Hell, they might even close Kavanaugh’s and spend the rest of the night out on the parking lot, matching war stories, trying to sober themselves before daybreak and the drive home to a wife already up and putting on her makeup, to the sound of kids already bouncing around the house. Home to the smell of breakfast in the kitchen, to a bedroom with the shades pulled tight and the sheets disturbed by someone else’s night. Another morning when the world spins along without them, another day of another year, measured for those who walk in light and deal with the living.
They sleep until dark.
EPILOGUE
The boundaries of this narrative-January 1, 1988, and December 31, 1988-are necessarily arbitrary, an artificial grid of days, weeks and months imposed on the long and true arc of men’s lives. The homicide detectives of Gary D’Addario’s shift were traveling their collective arc when this account began; they are traveling it still. The names, the faces, the scenes, the case files, the verdicts-these change. Yet the daily violence in any large American city provides a constant background against which a homicide detective seems to labor with timeless defiance. A few men transfer, a few retire, a few latch on to an extended investigation, but the homicide unit remains essentially the same.
The bodies still fall. The phone still bleats. The boys in the back office fill out the daily run sheets and argue about overtime. The admin lieutenant still calculates the clearance rate daily. The board still oozes red and black names. Long after the cases blur or fade entirely from a detective’s memory, the job itself somehow retains a special luster.
Every year, the Baltimore homicide unit stages an alumni dinner at the firefighters’ union hall in Canton, where a hundred or more current and former homicide detectives eat, drink and carouse with one another in celebration and remembrance of everything seen and done and said by men who spend the best part of their lives working murders. Jimmy Oz, Howard Corbin, Rod Brandner, Jake Coleman-every year the auditorium is filled with men who cling to memories of the hardest job they’ll ever have. Not that all of those gathered were great detectives; in fact, some were pretty mediocre in their day. But even the worst of them belongs to a special brotherhood, has a special standing for having lived for a time in the darkest corner of the American experience.
Strangely, they don’t talk much about the cases, and when they do, the murders themselves are little more than scenery. Instead, the stories they tell are about each other-about jokes cracked at crime scenes and things seen through the windshields of unmarked cars; about this asinine colonel, or that legendary, never-say-die prosecutor, or some long-legged blonde nursing supervisor at Hopkins, the young one who had this thing for police. What the hell ever happened to her anyway?
At the homicide reunion of 1988, the stories were about Joe Segretti, who at a crime scene in the east side projects of Waddy Court once pulled a bloody rag from a victim’s head and, noticing an impression of the dead man’s face, declared it the Shroud of Waddy: “A miracle for Baltimore,” he assured his partner. “We gotta call the pope.”
There were stories about Ed Halligan, once Terry McLarney’s partner, who on one occasion got so drunk he dropped a pending case file into a rain-soaked gutter while walking home. When McLarney went to rescue him the following morning, he found the entire file laid out in perfect order on Halligan’s living room floor, each page drying slowly. And everybody remembered the legendary Jimmy Ozazewski- “Jimmy Oz”-a true character, who once solved a red-ball case and proceeded to give television interviews from his own den while wearing a smoking jacket and puffing on an imported pipe.
And they remembered, too, the men no longer there, like John Kurinij, the mad Ukrainian who never did learn to curse properly, calling his suspects “sons-of-bitch-bitch” and bemoaning his “fuck-fuck” job. It was Jay Landsman and Gary D’Addario who got the call to go to Kurinij’s house in the county, where they found his badge and holster arranged neatly on the table. Kurinij was in the bathroom, kneeling over the tub with the bath mat doubled beneath him, his blood seeping into the drain. A detective’s suicide, clean and methodicaclass="underline" Landsman needed only to turn the spigot for the water to wash away the blood, leaving the bullet.
“Fuck him,” said D’Addario, when Landsman began to lose control. “He knew when he did it that we’d find him like this.”
Tales from the sanctum of the station house, back pages from a Book of Mayhem that has no beginning or end. In 1988, thirty detectives, six sergeants and two lieutenants wrote a few fresh stories of their own-comedy, tragedy, melodrama, satire-stories to be heard at many a reunion to come.
The jump in the clearance rate ended any substantive threat to Gary D’Addario’s tenure as a homicide shift lieutenant, but the political intrigue in 1988 still took a toll. To save himself and his men from any real damage, he swallowed just enough to please the bosses. He squeezed out a little overtime, he pressed a few detectives to work more cases, he wrote some memos calling for follow-ups in several files. Most of that could be classified under the heading of necessary and normal evil.
True, D’Addario’s relationship with the captain had never been close, but the events of 1988 left both men with few illusions. To D’Addario, it seemed that the captain was looking for unequivocal loyalty in his subordinates while offering little of the same. He hinted at an unwillingness to protect Donald Worden during the Larry Young mess, and he was unwilling to protect D’Addario when every fresh murder was coming in open. In the lieutenant’s mind, the pattern had become all too familiar.
D’Addario survived it: Eight years as a homicide commander makes any man a connoisseur of survival. Along the way, he managed to get good and sometimes superb police work from his men. But D’Addario was a proud man, and the cost of remaining in homicide was finally too high. One night in 1989, when D’Addario was called downtown in the early morning hours for a police shooting, he heard about an opening for a lieutenant in vice enforcement, and the longer he thought about the idea, the better he liked it. Vice would give him nine-to-five hours, his own car, his own command. He went to the colonel that same week and the transfer was immediately approved. A month later, the homicide unit had a new shift lieutenant-a decent guy, too, fair and sympathetic to the men. But he had a tough act to follow. As one detective put it succinctly, “He ain’t no Dee.”
At this writing, D’Addario is the commander of the BPD’s vice enforcement section. One of his best detectives there is Fred Ceruti, who still harbors some resentment about the events of 1988, but promises that he will be returning to homicide. “Hey,” he says, smiling. “I’m still young.”
Technically, Harry Edgerton remains a homicide detective, although the last two years might suggest otherwise.
Ed Burns, the only detective Edgerton was ever willing to call a partner, briefly returned to the homicide unit in early 1989 after completing his two-year FBI probe of the Warren Boardley drug organization in the Lexington Terrace projects. As chief protagonists in a bloody 1986 turf war in the projects, Boardley and his lieutenants were believed responsible for seven unsolved homicides and fourteen shootings. The federal probe eventually sent the key players to prison for terms ranging from double life to eighteen years without the possibility of parole. Edgerton, who had been removed from the probe because of a budget dispute between federal and local agencies, marked the November 1988 arrest of Boardley and his men by joining Burns and other agents in the raiding parties.