What a Waste

''You Start With a Body. Bodies in back alleys, in parking lots and playgrounds and automobiles, up on rooftops, in town house and tenements and housing projects.'' Lieutenant Detective Edward Sherry, head of Boston homicide, is talking. ''Bodies butchered into eight pieces and stuffed into three suitcases, in a trunk in the cellar, in an old mailbag at a deserted corner of an express station. And John Rooney---no head, no arms, just a single leg and a torso found in the marsh grass at Squantum.''

Or a floater in the Boston harbor, the bungled abortion, wrapped in burlap; flesh gnawed by crabs, invaded by silent scream. ''It was awful,'' Sherry says. ''How could you ask someone to identify it?'' But a few weeks before, a mother reported an absent daughter. Armed with his own charts and X rays, the girl's dentist peers at the remains. ''That's my work, and that's the mouth of Claire Quinn.''

Strangulation: ''I would wake up at night sweating,'' says Boston homicide's Lieutenant Jim McDonald, ''after I saw what the strangler had done to Ida Irga, a 75-year-old widow. She was spread-eagled on the floor. Ankles jammed into the spaces between vertical wooden rungs on the backs of two chairs like a gynecologist's stirrups, a white pillowcase knotted around her wrinkled neck, dried blood in her right ear.'' A 75-year-old woman whose murderer mounted her to perform an act of . . . love? . . . after her death.

''Strangulation is a common cause of death in sexual crimes,'' says Ed Sherry. (continued on page 110) What a waste (continued from page 107) ''Sometimes you don't want to tell the family what's actually happened in a sex murder.''

Shootings: From a statement by Richard K. Ellis, witness to a double shooting at a night club: ''Roger walked out of the elevator and by this partition, and just as he got by it, I don't know if he saw the fellow there . . . but he came out and made a slight turn and this gunman said, 'OK, open the safe.' At this, Roger said, 'I don't have the combination, only the general manager has that.' With that, the gunman shot him in the front somewhere. . . . Roger was standing there and I heard the gun go off and I saw him go like this'' (grabs his stomach).

Interrogator: ''Did he say anything?''

''No. Ugh. Just a groan. The gunman took me and just as I got in the elevator, I heard another shot. He took another shot at Roger. He shot him again.''

Jim McDonald: ''When people are shot, they usually just look so very peaceful.''

Lieutenant Jerry McCallum: ''The only thing that shocks me, and I've been to hundreds of autopsies, is the battered child. I can't take it. It's so unbelievable; they're almost all colored. The people upstairs could hear the body of the child going thump, thump, thump against the wall, swung by its hand. And in the wall, indentations where the body, the skull hit the wall.''

The knife: From an interrogation by Ed Sherry: ''When she came out of the kitchen and saw you and started to yell and scream, did you do anything?''

''I didn't know what to do. I panicked.''

''Did you do anything other than panic?''

''I started swinging at her.''

''With what?''

''With the knife.''

''Did you strike her?''

''Yes.''

''What part of the body did you strike?''

''I don't know, everything happened so fast.''

''Was it with the knife you struck her?''

''Yes.''

''Did she make any effort to fight back?''

''Yes.''

''How did she fight back?''

''She came at me.''

''With her hands?''

''Yes.''

''Did you stab her?''

''Yes.''

''How many times?''

''I don't know.''

Or, from another interview: ''How many times did you strike the man with the knife?''

''I don't know.''

''Was it more than once?''

''Yes.''

''Did he fall to the floor or onto the stairs?''

''He fell over the banister, like, and knocked over the table.''

''Was he able to get up again?''

''He moved a few feet past the table.''

''How did he move, was he walking upright?''

''No, he was more or less crawling.''

''Did you do anything with this man after you caught up to him?''

''I put him in a small closet, like. I dragged him.''

''Did you believe that perhaps he might be dead? Did that occur to you, did that thought enter your mind?''

''Yes, but I tried not to let it through.''

A blunt instrument: Jim McDonald: ''The guy used a claw hammer; it made holes, holes in the face and head. Every time he swung that hammer over his head, he flung blood all over the walls.''

Who gets murdered and why: At a sand-lot baseball game, ''It's my turn at bat.''

''No, it's my turn.'' A gun comes into play; one batter is permanently out.

A single bullet placed neatly in the back of the skull: Ed Sherry: ''Those are the ones by organized crime, always by white guys. You never find out who did it, or at least you never can arrest anybody even if you do know. Most gangland murders are prosecution-proof. But then, they're no great loss to the community, like George McLaughlin, who left us suddenly one noon on a Boston street. I remember the Delaney murder. He was found nude in the Boston harbor after he had broken into some North Shore house and stolen a dozen suits worth $250 apiece. His old Irish mother came to us in tears. She complained about receiving his body the same way it came into this world. He was buried in one of those stolen suits, though. His girlfriend copped it before we found where he kept them.''

Interruption of a crime: At a bank job, the alarm alerts police. As a cop approaches the bank, a lookout opens up with an automatic rifle from 60 yards away and stitches the cop up the back.

Hookers: An argument over price or practice, a knife four times in the gut. ''We know the two girls who did it,'' says Sherry, ''but we can't prove it. They carry a switchblade or a .22 in their bra. How do you tell some respectable family that their son was a white hunter looking for a black prostitute down in the combat zone?''

The spoils system: Four Roxbury ghetto people, all with police records, meet with a visitor from Cleveland to plan a community-action program. Enter a trio with guns, locals who erroneously feel themselves frozen out of a piece of the community action. They fire a bullet into the head of one man. A second man murmurs, ''What a waste, what a waste,'' and he, too, is shot.

The Cleveland traveler protests, ''I'm only a visitor. I don't know nothing about anything.''

''You should have stayed there, man,'' the last words he ever will hear. Two wounding bullets fell the surviving pair.

