Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets Part 64

McCollum, who was talking to another attorney a few feet away, suddenly made the connection. "You didn't just say what I thought you said?"

"f.u.c.k yes," said Garvey. "Somebody had to."

Alone among the three squads of D'Addario's 1988 command, Terry McLarney's crew is still intact.

Eddie Brown moves steadily from case to case, seemingly impervious to the pa.s.sage of time. Rick James, who worked hard and long on the March murder of cab driver Karen Renee Smith, has now moved far enough from Worden's shadow to be called a veteran. In fact, James's 1988 campaign was nearly as successful as Rich Garvey's: Alvin Richardson, who raped and murdered that two-year-old boy in November, was convicted in a jury trial and sentenced to life in prison, and Dennis Wahls, who led police to the stolen jewelry and implicated himself in the cab driver's murder, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and accepted a life sentence. Clinton Butler, the man whom Wahls named as the man who actually beat Karen Smith to death, was tried twice in Baltimore courtrooms. Despite Wahls's testimony and other corroborating evidence, the first jury was hung, the second found Butler innocent.

Donald Waltemeyer's career case went to trial in 1989, as prosecutors brought Geraldine Parrish into Judge Bothe's court for the murder of Albert Robinson, the alcoholic from Plainfield, New Jersey, found dead by the railbed in Clifton Park in 1986. Geraldine knew Albert Robinson from her storefront church in Plainfield, and years earlier she had convinced him to sign a life insurance policy that named her as the beneficiary. Of the four murders with which she was charged, the slaying of Robinson proved to have the most corroborative evidence. A trio of prosecutors told jurors an incredible, at times almost comical, tale in which Geraldine and a handful of other conspirators drove to New Jersey and lured Robinson into a car with promises of alcohol. Hours later, they shot him and left him for dead in a copse near Atlantic City. Robinson survived with only superficial wounds, but he was so drunk that he remembered nothing of the incident. A few months later, the gang returned to New Jersey, lured the drunk into the car once again, and this time drove him to Baltimore, where a teenage friend of one of Geraldine's nieces finished the job on the B&O railbed, leaving Rick James with a stone whodunit.

Geraldine disappointed no one at the trial. At one point, she threw a conniption in the jury's presence, flailing in her chair and spitting foam from the corners of her mouth. A bored Elsbeth Bothe ordered her to behave, ending the demonstration. Later, on the witness stand, Geraldine claimed she was duped by men who made her turn over the insurance policies and identify the prospective victims for them.

She wasn't convincing, and in this instance a jury had little problem agreeing on a verdict. Geraldine Parrish was sentenced to life in prison, after which she pleaded guilty to the remaining three murders and received concurrent life sentences. No one was more relieved to see the case end than Donald Waltemeyer, who returned to the rotation full time immediately after the trial.

Waltemeyer's partner, Dave Brown, no longer lives in a state of perpetual torment. For the last two years, Donald Worden has granted the younger detective a certain grudging acceptance, if not respect. It is true, however, that in the summer of 1989 the Big Man began charging Brown twenty-five cents apiece for his phone messages.

As for Terry McLarney himself, he continues to cling to the brotherhood. In 1989, he ignored a persistent cough until he could barely stand, then spent months recuperating from a bacterial infection around his heart. He was not expected to return to homicide, which is to say he was back in four months, looking leaner and healthier than he had in years.

At twenty-eight years of service and counting, Donald Worden is still a Baltimore police officer, still the center of McLarney's squad. And he is now a married man. The wedding was in the summer of 1989 and most of the shift was there. Toast followed toast, and the entire wedding party concluded the festivities at Kavanaugh's, with Diane gracing a barstool in her wedding dress and the Big Man holding court in a well-tailored tuxedo.

Marriage meant that Worden had to put in at least one more year to qualify his bride for full benefits, but that milestone came and went, and he is still working murders. He has stayed close to the Monroe Street case file and followed up on the few leads that have come into the unit in the last two years. Still, the death of John Randolph Scott in an alley off Monroe Street remains an open investigation-the only unsolved police-involved shooting in department history. The officers concerned remain, for the most part, on the street, although some, including Sergeant John Wiley, were subsequently rea.s.signed to administrative duties within the department.

But other outcomes are more gratifying. Once last year, Worden was driving out to a shooting scene in the early morning hours when he pa.s.sed the downtown bus station and noticed a clean-cut U.S. Navy seaman walking with a ragged-looking man on West Fayette Street. The combination seemed strange to Worden; he filed it away in that memory of his, and when the sailor turned up dead later that morning, beaten to death during a robbery in a nearby parking garage, Worden walked over to Kevin Davis, the primary on the case. Worden gave Davis a full description of the suspect; the two men got back in a Cavalier and found their man within hours.

