At the other end of the apartment, Martha was halfway to the bottom of a bottle of Gato Negro from Trojanowski, the liquor store on Bedford Avenue, prepping a tortilla casserole for dinner\u2014a tasty standby of beans, tomato sauce, cheese and anything else we had, zucchini or spinach or rice or eggplant, that was filling and cheap. We knew how to eat well on little money, and Martha was a superlative cook.\u00a0
\nWe also thought we were drinking well. We called Gato Negro, at about $8.99, the good wine.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Life on Metropolitan Avenue was sedate, almost suburban in its rhythms: We both had nine-to-five jobs and did laundry on the weekends, hauling it over to Driggs Avenue in a wire cart we named the Jazzy. Aspects of the neighborhood, like Radiac, a short-term storage facility for low-level radioactive waste, gave me the creeps. Yet Williamsburg was so full of artists, bookstores and quirky coffee spots that I had warmed to its Curtis Bay elements.\u00a0
\nOn this particular night, as my girlfriend made dinner, I was watching the TV in our bedroom, sitting on the floor on the pumpkin-colored wool rug from IKEA.\u00a0
\nHomicide: Life on the Street, the prime-time police drama about Baltimore, was based on the book by David Simon, the reporter who\u2019d come to our house and written the Sun feature about Dad in 1992. I watched every episode. This one started off with banter between Richard Belzer, Kyle Secor and Jon Seda. Yaphet Kotto enters and summons detectives to his office in his muted, authoritative way. Then shots of \u201cthe board,\u201d where the names of the murdered appear, in red if the case is open, in black if it\u2019s been solved.\u00a0
\nTo underscore the hard-boiled vibe, Belzer makes a Maltese Falcon quip that sails over Seda\u2019s head.\u00a0
\nThe wife of a writer had come to the police. No one had seen her husband for five days. In a small office, a colonel, called in for the high-profile nature of the case, says that L. P. Everett is missing.\u00a0
\n\u201cNot missing\u2014dead,\u201d she corrects him. \u201cMy husband was murdered.\u201d\u00a0
\nDetective Ballard: \u201cOK, he\u2019s been murdered and the body is where, exactly?\u201d\u00a0
\nMrs. Everett: \u201cWell, that\u2019s what I need you for.\u201d\u00a0
\nCut to the first commercial break. I didn\u2019t think much of it. A murder without a body. Just like my dad. But it\u2019s a generic detail, and besides, my father wasn\u2019t a writer.\u00a0
\nIncredibly, it was the seventh season of Homicide. I felt connected to this TV show, because of the location, and because, with that feature story, Simon had unlocked a door to life-altering knowledge.\u00a0
\nHomicide didn\u2019t interest Martha, but she didn\u2019t mind if I watched it. She knew very little about this part of my background, which, in my early twenties, was the dominant force in my life. I didn\u2019t know how to talk about it and I didn\u2019t want to try. Martha, however, was more open about her past. One night, in the dark at Clarence\u2019s apartment on a futon, she whispered to me: \u201cI ran away one summer when I was little, Katy. I lived in a cave with a Sasquatch.\u201d I knew my Bigfoot lore\u2014her account tracked. I believed her.\u00a0
\nI also thought what had happened to my father was stranger.\u00a0
\nThe episode resumed. The wife, Patti D\u2019Arbanville in a smart hat and veil, tells the roomful of police officers that when she last spoke with her husband, he was at his office in Canton.\u00a0
\nThey watch a video in which the missing husband says that he believes his literary agent is going to kill him, and if anything happens to him, that\u2019s where investigators should start.\u00a0
\nPrivately, the detectives express skepticism. \u201cWe have real murders to work. I think we should dump this on missing persons,\u201d says Ballard. \u201cTen to one, this hack is at a Vegas craps table with a bimbo on each arm.\u201d\u00a0
\nHuh. My father was murdered in his office. And Canton is right on the other side of the Harbor Tunnel from Curtis Bay. And the cops didn\u2019t believe he was murdered. And they told my uncle that he had probably run off with some woman.\u00a0
\nA feeling drifted in like fog. Something was wrong. I started to sense my jaw setting into a clench.\u00a0
\nBallard and another detective, Gharty, go talk to the literary agent, who\u2019s incredulous that his missing writer has pointed the finger at him from a VHS tape. The detectives say that Everett hasn\u2019t been seen or heard from in days, and his Jaguar isn\u2019t in the garage. Huh. My father was a Mercedes fanatic, and his car, the tan 1975 Mercedes 300D, was missing for the first week or so.\u00a0
\nIt couldn\u2019t be. But the more I thought about it, the more it made perfect sense. David Simon had already written about my dad. Now he had a television show. About Baltimore. Of course he would be likely to dip into the stories that had interested him, affected him.
