Part 19 (1/2)

Likewise, if a suspect calls a lawyer and continues to answer questions until the lawyer arrives, his rights have not been violated. If the lawyer arrives, the suspect must be told that an attorney is in the building, but if he still wishes to continue the interrogation, nothing requires that the police allow the attorney to speak with his client. In short, the suspect can demand an attorney; a lawyer can't demand a suspect.

Once the minefield that is Miranda has been successfully negotiated, the detective must let the suspect know that his guilt is certain and easily established by the existing evidence. He must then offer the Out.

This, too, is role playing, and it requires a seasoned actor. If a witness or suspect is belligerent, you wear him down with greater belligerence. If the man shows fear, you offer calm and comfort. When he looks weak, you appear strong. When he wants a friend, you crack a joke and offer to buy him a soda. If he's confident, you are more so, a.s.suring him that you are certain of his guilt and are curious only about a few select details of the crime. And if he's arrogant, if he wants nothing to do with the process, you intimidate him, threaten him, make him believe that making you happy may be the only thing between his a.s.s and the Baltimore City Jail.

Kill your woman and a good detective will come close to real tears as he touches your shoulder and tells you how he knows that you must have loved her, that it wouldn't be so hard for you to talk about if you didn't. Beat your child to death and a police detective will wrap his arm around you in the interrogation room, telling you about how he beats his own children all the time, how it wasn't your fault if the kid up and died on you. Shoot a friend over a poker hand and that same detective will lie about your dead buddy's condition, telling you that the victim is in stable condition at Hopkins and probably won't press charges, which wouldn't amount to more than a.s.sault with intent even if he does. Murder a man with an accomplice and the detective will walk your co-conspirator past the open door of your interrogation room, then say your bunky's going home tonight because he gave a statement making you the triggerman. And if that same detective thinks you can be bluffed, he might tell you that they've got your prints on the weapon, or that there are two eyewitnesses who have picked your photo from an array, or that the victim made a dying declaration in which he named you as his a.s.sailant.

All of which is street legal. Reasonable deception, the courts call it. After all, what could be more reasonable than deceiving someone who has taken a human life and is now lying about it?

The deception sometimes goes too far, or at least it sometimes seems that way to those unfamiliar with the process. Not long ago, several veteran homicide detectives in Detroit were publicly upbraided and disciplined by their superiors for using the office Xerox machine as a polygraph device. It seems that the detectives, when confronted with a statement of dubious veracity, would sometimes adjourn to the Xerox room and load three sheets of paper into the feeder.

”Truth,” said the first.

”Truth,” said the second.

”Lie,” said the third.

Then the suspect would be led into the room and told to put his hand against the side of the machine. The detectives would ask the man's name, listen to the answer, then hit the copy b.u.t.ton.

Truth.

And where do you live?

Truth again.

And did you or did you not kill Tater, shooting him down like a dog in the 1200 block of North Durham Street?

Lie. Well, well: You lying motherf.u.c.ker.

In Baltimore, the homicide detectives read newspaper accounts of the Detroit controversy and wondered why anyone had a problem. Polygraph by copier was an old trick; it had been attempted on more than one occasion in the sixth-floor Xerox room. Gene Constantine, a veteran of Stanton's s.h.i.+ft, once gave a mindless wonder the coordination test for drunk drivers (”Follow my finger with your eyes, but don't move your head ... Now stand on one foot”), then loudly declared that the man's performance indicated obvious deception.

”You flunked,” Constantine told him. ”You're lying.”

Convinced, the suspect confessed.

Variations on the theme are limited only by a detective's imagination and his ability to sustain the fraud. But every bluff carries a corresponding risk, and a detective who tells a suspect his fingerprints are all over a crime scene loses all hope if the man knows he was wearing gloves. An interrogation room fraud is only as good as the material from which it was constructed-or, for that matter, as good as the suspect is witless-and a detective who underestimates his prey or overestimates his knowledge of the crime will lose precious credibility. Once a detective claims knowledge of a fact that the suspect knows to be untrue, the veil has been lifted, and the investigator is instead revealed as the liar.

Only when everything else in the repertoire falls does a detective resort to rage. It might be a spasm limited to a well-chosen sentence or two, or an extended tantrum punctuated by the slamming of a metal door or the drop kick of a chair, perhaps even a rant delivered as part of a good-cop, bad-cop melodrama, although that particular routine has worn thin with the years. Ideally, the shouting should be loud enough to suggest the threat of violence but restrained enough to avoid any action that could jeopardize the statement: Tell the court why you felt threatened. Did the detective hit you? Did he attempt to hit you? Did he threaten to hit you? No, but he slammed his hand down on the table, real loud.

Oh my. Motion to suppress denied.

What a good detective will not do in this more enlightened age is beat his suspect, at least not for the purpose of obtaining a statement. A suspect who swings on a homicide detective, who raves and kicks furniture, who tries to fight off a pair of handcuffs, will receive as comprehensive an a.s.s-kicking as he would out on the street, but as a function of interrogation, physical a.s.sault is not part of the a.r.s.enal. In Baltimore, that has been true for at least fifteen years.