The newspapers said the crime was solved by sheer luck, proving once again how little this world understands about what it means to be a detective.

A final postscript: In 1988, 234 men and women died violent deaths in the city of Baltimore. In 1989, 262 people were murdered. Last year, the murder rate jumped again, leaving 305 dead-the city's worst toll in almost twenty years.

In the first month of 1991, the city is averaging one murder a day.

AUTHOR'S NOTE This book is a work of journalism. The names of the detectives, defendants, victims, prosecutors, police officers, pathologists and others identified in the text are, in fact, their real names. The events described in the book occurred in the manner described.

My research began in January 1988, when I joined the Baltimore Police Department's homicide unit with the unlikely rank of "police intern." As often happens when journalists hang around one place long enough, I became a piece of furniture in the unit, a benign part of the detectives' daily scenery. Within weeks they were acting as if allowing a reporter to gawk at the chaos of criminal investigation was entirely natural.

So that my presence would not interfere with the investigations, I agreed to look and dress the part. That meant cutting my hair, purchasing several sport coats, ties and slacks and removing a diamond-stud earring that had done little to endear me to the detectives themselves. Throughout my year in the unit, I never identified myself to anyone as a law officer. But my appearance, coupled with the presence of other police, often led civilians and even other police to a.s.sume that I was, in fact, a detective. To journalists trained to identify themselves while reporting, this may be perceived as a crime of omission. But to declare myself at crime scenes, during interviews or inside hospital emergency rooms would have dramatically impaired the investigations. In brief, there was no other way to research this book.

Still, the ethical ambiguity was there every time I quoted a witness, an emergency room doctor, a prison guard, or a victim's relative who a.s.sumed I was a law officer. For that reason, I have tried to accord these people as much anonymity as possible, balancing questions of fairness and privacy with the need for accuracy.

All of the detectives on Lieutenant D'Addario's shift signed release forms before seeing any portion of the ma.n.u.script. Other characters central to the book also gave approval for their names to be used. In order to obtain these releases, I promised the detectives and others that they would be allowed to review relevant portions of the ma.n.u.script and suggest changes for purposes of accuracy. I also told the detectives that if there was something in the ma.n.u.script that was not essential to the story but that could nonetheless harm their careers or personal lives, they could ask that it be deleted and I would consider the request. In the end, the detectives requested remarkably few changes, and the handful to which I agreed involved mundane items, such as one detective's comment about a woman in a bar or another's criticism of a specific superior. I allowed no changes that involved the handling of a case or in any way altered or muted the book's message.

In addition to the individual detectives, the police department itself had a limited right to review the ma.n.u.script-but only to ensure that undisclosed evidentiary material in pending cases (bullet calibers, manner of death, clothing of victim) was not being released in instances where such facts, if kept secret, might later help identify a suspect. No changes or deletions resulted from the department's review.

Representatives of the Baltimore state's attorney's office and the state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner also reviewed relevant portions of the ma.n.u.script for purposes of accuracy only. Like the detectives, they could suggest, but not insist on, changes.

Most of the dialogue in this narrative-perhaps 90 percent-comes from the scenes and conversations that I personally witnessed. In a few instances, however, important events occurred on shifts when I was not working or when I was busy reporting on the activities of other detectives. In those instances, I was careful not to use direct quotes for long portions of text, and I have tried to use only those quotes that were specifically recalled by the detectives. And when a character is shown to be thinking something, it is not mere presumption: In every case, subsequent actions made those thoughts apparent or I discussed the matter with that person afterward. And by reviewing the material with the detectives, I have tried to ensure that their thoughts have been portrayed as accurately as possible.

For the unprecedented and unparalleled cooperation of the Baltimore Police Department, I am indebted to the late Police Commissioner Edward J. Tilghman as well as the current commissioner, Edward V. Woods. I am also grateful to Deputy Commissioner for Operations Ronald J. Mullen; retired Colonel Richard A. Lanham and Deputy Commissioner Joseph W. Nixon, both of whom headed the Criminal Investigations Division for portions of 1988; Captain John J. MacGillivary, commander of the Crimes Against Persons section; Lieutenant Stewart Oliver, administrative lieutenant for the persons section; as well as the mult.i.tude of BPD commanders, line officers and technicians who went out of their way to a.s.sist me.

