Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets Part 46

"You did me, you G.o.dd.a.m.n mick." That was the new and improved Dave Brown talking, a far cry from the detective who had penned that please-keep-me-in-homicide missive the month before. A man has to feel fairly secure before he's willing to call his immediate supervisor an Irish potatohead, even in the casual environment of a homicide office. And of course McLarney loved it. Sitting at an admin office typewriter that same evening, he immortalized the deed in a memo to the lieutenant: To: Lt. Gary D'Addario, Homicide unit To: Lt. Gary D'Addario, Homicide unit From: Sgt. Terry McLarney, Homicide unit Subject: Ethnic/Slurs Comments made by Det. David John Brown Sir: Sir: It is with sorrow and disappointment that I call to your attention the flagrant and wanton infliction of emotional distress which was wrought upon this supervisor on this date. It is something which I have never faced in this enlightened department, and hoped that I never would. However, you should know that on this date Det. David John Brown twice made vicious verbal attacks on my ancestry, once referring to me as "a little Irish potato head" and later calling me "a little mick head." It is with sorrow and disappointment that I call to your attention the flagrant and wanton infliction of emotional distress which was wrought upon this supervisor on this date. It is something which I have never faced in this enlightened department, and hoped that I never would. However, you should know that on this date Det. David John Brown twice made vicious verbal attacks on my ancestry, once referring to me as "a little Irish potato head" and later calling me "a little mick head." You, being of negligible ancestry yourself, can certainly understand my shame and chagrin. As you know, my dear mother was born and raised in Ireland and my father is the issue of fine people who were forced to flee that sainted isle during the terrible potato famine, which made the potato head remark particularly painful. You, being of negligible ancestry yourself, can certainly understand my shame and chagrin. As you know, my dear mother was born and raised in Ireland and my father is the issue of fine people who were forced to flee that sainted isle during the terrible potato famine, which made the potato head remark particularly painful. Sir, I would prefer that this matter be handled in-house by you as I would like to avoid the anguish and shame that my family would endure as a result of publicity generated by trial boards and civil action. Thus, I have decided not to make a complaint with the department's civil rights advisory board, though I reserve the right to file with the National Labor Relations Board should in-house remedies prove insufficient. Brown used to walk foot in the Inner Harbor; he knows the area. In fact, he knows most of Edmondson Avenue, also ... Sir, I would prefer that this matter be handled in-house by you as I would like to avoid the anguish and shame that my family would endure as a result of publicity generated by trial boards and civil action. Thus, I have decided not to make a complaint with the department's civil rights advisory board, though I reserve the right to file with the National Labor Relations Board should in-house remedies prove insufficient. Brown used to walk foot in the Inner Harbor; he knows the area. In fact, he knows most of Edmondson Avenue, also ...

Funny stuff. A little too funny, thought Worden, reading a copy of the memo. McLarney's obvious delight in Dave Brown was helping to turn Carol Wright into nothing worse than a vague and distant memory. If the Nina Perry case meant anything at all, Worden thought, then now was the time for Brown to show it. Did he really want to work murders? Did he even know exactly what that meant? Or was he up here to submit overtime slips and close Kavanaugh's every other night? If McLarney wasn't going to stick a finger in Dave Brown's eye, then the Big Man would take that responsibility upon himself. For three weeks running, in fact, Worden had been knee deep in the younger detective's s.h.i.+t, waiting to see some movement on a case that Brown would like to see disappear. It's been the full Worden treatment-cold, demanding and a little bit vicious. For Dave Brown, a man who wants nothing more than to bask in the latest success, there is no joy, no mercy, and absolutely no chance of escape.

Now, on today's quiet eight-to-four s.h.i.+ft, the younger detective is actually foolish enough to be caught reading the new issue of Rolling Stone Rolling Stone in the coffee room, an act of utter indolence. Worden needs only to enter the room and ascertain that the Carol Wright file is not visible on Dave Brown's desk. in the coffee room, an act of utter indolence. Worden needs only to enter the room and ascertain that the Carol Wright file is not visible on Dave Brown's desk.

"De-tec-tive Brown," says Worden, imbuing each syllable with contempt.

"What?"

"Detective Brown ..."

"What do you want?"

"I'll bet you like the sound of that, don't you?"

"The sound of what?"

"Detective Brown. Detective David John Brown."

"Go f.u.c.k yourself, Worden." Worden stares at the younger detective intently and for so long that Brown can no longer concentrate on the magazine.

