Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets

POST MORTEM

To properly credit the idea for this book, we journey back twenty years to a Christmas Eve I spent with Roger Nolan, Russ Carney, Donald Kincaid and Bill Lansey, observing some routine mayhem and preparing to write a brief feature article on the holiday observances of those charged with working murders. I, for one, enjoy the perversity of a silent, holy night punctuated by a double-cutting in Pimlico, and I thought there might be a few readers of the Baltimore Sun who might also be willing to appreciate the small wit of the thing.

So I brought a bottle up to headquarters, slipped past the security desk, and joined the homicide squad working overnight as they handled a street shooting, a drug overdose and the aforementioned knife fight. Later, with much of the work done and an early morning choral concert of holiday music playing on the office television, I sat with the detectives as Carney poured cheer.

The elevator doors rang and Kincaid appeared, back from the last shooting of the shift-a desultory affair that landed the victim in an emergency room bed with a gunshot wound to an upper leg. He would live to see New Year’s.

“Most people are getting up right now, going under the tree and finding some kinda gift. A tie, or a new wallet or something,” mused Kincaid. “This poor bastard gets a bullet for Christmas.”

We laughed. And then-I will never forget the moment-Bill Lansey said:

“The shit that goes on up here. If someone just wrote down what happens in this place for one year, they’d have a goddamn book.”

Two years later, Bill Lansey, bless him, was dead of a heart attack and I wasn’t feeling all that good about things myself. Despite record profits, my newspaper was challenging its labor union with a contract of givebacks in medical coverage and provoking a strike-an economic stance that was to become thematic in journalism over the next couple decades. I hated my bosses just then, and being one to nurse a grudge I sensed it might be good to conjure a leave of absence, something that would hold my job at a daily newspaper but avoid the newsroom for a time.

Remembering Lansey’s remark, I wrote to the Baltimore police commissioner, Edward J. Tilghman. Would it be possible, I asked with feigned innocence, to observe his detectives for a year?

Yes, he replied, it would.

To this day, I have no direct explanation for his decision. The captain in charge of the homicide unit was opposed to the idea, as was the deputy commissioner for operations, the number two in the department. And a straw poll of detectives in the unit quickly revealed most thought it a terrible notion to allow a reporter into the unit. My good fortune was that a police department is a paramilitary organization with a rigid chain of command. It is not, in any sense, a democracy.

I never managed to ask Tilghman about his decision. He died before the book was published-indeed, before I’d finished my research. “You need to ask why he let you in?” Rich Garvey later offered. “The man had a brain tumor. What other explanation do you need?”

Maybe so. But years later the CID commander, Dick Lanham, told me there was something more subtle in play. In response to questions about my status, Tilghman said his own years as a homicide detective were the most enjoyable and gratifying of his career. I suppose I’d like to believe his motivation for letting me inside was as pure as that, though Garvey was probably onto something as well.

In any event, I entered the unit in January 1988 with the improbable rank of police intern, working New Year’s Day with the men-and all nineteen detectives and supervisors were male-of Lieutenant Gary D’Addario’s shift.

The rules were fairly straightforward. I could not communicate what I witnessed to my newspaper and I had to obey the orders of the supervisors and investigators I followed. I could not quote anyone by name unless they agreed to be so quoted. And when my manuscript was complete, it would be reviewed by the department’s legal affairs division-not to censor my work for general content but to assure that I did not reveal key pieces of evidence in cases still pending. As it turned out, no changes resulted from this review.

Shift after shift, with detectives looking on warily, I filled notepads with what seems to me now a frantic stream of quotes, case details, biographical data and general impressions. I read through all the detectives’ case files from the previous year, as well as the H-files on some of the biggest cases I had chased as a police reporter: the Warren House shootings, the Bronstein murders, the Barksdale warfare in the Murphy Homes back in ’82, the Harlem Park jacket slaying from ’83. I couldn’t believe I could just walk to the admin office and pull entire case files, then sit at a desk and read them at leisure. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t thrown off crime scenes, or out of interrogation rooms. I couldn’t believe the department brass wasn’t going to change its collective mind, confiscate my ID card and toss me onto Frederick Street.

But days became weeks and the detectives-even those cautious souls who would change their very tone when I walked up on their conversations-soon lost the will to perform, to pretend to be someone other than who they were.

I learned to drink. I dropped my Amex card now and then, whereupon the detectives more than matched me round for round, showing me I still had a lot to learn. Staggering from the Market Bar at closing one night, Donald Worden-who had allowed me to follow him on calls and through cases, but always with a certain veiled contempt-glared at me as if for the first time and drawled, “All right, Simon. What the hell do you wanna see? What the fuck do you think we’re gonna show you?”

I had no answer. Notepads were stacked on my desk, a dog-eared tower of random detail that confused and intimidated me. I tried to work six days a week, but my marriage was ending and sometimes I worked seven. If the detectives went drinking after work, I was often in tow.

