Turns out, it’s just a newspaper. Today’s Daily News, folded in half.
“What’s this?”
Jim figures George Junior’s in some kind of jam and he’s reaching out for help. Back when their dads worked together they would be forced to play with each other, but it was clear neither boy liked the other. Jim remembered the Wildeys coming over sometime around the holidays, and he was pretty sure George Junior broke some of his new toys out of spite. And Jim absolutely hated being in the Wildeys’ neighborhood. Lots of eyes, staring you down.
“They’re letting him out,” George Junior says.
“Who?” Jim asks, taking the paper.
“Page five,” George Junior says.
Jim squints in the dim light and scans the page until his eyes find the name buried in the six-inch piece. There it is. The name. That horrible name. It hurts him even to look at it. He hasn’t seen that name in print for a long, long time.
Terrill Lee Stanton, fifty-two years old, sprung early from his supposed life sentence through some kind of new amnesty program based on his hard work and good behavior while behind bars.
“Can’t fucking believe it,” Jim mutters.
“See what I’m saying? This is why I’ve been calling you, man. There ain’t no statute of limitation or whatever on murder, right?”
The reporter—who’s either a veteran or has done some righteous digging in the newspaper’s morgue—mentions Stanton was a notorious North Philly “agitator” who got under the skin of both police officers and civil rights leaders. Some even claimed he was one of the men who helped fan the flames of the ’64 riots on Columbia Avenue. He led a life of petty crime until 1970, when he was tried and convicted of killing a shopkeeper during a liquor store robbery gone wrong.
“You can reopen the case, can’t you? Nail his ass proper this time?”
There is no quote from Stanton himself, but his caseworker told the paper that “Mr. Stanton is eager to make a positive contribution to the city of Philadelphia, and he’s grateful for the support he’s received.” Family of the shopkeeper could not be reached.
“Jimmy, man, you hearing what I’m saying?”
“Yeah, I hear you, George.” Jim folds the paper and hands it back. He has to be careful here. Inner Jim is screaming, but George Junior doesn’t need to meet him. So it’s Outer Jim who tells him,
“It’s been thirty years—no physical evidence, no witnesses. I don’t think there’s much I could do.”
(Yes there is. You promised.)
George Junior takes the paper, sighs, smacks it on his leg, lowers his head.
“Fuck, man.”
“I know that’s not what you want to hear.”
“Damn sure isn’t,” he says before lifting his head and locking eyes with Jim. “This motherfucker shot our daddies point-blank in the head—and he gets to walk away? Why does he get a free pass? Shit, I know people been locked up for longer than this and they ain’t murderers!”
He’s right, Jim. You going to let this monster score a free pass?
“George, buddy, it’s late.”
Junior takes this as his cue, but he’s not happy about it. He grunts as he pulls himself up from the concrete stoop, then pats Jim on the shoulder.
“I know, man. I just wish…”
“Look, let me see what I can do. I’m not going to promise anything, but let me see.”
“Yeah, yeah, okay.”
Junior makes like he’s going to leave but then stops in his tracks.
“Oh—and look, I never scratched your record.”
Jim stares at him, truly perplexed. “What?”
“When we were kids, I was over with my old man on New Year’s Day, you thought I scratched one of your new records. It wasn’t me, man. It was one of those other kids. What’s his name, Taney. One of Taney’s kids.”
“It’s okay, George. I’m over the record. You take care.”
Jim waits until George Junior has walked back down the block and turned the corner before reaching into his pocket to pull out his keys. His hand is shaking so violently it’s as if the keys have been electrified.
Jim opens the front door as quietly as he can. Which is a real trick, considering the damned thing has a deep-set creak that more or less alerts the whole house to anyone’s arrival. He can’t see anyone tonight. He just can’t.
Put the Stanton stuff out of your head for now, Jim, there’s nothing you can do.
(But then again, you did promise.)
The living room is dark. Staś is dead asleep. Jim starts creeping up the stairs toward the bathroom, where he can finally peel off his clothes. He remembers something. He sniffs his shirt. Any telltale signs?
