The brain-dead on the porch is an unmistakable divination, a reminder that the rules still apply-even for the likes of Rich Garvey. Never mind that ten days from now he’ll be working a fresh drug murder on the east side, charging through a rowhouse door to grab the shooter beneath the colored lights of a decorated Christmas tree. Never mind that next year will be a crusade as successful as any other. Now, at this moment, Garvey can watch Anthony Morris’s cousin slip back indoors and know, with the faith and certainty of a religion, that there is nothing coming back on this one-no telephone calls to the homicide office, no snitching from the city jail, no talk on the streets of the Western. The case will never go black; it will be open long after Garvey is soaking in his pension.
“Mac, did I imagine that conversation?” he asks, laughing, on the return trip to the office. “Or did it really happen?”
“No, no,” says McAllister. “You must’ve imagined it. Put it out of your mind.”
“Dee-tective,” says Garvey, in bad imitation. “Is what you tryin’ to say is that my cousin is dead?”
McAllister laughs.
“Next case,” says Garvey.
In any man’s work, perfection is an elusive, ethereal goal, an idea that does constant battle with the daily grind. But to a homicide detective, perfection is not even a possibility. On the streets of a city, the Perfect Year is a mere wisp of a thing, a dying fragment of hope, pale and starved and weak.
The Perfect Murder will kick its ass every time.
“Look,” says Terry McLarney, watching the Bloom Street corners with mock innocence. “There’s a criminal.”
Half a block ahead of them, the kid on the corner seems to hear him say it. He turns abruptly from the Cavalier’s headlights, moving down the street, one hand reaching back to pull a rolled newspaper from his pants pocket. McLarney and Dave Brown can both see the newspaper fall softly into the gutter.
“Patrol was so easy,” says McLarney wistfully. “You know?”
Dave Brown knows. If the unmarked Chevy were a radio car, if they were wearing uniforms, if Bloom and Division was in their sector, they’d have a lockup just that easy. Throw the weasel against a wall, cuff him up good, then walk his ass back to that little stick of newsprint, that homemade sheath wrapped around a knife or a syringe or both.
“There used to be these two guys in my squad when I was in the Western,” says McLarney, nostalgic. “They had this running bet over who could go out and get a lockup in the shortest time possible.”
“In the Western,” says Brown, “five minutes.”
“Less,” says McLarney. “After a while, I told them that they ought to make it more challenging. You know, something better than a Part Two arrest. But they didn’t like that… too much work.”
Brown turns onto Bloom and then turns again at Etting. They watch more corner boys drop glassine packets or run into rowhouses.
“See that house there,” says McLarney, pointing to a two-story pile of painted brick. “I got thumped in there. Right in the hallway… Did I ever tell you that story?”
“I don’t think so,” says Brown, polite.
“It was a call for a man with a knife, and when I pulled up this guy just takes one look at me and runs into the house…”
“PC in my book,” says Brown, turning right and cruising back toward Pennsylvania Avenue.
“So I run in after him and there’s this convention of healthy black males in the living room. It was bizarre; we all just kinda looked at each other for a second.”
Dave Brown laughs.
“So then I grab hold of my guy and they’re all over me. Like five or six of ’em.”
“What’d you do?”
“I got hit,” says McLarney, laughing. “But I didn’t let go of my guy either. By the time my bunkies answered the thirteen, everyone had run out the back except for my guy, who ended up getting beat for all his missing friends. I kinda felt sorry for him.”
“What about you?” asks Brown.
“Stitches in my head.”
“Was this before or after you got shot?”
“Before,” says McLarney. “This was when I was in the Central.”
One story after another spills from Terry McLarney’s brain, his mood lightened by a night on the West Baltimore streets. A car ride through the west side never fails to have that effect on McLarney, who can roll through the ghetto remembering a strange thing that happened on this corner, a funny comment overheard down that street. On the surface, it all resembles a nightmare, but dig a little deeper and McLarney can show you the perverse eloquence of the thing, the unending inner-city comedy of crime and punishment.
That corner there, for instance, the one where Snot Boogie got shot.
“Snot Boogie?” asks Brown, disbelieving.
“Yeah,” says McLarney. “And that’s what his friends called him.”
“Nice.”
McLarney laughs, then leaps into the parable of Snot Boogie, who joined the neighborhood crap game, waited for the pot to thicken, then grabbed the cash and bolted down the street only to be shot dead by one of the irate players.
“So we’re interviewing the witnesses down at the office and they’re saying how Snot Boogie would always join the crap game, then run away with the pot, and that they’d finally gotten sick of it…”
Dave Brown drives in silence, barely tracking this historical digression.
“And I asked one of them, you know, I asked him why they even let Snot Boogie into the game if he always tried to run away with the money.”
McLarney pauses for effect.
“And?” asks Brown.
“He just looked at me real bizarre,” says McLarney. “And then he says, ‘You gotta let him play… This is America.’”
Brown laughs loudly.
“I love that,” says McLarney.
“Great story. Did it really happen?”
“Fuck yes.”
Brown laughs again. McLarney’s mood is contagious, even if the reason for tonight’s jaunt was wearing thin.
“I don’t think she’s out tonight,” says Brown, coasting up Pennsylvania Avenue for the fifth or sixth time.
“She’s never out,” says McLarney.
“Fuck this cocksucking bitch,” says Brown, slamming a hand on the steering wheel. “I’m tired of this fucking shit.”
McLarney looks at his detective with newfound delight, as if to encourage this sudden rant.
“I mean, we’re the homicide unit, the murder police, the highly trained investigative elite who always get their man…”
“Careful,” says McLarney. “You’re giving me an erection.”
“And who the fuck is she? She’s a disease-ridden twenty-dollar-a-fuck junkie from Pennsylvania Avenue who’s managed to elude us for three goddamn months. It’s fucking embarrassing is what it is…”
Lenore, the Mystery Whore. The lone witness to Worden’s September stabbing on Pennsylvania Avenue; the woman who can close the file by declaring that her now-dead boyfriend killed her then-dead boyfriend in a dispute over her affections. To Brown and Worden and everyone else in the squad, it is getting a bit embarrassing, this charging up and down the Avenue every other night, jacking up whores and addicts and coming nowhere near the elusive Miss Nore, who is always just beyond a detective’s reach. By now, they’ve heard every line:
“She was out walking last night…”
“Nore? She down on Division Street not a while ago…”
“She came out the carryout and went that way…”
Christ, thinks Brown. It isn’t bad enough that this junkie bitch doesn’t have a permanent address. No, she’s gotta move like the fucking wind. How in the hell do her customers find her?