After the second attempt, there will be no further excavations for the lost Reverend Gilliard. With a spate of murder charges already filed under Miss Geraldine’s name, this one will have to slip away. The pathologists, the lawyers, the cops-no one has the stomach to risk disturbing any more graves. For Waltemeyer, however, such sentiments come too late. True, the Geraldine Parrish investigation has been his career case, and his unstinting pursuit of it has secured his reputation as one of the homicide unit’s seasoned veterans. Nonetheless, his adventures in Mount Zion mark him with repute of an altogether different kind.
As if disinterring the odd, innocent body isn’t hard enough for a Catholic conscience, he will return to the office one day in January to find a new nameplate on his desk, the kind of thing you can order from any office supply store.
“Det. Digger Waltemeyer,” it reads.
“I don’t like the way he’s laying,” says Donald Worden, leaning over the bed. “Up on his side like that… like somebody rolled him.”
Waltemeyer nods in agreement.
“I think,” adds Worden, looking over the rest of the room, “that this one’s gonna come back from the medical examiner as a murder.”
“I think you’re right,” says Waltemeyer.
There is no overt trauma to the body, no bulletholes, no knife wounds, no bruises or contusions. A little bit of dried blood is visible around the mouth, but that could be the result of decomp. There is also no sign of struggle or ransacking in the motel room. But the old man is on his right side beneath the sheets, his back arched at an awkward angle, as if someone had pushed him into that strange position to check for signs of life.
He was sixty-five and white, a Southern Maryland man well known to the employees at the Eastgate Motel, a $25-a-night collection of double beds and bad wall prints on old Route 40 in East Baltimore. Once a week, Robert Wallace Yergin would drive to Baltimore from his home in Leonardtown, check into the Eastgate for a night, then spend the evening bringing young boys to and from the room.
For that purpose, at least, the Eastgate was situated perfectly. A few blocks from where Pulaski dead-ends into East Fayette Street, the motel is only blocks from the edges of Patterson Park, where $20 will pay for the services of a blond-haired billy kid anywhere from twelve to eighteen years old. The pedophile trade along Eastern Avenue is an old phenomenon, known to men up and down the East Coast. A few years back, when the vice squad wrote a warrant on a child pornography ring, they actually recovered some guidebooks to homosexual prostitution in major American cities. In Baltimore, the guides noted, the most promising locales were Wilkens near Monroe Street and Patterson Park along Eastern Avenue.
Not only is Robert Yergin’s affinity for boys under the age of majority known to the desk men and cleaning crew at the Eastgate, but the employees are able to identify and describe the sixteen-year-old who has been Yergin’s constant companion for the last several months. The kid is a Baltimore boy, the employees tell Worden, a street waif who for a pound or two of flesh had found a home with the old pervert down in the country. When Yergin came to Baltimore to troll for teenagers, he’d bring the kid, who would spend his time visiting friends from the old neighborhood.
“Maybe the boy is the one who took the car,” says the twenty-five-year-old employee from housecleaning who found the body. “He might have just borrowed it or something.”
“Maybe,” says Worden.
“When you came in here and found him,” asks Waltemeyer, “did you touch him or roll him over or anything to see if he was okay?”
“No way,” says the employee. “I saw he was dead right away and just left him be.”
“Did you touch anything in the room?” asks Worden. “Anything at all?”
“No, sir.”
Worden gestures to the young man, drawing him across the room for a private conversation. Quietly, and in a way that the employee immediately recognizes as truthful, Worden explains that this death is going to be a murder. Worden tries to reassure him: We only care about the murder.
“Don’t be offended,” the detective says, “but if you touched anything from the room, if you took anything from the room, tell us now and it won’t go any further…”
The employee understands. “No,” he says. “I didn’t steal nothin’.”
“Okay, then,” says Worden.
Waltemeyer waits for the young man to leave, then looks at Worden. “Well, if he didn’t get the wallet,” says Waltemeyer, “then someone else must’ve.”
That’s what it’s beginning to look like: Man meets boy, man gets undressed, boy strangles man, steals cash, credit cards and Ford Thunderbird and drives off into the Baltimore sunset. Unless, of course, the kid who lived with him did it. Then it’s man meets boy, man lives with boy, boy finally gets sick of playing grabass and chokes the living shit out of the landlord. That would play, too, thinks Worden.
The lab tech on call is Bernie Magsamen-good man, Bernie is, one of the best-and so they take their time with the scene, pulling fingerprints off the nightstand and the used drinking glasses near the bed and in the bathroom sink. They get a good sketch and several photographs of the body in that bizarre position. They go through the old man’s belongings carefully, looking for what is missing, what may be missing, or what is there that shouldn’t be.
They do this because they know they’ve caught a murder; they know it and act on it with the same resolve by which other men would declare the scene to be a motel room or its occupant to be dead. To Worden and Waltemeyer, the death of Robert Yergin is a murder even though the victim is sixty-five and overweight, fully primed for a heart attack, a stroke or some other natural death. To them it’s a murder, though there isn’t a suggestion of any struggle or any trauma to the body; it’s a murder, though there isn’t a hint of petechial hemorrhaging in the whites of the eyes-the postmortem telltale that so often occasions strangulation. To them it’s a murder even after Worden finds the victim’s wallet still fat with cash and credit cards in a jacket pocket, suggesting that anyone who killed the old man did a lousy job of robbing him. It’s a murder because Robert Yergin, who takes to bed young boys he barely knows, is lying there in a weird position without his 1988 Ford Thunderbird. What else does a good detective need to know?
Little more than three hours later, Donald Worden is standing next to Donald Kincaid on the opposite side of town, staring at a thirty-foot smear of drying blood that ends in a red-purple lake after traveling the full length of a vacant West Lexington Street rowhouse. And although the man whose carotid artery painted this picture is still clinging to life at Bon Secours, this, too, will come back a murder. Worden knows it, not only because so much blood has been sprayed across the dirty hallway tile, but also because he has no viable suspect.
Two whodunits in one night-the new standard by which a Baltimore detective can be judged. Any professional can work a series of mysteries on successive nights or handle dunkers in tandem on a rough midnight shift. But what prompts a man who inherits one open case file to then answer the telephone three hours later, grab a fresh pair of plastic gloves and a flashlight, and leave out for a West Baltimore shooting call?
“Well, well,” muses McLarney the morning after, as he stares at the fresh names on the board, “I guess it’s finally reached that point where Donald won’t trust anyone else with a murder.”
This is the Donald Worden around whom Terry McLarney built a squad, the Worden that Dave Brown can never please, the Worden that Rick James loves to call his partner. Two crime scenes, two autopsies, two family notifications, two sets of interviews, two batches of paperwork, two trips to the police computer for sheets on two separate sets of players-and not a word of complaint from the Big Man. Not even the barest suggestion that Waltemeyer may want to go it alone on the Eastgate murder, or that Kincaid will have to make do without a secondary for Lexington Street.