Part 17 (1/2)

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.