A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  “What the fuck you do that for?” asked Robinson.

  “What are you going to do about it, you fucking nigger?”

  “Come on, what do you want to do?”

  “I’ll kick your fucking ass.”

  They went outside onto Dickinson Street. Robinson didn’t know it, but the white man he was tangling with, a thirty-four-year-old named Keith Duczkowski, was a former Golden Gloves boxer.

  “What are you going to do, nigger?”

  They squared off in the street in an urban version of High Noon, a black teenager against a white man twice his age. Robinson hit him two or three times with a combination of lefts and rights. Duczkowski tried to rush Robinson and started hitting him on the back. A black man in his thirties jumped in to stop the fight. The heated ugliness of it appeared to be over.

  Then Will Taylor started arguing with Duczkowski. And then, from underneath the Starter jacket, came the shotgun. It had gray tape on the handle and looked like a long pistol. Those who knew Will had seen it before. But usually he kept it at home, except of course, as his cousin later put it to police, “if we were going to a party, something like that.”

  “Watch out,” Will said in the middle of Dickinson Street. Then he pulled down on the lever.

  Duczkowski grabbed his side and fell backward, the blue jean jacket darkening with blood from a bullet wound in his abdomen. He got up and staggered backward in the middle of the street at fifteen minutes before noon, with the front window of Don’s Variety still visible, with that little American flag taped to the window.

  “Oh my God,” he said.

  Taylor stood over him. Those who had been with him had all started running, so it was just the two of them, a fifteen-year-old black boy with a 72 IQ and a history of abuse and an education that was worthless and a habit of carrying his shotgun to parties and a thirty-four-year-old white man who had a wife and three children and a job as a roofer and lived in an area of the city where blacks were still routinely called niggers.

  There was a pause, and no one heard anything for a little bit. Five seconds, ten seconds, fifteen seconds …

  The boys who had been with Will had kept on running. They didn’t turn around to see what was happening, but there was no need. The sound of the blast booming down the street told them that Will had fired again.

  A man living on Dickinson Street was watching a rerun of The Fugitive on television when he heard the shots, and he ran outside with a towel. He placed it on Keith Duczkowski’s stomach in an effort to stop the bleeding.

  Someone else called 911.

  “They’re on the way.”

  “Thanks, I mean I thought I heard a shot, and I, I run out the door, and all I heard was this man screamin’, cryin’ here.”

  “They’ll be there. They’ll be there shortly, ma’am.”

  “Oh, Jesus! This poor man. Oh! He’s not moving! Oh come on, send it!”

  “I’m gone, I’m gone,” Keith Duczkowski whispered in the middle of the street with a towel and a sheet wrapped around him in a vain attempt to stop the rush of blood spreading over his clothes.

  It was the last thing anyone heard him say before he died.

  “I’m gone. I’m gone.”

  Will Taylor ran off before the police came. He found some of the kids, and they went back to a house in their neighborhood and watched some television and got a cold drink. Will thought about what had happened and told a friend that he hoped the guy didn’t die. “It isn’t right the guy’s kids don’t have a dad,” he said. But otherwise he seemed calm and cool. Several hours after the shooting, a probation officer paid Will a visit. Will told him everything was fine, leaving out that he had just killed someone in the middle of the street. The probation officer was satisfied, and even after Will’s arrest for murder, somehow unaware of the charges, he was still satisfied. In a note in the boy’s file, he wrote, “Will appeared to be doing well.” Aside from the fact that the spiral of Will Taylor’s life now included the possibility of imprisonment for life at the age of fifteen, perhaps he was.

  The trial ate at McGovern—the racial tension, the conflicting emotions of trying a juvenile. Both sides in the case closed ranks around their own, white witnesses determined to show that Taylor had committed premeditated murder, black witnesses trying to recant the statements they had given the police.