“Hi, Daddy,” a voice whispers from the darkness.
Audrey sits patiently at the top of the staircase, elbows on her knees, little feet poking out from under her nightshirt.
Shit.
“Hi, sugar,” Jim whispers back. “You should be in bed.”
She’s light but squirmy. Jim puts her down.
“What did you do today, Daddy?”
All Jim can see is Kelly Anne Farrace’s head twisted at an unnatural angle. His father in his coffin, thick hands folded, waxen eyes shut. I dealt with dead people, Audrey, he wants to say. But of course he can’t.
“Tried to catch some bad guys. And now I’m going to put a drunk and disorderly female to bed.”
She giggles. He carries her to her room. She insists, of course, on being carried, even though she’s getting a little too big for that. The stairs creak under his shoes as he carries their collective weight up, up, up. He’s still drunk and feels the house do a tiny spin around him.
“Good night, sweetheart.”
“Read me a story.”
“Honey, it’s way too late for a story.”
“I’m not tired.”
“Admit it, kid. We’re both exhausted.”
He lays her down in bed and reaches out to touch her cheek, but stops when he realizes his hand is still trembling. Fuck. He drops it. Audrey senses him pulling away and reaches out to grab the sleeve of his shirt.
“Daddy, please?”
“Audrey, please, go to sleep. Daddy’s had a really long day.”
Audrey Saves Her Ass
May 8, 2015
Audrey rolls over and her knuckles bang hard on hard wood. Even in its half-awake state, her brain informs her: Wow, that kinda fucking hurt. She forces her eyes to open.
For a brief moment she has no idea where she is. Then it all comes back: the flight home, the memorial, the drinking, the drinking, the drinking, and then this…yes, this glorious hangover.
She’s in her mother’s apartment. Technically, her mother’s boyfriend Will’s apartment. Audrey is in the guest bedroom, but don’t let that fool you. There’s no bed in here.
She rolls off the inflatable bed and comes down hard on a knee, reminded once again that it’s all hardwood floors up in this mother. Fancy Center City living at its finest. Audrey recalls with delight the words tumbling out of Will’s mouth (“Sure, uh, make yourself at home”) with his eyes saying quite the opposite (You’re a tattooed trainwreck—I don’t want you anywhere near my home).
Well, sorry, Will. I’m going to be hanging around for a little longer than you thought.
Oh yes I. Am.
She sent the email last night. She was drunk enough to be heartfelt, yet sober enough to make a convincing proposition.
And lo! Within an hour, her advisor responded. A cautious yes, and a request for a formal proposal by first thing Monday, but still a yes. A life preserver, tossed into the churning waters.
Audrey celebrating by going drinking with Cary in a series of bars in the vicinity of Thirteenth and Sansom. The logic: if things got ugly, they could literally crawl home to Will’s apartment building. In retrospect, both should have stayed home. Nobody guessed they were brother and sister out on a sibling bender. With Cary still in his police dress uniform and Audrey in her…w
ell, her usual duds…everybody was thinking cop and suspect.
Now she shuffles zombielike through the kitchen. A cat (Audrey can’t remember its stupid name) tumbles out of its litter box, shaking, as if it’s just taken an epic shit and has to recover its senses.
Audrey needs a Bloody Mary, stat.
She gathers the ingredients from Will’s well-stocked kitchen. Four ounces of tomato juice, one (okay, two) ounces of Tito’s Handmade Vodka, a teaspoon of lemon juice, an ounce of Worcestershire sauce, generous dashes of Tabasco sauce, then freshly ground salt, pepper, and a quarter teaspoon of celery salt. She rocks it back and forth between a Boston shaker and a pint glass, then dumps it into an ice-filled pint glass. Garnishes it with black olives—very important—pickle, lemon, and, of course, a celery stalk, which she psychologically associates with a life jacket.
Then she settles down to read the paper. Which always depresses her, even though she can’t help herself.
