No, sir, Worden’s got himself a fresh pack of cigars, a full pot of coffee and McLarney’s signature on the bottom of a departmental overtime slip. He hasn’t slept in twenty-four hours and if he gets a break in either case, he won’t get near a bed for twelve more. It’s a hard road, a long haul-a ridiculous way for a grown man to earn a living. It’s also about as close to a feeling of immortality as a career cop ever gets.
In the end, he resurrected himself. In the end, he simply waited his anger out, waited for that phone line to light up with the cure that was bound to come. Straight murders, one after another, each one a unique variation of that same eternal evil; just crime and punishment, meted out to a working cop in roughly equal shares. God knows Worden had talked enough about quitting; in this job, he liked to tell colleagues, you eat the bear until the bear eats you, and I’m going to walk before that bad boy gets hungry.
Tough-guy talk. But no one really believed that Donald Worden would loosen his grip on that silver shield. It would have to be the other way around.
Three days after Worden picks up two murders on a single shift, both cases are in the black. The break in the Yergin case comes as a direct result of Worden’s prolonged interrogation of the victim’s teenage companion, a conversation that makes it clear enough that in the absence of any other suspect, the old man’s housemate will remain at the top of Worden’s list. Two days later the kid-still frightened-calls the homicide unit to say he’s heard that some white boys are driving the dead man’s Thunderbird around Pigtown and Carroll Park.
Worden and Waltemeyer drive down to the upper end of the Southern District, where Waltemeyer talks to a few of the older hands with whom he served for so long. The Southern troops are already known for reading homicide teletypes, but for their old bunky Waltemeyer they’ll go so far as to tow every T-bird in the district down to headquarters. An hour after the detectives’ visit, two Southern men stop the right car at Pratt and Carey and take the driver, a seventeen-year-old male prostitute, into custody. Worden and Waltemeyer tag-team the suspect in the large interrogation room until he admits to being in the motel room; unaware that the autopsy proved the death to be suffocation, he claims the old man died of a seizure. When the two detectives complete the statement and leave the room, the kid stands up and uses the two-way window in the door as a mirror, breaking pimples and fretting over his complexion as if he’s still an ordinary teenager, contemplating a Friday night date.
The Lexington Street murder, a dispute over a small narcotics sale, is solved on a recanvass of the shooting scene, when Worden’s photographic memory matches the face of an old man who answers a door in the 1500 block with the face of a bystander he saw hanging out on a corner the night of the murder. Sure enough, the old man admits to being a witness and identifies the shooter from a photo array. But it’s still a weak, one-witness case until the suspect arrives downtown, whereupon Worden lets loose with the full blue-eyed, white-haired father-figure treatment and persuades the shooter to give up everything. So effective is Worden’s method that the suspect actually calls the detective from the city jail two weeks later with secondhand gossip about an unrelated murder.
“Detective Worden, I also just wanted to call and wish you a Merry Christmas,” he tells the man who has jailed him. “For you and your family both.”
“Thank you very much, Timmy,” says Worden, a little touched. “My best to you and yours for the holidays.”
Two up and two down. For Worden, the last weeks of a year that was so utterly frustrating now roll effortlessly onward, as if scripted for some cops-and-robbers television show in which all the crimes will be solved and explained before the last commercial break.
Three days before Christmas, the Big Man and Rick James go out on an East Baltimore shooting call, driving away from headquarters on a December night so unseasonably humid that the city is layered in thick, blinding fog. As the Cavalier lurches up Fayette Street, both detectives squint through the mist at the vaguest outline of rowhouses on either side of the street.
“This is fucking soup,” says James.
“I always wanted to work a murder in fog,” says Worden, almost wistful. “Like Sherlock Holmes.”
“Yeah,” agrees James. “That guy was always finding bodies in this shit…”
“ ’Cause it was London,” says Worden, pulling slowly through the light at Broadway.
“And it was always some motherfucker named Murray who did it. Murray something…”
“Murray?” says Worden, confused.
“Yeah, the killer was always named Murray.”
“Moriarty, you mean. Professor Moriarty.”
“Yeah,” says James. “That’s it. Moriarty. If we get a murder tonight, we gotta try and find a yo boy named Moriarty.”
They do get a murder, a street shooting that stays a whodunit for only as long as it takes Worden to wade into a sea of black faces, a pale wanderer waiting for the crowd’s natural hostility to dissipate, a patient, civil cop listening for the anonymous mention of a criminal’s name.
Just before dawn on that same midnight shift, when the paperwork is complete and the office television offers nothing better than a test pattern, Donald Worden, strangely wired, wanders through the quiet looking for something else to occupy his time. James is asleep in the coffee room; Waltemeyer, pecking away at a 24-hour report in the admin office.
While making a fresh pot of coffee, the Big Man pries the plastic top from an unopened coffee can. Then, with the look of raw science filling his face, he sends the disk spinning through the stagnant air of the main office.
“Watch this,” he says, walking over to pick up his new toy. He sends it back across the room, this time with a perfect ricochet off the tile floor.
“For my next trick,” he says, preparing another launch, “we go off the ceiling.”
Worden sends the plastic soaring. From the admin office, Waltemeyer looks up from the typewriter, momentarily distracted by what appears in the corner of his eye as a sort of thin, airborne blur. He looks over at Worden curiously, then back down at his report, as if dismissing the illusion.
“C’mon, Donald,” yells Worden. “Get your ass out here…”
Waltemeyer looks up.
“C’mon, Donald. C’mon out and play.”
Waltemeyer continues typing.
“Hey, Mrs. Waltemayer, can Donald come out and play today?”
Worden sends the disk soaring toward the plate glass that separates the two offices just as the admin lieutenant, an hour early for the coming dayshift, walks through the fishbowl toward his office. The plastic glances off the outer glass and sails gracefully past a wall column and into the open door of Nolan’s office. The lieutenant stops in the doorway, marveling at the rare and extraordinary sight of Donald Worden, happy.
“Well?” asks the lieutenant, mystified.
“It’s in the wrists, lieutenant,” says Worden, smiling. “It’s all in the wrists.”
Rule Ten in the homicide handbook: There is too such a thing as a perfect murder. Always has been, and whoever tries to claim otherwise merely proves himself naive and romantic, a fool who is ignorant of rules one through nine.
A case in point: Here lies a black male by the name of Anthony Morris, twenty-one years of age, shot dead in the western half of Baltimore, Maryland. A young man of suddenly declining status in the local drug trade, Mr. Morris is found by Western uniforms in an empty courtyard of the Gilmor Homes, where a person or persons repeatedly compressed the trigger of a.38-caliber weapon and thus caused several small pieces of metal alloy to rip holes in Mr. Morris’s body.