There is nothing worse than a billy murder, thinks Brown, contradicting any earlier assessments. I hate billies: They talk when they’re not supposed to, they fuck up your investigation, they waste your time by prattling on about everything they know. Fuck this case, he tells himself. Gimme a drug murder in the projects where nobody saw a thing, he muses. Gimme something I can work with.
Brown rereads the various descriptions of the suspect provided by bar patrons, the contradictory statements about hair length and style and eye color and everything else. He lines up the ident photos collected from every old lead and looks for anything that comes close to matching, but without better descriptions it’s hopeless. Not only that, but the ident photos all seem disturbingly similar. Every billy boy seems to stare out at the camera with one of those oh-so-this-is-my-mug-shot expressions; every one seems to sport tattoos, bad teeth and a tanktop shirt so dirty it could stand up on its own.
Look at this piece of work, thinks Brown, pulling one photo from the pile-a billy if ever there was one. The kid is an obvious motorhead, his shag of jet black hair parted in the middle and running halfway down to his ass. He’s got fucked-up teeth-big surprise there-and weird blond eyebrows. Christ, the kid’s got an expression so vacant that it qualifies as probable cause for a drug warrant…
Whoa. He’s got blond eyebrows. Blond as can be, thinks Brown, stunned.
The detective holds the ident photo close, his eyes bouncing back and forth between the kid’s hair and eyebrows. Black, blond. Black, blond. Gimme a fucking break here; they’re right there in the photograph, plain as day. How the hell did I miss that the first time? he wonders, searching for the report that was once stapled to the photo.
Sure enough, the kid’s name came from a car stop over by Pigtown, a follow-up by a Southern District officer on that lookout they had teletyped to patrol back in August. Brown finds the report and remembers it immediately: The guy was driving a black Mustang with a sunroof. Not exactly a T-top, not exactly a Lotus. But it was in the ballpark. A Mustang could have those low-to-the-ground performance tires, just as the traffic man had described. But the first time Brown read the report he had discounted it. The district officer stated unequivocally that the driver of the car had dark hair, and the one thing every witness agreed on was that Carol Wright’s companion was blond. Only a week ago, after reopening the file, did he bother to ask the ident section to send him photos of the long shots like this one. And only now was he noticing the mismatched eyebrows.
“Donald, look at this.”
Worden steps over, expecting something lame.
“This photo is from an arrest a couple weeks after my murder. Check out his eyebrows.”
The older detective scans the ident photo and raises an eyebrow of his own. Why in hell would a blond billy boy dye his hair black? You might go the other way, but blond to black? How often does a kid do that?
A good catch, Worden admits to himself. A helluva good catch.
Given the four-month delay, there isn’t a lot of hope for recovering any physical evidence, and it will be after the holidays before Brown and Worden get back on the street to chase this one. But when they do pluck the kid from his girlfriend’s house in Pigtown on a January morning, Jimmy Lee Shrout’s hair will be dyed red and he will act as though he’s been waiting for them since August. The battered Mustang, found in front of the girlfriend’s house that same day, will be towed to the Fallsway garage, where Worden is waiting with a lab tech. With the car up on a jack, the detective and tech begin by pulling greasy debris from the bottom, and for the first ten minutes or so they find dirt and shards of paper and pieces of leaves, until the lab tech is scoffing at the idea that anything will be left on the undercarriage after all this time.
“Well,” Worden replies, pulling at the edge of a thin strand, trying to pry it from the front crossbar, “what do we call this, then?”
“I’ll be damned.”
Worden gently unwraps the strand from the crossbar, traversing the metal three times. Finally, a long, reddish hair slides into his hand.
“What color hair did she have?” the tech asks.
“Red,” says Worden. “She had red hair.”
Later that day, Jimmy Lee Shrout will wait for the detectives in the large interrogation room, and when the wait gets a little long, he will go to sleep. Later still, he will be shown a picture of Carol Wright and he will tell Brown and Worden that he remembers picking her up as she hitchhiked on Hanover Street. He also remembers that she went to see someone at the Southern District and afterward he took her to a bar in Fell’s Point. Yeah, Helen’s-that was the name. They drank a little, she danced. Then he offered to drive her home, but she took him instead to this parking lot in South Baltimore, where she smoked his dope. He wanted to go home and sleep and he told her so. She got mad and left thecar, after which he fell asleep behind the wheel. He woke up a short time later and drove away.
“Jimmy, she was run over on that lot.”
“I didn’t do that.”
“Jimmy, you ran her down.”
“I’d been drinking. I can’t remember.”
Later, in a second interview, Jimmy Shrout admits to remembering that he hit a slight bump as he drove off the gravel lot. He tells the detectives that he thought he’d hit a curb or something.
“Jimmy, there’s no curb on that lot.”
“I don’t remember,” the kid insists.
Brown is especially curious about one particular detaiclass="underline" “Later on, did you ever find a single sandal anywhere in your car?”
“A sandal?”
“Like a woman’s summer thong.”
“Yeah, a few weeks later. I came across something like that. I thought it was my girlfried’s and I threw it out.”
In the end, it will be nothing better than manslaughter by auto, which is nothing better than two or three years of state time, tops. The problem with homicide by auto is the same as homicide by arson: Without witnesses, no jury can be made to believe that someone killed that way isn’t the victim of an accident.
Both Worden and Brown understand that, but Sprout’s story will make it clear to them what actually happened in that parking lot. It wasn’t Shrout who wanted to go home, it was Carol Wright. She wanted to go and Shrout was upset. After all, she’d driven across Baltimore with him, she’d smoked his shit, and now she wasn’t going for anything. They argued and she got angry or maybe scared; either way, Brown and Worden cannot imagine that Carol Wright left that car of her own volition and walked across that gravel lot with only one shoe. No question about it: She left that car in a hurry.
All that waits in the future, but today, at the moment that Dave Brown notices the bad dye job in Jimmy Lee Sprout’s ident photo, the case is solved, and it’s solved as a murder, not an accidental death by auto, not a case pended by the medical examiner. Dave Brown has every reason to be satisfied: Regardless of what any prosecutor or jury wants to say about it later, today the death of Carol Wright is going down as a crime. Black hair, blond eyebrows, case closed.
Another case closes as well. A few hours after Brown shows him the ident photo, telling him to check the hair color, Worden watches Brown pack up his desk and walk to the coffee room coat rack.
“Sergeant,” says Brown to McLarney, who sits across the aisle from Worden, “unless you need me for anything, I’m going to start my holiday.”
“No, go ahead, Dave,” agrees McLarney.
“Donald,” says Brown, acknowledging the older detective, “have a good one.”
“You too, David,” answers Worden. “Merry Christmas to you and yours.”