"Quit staring at me, you old b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

"I'm not staring at you."

"The f.u.c.k you aren't."

"It's your conscience." Brown looks at him, uncomprehending.

"Where's the Carol Wright case?" says Worden.

"Hey, I've got to type the prosecution report for Nina Perry ..."

"That was last month."

"... and I got a warrant out this week on my boy Clayvon, so gimme a f.u.c.king break already."

"My heart pumps purple p.i.s.s for you," says Worden.

"I didn't ask you about Clayvon Jones, did I? What's new with Carol Wright?"

"Nothing. I got my d.i.c.k in my hands on that."

"De-tec-tive Brown ..."

Dave Brown pulls open his top right drawer and grabs the .38, pulling the gun halfway out of the holster. Worden doesn't laugh.

"Gimme a quarter," says the older detective.

"What the h.e.l.l for?"

"Gimme a quarter."

"If I give you a quarter, will you shut the f.u.c.k up and leave me alone?"

"Maybe," says Worden. Dave Brown stands up and fishes a coin from his trouser pocket. He throws the quarter at Worden, then sits again, burying his face behind the magazine. Worden gives him a good ten seconds.

"De-tec-tive Brown ..."

NINE.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 13.

At its core, the crime is the same.

This time she is shot, not stabbed or garroted. This time the small frame is just a bit heavier and the hair is down, not pulled back in braids with a brightly colored beret. This time the v.a.g.i.n.al swabs will provide proof of the rape in the form of seminal fluid. This time she did not disappear while walking to a library but to a bus stop. And this time the dead girl will be a year older, twelve instead of eleven. But in every important way, it is the same.

Nine months after Latonya Kim Wallace was discovered behind a Reservoir Hill rowhouse, Harry Edgerton is once again staring at an act of unequivocal evil in a Baltimore alley. The body, fully clothed, is crumpled at the edge of an old brick garage foundation behind a vacant rowhouse in the 1800 block of West Baltimore Street. The single bullet wound is to the back of the skull-a .32 or .38 from the look of it-fired at close range.

Her name was Andrea Perry.

And her mother knows when she watches the evening news and catches a glimpse of the ME's attendants carrying the gurney out of an alley a block away from her Fayette Street home. Andrea has only been missing since last night, and the unidentified victim on television is initially believed to be an older girl, possibly a young woman. But her mother knows.

The identification process at Penn Street is achingly painful, hard even for the ME's attendants, who can do this sort of thing four or five times a day. Later that day in the homicide office, Roger Nolan has barely started to interview the mother when she breaks down uncontrollably.

"Go home," he tells her. "We'll talk tomorrow."

At about the same moment, Edgerton stands in the autopsy room and watches another postmortem of another murdered child. This time, however, Edgerton is the primary detective. In fact, he's the only detective. And this time, he tells himself, it's all going to end differently.

But if the Andrea Perry case is now the exclusive property of the homicide unit's consummate loner, it is also a contradiction in terms: behold, the one-man red ball.

The Andrea Perry murder has all the earmarks of a major case-a dead child, a brutal rape and murder, a lead story on the six o'clock news-yet this time there are no special details, no herd of detectives at the crime scene, no second-day cadet searches. This time the bra.s.s is nowhere to be seen.

It might have gone this way even if someone other than Edgerton had taken the call. Because once already this year, D'Addario's men had spent themselves in a communal fight, gathering the entire s.h.i.+ft for an absolutely essential case. For one little girl, they had called in extra troops from the districts. For one righteous cause, they had pursued their best suspects for weeks and then months, sacrificing other cases in the campaign for a single, small life. And none of it had mattered. The Latonya Wallace case had gone sour, reminding every man on the s.h.i.+ft that all the time and money and effort mean nothing when the evidence isn't there. In the end, it was an open file like any other-a special tragedy, to be sure-but an open murder now in the care of one solitary detective.

Success is its own catalyst; failure, too. Without any arrest in the death of one child, the same s.h.i.+ft of detectives had very little to deliver in the death of another. For Andrea Perry, there will be no general mobilization, no declaration of war. It is October; the a.r.s.enal is empty.

That it is Edgerton's case simply makes all of this easier. Of all the men on D'Addario's s.h.i.+ft, he is the only one who would never think to ask for more troops. Nolan is with him, of course; Nolan is always with him. But beyond the sergeant, everyone else in the squad holds to his own cases. Even if Edgerton wants their help, he wouldn't know how to ask. From the crime scene forward, he is on his own: So be it.

