Part 34 (1/2)
”Up on Madison.”
”I'll walk you.”
”What're you? My date?”
McLarney laughs. ”You could do worse.”
”Not really.”
”Listen, Donald,” says McLarney abruptly. ”Just give it some time. You're p.i.s.sed off now and I don't blame you, but things will change. You know this is what you want to do, right? You don't want to do anything else.”
Worden listens.
”You know you're the best man I've got.”
Worden shoots him a look.
”Really, you are. And I'd hate like h.e.l.l to lose you, but that's not why I'm saying this. Really.”
Worden shoots him another look.
”Okay, okay, maybe that is why I'm saying it. Maybe I'm full of s.h.i.+t here and I just don't want to be alone in the office with a mental case like Waltemeyer. But you know what I'm saying. You really should give it some time ...”
”I'm tired,” says Worden. ”I've had enough.”
”You've had a terrible year. Monroe Street and the cases you got ... You definitely haven't caught the breaks, but that will change. It'll definitely change. And this Larry Young thing, I mean, who the f.u.c.k cares?”
Worden listens.
”You're a cop, Donald. f.u.c.k the bosses, don't even think about the bosses. They're always going to be f.u.c.ked up and that's all there is to it. So what? So f.u.c.k them. But where else are you going to go and be a cop?”
”Careful driving home,” says Worden.
”Donald, listen to me.”
”I heard you, Terry.”
”Just promise me this. Promise me you won't do anything without coming to me first.”
”I'll tell you first,” says Worden.
”Okay,” says McLarney. ”Then we can have this discussion a second time. I get another chance to practice my speech.”
Worden smiles.
”You're off tomorrow, right?” asks McLarney.
”For ten days. My vacation.”
”Oh yeah. Have a good one. You planning on going anywhere?”
Worden shakes his head.
”Staying around the house, huh?”
”I'm doing some work on the bas.e.m.e.nt.”
McLarney nods, suddenly speechless. Power tools, drywall and all other facets of home improvement have always been a mystery to him.
”Careful driving home, Terry.”
”I'm fine,” says McLarney.
”Okay then.”
Worden climbs in the cab, pumps the ignition and edges the truck into the empty lanes of Madison Street. McLarney walks back to his own car, hoping against hope, wondering whether anything said tonight will make even the least bit of difference.
SEVEN.
Summertime and the living is easy, says Gershwin. But he never had to work murders in Baltimore, where summer steams and swelters and splits open wide like a mile of the devil's sidewalk. From Milton to Poplar Grove, visible heat wriggles up from the asphalt in waves, and by noon, the brick and Formstone is hot to the touch. No lawn chairs, no sprinklers, no pina coladas in a ten-speed Waring; summer in the city is sweat and stink and $29 box fans slapping bad air from the second-floor windows of every other rowhouse. Baltimore is a swamp of a city, too, built on a Chesapeake Bay backwater by G.o.d-fearing Catholic refugees who should have thought twice after the first Patapsco River mosquito began chewing on the first pale patch of European skin. Summer in Baltimore is its own unyielding argument, its own critical ma.s.s.
The season is an endless street parade, with half the city out fanning itself on marble and stone stoops, waiting for a harbor breeze that never seems to make it across town. Summer is a four-to-twelve s.h.i.+ft of night-sticks and Western District wagon runs, with three hundred hard cases on the Edmondson Avenue sidewalk between Payson and Pulaski, eyef.u.c.king each other and every pa.s.sing radio car. Summer is a ninety-minute backup in the Hopkins emergency room, an animal chorus of curses and pleas from the denizens of every district lockup, a nightly promise of yet another pool of blood on the dirty linoleum in yet another Federal Street carryout. Summer is a barroom cutting up on Druid Hill, a ten-minute gun battle in the Terrace, a daylong domestic dispute that ends with the husband and wife both fighting the cops. Summer is the season of motiveless murder, of broken-blade steak knives and bent tire irons; it's the time for truly dangerous living, the season of ma.s.sive and immediate retaliation, the 96-degree natural habitat of the Argument That Will Be Won. A drunk switches off the Orioles game in a Pigtown bar; a west side kid dances with an east-sider's girl at the rec center off Aisquith Street; a fourteen-year-old b.u.mps an older kid getting on the number 2 bus-every one of them becomes a life in the balance.
In a detective's mind, the beginning of the summer can be marked with precision by the year's first warm weather disrespect murder. Respect being the rarest of commodities in the inner city, its defense by homicidal a.s.sault on an 85-degree-or-better day can suddenly seem required. This year, summer begins on a warm Sunday night in May, when a sixteen-year-old Walbrook High School student dies of a gunshot wound to the stomach, sustained during a fight that began when his friend was punched and forced to relinquish a 15-cent cherry Popsicle.
”This had nothing to do with drugs,” says Dave Hollingsworth, one of Stanton's detectives, in a statement meant to rea.s.sure reporters and, through them, the sweltering ma.s.ses. ”This was over an ice cream.”
Summertime.
True, the statistics show only a mild increase in the homicide rate during the hot months, at least if you consider a 10 or 20 percent jump worthy of the term mild. But in the mind of any homicide detective, the statistics can't say a G.o.dd.a.m.n thing until they get out in an Eastern District radio car for a Fourth of July weekend. Out in the streets, summer is something to be reckoned with no matter how much meat the shock-trauma units manage to salvage. To h.e.l.l with the ones who die, a veteran detective will tell you, it's the a.s.sault-by-shootings and cuttings and beatings that can keep a squad running all summer long. Beyond that there are the suicides and overdoses and unattended deaths-routine garbage detail duty that suddenly becomes unbearable when the cadavers are going ripe in 90-degree weather. Don't even bother showing a homicide detective the charts and graphs because he'll shake them off. Summer is a war.
Just ask Eddie Brown on a hot July afternoon in Pimlico as the neighborhood girls dance with each other on rowhouse porches while lab techs and detectives clean up a crime scene. A young man is dead, shot while sitting in the pa.s.senger seat of a stolen car as he rode down Pimlico toward Greenspring in search of another homeboy who managed to find him first. A daylight murder on a main drag, but the driver of the car has fled and no one else saw a thing. Brown pulls a loaded .32 from the wrecked car as the girls move to a beat that has been brought to distortion by unlimited volume.
First a high wail: ”It takes two to make a thing go right ...” ...”
Then the ba.s.s lick and another soprano shout: ”... it takes two to it takes two to make it outta sight make it outta sight.”
Number 1 with a bullet. The song is this summer's hands-down winner for Sound of the Ghetto, with that deep-bottom ba.s.s line and those high-pitched screams on the quarter beat. Thick drum track, def rhythm and some sweet-voiced yoette wailing out the same two-line lyric. East side, west side, and all around the town, the corner boys of Baltimore are fighting and dying to the same soundtrack.
You think summer's just another season? Then ask Rich Garvey about the Fourth of July shooting on Madeira Street in the Eastern, where a thirty-five-year-old woman ends a running dispute with her neighbor by firing one shot from a .32 at close range, then walks back to her rowhouse as the other woman lies dying.
”It takes two to make a thing go right ...” ...”
Ask Kevin Davis about Ernestine Parker, a middle-aged Pimlico resident who decides that it's not the heat but the humidity, then puts a shotgun to the back of her husband's head on a July night. And when Davis gets back to the office and punches Ernestine into the computer, he learns it's her second bite of the apple; she had killed another man twenty years ago.
”It takes two to make it outta sight ...” ...”