“What are you, left-handed?” said Edgerton, rechecking the right arm. “Where the fuck did you shoot your shit?”
The dead man answered with his grin.
“Why,” Edgerton asked the corpse, “are you doing this to me?”
A week later and Edgerton is still the point man for D’Addario’s shift, racing across Southwest Baltimore to yet another shooting call that will, if bad luck holds, be nothing more than a grazing. There will be no crime scene, no suspect, no dead man sprawled at the intersection of Hollins and Payson. Edgerton conjures up not a corpse, but an eighteen-year-old sitting on a gurney in the ER at Bon Secours, fully alert, talking, with nothing more than an Ace bandage wrapped around one arm.
“The El Supremo’s gonna have to give me a break already,” he says, weaving between two lanes in the emptiness of Frederick Avenue. “I just can’t buy a murder.”
He does a Texas stop at the Monroe Street signal, then wheels right onto Payson. Blue strobes from the radio cars greet him, but Edgerton immediately notices the absence of fire department cherry tops. No body on the ground, either. If there was an ambo, Edgerton tells himself, it’s long gone.
The detective marks his time of arrival and slams the driver’s door. A Southwest uniform, a young white kid, sidles up with an earnest look on his face.
“He’s alive, right?” Edgerton says.
“Who? The victim?”
No, thinks Edgerton, Elvis fucking Presley. Of course the victim. The detective nods.
“I don’t think so,” says the uniform. “Not for long anyway. He looked pretty bad in the ambo.”
The detective shakes his head. The kid doesn’t understand what he’s dealing with. I don’t do murders, Edgerton wants to tell him. I just handle calls.
“We got you a witness, though.”
A witness. Now it’s definitely not a murder.
“Where’s this witness?”
“Over there by my car.”
Edgerton looks across the intersection at a short, wire-thin doper who stares back and nods with what appears to be mild interest. This strikes Edgerton immediately, because eyewitnesses forced to remain at the scene of a murder are generally uncooperative and sullen.
“I’ll be over there in a minute. Where’s the victim?”
“Bon Secours. I think.”
“This is the scene right here?”
“This here, and over that way you’ve got some more shell casings. Twenty-twos, I think.”
Edgerton moves slowly into the street, carefully gauging his own steps. Ten shell casings-.22 rifle by the look of them-are scattered across the asphalt, each circled by a yellow chalk mark. The pattern of the spent shells seems to travel west across the center of the intersection, with most of the casings lying near the southwest corner. And at that corner, two more chalk marks note the location of the body when the paramedics arrived. Head east. Feet west at the curb’s edge.
The detective walks the scene for another ten minutes, looking for anything out of the ordinary. No blood trail. No fresh scuff marks. No tire patches. Truly an unremarkable crime scene. In the gutter near the northeast corner, he finds a broken gelatin cap with traces of white powder. No surprise here-the intersection of Hollins and Payson is a drug market after dark. Moreover, the capsule is yellowed and dirty enough to make Edgerton believe it’s been in the street for several days and has nothing to do with his shooting.
“Do you have this post?” he asks the uniform.
“Not usually. But I’m in the sector, so I know this corner pretty well. What do you need to know?”
What do I need to know. Edgerton is beginning to like this kid, who not only knows enough to grab hold of anything at the scene that resembles a witness but is also talking like he knows the area he’s working. In the Baltimore department, this is a situation worthy of nostalgia. Ten or fifteen years ago, a homicide detective could ask a uniform a question and expect an answer. Those were the days when a good man owned his post and one dog couldn’t fuck another at Hollins and Payson without word getting back to the Southwest station house. In that era, a patrolman who worked a post and caught a murder could expect to be asked who hung on that corner and where they could be located. And if he didn’t know, he found out in a hurry. Nowadays, Edgerton tells himself, we’re lucky if the post man can get the street names right. This kid here is a real police. A throwback.
“Who lives in that corner house there?”
“Bunch of drug dealers. It’s a fucking shooting gallery is what it is. Our DEU hit it last week and locked up about a dozen of those fuckers.”
Fuck that. No likely witnesses there.
“What about that corner?”
“Corner house has junkies. Junkies and an old wino. No, the wino lives one house down.”
Priceless, Edgerton thinks. The kid is priceless.
“What about over there?”
The uniform shrugs. “I’m not sure on that one. That might be a real person living there.”
“Did you canvass?”
“Yeah, we did half the block. No answer at that house, and the assholes over there say they didn’t see shit. We can lock ’em up if you want.”
Edgerton shakes his head, writing a few lines in his notepad. The uniform leans over to get a look, just a little bit curious.
“You know this guy you grabbed?” Edgerton asks.
“Not by name, but I’ve seen him around. He sells off this corner and he’s been locked up, I know that. He’s a piece of shit, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Edgerton smiles briefly, then crosses the intersection. The wire-thin dealer is leaning against the radio car, a black beret pulled down straight across his forehead. High-top Air Jordans, Jordache jeans, Nike sweatshirt-a walking pile of ghetto status. He actually smiles when Edgerton walks up to the car.
“I guess I hung too long,” the dealer says.
Edgerton smiles. A homeboy who knows the drill.
“I guess you did. What’s your name?”
The dealer gives it up in a mumble.
“Any ID?”
The dealer shrugs, then pulls out a state proof-of-age card. The name checks.
“This your right address?”
The dealer nods.
“What was the shooting about?”
“I can probably say what it’s about. And I can say what it looked like from down the street, but I didn’t see who it was did it.”
“What do you mean you didn’t see them?”
“I mean I was too far. I was down in the middle of the block when they came up shooting. I didn’t-”
Edgerton cuts him off as another radio car, cruising south on Payson, pulls to the curb. O.B. McCarter, having returned to Southwest patrol after being detailed to homicide for the Karen Smith case, leans out the driver’s window and laughs.
“Harry Edgerton,” he says, unable to contain himself, “is this your call, man?”
“Yeah,’ fraid so. You been to the hospital?”
“Yeah, I been there.”
Fucking McCarter, thinks Edgerton. He’s been gone from homicide three weeks and I haven’t missed him even a little bit.
“So? Is he dead?”
“You got a suspect?”
“No.”
McCarter laughs. “He’s dead. You got yourself a murder, Harry.”
Edgerton turns back to the dealer, who is shaking his head at the news. The detective wonders whether his witness is putting on appearances or is genuinely upset about the murder.
“Did you know the guy?”
“Pete? Yeah, I knew him.”
“I got his name as Greg Taylor,” says Edgerton, checking his notes.
“Naw man,’ round here, he was Pete. I just talked to him a couple hours ago. This is some shit.”
“What was he about?”
“He was selling burn bags, you know. He was selling people shit. I told him that shit would get his ass killed…”