Childs looks down, moderately amused, then turns calmly to the Eastern uniform. "I guess you might want to call for that medic now," he says, "just to be on the safe side."

The sergeant returns upstairs, where he and Keller continue dumping every doc.u.ment, every insurance policy, every photo alb.u.m, every slip of paper into a green garbage bag-the better to sort through it all in the relative luxury of the homicide office. Meanwhile, the paramedics arrive and depart within minutes, having judged Geraldine Parrish healthy in body if not in mind. And across town, at the Division Street rowhouse of Geraldine Parrish's mother, Donald Waltemeyer is executing a second warrant, digging out another thirty insurance policies and related doc.u.ments.

It is the case to end all cases, the investigation that raises the act of murder to the level of theatrical farce. This case file has so many odd, unlikely characters and so many odd, unlikely crimes that it almost seems tailored for musical comedy.

But for Donald Waltemeyer, in particular, the Geraldine Parrish case is anything but comedic. It is, in effect, a last lesson in his own personal voyage from patrolman to detective. Behind Worden and Eddie Brown, the forty-one-year-old Waltemeyer is Terry McLarney's most experienced man, having come to homicide in '86 from the Southern District plainclothes unit, where he was a fixture of large if not legendary proportion. And though the last two years have taught Waltemeyer everything he needs to know about handling the usual run of homicide calls, this case is entirely different. Eventually, Keller and Childs and the other detectives a.s.signed to the case will return to the rotation and it will be Waltemeyer's lot to serve as primary investigator in the prosecution of Geraldine Parrish-a probe that will consume half a year in the search for victims, suspects and explanations.

In a unit where speed is a precious commodity, it's the rare case that teaches a detective patience, providing him with those last few lessons that come only from the most prolonged and complex avenues of investigation. Such a case can transform a cop, allowing him to see his role as something more than that of an ambulance chaser whose task is to clean up one shooting after another in the shortest time possible. And after a month or two, or three, this sort of sprawling case file can also drive a cop to the brink of insanity-which for Waltemeyer isn't all that long a journey in the first place.

Just yesterday, in fact, he was gnawing on Dave Brown's leg about one case or another when Brown felt compelled to whip out Rule 1, Section 1, from the department's Code of Conduct and read verbatim, to wit: "'All members of the department shall be quiet, civil and orderly at all times and shall refrain from coa.r.s.e, profane or insolent language,' And," added Brown, glaring at his partner, "I emphasize the word 'civil.'"

"Hey, Brown," said Waltemeyer, making an obscene gesture. "Emphasize this."

It isn't that Dave Brown doesn't respect his partner, because he does. And it isn't that they can't work together, because when they have to, they do. It's just that Waltemeyer is constantly trying to explain police work to Brown, an exercise in condescension that Brown will accept only when it comes from Donald Worden, no one else. But even on his best days, Waltemeyer is quite possibly the most volatile detective in homicide, with a hair-trigger temper that never ceases to amaze the rest of McLarney's squad.

Once, soon after Waltemeyer had come downtown, McLarney himself happened to be busy talking to one of several witnesses from a murder. He called Waltemeyer over and asked him to handle one of the interviews, but as he began explaining the details of the case, he quickly realized that it was simply easier for him to talk to the witness himself. Never mind, McLarney explained, I'll do it myself.

But later, at several points during the interview, McLarney looked up to see Waltemeyer's face staring at him from the hallway. Three minutes after the end of the interview, Waltemeyer was in the office, pointing a finger in McLarney's face and raving wildly.

"G.o.ddammit, I know my job, and if you don't think I can handle it, to h.e.l.l with you," he told McLarney, who could only watch with detached awe. "If you don't trust me, then send me back to the G.o.dd.a.m.n district."

As Waltemeyer stormed away, McLarney looked around the office at his other detectives, who were, of course, biting the sleeves of their sport coats to keep from laughing aloud.

That was Waltemeyer. He was the hardest worker in McLarney's squad, a consistently aggressive and intelligent investigator, and two days out of every five he was a confirmed mental case. A Southwest Baltimore boy and the product of a large German family, Donald Waltemeyer was a source of endless delight to McLarney, who would often distract himself on a slow shift by goading his new detective into a tirade against Dave Brown. If Brown could then be made to respond, the result was usually better than television.

