“I’m down at the Market Bar,” he will tell five other detectives, all of whom are fighting back laughter. “But if she calls back, I’m on the street.”
A detective understands that another world is out there, another universe in which discretion and privacy still have meaning. Somewhere far from Baltimore, he knows, there are taxpayers who hold dear the idea of a good and secret death-a well-lived life, becalmed at its end, extinguished in some private, comfortable place with equal measures of grace and solitude. They’ve heard a lot about that kind of death, but they rarely see it. To them, death is violence and miscalculation, mindlessness and cruelty. And what, a detective can ask, does privacy matter amid that kind of carnage?
Several months ago, Danny Shea from Stanton’s shift drove to a high-rise apartment house near the Hopkins campus for an unattended death. She was an elderly music teacher, fully rigored on her daybed, with the score of a Mozart concerto still open on the piano. The FM radio was playing quietly in the living room, tuned to a classical station at the end of the dial. Shea recognized the piece.
“You know what that is?” he asked a uniform, a young man writing his report at the kitchen table.
“What’s what?”
“The piece on the radio.”
“Uh-uh.”
“Ravel,” said Shea. “‘Pavane to a Dead Princess.’”
It was a beautiful, natural death, quite startling in its perfection. Shea suddenly felt himself an intruder in the old woman’s apartment, a violator of a genuinely private act.
A similar feeling now comes over Donald Waltemeyer when he looks at a dead addict and listens to her husband walking up the stairs. There is nothing beautiful or poignant in the death of Lisa Turner: Waltemeyer knows that she was twenty-eight years old, that she was from North Carolina and that she was married. And for reasons beyond his comprehension, she came up to this second-floor shithole to fire heroin until it killed her. End of story.
And still, something clicks for just a moment, some long-lost switch in Waltemeyer’s brain is suddenly thrown to overload. Perhaps it’s because she was young, perhaps because she looks pretty in the light blue sweater. Perhaps it’s because a price must be paid for all this privacy, because you can only be a bystander for so long without paying some of the cost yourself.
Waltemeyer looks down at the girl, listens to the husband struggle up the stairs, and suddenly, almost without thinking, reaches for the falling shoulder of a dead woman’s sweater.
When the husband appears at the door, Waltemeyer asks the question immediately: “Is that her?”
“Oh God,” the man says. “Oh my God.”
“Okay, that’s it,” says Waltemeyer, motioning to the uniform. “Thank you, sir.”
“Who the hell is he?” says the husband, glaring at Milton. “What the hell is he doing here?”
“Get him out of here,” says Waltemeyer, blocking the husband’s view. “Take him downstairs now.”
“Just tell me who he is, goddammit.”
Both uniforms grab the husband and begin pushing him out of the apartment. Easy, they tell him. Take it easy.
“I’m okay. I’m all right,” he tells them in the hallway. “I’m okay.”
They guide him to the other end of the hall, standing with him as he leans into the plasterboard and catches his breath.
“I just want to know what that guy was doing in there with her.”
“It’s his apartment,” says one of the uniforms.
The husband shows his pain, and the uniform volunteers the obvious information: “She just went in there to fire up. She wasn’t fucking the guy or anything like that.”
Another small act of charity, but the husband shakes it off.
“I know that,” says the husband quickly. “I just wanted to know if he was the guy that got her the drugs, that’s all.”
“No. She brought hers with her.”
The husband nods. “I couldn’t get her to stop,” he tells the cop. “I loved her, but I couldn’t get her to stop it. She wouldn’t listen. She told me where she was going tonight because she knew I couldn’t stop her…”
“Yeah,” says the cop, uncomfortable.
“She was such a beautiful girl.”
The cop says nothing.
“I loved her.”
“Uh-huh,” says the cop.
Waltemeyer finishes the scene and drives back to the office in silence, the entire event now confined to a page and a half of his notebook. He catches every light on St. Paul Street.
“What did you get?” asks McLarney.
“Nothing much. An OD.”
“Junkie?”
“It was a young girl.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Pretty.”
Very pretty, thinks Waltemeyer. You could see how, if she had cleaned herself up, she would have been special. Long dark hair. Big traffic-light eyes.
“How old?” asks McLarney.
“Twenty-eight. She was married. I thought she was a lot younger at first.”
Waltemeyer walks to a typewriter. In five minutes, it will all be just another 24-hour report. In five minutes, you can ask him about that loose sweater and he won’t know what you’re talking about. But now, right now, it’s real.
“You know,” he tells his sergeant. “The other day my boy comes home from school, and he’s sitting there in the living room with me and he says, ‘Hey, Dad, someone offered me coke in school today…’”
McLarney nods.
“And I’m thinking, aw shit, here it comes. And then he just smiles and tells me, ‘But I asked for Pepsi instead.’”
McLarney laughs softly.
“Some nights you go out and see shit that’s no good for you,” says Waltemeyer suddenly. “You know what I mean? No fucking good at all.”
Roger Nolan picks up the phone and begins shuffling through the admin office card file for Joe Kopera’s home number. The department’s best ballistics man will be working late tonight.
From the hallway comes the sound of loud banging on the large interrogation room door.
“Hey, Rog,” says one of Stanton’s detectives, “is that your man making all that noise?”
“Yeah. I’ll be there in a second.”
Nolan finds the number and reaches Kopera, explaining the situation quickly. He finishes the call to even louder banging.
“Hey, Rog, shut this motherfucker up, will you?”
Nolan walks through the fishbowl and out into the hallway. The devil himself has his face pressed against the window in the door, hands cupped around his eyes, trying to peer through the one-way glass.
“What’s your problem?”
“I gotta go to the bathroom.”
“The bathroom, huh? I bet you want a drink of water too.”
The devil needs to take a leak. Evil incarnate wants a drink of water. Nolan shakes his head and opens the metal door. “I’ll be damned,” he tells the suspect. “Every time you put one of these motherfuckers in the box, they lose control of their bladder and start getting dizzy from thirst… Okay, c’mon, let’s get it over with…”
The suspect steps slowly from the room, a thirty-one-year-old black man, thinly built, with receding, close-cropped hair and deep brown eyes. His face is rounded, his wide mouth marked by gap teeth and a long overbite. His sweatsuit is a size too big, his high-top tennis shoes well worn. Nothing in his appearance gives truth to his abominable deed: There is nothing in the face to inspire fear, nothing in the eyes to call extraordinary. He is altogether ordinary, and for that reason, too, he inspires contempt.
His name is Eugene Dale, and the computer sheet on Harry Edgerton’s desk provides enough history for two murderers. Most of the arrests involve rape, attempted rape and handgun violations; in fact, Dale is now on parole, having just been released by the state corrections department after serving nine years for sexual assault.