This project would also not have been possible without the invaluable a.s.sistance of Director Dennis S. Hill, chief public information officer for the Baltimore department, and Lieutenant Rick Puller and Sergeant Michael A. Fry of the department's legal affairs unit.

I would also like to thank Chief Medical Examiner Dr. John E. Smialek and others in the medical examiner's office for advice and a.s.sistance; and Dr. Smialek and Michael Golden, spokesman for the state health department, for providing access to the OCME. In the city prosecutor's office, I am indebted to State's Attorney Stuart O. Simms, Chief of the Violent Crimes Unit Timothy V. Doory, and Chief of the Trial Division Ara Crowe.

On the editorial side, this book comes into the world only through the determined and devoted efforts of John Sterling, editor in chief at Houghton Mifflin, who saw the possibilities from the outset and simply refused to let any of them slip away. His patience, talent and expertise are responsible for much of what may be called good writing in these pages; I plead guilty to the rest. This book also benefited immensely from the efforts of Luise M. Erdmann, who proved that ma.n.u.script editing, when done well, is more art than craft. My thanks also to Rebecca Saikia-Wilson and everyone else at Houghton Mifflin who gave this project such strong support.

I am also grateful to my editors at the Baltimore Sun Baltimore Sun, who granted me leave to complete the work and were unswervingly supportive of the project, even after I blew a deadline or three. My thanks to James I. Houck, managing editor; Tom Linthic.u.m, metropolitan desk editor; Anthony F. Barbieri, city editor; and writing coach Rebecca Corbett, who has been a source of advice and encouragement ever since I began making nightshift police rounds at the Sun eight years ago.

I would like to thank Bernard and Dorothy Simon, my parents, whose help over the last three years was essential, as well as Kayle Tucker, whose love and unstinting support was of equal value.

Most important, this book could not exist without the a.s.sistance of homicide shift lieutenants Gary D'Addario and Robert Stanton and the forty detectives and detective sergeants who served in their 1988 commands. They took the real risk here, and I hope they feel now that it was in some way worth it.

Finally, a note on one last ethical dilemma. Over a period of time, familiarity and even friendship can sometimes tangle the relationship between a journalist and his subjects. Knowing that, I began my tenure in the homicide unit committed to a policy of complete nonintervention. If the phone in the main office rang and there was no one but me to answer, then it was not meant to be answered. But the detectives themselves helped to corrupt me. It began with phone messages, then grew to spelling corrections and proofreading. ("You're a writer. Take a look at this affidavit.") And I shared with the detectives a year's worth of fast-food runs, bar arguments and station house humor: Even for a trained observer, it was hard to remain aloof.

In retrospect, it's good that the year ended when it did, before one of the detectives provoked me to intervene in some truly harmful way. Once, in December, I found myself crossing that line- "going native," as journalists say. I was in the back seat of an unmarked car cruising Pennsylvania Avenue, accompanying Terry McLarney and Dave Brown in their search for a witness. At one point, the detectives suddenly pulled over to the curb to confront a woman who matched the description. She was walking with two young men. McLarney jumped from the car and grabbed one man, but Brown's trenchcoat belt became caught in the car's shoulder harness and he fell back into the driver's seat. "Go," he yelled at me, still struggling with the harness. "Help Terry."

Armed with my ball-point pen, I followed McLarney, who was struggling to get one man up against a parked car while the second eyed him angrily.

"DO HIM!" McLarney yelled at me, gesturing toward the second man.

And so, in a moment of weakness, a newspaper reporter shoved a citizen of his city against a parked car and performed one of the most pathetic and incompetent body searches on record. When I got down to the guy's ankles, I looked up over my shoulder at McLarney.

He was, of course, laughing hard.

David Simon.

Baltimore.

March 1991

POST MORTEM.

To properly credit the idea for this book, we journey back twenty years to a Christmas Eve I spent with Roger Nolan, Russ Carney, Donald Kincaid and Bill Lansey, observing some routine mayhem and preparing to write a brief feature article on the holiday observances of those charged with working murders. I, for one, enjoy the perversity of a silent, holy night punctuated by a double-cutting in Pimlico, and I thought there might be a few readers of the Baltimore Sun Baltimore Sun who might also be willing to appreciate the small wit of the thing. who might also be willing to appreciate the small wit of the thing.

So I brought a bottle up to headquarters, slipped past the security desk, and joined the homicide squad working overnight as they handled a street shooting, a drug overdose and the aforementioned knife fight. Later, with much of the work done and an early morning choral concert of holiday music playing on the office television, I sat with the detectives as Carney poured cheer.