One testifies against the three accused of the crime, but the jury does not believe his identification. But two of the assassins receive long sentences for other offenses. The third still walks the Boston streets. ''An animal,'' says Sherry.

A bystander: William Sheridan peaceably attends the christening of a baby. Two gangland celebrants argue; a wild shot kills Sheridan.

A dead infant: For the benefit of policemen, a toddler demonstrates with a doll how she played with baby sister: walking on the doll's stomach, jumping up and down on the tiny chest.

An anxious student: With an iron bar, he bludgeons a watchman who catches him breaking into a classroom at Suffolk University for a look at an upcoming examination. The student pours sulphuric acid over his victim. No arrest at the time, but months later Texas police inform Sherry they are holding a former Suffolk student on charges of slaughtering a scrubwoman who discovered him going through an instructor's desk.

Self-defense: A black juvenile officer drives up a narrow street in Roxbury. Four youths, tagged troublemakers, come from the opposite direction. Vehicles brush. A dispute. The black officer kills one with a single shot. The survivors claim, ''We were backing up.''

The cop: ''They were coming at me.''

The threat: From an interrogation: ''I walked into the hallway and the boys stopped me.''

''Were they all known to you?''

''There was Ronnie and his brother Reuben and Hands and another one.''

''What did they do to you?''

''Hands asked me for money. I said, 'Man, I've got no money.' Hands started to fight me and he busted me on the mouth with his fist.''

''Where did you go?''

''I went home and got my knife.''

''Why?''

''I don't know. Ronnie said he was going to do something to me. His brother was laughing at me.''

''Were you scared?''

''Yes.''

''Had they beaten you before?''

''Yes, every day, all the time.''

The investigating detective: ''He said (continued on page 140) what a waste (continued from page 110) he didn't mean to kill Ronnie, only cut him. He put seven and a half inches of an eight-inch blade in Ronnie's chest.''

Race: A black man sat in a car with some friends in South Boston, enclave of lower-class white America. ''It's like Selma, Alabama,'' according to Jerry McCallum. Whites approached the car. ''Nigger, get out of South Boston,'' they ordered.

McCallum: ''He made the mistake of getting out of the car to argue. They beat him, stomped him, kicked him to death. His friends in the car testified against the whites who were arrested, but the jury decided not guilty.''

Sherry: ''You don't get that sort of thing from Negroes, mobbing a man, kicking him to death.''

• • •

Fourteen men work under Ed Sherry, who started out as a traffic cop 32 years ago. They're all white, thick-waisted, heavy-bottomed, earthy churchgoers. Mostly high school graduates, not a Mod haircut among them. Street tough. Jack Spencer, called Bruce, interrogates a Cuban refugee, through an interpreter, about the shooting of his wife. She took two .22-caliber bullets in the mouth while three children and a grandmother watched. The witnesses finger the husband. Through the interpreter the accused vigorously insists that an intruder burst into the apartment, snapped off the two shots and left, dropping the weapon behind him. After 15 minutes of Spanish relayed into English, Spencer turns to the interpreter. ''Tell him he's a fucking liar.''

''Who's a fucking liar?'' shouts the accused.

Sherry himself is plump, red-faced, deceptively gentle and soft-spoken. If the mean and friendly interrogation tactic is to be used with a suspect, you know who will play the Mr. Softie role. But he's devious when it profits. ''We had a suspect in the murder of a woman. He had worked for her but claimed that he hadn't been in the house for months. We had his fingerprints on the neck of a bottle. I told him that if the last time he had been in the house was in December, his prints wouldn't still be on the bottle in March. That was a lie. I left the room so he could talk with his mother, but I left the door ajar. He said, 'Ma, they have my fingerprints on a bottle. I killed her.'

'' 'Shut your damn mouth,' she said, but I came in, threw her ass out and he confessed.''

The lieutenant holds down a wooden desk in a small room sometimes used for interrogation. A one-way looking glass allows witnesses and cops to peek. Stashed in a corner are two paintings found in the apartment of a murdered girl. Lurid yellows and reds, thick gobs of oil paint, skull images with a knife cutting off one head. ''If this were crime fiction, the answer would be in the paintings,'' grunts Sherry as he removes them from his office. ''We tried to make this a suicide, but we couldn't find the knife.''

City grit powders the window sills of homicide's four-room suite on the second floor of headquarters. Recent Wanted posters hang on walls that are blotchy where paint has peeled away. There are also calendars from the Middlesex Welding Company, Army recruiting posters (an unlikely place for enlistees, considering the middle age of the residents and the character of their guests), a small notice that announces the schedule of Masses at Our Lady of Victories Shrine, an official document on the proper procedures for transporting a prisoner aboard a commercial aircraft and a monthly score sheet that notes the current homicide totals, by weapon and by race. An old cartoon clipped from a newspaper shows a policeman standing before a desk sergeant, with the gag line, ''I just made an arrest and I would like to call my lawyer.''

Lockers store neatly pressed uniforms to be used for ceremonial duties or crowd control, Smith & Wesson protective headgear. A bookcase contains Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People and How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, a Gideon Bible, Boston novelist Edwin O'Connor's Edge of Sadness, a stack of Massachusetts legal codes, plus some election ledgers that list residents by ward.

Atop a cabinet sits a cardboard box from the Southmost Vegetable Co-op and it bears in large letters the names Howard Steelman, Fats Buccelli, Thomas Sullivan and Rabbi Zuber. ''All unsolved cases from before I got here,'' says Sherry, and an ecumenical note on the wide spectrum of murder.

Along a wall of one of the rooms stands a cupboard packed with hundreds of stenographers' notebooks, all neatly numbered. These are the originals of interrogations and statements. But the thousands of notebook pages quietly gathering grit barely begin the pile of paperwork that surrounds a homicide.

