Revolver (17 page)

“The Kelly Anne Farrace murder. When I saw the story, I knew this was what I wanted to do with my life.”

“What do you mean?”

“I've been following the case in the newspapers. I follow
all
your cases, Dad. But this one…I don't know. It's horrible and all, but I'm also glad you're the one trying to find the asshole who did this. I don't even know if that makes any sense. I want to do what you do. Catch the guys who think they can get away with it.”

Jim leans back in his seat, sort of stunned. The two of them sit there in silence on Frankford Avenue.

The heat in the car has disappeared and a chill has set in. For a moment, Jim feels the tiniest bit redeemed. He and Claire had a really tough time five years ago—they'd come incredibly close to ending things, and Sta
ś
and Cary were old enough to know what was going on. Sometimes Jim was afraid that Sta
ś
only saw the worst in him, and he'd spend the rest of his life making decisions based on doing the opposite of what he imagined Jim would do. It was reassuring to know all was not lost. That he hadn't completely failed at this.

“I think we're close to finding out who killed that girl,” Jim says after a while.

“Really? Who?”

“Just between you and me?”

“Of course.”

Jim tells him a little about the recent developments in the case, trying to make a “teachable moment” (as they say) about looking for the little details, about not picking the low-hanging fruit, about sticking with your gut. But he's also bragging a little. Showing off for his kid, who wants to be like him when he grows up. And for a minute, Jim feels good about himself and what he does, feels that he doesn't have to explain or justify it to Sta
ś
. The boy gets it. Maybe he would make a good cop after all.

“Dad.”

“Yeah?”

“Is that him?”

Jim looks.

And shit, yeah, it's him.

Terrill Lee Stanton. Out in front of Mugsy's Tavern. His head no longer hangs low. He's feeling confident. He's made up his mind about what he's going to do. And he's going to do it soon.

“Stay here,” Jim tells his son.

“I can help you.”

Jim turns to lock eyes with Sta
ś
. “I mean it. No matter what you do, do not leave this car. Not until I come back.”

Sta
ś
doesn't like it, but what choice does he have but to agree?

Jim moves without consciously controlling his body, it seems. All at once he's out of the car and he's got his revolver in his hands and he's moving across Frankford Avenue and reality slows to a languid crawl as Stanton straightens his shoulders, then reaches for the door handle…

“Stop!”

Maybe it's the presence of Sta
ś
across the street, but things play out much different than Jim would have imagined. For one: he tucks away his gun and reaches out and grabs Stanton's arm before he can open the bar door.

“Hey—what's going on? Who the fuck are you?”

“I'm the guy telling you to get against the wall, that's who I am,” Jim says.

Stanton's face is slammed up against brick, arm twisted up behind him, while Jim pats him down. Inside the bar are the sounds of laughter and piano chord changes and off-key singing.

“What are you doing? You a cop or something?”

“Shut up, asshole.”

Jim finds Stanton's wallet tucked away in the left front pocket of his fleece jacket—hah, so no one will rob you, is that it? He flips it open, sees his state ID card, confirms his identity. Not that he had any doubt.

It's surreal to be touching him. The skin of Jim's right hand, touching the skin of Stanton's right hand, the hand he used to hold the gun and squeeze the trigger thirty years ago. Though cells grow and die, don't they? Every seven years, as Jim read once? So this collection of cells wasn't there when his father and Officer Wildey were killed. They're the great-great-grandsons of those cells, even if the man who wore them is the same.

“Please, man, I don't have anything.”

“I don't want your money. I've been watching you.”

“What?”

“Last night. This morning. Now. This bar. What are you going to do? Rob it? Just like you used to in the old days!”

But as Jim continues to pat down his suspect, there's nothing in the way of weapons. Not even a comb. If he intends to stick up the bar, he's either going to do it with an index finger poking the inner lining of his jacket pocket, or with no small amount of sheer balls.

“No way! I've never robbed a bar in my life, I swear!”

Jim decides to let that one go. For the moment.

“So what are you doing here, felon? You're a long way from the halfway house.”

The situation is still tense as fuck, but Jim can feel Stanton's back muscles relax a little. “So you a cop after all.”

“Yeah, I'm a cop.”

“Can I see your badge,
Officer?
”

“Shut the fuck up and answer my question. What are you doing here?”

“I'm here to see someone.”

“Who?”

“My kid. My boy. He works inside.”