  As much as McGovern liked aspects of the work he did—the sense of doing something worthwhile that very few other lawyers felt—there were significant constraints. As long as he worked for the district attorney’s office, he was also locked into the city, which meant among other things a wage tax, a public school system that could not provide even a nominal education for his four children, a level of service that was spotty at best and nonexistent at worst, and a level of pay that left no real room for upward mobility. On the typical ledger sheet of reasons to leave the district attorney’s office and reasons to stay, it wasn’t even close. But then a case like Will Taylor’s came along, and the qualities that made McGovern such a superb prosecutor—that religious sense of protecting the city from those who were destroying it—came rushing back.

  When he gave his closing argument in the Will Taylor case, he became so heated that his voice cracked. He knew his conduct was unprofessional, but it also conveyed his emotions about the case, the image of a fifteen-year-old bringing a pump shotgun to high school midterms. His whole style was a mirror of the way he looked, compact and energized and blunt, the roots of Port Richmond as apparent and as proudly worn as an American flag in the lapel. “All we had was a fistfight in the city,” McGovern told Common Pleas Judge Carolyn Temin. “No one should die over this.”

  “Why was Will standing over a man with his guts shot, totally helpless, with his bowels and intestines perforated?” he asked in his closing argument. Why did he fire that second shot? McGovern answered the question: because it was an act of premeditated, cold-blooded murder. “Some people can do it when they’re fifteen, and some people can do it when they’re ninety-five, and some people can never do it.”

  During the closing argument, Will Taylor looked at Mike McGovern with mild interest, the kind of interest a young teenager might exhibit while watching a television show he really doesn’t care about very much, a look in that adolescent space between boredom and reluctant amusement. It was a look that crept inside McGovern, and in the privacy of his office after the closing he couldn’t help but reflect on his picture of Will Taylor as a cold-blooded killer who deserved to go to prison for the rest of his life. He knew why Taylor carried that shotgun and flashed it around with as much pride as a father showing off pictures of his children. He knew how in Will Taylor’s world it was a way of proving strength and gaining peer acceptance. “You look at this guy, and he’s four years older than my son Michael. I love kids, and you wonder about this society disease that we have is corrupting all of us. Does it warp the young ones faster in areas where they are trapped?”

  McGovern knew that a first-degree murder conviction would mean that Will Taylor would spend the rest of his life in prison. “I feel sorry for his youth because he wasted his life,” he said. He also expressed sorrow for his family. But then, like a priest questioning his faith, he caught himself. “I don’t play sociologist anymore,” he said. “I just play with the facts on this day. I deal with the adult on trial. I deal with the act as opposed to the action.”

  Just as he was acutely aware of the tender age of the defendant, he was acutely aware of the racial hatred that had fueled the confrontation in the first place, cries of “nigger” on a street corner in Grays Ferry a quarter of an hour before noon, the specter of a white man and a black teenager fighting each other in the middle of the street, a black teenager standing over a white man with a pump shotgun in his hands.

  “Everybody says, ‘What racial hatred?’ It’s like saying, ‘What elephant in the phone booth?’ ” he had noted during his closing. But none of that ultimately mattered when matched up with the image that McGovern tho
ught about the most—the pleas of a man with his intestines hanging out met not with an ounce of sympathy or even the sound of footsteps as the shooter ran away but with another blast.

  “That second shot says a lot,” said McGovern, but did it say enough to convince a judge that Taylor should be found guilty of first-degree murder? Was there sufficient proof of premeditation and intent to kill, or would the judge, assuming she found Will Taylor guilty, come back with a verdict of third-degree murder instead? Although he was loathe even to consider it, that’s what McGovern thought it would be, which meant that when he marked the file, the strokes of the pen across the top would lack their usual spark. It also meant that when the trial was over, when the inevitable moment came when he would have to look into the eyes of the members of the victim’s family and explain to them what had happened, he would feel that he had somehow let them down, that the faith they had placed in him as a prosecutor had been misguided.

  III

  The morning of the verdict, a white man in white shorts and sneakers, lingering outside in the hallway, spoke to a friend and succinctly summed up what he perceived to be the thrust of the previous day’s testimony. “You missed the main event. The nigger took the witness stand.”

