May 2006
Case Closed
In the decade and a half since David Simon finished writing this book he has transformed himself from a T-shirt wearing, wet-behind-his diamondstudded-ear, notebook-toting journalist of questionable prowess into an award-winning author, acclaimed screenwriter and accomplished television producer. During that same fifteen years, I have advanced exactly one rank.
The years passed by and I had not seen much of Dave, save for a couple homicide reunions and the retirement parties of Gary D’Addario and Eugene Cassidy. Then one day my son called from North Carolina, “Dad, there is a show on HBO all about your police department.” I replied that I was familiar with The Wire and asked Brian whether he actually watched the show. His response seemed almost reverential, “Dad, everyone in the Marine Corps watches The Wire.”
Simon had done it again.
Back in 1988, when a confused command staff allowed Dave to spend a year with us, my cronies and I smirked and played with him like infants who had found a new toy in their cribs. To our delight, Dave, a youthful teetotaler, would get noticeably intoxicated after only a few measly beers. He would join us after work, perhaps hoping to glimpse homicide’s Holy Grail, but eventually he realized that we merely wanted to marvel at the spectacle of someone getting drunk on three little cans of liquid.
Dave took the good-natured ribbing and soon was operating unnoticed in our midst. He became the proverbial roach on the wall, soaking it all in while we were too busy fending off murders to calculate our behavior in his presence. At first we were wary of what transpired in front of Dave. We would check ourselves, our language, even our methodology. But, after a time, we were too busy to care; the busier we got, the more he scribbled. Though we allowed him to be present during routine interviews, legal concerns sometimes precluded his being physically in the room for certain interrogations. Back then we didn’t have the viewing portals and microphones now common in every police department’s interview rooms. We learned to open the door slowly, to avoid smashing Dave in the face. He would listen through cracks in the door frame, and he had excellent hearing, judging by how accurately he would later chronicle entire interrogations. When Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets came out, we were gratified by how clearly Dave had captured the controlled chaos that permeates every urban homicide unit: the roller-coaster tempo of some investigations, the frustrations, the triumphs, the steady stream of unfathomable violence.
The now-sobered command staff reacted to the groundbreaking work by inquiring of the department’s legal adviser whether we could be charged with conduct unbecoming an officer. Cooler heads prevailed and no charges were brought, though many of us watched our performance evaluations drop like lead weights in a polluted pond. But then came the NBC series based on the book and Dave’s time with us was seen in a more positive, Hollywood-enhanced light.
We police are obsessed with describing our fellow man: Hispanic male, black male, white male, everyone categorically defined. We sit on the witness stand and say, “The black male entered through the front door, then the black male exited through the rear door,” as if the black male would suddenly morph into a white or purple male if we didn’t keep a close eye on things. With that acknowledged limitation, here is how I remember David Simon, as he was fifteen years ago.
He was a white guy. When he first showed up you knew, from just one glance, that no one would ever, ever, ask to substitute his urine for theirs. Though he claimed to have been a newspaper reporter before his internship with us, I couldn’t verify that. I didn’t remember seeing him around before, though he might have been around, and I might have looked directly at him but not remembered. He was easy not to notice. Of average height, his physique was not remarkable. Actually, it was not really a physique. There was a body there, to be sure, but it was devoid of things one normally associates with a body, like muscles. Those that did exist were cleverly hidden between bones and flesh. I never understood how a guy could carry a notepad in one hand and a pen in the other, all day long, and not have thicker arms. He had hair then, though of the wispy, not-long-for-this-world variety. It has since departed, revealing a gleaming dome, the closest hair now being eyebrows. Beneath those brows are eyes of an undetermined color, maybe green or brown. It all comes down to this:
“White male, six foot, 170, bald, poorly dressed, puzzled expression, reeking of beer, tattered notebook in possession, last seen…”
For me, one of the more poignant passages from Homicide was Donald Waltemeyer straightening the clothing of an overdosed junkie to make her more presentable just before her husband arrived to identify her remains. Dave called it a “small act of charity” and it was vintage Waltemeyer. I was Donald’s sergeant for a long time and never fully understood him, but I respected him immensely.
Waltemeyer and I traveled twice to a rural corner of Indiana. An arsonist had set a fire there, killing his girlfriend and her two young children. He then made his way to Baltimore, set another fire, got caught, and felt compelled to confess his earlier crime to his transvestite cell mate, who immediately called us. We flew out for the preliminary hearing, but when the actual trial came around, Donald, a noted claustrophobic, argued for a road trip. The pink Cadillac he rented was wine colored, he claimed.
One morning, as we ate in a diner, several locals stopped to ask whether we were the detectives from Baltimore and to thank us. We were happy to be appreciated and Donald, beaming, related his surprise that people knew who we were. As the Cadillac loomed just beyond the plateglass window I reminded Donald that we were in a tiny, conservative town, hanging out with a transvestite and cruising around in a pink Cadillac. He chewed thoughtfully and replied, “I told you, it’s wine colored.”
Donald’s passing saddened us all.
The job has changed some over the past fifteen years. The so-called CSI effect has raised juror expectations to unreasonable levels and become the bane of prosecutors everywhere. There is more witness intimidation, and, not surprisingly, a corresponding reduction in citizen cooperation. Gangs have discovered Baltimore. The drug problem has not abated. There are fewer dunkers and more whodunits. On the positive side, there are epithelial cells. (I love to say that word.) They exploded onto the scene just a few years back, like some wonder drug, spurred by advances in collection methods and the general march of DNA analysis. You can mask your face, wash your hands and throw your gun in the harbor, but you can’t keep your skin from shedding DNA. Yet, in the overall scheme of things, those changes are minor and the job remains much as it was when captured by David Simon. It is all about crime scenes, interviews, and interrogations, played out against a backdrop of flawed humanity.
It always will be.
TERRY MCLARNEY
Lieutenant, Homicide
Baltimore
May 2006
David Simon
David Simon’s Homicide won an Edgar Award and became the basis for the NBC award-winning drama. Simon’s second book, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, co-authored with Edward Burns, was made into an HBO mini-series. Simon is currently the executive producer and writer for HBO’s Peabody Award-winning series The Wire. He lives in Baltimore.
