-with only a handful of exceptions, those who claim a place on Baltimore's murderers row aren't the most visually threatening crew ever a.s.sembled. But with a low rumble to his voice and that thousand-yard stare, Frazier adds a little something to the melodrama. Here is a man for whom large-caliber handguns were created.

All of which seems to go to waste the minute he hits the interrogation room door. Because once Frazier comes to rest across the table from Garvey, he shows a complete willingness to discuss his girlfriend's violent death. More to the point, he is now able to provide a suspect more plausible than himself.

Of course, Frazier was only convinced of the need for a voluntary appearance in the homicide office after a week's legwork by both Garvey and Donald Kincaid, who signed on as a secondary when Dave Brown was himself tied up with an unrelated murder. Looking for a little leverage, the two detectives put Frazier's dirty laundry out on the street, visiting the man's home on Fayette Street and asking his wife a series of questions about her husband's work hours, habits and drug involvement before dropping the Big One.

"Did you know he had a thing going with Lena?"

Whether the news affected the woman to any great degree was uncertain; she conceded that the marriage had seen rough times recently. Either way, she made no effort to alibi her husband on the night of the murder. And the next day, plant officials at Sparrows Point told the detectives that Frazier had not been on his s.h.i.+ft for the two days before the killing.

Then, last night, Frazier telephoned Garvey at the homicide office, declaring that he had information about Lena's murder and wanted to meet with detectives right away. But by midnight he had failed to post and Garvey headed home. An hour later, Frazier wandered up to the garage security booth and asked to speak with detectives. Rick Requer talked to him, long enough to determine that Frazier was wired tight, and judging from his pupils, which were dancing a mad Bolivian samba, the wire of choice was probably cocaine. Requer called Garvey at home and the two men agreed to abort the interview and tell Frazier to come back clean.

Before leaving the floor, however, Frazier asked a question that Requer found curious: "Do you know if she was shot and stabbed?"

Maybe he picked it up on the street. Maybe not. Requer wrote a report for Garvey that included the statement.

Now, on his return visit to headquarters, Frazier seems not only cognizant of his surroundings but genuinely curious about his girlfriend's death. Over the hour-and-a-half interview with Garvey and Kincaid, he asks as many questions as he answers and volunteers a good bit of information on his own. Leaning back in his chair, tipping it slightly with every stretch of his legs, Frazier tells the detectives that although he has a wife and a second girlfriend, who lives in the Poe Homes, he had been seeing Lena Lucas for some time. He also claims they rarely fought and says that he, as much as the police, would like to know who killed Lena and stole his cocaine from the bedroom dresser.

Yeah, he admits, Lena often kept cocaine for him in the Gilmor Street apartment. Kept it in that stand-up dresser, in a purse in a bag of rice. He had already heard from the family that whoever killed Lena took what she was holding at the time.

Yeah, he dealt cocaine and a little heroin, too, when he wasn't working down at the Sparrows Point plant. He wasn't going to waste time lying about that. He sold enough to make a living, most of it down by the Poe Homes low-rises, but it wasn't like he was working out all the time.

Yeah, he had a gun. A .38 revolver, but it wasn't even loaded. He kept it at his other girlfriend's house on Amity Street. She held it for him, and that's where it was now.

Yeah, he had heard about Vincent Booker's father, too. Didn't know Purnell Booker, but he had heard on the street that the same gun had been used in both murders. True, the boy Vincent had worked for him for a while, selling dope on consignment. But the boy often f.u.c.ked up the money, and he had a bad habit of snorting up profit, so Frazier had found it necessary to let him go.

Yeah, Vincent had access to Lena's place. In fact, Frazier would often send him there for dope, or bags, or cut. Lena would let him in because she knew he worked for Frazier.

Garvey moves to the meat of the interview: "Frazier, tell me what you can about that night."

Here, too, Frazier is more than helpful, and why shouldn't he be? After all, he last saw Lena alive on Sat.u.r.day, the evening before the night of the murder, when he stayed with her on Gilmor Street. On Sunday, he spent the entire evening ten blocks away in the projects on Amity Street, where his new girlfriend threw a dinner party for several friends. Lobster, crabs, corn on the cob. He was there all night, from seven or eight o'clock on. Slept in the back bedroom, didn't leave until morning. He went by Lena's on the way to work that day and saw that the front door of the rowhouse was open, but he was late, and when Lena didn't answer the buzzer, he didn't go in. That afternoon, he tried calling Lena's house a couple of times but got no answer, and by early evening, the police were already over there about the murder.