In Sherry's office, dark-green filing cabinets store an age of Boston homicides, each murder neatly tucked into a manila casing. Written on the outside are the names of victims, defendants, stenographers, photographers, chemists, medical examiners, witnesses and other principals. Inside the folders, a thick stack of forms reduces murder to a clerical procedure. A number 87, a white card, carries the victim's vital statistics and a green, number 1381, lists the data on the defendant. ''We have more white cards than green ones.'' Sherry points out.

A homicide case-summary form encapsulates what's known about a killing at any one time. The police journal records the initial discovery of a crime by an officer. ''About 12:30 P.M. Saturday, July 17, 1971, as a result of information received, Patrolman Albert Covello and Patrolman Cornelius Kelly of District Four found one John Sebastian, 41, lying in the street in front of 401 Ashley with a wound in the back of his head. . . .''

Also in that manila folder are copies of reports from ballistics, the fingerprint man, the crime lab, the medical examiner. Photographs of the murder scene, complete with descriptions of the camera position, add more bulk to the file. Then there are the requests for an individual's criminal record, teletypes to the FBI or other police organizations and warrants for a suspect's arrest. ''Most of the time, though,'' says Sherry, ''we don't wait for a warrant but pick up the guy on probable cause.''

''Press down hard, you are writing through five copies,'' commands the sheet that must be filed with the Boston central records office. Field-interrogation forms that tell who has been interviewed and what was said increase the paper weight. Much of the collecting must be done by uniformed men and detectives working out of the various station houses. ''We encourage them to get it all down on paper, instead of trusting to memory,'' says Sherry. ''We like to know what the neighbors saw or heard and get a listing of license-plate numbers in the area so we can talk to other potential witnesses later.''

There are chits to be filled out for toll calls. ''So nobody thinks we're just calling a broad in New Orleans,'' explains Sherry. And if a man is found in New Orleans, someone must go and get him. ''It's known as rendition,'' points out Sherry. ''Extradition refers only to transfer of a person from a foreign country.''

A chronology-of-interrogation form requires homicide cops to list the places and times of questioning of a suspect or defendant. ''So he won't claim we took him down in the cellar and beat the shit out of him,'' says Sherry. It also provides an obstacle to a defense attorney who argues that the cops interrogated the client for an excessive length of time or bounced him from station house to station house to avoid being served legal writs.

Another form covers the warnings that must be given before a suspect can be interrogated. Sherry calls it ''the Miranda card'' after the Supreme Court decision that declared an individual had a right (continued on page 246) What a waste (continued from page 140) to consult with counsel before being questioned by police. The Boston police ritual calls for an officer to read the suspect the following: ''We are going to place you in a line-up with other persons to see if certain witnesses can identify you as the person who committed the crime which we are investigating. You have a right to have a lawyer present during the line-up to see to it that the line-up is conducted fairly. If you cannot afford a lawyer, we will see that a lawyer is present on your behalf before the line-up takes place.'' To make sure the suspect understands the situation, the statement is then put into the form of three questions, with the answers recorded. ''That's provided he can understand it, and if not, we have to send out for an interpreter. I don't like to use a policeman who speaks the foreign language, because they may charge that he distorted the answers,'' says Sherry. Naturally, a voucher for payment to the interpreter must be included in the case file. ''Otherwise, the city of Boston won't pay; we've got some instances where the interpreter is still waiting for his money three months later.''

With the accused papered into a lineup, the cops must still scramble for people to appear alongside him. In the old days, they just brought in folks who happened to be passing by. ''Now we have to pay candidates for the line-up,'' continues Sherry. ''Nobody wants to appear; I'm sure there are a lot of people walking the street who are wanted.

''We may not be fighting crime,'' Sherry concludes, ''but we sure are recording it.''

The room adjacent to Sherry's is a bull pen with seven desks. From two to a dozen detectives are on the phones, talking shop or making out reports on a pair of aging typewriters. The dialog centers on the work.

A defense lawyer telephones because he wants to talk to a prosecution witness about his account of the crime. ''He wants to know if the witness is legitimate. A witness doesn't have to talk to the defense,'' explains Sherry. ''We tell witnesses that if they want to talk to defense counsel they may, but they can tell them that they've talked to the police and given them their story. You hate to help the other side in this business, but. . . .''

On another telephone a detective checks to determine whether any fingerprints were found on a knife used by a mother to carve up her daughter some months back.

''Joe, what happened to your car?'' asks a lieutenant of a sergeant.

''I'm standing still, see, and this guy hits me. Is that covered by no-fault insurance?''

At another desk, Spencer growls into a phone, ''No, you got it wrong. Sadie is the victim.''

The chief topic for the morning is the shooting of a man as he left a bar during the night. ''Check this out,'' instructs a lieutenant. ''This broad he was with may have a record. It's a through-and-through wound of the chest. He's still alive and doing pretty good.'' Homicide often begins its investigation before the injured dies, since the trail and the witnesses may evaporate if it waits until death.

''See if it's one of those rifles that eject a shell,'' advises a third cop. ''Do you know where the place is?''

''Yeah, there's a grass lot, right where all those buildings have been torn down, a little short street out by the bridge.''

''It could be a revenge job. He owned a café; there could be hundreds of reasons.''

Spencer studies a crime report drawn up by Jim McDonald and bursts out, ''What's a mal-e-factor mean? Is he the victim or the victor?''

''I see where they got Robichaud down in Rhode Island,'' announces one detective, referring to the arrest of a badly wanted suspect.

''Yeah, and he had six bullets in him.''

''Somebody took four of them out, but he still had two in him.''

''Did you know Jim Dugan's going on days?''

''Is that right?''

''Yeah, he's got high blood pressure.''

''Hey, does anybody know anything about the Bromley Street Neighborhood Association?''