The first story that catches Audrey’s eye: a twenty-six-year-old mother, eight months pregnant, shot in the face by a stray bullet. Late on a Sunday morning. The girl was sitting outside, watching a neighbor’s kid for a little while. Friends say she often sat outside to read. A block away, some monster saw a car he recognized and opened fire. The bullets missed the car. They hit the girl. She died at the hospital. They tried to save the baby. The baby died early this morning.
She wishes the Captain were still on the job. This is the kind of case he’d love. He’d track down the shooters in no time.
Then there’s an update on what happened on Chancellor Street last September 11, of all days. A gang of clean-cut white people, dressed up for a night on the town, approached a gay couple, asked one of them, What are you, his boyfriend? Then proceeded to beat the shit out of them, fracturing skulls, before running away. Reportedly, police have some footage and will be posting a video soon.
What is wrong with this stupid city? Audrey sips her Bloody just as something out in the living room groans.
It’s Cary, who crashed out on the couch, still in his dress uniform.
And shoes.
And ooh, look, a can of beer in his hand.
“Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” he says.
“Yeah, brother. Exactly.”
Cary got into a fight with Jean via text last night. At first, she demanded he come home. Then, later, she told him he’d better not dare show up at home all drunk. She told her husband she was done. It’s over. He can’t keep doing this. Apparently, Jean says this all the time. Cary, meanwhile, still complains about being on restricted duty, as he has been for the past six years. He hurt his back (so he says) jumping out of a police van and his doctor says he can’t handle the street yet. If ever. Nice work if you can get it, Audrey thinks.
“Time’s your plane,” Cary asks. Not out of curiosity. He promised to drive her, and he’s wondering how he’s possibly going to sober up in time.
“I changed my flight. I’m staying for a few more days.”
Cary sits up and shakes his head. The question he’s trying to formulate is hampered by endless fields of dead brain cells. His brain needs to reroute. Rerouting. Rerouting. Rerouting…Ah. There we go.
“Wait…why?”
Give me a slice and a double homicide,
Audrey wants to say.
But instead she asks for an iced tea. Her stomach can’t handle pizza right now. She’s still sweating from the walk up here, which was farther than she thought. She needs to replenish fluids, stat.
“That all?” the guy at the counter asks.
Audrey smiles at him. It’s going to be important to lay on the charm, extra chunky style, with this guy.
“That’s all.”
She brings her drink to a Formica-topped table situated on the other side of the room, pulls out the wooden chair, which scrapes along the tiled floor, then sits down and takes in the whole place.
You can totally tell it used to be a bar, which is a relief to Audrey. If the owner had totally gutted the joint, she wouldn’t have much to work with, and her advisor would sadly shake her head before pulling the chain that would flush Audrey’s academic career down the toilet.
But no…this totally used to be a bar.
For one thing, the bar is still here.
The mammoth wooden bar itself, on which rest the register, the takeout menus, and the warming case holding slices of plain, mushroom, pepperoni, vegetarian, and so on. Instead of removing the bar, they just slapped some panels on the front to cover up the wood.
Then there’s the floor, a mosaic of tiles that extends throughout the entire room. That’s pretty amazing, too.
As a pizza place, it’s no great shakes, even though it claims to be THE BEST IN PHILADELPHIA. There are a few tables, of course, but mostly they want you to stop in, order your slices and sodas, then get the fuck out. The owner has mounted a TV in the corner; right now CNN is live-updating the situation in Ferguson. They also cut the former tavern in half and put the ovens in the middle; in the other half of the joint, out of customers’ view, is most likely the prep kitchen, employee restrooms, all that.
She can work with this.
Audrey takes a sip of her iced tea, then walks over to the counter, feeling the wooden top with her fingers. They’ve painted it to match the paneling. Shame, covering up good wood like this.
She peers up and down the counter, like a carpenter making mental measurements.
Pizza Counter Guy gives her a quizzical look.
“You want something else, miss?”
“No,” Audrey says as cheerily as possible.
“Let me know if you do.”
“Oh, I will.”