Who, Garvey asks, can confirm your whereabouts on Sunday night?

Nee-Cee-Denise, that is, his new girl. She was on Amity Street with him all night. And of course, the people at the dinner party saw him there. Pam, Annette, a couple others.

Here, Frazier puts in another good word for young Vincent Booker, who, he says, showed up on Amity Street at the height of the party, knocking on the door just after ten o'clock and asking to speak with Frazier. The two men talked on the stoop for a few minutes, Frazier says, long enough for him to see that the boy was all nervous and wild-eyed. Frazier asked what was the matter, but Vincent ignored the question, asking instead for some cocaine. Frazier asked him if he had any money; the boy said no.

Frazier then told him that there would be no more drugs, not when he kept f.u.c.king up the money. At which point, according to Frazier, young Vincent got mad and stormed off into the night.

As the interview winds to a close, Frazier offers one last observation about Booker: "I don't know how things were between him and his father, but since they found the old man dead, Vincent hasn't been real upset about it."

Was Vincent sleeping with Lena?

Frazier looks surprised at the question. No, he answers, not that he knew about.

Did Vincent know where Lena kept the dope?

"Yeah," says Frazier, "he knew."

"Would you be willing to take a lie detector test, a polygraph?"

"I guess. If you want."

Garvey doesn't know what to think. Unless Vincent is fooling around with Lena Lucas, there is nothing to explain her nudity or the nested clothes at the bottom of the bed. On the other hand, there isn't any obvious connection between Frazier and old man Booker, though it's certain that both murders were committed by the same hand, wielding the same gun.

The detective asks a few more questions, but there isn't much you can do when a man answers everything put to him. As a measure of good faith, Garvey asks Frazier to bring in his .38 handgun.

"Carry it down here?" Frazier asks.

"Yeah. Just bring it in."

"I'll get a charge."

"We won't charge you with that. You got my word on it. Just make sure the gun's unloaded and bring it down here so we can get a look at it."

Reluctantly, Frazier agrees.

At the end of the interview, Garvey gathers up his notepaper and follows Frazier out into the hall. "All right, Frazier, thanks for coming down."

The man nods, then holds the yellow visitor pa.s.s issued to him by building security. "What ..."

"You just give that to the man at the booth on your way out of the garage."

Garvey begins walking his witness toward the elevator, then stops near the water cooler. Almost as an afterthought, he leaves Frazier with something that is part warning and part threat.

"I'll tell you, Frazier, if anything you're saying isn't right, now's the time for you to deal with that," Garvey says, looking impa.s.sively at the man. "Because if this is bulls.h.i.+t, it's going to come back on you in a bad way."

Frazier takes this in, then shakes his head. "Told you what I know."

"All right, then," says Garvey. "See you 'round."

The man catches the detective's eyes briefly, then turns down the corridor. His first few steps are short, uncertain movements, but those that follow gather speed and rhythm until he's moving hip to shoulder, shoulder to hip, sailing forward in a full roll. By the time he clears the headquarters garage, Robert Frazier is once again ready for the street.

THURSDAY, MARCH 3.

D'Addario turns page after page on a cluttered clipboard, his voice locked in the monotone of another morning's roll call: "... is wanted in connection with a homicide in Fairfax, Virginia. Anyone with information about the suspects or the vehicle should call the Fairfax department. Number is on the teletype.

"What's next here?" says the lieutenant, scanning a fresh printout. "Oh yeah, we got another teletype from Florida ... No ... um, check that. It's three weeks old.

"Okay, one last item here ... As a result of the ISD inspection, I'm informed that you need to write down the number of the gas cards on your run sheets, even if the cards aren't used."

"What for?" asks Kincaid.

"They need the number of the gas card."

"Why?"

"It's policy."

"Jesus, come on twenty-year pension," cracks Kincaid, disgusted.

D'Addario breaks up the laughter. "Okay, the colonel would like to say a couple words to you all."

Well, thinks every cop in the room, the s.h.i.+t must have really caught the fan. As CID commander, d.i.c.k Lanham rarely has call to address any particular unit on any particular case; G.o.d made captains and lieutenants and sergeants for that exact purpose. But a homicide clearance rate that is reaching new depths with every pa.s.sing day is apparently enough to make even full colonels wince.

