Homicide. David Simon

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СКАЧАТЬ and James quickly sized up the situation and paired up with the Big Man, following him so closely that other detectives gave him grief about it. But Worden clearly enjoyed the role of an elder sage and James was willing to hold up his end by doing a good crime scene and writing the necessary reports. If Worden taught him half of what he knew before taking that pension, Rick James would be in homicide a long, long time.

      The bad thing about working with Worden was the black moods, the sullen brooding because he was still working for a patrolman’s wage when he should be taking a pension and living a life of leisure as some security consultant or home improvement contractor. Worden was strangely self-conscious that he was still out there running down ghetto murders when most of the men who came on with him were retired or working a second career; the few that remained on the force were ending their days in the districts as desk sergeants or turnkeys, or in the headquarters security booths listening to the Orioles drop a double-header on a transistor radio, waiting out another year or two for a higher pension. All around him, younger men were getting out and moving on to better things.

      More often than not these days, Worden found himself talking seriously about packing it in. But a large part of him didn’t even want to think about retirement; the department had been his home since 1962—his arrival in homicide marked the last curl in a long, graceful arc. For three years, Worden’s work in the unit had sustained and even revived him.

      The Big Man took particular delight in his ongoing effort to break in the younger detectives in his squad, Rick James and Dave Brown. James was coming along all right, but in Worden’s mind Brown could go either way. Worden never hesitated to press the point, subjecting the younger detective to a training regimen best characterized as education-by-insult.

      The least experienced man in the squad, Dave Brown tolerated the Big Man’s bluster—in large part because he knew Worden genuinely cared whether Brown stayed a detective, in smaller part because there was no real choice in the matter. The relationship between the two men was perfectly captured in a color photograph taken by a crime lab tech at a murder in Cherry Hill. In the foreground was an earnest Dave Brown, collecting discarded beer cans near the shooting scene in the vain and excessively optimistic hope that they might have anything at all to do with the killing. In the background, sitting on the front stoop of a public housing unit, was Donald Worden, watching the younger detective with what appears to be a look of unequivocal disgust. Dave Brown liberated the photograph from the case file and took it home as a memento. It was the Big Man that Brown had come to know and love. Cantankerous, annoyed, ever critical. A last, lonely centurion who sees both his affliction and his challenge in a younger generation of menials and incompetents.

      The photograph showed the Big Man at the height of his powers: abrasive, confident, the nettled conscience of every younger or less experienced detective on the shift. And, of course, the Cherry Hill case went down, with Worden getting the tip that led to the murder weapon at the home of the shooter’s girlfriend. But that was when Worden still felt some delight at being a homicide detective. That was before Monroe Street.

      Climbing into a Cavalier on the mezzanine level, James decides to risk conversation one more time.

      “If this is a murder,” he says, “I’ll be the primary.”

      Worden looks at him. “You don’t want to see if someone’s been locked up first?”

      “No, babe. I need the money.”

      “You’re a whore.”

      “Yeah, babe.”

      James rolls the car down the garage ramp, over to Fayette, then north on Gay Street to Greenmount, preoccupied with the complex computations of anticipated overtime. Two hours at the scene, three hours of interrogation, another three for paperwork, four more for the autopsy; James thinks about how sweet twelve hours of time-and-a-half will look on his pay stub.

      But it is not a murder on Greenmount; it isn’t even a straight shooting. Both detectives know that after listening to a sixteen-year-old witness rattle through an incoherent three-minute monologue.

      “Whoa, start from the beginning. Slowly.”

      “Derrick came running in …”

      “Derrick who?”

      “That’s my brother.”

      “How old is he?”

      “Seventeen. He come running through the front door and upstairs. My older brother went up and found him shot and called nine-one-one. Derrick said he was at the bus stop and got shot. That’s all he said.”

      “He didn’t know who shot him?”

      “No, he say he just got shot.”

      Worden takes the flashlight from James and walks outside with a patrolman.

      “Are you the first officer?”

      “No,” says the uniform. “That’s Rodriguez.”

      “Where is he?”

      “He went to shock-trauma with your victim.”

      Worden shoots the patrolman a look, then walks back toward the front door of the house and turns the flashlight on the floor of the porch. No blood trail. No blood on the door handle. The detective scans the brick front of the rowhouse with the light. No blood. No fresh damage. One hole, but too even to be from a bullet. Probably an old drill hole for a light fixture.

      Worden takes the flashlight back down the front walk toward the street. He walks back inside the house and checks the rooms upstairs. Still no blood. The detective walks back downstairs and listens to James questioning the sixteen-year-old.

      “Where’d your brother run to when he came in the house?” Worden interrupts.

      “Upstairs.”

      “There’s no blood upstairs.”

      The kid looks at his shoes.

      “What’s going on here?” says Worden, pressing him.

      “We cleaned it up,” the kid says.

      “You cleaned it up?”

      “Uh-huh.”

      “Oh,” says Worden, rolling his eyes. “Let’s go back upstairs then.”

      The kid takes the stairs two at a time, then turns into the clutter and disarray of a teenager’s room, replete with pinups of models in bikinis and posters of New York rappers in designer sweats. Without further prompting, the sixteen-year-old pulls two bloodstained sheets from a hamper.

      “Where were those?”

      “On the bed.”

      “On the bed?”

      “We turned over the mattress.”

      Worden flips the mattress. A red-brown stain covers a good quarter of the fabric.

      “What jacket was your brother wearing when he came in?”

      “The gray one.”

      Worden picks up a gray puff jacket from a chair and checks СКАЧАТЬ