Revolver (10 page)

That old-timer was old Rod Wiethop, a member of Smedley Butler's famed soup-and-fish squad, raiding ballrooms during Prohibition. Stan thought Wiethop was pulling his leg—the equivalent of telling a rook to not get shot—but as time went on, he saw the simple wisdom in it. Coming home every night, or morning, or whenever your shift ends, makes all the difference. You remember why you're working so hard. You avoid stupid mistakes or losing yourself to the job, as Stan once did.

So every morning, Stan goes home. Some of the other guys in the Twenty-Two go out for beers at a cop bar near the Boulevard and Erie, but not Stan, who prefers to do his drinking at home. And Wildey, who says he rarely touches the stuff, heads home to Germantown. They wave goodbye and go off to opposite corners of the city.

By the time Stan reaches Bridge Street, Rosie has already been up for hours—she doesn't sleep much—and Jimmy is scrambling to get ready for school. Stan usually pours himself a tomato and clam juice and Rosie pretends not to see him dump some Smirnoff into the glass. The drink helps him sleep. Sometimes. He tries to get Rosie to join him, joking about the house being empty and all. She pretends to be cross with him, calling him a dirty old man, but just lets him sleep. For which Stan is grateful, because he's usually exhausted. He'll never get used to last-out shift.

“Wildey wants us all to go out sometime,” Stan tells Rosie one night as she prepares supper. Jimmy works on his math problems at the kitchen table.

“Who's that?”

“You know, Rosie. George Wildey. My partner?”

Rosie knows exactly who he's talking about.

“Anyway, he wants us to come over some night.”

“Where does he live?”

“Germantown. He also keeps talking about this club over near Broad and Erie, supposed to be good music.”

“Well, we'll see about that.”

“Is he talking about the Cadillac Club?” Jimmy asks.

Stan shoots his boy the side-eye. “How do you know about the Cadillac Club?”

“Supposed to be great music,” Jimmy says, ducking the question. “You should definitely go.”

Rosie dishes some hot sausage and peppers onto Stan's plate. “Well, we'll see about that,” she says.

That last week of September the city seems to lose its goddamned mind. The relative lull after the storm of the riots has faded away. The Phils are done, their winning summer tarnished by an embarrassing collapse over the past few weeks.
THE GREAT PHOLD
, one newspaper says. And all at once, Philadelphia remembers it wants to destroy itself. Break-ins. Muggings. Assaults. Armed robberies.

And in the Jungle, lots of Negroes killing Negroes.

The homicide dicks, with their wrinkled suits and potbellies, have a code name for it—NHI.

No Humans Involved.

Stan and Wildey don't investigate any of them, of course. But as members of the mobile squad, they're often the first responders that fall.

“Goddammit,” Wildey says each time they roll up on another body.

Their job is to secure the scene, grab any witnesses, and make them stay put until the homicide dicks arrive. Usually, these homicide guys are the bottom of the barrel—drunks, career burnouts, incompetents. Why throw good men at blacks killing blacks up here?

They catch their first dead body on the first day of October.

Just some nappy-haired kid, barely out of his teens, one bullet in the side of his head and another through his skinny guts. It's a messy kill, right outside a crumbling pool hall with a tilting roof near Broad Street. Already a crowd has gathered.

Bad news travels through the Jungle like telepathy. Seems like seconds after someone is shot, everybody within a three-block radius is out of their rowhomes and making their way to the scene to see for themselves. The police never have to alert next of kin; the Jungle does it for them.

A woman, presumably the mother, touches the side of the pool hall repeatedly, like she needs to make sure it's real, as she moves up the sidewalk toward the vic. Then she wails and falls to her knees next to the body. Stan and Wildey catch her before she can throw herself on the corpse.

“We're gonna take care of him, honey,” Wildey coos. “I promise, we'll take care of him.”

But she's not calmed. She sees big Stan there, looming over the body, and she starts screaming at him, calling him a blue-eyed devil. As if Stan pulled the trigger on this poor kid.

“Hey, it's all right,” Stan says, trying his best to imitate Wildey's soothing voice. But it comes out all wrong and infuriates the woman all the more. She doesn't want some honky bastard telling her everything is going to be all right. What on God's holy earth could be
all right
about this?