On night shifts, I would work doubles, coming in at four and staying through the midnight shift until early morning. Sometimes, coming off midnight, we drank at dawn, and I would stagger home to sleep until night. I learned to my amazement that if you forced yourself to drink the morning after a bad drunk, it somehow felt better.

On one February morning, I was hungover and late for morning roll call when Worden phoned to wake me with the news that a dead girl had been found in a Reservoir Hill alley. I was at the crime scene ten minutes later, staring at the eviscerated body of Latonya Wallace and the beginning of an investigation that would become the spine of the book.

I began to focus on that case. On Pellegrini, the new man. On Edgerton, the lone-wolf secondary on the case, and on Worden, the gruff conscience of the unit. I talked less, listened more and learned to pull out the pen and notepad discreetly, so as not to upset the delicate moments of ordinary squadroom life.

In time, because I read the casework voraciously and sat through multiple shifts to note the comings and goings of detectives, I became in some small way a clearinghouse of basic information:

“Where’s Barlow?”

“He’s in court. Part eighteen.”

“Is Kevin with him?”

“No, he’s at the bar.”

“With who?”

“Rick James and Linda. And Garvey went, too.”

“Who caught the one on Payson last night?”

“Edgerton. He went home after the morgue and he’s coming back at six.”

But mostly, I was comic to these men, an amusing twenty-something distraction- “a mouse tossed into a room full of cats,” by Terry McLarney’s description. “You’re lucky we’re so bored with each other.”

If I went to a morning autopsy, Donald Steinhice would throw his voice and watch me eye the cadavers warily, just as Dave Brown would drag me to the Penn Restaurant to eat that nasty chorizo-and-egg platter so as to measure the fortitude of a novice. If I sat through a successful interrogation, Rich Garvey would turn to me at the end to ask if I had questions of my own, then laugh at whatever reportorial impulse resulted. And if I feel asleep on midnight shift, I would wake to find Polaroid photos of myself, head back in a chair, mouth open, flanked by smiling detectives imitating fellatio, their thumbs stuck through open zippers.

McLarney wrote my green sheet, the semi-annual evaluation so detested by working police in Baltimore. “Professional kibbitzer,” he wrote in summation of my standing. “It’s unclear what Intern Simon’s actual responsibilities are, however his hygiene is satisfactory and he seems to know a good deal about our activities. His sexual appetites remain suspect, however.”

At home, with a mattress on the bedroom floor and most of the furnishings in the possession of my ex-wife, I spent hours filling a computer with stream-of-consciousness rambling, emptying the notepads, trying to organize what I was witnessing into separate casefiles, biographies and chronologies.

The Latonya Wallace murder stayed open. I was mortified by this-and not because a killer roamed free and the destruction of a child was unavenged. No, I was too overawed by the manuscript I would soon have to write to waste a moment thinking in moral terms. Instead, I worried that the book would have no climax, that its conclusion would be open and empty and flawed.

I drank some more, though by summer the detectives, feeling sorry for me perhaps, were buying as many rounds as they put to my credit card. To avoid the heart of the matter-actually writing-I wasted a week or two interviewing the detectives at length with a tape recorder, producing the kind of interviews in which people who have for months been candid and open suddenly talk into a microphone with the certain knowledge that posterity is at stake.

Edgerton caught a second child-murder and solved it, and, without knowing it, I met in the mother of the dead girl one of the central characters of my next book, The Corner. Ella Thompson began for me at the door of her Fayette Street rowhouse, a mother’s face contorted in grief. Four years later, I would wander into the recreation center on Vincent Street and encounter her again-by accident-as I began reporting a different narrative, one that even the best detectives can only glimpse.

During that year in the homicide unit, I never actually felt I’d gone native. Not in any way that seemed to matter. Not in my own mind, anyway. I dressed the part, and at crime scenes and in courtrooms I did what the supervisors and investigators told me to do. Ultimately, I enjoyed myself and the company of the detectives immensely. For four years I had written city murders in a cramped, two-dimensional way-filling the back columns of the metro section with the kind of journalism that reduces all human tragedy, especially those with black or brown victims, to bland, bite-sized morsels:

A 22-year-old West Baltimore man was gunned down yesterday at an intersection near his home in an apparent drug-related incident. De tectives have no motive or suspects in the case, police said.

Antwon Thompson, of the 1400 block of Stricker Street, was found by patrol officers called to the scene of…

Suddenly, I had been granted access to a world hidden, if not willfully ignored, by all of that dispassionate journalism. These weren’t murders as benchmarks of a day’s events. Nor were they the stuff of pristine, perfectly rendered morality plays. By summer, with the body count rising in the Baltimore heat, I came to realize that I was standing on the factory floor. This was death investigation as an assembly-line process, a growth industry for a rust-belt America that had long ceased to mass manufacture much of anything, save for heartbreak itself. Perhaps, I told myself, it was the ordinariness of it all that made it, well, extraordinary.