"I just wanted to say a few words to you all," Lanham begins, looking around the room, "to let you know that I've got absolute confidence in this unit ... I know that this has been a rough time for you people. In fact, the whole year has been rough, but that's nothing new for this unit, and I don't have any doubt that it will bounce back."

As the detectives rustle uncomfortably and stare at their shoes, Lanham presses on with his pep talk, carefully straddling the fence between high praise and open acknowledgment of an ugly truth understood by everyone in the room: The Baltimore Police Department's homicide unit is getting thumped.

Never mind the Latonya Wallace probe or, for that matter, the Monroe Street investigation, both of which are still as open as the days are long. At least in those cases, the department could say that it reacted properly, pouring men and overtime into the search for suspects, and Lanham, looking for silver linings, can't help but bring that up.

"Anyone who knows anything about those investigations knows how hard they've been worked," he tells the gathering.

And never mind the newspaper articles this morning, in which the NAACP, in a letter to the mayor's office, has roundly criticized the Baltimore department for failing to curb racial abuses and-a charge unsupported by the evidence-for being slow to solve crimes involving black victims.

"I don't want to tell you what I think about those allegations," the colonel a.s.sures his detectives.

"But let's face it," he says, turning the corner, "the clearance rate is very low, and unless we get you all some help we're going to have a hard time bringing it back up to where we want it. Particularly if we have another night like the last one ... Most of all, we got to crack some of these G.o.dd.a.m.n killings of women in the Northwest."

The room stirs uncomfortably.

"After talking with the captain, we've decided to bring in some extra men from around the sixth floor to work with the primary detectives on those cases ... But I want you to understand that this is to help you in a rough time. Everyone has absolute confidence in the detectives a.s.signed to those cases.

"At least," says the colonel, trying to close on a positive note, "at least it's not as bad as what's going on in Was.h.i.+ngton." Lanham then nods to D'Addario, who opens the floor to the robbery and s.e.x offense supervisors.

"Is that it?" says D'Addario. "Lieutenant, you have anything to add? Joe? ... All told."

Roll call ends and the homicide unit's days.h.i.+ft breaks down into smaller cl.u.s.ters of detectives, some arguing and bartering for one of the Cavaliers, some heading for city court, some cracking jokes by the coffee machine. A day like any other, but every man on D'Addario's s.h.i.+ft now understands that things have sc.r.a.ped bottom.

The clearance rate-murders closed by arrest-is now 36 percent and falling, a statistic that doesn't begin to explain the threat to Gary D'Addario's tenure. The board that gave His Eminence reason for concern six weeks ago has continued to fill with open murders, and it is on D'Addario's side of the wall that the names of the victims are writ in red. Of the twenty-five homicides handled by Dee's three squads, only five are down; whereas Stanton's s.h.i.+ft has cleared ten of sixteen.

Of course, there are reasons for any statistical variation, but in the last a.n.a.lysis, the only fact that matters to the command staff is that Stanton's detectives know who killed their victims; D'Addario's men do not. There is no point in explaining that three fifths of D'Addario's homicides happen to be drug-related, just as seven of those solved by Stanton's s.h.i.+ft are domestics or other arguments. Nor does it do any good to note that two or three case files were sacrificed to free men for the Latonya Wallace detail, or to point out that Dave Brown has a warrant out for one of the Milligan murders, while Garvey has a decent shot at clearing both the Lucas and Booker files.

All of that is commentary, and a Talmudic, murder-by-murder a.n.a.lysis of the board doesn't mean a d.a.m.n thing to anyone when it comes to the clearance rate. It is the unrepentant wors.h.i.+p of statistics that forms the true orthodoxy of any modern police department. Captains become majors who become colonels who become deputies when the numbers stay sweet; the command staff backs up on itself like a bad stretch of sewer pipe when they don't. Against that truth, which everyone above the rank of sergeant holds to be self-evident, D'Addario is in deep water-not only because his rate compares poorly to Stanton's, but because it compares poorly to expectations.

The clearance rate for murders in Baltimore has been slipping for seven years, from 84 percent in 1981 to 73.5 percent registered in 1987. Fortunately for the careers of several commanders, at no point in the decade did the homicide unit ever post a solve rate lower than the national average for murder clearances, which has also fallen-from a high of 76 percent in 1984 to a low of 70 in 1987.

