THE CALL
LAUDERDALE HOMICIDE
Mayhem and ennui set the tone for a week spent in the forefront of
the battle against a city’s murders.
SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL
October 25, 1987
IT HAS BEEN FOUR DAYS since anybody has heard from or seen Walter
Moody and people are thinking that something is wrong. The tenants
at the South Andrews Avenue apartment building he manages say he
hasn’t answered his door since Thursday. His parents can’t get him
on the phone. And he didn’t call his boss Saturday when he didn’t
show up for his part-time truck-driving job.
This is not like Walter, everyone agrees.
It is now 1:40 p.m., Monday, June 29. The happenstance of concern
from so many places for Walter Moody results in two Fort Lauderdale
police officers and a locksmith coming to his apartment door. There
is a small crowd of tenants watching closely.
The three-story apartment building has a Spanish castle motif: white
walls, red barrel-tile roof, round turret with small arched windows
at the corner. It is a U-shaped building with a neatly kept center
courtyard dominated by a shade tree reaching all the way to the
roof. There are small bushes and shrubs about the courtyard, all
trimmed and cared for by the manager, Walter Moody. The tenants sit
on a bench beneath the shade tree and look up to the second-floor
walkway where the locksmith has just opened the door to Walter’s
apartment. The officers go in and find the place ransacked and the
door to the master bedroom locked. They call for the locksmith to
open it. And after a few moments inside, they call for the homicide
squad.
GEORGE HURT has gone home early. His sinuses are acting up and the
last few days have been slow. He figures he can take the break. He
is sitting on the couch and has the afternoon paper in his hands
when he gets The Call.
It’s another murder. An apartment manager. No smoking gun. No such
luck.
He is told where. He is told when. The how is not yet known. It is
Detective Vicki Russo telling him this. She’s rolling on it, she
says. And so are the others-they being all available members of the
homicide squad. George Hurt, sergeant in charge of the squad, says
he’s rolling too. A routine week in homicide has begun. Hurt hangs
up and curses to himself. This is number 38.
Murder in Fort Lauderdale comes in all ways, times, places and
circumstances. It is a crime unclassifiable in any way other than by
its final result, the taking of life. For George Hurt and the
homicide squad the only sure bet is that it comes and comes. This is
Monday, June 29, and already there have been 38 homicides this year.
There were 42 in all of 1986. The most ever was 52, back in 1981. At
this rate, George Hurt is thinking he is going to need another case
chart for the wall in the squad room. There could be 60 to 70
murders in Fort Lauderdale this year. That’s kind of scary. And
that’s why he curses each time he gets The Call.
It is hard to account for the numbers. Economics, drugs, heat, full
moons, whatever. Hurt’s squad has investigated three people shot to
death in a fast-food restaurant during a Saturday morning robbery; a
high-profile divorce lawyer murdered a few steps from his office
elevator; a rock-and-roll singer beaten to death because he was gay.
More than a dozen times the victim was either the buyer or seller of
drugs when things went wrong. There have been the quiet cases that
rated only a few paragraphs in the newspapers, and the big cases
that drew the TV trucks with the microwave dishes.
It all adds up to 37 times in six months that the squad has
assembled at a scene that defied common sensibilities, the Norman
Rockwell portrait of life. And now it is time to gather again.
Number 38, Walter Moody, lies cold in bed, his blood four days old
on the sheets and pillows, waiting for the homicide squad.
“SMELL THAT?” says George Hurt. “They just rolled the body over in
there.”
Capt. Al Van Zandt, a supervisor of the detective division, puffs on
his cigar so the smell of tobacco will overcome the sickly smell of
death.
The two of them are standing outside the door to Walter Moody’s
apartment. Hurt didn’t have to be inside to know what the smell is;
he has had years of experience with it. Going back to his stint as
head of the department’s forensic unit before coming to homicide,
and even back 20 years to Vietnam, he says that it seems much of his
life has been spent rolling bodies over.
This time he stays mostly outside the apartment with Van Zandt,
content to let the forensic investigators and the assistant medical
examiner do the work inside.
There are five homicide detectives working the first hours of the
Walter Moody case. One of the first to arrive was Phil Mundy, the
squad’s senior detective. But after surveying the murder scene and
discerning that it was a “whodunit” as opposed to a “smoking gun”
case, Mundy returned to the bureau to run record searches on Moody
and to coordinate requests that would come from detectives at the
scene. His partner, Pete Melwid, is still at the apartment building
questioning tenants. So are detectives Mike Walley, Gary Ciani and
Vicki Russo. Russo’s partner, Kevin Allen, is on the way, called in
from a day off. When was Walter last seen? Who were his friends? Who
were his enemies? These are the questions the detectives are asking.
In the early stages of a case, information is the only available
tool.
