Roger Nolan said he would tell me about his life and that he would "start from the beginning." He began with 1968, when he was 29 years old and had just graduated from Baltimore's police academy.
He didn't, until prodded later, volunteer information about being a Marine (he served in Vietnam), or about his wife (his closest colleagues have never met her), or about his son (who followed him onto the city force), or about policing the streets he grew up on, or even about his dedication to the Boy Scouts.
Police business stayed with police, and family business stayed with family, and Nolan worked hard to keep the two separate. He dispensed information strictly on a need-to-know basis, and people who weren't in the close-knit law enforcement community needed to know very little.
"He just didn't want to take a chance at getting too close to the outside world," said Donald Worden, a retired detective who worked with Nolan for years.
Sgt. Roger Nolan retires Monday with a simple ceremony - he sternly corrected me when I called it "a party" - in the commissioner's boardroom, 9:30 a.m. sharp, followed by lunch in the atrium, 11 a.m. sharp. He's leaving a department he reveres one day shy of his 70th birthday, a departure timed with military-like precision to adhere to a long-obsolete rule that requires sergeants to retire by age 70.
In 42 years on the force, he never used a single sick day.
I asked what he would be doing the next day.
"Same thing I do every morning," Nolan deadpanned. "Hope I wake up the next morning."
For nearly a quarter-century, Roger Nolan was, in the dusty department vernacular of Baltimore, "a murder police." He worked homicide, a title that demanded reverence and respect. Their motto: "We work for God." He investigated shootings, supervised detectives and is a founding member of the cold-case squad, which he led, starting in 1995.
"I spent the last 14 years doing what I could for the mothers of victims who called," he said.
To outsiders, Nolan could seem surly, sour and gruff. But to colleagues, friends, family, and, most importantly, to those grieving over their murdered children, he is compassionate, helpful and kind.
"We get calls, especially around the holidays, from people involved in cases that are closed, but mostly ones that are still open, and Roger will sit on the phone for a long time talking to the children and parents of the deceased," said Maj. Terrence McLarney, head of the homicide unit. "That's when you see the real Roger. You have to sit and listen to him talk with a grieving family member. ... Don't be fooled by his gruff exterior."