Another phone call. ''It's for Mark,'' grins a detective. ''You're a little nice to some people and they keep calling you, They fall in love with you.''

At one of the two typewriters, McDonald, who will shortly spend 12 weeks at the FBI Academy in Quantico. Virginia, pecks out a fugitive warrant for a girl doing time in a North Carolina prison for stealing 72 credit cards. She faces a Boston rap as an accessory to murder. Sherry remarks, ''I talked to her mother and to her sister, real fine people, but this girl became a prostitute. She lured this kid into an alley. She says she only wanted to turn a trick, but I guess she and her boyfriend tried to rob the kid, went through his pockets and he resisted. A real nice kid, he was watching the Bruins on TV in a bar with some friends. When the game ended, they all went home except him. He called his girlfriend, but she was out, and then I guess he picked up this prostitute. His father knows what happened, but his mother doesn't know that he was with a prostitute.''

McDonald stops typing for a moment. ''I love the way they talk down there in Carolina. 'I 'preciate this, y'all.' And did you ever notice how they all have no first names, just initials, like A. C. or J. W.?''

Sherry answers a call from one of the medical examiners. He wants to know which judge sits in a particular district, since application to the magistrate must be made in order to hold an inquest. Either the district attorney or the medical examiner may ask for an inquest. ''Some of these take more time than a trial,'' Sherry points out. ''Like, we had an officer guarding a wounded prisoner at the hospital. Some other patient there goes berserk and tries to attack the policeman with this.'' Sherry holds up a metal clipboard whose swinging edge would perform like a dull guillotine. ''He not only shoots and kills the guy but one bullet also kills another patient. That inquest involved sixty-three witnesses, all the patients in the ward, the nurses. It took nine days.''

Conversation turns to judges and one detective says, ''Bruce, tell 'em what you said to that judge.'' Before Spencer can answer, the detective tells what happened. ''This judge is Harvard, society, and he asks Bruce, 'Well, what about these guys up for sentencing?' Bruce says, 'They're all shit bums, Your Honor.' The judge calls Bruce a breath of fresh air in the court.''

Sherry walks into the room with a copy of a crime report in hand. ''What the hell is this about a malefactor?''

''That's just McDonald getting ready for the FBI.''

''I still prefer perpetrator; and what's this stuff about being 'notified telephonically'?''

Another member of the unit enters. ''Hey,'' he calls to one of those present, ''I just saw your friend Sal on the corner of Washington. Dark glasses, hair slicked down with witch hazel, looks like he's really making out with Patriarca'' (a New England Mafia don).

Sherry says to McCallum, ''Next week it'll be ten years since you took that call about a suspected suicide.'' He means the first victim of the Boston Strangler, whose works bound the Boston homicide squad together like the survivors of a combat Infantry platoon. The Strangler destroyed not only the sleep of the public but also that of the police as newspaper stories and the panic of the citizenry put the cops into a pressure cooker. Sherry fears---perhaps more than anything else---another rampage by a psychopath with the flair to invade the imagination. In his office, he keeps a tape recording of a call to the police some two years ago. ''Dear,'' begins the male voice addressing a woman operator, ''at the corner of Washington and Knee-land Street, in the excavation, you'll find a man dead, dead in the water. The Giggler,'' and he trails off in laughter. At the site, the cops found a body; but that was the only call from the one who named himself The Giggler. Sherry suppressed the recording to prevent newspaper scares and pranks about The Giggler. He also wanted the tape recording kept secret in order to test its contents on a suspect or on anyone who might confess to clumping the corpse into the excavation.

On Sherry's desk sits a greeting card. The well-wisher is a lifer convicted recently of the murder of a nine-year-old boy and a suspect in other murders. Sherry thinks he may be The Giggler. When the prisoner read The Giggler's words, there were noticeable similarities in delivery. But identification remains difficult, since Sherry believes The Giggler was drunk and his diction would be hard to reproduce.

Sherry has considered the possibility that the technique of voice prints might aid in identification of The Giggler. He says, to no one in particular in the bull pen, ''I see where they admitted voice prints in a couple of cases down in Washington.''

McDonald answers, ''For what it's worth.''

''I'd like to see them develop a real test to show whether anybody's fired a gun. Those so-called paraffin tests aren't worth a shit.''

Still on the subject of crime-lab work, a detective mentions, ''You know, we got this guy with blood all over his shoes where that woman was run over and then stomped. He says the blood on his shoes was from picking up the body of his brother, who was killed. We'll see what the lab says about the blood type on his shoes.''

''There's going to be a good question of law there,'' warns Sherry. ''Whether there was probable cause to take blood samples off that man's shoes.''

At the hospital, one detective patiently waits for the woman who was involved to recover consciousness. During a brawl at a housing project, the white woman's white escort gunned down two Puerto Ricans, then everybody started to run. ''They caught up with her in a car, ran her down, then carried her back into the apartment, where everyone took turns kicking her. When they brought her to the hospital, we couldn't tell whether she was white, black or green; her face was just a mess of blood and the tire tracks were still on her chest. Here, look at the photographs we took of her body.'' Across her breasts and stomach the treads are clearly visible.

Sherry asks why the photographs don't have a ruler or a tape measure alongside the tire tracks to help identify the car that was used. No one has an answer, but one man reports that human-tissue samples from the tire of an automobile have been sent to an FBI lab for identification and analysis.

The bull pen empties as men go to assignments. Two detectives have gone to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to interview witnesses for a forthcoming trial. One man is in court, ready to testify about the murder of an 18-year-old heroin addict, shot four times in the back by another junkie. Two more have gone to talk to the family of a recent murder victim. A couple of spares get drafted to help with security for a Boston visit by Representative Wilbur Mills and Senator Edward Kennedy. Another detective serves as a guide to an assistant D. A. who wants to become familiar with the scene of a crime.