  Will Taylor was brought down the hallway in handcuffs. He wore a black suit that was too big for him, looking like the concentration camp uniforms that the characters wear in Art Spiegelman’s Maus. The suit floated on his frame. His face, still with the softness of youth, only added to the incongruity. He walked down the hallway with a look that was calm and resolute, playing out his self-perceived part to the end.

  Inside the courtroom, five rows of wooden chairs were divided by an aisle down the center. The right side was completely filled with whites who were friends and family of Keith Duczkowski. The left side was occupied by blacks who were friends and family of Will Taylor. There were plenty of seats to sit in on the left side, unless you were white. Then there were apparently no seats at all. “Do I have to sit over there?” said a white woman as she walked into the courtroom and saw the seating arrangement. She shrugged and looked disgusted. Rather than go near the left side, she found a seat in the jury box.

  “This is a courtroom, and I want to remind you to be calm and act with restraint,” said the court crier, sensing the tension, as if the slightest gesture or movement might set off a mêlée, as if all the sad, insoluble hatred in the city between blacks and whites were focused in the silence of this room.

  McGovern stood in that small and claustrophobic space between the rows of spectators and the judge’s bench, his arms folded like a circumspect schoolboy, waiting for the verdict. A little bit before 10:00 A.M., Judge Temin appeared to render a verdict, the decision entirely in her hands since Taylor had requested a non-jury trial. McGovern knew virtually all the judges in the system, and after a while when you knew a judge, you could predict with regularity those willing to grant some degree of mercy and those who saw mercy as something that God could sort out once the defendant died in prison. McGovern didn’t know Temin. He had never tried a major case in front of her, and he did not know what to expect.

  She asked the defendant to rise. He did so, standing obediently in that ill-fitting suit. She looked at him and announced her verdict.

  Guilty of murder. Guilty of murder in the first degree.

  Several members from the white side of the courtroom began to applaud, as if they were at a sporting event, but they stopped when the court crier yelled, “Quiet, please!” The courtroom fell silent, the only sound the click of the handcuffs around Will Taylor’s small wrists. Several sheriff’s deputies surrounded him and took him away through the back of the courtroom, and there was the sound of a slam of a door. Sentencing was set for November 30, but it was moot since first-degree murder in Pennsylvania carried a minimum sentence of life imprisonment without parole. The only other sentence would have been the death penalty, but since Will Taylor was still fifteen, he was too young for that. Instead of dying some day by lethal injection, he would simply die in prison instead.

  Outside the courtroom, Joe Duczkowski, Keith’s older brother, hugged a friend and said, “Let’s go, man! Everything’s made!”

  Inside the courtroom, Will Taylor’s mother sat in the front row, rocking back and forth, moaning softly in a kind of mantra, vomiting into a metal wastepaper basket with a black plastic liner.

  Outside the courtroom, Joe Duczkowski talked about his brother’s legacy as a Golden Gloves fighter and said of the verdict, “That was his last fight, and he won it.”

  Inside the courtroom, the sound of the vomiting coming from Will Taylor’s mother continued. A little girl watched, then ran to the back and shielded her eyes.

  Outside the courtroom, on the way back to his office, Mike McGovern said he felt the way he used to feel at law school, when actually linking the law with the ideals of justice wasn’t considered some pathetic form of naïveté. “No amount of money can compensate for the feeling you get when the mother of the dead guy says, ‘Thank you, God bless you, I’ll do anything for you.’ ” He knew those feelings would not last—another case in a week or two, another pumping of emotion—but standing on Broad Street, the glowering frown of City Hall behind him, he said he felt like the best lawyer in the entire world—proud of the legal system, proud of the judge who hadn’t been swayed by sympathy, proud of the family of the victim who had put their faith in him, proud of himself. He was a prosecutor, and he was ready to mark the file murder in the first degree.

  “There will be another case tomorrow, but this guy is slam-dunked. In terms of this town, he’s out of here. I don’t have to worry about him anymore.”

