The manager rolls his eyes. “I mean, I’m amazed he actually killed him. I’m amazed he did it, but I’m not surprised he did it, you know?”
Warren was crazy, the manager says. He came to work every other day with a semiautomatic pistol tucked into his jeans, showing off his flash money and telling everyone about how good his drug connections were.
“Did he have drug connections?”
“Oh yeah.”
It was hard getting Waddell to do work out at a site, the manager says. He’d rather spend time telling everyone else on the crew how dangerous he was and how he had killed people before.
Well, thought Garvey, listening to the manager ramble on, that much was true anyway. Back at the office an hour ago, the detectives had run Waddell’s name and come up with an impressive sheet that culminated in a second-degree murder conviction twelve years ago. In fact, Waddell had just made parole.
“He’s a mental case,” says the manager, a sawed-off billy with dirty blond hair. “You know, I’d be scared to deal with him sometimes… I can’t believe he killed Carlton.”
For the regulars in the morning rush at the Dunkin’ Donuts counter, the conversation is a startling diversion. The manager chose the spot because it was near the day’s construction site; now, the businessmen at the counter are ordering refills and staring over their newspapers at the spectacle of two plainclothes detectives working a murder.
“What was Carlton like?”
“Carlton was a real good worker,” says the manager. “I’m not sure, but I think it was Carlton who got Waddell his job with us. I know they came to work together all the time.”
“Tell me what happened yesterday at work,” says Garvey.
“Yesterday,” says the manager, shaking his head. “Yesterday was just a joke. They were joking around, you know, teasing Warren.”
“What about?”
“Different stuff, you know. The way he acted and how he didn’t do any work.”
“Was Carlton teasing him?”
“They all were. They called him a dickhead and he didn’t like that.”
“Why’d they call him a dickhead?”
“Because, you know,” says the manager, shrugging off the question, “he’s a dickhead.”
Garvey laughs.
At one point, the manager tells them, Waddell flashed his semiauto and declared cryptically that tomorrow was election day and people always get killed on election day. Garvey has heard the summer heat wave theory and the full moon theory of inner-city mortality, but never the election day postulate. This is a new one.
“Tell me about this gun.”
The manager describes the weapon as a 9mm semiauto with a clip of eighteen rounds. The casings at the scene were.38, but both Garvey and McAllister know that most people can’t tell a.38 from a 9mm on first sight. Warren was proud of the gun, the manager says, recalling that Waddell had explained that he always mixed hollow-point and roundnose ammunition together in the clip, alternating between the two. “That’s the way to kill a man,” Waddell told anyone willing to listen.
That, too, matches up when both detectives return to the city to watch an assistant medical examiner pull bullets out of Carlton Robinson’s body. It is a slow morning on Penn Street-a double suicide or murder-suicide from Montgomery County, another suicide from Anne Arundel, two probable overdoses, an unexplained collapse, and a ten-year-old girl run down by a truck. The detectives don’t have to wait more than an hour to confirm that half the recovered slugs are hollow-point, the rest, standard roundnosed ammo.
The ballistic evidence is tinged with irony. Not only is November 9 election day in Maryland, it also happens to be the same day the state’s vaunted Saturday Night Special law takes effect. Passed by the state legislature in the spring despite a $6.7 million lobbying effort backed by the National Rifle Association, the law set up a review board to identify and prohibit the sale of cheap handguns in Maryland. Touted as a victory over gun control opponents and a counterweight to handgun violence, the law is in truth a largely meaningless exercise. Not since the 1970s have cheap handguns been responsible for more than a handful of the city’s homicides; nowadays even teenagers are walking around with semiautomatics tucked into their sweatpants. Smith & Wesson, Glock, Baretta, Sig Sauer-even the dickheads of the world, Warren Waddell included, are carrying quality weapons. And though Maryland’s landmark gun control law is the pride of its political leaders, it has arrived about fifteen years too late.
On the day after Carlton Robinson’s murder, Warren Waddell calls the manager to say he won’t be coming to work. He also asks if his employer can pick up tomorrow’s paycheck and meet him across town. Anticipating such a request, the detectives told supervisors at the construction company to explain to Waddell that he has to come to the office in Essex and sign for the check in person. The manager gives him that story and then asks if he really killed Carlton.
“I can’t talk right now,” Waddell says.
Then, to the amazement of all concerned, Waddell shows up the next morning to claim his paycheck, eyes the secretaries suspiciously, then leaves abruptly. He and the friend who drove him are arrested at a county police roadblock a mile or two away. Searched by the county officers, Waddell is found to be carrying a large amount of cash, an American Express card and a U.S. passport. Upon his arrest, he makes no statement, then further endears himself to Garvey and McAllister by faking a stomach ailment on the trip downtown, wasting two hours of the detectives’ time at Sinai Hospital.
Everything about the case puts Waddell’s signature on the murder-the victim’s dying words, the fight and threats at work the previous day, the mixture of hollow-point and standard ammo, the suspect’s behavior after the murder. Yet when Garvey brings the case into the state’s attorney’s office, he’s told that it’s an easy indictment but a loser in court.
The centerpiece of the case-Carlton Robinson’s dying words-may prove inadmissible simply because the officers at the scene did not inform the victim that he was dying. Nor did Robinson specifically tell the officers that he believed his life was ending. Instead, the officers did the natural thing. They called for the ambo and leaned close to the victim, telling Robinson to hang on, assuring him that if he remained conscious he would make it.
Without an acknowledgment of imminent death by either the victim or his attendants, Robinson’s accusation could well be knocked down by a defense attorney who knows his Maryland code.
And without the dying declaration, they have weak circumstance and little more. Having been through the murder mill once before, Waddell shows no interest in the interrogation process, nor does a subsequent search warrant produce the murder weapon.
Garvey, of course, has no choice but to charge the murder. For one thing, he knows that Warren Waddell murdered Carlton Robinson. For another, he owes it to himself to close the case in this Perfect Year. But even as Waddell is trundled off to city jail for pretrial detention, the detective knows that this is one case for the lawyers to salvage.
Frustrated by the initial reaction from the state’s attorney’s office, Garvey asks Don Giblin, his golfing buddy in the violent crimes unit, to shop around for a veteran prosecutor. Garvey has seen enough of the trial division to know that half the ASAs in the office will look at a file like this and immediately pronounce the legal problem insurmountable. As with the Lena Lucas murder, he needs a fighter.
“Get me a good one, Don,” he tells Giblin over the telephone. “That’s all I’m asking.”
TEN
Deck the halls with boughs of holly,
Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!
Throw that stiff up on the dolly,
Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!
Talk to us and if you’re willing,
Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!