Flash that smile. Work that charm, honey.
Audrey crouches down and touches the cool tile with her fingertips. Fifty years ago her grandfather bled out on these tiles. Once, a very stoned friend told Audrey that we exchange atoms with everything we ever touch. If that’s true, then she’s touching some infinitesimal part of her grandfather. Then again, Audrey also learned in some physics class that we never actually touch anything—that it’s all a sensory illusion courtesy of our brain, and that in reality, existence is merely an ever-growing ball of quantum energy.
Pizza Counter Guy peeks over the top. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” she says.
She looks at the paneling. Some of it will have to come off. If she’s lucky, the holes will still be there.
“No, Aud, just…no. Real bad frickin’ idea”
is what Cary said after Audrey told her brother she planned on solving their grandfather’s murder, thereby putting a family mystery to rest—and saving her academic bacon at the same time.
“Why not?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Because maybe Dad will go ballistic.”
“Interesting choice of words,” Audrey says.
“It’s a stupid idea, Aud.”
“Come on, Care. You’re a cop. Sort of. Don’t you want to find out who did it?”
“What are you talking about? Everybody knows who did it.”
“What do you mean?”
Cary makes exasperated bug eyes. “Dad knows who did it.”
Which is the exact moment that Claire emerges from her bedroom.
“Dad knows who did what?”
“Killed Grandpop Stan.”
“Oh, Audrey,” Claire says. “Don’t go poking that wound, please, for all our sakes.”
Audrey opens her purse and looks at the tools she scrounged from Will’s apartment. It’s one of those turnkey, maintenance-free deals, but Will likes to pretend he has testicles and keeps a small, pristine box of tools under the kitchen sink. He’ll never miss the stuff. She finds the tool she’s looking for: a crowbar so petite it should have the words FISHER-PRICE stamped on its side.
Crouching down, she looks for a weak spot, fingertips gliding along the paneling.
Finds one.
She shoves the end of her baby crowbar into the gap, then pulls.
K
EEEERAACK.
Tiny nails jiggle in the holes. This was slapped up in a hurry. This joint may have THE BEST PIZZA IN PHILADELPHIA, but they employed a shoddy-ass remodeling crew.
Counter Guy can’t exactly ignore the noise, of course. He comes out from around his counter to look at what the crazy white girl with the tattoos is doing.
“Uh, miss?”
“Just a second,” Audrey says.
KEEERAACK.
There. Panel off.
She gingerly lays it up against the next panel, then turns her attention back to the exposed bar.
“If you didn’t like the iced tea, I would have given you something different.”
“Shit,” Audrey says.
“Maybe a Diet Coke?”
The naked bar reveals…nothing obvious. Burn marks from countless cigarettes. Nicks and chips from decades of shoe tips and knees and bar stools. Audrey runs her palms along the exposed surface. Maybe the former owners patched up the holes? Or she’s looking in the wrong spot.
“I don’t mean to pry into my customer’s business,” Pizza Counter Guy says, “but what are you doing?”
Audrey knows this is where she’s going to have to (a) come clean and (b) pour on the maximum charm. But now that she’s sizing up Pizza Counter Guy, she’s betting it won’t be about making pouty kissy-faces. There’s a light on behind his eyes. The Diet Coke line was pretty funny.
She stands up to face him, petite crowbar in her hands. Pizza Counter Guy eyes the crowbar.
“Before it was a fine Italian-themed dining establishment,” Audrey says, “this place was a bar. A taproom, if you will.”
Pizza Counter Guy nods. “Yeah, there’s a lot of crazy old stuff in the basement. Lots of sports memorabilia, neon signs.”
“Well, in this very taproom, exactly fifty years ago,” Audrey continues, “my grandfather was shot to death.”
“What? You serious?”
Audrey was hoping he’d say something like that. When your prey is stunned, you go in for the kill.
She crooks her finger twice: Follow me. Counter Guy looks around, wondering if he’s being led to an ambush or a practical joke, then follows anyway.
Revolver Page 7
