The Fish Man, as durable a murder suspect as ever existed, once again returns to center stage.
Donald Waltemeyer grabs the dead girl by both arms, feeling for any tension in the hands and fingers. The girl’s hands follow his freely, giving the appearance of a bizarre, horizontal dance.
“She’s wet,” he says.
Milton, the junkie on the sofa, nods.
“What’d you do? Put her in cold water?”
Milton nods again.
“Where? In the bath?”
“No. I just splashed her with water.”
“From where? That bathtub?”
“Yeah.”
Waltemeyer walks into the bathroom, where he satisfies himself that the tub is still covered with droplets. It is an old wives’ tale among the junkies: Overdoses can be brought back by putting them in cold water, as if a bath can somehow rid them of whatever they’ve put in their veins.
“Lemme ask you this, Milton,” says Waltemeyer. “Did you and her use the same works or did you fire your shit using something else?”
Milton gets up and moves toward the closet.
“Don’t fucking show it to me,” says Waltemeyer. “If you show it to me, I gotta lock you up.”
“Oh.”
“Just answer the question. Did you use the same needle?”
“No. I got my own.”
“Okay then. Sit down and tell me again what happened.”
Milton runs down the tale again, leaving nothing out. Waltemeyer hears again about how the white girl came by to fire up, about how she often came up here to shoot because her husband didn’t like her using.
“Like I said, she brought me that box of noodles ’cause she used some last time she was here.”
“This macaroni here?”
“Yeah. She brought that with her.”
“She had her own dope?”
“Yeah. I had mine and then she came with hers.”
“Where was she sitting when she fired?”
“This chair here. She fired up and then fell asleep. I looked over after a while and she wasn’t breathing.”
Waltemeyer nods. The call is straight up, and for that reason alone he feels good. After three months of tracking Geraldine Parrish and her missing relatives, even a simple overdose can be something of a reprieve. Waltemeyer had told himself that if he didn’t get back into the rotation on this midnight shift, he would lose his mind. McLarney had agreed.
“Your run sheets have been getting messier and messier,” the sergeant told him a week ago. “It’s like a cry for help.”
Maybe so. Waltemeyer had taken the Parrish case as far as he could, though there would be more work to come as trial preparation got under way. And he still hadn’t figured out exactly what had happened to Geraldine’s last husband, the aged Reverend Rayfield Gilliard, who died after a few weeks of marriage. A relative was now telling them that Miss Geraldine had ground two dozen Valium into the Reverend Gilliard’s tuna salad, then watched as the old man slowly succumbed to a seizure. The story was solid enough that Doc Smialek and Marc Cohen, the assistant state’s attorney handling the case, were willing to try for an exhumation order. Some days, Waltemeyer truly believed that the case had no end.
All of which makes this little overdose quite pleasing. One body, one witness, one page of a 24-hour report on the admin lieutenant’s desk-police work as Waltemeyer remembers it. The lab tech is hard at work and the ME is on the way. The witness is even cooperative and apparently truthful. All is flowing gracefully toward a resolution until the first officer appears in the doorway to say that the dead girl’s husband is downstairs.
“Do we need him for an ID?” asks the uniform.
“Yeah,” says Waltemeyer, “but not if he’s going to come up here and lose it. I don’t want that.”
“I’ll warn him about that.”
The husband comes to the bottom of the stairs, wearing an expression of incredible grief. He is a good-looking man, thirty or so, tall with long sandy brown hair.
“If you’re going to go up there, you have to be calm,” says the officer.
“I understand.”
Hearing footsteps on the stairs, Waltemeyer turns back toward the young woman and notices that the left bra strap and part of the cup are exposed, with the sweater pulled back down the arm in the search for the fresh track. Leaning over at the last second, he pulls the sweater gently over her shoulder.
For a detective, it is a small but extraordinary act-extraordinary because the notion of privacy loses most of its meaning after a few months of working murders. What, after all, could be less private than a stranger, an interloper, evaluating a human being’s last moments on earth? What could be less private than a body taken apart at autopsy, or a bedroom emptied of its contents by a search warrant, or a suicide note read and Xeroxed and stapled to the face sheet of a police incident report? After a year or two in the trenches, privacy is something that every detective learns to mock. More than compassion or sincerity or empathy, it is the first casualty of police work.
Two months ago, Mark Tomlin caught the year’s first and only autoerotic death. It was an engineer in his late thirties, trussed up on his bed in leather underwear, suffocated by a plastic bag that the victim had placed on his own head. There were pulleys and levers that controlled the cords by which the victim was bound, and by moving an arm in a certain direction, the man could have freed himself. But long before he could do that, he passed out from lack of oxygen-a consequence of the plastic bag, which he had used to induce hypoxia, an ethereal, oxygen-deprived state in which masturbation supposedly becomes more erotic. That bedroom was a strange sight, and Tomlin, of course, couldn’t help but show Polaroids to a few thousand other cops. After all, the poor guy looked damned silly decomposing in his leather shorts, arms trussed up over his head, toes clamped together by thumbcuffs, bondage magazines scattered across the dresser. Bizarre stuff, and no one would have believed it without the photographs. Neither privacy nor dignity had much of a chance on that one.
Almost every detective has encountered two or three scenes where some relative tried, for reasons of propriety more than deception, to dress a dead body. Likewise, almost every detective has handled a dozen overdoses in which mothers and fathers had felt compelled to hide the needle and cooker before the ambulance arrived. One suicide prompted a parent to painstakingly rewrite the victim’s note in the desire to exclude one especially embarrassing admission. The world never stops insisting on values and standards, although such things no longer matter to the dead. The world never stops calling for a little dignity, a little propriety, but the cops never stop calling for the morgue wagon; between the two lies an abyss that can never be bridged.
In the Baltimore homicide office, privacy is a stillborn idea. The unit, after all, is a locker room of sorts, a male-dominated purgatory in which thirty-six detectives and detective sergeants wander in and out of each other’s lives, cracking jokes as this detective’s marriage implodes and that detective shows the unmistakable signs of alcohol addiction.
A homicide detective isn’t any more or less degenerate than any other middle-aged American male, but since he spends his life prying up other men’s secrets, he has little regard for his own. And in a world where the act of premeditated murder becomes routine, any more subtle sin has trouble competing. Any man can drink too much and wreck his station wagon on an upcounty road, but a homicide detective can tell the rest of his squad the story in a voice that betrays equal shares of bravado and embarrassment. Any man can pick up a woman in a downtown bar, but a homicide detective will later entertain his partner with a comedic soliloquy that describes in detail all the later action at the motel. Any man can lie to his wife, but a homicide detective will sit in the middle of the coffee room yelling into a phone extension that he has to work late on a case and if she doesn’t believe that, she can go to hell. And then, after convincing her, he will slam down the receiver and stalk over to the coat rack.