“I’m afraid the colonel is talking about making changes,” said the captain. “How do you think the men would feel about working for another lieutenant?”
“I think you’d have a mutiny on your hands,” answered Worden, hoping to shoot down the trial balloon. “Why are you asking?”
“Well, I want to know how the men feel,” explained the captain. “Something may be in the works.”
In the works. Within an hour, D’Addario had heard about that exchange from Worden and three other detectives. He went directly to the colonel, with whom he believed he had credibility. Eight successful years as a homicide supervisor, he reasoned, had to count for a little something.
To D’Addario, the colonel confirmed that the pressure to move him was coming from the captain. Moreover, the colonel seemed noncommittal and expressed concern about the low clearance rate. D’Addario could hear the unasked question: “If you aren’t the problem, then what is?”
The lieutenant returned to his office and typed a long memo that sought to explain the statistical difference between Stanton’s rate and his own. He noted that more than half of the murders taken by his shift were drug-related, noting further that some of those cases had been sacrificed to staff the Latonya Wallace probe. Moreover, he argued, one critical reason for the low rate was that neither lieutenant managed to save any December clearances for the new year-something that always gives the unit a January cushion. The rate will rise, D’Addario predicted, it’s rising now. Give it some time.
To D’Addario, the memo seemed to convince the colonel; others on his shift weren’t sure. The choice of a shift lieutenant as a likely scapegoat might not be so much the work of the captain as the result of criticism from above, perhaps the colonel and maybe even the deputy. If that was the case, then D’Addario was being pressured by more than the clearance rate. It was Monroe Street, too. And the Northwest murders and Latonya Wallace. Especially Latonya Wallace. By itself, D’Addario knew, the absence of charging documents in the little girl’s murder could be enough to send the brass on a head-hunting sortie.
Shorn of political allies, D’Addario had two options: He could accept a transfer to another unit and learn to live with the taste that such a transfer would leave. Or he could tough it out, hoping the clearance rate would continue to climb and a red ball or two would get solved in the process. If he stayed on, his superiors could try to force a transfer, but that, he knew, was a messy process. They would have to show cause, and that would result in a nasty little paper war. He would lose, of course, but it would not be pretty-and the colonel and captain both had to know that.
D’Addario also understood that there would be another cost if he remained in homicide. Because as long as that rate stayed low, he would no longer be able to protect his men from the whims of the command staff, at least not to the extent he had protected them in the past. Appearances would count: Every detective would have to toe closer to the line, and D’Addario would have to make it appear that he was the one compelling them to do so. The overtime would no longer flow as freely; the detectives handling fewer calls would have to pick up their pace. Most important, the detectives would have to cover themselves, writing follow-ups and updates to every case file so that no supervisor could come behind them, arguing that leads had not been pursued. This, D’Addario knew, was pure departmental horseshit. The make-work required for a half-dozen cover-your-ass office reports would waste valuable time. Still, that was the game, and now the game would have to be played.
The most complicated part of that game would be the crack-down on the unit’s overtime pay, a ritual that often marked the end of a budget year in the Baltimore department. The homicide unit consistently came in almost $150,000 over budget on straight overtime and courtside pay for its detectives. Just as consistently, the department tried to crack the whip in April and May, exerting a minimal effect on the unit that disappeared entirely in June, when the new budget year began and the money once again flowed freely. For two or three months each spring, captains told lieutenants who told sergeants to authorize as little OT as possible so that the numbers would look a little better to the brass upstairs. This was possible in a district where, on any given night, one or two fewer radio cars might be handling calls during an overtime crunch. In the homicide unit, however, the practice created surreal working conditions.
The overtime cap was premised on a single rule: Any detective who reached 50 percent of his base pay in accumulated OT and court time was taken out of the rotation. The logic made perfect sense to fiscal services: If Worden hits his limit and is put on permanent daywork, he can’t handle calls. And if he can’t handle calls, he can’t earn overtime. But in the opinion of the detectives and their sergeants, the rule had no logic. After all, if Worden is out of the rotation, then the other four detectives in his squad are catching more calls on the nightshift. And if, God forbid, Waltemeyer is also near his OT limit, then this squad is down to three men. In CID homicide, a squad that goes into a midnight shift with no more than three detectives is asking to be punished.
More important, the overtime cap was a frontal assault on quality. The best detectives were inevitably those who worked their cases longest, and their cases were inevitably those that were strong enough to go to court. Granted, an experienced detective could milk any case for extra hours, but it usually cost a great deal more money to solve a murder than to keep it open, and even more money to actually win that case in court. A cleared homicide is a money tree, a truth recognized by Rule Seven in the pantheon of homicide wisdom.
In reference to the color of money, and the colors by which open and solved murders are chronicled on the board, the rule states: First, they’re red. Then they’re green. Then they’re black. But now, because of D’Addario’s vulnerability, there would be less green in the equation. This spring, the 50 percent overtime rule threatened to do some real damage.
Gary Dunnigan hit the 50 percent mark first and suddenly found himself on a permanent dayshift, working follow-ups to old cases and nothing else. Then Worden hit the wall, then Waltemeyer, then Rick James began edging up over 48 percent. Suddenly, McLarney was looking at three weeks of nightwork with two detectives to call on.
“There’s no limit to how many they can kill,” said Worden cynically. “There’s only a limit to how long we can work them.”
D’Addario played the game as it had to be played, sending warning letters-copied to the colonel and captain-to the detectives approaching the 50 percent cap, then benching those who exceeded the limit. Remarkably, his sergeants and detectives were willing to cooperate in this nonsense. Any one of them could have thwarted the restrictions by calling in more detectives to help with a bad midnight shift and then claiming that events overran policy. Murder, after all, is one of the least predictable things in this world.
Instead, the sergeants sidelined detectives and juggled the schedules because they understood the risk to D’Addario and, beyond that, to themselves. There were a lot of lieutenants in the department and in the estimate of McLarney and Jay Landsman, at least, a good 80 percent of them had the ability, the will and the ambition to do a superior job of screwing up the CID homicide unit if ever given any chance.
But if McLarney and Landsman played the game out of genuine loyalty to D’Addario, Roger Nolan’s reasons were altogether different.
Nolan took seriously his role as a sergeant and he clearly enjoyed working in what was essentially a paramilitary organization. More than most of the men in homicide, he took satisfaction in the protocols of police work-the deference to rank, the institutional loyalty, the chain of command. This peculiarity did not necessarily make him a company man; Nolan protected his detectives as well or better than any other supervisor in homicide, and a detective who worked for him could be assured that only his sergeant would mess with him.