From those first moments at the scene, Edgerton tells himself he will not make the same mistakes that he believes are buried in the Latonya Wallace file, and if he does, they will be his alone to deal with. He has watched Tom Pellegrini waste most of a year kicking himself for investigative flaws, real and imagined. Much of that is the kind of second-guessing that accompanies any unsolved case, but some of it, Edgerton knows, has to do with Pellegrini's feeling that the red-ball treatment had taken away control of the case. Landsman, Edgerton, Eddie Brown, the detail officers-every one of them had become a force for Tom to reckon with, particularly the veteran detectives who had so much more time than Pellegrini and, as a result, tended to influence the case to a greater degree. Well, thinks Edgerton, that was Tom. I won't have that problem.

For one thing, he has a crime scene-not just a site where the child's body has been dumped, but a bona fide murder scene. Edgerton and Nolan had taken the call alone, and for once they had taken their G.o.dd.a.m.n time with the body. They made sure to do everything in the proper order, to let the little girl be until they were absolutely ready to move her. They bagged the hands at the scene and carefully chronicled the exact array of clothing, noting that while she was fully dressed, her jacket and blouse seemed to have been improperly b.u.t.toned.

Working closely with the lab tech at the scene, Edgerton managed to pull several hairs from the victim's blouse, and he carefully noted even the smallest scars and injuries. Walking the length of the alley, he found a single .22 casing, though the head wound appeared to be the result of a larger caliber. With a wound to a fleshy part of the body, a detective can't really tell, because the skin expands at the point of contact and then returns to its shape after the bullet pa.s.ses, leaving a smaller hole. But a head wound retains an accurate circ.u.mference; chances are good that the .22 casing had nothing to do with the murder.

There was no blood trail whatsoever. Edgerton carefully examined the victim's head and neck at the scene, satisfying himself that she had done all of her bleeding right there against the low brick foundation. In all probability, she had been led into the alley, forced to kneel down, and then shot, execution style, in the back of the head. Nor was there an exit wound, and a clean, remarkably unmutilated .32 round is subsequently recovered at the autopsy. In addition, the v.a.g.i.n.al swabs will later come back positive with the seminal fluid of a secreter-a male whose e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e contained sufficient blood to type or DNA-test against any potential suspect. In contrast to the Latonya Wallace case, the killer of Andrea Perry has left behind a wealth of physical evidence.

But the interviews with two young men brought downtown by the first uniforms provide little. Apparently, neither one was the first to discover the body. One tells detectives that he learned about it from the other; the second says only that he had been walking on Baltimore Street when an old woman told him that there was a body in the alley. He had not gone to investigate, he tells Edgerton, but had simply told the second man, who flagged down a cop. Who was the old woman? The first young man has no idea.

As the case develops, Edgerton works deliberately and at his own pace. The initial canva.s.s by Western officers was carefully done, but Edgerton spends days creating his own schematic diagram of the surrounding blocks, listing residents at each rowhouse and matching them with criminal histories and alibis. It is a rough little neighborhood, hard by the Western District's lower boundary with the Southern, and the Vine Street drug market a block away brought all kinds of trash into the area, greatly adding to any list of potential suspects. This is the kind of investigation that brings out the best in Edgerton, playing as it does to his strengths: More than any other detective in the unit, he can work a neighborhood until every other pedestrian is feeding him information.

Part of it is his appearance-black, reedy thin, and well groomed, with salt-and-pepper hair and thick mustache, Edgerton is attractive in a decidedly laid-back way. At crime scenes, the neighborhood girls actually line up on the other side of the police tape and giggle. Detective Edge, they call him. Unlike most of his colleagues, Edgerton maintains his own string of informants, and more often than not they are eighteen-year-old yoettes whose boyfriends are out in the streets shooting one another for drugs and gold chains. Time and again, some corner boy would be on his way to the Hopkins ER with holes in his torso and Edgerton's beeper would go off before the ambo could even arrive, the digital readout displaying the number of an east side pay phone.

Edgerton is at ease in the ghetto in a way that even the best white detectives are not. And more than most of the black investigators, too, Edgerton can somehow talk his way past the fact that he's a cop. Only Edgerton would have bothered to clean the blood from a wounded girl's hands in a University Hospital emergency room. Only Edgerton could share a smoke with a drug dealer in the back of a radio car on Hollins Street and emerge with a complete statement. In corner carryouts, in hospital waiting rooms, in rowhouse vestibules, Edgerton makes sudden and lasting connections with people who have no reason ever to trust a homicide detective. And now, in the case of Andrea Perry, a true victim, those connections come even easier.