They went after the Fish Man for the last time in December. He didn’t break. Latonya Wallace would not be avenged. But by then I had seen enough to know that the empty, ambiguous ending was the correct one. I called John Sterling, my editor in New York, and told him it was better this way.

“It’s real,” I said. “It’s how the world works, or doesn’t.”

He agreed. In fact, he’d seen it before I did. He told me to start writing, and after staring at the computer screen for a couple weeks, wondering how you type the first fucking sentence of a fucking book, I found myself back at the Market Bar with McLarney, who swayed to the rhythm of a ninth Miller Lite and eyed me, much amused at my predicament.

“Isn’t this what you actually do for a living?”

Sort of. Except not something so big as a book.

“I know what you’re gonna write.”

Do tell.

“It’s not about the cases. The murders. I mean, you’ll write about the murders so you have stuff to write about. But that’s all just the bullshit.”

I listened. Carefully.

“You’re gonna write about us. About the guys. About how we act and the shit we say to each other, about how pissed off we get and how funny we are sometimes and the shit that goes on in that office.”

I nodded. As if I’d known it all along.

“I’ve seen you taking notes when we were just bullshitting, when we’re just sitting around with nothing to do but jerk each other around. We piss and moan and there you are writing. We tell a dirty joke and you’re writing. We say anything or do anything and you’re there with your pen and your notepad and a weird look on your face. And fuck if we didn’t let you do it.”

And then he laughed. At me, or with me-I’ve never quite been sure.

The book sold some copies. Not enough to make any bestseller lists, but enough that Sterling was willing to pay me if I could manage another idea for another tome. Roger Nolan confiscated my police intern ID and I went back to the Sun. The detectives went back to having their world unexamined. And save for an immediate, panicked reaction by the department brass in which there were threats to charge the entire unit with conduct unbecoming an officer-the raw wit and rampant profanity of their underlings left colonels and deputy commissioners shocked, shocked, I tell you-the general response to Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets seemed to be no less muted than that which greets most narrative nonfiction.

Certainly, it didn’t help that the tale came from Baltimore. The editor of the New York Times Book Review declined initially to review the work, declaring it to be a regional book. A few police reporters at other newspapers said nice things. One evening, when I was working rewrite, plugging out-of-town temperatures into the weather chart, William Friedkin called from Los Angeles to say how much he enjoyed the book.

“William who?”

“Friedkin. I directed the French Connection? To Live and Die in L.A.?

“Alvarez, stop fucking with me. I’m late with the goddam weather table.”

A few more deep breaths like that one and the hardbacks copies were off the display shelves and consigned to the true-crime section. I nestled back into the Sun, took up my old beat and began encountering the detectives from the other side of the crime-scene tape. Once, at a triple murder in North Baltimore, I lost my temper at Terry McLarney when he wouldn’t come out of an indoor crime scene to debrief me even as the home-final deadline passed. In the squadroom the next day, as I was ranting with probably a bit too much indignation, Donald Waltemeyer suddenly exploded out of his chair like a.45 round.

“Jesus fucking Christ, Simon. Listen to you. You’re like one of these fuckin’ defense lawyers who get you on the stand and start asking if it’s true, Detective Waltemeyer, that you fucked some broad in 1929. Who gives a fuck? McLarney was on a scene and he didn’t give a fuck about your fuckin’ deadlines. So just go fuck yourself and tell your newspaper to go fuck itself and stop bein’ a fuckin’ lawyer with us.”

I looked over to see McLarney giggling, hiding his face in his sport-coat.

“A whole year up here,” Waltemeyer concluded, “and you’re still nothing but a prissy bitch.”

Ah, normalcy.

And it might’ve stayed that way had not Barry Levinson bought the book and metastasized the thing into an NBC drama, turning our small, self-contained world upside down. Suddenly, Edgerton was some proud, fully intellectualized peacock of a detective named Pembleton. And McLarney was bald with a funny mustache, and obsessed with the Lincoln assassination. And Worden was that actor-whatshisname-the one that got fucked in the ass in Deliverance. And Garvey? Damned if they didn’t give Rich Garvey red hair and tits. He was a woman, for Chrissake.

For me, Homicide: Life on the Street was a strange stepchild at first. I admired the drama and the craft of it-and to the detectives themselves, I actually defended the show’s willingness to fictionalize their world as a necessary license for long-form storytelling. I was certainly happy to have the book rediscovered; well before the NBC show ended its run, a quarter of a million copies were sold. But, in truth, I was ambivalent.

After reading the first three scripts, I wrote a long memo to Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana in which I explicated the intricacies of various investigative techniques and legal requirements. No, you cannot search a suspect’s domicile for a weapon because a detective dreamed that the gun was there. Probable cause is a required element for any affiant to obtain a search-and-seizure warrant signed by a circuit court, and so forth and so on and furthermore, et cetera, et cetera…

Nonfiction boy, Fontana called me after that, and not with any particular fondness.

