Homicide Read Free

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 Pellegrini can read his sergeant’s mind: three yos wearing black, a description that narrows the list to about half the fucking city. Landsman nods vaguely and Pellegrini begins making his way across Gold Street, stepping carefully around the patches of ice that cover much of the intersection. It is