Homicide is a day-in, day-out journal, an intermingling of the mundane and the biblically heinous, and Simon’s eagerness and avidity to absorb, to digest, to be there and convey the world before his eyes to the universe beyond, runs through every page. There is a love for everything he witnesses, an implicit belief in the beauty of simply stating that whatever he sees playing itself out in real time is “The Truth” of a world-this is how it is, this is how it works, this is what people say, how they act, act out, dissociate, justify, where they come up short, transcend themselves, survive, go under.
Simon also exhibits a knack for keying in on the enormity of little things: the quality of mild surprise in the half-closed eyes of the freshly dead, the ineffable poetry of a throwaway non sequitur, the physical ballet of aimlessness on the corners, the unconscious dance of rage and boredom and joy. He documents the gestures, the rueful misnomers, the way the eyes cut, the mouth tightens. He records the unexpected civilities between adversaries, the gallows humor that allegedly saves one’s sanity or humanity or whatever the excuse is for making jokes at the expense of the recently murdered, the breathtaking stupidity that propels most homicidal actions, the survival strategies adopted by people living in the most dire circumstances in order simply to make it through one more day. He captures how the streets themselves are a narcotic for the cops as well as the street soldiers (and the occasional writer), everyone jacked for the next predictable yet unexpected bit of drama that will put both sides in motion and send the innocents caught in the middle dropping for cover beneath the bedroom window or huddling in the supposedly bulletproof bathtub-the family that ducks together stays together. And time after time he hammers home the fact that there’s very little Black and White out there, and a hell of a lot of Gray.
Homicide is a war story, and the theater of engagement stretches from the devastated rowhouses of East and West Baltimore to the halls of the state legislature in Annapolis. It reveals with no small irony how survival games on the streets mirror survival games in city hall, how all who engage in the drug war live and die by the numbers-kilos, ounces, grams, pills, profits for one side; crimes, arrests, solve rates, and budget cuts for the other. The book is a realpolitik examination of a municipality in the midst of a slow-motion riot, but through the steadfastness of Simon’s presence Homicide offers us the patterns hidden within the chaos. Baltimore, in fact, is Chaos Theory incarnate.
With the success of the television adaptation of this book, Simon has been able to branch out into drama-the brilliant six-part miniseries based on his follow-up book, The Corner (co-written with Ed Burns), and the Russian novel of an HBO series, The Wire. With these later projects he gets to kick out the jams a little, to nudge and mastermind the truth into a slightly artificial shapeliness to heighten the big-ticket social issues. But even with the creative freedom of fiction, his work remains an exaltation of nuance, a continuing exploration of how the smallest external act can create the greatest internal revolution-in the life of a single marginalized person or in the spiritual and political biorhythm of a major American city.
All of which is to say that if Edith Wharton came back from the dead, developed a bent for municipal power brokers, cops, crackheads and reportage, and didn’t really care what she wore to the office, she’d probably look a little something like David Simon.
The Players
Lieutenant Gary D’Addario
Shift Commander
Detective Sergeant Terrence McLarney
Squad Supervisor
Detective Donald Worden
Detective Rick James
Detective Edward Brown
Detective Donald Waltemeyer
Detective David John Brown
Detective Sergeant Roger Nolan
Squad Supervisor
Detective Harry Edgerton
Detective Richard Garvey
Detective Robert Bowman
Detective Donald Kincaid
Detective Robert McAllister
Detective Sergeant Jay Landsman
Squad Supervisor
Detective Tom Pellegrini
Detective Oscar Requer
Detective Gary Dunnigan
Detective Richard Fahlteich
Detective Fred Ceruti
ONE
Pulling one hand from the warmth of a pocket, Jay Landsman squats down to grab the dead man’s chin, pushing the head to one side until the wound becomes visible as a small, ovate hole, oozing red and white.
“Here’s your problem,” he said. “He’s got a slow leak.”
“A leak?” says Pellegrini, picking up on it.
“A slow one.”
“You can fix those.”
“Sure you can,” Landsman agrees. “They got these home repair kits now…”
“Like with tires.”
“Just like with tires,” Landsman says. “Comes with a patch and everything else you need. Now a bigger wound, like from a thirty-eight, you’re gonna have to get a new head. This one you could fix.”
Landsman looks up, his face the very picture of earnest concern.
Sweet Jesus, thinks Tom Pellegrini, nothing like working murders with a mental case. One in the morning, heart of the ghetto, half a dozen uniforms watching their breath freeze over another dead man-what better time and place for some vintage Landsman, delivered in perfect deadpan until even the shift commander is laughing hard in the blue strobe of the emergency lights. Not that a Western District midnight shift is the world’s toughest audience; you don’t ride a radio car for any length of time in Sector 1 or 2 without cultivating a diseased sense of humor.
“Anyone know this guy?” asks Landsman. “Anyone get to talk to him?”
“Fuck no,” says a uniform. “He was ten-seven when we got here.”
Ten-seven. The police communication code for “out of service” artlessly applied to a human life. Beautiful. Pellegrini smiles, content in the knowledge that nothing in this world can come between a cop and his attitude.
“Anyone go through his pockets?” asks Landsman.
“Not yet.”
“Where the fuck are his pockets?”
“He’s wearing pants underneath the sweatsuit.”
Pellegrini watches Landsman straddle the body, one foot on either side of the dead man’s waist, and begin tugging violently at the sweatpants. The awkward effort jerks the body a few inches across the sidewalk, leaving a thin film of matted blood and brain matter where the head wound scrapes the pavement. Landsman forces a meaty hand inside a front pocket.
“Watch for needles,” says a uniform.
“Hey,” says Landsman. “Anyone in this crowd gets AIDS, no one’s gonna believe it came from a fucking needle.”
The sergeant pulls his hand from the dead man’s right front pocket, causing perhaps a dollar in change to fall to the sidewalk.
“No wallet in front. I’m gonna wait and let the ME roll him. Somebody’s called the ME, right?”
“Should be on the way,” says a second uniform, taking notes for the top sheet of an incident report. “How many times is he hit?”
Landsman points to the head wound, then lifts a shoulder blade to reveal a ragged hole in the upper back of the dead man’s leather jacket.
“Once in the head, once in the back.” Landsman pauses, and Pellegrini watches him go deadpan once again. “It could be more.”