Wildey gives him a look and holds up a hand, like
Let me handle this
.

Eventually the detectives show up—white guys, of course. Potential witnesses scatter. The dicks aren't too concerned; they don't see any great mystery to be solved here. Wildey passes along what the mother told him, but they listen with only half an ear. Thanks, buddy.

Back in the car, Stan is still sulking.

“Hey, you all right?” Wildey asks.

“I've never done anything to these people.”

“It's not you. It's the uniform. They hate me just as much.”

“Kind of doubt that.”

“You know what? You're absolutely right. They hate me even more. I'm a traitor. A brother who put on a badge and is fighting for the other team.”

Stan says nothing.

“Look, man,” George says, “you talk to anybody in the Jungle. I'm talkin' anybody, from a street tough to a minister to a gospel singer to a smiling grandma sitting on her front stoop. They've all got one thing in common.”

“What's that?”

“At some point—and I guarantee this to be one hundred percent true—some cop has treated them like shit.”

“Come on, everybody's been hassled by the police at some point.”

“Uh-uh. I'm not talking about hassling somebody because they ran a light. I'm talking about cops fucking with them just because of the color of their skin. Man, it happens to me. So you've got to cut them a break, give 'em time. There's good people in this neighborhood. We just have to earn their trust.”

Stan doesn't know what to say to that. He slips and mutters that he “never wanted to be assigned to this goddamn
murzyn
neighborhood.”

“What was that?” Wildey asks. “You callin' them Muslims?”

“No, forget it.”

“What are you sayin', then? Come on, man, it's a word I've never heard before. What was that,
mooshin
?”

“Murzyn.”

“That's what I thought you said.
Mooshin
. That Polish?”

“Yeah.”

“What's it mean?”

“I think you probably know what it means.”

Wildey blinks as if he's been slapped. “I'm really hoping that's not true.”

Stan sighs. “It's Polish for black, somebody with a dark tan. That's it.”

“Huh. So do you call me a
mooshin
?”

“No, I call you a pain in the goddamned ass, that's what I call you.”

For a long couple of seconds Stan is not sure how it's going to go. Will his new partner take a swing at him?

Instead he belly-laughs.

“That's more like it,” Wildey says. “Finally the truth comes out. My partner here thinks I'm a goddamned pain in the ass! Now we're getting somewhere.”

Stan forces a smile.

“You a goddamned pain in the ass, too, you know,” Wildey says.

Stan doesn't want to tell him that among Poles,
murzyn
has another connotation. Like
slave
—someone who toils for another. Stan's father used to complain about all the
murzyns
stealing good jobs, that they should go back down to the South where they belong. He's embarrassed to say that he heard it growing up so much, it just became part of his language. They
were
murzyns,
weren't they? It'd be like retraining yourself to call an apple something else. But he also knows it's wrong, and he needs to cut this shit out. Especially around Wildey.

By late October they've already got a reputation as the toughest cop duo in the Jungle. Relentless, tough, fair. Somehow word reaches the
Bulletin
and they send one of their best reporters, Joe Daughen, to interview them. He writes a good, tough, fair piece.

Wildey is especially happy that they sent Daughen. Apparently he's known in Negro circles for his fair reporting and straight shooting. A rare quality in white reporters, or so Wildey says.

Stan, for his part, doesn't like how the photograph turned out. His head looks three sizes too big, and he's squinting nervously, making him look like he has two blackened eyes. All the attention, too, worries him.

“This could backfire on us, you know,” Stan says the night the story appears, during their 3 a.m. lunch break. Stan, with his liverwurst on white. Wildey, with his peanut butter and jelly on wheat with the crusts cut off. Like he's still in grade school.

“How's that, Hondo?” Wildey asks.

“We become so well known, all the damn crooks are gonna see us coming.”

“No,” Wildey says. “They're gonna
fear us
. Which is the point. Now c'mon and finish your cat food sandwich. I'm not going to let you ruin one of the best days of my life. You know who called me after the papers hit the racks this afternoon? Carla.”