The elevator doors rang and Kincaid appeared, back from the last shooting of the shift-a desultory affair that landed the victim in an emergency room bed with a gunshot wound to an upper leg. He would live to see New Year's.

"Most people are getting up right now, going under the tree and finding some kinda gift. A tie, or a new wallet or something," mused Kincaid. "This poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d gets a bullet for Christmas."

We laughed. And then-I will never forget the moment-Bill Lansey said: "The s.h.i.t that goes on up here. If someone just wrote down what happens in this place for one year, they'd have a G.o.dd.a.m.n book."

Two years later, Bill Lansey, bless him, was dead of a heart attack and I wasn't feeling all that good about things myself. Despite record profits, my newspaper was challenging its labor union with a contract of givebacks in medical coverage and provoking a strike-an economic stance that was to become thematic in journalism over the next couple decades. I hated my bosses just then, and being one to nurse a grudge I sensed it might be good to conjure a leave of absence, something that would hold my job at a daily newspaper but avoid the newsroom for a time.

Remembering Lansey's remark, I wrote to the Baltimore police commissioner, Edward J. Tilghman. Would it be possible, I asked with feigned innocence, to observe his detectives for a year?

Yes, he replied, it would.

To this day, I have no direct explanation for his decision. The captain in charge of the homicide unit was opposed to the idea, as was the deputy commissioner for operations, the number two in the department. And a straw poll of detectives in the unit quickly revealed most thought it a terrible notion to allow a reporter into the unit. My good fortune was that a police department is a paramilitary organization with a rigid chain of command. It is not, in any sense, a democracy.

I never managed to ask Tilghman about his decision. He died before the book was published-indeed, before I'd finished my research. "You need to ask why he let you in?" Rich Garvey later offered. "The man had a brain tumor. What other explanation do you need?"

Maybe so. But years later the CID commander, d.i.c.k Lanham, told me there was something more subtle in play. In response to questions about my status, Tilghman said his own years as a homicide detective were the most enjoyable and gratifying of his career. I suppose I'd like to believe his motivation for letting me inside was as pure as that, though Garvey was probably onto something as well.

In any event, I entered the unit in January 1988 with the improbable rank of police intern, working New Year's Day with the men-and all nineteen detectives and supervisors were male-of Lieutenant Gary D'Addario's shift.

The rules were fairly straightforward. I could not communicate what I witnessed to my newspaper and I had to obey the orders of the supervisors and investigators I followed. I could not quote anyone by name unless they agreed to be so quoted. And when my ma.n.u.script was complete, it would be reviewed by the department's legal affairs division-not to censor my work for general content but to a.s.sure that I did not reveal key pieces of evidence in cases still pending. As it turned out, no changes resulted from this review.

Shift after shift, with detectives looking on warily, I filled notepads with what seems to me now a frantic stream of quotes, case details, biographical data and general impressions. I read through all the detectives' case files from the previous year, as well as the H-files on some of the biggest cases I had chased as a police reporter: the Warren House shootings, the Bronstein murders, the Barksdale warfare in the Murphy Homes back in '82, the Harlem Park jacket slaying from '83. I couldn't believe I could just walk to the admin office and pull entire case files, then sit at a desk and read them at leisure. I couldn't believe I wasn't thrown off crime scenes, or out of interrogation rooms. I couldn't believe the department bra.s.s wasn't going to change its collective mind, confiscate my ID card and toss me onto Frederick Street.

But days became weeks and the detectives-even those cautious souls who would change their very tone when I walked up on their conversations-soon lost the will to perform, to pretend to be someone other than who they were.

I learned to drink. I dropped my Amex card now and then, whereupon the detectives more than matched me round for round, showing me I still had a lot to learn. Staggering from the Market Bar at closing one night, Donald Worden-who had allowed me to follow him on calls and through cases, but always with a certain veiled contempt-glared at me as if for the first time and drawled, "All right, Simon. What the h.e.l.l do you wanna see? What the f.u.c.k do you think we're gonna show you?"

I had no answer. Notepads were stacked on my desk, a dog-eared tower of random detail that confused and intimidated me. I tried to work six days a week, but my marriage was ending and sometimes I worked seven. If the detectives went drinking after work, I was often in tow.

On night shifts, I would work doubles, coming in at four and staying through the midnight shift until early morning. Sometimes, coming off midnight, we drank at dawn, and I would stagger home to sleep until night. I learned to my amazement that if you forced yourself to drink the morning after a bad drunk, it somehow felt better.