I went to the set a couple times during filming, standing around like any other tourist. The detectives themselves would occasionally show up, usually with wives or girlfriends who wanted to meet Danny Baldwin or Kyle Secor. A few took the gig of technical advisor, sitting by the video monitors and offering advice when asked, and sometimes, to the chagrin of the film company, when not.

A special moment in this regard belongs to Harry Edgerton, who, upon witnessing Frank Pembleton-his television alter ego-order a Scotch and a milk at a bar, shouted, “Cut.”

Barry Levinson turned to look at his technical advisor as if to examine a new species. Assistant directors and junior producers scurried to immediately right the wrong.

“But there’s no way I would drink something like that,” Edgerton said to me later. “Scotch and milk? Seriously, Dave, people I know are gonna see that and what are they gonna think?”

Eventually, Gary D’Addario-a man of demonstrated tact and discretion-became the solitary advisor and, in time, played the role of a tactical commander in the cast. And, as the novelty of filming wore thin, the other detectives drifted away. So did I, feeling, as all authors probably do on a film set, entirely beside the point.

To be fair, one of the producers, Gail Mutrux, had asked if I wanted to try my hand at writing the pilot for the show. Ridiculously ignorant of the money involved, I had declined, telling Gail-who first read Homicide and brought it to Levinson’s attention as possible television fare-that she should get someone who knew what he was doing, if only to give the project a fighting chance. I would, if they wanted, take a later script, writing only when a template for the show was established.

Fontana and Levinson obliged. And that later script, which I cowrote with David Mills, a friend from college newspaper days, proved so relentlessly dark and unsparing that NBC executives declined to allow it to be shot during that first season of the drama. It was only a year later, during the truncated, four-episode run of season two, that it was filmed, and then only because Robin Williams had agreed to star in the guest role.

I still have my first draft of that script-replete with Tom Fontana’s notes in thick red ink. Our scenes were long and the speeches longer, and the descriptive sections were marred with the kind of camera direction that denotes an amateur effort. Once Tom and Jim Yoshimura got done adding additional scenes for the guest star-and cutting dialogue for other characters-maybe half of the script could be credited to Mills and me.

I thought this a personal failure-even after the episode won the Writer’s Guild of America writing award-and I took the opportunity to remind myself where it was I actually belonged. Back at the Sun, working my beat, I began planning that second book, a year in the life of a West Baltimore drug corner. Mills, however, left his gig at the Washington Post for Hollywood, and after hiring on at NYPD Blue called back to assure me that any freelancer who, on a first script, manages to get half his words into an episode, is doing fine.

So after a second Homicide script-this one filmed with few changes-I jumped. It helped that my newspaper-once a good, gray lady of venerable, if somewhat hidebound traditions-had become the playground of a couple carpetbaggers from Philadelphia, two tone-deaf hacks for whom the apogee of all journalism was a five-part series that declared “The Baltimore Sun has learned” in the second paragraph, then offered a couple overreported pages of simplistic outrages and even more simplistic solutions.

There was a Pulitzer fever to the place, and a carefully crafted mythology in which no one knew how to do their job until the present regime brought tablets down from Sinai. I returned from my research on The Corner to a depressed and depressing newsroom, moreso after a series of buyouts began driving talented veterans to other newspapers. Eventually, cost-cutting and out-of-town ownership would all but destroy the place, but even by the mid-nineties, there was enough intellectual fraud and prize lust at the Sun for me to realize that whatever I had loved about the Sun was disappearing, and that, in the end, the artifice of television drama was, in comparison to the artifice of a crafted Pulitzer campaign, no longer a notable sin.

I hired on with the stepchild, and Tom Fontana and his crew taught me how to write television to a point where I was proud to work for the man. And when The Corner was published, I was ready, with Mills, to tell that story on HBO.

As for the detectives, most accepted The Corner as a legitimate story, fairly told. Following a shooting one day at Monroe and Fayette, Frank Barlow actually came across the yellow crime-scene tape to chat with me about old times and ask how the new project was going-an act of fraternization for which I had to explain myself for days afterward to touts and dealers and dope fiends. But other detectives regarded the second book as something of a betrayal-a narrative written not from the point of view of stalwart Baltimore police but in the voice of those they were chasing.

By the early nineties, that chase had turned brutal and unforgiving. Five years after I reported Homicide, the cocaine epidemic had overheated Baltimore’s drug economy and transformed the inner city. Where once there were a couple dozen drug markets, now there more than a hundred corners. And where once the city’s homicide unit had to work 240 slayings a year, suddenly they were contending with more than 300. The clearance rate slipped a bit, the bosses got nervous and, eventually, they panicked.