The family and the neighborhood tell him that the child was last seen at eight the night before, walking her eighteen-year-old sister to the bus stop on West Baltimore Street. The sister says that as she boarded her bus, she saw Andrea walking north toward the 1800 block of Fayette and home. When the sister returned home at eleven and found that her mother was already asleep, she too went to bed. Not until the following morning did the family realize that the child had never arrived home. They filed their missing person's report and held out some hope until that evening news broadcast from just a block away.

But days after the murder, the media coverage has all faded away. The Andrea Perry murder isn't getting anything like a red-ball treatment from the city, and as the days wear on, Edgerton has to wonder about that. Perhaps it is because the victim was a year older, perhaps because her neighborhood was less stable and less central to the city than Reservoir Hill. For whatever reason, the newspapers and TV crews don't stay with this one and, as a result, there is no deluge of calls and anonymous tips such as those that accompanied the death of Latonya Wallace.

In fact, the only anonymous call on the case came a few hours after the body's discovery: a high-pitched male voice gave the name of a West Baltimore woman, claiming that he had seen her running out of the alley after hearing shots. Edgerton immediately decided the story was bulls.h.i.+t. This wasn't a woman's crime; the s.e.m.e.n tells them that much. As with Latonya Wallace, this was a crime of one man, acting alone and for a motive that he could never share with other men, much less a woman.

Was this mystery woman then a witness? More bulls.h.i.+t, Edgerton reasoned. The killer chose the alley and the remains of that garage for an anonymous murder. He killed that little girl to prevent her from identifying him as a rapist, so why the h.e.l.l would he fire that shot with anyone else in the alley? Edgerton was absolutely convinced that his suspect walked the little girl around those back alleys until he was sure they were alone. Only then did he pull the girl down against the brick wall. Only then did he bring out the gun.

Gary Dunnigan, who took the anonymous phone call, wrote out an office report and gave it to Edgerton for the file. Edgerton absorbed the information and checked the woman's name on the computer to a.s.sure himself that she wasn't a serious suspect. He even interviewed the woman's neighbors and relatives, learning enough about her to satisfy his curiosity, but in the first week of the investigation he does not pick the woman up.

After all, the story makes no sense, and besides, he's getting better information from his neighborhood canva.s.s. One story has the little girl's murder as an act of retaliation against one of her relatives, the other as a predatory act by a dealer who simply wanted to show the neighborhood how hard he could be. There is talk about two drug traffickers in the area, and neither man seems to have much of an alibi.

For once, and to the amus.e.m.e.nt of the other detectives, Edgerton arrives in the homicide office early each day, grabbing the keys to a Cavalier and then disappearing into West Baltimore. Most afternoons, Edgerton works through the s.h.i.+ft change, not returning until well into the evening. Some days Nolan is with him, other days he works alone, his whereabouts a mystery to the rest of the squad. Alone on the street, Edgerton can be more effective than any man who ever had a partner. Out on the street, he understands the special benefits of isolation; his critics do not. There are detectives in the homicide unit who never go anywhere in the ghetto alone, who always double up on any investigative trip to West Baltimore.

"You want company?" detectives routinely ask each other. And on those rare occasions when one investigator sets out for the slums alone, he is invariably cautioned: "Careful, bunk, don't get yourself captured."

From the outside looking in, Edgerton understands that the camaraderie of the unit can be a crutch. More often than not, Edgerton ventures into the high-rise projects alone and finds witnesses; more often than not, other detectives march through neighborhoods in twos and threes and find nothing. Edgerton learned long ago that even the best and most cooperative witnesses are more likely to talk to one detective than to a pair. And three detectives working a case are nothing short of a police riot in the eyes of a reluctant or untrusting witness. In truth, when all is said and done, the surest way for a cop to solve a murder is to get his a.s.s out on the street and find a witness.

The better detectives all understand this: Worden often does some of his best work alone in a Cavalier, riding back out to a neighborhood to talk quietly with people who recoiled when it was Worden and James and Brown camped on their doorstep. But there are detectives in the unit who are genuinely fearful of riding alone.

Edgerton has no such fears; he wears his att.i.tude like a s.h.i.+eld. Two months ago, he was out at Edmondson and Payson working a drug murder and, without thinking twice, he wandered away from his crime scene and down the worst stretch of Edmondson Avenue alone, parting a block of corner boys as if he were Charlton Heston on the Universal Studio lot. He was looking for witnesses or, at the very least, for someone willing to whisper into a cop's ear some truth about what happened on Payson Street an hour earlier. Instead, he got surly looks and silent rage from fifty black faces.

