Returning to his own office a few minutes later, Landsman confronted the fat kid again. “You’re done lying. Your buddy just gave you up.”
And the fat kid simply nodded, almost relieved. “I didn’t mean to shoot Jimmy. The gun just went off in my hand. I swear, it just went off.”
Landsman smiled grimly.
“You broke your lamp,” said the fat kid.
“Yeah,” said Landsman, leaving the room. “How ’bout that?”
Outside, in the annex office, Pellegrini greeted his sergeant with a smile and a look that suggested regret. “Thanks, Sarge.”
Landsman shrugged and smiled.
“You know,” said Pellegrini, “I’d still be talking to them if you hadn’t done that.”
“Fuck it, Tom, you’d have done the same thing eventually,” Landsman told him. “You were getting there.”
But Pellegrini said nothing, uncertain. Then and now, Landsman teaches a truth that is a contradiction, an unnerving counterweight to Pellegrini’s methodical pursuit of empirical answers. Landsman’s lesson says that science, deliberation and precision are not enough. Whether he likes it or not, a good detective eventually has to pull the trigger.
Season’s greetings from the Baltimore homicide unit, where a Styrofoam Santa Claus is taped to the annex office door, its visage marred by a deep, bloody, close-range gunshot wound carved into the old saint’s forehead. The wound track was created with a penknife, the blood with a red felt-tipped pen, but the message is clear: Yo, Santa. This is Baltimore. Watch your back.
Along the metal bulkhead walls of the main office, Kim and Linda and the other sixth-floor secretaries have applied a few lonely strips of red and gold trim, some cardboard reindeer and a few candy canes. In the northeast corner of the office stands the unit’s tree, sparingly decorated this year but otherwise unmarked by the cynical displays of holidays past. A few years back, some of the detectives retrieved a few morgue photos from the files-mostly shots of dead drug dealers and contract killers, a few of whom had beat out murder charges of their own. With some careful cutting, the detectives liberated the bullet-riddled bodies from the photo background and, overcome by the Yule spirit, pasted hand-drawn wings on the shoulders of the dead. In a way it was touching: Hard-core players like Squeaky Jordan and Abraham Partlow looked positively angelic hanging from those polyurethane branches.
Even the decorations that began as sincere gestures seem small and defeated in this place, where phrases such as “peace on earth” and “goodwill towardmen” have no apparent connection to the work at hand. Onthe anniversary of their savior’s birth, the men who work homicides are decidedly unsaved, stuck as they are in the usual rotation of shootings and cuttings and overdose cases. Still, the holiday will be acknowledged if not celebrated by the squads working the four-to-twelve and overnight on Christmas Eve. What the hell, this much irony ought to be marked in some meaningful way.
A year ago, there wasn’t much Christmas mayhem at all, a shooting or two on the west side. But two years ago, the phone lines were all lit up, and the year before that was also a hellacious piece of work, with two domestic homicides and a serious shooting that kept Nolan’s squad running until the light of day. On that Christmas, the early relief arrived to find Nolan’s men suffering from a strange holiday fever, acting out a series of holiday homicides in the main office.
“Bitch,” yelled Nolan, pointing his finger at Hollingsworth. “You got me the same thing last year… BANG!”
“You bastard, I already got a toaster,” said Hollingsworth, turning his finger on Requer. “POW!”
“Oh yeah?” says Requer, firing a round in Nolan’s direction. “Well, you burned the stuffing again this year.”
Their little dramas weren’t all that farfetched, either: On a legendary Christmas shift back in the early 1970s, a father killed his son in a dark meat-light meat argument at the family dinner table, plunging the carving knife into the kid’s chest to assure himself of the first crack at the serving plate.
True, the captain always remembers to have a respectable deli spread brought up for the night crew. True, also, that the Christmas shift is the one night of the year when a detective can pull a bottle out of his desk without worrying about being caught by a roving duty officer. Even so, the holiday shift in homicide remains the most depressing duty imaginable. And as luck would have it this year, the three-week shift change for D’Addario’s men falls on the morning of December 25. Landsman and McLarney will work their squads on the Christmas Eve four-to-twelve shift, followed by Nolan’s men on midnight, followed by McLarney’s men again for the Christmas dayshift relief.
No one is happy about the schedule, but Dave Brown, for one, has found a way around its rigors. He always makes a point of putting in early for vacation on the holidays, and this year, with a one-year-old daughter and fervent dreams of domestic bliss, he plans to be nowhere near headquarters on Christmas morning. Naturally, this absurd notion of Brown’s becomes yet another item on Donald Worden’s list of things for which the younger detective requires abuse, to wit:
1. Brown hasn’t done shit with the Carol Wright case, which is still nothing more than a questionable death by automobile.
2. He has just finished five weeks of medical for a leg operation at Hopkins, a procedure allegedly made necessary by some sort of mysterious nerve damage or muscle spasms that any real man would ignore after a second beer.
3. His abilities as a homicide detective have yet to be truly tested.
4. He won’t be around to drive to Pikesville for garlic bagels on the Sunday dayshift, since that happens to be Christmas Day.
5. Worse, he now has the nerve to be off on holiday while the rest of his squad has to work both ends of a shift change.
6. He’s a piece of shit to begin with.
Worden, with his remarkable memory, has no need to write down this healthy little list. Instead, he keeps it on the tip of his tongue, so as to better reacquaint the younger man with the essential facts of life.
“Brown, you are a piece of shit,” Worden declared on the elevator one evening a week ago. “As long as I’ve been on, do you know how many days I missed on medical?”
“Yes, you miserable bastard, I know,” answered Brown, his voice rising. “You’ve never missed one lousy, stinking day for medical. You only told me about a thousand times, you…”
“Not one day,” said Worden, smiling.
“Not one day,” said Brown in falsetto imitation. “Give me a fuckin’ break already, will you?”
“But your leg hurt a little so you-”
“It was a serious medical condition,” yelled Brown, losing all patience. “There was an operation-a dangerous, life-threatening operation…”
Worden only smiled. He had the poor boy right where he wanted him; in fact, he’d had him there for weeks. Worden had become so utterly insufferable that the day after the encounter on the elevator, the Carol Wright folder suddenly and magically returned from the oblivion of the file cabinets to occupy a more prominent place on David Brown’s desk.
“It has nothing to do with Worden,” Brown insisted at the time. “This case has bothered the shit out of me for months and I always planned to come back on it as soon as I came off medical.”
Probably so. But now, from the other side of the coffee room, Worden watches with a measure of personal satisfaction as the younger detective spends another day reacquainting himself with the dead billy girl on the gravel lot.
Brown picks through the pieces of the file, reacclimating himself to the office reports, scene photos, follow-ups and BPI shots of a dozen suspects who never panned out. Once again he reads the witness statements from Helen’s Hollywood Bar, the woozy statements of drunks who wanted to believe that the killer was driving a Lotus custom through the streets of Baltimore. Once again he glances through the reports from all those random car stops of black sports cars and compacts in the southern districts of the city.