“Careful,” says McLarney. “You’re giving me an erection.”
“And who the fuck is she? She’s a disease-ridden twenty-dollar-a-fuck junkie from Pennsylvania Avenue who’s managed to elude us for three goddamn months. It’s fucking embarrassing is what it is…”
Lenore, the Mystery Whore. The lone witness to Worden’s September stabbing on Pennsylvania Avenue; the woman who can close the file by declaring that her now-dead boyfriend killed her then-dead boyfriend in a dispute over her affections. To Brown and Worden and everyone else in the squad, it is getting a bit embarrassing, this charging up and down the Avenue every other night, jacking up whores and addicts and coming nowhere near the elusive Miss Nore, who is always just beyond a detective’s reach. By now, they’ve heard every line:
“She was out walking last night…”
“Nore? She down on Division Street not a while ago…”
“She came out the carryout and went that way…”
Christ, thinks Brown. It isn’t bad enough that this junkie bitch doesn’t have a permanent address. No, she’s gotta move like the fucking wind. How in the hell do her customers find her?
“Maybe she’s not real,” says McLarney. “Maybe it’s a hoax and all the derelicts out here made her up. It’s a test to see how long we’ll ride around looking.”
McLarney smiles, warm with the thought of a $20 cockhound defying every law of metaphysics. A translucent wraith, she walks the streets of West Baltimore immune to the forces of authority. Some paid their $20 and swear her to be real, but to generations of homicide detectives, she is but the stuff of dreams, destined to be Baltimore’s contribution to the treasure chest of American folklore: Paul Bunyan, the Headless Horseman of Tarrytown, the ghost ship Mary Celeste; Lenore, the Mystery Whore.
“So why does James have her sheet in the file?” counters Brown. “And why do I have her B of I photo in my pocket?”
“Whoa,” says McLarney. “A clever hoax at that.”
“Fuck this bitch,” says Brown, still irritated. “She’s not out here.”
“What the hell,” says McLarney. “Let’s go ’round once more and then call it a night.”
They don’t have a prayer of finding her, of course. But McLarney loves being out on the street, out in the Western working a case that doesn’t matter to anyone. Not to Worden or James or Brown. Not to the dead man and, in this case, not to the killer either. Not even to McLarney. Tonight is police work with neither pain nor pressure, conducted at no emotional cost by men who have no real stake in the outcome.
For McLarney especially, the hunt for Lenore is a pleasing distraction, just as the murder he worked last month with Waltemeyer was pleasing. What could matter less than a drug robbery in a Pimlico alley, with the victim a doper and the witness talking bullshit? And then a young suspect, Fat Danny by name, claiming total innocence, crying for justice in his grandparents’ living room as detectives stalked through the house in search of the murder weapon?
“C’mon, stop crying,” McLarney told the suspect, a bruiser of a kid with at least six inches on him. “Calm down-”
“I DIDN’T KILL NO ONE!” screams Fat Danny, sliding away until McLarney backs him against the kitchen sink, one hand wrapped around the kid’s throat.
“C’mon, already,” McLarney said. “You’re gonna make it so we have to hurt you.”
“I DIDN’T-”
“Look at me,” said McLarney, glaring. “You’re under arrest. Do you want us to hurt you?”
And then a Northwestern DEU officer, one of the raiders, silenced the frantic, struggling suspect with an offhand remark: “For Chrissakes, kid, you did a man’s crime. Now act like a man.”
Later that night, after McLarney brought a Coke and candy bar into the interrogation room and made friends with the fat kid, he sat at his desk and thought about how simple and strangely enjoyable it all was. When nothing mattered, McLarney told himself, he could actually love this job.
Same thing tonight, he muses. If we never find Lenore, if she stays a mystery, then we live forever, rolling across West Baltimore in a four-cylinder go-cart, telling stories and cracking jokes and watching brain-dead homeboys drop their dope. But if we somehow find her, we gotta go back. We gotta go back and pick up the phone on something else, something that might just be reaclass="underline" a woman raped and carved up, an infant beaten, a cop you worked with and called a friend shot twice in the head.
That one was anything but pleasing. That one was real and brutal and unforgiving. The Cassidy shooting had stayed with McLarney as no other case could, bleeding him a little more every time he thought about it. All of his effort had been repaid with the proper result; Butchie Frazier at a sentencing hearing in Judge Bothe’s courtroom a couple of months ago, cuffed and sneering for the last time at life plus twenty, parole in no less than twenty-five. The verdict and sentence counted for something in McLarney’s mind; God knows where he would be now if the outcome had been different. But life and twenty was a courtroom victory, one that seemed sufficient for only as long as Gene Cassidy was in the courtroom.
No, in the end it was simply not enough-not for McLarney, certainly not for Gene. After learning to handle his guide dog at a school in New Jersey, Cassidy had returned to his alma matter, enrolling at York College in a graduate teaching program. These were the first sure steps on a long road back, and yet the recovery had been repeatedly, almost routinely, hampered by a city that somehow found it possible to treat a blind police officer as if he were just one among hundreds. Bills for specialists and physical therapy went unpaid for months at a time, with doctors complaining to Cassidy and Cassidy unable to do anything more than refer them to the city. Requests for special equipment-such as a sight-reading computer to aid with Cassidy’s studies-moved through the bureaucracy at an arthritic crawl. At one point, a friend of Patti Cassidy’s actually called a radio talk show to confront the visiting mayor, asking whether or not the computer was going to be purchased before the next semester of classes.
It took more than a year, in fact, before there was an award ceremony for Cassidy, something that McLarney thought should have happened within weeks of his return from the hospital. A dead cop would have received the splendor of full honors at the funeral-the color guard, the twenty-one-gun salute, the folded flag offered to the widow by the commissioner of police. But a wounded cop seemed to paralyze the department; the brass had a hard time deciding what to say, much less cutting through its own red tape.
To McLarney, the departmental response to Cassidy’s ordeal was a little bit obscene, and in the months that followed the shooting, he made himself a promise. If I ever get killed line-of-duty, McLarney told several other detectives, there shouldn’t be anyone above the rank of sergeant at the funeral-except maybe D’Addario, who was a friend. Yeah, Dee could be there. But no color guard, no bagpipes, no command staff, no delegations from a dozen other departments. Just Jay Landsman calling the men to attention by shouting “Present arms,” after which a hundred Baltimore cops would produce cold cans of Miller Lite and simultaneously pull the poptops.
Gene Cassidy’s ceremony, when it finally occurs, is only a bit more formal. On the night after the latest search for the missing Lenore, McLarney once again finds himself back in the Western District, this time in the roll call room at the Riggs Avenue station house, watching from the edge of the room as the four-to-twelve shift collects in front of two dozen evenly spaced chairs. Gene himself asked that the ceremony be held here at the district, just as his old shift prepared to go out on the street. McLarney scans the uniforms and realizes that most of the men Cassidy worked with are now gone-some to other shifts and other districts, others to better-paying police departments in the surrounding counties. Still, there is some power to the moment when the shift lieutenant barks attention and the entire shift snaps rigid; Cassidy, sitting in a front-row seat with Patti beside him, rises too.