Simply put, the violence isn't worth the risk-not only the risk that the statement obtained will later be ruled inadmissible, but the risk to a detective's career and pension. It would be another thing entirely in those instances in which an officer or an officer's family member is the victim. In those cases, a good detective will antic.i.p.ate the accusation by photographing a suspect after interrogation, to show an absence of injuries and to prove that any beating received prior to the suspect's arrival at the city jail had nothing to do with what occurred in the homicide unit.

But those are rare cases and, for the vast majority of murders, there is little for a detective to take personally. He doesn't know the dead man, he just met the suspect and he doesn't live anywhere near the street where the violence occurred. From that perspective, what civil servant in his right mind is going to risk his entire career to prove that on the night of March 7, 1988, in some G.o.dforsaken tract of West Baltimore, a drug dealer, Stinky, shot a dope fiend, Pee Wee, over a $35 debt?

Still, circuit court juries often prefer to think in conspiratorial terms about back rooms and hot lights and rabbit punches to a suspect's kidneys. A Baltimore detective once lost a case because the defendant testified that his confession was obtained only after he had been mauled by two detectives who beat him with a phone book. The detective was sequestered and did not hear that testimony, but when he took the stand, the defense attorney asked what items were in the room during the interrogation.

”The table. Chairs. Some papers. An ashtray.”

”Was there a phone book in the room?”

The detective thought about it and remembered that yes, they had used a phone book to look up an address. ”Yeah,” he acknowledged. ”A yellow pages phone book.”

Only when the defense attorney looked approvingly at the jury did the cop realize that something was wrong. After the not guilty verdict, the detective swore he would never again begin an interview until he had cleared the room of every unnecessary item.

The pa.s.sage of time can also damage the credibility of a confession. In the privacy of the interrogation room, it requires hours of prolonged effort to break a man to a point where he's willing to admit a criminal act, yet at some point those hours begin to cast doubt on the statement itself. Even under the best conditions, four to six hours of interrogation are required to break a suspect down, and eight or ten or twelve hours can be justified as long as the man is fed and allowed the use of a bathroom. But after a suspect has spent more than twelve hours in an isolated chamber without benefit of counsel, even a sympathetic judge will have qualms about calling a confession or statement truly voluntary.

And how does a detective know he has the right man? Nervousness, fear, confusion, hostility, a story that changes or contradicts itself-all are signs that the man in an interrogation room is lying, particularly in the eyes of someone as naturally suspicious as a detective. Unfortunately, these are also signs of a human being in a state of high stress, which is pretty much where people find themselves after being accused of a capital crime. Terry McLarney once mused that the best way to unsettle a suspect would be to post in all three interrogation rooms a written list of those behavior patterns that indicate deception: Uncooperative.

Too cooperative.

Talks too much.

Talks too little.

Gets his story perfectly straight.

f.u.c.ks his story up.

Blinks too much, avoids eye contact.

Doesn't blink. Stares.

And yet if the signs along the way are ambiguous, there can be no mistaking that critical moment, that light that s.h.i.+nes from the other end of the tunnel when a guilty man is about to give it up. Later, after he's initialed each page and is alone again in the cubicle, there will be only exhaustion and, in some cases, depression. If he gets to brooding, there might even be a suicide attempt.

But that is epilogue. The emotive crest of a guilty man's performance comes in those cold moments before he opens his mouth and reaches for the Out. Just before a man gives up life and liberty in an interrogation room, his body acknowledges the defeat: His eyes are glazed, his jaw is slack, his body lists against the nearest wall or table edge. Some put their heads against the tabletop to steady themselves. Some become physically sick, holding their stomachs as if the problem were digestive; a few actually vomit.

At that critical moment, the detectives tell their suspects that they really are sick-sick of lying, sick of hiding. They tell them it's time to turn over a new leaf, that they'll only begin to feel better when they start to tell the truth. Amazingly enough, many of them actually believe it. As they reach for the ledge of that high window, they believe every last word of it.

”He came at you, right?”

”Yeah, he came at me.”

The Out leads in.

THURSDAY, MARCH 10.

”Sixty-four thirty-one.”

Garvey listens to ten seconds of silence, then keys the mike a second time: ”Sixty-four thirty-one.”

More dead air. The detective cranks the volume control on the Cavalier's radio, then leans over to check the frequency indicator on the front of the set. Channel 7, just as it should be.

”Sixty-four thirty-one,” he says again, releasing the key on the hand mike before adding the less procedural ”oooh, yoo-hoo.... Anybody home in the Western? h.e.l.loooo ...”

Kincaid laughs from the pa.s.senger seat.

”Sixty-four thirty-one,” repeats the dispatcher, acknowledging the detective in a mumble that suggests only mild irritation. It's a known fact that those a.s.signed to a police communications unit are carefully screened to ensure that they will sound as if they've been watching televised bowling tournaments for a month. Perhaps it's the job, perhaps it's the metallic squawk of the broadcast itself, but the speaking voice of the average police dispatcher falls somewhere between tedium and slow death. In Baltimore, at least, the world will not end with a bang but with the weary, distracted droning of a forty-seven-year-old civil servant who will ask a patrol unit for the 10-20 on that mushroom cloud, then a.s.sign the incident a seven-digit complaint number.