Spencer remains behind to talk about one of his searches for a witness. ''I was looking for this guy for two fucking years. Everybody thought he'd been dropped in an acid vat at a leather factory. I get word the guy is working as a ranch hand on an island off the coast of Texas. The only way you can get out there is by plane. I ask around at Port Lavaca and they tell me there's this fellow has his own plane. I call him up and he says sure. He shuts his fucking store, we go out in the fucking pasture, take off and land on a road on this island, right where the guy I'm looking for is working. I say to him, 'I gotcha.' He almost shit in his pants.

''He tells me everything I want to know and it's fine. The guy who was murdered, they dropped a 200-pound rock on his head. But some good comes out of it. His eyes weren't even closed when they had his kidneys in a bucket of brine going upstairs to a guy waiting for them. Made a transplant. All this fucking bad, there's fucking good comes out of it.''

Homicide, in fact, seems to turn cops on to life the way no other crime does. Robbery, burglary, assault and noncapital mayhem leave the policemen responsible with room only to investigate the superficialities---of the crimes and of the people involved. But murder calls for detailed study of the victim. Sherry must discuss circumstances of the death with parents, spouse, children, friends. ''You get to know the people. Some of them you still see long after the case is over.'' While an arresting officer in a burglary rap may know little more about his captives than that they are shit bums, Sherry philosophizes, ''Eighty percent of these cases are tragedies. When you get the murderer and he talks, he's glad to get it off his chest. They show a pattern of failure. You feel sorry for them. A lot just aren't too bright. After you look into their background, you see it's pathetic.''

McCallum backs up his boss. ''I feel happy about the work, even though it is a tough job and sometimes you go home sad. Like a call about an unknown male found lying in an alley, fallen from the roof. I walked into the alley; it was raining and there was a fourteen-year-old boy sprawled flat in the rain after a six-story fall. There were blobs of rain on his watch crystal. It was still running---a Timex. I suppose it lived up to its ads. The kid had been up on the roof with a friend, sniffing hair spray, and he fell over the edge. That's all, and he was dead.

''Once in a while, you get some character from the underworld sitting on the lawyer's lap when you pick him up. You hate to see those guys get away. Sometimes in a burglary a guy invades a home with a lot of violence. But most of the time it's just a wife, husband, boyfriend, friends---crimes of passion, you might say.

''I used to work on vice and gambling. You didn't have any personal feelings there, just matching wits. At least in homicide you don't get any political pressure in a case. In vice and gambling, someone would say to you, 'Not a bad fellow; see what you can do for him.'''

All of this does not qualify Sherry or his mates for instant membership among what they would call ''do-gooders.'' In a rare moment of temper, McCallum fires off a diatribe. ''I'll go along with improvements in housing, help for the unemployed, programs lor alcoholics and drug addicts, but I'm still in favor of tough punishment. It's a deterrent---even to murder. The popularity of kidnaping fell off after it became subject to the death penalty,'' he growls, forgetting his own notion that most murders are crimes of passion, while kidnaping falls under the heading of a well-planned caper. ''There are murderers we could let out of prison and there'd be no problem. But twenty percent are incorrigibles. These bastards you can never rehabilitate. Most of the time it's the defendant who doesn't want a speedy trial. If he can delay it long enough, witnesses disappear, they forget, nobody cares. Too many do-gooders around talk about how it takes twelve thousand dollars a year to keep a man in prison. They don't think about what it costs to have him out on the street.''

• • •

The men of Boston's largely white police force grew up in less violent times, when there was a stability even in the slums, and they find it difficult to reconcile themselves to the explosive, cancerous change that eats away their familiar city. ''Look at this neighborhood,'' complains a detective. ''I saw the first piece of asbestos shingle ripped off that house five years ago by some kid. Now look at the area. It's the black plague.'' The cop belongs to a robbery detail that serves (during the evening hours) as a preliminary investigatory unit for homicide until one of Sherry's men shows up. He often refers to the ''black plague'' and ''our ebony-skinned brothers.'' Homicide cops, while more sensitive to the race issue, also find it hard to comprehend the climate of the ghetto. Although blacks number 16.3 percent of Boston's population, they figure in well over half the murders.

''There's a body on the living-room floor and nine kids in the apartment,'' recalls a homicide investigator. ''I finally get a neighbor to take the kids out of there, step over the body and ask the man of the house for a formal statement. I begin with the routine, 'Did anything unusual happen tonight?' He answers, 'No.' I say wait a minute. And he starts, 'Oh, you mean the shooting.'''

Sherry and his men refer to crimes of passion as murder from pride or panic. The pride of a man whose place is taken in a taxi line or whose shoeshine has been spoiled by an errant foot. A hitter whose turn in the line-up has been usurped. The pride of a lover deposed. Panic follows discovery during a burglary or resistance in a holdup. The sum total of the homicide experience.

But banal or not, Sherry has his job, the arrest and conviction of murderers. ''We have a high clearance rate,'' he says, ''not because of any brilliance on our part but because eighty percent are crimes of passion or family disputes. There's a connection between the people involved. Lots of guys don't want any part of homicide. They think it's too gory, too gruesome. But you get used to that. It's fantastic when you're looking for something or somebody and you don't even know what or who you're looking for. The thing is to get evidence against a suspect, rather than from a suspect. For years we relied on the confession, but in time I believe we'll look back on our so-called voluntary confession with a sense of shame, like we do the witch trials of Salem. Ten years ago we didn't have to advise anyone of his rights. We used to sit here, shoot the shit with a guy, let him talk, con him, tell him, 'Hell, it wasn't murder, you just lost your head.' What is called the new law of the Supreme Court is simply application of individual rights handed down in the U. S. Constitution. Actually, I would much rather go to court with physical evidence than a so-called confession, which might be repudiated or challenged by a smart lawyer.''