On one February morning, I was hungover and late for morning roll call when Worden phoned to wake me with the news that a dead girl had been found in a Reservoir Hill alley. I was at the crime scene ten minutes later, staring at the eviscerated body of Latonya Wallace and the beginning of an investigation that would become the spine of the book.

I began to focus on that case. On Pellegrini, the new man. On Edgerton, the lone-wolf secondary on the case, and on Worden, the gruff conscience of the unit. I talked less, listened more and learned to pull out the pen and notepad discreetly, so as not to upset the delicate moments of ordinary squadroom life.

In time, because I read the casework voraciously and sat through multiple shifts to note the comings and goings of detectives, I became in some small way a clearinghouse of basic information: "Where's Barlow?"

"He's in court. Part eighteen."

"Is Kevin with him?"

"No, he's at the bar."

"With who?"

"Rick James and Linda. And Garvey went, too."

"Who caught the one on Payson last night?"

"Edgerton. He went home after the morgue and he's coming back at six."

But mostly, I was comic to these men, an amusing twenty-something distraction- "a mouse tossed into a room full of cats," by Terry McLarney's description. "You're lucky we're so bored with each other."

If I went to a morning autopsy, Donald Steinhice would throw his voice and watch me eye the cadavers warily, just as Dave Brown would drag me to the Penn Restaurant to eat that nasty chorizo-and-egg platter so as to measure the fort.i.tude of a novice. If I sat through a successful interrogation, Rich Garvey would turn to me at the end to ask if I had questions of my own, then laugh at whatever reportorial impulse resulted. And if I feel asleep on midnight shift, I would wake to find Polaroid photos of myself, head back in a chair, mouth open, flanked by smiling detectives imitating f.e.l.l.a.t.i.o, their thumbs stuck through open zippers.

McLarney wrote my green sheet, the semi-annual evaluation so detested by working police in Baltimore. "Professional kibbitzer," he wrote in summation of my standing. "It's unclear what Intern Simon's actual responsibilities are, however his hygiene is satisfactory and he seems to know a good deal about our activities. His s.e.xual appet.i.tes remain suspect, however."

At home, with a mattress on the bedroom floor and most of the furnishings in the possession of my ex-wife, I spent hours filling a computer with stream-of-consciousness rambling, emptying the notepads, trying to organize what I was witnessing into separate casefiles, biographies and chronologies.

The Latonya Wallace murder stayed open. I was mortified by this-and not because a killer roamed free and the destruction of a child was unavenged. No, I was too overawed by the ma.n.u.script I would soon have to write to waste a moment thinking in moral terms. Instead, I worried that the book would have no climax, that its conclusion would be open and empty and flawed.

I drank some more, though by summer the detectives, feeling sorry for me perhaps, were buying as many rounds as they put to my credit card. To avoid the heart of the matter-actually writing-I wasted a week or two interviewing the detectives at length with a tape recorder, producing the kind of interviews in which people who have for months been candid and open suddenly talk into a microphone with the certain knowledge that posterity is at stake.

Edgerton caught a second child-murder and solved it, and, without knowing it, I met in the mother of the dead girl one of the central characters of my next book, The Corner The Corner. Ella Thompson began for me at the door of her Fayette Street rowhouse, a mother's face contorted in grief. Four years later, I would wander into the recreation center on Vincent Street and encounter her again-by accident-as I began reporting a different narrative, one that even the best detectives can only glimpse.

During that year in the homicide unit, I never actually felt I'd gone native. Not in any way that seemed to matter. Not in my own mind, anyway. I dressed the part, and at crime scenes and in courtrooms I did what the supervisors and investigators told me to do. Ultimately, I enjoyed myself and the company of the detectives immensely. For four years I had written city murders in a cramped, two-dimensional way-filling the back columns of the metro section with the kind of journalism that reduces all human tragedy, especially those with black or brown victims, to bland, bite-sized morsels: A 22-year-old West Baltimore man was gunned down yesterday at an intersection near his home in an apparent drug-related incident. De tectives have no motive or suspects in the case, police said. A 22-year-old West Baltimore man was gunned down yesterday at an intersection near his home in an apparent drug-related incident. De tectives have no motive or suspects in the case, police said. Antwon Thompson, of the 1400 block of Stricker Street, was found by patrol officers called to the scene of ... Antwon Thompson, of the 1400 block of Stricker Street, was found by patrol officers called to the scene of ...