Since the reign of Donald Pomerleau, the homegrown management of the Baltimore department had devolved to mediocrity, but it was only amid the cocaine wars that the cost of such was revealed. It was one thing to have a half-senile commissioner caretaking a viable department in 1981, when crackhouses and speedballs were just a rumor in Baltimore. A decade later, actual leadership was a fundamental need and, for the first time since 1966, the city hired a commissioner from the outside, giving him a mandate to clean house.

He did. But in the worst way, because Thomas Frazier, arriving with an air of supreme confidence from San Jose, almost singlehandedly managed to destroy the Baltimore Police Department’s homicide unit in the process.

For one thing, Frazier proved indifferent to the fact that inside every police agency in America there are two hierarchies. The first is the chain of command, where rank itself is the chief determinant; sergeants learn to supplicate before lieutenants, who prostrate themselves before majors, who genuflect before colonels, who kiss the haunches of deputy commissioners. That hierarchy is necessary to the form and it can never be wholly disregarded.

But the alternate hierarchy-equally essential-is one of expertise, and it exists for the department’s technicians, those whose skill at a specific job requires due deference.

This defines a homicide detective.

Yet incredibly, Frazier came to Baltimore and immediately declared that the rotation of police officers from one assignment to the next would constitute his plan for revitalizing the city department. No officer, he declared, should remain in the same assignment for more than three years.

Never mind that it takes a homicide detective-not to mention other departmental investigators and technicians-at least that long to fully learn his craft and become effective. And never mind that rotation threatened the professional standing of every man in the homicide unit. Frazier cited his own career as a justification, declaring that he had, after three years in any assignment, become bored and desirous of new challenges.

Rotation chased some of the best men from the city, as they departed to investigative jobs with the federal government and the surrounding counties. When, for example, Gary Childs and Kevin Davis decided to leave before submitting to the policy, I interviewed Frazier and asked him how he felt about such losses.

“These are guys who can carry a squad,” I said.

“Why does anyone need to be carried? Why can’t every man in homicide be the best?”

As hyperbole, it sounds great. But the truth about the Baltimore homicide unit-even when it was at its best in the 1970s and 1980s, when clearance rates were well above the national averages-is that some detectives were brilliant, some were competent and some were notably ineffective.

Yet in every squad there seemed to be a Worden, a Childs, a Davis or a Garvey to center the half dozen men and keep watch over weaker colleagues. With thirty detectives and six sergeants, it was possible for squad supervisors to monitor the struggling detectives, to pair them with proven veterans, to ensure that cases didn’t so easily slip between the cracks.

Frazier’s other strategy-apart from simply chasing talent from the department-was to assign more detectives to the sixth floor. More squads. More new detectives. Eventually, the violent crimes task force was co-mingled with homicide on the sixth floor and another thirty bodies wandered to and fro amid the casework.

More detectives, less responsibility. And now, when a detective took a phone call on a murder, more likely than not he didn’t know which squad was working the case or what the capabilities of a new detective actually were. There had always been rookies-one or two a squad-and the veterans would look out for them, nurture them, making sure they weren’t given whodunits until they had gone out on a dozen calls as secondaries, or maybe even handled a dunker or two on their own. Now, whole squads were comprised of first-year men, and with the continuing departure of veterans the clearance rate fell dramatically.

A few years later, it was well below 50 percent, with the actual conviction rate hovering at about half that. And as in any institutional enterprise, once the expertise goes, it does not come back.

“They ruined us,” Garvey told me before putting in his papers. “This was a great unit and it was like they had a plan to ruin it.”

For my part, I had come to feel much the same in my own world, having seen some of the best reporters at my newspaper depart for the New York Times, the Washington Post and other papers-chased by an institutional arrogance that was every bit equal to that of the police department.

Struck, Wooten, Alvarez, Zorzi, Littwin, Thompson, Lippman, Hyman-some of the best reporters the Baltimore Sun had were marginalized, then bought out, shipped out and replaced with twenty-four-year-old acolytes, who, if they did nothing else, would never make the mistake of having an honest argument with newsroom management. In a time of growth, when the chance to truly enhance the institution was at hand, the new regime at the Sun hired about as much talent as they dispatched. And in the end, when the carpetbaggers finally departed, their mythology of heroic renewal intact, they had managed to achieve three Pulitzers in about a dozen years. During the previous dozen, the newspaper’s morning and evening editions achieved exactly the same number.

Listening to Garvey over drinks that day, I came to realize that there was something emblematic here: that in postmodern America, whatever institution you serve or are served by-a police department or a newspaper, a political party or a church, Enron or Worldcom-you will eventually be betrayed.

It seemed very Greek the more I thought about it. The stuff of Aeschylus and Sophocles, except the gods were not Olympian but corporate and institutional. In every sense, ours seems a world in which individual human beings-be they trained detectives or knowledgeable reporters, hardened corner boys or third-generation longshoremen or smuggled eastern European sex workers-are destined to matter less and less.