Some of the hoarier conceits about murder investigations play little or no part in the actual gathering of evidence. ''Ordinarily,'' says Sherry, ''we do very little surveillance, except maybe in a gang shooting. There is nothing more monotonous or tiresome than waiting for something that may not even happen. We did forty-five surveillances on one gangland case and it didn't help us.'' From one of those reports: ''Observation at Coachman's Bar. About 12:30, while making observations at Coachman's Bar in Flood Square, I observed Thomas_____get into a car listed as owned by Vincent_____and was let out at Cronin's Pub in Andrew Square. He went in, stayed five minutes, from where he went to the Tunnel Café. I waited there for an hour, then returned to the Coachman's Bar.''

The lieutenant dismisses a favorite fiction gambit, the graveyard visit. ''The only reason to go to the funerals is to satisfy the press, who thinks we should go. What the hell does a killer want to go to a funeral for?'' He also reports that the butler never does it. In the only instance of a death where a butler admitted the police to the house, the medical examiner found suicide the cause of death. And no one gets poisoned with arsenic, either; every preschooler knows it's too easy for the medical examiner to detect.

Sherry depends heavily upon the medical examiner, referred to as the M.E. ''They picked up a guy with a driver's license and some credit cards belonging to a Boston man who'd been dead three months, supposedly of natural causes. The suspect confessed that he got the stuff off a homosexual contact who said he swiped it from a man he had killed. We had the body exhumed. Dr. Luongo, one of the M.E.s, discovered around the decomposed neck a ligature, a wire somehow missed by the physician who declared the man dead of natural causes.'' When the ligature was brought to the inquest, it was in a plastic bag. During the testimony, the bag had to be opened for inspection of the murder weapon.

''We had to open all the windows in the courtroom because of the stink,'' recalls one detective.

In another instance, a patrolman found the decapitated body of a derelict in an alley. ''It looked like a vicious homicide,'' remembers Sherry. ''But the medical examiner found that the guy died of natural causes and rats chewed away his neck. The M.E. tells us what killed the victim, where the bullet entered, exited, whether that skull fracture came from a blow or a fall. We have to be there at the autopsy so we can answer any questions and the M.E. can check out what witnesses claim happened.''

''At an autopsy,'' says McCallum, ''the toughest are the kids. You see that small body that takes up so little room on the table. They cut the scalp, pull it back to open up the head and look at the brain. They make a V-shaped incision to see all the vital organs in the abdomen.''

Sherry brings some basic knowledge of the ways of death to the scene of a murder. The beard does not grow after death; the skin darkens and the beard only appears to grow. Eyes don't necessarily close. We are all loaded with bacteria in the digestive system and it destroys blood as well as other tissue. Putrefaction causes blood to ooze from the mouth and nose, swells the body and discolors and enlarges bruises. Dismember a body and throw it into the salt water of the Boston harbor and putrefaction slows, since the bacteria of the intestines cannot spread to tissue in other parts of the body.

Post-mortem lividity---a dark-blue stain on the portion of the body nearest the ground---starts to occur within one to two hours of death, a final pooling of blood obedient to the law of gravity when the mechanism that circulated blood has been stilled. If a victim is found lying face down and the lividity discoloration shows on the back, the body must have been moved.

Rigor mortis starts in the face and jaws within three to five hours of death. Varying with age and individuals, rigor mortis is usually complete inside of 12 hours.

With handguns the growing choice of murderers, the case load on Boston's ballistician Frank Bailey grows heavier. Pistols and revolvers cover the walls of the ballistics unit, while a World War One machine gun, confiscated from a store display before someone added it to his private arsenal, stands on a pedestal. Bailey will tell Sherry what pistol fired which shot, after the M.E. retrieves the bullet from the body. But Sherry knows how gunfire destroys human tissue, that a gun builds up enormous pressure in the barrel and if the weapon has been held against the head, it will do more damage. Small-caliber bullets with pointed heads often do more damage than larger projectiles. The .22-caliber bullets tumble, break up when they hit bone and become difficult to identify. One victim was shot in the thigh, but the .22 slug struck a bone and veered upward to do fatal damage in the abdomen.

Several floors above Sherry's domain, a handful of experts practice dactylography, the study of fingerprints. ''They put themselves in the shoes of the criminal, figure out his position or the most likely areas for him to have touched---cash-register drawer, beer bottles, glasses, Coke cans, lamps, point of entry, point of exit.'' There is no mathematical possibility of a random duplication of fingerprints. Still, Sherry thinks that the technology of fingerprinting could be improved. ''I'd like to see them develop a system to get prints off flesh.''

Another valuable tool for Sherry is the crime lab. It examines physical traces---human hair, powder burns, blood on a weapon or clothing, fibers left from garments. Crime-lab technicians can distinguish among the hair of Caucasians, Asians, Negroes and North American Indians by microscopic study. At a murder-rape trial, a representative of the crime lab testified that Negroid hairs were found on the white victim's body, Caucasian ones on the accused black man's underwear. He was convicted, although hair studies prove only that the specimens could or could not have come from an individual of a race. They do not identify the way fingerprints do.

The crime lab examines a suspect's possessions, ''permissible if an individual has been arrested upon reasonable suspicion,'' points out Sherry. A young man took his girlfriend on a date. Later, her body was found in her room, her clothing ripped off; blood was spattered about the room. The murderer administered the final blows with his shoe. The boyfriend said he left her to get a pack of cigarettes. In his shoe, the crime lab located a hair consistent with the murdered girl's. Bloodstains on the shoe matched her blood and the print of the sole coincided with the marks on her face.

''Very few murderers are caught in the act,'' advises Sherry. ''You either get them in the first few hours or you don't get them until somebody comes forward.'' Nor does Sherry reach a solution by putting himself in the place of the killer. ''The idea of myself in the place of the culprit is fantastic. It's wrong; they're so different from me.''