Heavyset, with a ruddy face and a mop of thick, coal black hair, Waltemeyer suffered his most embarra.s.sing moment in homicide one morning at roll call: a sergeant read an announcement that Waltemeyer had been named the hands-down winner in a look-alike contest for his portrayal of Shemp, the forgotten Stooge. In Waltemeyer's considered judgment, the author of that little item would survive only as long as he remained anonymous.

Neither temper nor appearance had prevented Waltemeyer from becoming a first-cla.s.s street police in the Southern District, and he still liked to think of himself as the same down-in-the-trenches patrolman he had always been. Long after his transfer to homicide, he made a point of staying close to his old bunkies in the district, often disappearing at night with one of the Cavaliers to visit the Southern's holes or shift-change parties. It was as if there was something a little disreputable about his having gone downtown to CID, something for which a real cop ought to apologize. The vague embarra.s.sment Waltemeyer so obviously felt at having become a detective was his most distinctive trait.

Once last summer, he made a point of taking Rick James out to lunch at Lexington Market, where the two bought tuna sandwiches from a carryout vendor. So far, so good. But then, instead of taking the meal back to headquarters, the older detective drove to Union Square, parking the Cavalier in his old patrol post.

"Now," said Waltemeyer, pushing the driver's seat back and spreading a napkin over his trousers. "We're going to eat like real police."

In McLarney's opinion, Waltemeyer's unswerving adherence to the patrolman's ethic was his only real weakness. Homicide is a world unto itself, and the things that work out in the district don't always work downtown. Waltemeyer's written reports, for example, were no better than district quality when he first came to homicide-a typical problem for men who spent more time on the street than at the typewriter. But in homicide the reports genuinely mattered, and what fascinated McLarney was that after mentioning the value of coherent paperwork to Waltemeyer, the detective set out on a successful, systematic campaign to improve his writing ability. That was when McLarney first realized that Waltemeyer was going to be one h.e.l.l of a detective.

Now, neither McLarney nor anyone else could teach Waltemeyer much that was new about working murders. Only the cases themselves could add to his education, and only a case such as Geraldine Parrish could qualify him for the advanced degree.

The case actually began back in March, though at the time, no one in the homicide unit recognized it for what it was. In the beginning, it appeared to be nothing more than a routine extortion case: a complaint from a twenty-eight-year-old heroin addict who claimed that her uncle wanted $5,000 to keep her from being murdered by a contract killer. Why anyone would want to kill a brain-dead like Dollie Brown was unclear; the girl was a fragile little wraith with no known enemies, tracks on every appendage and very little in the way of money. Nonetheless, someone had tried to kill her, not once, but twice.

The first attempt was almost a year ago, when she was shot in the head during an ambush in which her thirty-seven-year-old boyfriend had been slain. That, too, had originally been Waltemeyer's case, and though it was still an open file, Waltemeyer believed that the boyfriend had been the intended victim and that the shootings had been drug-related. Then, after being released from University Hospital's shock-trauma unit back in March, Dollie Brown had the misfortune to be standing on Division Street when an unknown a.s.sailant cut her throat and ran away. Again, the girl survived, but this time there could be no doubt of the intended victim.

In any other environment, two such a.s.saults in a six-month period may have led an investigator to believe that a campaign to end Dollie Brown's life was indeed under way. But this is West Baltimore, a place where two such incidents-absent any other evidence-can be safely regarded as coincidence and nothing more. The more likely explanation, Waltemeyer reasoned, was that Dollie's uncle was simply trying to capitalize on her fears and cheat her out of the $5,000 check she had received after the shooting from the state's crime victims compensation board, a government agency that provides financial a.s.sistance to those seriously harmed by violent crime. Her uncle knew about that money and told his niece that in return for the cash, he would intervene by killing the man who had been trying to kill her.

