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—a 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.
We also thought we were drinking well. We called Gato Negro, at about $8.99, the good wine.
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.
On 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.
Homicide: Life on the Street, the prime-time police drama about Baltimore, was based on the book by David Simon, the reporter who’d 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 “the board,” where the names of the murdered appear, in red if the case is open, in black if it’s been solved.
To underscore the hard-boiled vibe, Belzer makes a Maltese Falcon quip that sails over Seda’s head.
The 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.
“Not missing—dead,” she corrects him. “My husband was murdered.”
Detective Ballard: “OK, he’s been murdered and the body is where, exactly?”
Mrs. Everett: “Well, that’s what I need you for.”
Cut to the first commercial break. I didn’t think much of it. A murder without a body. Just like my dad. But it’s a generic detail, and besides, my father wasn’t a writer.
Incredibly, 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.
Homicide didn’t interest Martha, but she didn’t 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’t know how to talk about it and I didn’t want to try. Martha, however, was more open about her past. One night, in the dark at Clarence’s apartment on a futon, she whispered to me: “I ran away one summer when I was little, Katy. I lived in a cave with a Sasquatch.” I knew my Bigfoot lore—her account tracked. I believed her.
I also thought what had happened to my father was stranger.
The episode resumed. The wife, Patti D’Arbanville 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.
They 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’s where investigators should start.
Privately, the detectives express skepticism. “We have real murders to work. I think we should dump this on missing persons,” says Ballard. “Ten to one, this hack is at a Vegas craps table with a bimbo on each arm.”
Huh. 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’t believe he was murdered. And they told my uncle that he had probably run off with some woman.
A feeling drifted in like fog. Something was wrong. I started to sense my jaw setting into a clench.
Ballard and another detective, Gharty, go talk to the literary agent, who’s incredulous that his missing writer has pointed the finger at him from a VHS tape. The detectives say that Everett hasn’t been seen or heard from in days, and his Jaguar isn’t 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.
It couldn’t 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.
Sitting on that scratchy IKEA rug, I realized I was watching a dramatization of my father’s murder. Maybe to Simon this was some kind of tribute. Yet as I watched the circumstances and investigation of Dad’s disappearance unfolding in front of me on the TV screen, I didn’t feel honored. The fog gave way to shock and rage.
I could not look away. I had to take in every second of it, compare truth with TV. I’d been asleep when Dad met his end. Tonight I was a witness, reluctant but riveted.
This cannot be happening, I thought.
Every bit of dialogue confirmed the oily churn in my stomach. I knew Martha would be calling me to dinner any minute. It didn’t 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.
At 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’s. But my mother didn’t like to drive on the highway or ride trains.
“Hello?” I heard it in her voice. She was watching it too.
“Are you seeing this?” I asked.
A pause. “Yes.”
“I’ll call you when it’s over.”
When Everett’s car shows up in long-term parking at BWI Airport, near where Dad’s 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’s office.
From the second they flung open the doors and turned on the light, I saw what they didn’t. I knew what was coming.
Ballard lounges on the couch and laments, “There is nothing out of the ordinary in this office. There is no blood. No bullet holes. No signs of a struggle.”
The desk chair is missing, bozos.
“THE CHAIR IS MISSING!” I snarled at the screen.
I heard a startled clatter in the kitchen.
“Katy, what’s going on?”
“Sorry, Martha. I’ll tell you later,” I said, trying to keep my voice even.
“No chair,” says Gharty. “The desk chair is missing.” Wow, they muse. We’ve been looking for what didn’t belong but couldn’t see what should have been here! But why would a leather desk chair be missing? Blood cleans up easy off of leather.
Police never recovered my father’s 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.
Gharty gets a clue. “A bullet hole,” he says. “If you put a couple slugs in that chair, there’s no repairing it.” He clears off the desk with a theatrical sweep of his arm, revealing multiple bullet holes in the wooden desktop.
“Bingo.”
Then Gharty backs into the office doorway.
“Semiauto. He stood right here and he walked the shots up.” He makes his hand into a gun. Cocks it.
“BOOM.” A gunshot sounds.
“BOOM.” Another shot.
“BOOM.” And another.
I’d 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.
Martha wandered in, wiping her hands on a dish towel. When she saw my face, she winced.
“What’s wrong?”
“This episode of Homicide,” I said, choking on tears. “It’s about my dad.”
She raised her eyebrows in doubt. “About your dad? Why would the TV show be about your dad?” She shook her head. “I’m sure you’re misunderstanding something. Come and eat. And it’s your turn to do the dishes. And to vacuum. And we’ve got to get up early tomorrow.” Her friends, also artists, were coming up from the Jersey Shore.
I felt like I was having my own Bigfoot experience. Our little sixteen-inch television was beaming my dad’s 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.
I 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?
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Excerpted from What Ever Happened to Eddy Crane? (c) 2026 by Kate Crane. Published by HarperCollins. Used with permission.