Or, as another detective snarls, ''How can you put yourself in their place? They're garbage.''

Sometimes the denouement astonishes even veterans like Sherry. One killer left the murder scene and wandered the streets of Boston, threaded his way along the banks of the Charles River, rode a bus to the suburbs and slept in parks for two nights. Then he telephoned his wife in Georgia to tell her that he had killed two men in Boston. She asked where he was calling from and he said he could see a sign, Courthouse Square. The wife informed Georgia police, who relayed a message to Boston. He was arrested almost on the doorstep of the police station. ''Looked like an all-American boy,'' comments Sherry.

While Sherry inspected the bloody rooms where a double murder occurred, the telephone rang. It was Sears Roebuck in Philadelphia. A man claiming to be from that address had run up a string of credit-card purchases. By evening Sherry was in Philadelphia interrogating the murderer, ''another all-American boy.''

Sherry has learned that although the dead---in the words of a sign that hangs over one medical examiner's door---may speak with miraculous organ, the dying can squeak false notes. A legal form for a deathbed declaration enjoys some standing in court, but Sherry has never used one. ''Who's going to tell a guy he's about to die? Just by telling him, you might cause him to die.'' Years ago, Sherry went to the Boston City Hospital to interview a naval officer stabbed four times in the stomach. He accused a man of wounding him on a street corner. Within minutes the officer died and Sherry went in search of the accused man. He surrendered, in the company of a lawyer. But to the detective's dismay, he produced an unshakable alibi. ''One thing more puzzled,'' says Sherry. ''Here's a guy stabbed on the corner of Boylston and Berkeley at Six A.M., and yet his clothes have no cuts in them.''

The Navy man had lived with his parents in a suburb. Checking through his possessions. Sherry found a receipt from a gas bill for an apartment in Boston. He hurried to the site, in time to find a porter mopping up a puddle of dried blood in the hallway. ''I went into the apartment; Jeez, there's an awful lot of blood.'' Now he knew where the assault actually occurred but had few clues. ''We found a thumbprint on a cigarette lighter and I located the knife in a heat register in the floor. It was a switchblade with a toreador and a charging bull on the handle.''

With a photograph of the naval officer in hand, Sherry checked the downtown cafés. He traced the man to a hotel where he had cashed a check, but he was alone. He found that he had visited a bar but left, alone. Sherry filed the information and waited.

A year later, a Providence cop called and asked, ''Did you have a naval officer stabbed to death in your town a year ago? We've got a girl down here who says she did it.''

''I figured it was someone who wanted a free ride back to Boston, but I asked her name. Barbara Buck. Turns out we have an arrest sheet on Barbara Buck and her prints match the one on the cigarette lighter. Now I am interested. When I see her, I ask her about the knife. She describes the toreador and bull on the handle perfectly. That meant a lot, because we never told anybody what the knife looked like. I always keep some information out of the press, like the caliber of the revolver, to test a confession or a witness. The press may print something that has no news value but it can croak us.'' Several confessors to the Boston stranglings manufactured their memories from press clippings.

''Barbara Buck told us she picked the Navy man up in a café across the street from where we lost his trail. They had a dispute in his room and she killed him. The only reason we found her was that she and her current boyfriend got into an argument. She called the police, said he was trying to kill her and that he was wanted for child support. When the cops grabbed him, he was sore and told them that she had come back from Boston one night and confessed to him that she killed a man there.''

The victim in this case evidently believed he would not die and did not want to admit he had picked up a hooker. Why he picked on the man he did, Sherry professes not to know, but so much for the deathbed, or at least the badly wounded man's statement.

Boston homicide bears little animus toward either the criminal lawyer or his clients. ''My hat's off to F. Lee Bailey,'' says McCallum. ''He beats you fair and square. But if it's fifty-fifty whether a man is guilty, I suppose the jury leans to innocence, and that's the way it should be.''

And for the losers in court, Sherry says, ''I don't gloat over putting a guy away for life. It's like a ball game; you like to win, but you can't every time. Most of these people who commit murder would never do it again if let free. Sometimes I feel sorry for them, but then I think about the dead, cut down before their time came. I think of what it's like to tell a family that their son or daughter has been murdered.''

A case: On July 9, about 9:30 in the morning, a slender young black man wearing sneakers entered the Mt. Vernon Cooperative Bank on Boylston Street. He flashed a revolver, vaulted into the tellers' area and shouted, ''Where is the money?'' Then, ''Everybody keep their hands up.'' He scooped money from cash drawers and, with the cash stowed in a blue-paper sack, headed for the exit.

Just before he reached the door, the assistant manager, Edward Grenier, father of five children, grabbed him. They struggled, a single shot ripped into the chest of the bank official. The holdup man sprinted across Boylston.

At 9:55, the police teletype clacked a bulletin for an unknown black male, six feet tall, with gray pants, dark suit coat, wearing one white sneaker. The other had slipped from his foot in the bank. The police message concluded that the victim of the shooting was en route to the hospital. At 10:17, the teletype advised that the victim had expired at Boston City Hospital. He was actually D.O.A. It was now a homicide assignment.

At the crime scene, Sherry and several others began to question witnesses. Men from the precinct took down the license numbers of parked cars. The owners, once located, might offer information on the killer or his escape route.

Meanwhile, the medical examiner had the body. He extracted a .38-caliber bullet. Fingerprint crews dusted ''the area touched by the culprit,'' according to one of the homicide forms. Impressions of the heel of a hand were found atop counters, partial prints appeared behind the counters and on one of the tellers' windows. All of these prints had to be checked against those of employees and people in the bank to isolate those that belonged to the murderer.