Working with a special undercover unit of the Maryland State Police, Waltemeyer had Dollie and her sister, Thelma, wired up with Nagra recorders and sent under police surveillance into a meeting with her uncle. When the man again demanded the money to prevent the impending murder, the extortion attempt was captured on tape. A week or so later, Waltemeyer made an arrest and closed the file.

Only in July did the Dollie Brown case become truly bizarre, for only then did a murder defendant with the singularly appropriate name of Rodney Vice begin talking to prosecutors, trying to cut a deal for himself. And when Rodney Vice opened his mouth, the plot didn't just thicken, it positively congealed.

Vice had been implicated as a go-between in the contract slaying of Henry Barnes, a middle-aged West Baltimore man who had been killed by a shotgun blast as he warmed up his car on a cool morning in October. The victim's wife had paid Vice a total of $5,400 for his services in procuring a gunman to kill her husband, thereby allowing her to collect on a series of life insurance policies. Vice had given a Polaroid photograph of Barnes and a shotgun to a tightly wound sociopath by the name of Edwin "Conrad" Gordon. Told that the intended victim usually warmed his car in front of his rowhouse every morning, Gordon was able to get close enough to use the shotgun at point-blank range. Henry Barnes left this world never knowing what hit him.

All would have gone according to plan had Bernadette Barnes been able to keep her silence. Instead, she admitted to a co-worker at the city social services building that she had arranged her husband's death, telling the woman, "I told you I was serious." Alarmed, the co-worker called the police department, and after several months of investigation by the detectives on Stanton's shift, Bernadette Barnes, Rodney Vice and Edwin Gordon were all in the Baltimore City Jail, tied together in a single prosecution report. Only then did Rodney Vice and his lawyer begin shopping some cooperation around, searching for a ten-years-or-less deal.

At a July 11 proffer session with lawyers and detectives at the Mitch.e.l.l courthouse, Vice was asked how he had known that Edwin Gordon was a man capable of carrying out a contract murder. Nonplussed, Vice a.s.sured the detectives and prosecutors that Gordon had been in that line of work for some time. In fact, he had been killing people for an East Baltimore woman by the name of Geraldine for several years now.

How many people?

Three or four that Vice knew about. Not to mention that one girl-a niece of Geraldine's-who wouldn't die no matter how many times Gordon tried to kill her.

How many times did he try?

Three, said Vice. After the most recent occasion, when he had shot the girl in the head three times to little effect, Gordon was particularly disheartened, telling Vice, "It don't matter what I do, the b.i.t.c.h won't die."

Checking back with Dollie Brown that same day, Waltemeyer and Crutchfield confirmed that Geraldine Parrish was indeed her aunt and that the young woman had indeed been a.s.saulted a third time. She had been walking with Aunt Geraldine back in May, when the older woman told her to wait on a Hollins Street stoop while she went to get something. Seconds later, a man ran up and shot her repeatedly in the head. Again, she was treated and released from University Hospital; incredibly, she mentioned nothing to the investigating officers about the previous attempts on her life. McAllister handled the Hollins Street shooting, and knowing little of Waltemeyer's extortion case two months earlier, he wrote nothing more than a brief 24-hour report.

As Vice spoke, a new tale was being added to the lore and legend of the BPD homicide unit, that of the Unsinkable Dollie Brown, the hapless, helpless niece of Miss Geraldine Parrish, alias the Black Widow.

Rodney Vice had a lot more to say about Miss Geraldine, too. After all, Vice told the gathering, it didn't exactly stop with Dollie Brown and the $12,000 in insurance policies that Aunt Geraldine had obtained in her niece's name. There were other policies, other murders. There was that man back in 1985, Geraldine's brother-in-law, who had been shot on Gold Street. Edwin Gordon had taken that contract as well. And then there was the old boarder who lived at Geraldine's house on Kennedy Street, the elderly woman whom Gordon had to shoot twice before he finally killed her off. It was Miss Geraldine herself who sent the old woman out to a Chinese carryout on North Avenue, then signaled Gordon, who walked calmly up to the target and fired one shot to the back at point-blank range, then issued a coup de grace to the head after the victim fell to the sidewalk.

