Rodney Tripps. Dead drug dealer in the driver’s seat of his luxury car. No witnesses. No suspects. No physical evidence. What the hell was there to work on?
“You know, I’m not the only person around here with an open one,” says Brown, exasperated. “I see a couple names up there in red ink that belong to you.”
Worden says nothing, and for just a second Brown wishes he could take back the last two sentences. The office banter always has an edge, but every now and then the line gets crossed. Brown knows that for the first time in three years the Big Man is truly slumping, carrying two consecutive open cases; more important, the mayhem that is the Monroe Street investigation is dragging on interminably.
As a consequence, Worden spends his days shepherding two dozen witnesses into the grand jury room on the second floor of the Mitchell Courthouse, then waiting outside while Tim Doory, the lead prosecutor in the case, does his best to recreate the mysterious slaying of John Randolph Scott. Worden, too, has been called before the same panel, with several of the grand jurors asking pointed questions about the actions of the officers involved in the pursuit of Scott-particularly after those jurors listened to the Central District radio tape. And Worden has no answers; the case begins and ends with a young man’s body in a West Baltimore alley and a cast of Western and Central District officers, all claiming no knowledge of the event.
Not surprisingly, Worden’s only civilian witness-the man identified in newsprint as a potential suspect-has gone before the grand jury and refused to testify, invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Sergeant Wiley, the officer who found the body and who would be made to explain his prior radio transmission canceling the suspect’s description, has not been called as a witness.
We call Wiley as a last resort, Doory explained to Worden at one point, because if he’s culpable, he’ll also take the Fifth. And at that point, the prosecutor argued, there are few options left: If we let him refuse to testify, he walks out of the grand jury room, leaving us with insufficient evidence for any kind of indictment. But if we offer him immunity to compel his testimony, then what? What if John Wiley, under a grant of immunity, tells us he shot that kid? Then, Doory explained, we’ve solved a crime we can’t prosecute.
Returning from the courthouse every weekday afternoon, Worden’s nights are spent in the rotation, handling shootings, suicides and, ultimately, fresh murders. And for the first time since his transfer to homicide, Worden has no answers for those either.
Given that his squad is built around Worden, even McLarney is a little unnerved by the trend. Every detective gets his share of unsolved cases, but for Worden, two consecutive open files simply don’t happen.
During a recent midnight shift, McLarney pointed to the red names on the board and announced: “One of those is going down,” adding, as much to hear himself say it as to convince anyone else, “Donald won’t stand for two in a row like that.”
The first case was a drug murder from Edmondson Avenue back in March, a street shooting in which the only potential witness was a fourteen-year-old runaway from a juvenile detention center. Whether the kid could be found and whether he would tell his story was uncertain. But the second murder, an argument up on Ellamont which escalated into the slaying of a thirty-year-old man-that one ordinarily should have been a dunker. Dwayne Dickerson had been shot once in the back of the head when he tried to intervene in a street dispute, and when everyone involved had been shipped downtown and interviewed, Worden was left with one depressing truth: No one seemed to know the shooter or, for that matter, what he was doing in Baltimore with a gun in his hand. By all accounts-and the witnesses were consistent-the shooter had nothing to do with the original argument.
McLarney may like to think that Worden isn’t capable of letting two murders stay red, but unless the phone rings on the Dickerson murder, there isn’t much left for an investigator to do but check other assault-by-shooting reports from the Southwest and hope something matches. Worden has told his sergeant just that, but McLarney heard instead the echo of Monroe Street. To his way of thinking, the department had used his best detective to go after other cops, and God knows that kind of thing has an effect on a man like Worden. For two months, McLarney has been trying to get his best detective away from the Scott murder, easing him back into the rotation. Get the man back on his horse with some fresh murders, McLarney figures. Get him back on the street and he’ll be the same.
But Worden is not the same. And when Brown lets slip the comment about the red names on the wall, Worden suddenly lapses into cold silence. The banter, the bitching, the locker room humor, give way to brooding.
Brown senses this and changes tone, trying to bait the Big Man rather than fight him off. “Why are you always fucking with me?” he asks. “Why don’t you ever go after Waltemeyer? Does Waltemeyer go out to Pikesville on Saturday dayshifts to get you bagels?”
Worden says nothing.
“Why the hell don’t you ever fuck with Waltemeyer?”
Brown knows the answer, of course. Worden isn’t going to fuck with Waltemeyer, who has more than two decades in the trenches. He’s going to fuck with Dave Brown, who has a mere thirteen years on the force. And Donald Waltemeyer isn’t going to drive up to Pikesville at seven A.M. to get bagels for the same reason. Brown gets the bagels because Brown is the new man and Worden is breaking him in. And when the likes of Donald Worden wants a dozen bagels and half a pound of veggie spread, the new man gets in a Cavalier and drives to Philadelphia if need be.
“This is the thanks I get,” says Brown, still goading the older detective.
“What do you want me to do, kiss you?” says Worden, finally responding. “You didn’t even get garlic for me.”
Brown rolls his eyes. Garlic bagels. Always with the goddamn garlic bagels. They’re supposed to be better for the Big Man’s blood pressure, and when Brown brings back onion or poppy on weekend dayshifts, he never hears the end of it. Excluding the image of Waltemeyer locked in the large interrogation room with six drunken Greek stevedores, Brown’s most fully formed fantasy delivers him to Worden’s front lawn at five on a Saturday morning to lob sixty or seventy garlic bagels against the master bedroom windows.
“They didn’t have garlic,” says Brown. “I asked.”
Worden looks at him with contempt. It is the same expression he carries in that crime scene photograph from Cherry Hill, the one that Brown liberated for his personal collection, the one that said, “Brown, you piece of shit, how can you possibly believe those beer cans have anything to do with your crime scene.” One day, Worden just may retire and Dave Brown just may become the next centerpiece of McLarney’s squad. But until then, the younger man’s life is consigned to any hell of Worden’s choosing.
For Worden, however, the hell is entirely the creation of his own mind. He has loved this job-loved it too much, perhaps-and now, finally, he seems to be running out of time. That it is hard for Worden to accept this is understandable; for twenty-five years, he came to work every day armed with the knowledge that wherever the department decided to put him, he would shine. It had always been so, beginning with all those years in the Northwest, an extended tour that made working that district second nature to him. Hell, he still can’t work a homicide up there without making some connection to places and people he knew back when. From the beginning, he had never been much on writing the reports, but damned if there was anyone better at reading the street. Nothing happened on his post that escaped Worden’s notice: his memory for faces, for addresses, for incidents that other cops had long forgotten, is simply amazing. Unlike every other detective in the unit, Worden never carries notepaper to his crime scenes for the simple reason that he remembers everything; a standard joke in the unit was that Worden needed a single matchbook to record the particulars of three homicides and a police shooting. On the witness stand, attorneys would often ask to see Worden’s notes, then be incredulous when he claimed to have none.