There is a basic rule to murder investigation; as more time elapses
in a case, the chances of solving it grow slimmer. So whenever
possible, depending on constrictions of time, the overtime budget,
fatigue and so on, Hurt puts all available hands on the initial
stages of a case. “It’s called trying to figure out what is what and
going from there,” he says.
The squad has a rotation system for assigning cases to lead
detectives. This time partners Russo and Allen are “up.” They will
be responsible for the case from start to finish. If it is not
solved by the group effort in the next few hours, it will be theirs
to work alone.
“I haven’t had a smoking gun yet this year,” Russo says as she
starts compiling information in a notebook. “For once, I’d like a
gimme-to come in and there would be a victim and over there would be
the suspect.”
But it hasn’t been that way for Russo or the rest of the squad for
most of this year.
WHILE THE HOMICIDE detectives corral and question the tenants and
the owner of the apartment building, three forensic investigators
are inside the apartment looking for fingerprints, photographing and
gathering evidence. Dr. Felipe Dominguez, assistant medical
examiner, is in the bedroom with the body.
Moody lies faceup on his bed and almost looks as if he is asleep.
Almost but not quite. There is a stab wound on his forearm, other
cuts, but it is obvious that none were fatal. And there is blood on
the sheets and pillow, but the odor of death is not noticeable to
anyone without Hurt’s nose for it. The killer had left on the air
conditioner, slowing decomposition.
The phone in the apartment rings but the detectives don’t answer it
because there is blood on it and possible fingerprints. After
several rings, a tape recording of Walter’s voice comes on asking
the caller to leave a message. He’ll get back to them. The caller is
Walter’s mother. She is hysterical and wondering what is going on.
“Please, will someone call us as soon as you know what is
happening,” she pleads after the beep. A detective borrows a phone
in another apartment to call.
The detectives interviewing the tenants have come up with three
potential avenues of investigation: Walter evicted people from the
apartment. Walter was set to be a witness in an upcoming robbery
trial. And Walter frequently allowed young men to stay in his
apartment in exchange for work around the building.
Working from experience, the detectives pick the third version as
the best place to start. And the tenants have provided a description
of a young man named Troy who was seen around the apartment as late
as Friday afternoon. Let’s try to find this Troy, the detectives
decide.
Dr. Dominguez is leaving the apartment now and tells Hurt the body
is ready to be moved to the medical examiner’s office for autopsy.
Hurt wants to know the cause of death.
“Knife wound in the back, between the shoulder blades,” Dominguez
says.
“Big knife? Little knife?”
“Big knife,” Dominguez says. “Kitchen knife.”
THREE MEN PULL UP to the apartment building in a white van and
unload a stretcher. They are the body movers, from a company called
Professional. All three are wearing suits and ties, the top buttons
on their shirts fastened. They are easily the best-dressed people on
the scene. They move in a solemn single file into Walter Moody’s
apartment to take him on his last trip out.
As they do this, the crime scene begins breaking up. The detectives
are heading off in different directions; Melwid to a fast-food
restaurant to follow a lead on Troy, Ciani and Walley back to the
bureau with three tenants who will help make a composite drawing of
the suspect. Van Zandt also heads back. Hurt, Russo and Allen are
tying up the last details at the scene before leaving. And inside
the apartment, the crime scene technicians are going to take a
dinner break. They will have to come back to the apartment later to
begin a meticulous and long search into the night for evidence and
clues.
When Walter Moody comes out of his apartment for the last time, one
tenant is still standing under a shade tree, watching and sipping a
beer. Moody is beneath a white sheet. Two of the Professionals-one
now has blood on the sleeve and pants of his light blue suit-are
straining under the weight of the stretcher, their heels shuffling
on the concrete. Once down the stairs, the body is gently placed on
a wheeled stretcher and covered with a green velvet blanket. It is
then wheeled to the white van. One of the body movers has blue tears
tattooed at the corners of his eyes. Somehow it seems appropriate.
The people here can’t let true sympathy get too much in the way of
the work.
At 7 p.m. the yellow plastic barricade tape police had strung across
the entrance of the apartment building is taken down. The white van
pulls away. The last of the police officers leave the scene. On the
walkway outside the murder victim’s apartment, the cops have left
five empty coffee cups behind. And there are 36 cigarette butts
crushed on the cement or dropped in the wood chips spread around the
shrubs that Walter Moody had once planted and cared for.
IT IS NEARLY 9 P.M. before the detectives are finished getting a
composite of Troy from the witnesses and turning over the collected
information to Russo and Allen, the case detectives.
Russo and Allen have several leads. First to check is a name that
Mundy came up with on the police computer. It is a person being held
in the county jail who gave Walter Moody’s address as his own. It
might be a former roommate and someone who may know Troy. As Hurt
and the other detectives head home for the night, Russo and Allen
decide to head to the jail to interview the prisoner. Russo first
calls her daughter to say she won’t be home until late.