The crime lab photographed a bloodstain on the carpet near the bank entrance, searched for physical traces and took custody of the white sneaker. Using what Sherry learned from questioning witnesses, an artist friend of his drew up a likeness of the robber. But all of these routine efforts brought the police no closer.

About two weeks later, Sherry heard from a lawyer. He told the detective that James Allen (not his real name), a draft evader living in Ontario, Canada, had told him over the phone that Robert Bumpus, married to the sister of Allen's wife, Susan, had just completed a visit in search of his estranged wife, Katherine. Bumpus had reportedly told the Allens that he robbed a Boston bank and, to back up his boast, pointed to a red Mustang that he drove to Canada. He also told the Allens that he had made a down payment on a house and wanted to start life anew with Katherine.

While the Allens were fond of their brother-in-law, they also feared him. As soon as he left their home, the draft dodger checked with Canadian police to see if, as he suspected, a Boston bank had been robbed on the date Bumpus claimed. With that fact confirmed, Allen telephoned his lawyer in Boston with the information.

Sherry and another detective decided to call on Bumpus at an address furnished by Allen. Nobody was home, but rummaging through the apartment, the police discovered some weapons and a photograph of Bumpus that bore a considerable similarity to the sketch by Sherry's friend.

There was a second break. In a Boston precinct, a detective met an individual who claimed to have found a revolver. When the weapon was examined by a ballistician, it proved to be the murder weapon, stolen months before from a transit-authority cop. ''We talked to the man who said he found the gun,'' says Sherry. ''That story wasn't accurate. It seemed that a friend had handed over the revolver with the suggestion of a lost-and-found line.'' The friend was a cabdriver.

When coaxed, the hackman admitted that on the morning of the robbery, a black had hailed his cab, jumped in and given an address, one near where Bumpus lived. When he got out, he handed the driver a fistful of money that amounted to $160 and left both a gun and a sneaker in the taxi. ''Mind you, this is ten to twenty minutes after the shooting,'' recalls Sherry. ''We could have solved it right then, if the driver had come forward.'' But the cabby had tossed the sneaker into a garbage can and it had long ago gone to the incinerator.

Sherry wanted more evidence before he approached Bumpus with a warrant. He had the photograph found at the apartment, but it was tainted evidence, since he had lacked a warrant to search there. ''The law says you may not profit from the fruit of the poisoned tree. We decided to sacrifice one of our five witnesses and showed her the photograph. She said it looked just like him. Then we obtained a court order, forcing Bumpus to take part in a police line-up and give his fingerprints. The operation was a dud. Four of the five witnesses could not identify Bumpus; the one who did happened to be the woman shown the photograph. The cabdriver was not available to view the line-up and the fingerprints proved nothing.''

The line-up results left Sherry feeling he lacked sufficient evidence for a prosecutor. Now another cabby provided a new break. This time, too, it was through a police officer working in the street who connected with an individual who had some information but wanted to know if the cops would do something for him. Homicide doesn't employ paid informants the way narcotics or the FBI does. ''You develop sources,'' says a homicide cop, ''and because they trust you, because you did right by them sometime in the past, they'll give you information.''

Through the informant, Sherry met a cabdriver who, on the day of the shooting, picked up a rider he knew as Bobby Bumpus. He was carrying a blue-paper bag filled with money. Sherry had never informed the press of the color of the sack. Furthermore, the cabdriver observed that the bills were held together with metal clips, a trademark of the Mt. Vernon Cooperative, since most banks use paper wrappers. It was again a fact not publicly known. Finally, the driver said he'd been paid off with a $100 bill.

Armed with this deposition, an indictment against Bumpus was secured. Sherry went to interview him. Actually, Bumpus was already in the custody of the state. His squabbles with his wife had taken him into court, where he became so enraged that the judge ordered him confined for psychiatric study. Under interrogation, Bumpus spoke freely about his life, how he had shuffled from one job-to another without much success, how he intermittently studied English at local colleges. But he denied any connection with the bank job.

Sherry had no doubts about Bumpus' guilt, particularly because he discovered that a few days after the crime, Bumpus had confessed his role to a clergyman. Only ethical considerations barred that form of revelation. From a real-estate broker and a used-car salesman, Sherry secured affidavits of Bumpus' purchases with wealth whose source couldn't be explained. Sherry also went to Canada to seek help from the Allens. The husband flatly refused to go to Boston for the trial. As a draft evader, he would risk his own arrest and imprisonment. Sue Allen said she would testify only if she became convinced it was necessary. Sherry tried to persuade her, but all she would agree to was to follow the progress of the trial.

At the trial, the second cabdriver definitely identified Bumpus as his passenger after the robbery. The judge permitted the teller who saw the tainted photo to ''identify anyone she saw in court, whom she saw in the bank.'' She named Bumpus. In a session that was closed to the public and the jury, attorneys argued before the judge whether or not the transcript of the Sherry interview with the Allens could be admitted into the record. The magistrate ruled in favor of the district attorney. But it was decided to hold off introduction of the document until rebuttal time.

No hint of this strategic move was made when the trial resumed, nor was it indicated whether or not Sherry's interrogation would be admitted. That night Sue Allen called Sherry. '''You didn't get the statement in,' she said to me. Somebody was obviously keeping her posted, but the informant didn't know the real reason the statement hadn't been introduced. I didn't give her any information. The next day she showed up and testified. It was a helluva break.''

The jury found Bumpus guilty of murder in the first degree, plus four counts of armed robbery (for each teller), with a recommendation that the death sentence not be imposed. He's now serving 20 years to life.

Who was Bobby Bumpus to homicide? ''He was a kid,'' says Sherry, ''trying to prove to his wife that he could support her, get a house and a car, and he killed a man with five children. And why did the man get killed? To stop a guy with a lousy five thousand dollars. A guy gets killed, a guy gets sentenced to life in prison. What a waste.''