This wasn't something Jim expected. This fuckhead has children? Jim would ordinarily chide himself for not knowing this, but he didn't even think about the possibility. Monsters don't
have
kids. Monsters eat kids. Ruin lives.

Jim sighs, then orders Stanton to sit on the sidewalk, hands behind his back, back against the wall.

“What's his name?”

“Who? My son? It's Roger. Roger Howarth. His mama named him.”

“So if I go in there and ask this Roger Howarth who his daddy is, he's going to say Terrill Lee Stanton.”

Stanton shakes his head. “He doesn't know me. We never met. My girl was pregnant went I got sent away. So he wouldn't know who the hell you're talking about.”

“Convenient.”

“It's why I was up here last night and this morning,” Stanton says. “Trying to work up the nerve to talk to him. I must have walked up and down that block a million times. But somebody told me he works at this bar, so I had to try, you know? You got kids, man?”

“Yeah,” Jim says. “And I used to have a daddy, too.”

Confusion breaks over Terrill Lee Stanton's face. “What? What do you mean?”

“Don't give me that bullshit about never robbing bars. Why else were you put away for thirty years?”

“Look, man, I've said it too many times to expect anybody to believe me, but I didn't do it. I didn't kill those police officers. I was trying to
help
them.”

Right now, in this moment, Jim would very much like to grab Terrill Lee Stanton's ears and bash his head back against the brick wall of this bar, over and over, over and over, BAM, BAM, BAM, until the back of his skull was nothing but smashed fruit, so he could watch the lights of his lying eyes slowly flicker away to nothing.

Oh, that would be so nice.

But Sta
ś
is in the car, watching him closely, so all Jim can do is whisper
you fucking liar,
then tell Stanton to get going back to Erie Avenue before he reports him.

When Jim finally climbs back into the car and Sta
ś
asks what happened, he tells him,

“It was the wrong guy.”

As they drive away from the Woods, Audrey steals glances at her father. The Captain looks troubled. Not his usual grim, nor his usual gruff—the man is truly
bothered,
as if he's eaten something that has disagreed with him. Like a baby goat.

“What is it?” Audrey says. “Trying to phrase the right way to say
I told you so?
”

“No, that's not it. I'm thinking about the story Taney told us. The drugs, Wildey, Stanton, the whole thing.”

“What about it?”

“The story he told me forty-five years ago was very different.”

They drive in silence, headed back down Frankford Avenue toward home. Audrey resists the urge to gloat. Guess Little Miss Forensics Expert has a point, now doesn't she? But it's no fun to gloat when your target looks like he's had his dick knocked in the dirt.

“How different?”

The Captain says nothing as he keeps the car moving at a steady thirty-five miles per hour down Frankford Avenue. Audrey looks out of her window. There are campaign signs all in the storefronts. Up here, mostly the white mayoral candidates.
KENNEY. DEHAVEN.
Once in a while you see a lone
WILLIAMS,
but not too often. Not that it matters to Audrey. Whoever runs this fucked-up city is in the hands of the super-rich anyway. She's not going to be here long enough to hear the results. She needs to finish this project and get home to Bryant.

“Dad?”

Nothing.

“Dad.”

“What, Aud, what?”

“Can I please, please,
please
take a look at the stupid murder book already?”

The Captain doesn't have the actual murder book, of course—just his version of it, which he started gathering as a teenager obsessed with solving his father's murder. Most kids Jimmy Walczak's age collected baseball cards; he collected clippings of crime stories and photographs of the crime scene and his own typed notes on index cards. All of these were pasted into a scrapbook meant for dead flowers or whatever. He picks it up from his desk in the basement and underhand-tosses it to Audrey. She catches it.

“You were probably a scream at parties,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“Never mind.”

She flips through the pages, which are mostly newspaper clippings and photos and random notes in neat Catholic-school penmanship—the notes of a kid who wore a plaid tie to school. The final pages in the scrapbook, however, consist of a young Jim Walczak copying as much of the real murder book as he could. Including outlines of the bodies, with little red X marks showing the entry wounds.

“How did you get a look at this?”

“Taney checked it out for me. Gave me an hour with it, then took it back. I wrote as fast as I could and then spent the next few hours trying to write down every detail I could recall.”

“Taney. Our drunk, racist source. Did you ever check out the murder book again? I mean, yourself, when you were a police officer?”