And yet he moved on, seemingly oblivious of the hostility until, at the corner of Edmondson and Brice, he watched a young kid, fourteen or fifteen years old, pa.s.s a paper bag to an older boy who ran around the block. For Edgerton, it was opportunity knocking. With the rest of the street watching coldly, he grabbed the kid by a shoulder and dragged him to a Cavalier around the corner, pressing the boy for details about the murder.

A Western uniform, watching from the crime scene two blocks away, later cautioned the detective.

"You shouldn't have gone down there alone," he told Edgerton. "What if some s.h.i.+t had started?"

To which Edgerton could only shake his head.

"I'm serious, man," the uniform said. "You only got six bullets."

"I don't even have that." Edgerton laughed. "I forgot my gun."

"YOU WHAT?"

"Yeah. I left my gun in my desk."

A cop at Edmondson and Brice with no gun. The Western uniforms were stunned; Edgerton was indifferent: "This job," he told them, "is ninety percent att.i.tude."

Now, working the Andrea Perry murder, Edgerton is back in another West Baltimore neighborhood, mixing with the locals as few police can. He talks to the occupants of every rowhouse that backs up to his alley, he chats up the hangers-on at the carryouts and bars. Working from the bus stop toward his victim's home on Fayette Street, he checks every address for a witness who may have seen the child walking with someone. When nothing comes from that effort, he begins checking other s.e.xual a.s.sault reports from the Southern and Western districts.

In fact, Edgerton makes a point early on in the investigation of calling the operations unit officers from the Southern, Southwestern and Western districts downtown and briefing them on the case. He tells them to be looking for anyone involved in anything s.e.xual with underage girls, or any report involving an abduction or a .32-caliber weapon. Edgerton urges the ops unit officers in all three districts to call him with information that seems even remotely related. That, too, differs from the approach taken in the Latonya Wallace case, where district officers had been detailed downtown to help with the investigation. For this little girl, Edgerton decides, the districts will not come to CID; CID will go into the districts.

Only once, on the day after the body's discovery, is there any hint of the communal effort that normally accompanies a red-ball case, and it is prompted by Nolan, who for the sake of appearances asks McAllister, Kincaid and Bowman to give them a day's help to expand the canva.s.s.

Looking through the case file that day, the other detectives in the squad wonder aloud why Edgerton hadn't immediately followed up on the anonymous call. At the very least, they argue, he should go out and grab the woman whom the male caller allegedly saw running from the alley.

"That's the last thing I want to do," says Edgerton, explaining his strategy to Nolan. "If I get her down here, what am I going to do? I have one question to ask her, and after that I've got nothing."

To Edgerton's way of thinking, it is another mistake that too many detectives make too often-the same mistake that they had made with the Fish Man in the Latonya Wallace case. You bring someone down and go at them in the interrogation room with no real ammunition. They walk out an hour later, more confident than before, and if you ever do get any leverage on them, you've only made it harder to come back and break them the second time.

"I ask her why she was running out of the alley, and she tells me she doesn't know what I'm talking about," Edgerton explains to Nolan. "And she's right. I don't know what I'm talking about."

He still doesn't believe that the woman named by the caller actually ran from the alley after the murder. But even if he did believe it, he would not risk an interrogation until it had at least a chance of success.

"If all else fails, then I bring her down here and ask my one question," the detective says, "and not before."

Nolan agrees. "It's your case," he tells Edgerton. "Do it your way."

Beyond his squad's limited help with the expanded canva.s.s, Edgerton's isolation on the case is complete. Even D'Addario keeps his distance: He asks Nolan for regular progress reports and offers help if help is needed, but otherwise he is content to let Edgerton and his sergeant set their own pace.

The contrast with D'Addario's response to the Latonya Wallace investigation is striking. Edgerton hopes that the lieutenant's hands-off approach is, at least in part, a display of confidence in his investigator. More likely, the detective reasons, D'Addario has himself soured on the full-blown red-ball treatment. Throwing troops and money at a case had accomplished so little in Reservoir Hill that maybe the lieutenant is reluctant to travel the same road a second time. Or maybe, like everyone else on the s.h.i.+ft, LTD is just too d.a.m.n tired for another all-out campaign.