\nSitting on that scratchy IKEA rug, I realized I was watching a dramatization of my father\u2019s murder. Maybe to Simon this was some kind of tribute. Yet as I watched the circumstances and investigation of Dad\u2019s disappearance unfolding in front of me on the TV screen, I didn\u2019t feel honored. The fog gave way to shock and rage.\u00a0
\nI could not look away. I had to take in every second of it, compare truth with TV. I\u2019d been asleep when Dad met his end. Tonight I was a witness, reluctant but riveted.\u00a0
\nThis cannot be happening, I thought.\u00a0
\nEvery bit of dialogue confirmed the oily churn in my stomach. I knew Martha would be calling me to dinner any minute. It didn\u2019t occur to me to call her in for support. I knew my girlfriend would not understand the uneasy exchange I was having with the television.\u00a0
\nAt the next commercial, I got on the phone long-distance to my mother. Our family dynamics had further shifted with my move to New York. I left. She and my sister stayed. I thought my move might expand our collective worlds. I pictured trips to the MoMA, pizza at Grimaldi\u2019s. But my mother didn\u2019t like to drive on the highway or ride trains.\u00a0
\n\u201cHello?\u201d I heard it in her voice. She was watching it too.\u00a0
\n\u201cAre you seeing this?\u201d I asked.\u00a0
\nA pause. \u201cYes.\u201d
\n\u201cI\u2019ll call you when it\u2019s over.\u201d\u00a0
\nWhen Everett\u2019s car shows up in long-term parking at BWI Airport, near where Dad\u2019s turned up, cops take it as further evidence that he skipped town. But eventually it dawns on them that they might actually have a murder, or at least a truly missing person. So detectives Ballard and Gharty head down to Everett\u2019s office.
\nFrom the second they flung open the doors and turned on the light, I saw what they didn\u2019t. I knew what was coming.\u00a0
\nBallard lounges on the couch and laments, \u201cThere is nothing out of the ordinary in this office. There is no blood. No bullet holes. No signs of a struggle.\u201d\u00a0
\nThe desk chair is missing, bozos.\u00a0
\n\u201cTHE CHAIR IS MISSING!\u201d I snarled at the screen.\u00a0
\nI heard a startled clatter in the kitchen.\u00a0
\n\u201cKaty, what\u2019s going on?\u201d\u00a0
\n\u201cSorry, Martha. I\u2019ll tell you later,\u201d I said, trying to keep my voice even.\u00a0
\n\u201cNo chair,\u201d says Gharty. \u201cThe desk chair is missing.\u201d Wow, they muse. We\u2019ve been looking for what didn\u2019t belong but couldn\u2019t see what should have been here! But why would a leather desk chair be missing? Blood cleans up easy off of leather.\u00a0
\nPolice never recovered my father\u2019s chair, and its disappearance probably had to do with his size. Two grown men would have struggled to carry him out the door. He would never have walked out with them.\u00a0
\nGharty gets a clue. \u201cA bullet hole,\u201d he says. \u201cIf you put a couple slugs in that chair, there\u2019s no repairing it.\u201d He clears off the desk with a theatrical sweep of his arm, revealing multiple bullet holes in the wooden desktop.\u00a0
\n\u201cBingo.\u201d\u00a0
\nThen Gharty backs into the office doorway.\u00a0
\n\u201cSemiauto. He stood right here and he walked the shots up.\u201d He makes his hand into a gun. Cocks it.\u00a0
\n\u201cBOOM.\u201d A gunshot sounds.\u00a0
\n\u201cBOOM.\u201d Another shot.\u00a0
\n\u201cBOOM.\u201d And another.
\nI\u2019d been watching this show for years, and it had never occurred to me that one night I might see my own life unfold on the screen. I felt dazed.\u00a0
\nMartha wandered in, wiping her hands on a dish towel. When she saw my face, she winced.\u00a0
\n\u201cWhat\u2019s wrong?\u201d\u00a0
\n\u201cThis episode of Homicide,\u201d I said, choking on tears. \u201cIt\u2019s about my dad.\u201d\u00a0
\nShe raised her eyebrows in doubt. \u201cAbout your dad? Why would the TV show be about your dad?\u201d She shook her head. \u201cI\u2019m sure you\u2019re misunderstanding something. Come and eat. And it\u2019s your turn to do the dishes. And to vacuum. And we\u2019ve got to get up early tomorrow.\u201d Her friends, also artists, were coming up from the Jersey Shore.\u00a0
\nI felt like I was having my own Bigfoot experience. Our little sixteen-inch television was beaming my dad\u2019s murder back at me in no uncertain terms, while my girlfriend assured me such a thing was impossible, here, have some cheese and beans, and a dishrag for later.\u00a0
\nI wanted my father to stay out of my apartment, and I also desperately wanted to be alone. I was in Brooklyn; I thought I was safe. How far away did I have to move to actually escape Baltimore?
\n___________________________________
\nExcerpted from What Ever Happened to Eddy Crane? (c) 2026 by Kate Crane. Published by HarperCollins. Used with permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At the other end of the apartment, Martha was halfway to the bottom of a bottle of Gato Negro from … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[456],"class_list":["post-23440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-investigate-unsolved-mysteries","tag-crimes"],"yoast_head":"\n