After watching what was done to my newspaper, and to the Baltimore homicide unit, I began to write the pilot for a new HBO drama. The Wire, for better or for worse, has occupied my time since.

Just after reading the manuscript for Homicide, Terry McLarney mailed me a single sheet of white bond paper. Atop that solitary page:

“The Book. Volume II.”

And then the sentence, “My God. They’ve all been transferred. I think I see now what it is they were trying to tell me.”

That was the only shot fired across my bow before publication, the only warning-however lighthearted-that the book might prove problematic for those it characterized.

And in the wake of Frazier’s rotation policy, as well as other departures of veteran detectives unrelated to that policy, McLarney’s dry, comic lament might certainly seem prophetic.

But there is a corresponding truth, and one that also bears noting: In 1998, looking back a decade to the year when I followed these men with pen and notepad akimbo, it was accurate to say that more than three-quarters of them were no longer in the Baltimore city homicide unit. But, looking back ten years from my moment as a police intern, it is also true that three-quarters of the detectives who had manned the unit in 1978 were also gone. And they departed, of course, without any book having been written about them.

Time itself is a means of attrition.

And, in time, Baltimore became comfortable with its depiction in both Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and the television drama that followed. The mayor appeared on the show; Maryland’s governor as well. The actors themselves came to be regarded as resident Baltimoreans, or Baltimorons as some of us like to call ourselves. Over the last decade and a half, I’ve signed copies of the book for the city’s politicians, for its civic leaders, for its lawyers, its cops, its criminals.

In some quarters, though, my welcome has worn thin, perhaps because both The Corner and The Wire offer a much darker vision of the problems that confront the city. There is consternation about the net effect of all this murderous narrative on Baltimore’s image and its viability as a tourist destination, to be sure. Conversely, there is also a peculiar pride at being part of a city that endures despite such an appalling and persistent rate of violence.

I know that sounds ridiculous-a hoary citing of lemons and lemonade-but there is something to it. From the first, Homicide was, I think, a blunt and clear-eyed response to the national neglect of urban problems, demonstrating if not our civic ability to solve those problems, then at least our honesty and wit in confronting them.

The Natty Boh beer ads used to declare Maryland to be “The Land of Pleasant Living,” just as a standard credo of local pride claims of Baltimore that “If you can’t live here, you can’t live anywhere.”

Such sentiments might seem grandly mocked by the contents of Homicide or The Corner or certainly, given its angry, political tone, The Wire. But no such sarcasm is intended, and among residents of this city I don’t sense that many feel particularly abused. If you live here, you know the good, and you still sense the civic ideal that has somehow managed to survive so much poverty, violence and waste, so much mismanagement and indifference.

Recently, the city paid a half million dollars to a consultant seeking a new slogan for itself:

“Baltimore-Get In On It”

I like it. An implied secret. As if you need to walk these streets for a while before you’re entitled to know for certain what is at stake in this city’s survival and why so many people still care.

But I confess that my favorite slogan came from a short contest sponsored on the daily newspaper’s website, where readers offered their own free suggestions to the highly paid image consultants, and one local resident, tongue in cheek, wrote:

“It’s Baltimore, hon… duck!”

The detectives would have recognized the humor, and, more than that, the temperment that gives rise to such humor. Hell, if they could buy the bumper sticker, they’d probably have it on the back of every unmarked unit.

These men lived and worked without illusion, and late at night, when I was rewriting sections of the book for the third and fourth time, I realized that I was trying to achieve a voice, a statement even, that they would recognize as true.

Never mind the demographics of bookbuyers, or the sensibilities of other journalists, or, God forbid, whoever might be judging some book award somewhere. Fifteen years ago, when I was trapped at my computer, the only judgments that mattered to me were those of the detectives. If they read the book and pronounced it honest, I would not feel the shame that comes from snatching pieces of human lives and putting them on display for all to see.

This is not to say that everything I wrote was complimentary or ennobling. There are pages of the book on which these men appear to be racist or racially insensitive, sexist or homophobic, where their humor derives from the poverty and tragedy of others. And yet with a body on the ground-black, brown, or, on rare occasion, white-they did their job regardless. In this graceless age of ours, any sense of duty is remarkable enough to excuse any number of lesser sins. And so readers learned to forgive, just as the writer learned to forgive, and six hundred pages later the very candor of the detectives was a quality, rather than an embarrassment.

In the preface to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee asked absolution for his journalistic trespass, declaring that “these I will write of are human beings, living in this world, innocent of such twistings as these which are taking place over their heads; and that they were dwelt among, investigated, spied on, revered and loved by other quite monstrous human beings, in the employment of others still more alien; and that they are now being looked into by still others, who have picked up their living as casually as if it were a book.”