Carla is Wildey's on-again, off-again ex. Mother of his boy, George Junior.

“She said I was looking all handsome and shit.”

Jimmy is also over the moon about the article. He uses his allowance to buy a dozen copies from the newsstand at Bridge and Pratt. (The corner store had already sold out.) He sacrifices one to clip the article so that he can Scotch-tape it to the paneling in his bedroom, joining his rock band posters. And each night as he does his homework, Jimmy has Dylan and Jagger and Lennon and Walczak and Wildey looking down on him. For the first time, Jimmy tells his pop:

“When I grow up, I think I want to be a cop.”

Surprise, surprise, Jim is having a hard time focusing this morning. Could it be the fact that he was up drinking and brooding until at least three, maybe even four in the morning? He doesn't remember going to bed.

But now he and Aisha are standing around in the chilly medical examiner's office, he's got a five-alarm hangover, and the coroner is telling them he found
two
different types of semen inside Kelly Anne Farrace: one type in the vaginal cavity, the other in the rectum.

“Now it's just a matter of figuring out who came first,” he says, lifting an eyebrow, waiting for a reaction.

“Jesus, Lew,” Jim says wearily when the fog clears and he finally gets it.

Aisha shakes her head, disgusted.

“What?” says the coroner. “Homicide cops don't make jokes anymore?”

“You're not a parent, are you, Lew?” Jim says.

Aisha forces the conversation back to the subject at hand. “Any signs of trauma?”

“None that I can see. I think this was consensual.”

“How long before she died, Baxter?”

The coroner rubs his stubbly chin and considers this. “I'd have to say up to a day before.”

So Kelly Anne was sleeping with somebody. Or a couple of somebodies. One of whom liked it traditional, Jim thinks, and one of whom liked it Greek.

“You get me a DNA sample and I can try to match it against either,” Baxter says.

The parents are due here any minute. Jesus. Do you tell the Farraces that? That her daughter was one of those “do-me feminists”? Jim recalls some drunk idiot journalist kid at the Pen & Pencil Club the other night joking/whining,
How come all these do-me feminists aren't doin' me?

What's now clear is that they need to build a complete picture of Kelly Anne's social circles. There's the magazine staff. There are friends outside the magazine. And there are (potentially) the dozens of people she talks to on a daily basis. Any life bumps up against hundreds of lives, once you start looking.

But most importantly, there are
MS
and
JDH
.

To Jim, this is looking less like a random attack and more like someone who knew her.
(They said Terrill Lee Stanton randomly chose that bar, but of course that wasn't true—he knew Jim's father and his partner.)
Maybe the killer even told her he loved her, then changed his mind. Please let it be someone overconfident, Jim thinks, so that they can find him and fry his ass, posthaste. To do that, they need to construct a complete timeline of her last twenty-four hours. From work that morning, to her movements that day throughout Center City, right up until the moment she ends up in a stairwell on Pine Street.

Kelly, no matter what you did in your life, you didn't deserve this. I'm going to find the monster who ended your life. Your case isn't going to go unsolved.

Now help me fact-check your last day.

Wednesday, November 1, you report to work just before 8 a.m.

You're always one of the first ones in the office, according to Marie, the sweet older woman who runs the front desk. You like to get an early jump on your fact-checking calls. People are sharper, less harried, first thing in the morning. Lots of restaurants and shops aren't open quite yet. You take your job seriously. You like to sip coffee as you make your to-do lists. You're sharp, focused, determined.

You remain in the office at 1919 Market until twelve thirty, when you and the editorial assistant, Lauren Feldman, take the elevator down to Market Street and walk two blocks to Berri Blues deli on the corner of Nineteenth and Chestnut, where you both hit the salad bar and pick up Snapples and return to work. Deadline week; can't spend too much time away. Production needs facts so they can finalize the text and send around full galleys for corrections. Even though you're gone only a short while, there will be four galleys waiting on your desk by the time you return.

You work steadily all afternoon.

You make little bracket marks in pencil around each individual fact in a manuscript.

You make phone calls, and as you confirm each fact, you make a little pencil check mark in the middle of the bracket.

You make corrections in pencil, too.