Suddenly, I had been granted access to a world hidden, if not willfully ignored, by all of that dispa.s.sionate journalism. These weren't murders as benchmarks of a day's events. Nor were they the stuff of pristine, perfectly rendered morality plays. By summer, with the body count rising in the Baltimore heat, I came to realize that I was standing on the factory floor. This was death investigation as an a.s.sembly-line process, a growth industry for a rust-belt America that had long ceased to ma.s.s manufacture much of anything, save for heartbreak itself. Perhaps, I told myself, it was the ordinariness of it all that made it, well, extraordinary.

They went after the Fish Man for the last time in December. He didn't break. Latonya Wallace would not be avenged. But by then I had seen enough to know that the empty, ambiguous ending was the correct one. I called John Sterling, my editor in New York, and told him it was better this way.

"It's real," I said. "It's how the world works, or doesn't."

He agreed. In fact, he'd seen it before I did. He told me to start writing, and after staring at the computer screen for a couple weeks, wondering how you type the first f.u.c.king sentence of a f.u.c.king book, I found myself back at the Market Bar with McLarney, who swayed to the rhythm of a ninth Miller Lite and eyed me, much amused at my predicament.

"Isn't this what you actually do for a living?"

Sort of. Except not something so big as a book.

"I know what you're gonna write."

Do tell.

"It's not about the cases. The murders. I mean, you'll write about the murders so you have stuff to write about. But that's all just the bulls.h.i.t."

I listened. Carefully.

"You're gonna write about us. About the guys. About how we act and the s.h.i.t we say to each other, about how p.i.s.sed off we get and how funny we are sometimes and the s.h.i.t that goes on in that office."

I nodded. As if I'd known it all along.

"I've seen you taking notes when we were just bulls.h.i.tting, when we're just sitting around with nothing to do but jerk each other around. We p.i.s.s and moan and there you are writing. We tell a dirty joke and you're writing. We say anything or do anything and you're there with your pen and your notepad and a weird look on your face. And f.u.c.k if we didn't let you do it."

And then he laughed. At me, or with me-I've never quite been sure.

The book sold some copies. Not enough to make any bestseller lists, but enough that Sterling was willing to pay me if I could manage another idea for another tome. Roger Nolan confiscated my police intern ID and I went back to the Sun Sun. The detectives went back to having their world unexamined. And save for an immediate, panicked reaction by the department bra.s.s in which there were threats to charge the entire unit with conduct unbecoming an officer-the raw wit and rampant profanity of their underlings left colonels and deputy commissioners shocked, shocked, I tell you-the general response to Homicide: A Year on the Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets Killing Streets seemed to be no less muted than that which greets most narrative nonfiction. seemed to be no less muted than that which greets most narrative nonfiction.

Certainly, it didn't help that the tale came from Baltimore. The editor of the New York Times Book Review New York Times Book Review declined initially to review the work, declaring it to be a regional book. A few police reporters at other newspapers said nice things. One evening, when I was working rewrite, plugging out-of-town temperatures into the weather chart, William Friedkin called from Los Angeles to say how much he enjoyed the book. declined initially to review the work, declaring it to be a regional book. A few police reporters at other newspapers said nice things. One evening, when I was working rewrite, plugging out-of-town temperatures into the weather chart, William Friedkin called from Los Angeles to say how much he enjoyed the book.

"William who?"

"Friedkin. I directed the French Connection? To Live and Die in L.A. French Connection? To Live and Die in L.A.?

"Alvarez, stop f.u.c.king with me. I'm late with the G.o.ddam weather table."

A few more deep breaths like that one and the hardbacks copies were off the display shelves and consigned to the true-crime section. I nestled back into the Sun Sun, took up my old beat and began encountering the detectives from the other side of the crime-scene tape. Once, at a triple murder in North Baltimore, I lost my temper at Terry McLarney when he wouldn't come out of an indoor crime scene to debrief me even as the home-final deadline pa.s.sed. In the squadroom the next day, as I was ranting with probably a bit too much indignation, Donald Waltemeyer suddenly exploded out of his chair like a.45 round.

"Jesus f.u.c.king Christ, Simon. Listen to you. You're like one of these f.u.c.kin' defense lawyers who get you on the stand and start asking if it's true, Detective Waltemeyer, that you f.u.c.ked some broad in 1929. Who gives a f.u.c.k? McLarney was on a scene and he didn't give a f.u.c.k about your f.u.c.kin' deadlines. So just go f.u.c.k yourself and tell your newspaper to go f.u.c.k itself and stop bein' a f.u.c.kin' lawyer with us."