At home, George Hurt watches the first half of a New York Mets and
St. Louis Cardinals baseball game on TV before falling asleep. But
at 12:30 a.m. he is yanked out of it by the phone. The Call. Fifteen
minutes later he is at 600 Southwest 12th Avenue, the corner of
Riverside Park, looking at the facedown body of a man with a bullet
hole in his back. Number 39.
Walley and Ciani are also there, the partners who are up on the
rotation. Van Zandt is there, cigar in hand, as well as Dominguez
and the crime scene detectives. Somebody asks if anybody knows if
the Mets won. Somebody else starts an electric generator and a
spotlight bathes the body in a harsh white light. Above the grim
proceedings the detectives can see storm clouds forming. It will
rain soon. They hurry.
The detectives begin talking to witnesses and the two men who had
been with the dead man when he was alive just minutes before. They
get an idea of what happened.
Michael Connable, 31, was walking with two friends down Sixth Street
toward the Riverside Pub. It was midnight dark, and a second group
of three men were approaching from the opposite way. As the two
groups passed, one of the men from Group Two opened fire. The men of
Group One began running. Fifty yards later Connable fell dead a few
feet from the door of the Riverside Pub, his blood slowly seeping
down an incline on the parking lot toward a storm drain.
Group One did not know Group Two. Group One did not say anything to
Group Two. Group One consisted of three gay white men. Group Two
consisted of three black men. What did it all mean? What was the
motive? Was it random violence? Was it racial? Was it because the
men in Group One were gay? In the silence and the darkness, how
could the shooter even have known that?
By the time the body movers from Professional arrive-the same three
who came for Walter Moody-the detectives know they have the kind of
case that will take a lot of work on the street.
“The only thing we can do is hope to find a snitch,” says Walley.
In the last 12 hours, Hurt and his squad have gone zero for two.
They’ve got two whodunits and few clues to the perpetrators. Hurt
says he could sure use a smoking gun case. He could also use some
sleep.
It starts to rain as Connable is put on the stretcher and carried to
the waiting van. The detectives split up and go home. Connable’s
blood starts to wash down the storm drain. And raindrops fall on the
face of the body mover with the tattooed tears.
ON THE WALL in George Hurt’s office is a sign that says, “Get off
your ass and knock on doors.” It might have been made with a
salesman in mind, but the slogan is a creed for the homicide
detective as well.
Outside his office, the squad room is a quiet place during the days
following the Moody and Connable slayings. No murders occur, but the
detectives are out on the street, knocking on doors.
Tuesday is autopsy day. But in these cases the autopsies will not
provide information critical to solving the cases. So Walley and
Ciani and Russo and Allen get the cause of death details on Connable
and Moody by phone. There is no need to stand in the tiled room and
watch the post-mortem procedures like they do on the TV cop shows.
WHAT IS NEEDED is the almost always boring legwork they don’t show
on TV. Walley and Ciani spend their time during the rest of the week
looking for witnesses in the Connable case, knocking on doors in the
Riverside neighborhood, talking to regulars at the Riverside Pub,
and checking out the few phone tips that have come in. They are
getting nowhere.
The detectives are also working informants, putting the word out
into the netherworld network of people who sell street information
that this case will bring up to $1,000 for the name of the shooter.
Working informants is one of the ironies of death investigation.
Snitches are often criminals themselves; information is gathered on
the street by those who work the street-drug dealers and thieves
among them. Some wear beepers so they don’t miss calls from either
customers or the cops. Cops despise them and need them at the same
time. But the trouble at the moment is that this time nobody is
calling with any information on the Michael Connable case.
“So far, we have nothing,” says Walley, a large man who seems more
to hunker down over his desk in the squad room than to sit at it.
Russo and Allen are having similar difficulties. Their efforts to
track down the missing Troy are getting them nowhere. The jail
prisoner they talked to didn’t know any Troy, was no help at all.
The fast-food worker named Troy that Melwid came up with can’t be
located, and might not be the right one anyway. On his application
form at the restaurant he put a phony address down. They have tips
to three other men who might be their Troy but so far they’ve hit
dead ends.
By Thursday, the only thing for sure about the week’s two cases is
that both are getting older and harder to solve.
GEORGE HURT is sitting at his desk, shaking his head. He has the
reading glasses he usually wears while doing paperwork off and the
tip of one of the earpieces clenched in his teeth. The plastic tip
is grooved from being clenched often. It is that kind of job.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Crime Beat
by Michael Connelly
Copyright © 2004 by Hieronymus, Inc..
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Little, Brown
Copyright © 2004
Hieronymus, Inc.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-316-15377-X