For larger corrections, you attach a yellow Post-it note to the side of the manuscript for later review with the editor.

Do I have all this right, Kelly Anne?

The magazine is preparing the December issue, and you work late—until almost 7 p.m. This is confirmed by the managing editor, Marcy Lombardi, who cracks the whip on deadline week.

Then finally you go home to change. We know this because the clothes you were wearing to work that day—black skirt, maroon turtleneck sweater, flats—were in your apartment, on the couch.

Have you had time to have sex so far? Unlikely. Lew Baxter says the window is only twenty-four hours, so unless you had an early-morning session, you meet up with someone after work.

Do you eat something? Or do you head right out?

Help me out. Give me some clues as to where you're headed…

The weekly minder Jim found at her desk only gives two cryptic suggestions about the rest of her evening. There are the initials
MS
for 9 p.m., and then
JDH
at 11.

Who are they?

Meanwhile the local media are busy following their own leads. The story is on the front pages and at the top of every radio and TV news hour. Jim will keep an eye on this—once in a while the media digs up something new. People will always talk to some reporter more freely than to someone with a badge. On the downside, all the attention will mean that the mayor—and Sonya Kaminski—will be further up his ass with every column inch published.

The Farraces are not what Jim expected.

For starters, they're not even Farraces.

The father is tall and doughy and, as a result, almost boyish, which he tries to offset with a long blond beard. Is he old enough to have a daughter Kelly Anne's age? The wife, meanwhile, looks at least a decade older, with gray streaking her long dark hair, and her clothes pulled on like an afterthought—oh, I should wear something in public. Understandable, given the circumstances. But to Jim's eye, her soul wasn't just broken in the last twelve hours. It's been broken for a while.

Aisha takes the lead.

“Detective Walczak and I are very sorry for your loss,” Aisha says, “and please know that we're doing everything in our power to find the man who did this to your daughter.”

The father extends a hand. “George Linden.”

Aisha blinks. “You're not Mr. Farrace?”

The wife shakes her head. “I remarried.”

“Does Kelly Anne's father know what happened?”

“I don't think he knows much about anything,” Mrs. Linden says.

“Kelly Anne's father hasn't been in the picture for quite a while,” Mr. Linden says quickly, not so much stepping on his wife's last syllable as merely continuing her sentence.

Jim thinks about Kelly, her prematurely aged mother, her pompous stepfather, her deadbeat dad. Yeah, I'd leave Beerfart, Ohio, too.

“When's the last time you heard from Kelly Anne?”

“She calls home every week.”

“And the last time was…”

“Last week,” Mrs. Linden says, as if it's the most obvious answer in the world.

Aisha's asking the questions, but the Lindens keep looking at Jim when they answer.

“What I'm getting at is,” Aisha says, “did she mention anything strange to you the last time you spoke? Maybe trouble with a boyfriend, or at work? Anything like that?”

No, there was nothing like that. Round and round they go and the deeper they get the clearer it becomes that the Lindens had very little idea what was going on with Kelly Anne once she moved to Philadelphia. Out of sight out of mind. Apparently there are three other daughters, all younger, to deal with. Kelly Anne is the only Farrace; the other three have a different father. Who is not Mr. Linden here. Seems this college professor stepped into their lives to bat cleanup.

Jim wonders, Did you flee Ohio to get away from beardo here? Was he lingering in your doorway? Married the mom but wanted the oldest daughter?

“What do you teach?” Jim asks Linden.

“Nineteenth-century literature. Why?”

“College?”

“Community. Look, is this important? What does this have to do with finding Kelly Anne's killer?”

College guys. Jim doesn't understand people who pay all that money and spend all that time to dick around. Sure, he wants Sta
ś
to go to college, but for something useful.

Jim shakes his head. “Nothing.”

The mayor's office wanted to put them up at the Four Seasons on the Parkway, but they insist on returning home to make funeral arrangements and see to their other daughters.

“Any idea where we can find Kelly Anne's father?” Aisha asks.

Mrs. Linden blinks. “You would know better than us.”

Jim sits up. “What do you mean?”

“He's here,” Mr. Linden says. “Here in Philadelphia, somewhere.”