There are many journalists who believe that their craft must burden itself with a nodding, analytic tone, that they must report and write with feigned, practiced objectivity and the presumption of omniscient expertise. Many are consumed by the pursuit of scandal and human flaw, and believe it insufficient to look at human beings with a skeptical yet affectionate eye. Their work is, of course, accurate and justifiable-and no closer to the actual truth of things than any other form of storytelling.

Years ago, I read an interview with Richard Ben Cramer in which he was accused by a fellow journalist of engaging in a love that dares not speak its name-at least not in newsrooms. Regarding the candidates he followed for What It Takes, his masterful narrative of presidential politics, Cramer was asked if he actually liked the men he was covering.

“Like them?” he replied. “I love them.”

How could he write a nine-hundred-page tome in their voices if he didn’t love every last one of them, warts and all? And what kind of journalist follows human beings for years on end, recording their best moments and their worst, without acquiring some basic regard for their individuality, their dignity, their value?

I admit it. I love these guys.

At this writing, Richard Fahlteich-a detective in Landsman’s squad in 1988-is a major and the commander of the homicide unit, though he is planning to retire after more than thirty years service within the month.

Lieutenant Terrence Patrick McLarney, who commanded a squad on D’Addario’s shift fifteen years ago, is a shift commander, having fought his way back to the unit after years of exile in the Western and Central Districts, where he was banished after his shift commander politely declined an invitation to fisticuffs in the headquarters garage.

The reason McLarney felt the need to extend such an invitation was simply that his shift commander was no longer Gary D’Addario, who had been promoted first to captain, and, later, to major and command of the Northeastern District. The man who replaced D’Addario did not understand the homicide unit, in the opinion of many. He certainly didn’t understand McLarney, who, despite his protestations, his calculated appearance and his general demeanor, happens to be one of the smartest, funniest and most honest souls I ever had the privilege to know.

For his part, D’Addario thrived not only as a district commander but as the technical advisor to Homicide and ensuing productions. His portrayal of Lieutenant Jasper, the tactical commander on the drama, brought, if not widespread acclaim, then an opportunity for many subordinate commanders to advise him on the value of his day job.

He was forced to resign abruptly three years ago by a police commissioner who never offered a reason, simply summoning D’Addario to his office and issuing the demand.

That this came a couple days after D’Addario first appeared in a brief scene of The Wire, playing the part of a grand jury prosecutor, may be relevant. The current city administration is known to dislike the HBO drama, and though D’Addario wasn’t the only department veteran to appear in episodes, he was the only ranking commander to do so at the time. I wrote a letter to the mayor, noting that the part was a neutral one and that D’Addario’s dialogue brought no discredit on the department. I suggested that if displeasure with the major stemmed from his appearance on the show, then the decision should be reconsidered, and, further, that the administration should inform us one way or another if it had concerns about officers appearing on the drama.

No response was forthcoming.

In 1995, Donald Worden retired on his own terms after more than three decades service. Kevin Davis-the Worden of Stanton’s shift-called it quits the same day. I made it a point to go out with the two veterans on their last shift, when they picked up a suspect from the city jail and tried unsuccessfully to get him to roll on an old murder. That story of their last day on the job was my last staff byline for the Sun-a personal metaphor of sorts, not that anyone was going to notice.

Within a year, as the murder toll jumped and clearance rates fell, the department hired Worden back as a civilian contractor to help clear cold homicide cases. He is clearing them still, along with his cold case supervisor, Sergeant Roger Nolan, putting blue names on The Board even though he carries neither badge nor gun.

When I see Worden on occasion, usually for a pint or two at that Irish dive on O’Donnell Street, I always offer him a quarter. He politely declines, though he can’t help but point out that it would now be forty-five cents.

Along with Fahlteich and McLarney, Worden and Nolan are the only remaining members of D’Addario’s shift still on duty. Much of the remainder of that shift is scattered throughout mid-Atlantic law enforcement, most having put in their retirement papers to take better-paying investigative positions in other agencies.

Worden’s partner, Rick James, went to work for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. Rich Garvey and Bob McAllister took positions as investigators with the federal public defenders office, with Garvey working out of the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, branch and McAllister employed in Baltimore.

Gary Childs became an investigator for the Carroll County State’s Attorney’s Office, and later a homicide detective in Baltimore County. He was joined in Baltimore County by Jay Landsman, who was, in turn, joined by his son. And with two generations of Landsmans working the same precinct, some hilarity naturally ensued.

Recently, on a surveillance, Jay got on the radio to ask if his son, who ranks him, had the eyeball on a car they were following.

“Got him, Dad,” came the laconic radio response, followed by delighted laughter from the rest of the surveillance detail.

Without Roger Nolan to protect him, Harry Edgerton soon ran afoul of a department with little tolerance for iconoclasts.