Veteran detectives left the courthouse with their heads spinning. Three murders, three attempted murders-and that was just what Vice happened to know about. On their return to the homicide office, open murder files dating back as many as three years were suddenly being yanked from the oblivion of the filing cabinets.

Incredibly, everything in those files conformed exactly to Rodney Vice's account. The November 1985 murder of Frank Lee Ross, the common-law husband of Geraldine's sister, had been handled by Gary Dunnigan, who at that time could find no motive for the slaying. Likewise, Marvin Sydnor had worked the fatal shooting of Helen Wright, sixty-five, who had been boarding with Geraldine on Kennedy Street; lacking any solid information about the murder, he had presumed that the old lady had been killed in a robbery attempt gone awry. Not that Sydnor hadn't found a few loose ends in a routine interview with Geraldine Parrish; he even tried to polygraph the landlady, but he gave up when she produced a cardiologist's note saying that her health could not stand the stress of a lie detector test. True to Vice's account, the old woman had been shot in the head several weeks before being murdered but had survived the first a.s.sault-a redundancy that had also been written off as inner-city coincidence.

The sheer amount of new information made clear the need for a special detail, and Waltemeyer-because he had handled the original March extortion complaint as well as the initial shooting of Dollie Brown-soon found himself rea.s.signed to Gary Childs's squad on Stanton's shift. He was joined by Mike Crutchfield, the primary detective on the Bernadette Barnes case, and later by Corey Belt, the bulldog from the Western District who had done so well on the Ca.s.sidy investigation. At Stanton's request, Belt had been returned to homicide from the Western ops unit specifically for the investigation of Geraldine Parrish.

They began with detailed interviews of Dollie Brown and other relatives of Miss Geraldine's, and what they heard became more incredible with each telling. Everyone in the family seemed to know what Geraldine had been doing, yet everyone seemed to have regarded her campaign to trade human lives for insurance benefits as an inevitable, routine bit of family business. No one ever bothered to call the police-Dollie, for one, had said nothing about her aunt during the extortion probe-but worse than that, many family members had signed insurance policies for which Geraldine was the beneficiary. Nieces, nephews, sisters, brothers-in-law, tenants, friends and neighbors-the detectives began learning of hundreds of thousands of dollars in double-indemnity policies. Yet when people were being shot, no one who knew anything about it had bothered to voice so much as mild apprehension.

They feared her. At least they said they feared her-and not just because they knew of the sociopaths that Geraldine Parrish employed for her insurance killings. They feared her because they believed that she had a special power, that she knew voodoo and hexes and all kinds of Carolina backwoods garbage. She could bend a man to her will, make one marry her or make one kill for her. She told them that stuff and, after a time, when people began dying, they actually took to believing it.

But Aunt Geraldine's power wasn't at all obvious to anyone outside the family circle. She was a semiliterate lay preacher with a gray Cadillac and a white stone rowhouse with fake paneling and dropped tile ceilings. She was heavyset, and ugly, too-a thoroughly unattractive woman whose penchant for wigs and fire engine red lipstick suggested a $20 Pennsylvania Avenue prost.i.tute. Geraldine was a hard fifty-five years old when the city homicide unit finally kicked in her front door and that of her mother's house on Division Street.

The search of both addresses takes hours, as Childs, Keller and Waltemeyer find policy binders and other papers strewn throughout the two rowhouses. Long before the search at Kennedy Avenue is complete, Geraldine departs in the back of an Eastern District wagon, arriving at the homicide office well before the investigators. She sits stoically in the large interrogation room as Childs and Waltemeyer arrive and spend another hour or so in the coffee room scanning the insurance policies, photo alb.u.ms and doc.u.ments seized in the two houses.

The two detectives immediately notice a proliferation of marriage licenses. As far as they can tell, the woman is married to five men simultaneously, two of whom were living with her on Kennedy Avenue and were taken downtown as witnesses following the raid. The two men sit together like bookends on the fishbowl sofa, each believing the other to be nothing more than a tenant at the East Baltimore home. Each is confident of his own place in the household. Each has signed a life insurance policy naming Geraldine Parrish or her mother as the beneficiary.

