Chapter One
Tuesday, January 19
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.”
The uniform puts pen to paper.
“There is a possibility,“ says Landsman, doing his best to look professorial, “a good possibility, he was shot twice through the same bullethole.”
“No shit,“ says the uniform, believing.
A mental case. They give him a gun, a badge and sergeant’s stripes, and deal him out into the streets of Baltimore, a city with more than its share of violence, filth and despair. Then they surround him with a chorus of blue-jacketed straight men and let him play the role of the lone, wayward joker that somehow slipped into the deck. Jay Landsman, of the sidelong smile and pockmarked face, who tells the mothers of wanted men that all the commotion is nothing to be upset about, just a routine murder warrant. Landsman, who leaves empty liquor bottles in the other sergeants’ desks and never fails to turn out the men’s room light when a ranking officer is indisposed. Landsman, who rides a headquarters elevator with the police commissioner and leaves complaining that some sonofabitch stole his wallet. Jay Landsman, who as a Southwestern patrolman parked his radio car at Edmondson and Hilton, then used a Quaker Oatmeal box covered in aluminum foil as a radar gun.
“I’m just giving you a warning this time,“ he would tell grateful motorists. “Remember, only you can prevent forest fires.”
And now, but for the fact that Landsman can no longer keep a straight face, there might well be an incident report tracked to Central Records in the departmental mail, complaint number 88-7A37548, indicating that said victim appeared to be shot once in the head and twice in the back through the same bullethole.
“No, hey, I’m joking,“ he says finally. “We won’t know anything for sure until the autopsy tomorrow.”
He looks at Pellegrini.
“Hey, Phyllis, I’m gonna let the ME roll him.”
Pellegrini manages a half-smile. He’s been Phyllis to his squad sergeant ever since that long afternoon at Rikers Island in New York, when a jail matron refused to honor a writ and release a female prisoner into the custody of two male detectives from Baltimore; the regulations required a policewoman for the escort. After a sufficient amount of debate, Landsman grabbed Tom Pellegrini, a thick-framed Italian born to Allegheny coal miner stock, and pushed him forward.
“Meet Phyllis Pellegrini,“ Landsman said, signing for the prisoner. “She’s my partner.”
“How do you do?” Pellegrini said with no hesitation.
“You’re not a woman,“ said the matron.
“But I used to be.”
With the blue strobe glancing off his pale face, Tom Pellegrini moves a step closer to take stock of what half an hour earlier had been a twenty-six-year-old street dealer. The dead man is sprawled on his back, legs in the gutter, arms partly extended, head facing north near the side door of a corner rowhouse. Dark brown eyes are fixed under half-lids in that expression of vague recognition so common to the newly and suddenly departed. It is not a look of horror, consternation, or even distress. More often than not, the last visage of a murdered man resembles that of a flustered schoolchild to whom the logic of a simple equation has just been revealed.
“If you’re okay here,“ says Pellegrini, “I’m gonna go across the street.”
“What’s up?”
“Well...”
Landsman moves closer and Pellegrini lowers his voice, as if the spoken suggestion that there may be a witness to this murder would be an embarrassing display of optimism.
“There’s a woman who went into a house across the street. Someone told one of the first officers she was outside when the shooting started.”
“She saw it?”
“Well, supposedly she told people it was three black males in dark clothes. They ran north after the shots.”
It isn’t much, and Pelle