Jim and Aisha exchange glances. After the Lindens leave, he asks her to check out the father.

“What are you going to do?”

“I need to follow up on something,” he says, and doesn't elaborate. Aisha knows better than to press him on it.

Come on, Terrill Lee Stanton, rise and shine, you scumbag.

According to your record you've got a job at a soup kitchen all the way over in West Philly. If you're going to make it on time, you're going to have to be leaving this halfway house near Erie and Castor in a few minutes to catch the El.

Jim sits across the street in his car, waiting, feeling vaguely guilty about lying to Aisha, knowing she's left alone to handle the press and everything else. But this can't wait. Jim's already waited thirty years for this moment.

At the small reception after Stan's funeral, Jim was approached by Officer Billy Taney, his dad's former partner. He needed a cane to walk and steadied himself on Jimmy's shoulder as he leaned down.

“Your father saved my life,” he said solemnly, his eyes buttery and unfocused, his breath like cold whiskey. “Anything you need, you come find me.”

Over the next five years, Jim did just that on a regular basis. They met once a month for breakfast at the Aramingo Diner, not far from where Taney lived. Jim always ordered oatmeal—the cheapest breakfast item on the menu. Taney stuck with black coffee, augmented by some “syrup” he kept in a silver flask.

At first Taney just spun “Stan Walczak stories” from their days on the force. They both became cops the same year, 1951. Bounced around various districts—including a wild tour of the Tenderloin 1950s—until they joined the vice squad in the mid-1950s, mostly working the clubs and bordellos around Juniper Street. Frank Rizzo's turf, Taney would add with pride. Taney loved to talk about rousting drunks, hookers, and “slick boys”—ethnic gangsters who would run numbers, pimp, and embroil themselves in stupid little dramas.

As a kid, Jim listened politely. The stories
were
interesting; his father had never told him much about those days. But what Jim really wanted to hear about was his father's murder investigation.

“I can't tell you about that, Jimmy,” Taney would say at first. “Just know that we're going to catch the son of a bitch who did this. Your father saved my life.”

But gradually, as the months wore on, Taney's tongue loosened slightly. “I heard that homicide is looking at a guy.”

And then: “I didn't tell you this, but I think homicide found the gun.”

And by the summer of 1968: “Pretty sure they know who did it.”

“So why aren't they arresting him?” a fifteen-year-old Jimmy asked.

“They don't know that it's enough. Look, we're going to catch this black son of a bitch. Your father, he saved my life.”

“Tell me his name.”

“Jimmy, come on.”

“I deserve to know his name!”

But Taney held back.

For a few years, at least.

One morning in early 1972, not long after Jimmy himself joined the force, a drunk Billy Taney slipped and gave him the name of the “person of interest” in the murder of Stanisław Walczak and George W. Wildey.

The name was Terrill Lee Stanton.

Which filled Patrolman Jimmy Walczak with a cold kind of energy. Immediately he wanted to know where this Terrill Lee Stanton lived, what he'd been doing for the past seven years.

“Thing is,” Taney said, “he's already in prison.”

Doing thirty to life for another murder.

“He's paying for it, believe me,” Taney added.

Not enough, Jim thought.

So for the next few decades he'd dream of the day they let Stanton out of prison, so that he could look him in the eye and ask why why
why
…

And there he is, bold as day.

His father's killer steps out of the halfway house, fists shoved into the pockets of a fleece jacket. The weird thing is, he looks nothing like the mug shot Jim knows in vivid detail
(obsesses over)
. The guy in the mug shot looks feral, ready to punch you in the gut as soon as say hello. But this later, postprison version is just a skinny old man, walking down Erie Avenue with his head hung like there are invisible weights attached to his forehead, presumably headed for the El so he can ladle out chicken noodle to the less fortunate.

Don't let him fool you, Jim. This is the man who pointed a revolver at your father and pulled the trigger, repeatedly.

Probably liked it.

Probably still gets off on it…

Stop it.

Jim watches Terrill Lee Stanton shuffle down Erie. Pathetic old man. It's a shame for someone his age to be walking out here in the cold like that. Maybe Jim should scoop him up, give him a ride, save him the token money.