Within a year, as the murder toll jumped and clearance rates fell, the department hired Worden back as a civilian contractor to help clear cold homicide cases. He is clearing them still, along with his cold case supervisor, Sergeant Roger Nolan, putting blue names on The Board even though he carries neither badge nor gun.
When I see Worden on occasion, usually for a pint or two at that Irish dive on O’Donnell Street, I always offer him a quarter. He politely declines, though he can’t help but point out that it would now be forty-five cents.
Along with Fahlteich and McLarney, Worden and Nolan are the only remaining members of D’Addario’s shift still on duty. Much of the remainder of that shift is scattered throughout mid-Atlantic law enforcement, most having put in their retirement papers to take better-paying investigative positions in other agencies.
Worden’s partner, Rick James, went to work for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. Rich Garvey and Bob McAllister took positions as investigators with the federal public defenders office, with Garvey working out of the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, branch and McAllister employed in Baltimore.
Gary Childs became an investigator for the Carroll County State’s Attorney’s Office, and later a homicide detective in Baltimore County. He was joined in Baltimore County by Jay Landsman, who was, in turn, joined by his son. And with two generations of Landsmans working the same precinct, some hilarity naturally ensued.
Recently, on a surveillance, Jay got on the radio to ask if his son, who ranks him, had the eyeball on a car they were following.
“Got him, Dad,” came the laconic radio response, followed by delighted laughter from the rest of the surveillance detail.
Without Roger Nolan to protect him, Harry Edgerton soon ran afoul of a department with little tolerance for iconoclasts.
In 1990, his longtime partner, Ed Burns, had returned from the successful joint FBI-Baltimore city prosecution of Warren Boardley’s drug organization and immediately wrote a proposal for a specialized unit that could conduct long-term proactive investigations of violent drug crews. When that proposal disappeared on the eighth floor without so much as a response, Burns chose to cash in his chips, retiring in 1992 to begin a teaching career in the Baltimore city schools-a career that I shortstopped by a year or two, convincing Ed to go with me to West Baltimore to report and write The Corner. That partnership continues-Ed is currently a writer and producer on The Wire.
On his own, Edgerton left the shelter of Nolan’s squad-where his sergeant always had his back, and where the complaints of co-workers were always received with some salt. He transferred from homicide to a fledgling investigative squad-the violent crimes task force-which Edgerton believed could become the major case squad that he and Burns had long imagined.
The VCU, however, proved to be nothing of the sort, and, as it began concentrating on meaningless street rips and corner raids, Edgerton began a singular rebellion, going his own way, ignoring the orders of supervisors and alienating fellow detectives as only Harry Edgerton can.
A deputy commissioner then assigned him the quixotic, existential task of recovering the gun of a patrol officer who had been wounded in East Baltimore. Within weeks Edgerton was in negotiations with an east-side dealer to do precisely that. His bargaining chip was a series of homemade porn videos, all packed in a leather case seized during a drug raid. Acknowledging to the dealer that the tapes were of a personal nature, Edgerton was offering to exchange them for the officer’s gun. But in the interim, as negotiations progressed, a supervisor charged him with failing to inventory both the tapes and the leather case with evidence control, and, pending a trial board, Edgerton was suspended with pay. Then, before that case could be heard, he was found in West Baltimore, armed with his service revolver though suspended, meeting with a man Edgerton described as an informant.
Donald Worden, a sage among murder police, is fond of pointing to the massive binder that is the Baltimore City Police Department’s Code of Conduct and declaring: “If they want you, they got you.”
The department wanted Edgerton, having tired of his indifference to chain of command and his willful disregard of anything other than casework. He was convinced, before any trial board could convene, to wait out his twenty-year anniversary and then retire with his pension intact. He now does security work with several companies.
Edgerton’s partner in the Latonya Wallace case, Tom Pellegrini, continued to pick at the dead girl’s case for years afterward, but to little avail. He finally visited the Fish Man one last time and encouraged his best suspect to write down on a slip of paper whether he was guilty or innocent, then hide the document.
“That way, if you ever die,” Pellegrini explained, “I’ll find the paper and at least I’ll know.”
When the Fish Man did indeed depart this vale, several years ago, no such document was recovered from his effects. Sometimes the magic works, sometimes not.
After retiring from the Baltimore department, Pellegrini did a tour of duty with the United Nations in Kosovo, teaching death investigation to fledgling detectives there. He currently operates a private investigation firm in Maryland.
Among others, Gary Dunnigan is now an insurance investigator. Downtown Eddie Brown went to work security for the Baltimore Ravens, as did Bertina Silver of Stanton’s shift. Rick “The Bunk” Requer left to man the department’s retirement services bureau, though his homicide incarnation lives on in Wendell Pierce’s portrayal of the legendary Bunk Moreland on The Wire, right down to the ubiquitous cigar. The remaining detectives of D’Addario’s shift-Donald Kincaid, Bob Bowman and David John Brown-have retired as well, though Dave Brown went out in a frustrating way, having sustaining a severe leg injury during the search of a vacant house.
Danny Shea died of cancer in 1991. I didn’t follow him on many cases, as he was a veteran of Stanton’s shift, but I have the distinct memory of standing with him at the most natural of deaths, in a Charles Village apartment where an elderly piano teacher expired in bed with her radio playing softly.
Ravel’s “Pavanne for a Dead Princess” was broadcast at that moment, and Shea, being a man of deep and varied knowledge, knew this as I did not.
“A quiet, perfect death,” he said, nodding at the cadaver and granting me a moment I always remember when thinking about Danny Shea.
Donald Waltemeyer, too, died of cancer last year, having retired from Baltimore city to become an investigator with the Aberdeen Police Department in northeast Maryland.
When McLarney and the other members of his old squad got together with Aberdeen veterans at the wake, they quickly realized that Digger Waltemeyer had managed to infuriate and endear himself to both departments in exactly the same manner. At the funeral, men in different dress uniforms assured each other that they were privileged to know and work with both a consummate investigator and a renowned pain in the ass.
Meanwhile, the police intern from that long-ago year is still at large, his whereabouts subject to rumor and the crude conjecture of certain unit veterans. He is seen occasionally on Baltimore film sets and glimpsed in cluttered production offices and writing rooms. Sometimes, he attends the Baltimore homicide reunions out in Parkville, where retired detectives never fail to talk the same shit and ask, with a wink and nod, when NBC is gonna get those bigass checks in the mail.
No comment to that. But the intern and his credit card stand ready, knowing that for many reasons, if not for his entire career, he owes these guys-every last one of them-more than a few rounds.
DAVID SIMON
Baltimore