“I already gave them blood.”
“This is different. This is a court order for evidence.”
“I don’t want to.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
“I want to talk to a lawyer.”
Edgerton shoves the paper into Dale’s hands, then points to the judge’s signature at the bottom of the page. “You don’t get to talk to a lawyer for this. It’s signed by a judge-see that? We have a right to your blood and your hair.”
Eugene Dale shakes his head. “Why do you need my blood?”
“For DNA testing. We’re going to match it to the girl,” says Edgerton.
“I want to talk to a lawyer.”
Edgerton moves closer to his suspect, his voice low. “Either you let her take some blood and some hairs the easy way or I’m going to take it myself, because that warrant says I can. And I can tell you that you’d definitely rather have her do it.”
Eugene Dale sits silently, almost in tears as the nurse brings the needle up to his right arm. Edgerton watches from the opposite wall as blood is drawn and then hairs plucked from his suspect’s head and body. The detective is on the way out the door, samples in hand, when Eugene Dale speaks again.
“Don’t you want to talk to me again?” he asks. “I want to tell the truth.”
Edgerton ignores him.
“You want to hear the truth?”
“No,” says Edgerton. “Not from you.”
Rich Garvey stands shivering in the predawn emptiness of Fremont Avenue, staring at a pile of blood-soaked clothing, two spent.38 casings and a blue plastic lunch pail containing two submarine sandwiches wrapped in tin foil. So much for physical evidence.
Robert McAllister stands shivering next to Garvey, scanning the length of Fremont Avenue and its tributaries for any trace of human endeavor. It’s not bad enough that the streets are empty, there aren’t even any lights in the rowhouse windows. So much for witnesses.
In the few seconds before anyone speaks, Garvey looks at McAllister and McAllister looks at Garvey, each of them wordlessly communicating the same thought:
Hell of a case you got, Mac.
Whoa, you caught a tough one here, Garv.
And yet before anything unseemly can pass between two partners, the first officer-a kid by the name of Miranda, an earnest young soldier still basking in the wonder of it all-approaches them to offer up one little detaiclass="underline" “He was talking when we got here.”
“He was talking?”
“Oh yeah.”
“What did he say?”
“Well, he told us who shot him…”
If this universe is truly balanced, if there is a negative and positive to the order of things, then somewhere exists a yin to balance Rich Garvey’s yang. Somewhere there exists another career cop, an Irishman no doubt, with wire-rim glasses and a dark mustache and a back problem. He is standing over his eleventh straight drug murder in silent suffering, bargaining with an indifferent God for one shred of physical evidence, for one ignorant, evasive witness. The anti-Garvey is a good cop, a good detective, but lately he has entertained a few doubts about his abilities, as has his sergeant. He is drinking a little too much and he is yelling at his kids. He knows nothing of balance and order, of Tao logic, of his alter ego in the city of Baltimore who is wantonly solving homicides with the good fortune of two men.
“Oh do tell,” says Garvey.
“He said Warren Waddell shot him.”
“Warren Waddell?”
“Yeah, he said his buddy Warren shot him in the back for no reason. He kept saying, ‘I can’t believe he shot me. I can’t believe it.’”
“You heard all this?”
“I was standing right over him. Me and my side partner heard it all. He said this guy Warren works with him at a place called Precision Concrete.”
Way to go, my man, way to go. Everything was going from gray to black in the rear of Medic 15, but you got it done, you said what had to be said. You left a little something behind for a homicide detective to remember you by, and for that Rich Garvey thanks you.
A dying declaration, the lawyers call it-admissible evidence in a Maryland courtroom if the victim is informed by competent medical personnel that he is dying or otherwise indicates that he believes himself to be dying. And while it’s not uncommon for homicide victims to make dying declarations, it is a rare and special moment when those utterances are at all helpful to a detective, not to mention relevant.
Every homicide detective has a favorite story involving a murdered man’s last words. Many of these tales center on the code of the street and its observance even at life’s end. One involves the last moments of a West Baltimore doper, who was still talking when officers arrived.
“Who shot you?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute,” the victim declared, presumably unaware that he had about forty seconds left to live.
Having suffered deep stab wounds to the chest and face, one dying man claimed to have cut himself shaving. Another victim, shot five times in the chest and back, assured officers with his last breath that he would take care of the problem himself.
But perhaps the most classic dying declaration story belongs to Bob McAllister. Back in ’82, during his first weeks as a homicide detective, Mac had worked a long detail case with other detectives and had been a secondary on a few calls, but otherwise he was pretty green. In the hope that he’d learn from a veteran, they paired him with Jake “the Snake” Coleman, alias the Polyester Prince, a gravel-voiced, bantamweight detective of legendary proportions. And so, when the call came in for a shooting on Pennsylvania Avenue, Jake Coleman was out the door with McAllister in tow.
The dead man at Pennsie and Gold was named Frank Gupton. McAllister can remember the name without hesitation; he also remembers that the case is still as open as the day is long.
“He was alive when we got here,” said the first officer at the scene.
“Oh yeah?” said Coleman, encouraged.
“Yeah. We asked him who shot him.”
“And?”
“He said, ‘Fuck you.’”
Coleman slapped McAllister on the back. “Well, brother,” he growled, imparting an early lesson to the younger detective, “looks like you got your first murder.”
Now, standing out on Fremont Avenue, Garvey and McAllister both know enough about their victim, one Carlton Robinson, to say that whatever else he was, he wasn’t cut from the same cloth as Frank Gupton. He wanted to be avenged.
An hour after clearing the scene, both detectives are in a west side rowhouse, talking with Carlton’s girlfriend, who had packed the victim’s lunch pail and kissed him good-bye as he left to catch an early morning ride to work.
The interview is hard. The girlfriend is pregnant with Carlton’s child, and he was supporting her and talking about marriage. She knows that he usually caught his ride to work at Pennsylvania and North and she knows the name Warren Waddell as a co-worker who sometimes caught the same ride. But Garvey and McAllister have only a few minutes to talk with her before the sound of a ringing telephone fills the small apartment. The hospital, thinks Garvey, already aware of what the news will be.
“No,” she wails, dropping the receiver on the floor and falling into a girlfriend’s arms. “No, goddammit. No…”
Garvey stands up first.
“Why is this happening to me?”
Then McAllister.
“Why…”
Both detectives leave their cards in the kitchen and find their own way to the door. Everything so far-from the lunch pail to Carlton’s willingness to name his killer to his girlfriend’s tears-tells them they have a real victim here.
A few hours later, at a doughnut shop off Philadelphia Road in eastern Baltimore County, the site manager of Precision Concrete confirms as much: “Carlton was just a great guy, a really great guy. He was one of my best guys.”
“And Waddell?” asks Garvey.