“Didn't think I needed to. I'd already copied everything important, and by that time, Stanton was in jail.”

He taps the scrapbook of murder. “I didn't even look at this thing until years later, when Stanton got paroled in ninety-five.”

“Well, we can't trust anything that came from Taney. I don't like him.”

“Liking him has nothing to do with it. Are you saying he showed me phony notes? Why would he do that?”

“I'm saying let's go down to the Roundhouse or wherever and check out the actual murder book.”

So of course the murder book is missing. Along with any record of who may have checked it out last.

First they go to the Roundhouse, where they navigate crowds of back slaps and jokes as the Captain makes his way through the building. Hey, Boss, back so soon? Look who missed us! Whatsamatter, getting tired of
Wheel of Fortune
? That takes forever and an hour. The Captain disappears for stretches, to gab with this one or that one, leaving Audrey to wait in metal chairs with passing cops eye-fucking her as if she's some kind of perp. It's her tats, she knows it, along with her wrinkled jeans and ratty faux-vintage N.W.A. T-shirt. She wishes she had a sticker that read
DON'T SHOOT! CAPTAIN'S
DAUGHTER
or something.

Turns out, after all that…all homicide records prior to 1980 were shipped over to the massive city archives near Thirty-First and Market, on the fringes of Drexel University. The archivist is polite, but the search takes forever and
two
hours and yields jack shit.

“Things get misfiled,” he explains. “I'm really sorry. I can make a note to contact you if it turns up.”

The Captain nods and thanks him. Audrey wants to frog-march him into the archives and force him to keep looking, but the Captain shakes his head. As if he didn't expect to find it all along.

Which of course gets the wheels in Audrey's head spinning. What if Taney's not the source of bad information? What if it's her dad?

By the time they leave, it's close to dinnertime. They stop at a pub inside Thirtieth Street Station. The Captain orders himself a Caesar salad and a beer, buys his daughter a cheeseburger deluxe and a beer. He refuses to spring for a Bloody. She pouts a little. He ignores her.

They watch busy commuters rush up and down the halls. Better to wait here anyway. The Schuylkill Expressway will be a parking lot this time of day.

“So,” the Captain says, “do you have everything you need?”

“Hardly,” she says around a mouthful of meat, onions, pickles, and brioche bun. She power-chews, swallows. “You're kidding, right?”

“Listen,” the Captain says. “I know you're proud of what you found on that bar, but do you know how old it is? How many shoes and knees and umbrellas and god knows what have chipped away at that thing over the last century?”

“I can tell a bullet path from a dent, Dad,” she says. “You're paying good money for me to learn this shit.”

“You,” he says, “are assuming there were no other bullets fired in that bar at any other point in time.”

“Unlikely,” Audrey replies. “The coloration was consistent. I'd be willing to testify in court that those bullets were fired at the same time.”

The Captain sighs. “I just don't know what you're hoping to find.”

“Gee, I don't know, Dad…the truth? Why do I have to explain this to you? This is what you did for a living!”

“You want me to reopen a fifty-year-old case just because you found some bumps and scratches on a bar?”

The Captain stabs at his Caesar salad like it's personal. Audrey drains her beer, nods at the bartender for another, and, when he approaches, bats her eyes and quietly asks for a Bloody Mary, please? Bartender nods. Dad just shakes his head.

Whatever, dude. Benefits of not being able to drive.

“Let me turn this around for a minute,” the Captain finally says. “Let me tell you what I've found out about you.”

“Me?”

“The number that keeps calling. It was unlisted, so I had someone run it.”

Down at the Roundhouse, while she was waiting forever…oh man, so diabolically crafty, Cap. The man is old, but he still has some moves.

“Congratulations,” Audrey says. “Or you could have saved us five hours and just, oh, I don't know, asked me.”

“Tried that. You told me it was Sister None of My Business. I disagreed. You live in my house, it becomes my business.”

“You're kidding, right? I've been living in your house for a grand total of three hours!”

Other boozing commuters turn to look at them. The Captain doesn't care. He leans in closer.

“Who are Mr. and Mrs. Jamie Tennellson?”

“You're such an asshole.”

“I'm an asshole for asking questions? You told me you had two roommates. You didn't tell me they were a black married couple in their late fifties.”

“What does it matter that they're African-American?”

“It doesn't, Audrey,” he says. “But it matters that you're not telling me the truth. I assume the money for rent I send you goes to the Tennellsons, correct?”