In 1990, his longtime partner, Ed Burns, had returned from the successful joint FBI-Baltimore city prosecution of Warren Boardley’s drug organization and immediately wrote a proposal for a specialized unit that could conduct long-term proactive investigations of violent drug crews. When that proposal disappeared on the eighth floor without so much as a response, Burns chose to cash in his chips, retiring in 1992 to begin a teaching career in the Baltimore city schools-a career that I shortstopped by a year or two, convincing Ed to go with me to West Baltimore to report and write The Corner. That partnership continues-Ed is currently a writer and producer on The Wire.

On his own, Edgerton left the shelter of Nolan’s squad-where his sergeant always had his back, and where the complaints of co-workers were always received with some salt. He transferred from homicide to a fledgling investigative squad-the violent crimes task force-which Edgerton believed could become the major case squad that he and Burns had long imagined.

The VCU, however, proved to be nothing of the sort, and, as it began concentrating on meaningless street rips and corner raids, Edgerton began a singular rebellion, going his own way, ignoring the orders of supervisors and alienating fellow detectives as only Harry Edgerton can.

A deputy commissioner then assigned him the quixotic, existential task of recovering the gun of a patrol officer who had been wounded in East Baltimore. Within weeks Edgerton was in negotiations with an east-side dealer to do precisely that. His bargaining chip was a series of homemade porn videos, all packed in a leather case seized during a drug raid. Acknowledging to the dealer that the tapes were of a personal nature, Edgerton was offering to exchange them for the officer’s gun. But in the interim, as negotiations progressed, a supervisor charged him with failing to inventory both the tapes and the leather case with evidence control, and, pending a trial board, Edgerton was suspended with pay. Then, before that case could be heard, he was found in West Baltimore, armed with his service revolver though suspended, meeting with a man Edgerton described as an informant.

Donald Worden, a sage among murder police, is fond of pointing to the massive binder that is the Baltimore City Police Department’s Code of Conduct and declaring: “If they want you, they got you.”

The department wanted Edgerton, having tired of his indifference to chain of command and his willful disregard of anything other than casework. He was convinced, before any trial board could convene, to wait out his twenty-year anniversary and then retire with his pension intact. He now does security work with several companies.

Edgerton’s partner in the Latonya Wallace case, Tom Pellegrini, continued to pick at the dead girl’s case for years afterward, but to little avail. He finally visited the Fish Man one last time and encouraged his best suspect to write down on a slip of paper whether he was guilty or innocent, then hide the document.

“That way, if you ever die,” Pellegrini explained, “I’ll find the paper and at least I’ll know.”

When the Fish Man did indeed depart this vale, several years ago, no such document was recovered from his effects. Sometimes the magic works, sometimes not.

After retiring from the Baltimore department, Pellegrini did a tour of duty with the United Nations in Kosovo, teaching death investigation to fledgling detectives there. He currently operates a private investigation firm in Maryland.

Among others, Gary Dunnigan is now an insurance investigator. Downtown Eddie Brown went to work security for the Baltimore Ravens, as did Bertina Silver of Stanton’s shift. Rick “The Bunk” Requer left to man the department’s retirement services bureau, though his homicide incarnation lives on in Wendell Pierce’s portrayal of the legendary Bunk Moreland on The Wire, right down to the ubiquitous cigar. The remaining detectives of D’Addario’s shift-Donald Kincaid, Bob Bowman and David John Brown-have retired as well, though Dave Brown went out in a frustrating way, having sustaining a severe leg injury during the search of a vacant house.

Danny Shea died of cancer in 1991. I didn’t follow him on many cases, as he was a veteran of Stanton’s shift, but I have the distinct memory of standing with him at the most natural of deaths, in a Charles Village apartment where an elderly piano teacher expired in bed with her radio playing softly.

Ravel’s “Pavanne for a Dead Princess” was broadcast at that moment, and Shea, being a man of deep and varied knowledge, knew this as I did not.

“A quiet, perfect death,” he said, nodding at the cadaver and granting me a moment I always remember when thinking about Danny Shea.

Donald Waltemeyer, too, died of cancer last year, having retired from Baltimore city to become an investigator with the Aberdeen Police Department in northeast Maryland.

When McLarney and the other members of his old squad got together with Aberdeen veterans at the wake, they quickly realized that Digger Waltemeyer had managed to infuriate and endear himself to both departments in exactly the same manner. At the funeral, men in different dress uniforms assured each other that they were privileged to know and work with both a consummate investigator and a renowned pain in the ass.

Meanwhile, the police intern from that long-ago year is still at large, his whereabouts subject to rumor and the crude conjecture of certain unit veterans. He is seen occasionally on Baltimore film sets and glimpsed in cluttered production offices and writing rooms. Sometimes, he attends the Baltimore homicide reunions out in Parkville, where retired detectives never fail to talk the same shit and ask, with a wink and nod, when NBC is gonna get those bigass checks in the mail.

No comment to that. But the intern and his credit card stand ready, knowing that for many reasons, if not for his entire career, he owes these guys-every last one of them-more than a few rounds.

DAVID SIMON

Baltimore

May 2006