Johnnie Davis, the older of the two husbands, tells detectives that he met Miss Geraldine in New York and had, over his own objection, been intimidated into marriage and brought to Baltimore to live in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the Kennedy Avenue rowhouse. Without fail, Miss Geraldine confiscated his disability checks at the beginning of every month, then returned a few dollars so that he could buy food. The other husband, a man by the name of Milton Baines, was in fact Miss Geraldine's nephew and had rightly objected on grounds of incest when his aunt insisted on marriage during a trip back home to Carolina.

"So why did you marry her?" Childs asks him.

"I had to," he explains. "She put a voodoo curse on me and I had to do what she said."

"How did she do that?"

Baines recalls that his aunt had cooked him a meal using her own menstrual discharge and watched as he ate. Afterward, she told him what she had done and explained that she now had power over him.

Childs and Waltemeyer exchange glances.

Baines rambles on, explaining that when he continued to express concern about marrying his mother's sister, Miss Geraldine took him to an old man in a neighboring town who spoke briefly with the bride-to-be, then a.s.sured Baines that he was not, in fact, related to Geraldine.

"Who was the old man?" Childs asked.

"I don't know."

"Then why did you believe him?"

"I don't know."

It was not to be believed-a murder case with cosmic insanity as the only common frame of reference. When the detectives tell Milton Baines that the old man living in the bas.e.m.e.nt is also Geraldine's husband, he is stupefied. When they explain to him that both he and his rival were living in that house like hogs waiting for the slaughter, corralled by a madwoman who would eventually trade them in for a few thousand dollars of insurance benefits, the man's mouth drops in abject wonder.

"Look at him," says Childs from the other side of the office. "He was the next victim. You can almost see the H-file number stenciled on his forehead."

Waltemeyer guesses by the marriage licenses and other doc.u.ments that husband number three is probably in Plainfield, New Jersey, though whether he is dead or alive isn't immediately clear. Husband number four is doing a five-year bit at Hagerstown on a gun charge. Husband number five is somebody by the name of the Reverend Rayfield Gilliard, whom Geraldine married this past January. The good reverend's whereabouts are uncertain until Childs goes to the blue looseleaf binder that lists unattended deaths for the year. Sure enough, the seventy-nine-year-old Gilliard's marriage to Miss Geraldine had lasted little more than a month; his sudden departure had been attributed by the medical examiner's office to natural causes, though no autopsy had been performed.

There are also the photo alb.u.ms, in which Miss Geraldine had saved not only the Reverend Gilliard's death certificate but also that of her thirteen-year-old niece, Geraldine Cannon, who, according to an accompanying newspaper clipping, had been in her aunt Geraldine's care when she succ.u.mbed to an overdose of Freon in 1975-an overdose ruled accidental, though pathologists attributed it to a possible injection of Ban deodorant. On the following page of the alb.u.m, the detectives find a $2,000 insurance policy in the child's name.

In the same alb.u.m, they locate more recent pictures of Geraldine with an infant girl and soon learn that she had purchased that child from a niece. The baby would be found later that week at a relative's house and would be taken into custody by the Department of Social Services after the detectives match that infant to at least three life insurance policies totaling $60,000 in double-indemnity benefits.

The list of potential victims has no end. An insurance policy is found for aman who had been beaten and left to die in a wooded section of Northeast Baltimore; however, he survived the attack and was later located in a rehabilitative hospital. Another policy is found for Geraldine's younger sister, who died of unexplained causes several years back. And from one page of another alb.u.m, Childs pulls out a death certificate, dated October 1986, for a man named Albert Robinson. The manner of death is listed as homicide.

Childs takes the doc.u.ment and walks to another blue binder that contains a chronological list of Baltimore homicides. He opens the binder to the '86 cases and scans the column of victims: Robinson, Albert B/M/48 10/6/86, shot, NED, 4J-16884 Nearly two years later, the case is still open, with Rick James as the primary detective. Childs takes the death certificate back into the main office, where James is at his desk, absently poking at a chef's salad.

"This mean anything to you?" Childs says.

James scans the death certificate. "Where'd you get this?"

"Out of the Black Widow's photo alb.u.m."