The Baltimore unit has maintained its rate both through good, solid police work and through a gentle manipulation of the clearance rate itself. Whoever declared that there are lies, d.a.m.n lies and statistics could just as easily have granted law enforcement data a category unto itself. Anyone who ever spent more than a week in a police department's planning and research section can tell you that a burglary clearance doesn't mean that anyone was actually arrested, and that a posted increase in the crime rate can have less to do with criminal proclivity than with the department's desire for a budget increase. The homicide clearance rate is equally vulnerable to subtle forms of manipulation-all of which are permitted under the FBI's guidelines for uniform crime reporting.

Consider the fact that a case is regarded to be cleared whether it arrives at the grand jury or not. As long as someone is locked up-whether for a week or a month or a lifetime-that murder is down. If the charges are dropped at the arraignment for lack of evidence, if the grand jury refuses to indict, if the prosecutor decides to dismiss the case or place it on the inactive, or stet, docket, that murder is nonetheless carried on the books as a solved crime. Detectives have a tag line for such paper clearances: Stet 'em and forget 'em.

Consider, too, that the federal guidelines allow a department to carry a previous year's clearance as a solved crime. This, of course, is as it should be: The mark of any good homicide unit is its ability to work back on open cases that are two, three or five years old; the clearance rate should reflect that persistence. On the other hand, the guidelines don't require departments to include the crime itself in the current year's statistics; clearly, the crime itself actually occurred in a prior year. Theoretically therefore, an American homicide unit can solve 90 of 100 fresh murders, then clear twenty cases from previous years and post a clearance rate of 110 percent.

Such card-up-the-sleeve tactics make every year's end an adventure in statistical brinksmans.h.i.+p. If the clearance rate is high enough, a s.h.i.+ft commander or squad sergeant who knows his business can save an arrest on a December case until January to get a jump on the new year. Alternatively, if the clearance rate is a bit low, a commander might allow a two-or three-week grace period in which January clearances of December cases are credited to the prior year. The paper clearances and calendar tricks can give a homicide unit an extra 5 to 10 points on the sheet, but when the true solve rate takes a dive, no amount of statistical ma.s.sage can help.

This was D'Addario's predicament and, over the last twenty-four hours, bad had become worse. His detectives clocked five fresh murders-only one of which was a dunker. That case, Kincaid's, featured a fifty-two-year-old man stretched out on the floor of a Fulton Avenue apartment. His skull had been crushed in an argument with a younger man, a boarder who used a steam iron to demonstrate the law of physics that allows no two objects to occupy the same s.p.a.ce at the same instant. But things were not so tidy on the earlier midnight s.h.i.+ft, when McAllister and Bowman caught a bludgeoning in the Northeast, only hours before Bowman learned that his shooting victim from three nights earlier had rolled a seven at University Hospital. There was no hint of a suspect in either case, and Fahlteich faced much the same problem later that same evening when he caught a fatal shooting off Wabash Avenue.

But all this was just a prelude to the one that really mattered: They'd found the body of another taxi driver in a wooded park on the city's northwest edge. As the fifteenth murder of a cab driver in eight years, the beating death of a Checker Cab employee got the full red-ball treatment, not only because it looks bad for a city to permit an open season on its taxi drivers, but because the hack was a woman. Found nude from the waist down. Murdered. In Northwest Baltimore.

That made six dead women in that district since December, all of them unsolved. The Northwest murders were decidedly unrelated: two were rape-murders with markedly different characteristics, two were drug killings, one an apparent argument, and this latest a cab robbery and possible rape. But the string of open cases was beginning to attract newspaper headlines and therefore dead women in the Northwestern District had suddenly acquired real prestige with the department bra.s.s.

As if to acknowledge his sudden vulnerability, D'Addario himself went to the scene of the cabbie murder. So, too, did the captain. Not to mention the district commander from the Northwest and the police department's chief spokesman. Donald Worden was off, but the rest of McLarney's squad took the call, with Rick James as the primary and Eddie Brown as secondary investigator. Never mind that he would be without the Big Man on this call, James was a man who counted his overtime, and by that reckoning alone he was due for a fresh murder. For three weeks he had wallowed at his desk near the front of the office, cursing every phone extension, silently willing the communications unit to send him a major case, a red ball with many hours involved.