  IV

  Right around the corner from the courtroom, the mayor sat at the table in his office surrounded by some of the keenest and cleverest minds in the city. The verdict had been handed down only hours earlier. They were all aware of what had just happened and even more aware of how this could be a major black eye for the city unless it was immediately addressed and handled. The injustices and inequities that had been revealed must be righted. Somehow, some way, the Miss International U.S. Beauty Pageant must be saved. Somehow, Miss North Dakota and Miss Tennessee, not to mention Miss Minnesota and Miss Georgia and Miss Virginia and all the rest had to get the toothy gleams back in their smiles.

  The previous day by happenstance Rendell himself had witnessed the spectacle of pageant contestants beating on the sides of a police van outside a hotel as it carted off the show’s sponsor. The mayor didn’t know what was going on, but the sight of those crying, screaming beauty-show contestants in such pain and agony over the loss of their dreams and their entrance fees moved him. He swung into action that very same day, at around midnight, calling a member of his staff, marshaling the forces of the city to turn the nightmare of these girls into a fairy tale. He got the hotel they were about to be evicted from to let them stay for free. He arranged for tours of the city, and he talked various restaurateurs into letting the contestants have a night on the town.

  That Friday around noon, two hours after Will Taylor had been carted off to prison for the rest of his life with a single tear in each eye, the mayor held a press conference to publicize his monumental efforts on behalf of a beauty contest. “This way, ladies,” said Deputy Chief of Staff Ted Beitchman, ushering the fallen contestants into the Reception Room as if they were survivors of a year-long hostage crisis. Three reporters had been in the courtroom when the verdict in the Will Taylor case was reached. Nearly twenty reporters milled about with notebooks and cameras and microphones for what one newspaper later dubbed “Beauties and the Feast,” filing through the rows of the Reception Room like prep-school boys trying to coax shy girls to dance, gently bending down to get all the details from Miss Tennessee and Miss North Dakota and Miss Minnesota. The girls themselves sat in the front row, pretty and prim, the white sashes proclaiming their states running in neat diagonal lines from shoulder to sternum like cellophane wrapping on a piece of pro
cessed cheese. In between answering questions, they munched on a spread of hoagies and chicken wings, and whereas they were polite and artful, they could also feel the power.

  “Are we going to a baseball game?” warbled Miss Georgia.

  “Do you want to go to a baseball game?” warbled back the mayor.

  At the front of the Reception Room, underneath all those portraits of mayors past, various city officials beamed like groomsmen at a wedding party. They knew they were onto something. “Talk about getting mileage!” said press secretary Feeley, watching one reporter after another sidle up to the pageant contestants. Even the wire services were there, which meant national coverage. Sure enough, that following Sunday The New York Times had a story with a headline that read, PHILADELPHIA RESCUES STRANDED CONTESTANTS, and the mayor was cast as a worthy hero. “I figured these young ladies from all over the country would have nothing but bad thoughts and would always remember their awful experience in Philadelphia, which was humiliating and tragic, and I didn’t want that to happen,” he was quoted as saying.

  It was another sublime moment for the mayor, another perfect bull’s-eye in the game of creating the perception of change. Eight months into the term a remarkable amount had gone well, more than anyone, friend or foe, would have predicted. But absent the one piece that could make the miracle of a reborn city truly plausible, it still was all largely illusory. Blocking the road to glory and national acclaim were the city’s four major unions. Together they numbered nearly twenty-five thousand members, and the tentacles of their power reached deep into every politician in the city. They also knew what they could do with a slowdown here and a work stoppage there and the ultimate weapon of an all-out strike to create an image of the city so different from the one the mayor was groping to create—not once-scorned beauty contestants with beauteous smiles, but pictures of stinking garbage piled to the heavens on city streets and angry workers with picket signs, the portrait of a city in chaos. It was contract time, and it seemed unlikely the unions could be bought off with hoagies, chicken wings, free hotels, or even free tickets to a baseball game. They wanted more, much more.