"Are you s.h.i.ttin' me?"

"Uh-uh."

"Hot d.a.m.n," says James, jumping up to grip the sergeant's hand. "Gary Childs done solved my murder."

"Yeah, well, someone had to."

A smokehound from Plainfield, New Jersey, Albert Robinson had been found dead by the B&O railbed at the foot of Clifton Park, shot once in the head. The man's blood-alcohol level at the time of death was 4.0, four times the legal standard in drunk driving cases. Working on that murder, James never did figure out why an alcoholic from north Jersey was dead in East Baltimore. Perhaps, he had reasoned, the man was a hobo who had hitched a southbound freight only to be shot to death for some unknown reason as the train meandered through Baltimore.

"How does she connect with Albert?" asks James, suddenly fascinated.

"I don't know," says Childs, "but we know she used to live up in Plainfield ..."

"No s.h.i.t."

"... and I got a feeling that somewhere in that pile of papers we're gonna find an insurance policy on your man."

"Oooooo, you makin' me feel all warm an' happy inside," says James, laughing. "Keep talkin' that nice talk."

Inside the large interrogation room, Geraldine Parrish adjusts her wig and applies another coat of makeup, using a small mirror. None of this has made her any less conscious of her appearance, such as it is. Nor has she lost her appet.i.te; when detectives bring her a tuna sub from Crazy John's, she puts away the entire thing, chewing slowly, pinkies raised as she holds the ends of the sandwich to her mouth.

Twenty minutes later, she demands to use the ladies' room and Eddie Brown walks her as far as the door, shaking his head and smiling when his prisoner asks if he would be coming inside.

"You go on ahead," he tells her.

She is in there for a good five minutes, and when she steps back into the hallway, it's with a fresh coat of lipstick. "I need my medicines," she says.

"Well, which medicines do you need?" asks Brown. "You had about two dozen different ones in your purse."

"I need all of them."

Visions of an interrogation room overdose dance through Eddie Brown's head. "Well, you ain't getting all of them," he says, walking her back down the hallway. "I'll let you pick three pills."

"I got rights," she says bitterly. "Const.i.tutional rights to my medicines."

Brown smiles, shaking his head.

"Who you laughing at? What you need to get is some religion ... stand there laughing at people."

"You gonna give me religion, huh?"

Geraldine saunters back into the interrogation room, followed by Childs and Waltemeyer. In the end, four detectives will take a crack at this woman, laying the insurance policies on the long table and explaining over and over that it doesn't matter whether she actually pulled the trigger.

"If you caused someone to be shot, then you're guilty of murder, Geraldine," says Waltemeyer.

"Can I have my medicines?"

"Geraldine, listen to me. You're charged with three murders already, and before this is over you're probably going to be charged with some others. Now's the time to tell us what happened ..."

Geraldine Parrish stares up at the ceiling, then begins babbling incoherently.

"Geraldine ..."

"I don't know what you're talkin' 'bout, Mistah Poh-leeces," she says suddenly. "I didn't shoot no one."

Later, when the detectives have given up on the notion of a coherent statement, Geraldine sits alone in the interrogation room, waiting for the paperwork to catch up with her before she is transferred to the City Jail. She is leaning forward, her head resting on the table, when Jay Landsman walks by the one-way window and glances inside.

"Is that her?" says Landsman, who has just come on the four-to-twelve shift.

"Yeah," says Eddie Brown. "That's her."

Landsman's face creases into an evil grin as he slams an open palm hard against the metal door. Geraldine jumps in her seat.

"Whhhhooooaaaaaaaaaaa," wails Landsman in his best approximation of a ghost. "Whhhhooooaa, mmuuurrder ... MMMUUURRDER ..."

"Aw Christ, Jay. Now you f.u.c.kin' did it."

Sure enough, Geraldine Parrish dives under the table on all fours and begins bleating like a crazed goat. Delighted with himself, Landsman keeps at it until Geraldine is p.r.o.ne on the floor, bellowing at the metal table legs.

"Whhhhhoooaaaaa," moans Landsman.

"Aaaaaaaaahhhhhh," screams Geraldine.