No, not correct, Audrey thinks. But screw him. This kind of shit is exactly why she's kept her life—her real life—quiet for the past two years.

“You want me to keep going, or do you want to tell me the story?”

“I want you to go fuck yourself,” Audrey says, and leaves.

Once again Audrey finds herself on the Market-Frankford Elevated, rumbling down the tracks, listening to a computerized voice tick down the old familiar stations. Erie-Torresdale. Church. Margaret-Orthodox.

The El is turning out to be remarkably handy whenever she has a blowout with one of her parents. A ride straight back to the Northeast, all for only two bucks and change. Not counting bus transfer.

Which she needs, because she's not in the mood to walk from Bridge and Pratt all the way up to her father's house in Mayfair.

As she rides the 66, she realizes she doesn't have a key. But that's okay. She knows a way or two to sneak back into the ol' family manse. Mainly through the basement.

Where her father keeps his scrapbook o' murder.

Okay, she's willing to admit that she's furious, and inclined to think the worst of her father at this particular moment. But c'mon. It was awfully strange for him to be so uninterested in his father's murder, no? Especially after she told him what she'd found?

He wouldn't let her look at the scrapbook. Only flipped through it fast. Explaining it to her.

She needs that book.

Well, no, what she really needs is the original murder book. If she tries to cite her father's scrapbook as a primary source, her professor will pretty much laugh until she cries blood.

What if
the Captain
is the one who checked it out all those years ago, and it's packed somewhere in the basement?

Come on, Audrey Kornbluth-Walczak, come out with it. Admit what you're really thinking.

That your own father killed the man he
believed
murdered his father. Right then, in November 1995, just days after he was released from prison.

She thinks about her own childhood, tries to pin down when it all went wrong. Hmmm, that would be 1995, the year Terrill Lee Stanton was released on parole. The same year her parents split up. You remember the awful, drunken Thanksgiving. The Christmas your dad wasn't around. Valentine's Day 1996, when Claire sat you down and explained to your five-year-old self that Daddy wasn't going to be living here much longer.

What would cause Dad to go off the deep end?

A homicide detective who planned and executed the perfect murder. That might do it.

Why would he agree to help her, then?

Because that's what homicide cops do. They let you do all the talking, all the storytelling. They hold your hand until they reach the end of the story and boom, you're in handcuffs waiting for Ol' Sparky.

She roots through her father's basement possessions looking for the real murder book, but somehow she knows she's not going to find it down here. If her suspicions are correct, he probably burned it. Hell, maybe he burned it during the barbecue they had on the thirtieth anniversary of Grandpop Stan's murder.

Here you go, kids, a little extra seasoning for the kielbasa.

No; that couldn't be right. That was May 1995; Terrill Lee Stanton wasn't released until August. She needs to find out when he died, exactly how he died, somehow trace her father's movements around the same time…

Wait.

As usual, she's missing the real question.

The real question is…
Did Terrill Lee Stanton do it?

Based on her rough examination of the bar, the answer has to be no. Unless he held two guns and fired both at the same time, all gangsta style, at strange angles.
Maybe
he was one of the shooters—but if so, he had a friend. Her father's explanation that he had an accomplice doesn't make much sense, either. Why wouldn't Stanton offer up this mysterious second shooter in exchange for a lighter sentence? Hell, offer up a cop killer and he could probably have cut his sentence in half.

Nope. Doesn't make sense.

God, is she really going to do this? Follow this whole thing through to its natural conclusion—which might end with her father in handcuffs?

Audrey's cheap-ass cell goes off. It's a local number she doesn't recognize. Which means it could be anybody within the city of Philadelphia, since she purged her contacts a year ago while drunk and angry one night.

It's a gamble: what are the chances this is someone she'd actually want to talk to?

Her call log is already full of a Houston area code she doesn't want to deal with right now.

Against her better judgment, she swipes the screen. “Impress me.”

“Aud, it's me.”

“Me who.”

“It's
Cary
.”

Her brother. His name is only two syllables, but both are packed with sheer panic. He sounds like he's drunk and he's been crying.

Audrey's internal alarm goes off:
Oh God, Dad
. Something happened to Dad. And here I am rummaging through his papers while he's somewhere out there clutching his chest and falling to his knees and…

“Spit it out, Care! Is something wrong with Dad?”

“No…it's Sta
ś
. He's gone.”