But Edgerton also knows that nothing happens in a vacuum. He is being left alone to work his case largely because D'Addario can afford to leave him alone. On the day that Andrea Perry was discovered, the clearance rate stood at a fat 74 percent, with five outstanding murder warrants still on the street-a rate that compares favorably to both the previous year's totals and the national average. As a result, D'Addario can once again make decisions without worrying about public consumption or the perceptions of the command staff. From talking with Pellegrini, Edgerton knows that the lieutenant has already expressed some dissatisfaction with the tidal wave of investigation that followed Latonya Wallace's death. At various stages in that probe, D'Addario had listened to Landsman and Pellegrini both argue that less could be more, and the lieutenant seemed to agree. If the clearance rate had been higher, if the department hadn't also been publicly sweating the murders of all those women in the Northwest, then the case might have gone differently. Now, with the board showing more black than red, the homicide unit's political equilibrium has been fully restored. Thanks to some hard work, some skillful maneuvering and not a little luck, D'Addario's reign has survived the threat and been returned to its rightful glory. And if the rise in the clearance rate and D'Addario's true feelings about the red-ball treatment aren't reasons enough for Edgerton to be granted his distance, then Edgerton also understands that he is alone on this case simply because the murder has fallen to Nolan's squad.

Not only does Nolan have absolute confidence in Edgerton's methods, but he is the sergeant least likely to ask for help from the rest of the s.h.i.+ft and from D'Addario in particular. Of the three sergeants, only McLarney and Landsman are now counted among LTD's true disciples; Nolan had stayed on the fence during D'Addario's year-long conflict with the captain. Lately, the lieutenant has taken some pleasure in bringing that out.

Two nights ago, all three squad sergeants were in the coffee room as D'Addario prepared to leave at the end of a four-to-twelve s.h.i.+ft.

"I note by my watch that it's nigh on twelve o'clock," he declared dramatically. "And I know that before the c.o.c.k crows thrice, one of you shall betray me ..."

The sergeants laughed nervously.

"... but it's okay, Roger, I understand. You gotta do what you gotta do."

As Nolan's man, Edgerton couldn't really be sure exactly why he was being isolated on the Andrea Perry case. It may well be Dee's faith in him, or it may be the lieutenant's new philosophy about leaving red b.a.l.l.s to the primary investigator. Then again, it may just be that Roger Nolan is the one sergeant who is not about to ask his lieutenant for anything. Maybe, Edgerton thinks, it's a little of all three. For an outsider like himself, it's always harder to get a handle on the office politics.

But whatever the reasons for D'Addario's distance from the investigation, Edgerton understands that the effect is the same: He is on the longest possible leash. As a result, Andrea Perry will not become Latonya Wallace, just as Edgerton will not become another Pellegrini. Good-bye to the detail officers, to the FBI psych profiles, to the aerial photographs of the crime scene, to a hundred endless debates among a full squad of homicide detectives. Instead, this child's murder will be one man out in the street, with time enough and room enough to solve his murder. Or, perhaps, hang himself.

Whichever comes first.

It is a beautiful courthouse, truly impressive in its cla.s.sical form. The bronze doors, the varied Italian marbles, the deep redwoods and gilded ceilings-the Clarence M. Mitch.e.l.l Jr. Courthouse on North Calvert Street is a work of great architecture, as fine and glorious as any structure ever built in the city of Baltimore.

If justice itself were measured by the grandeur of its house, then a Baltimore detective would have little to fear. If well-cut stone and hand-carved woods could guarantee a righteous vengeance, then the Mitch.e.l.l Courthouse and its companion across the street-the old post office building now known as Courthouse East-might be places of sanctuary for a Baltimore law officer.

The city fathers spared little when they created these two exquisite buildings in the heart of downtown, and in the last several years their descendants have been equally generous in their ongoing effort to renovate and preserve the beauty of both structures. From the arraignment courts to the jury rooms, from front lobbies to back corridors, the courthouse complex exists so that generations of law officers and lawyers could walk the halls of justice and feel their spirits soar. Stepping lightly down the restored portico of the post office building, or walking into the elegance of Judge Hammerman's paneled palace, a detective has every reason to hold his head high in the knowledge that he has arrived at a place where society can exact its price. Justice will be done here; all the hard, dirty work performed in the city's rotten core will no doubt be gracefully shaped into a clean and solemn judgment of guilty. A jury of twelve respectable, thoughtful men and women will rise as one to render that verdict, imposing the law of a good and valiant people on an evil man.