Free Homicide by David Simon

the three right-hand sections is a letterplate bearing the nameof Lieutenant Robert Stanton, who commands the homicide unit’s second shift. To the immediate left, below the name of Lieutenant Gary D’Addario, are the three remaining sections. Underneath the nameplates of the two lieutenants, affixed to the top of each section, is the name of a detective sergeant: McLarney, Landsman and Nolan for D’Addario’s shift: Childs, Lamartina and Barrick for Stanton’s command.
    Below each sergeant’s nameplate are brief listings of dead people, the first homicide victims of the year’s first month. The names of victims in closed cases are written in black felt marker; the names of victims in open investigations, in red. To the left of each victim’s name is a case number—88001 for the year’s first murder, 88002 for the second, and so on. To the right of each victim’s name is a letter or letters—A for Bowman, B for Garvey, C for McAllister—which correspond to the names of the assigned detectives listed at the bottom of each section.
    A sergeant or lieutenant trying to match a homicide with its primary detective, or the reverse, can scan the sections of the white rectangle and in a matter of moments determine that Tom Pellegrini is working the murder of Rudy Newsome. He can also determine, by noting that Newsome’s name is in red ink, that the case is still open. For this reason, supervisors in the homicide unit regard the white rectangle as an instrument necessary to assure accountability and clerical precision. For this reason, too, detectives in the unit regard the rectangle as an affliction, an unforgiving creation that has endured far beyond the expectations of the now-retired sergeants and long-dead lieutenants who created it. The detectives call it, simply, the board.
    In the time that it takes the coffeepot to fill, shift commander Lieutenant Gary D’Addario—otherwise known to his men as Dee, LTD, or simply as His Eminence—can approach the board as a pagan priest might approach the temple of the sun god, scan the hieroglyphic scrawl of red and black below his name, and determine who among his three sergeants has kept his commandments and who has gone astray. He can further check the coded letters beside the name of each case and make the same determination about his fifteen detectives. The board reveals all: Upon its acetate is writ the story of past and present. Who has grown fat on domestic murders witnessed by half a dozen family members; who has starved on a drug assassination in a vacant rowhouse. Who has reaped the bountiful harvest of a murder-suicide complete with a posthumous note of confession; who has tasted the bitter fruit of an unidentified victim, bound and gagged in the trunk of an airport rental car.
    The board that today greets the shift lieutenant is a wretched, bloody piece of work, with most of the names etched beneath D’Addario’s sergeants written in red. Stanton’s shift began the new year at midnight, catching five murders in the early hours of January 1. Of those cases, however, all but one were the result of drunken arguments and accidental shootings, and all but one are in the black. Then, a week later, came the shift change, with Stanton’s men going to daywork and D’Addario’s crew taking over on the four-to-twelve and midnight shifts and catching their first cases of the year. Nolan’s squad took the first murder for the shift on January 10, a drug-related robbery in which the victim was found stabbed to death in the back seat of a Dodge. McLarney’s squad picked up a whodunit the same night when a middle-aged homosexual was shotgunned as he opened his apartment door in lower Charles Village. Then Fahlteich caught the first murder of the year for Landsman’s squad, a robbery beating in Rognel Heights with no suspects, after which McAllister broke up the red ink with an easy arrest on Dillon Street, where a fifteen-year-old white kid was stabbed in the heart over