“Come on, let’s go,” Stan says.
“To be continued, young man,” Wildey says, putting his hand on Jimmy’s shoulder. “You’ve got some education coming your way.”
Spray-painted messages on the side of a Baptist church up on the northern edge of the Jungle, where it borders Frog Hollow, one of the last Irish-German strongholds in North Philly:
GET THE FUK OUT
HATE NIGERS
“I hate racist motherfuckers who can’t spell,” Wildey says.
“This what we were called about? A property crime?”
“No, there’s more to it. Come on, Pastor’s waiting on us inside.”
Stan feels strange being inside the church of a different faith. Sure, the basics are the same—the cross, the pews, Jesus—but it’s the little differences that make him feel like he’s stepped onto foreign soil. He was raised Polish Catholic, still hits mass when he feels guilty enough. When he was a teenager, he even attended mass on his own, when nobody was forcing him. He’d duck into an Italian parish, Mater Dolorosa, and listen to the Latin words and hymns and just enjoy the peace of it all.
The pastor, a tall and reedy black man named Jeremiah Stebbens, shakes hands with Wildey and greets Stan warmly, then leads them toward the back of the church. There’s a battered upright piano off to the side.
“If you wouldn’t mind waiting here for a moment, Officers. Just want to make sure he’s ready.”
Stan doesn’t mind. He’s still half asleep. After Stebbens leaves he turns to Wildey and asks, “So who are we waiting for?”
“Patience, my man. We’re finally about to get some answers.”
Wildey paces a little as Stan takes a seat on the piano bench. He swings his knees around, lifts the lid, starts noodling around on the keys. A chord first, then another, and another, until it blossoms into an almost unconscious progression, a song hard-wired into his hands even though he hasn’t touched a keyboard in almost a decade.
Da-dum, da-da-da-da da dum da-dum
Stan is pleasantly surprised to see his fingers moving on their own, remembering the chord changes of the song he and Rosie danced to on their wedding day. The song he’s played a thousand times since he was a teenager.
But he’s even more surprised when Wildey starts singing along, his voice strong and clear and tender.
“I don’t want to set the world…on…fi-ure…”
They continue for the rest of the chorus, until Wildey sings about his one desiiiiiire and Stan, embarrassed, drops his fingers from the keyboard.
“Hey, why’d you stop, man?”
“Didn’t know you were a singer,” Stan says to Wildey.
Wildey waves his hand. “Naw, just something I mess around with now and again. But you’re quite the piano man. You and Jimmy do a little jamming now and again?”
Stan shakes his head. He shouldn’t have sat down here. Why did he play just now? He blames the misjudgment on a lack of sleep. Jimmy probably doesn’t even know he plays. They don’t keep a piano in the house. For Stan music is the past, and belongs there. A reminder of a life he’s left behind to have a family. A family man shouldn’t be out nights, playing Tin Pan Alley tunes for drunks.
Soon the pastor returns and leads them down a long, cramped corridor to a kitchen in the back with an old table where a short, squat black man is hunkered over a cup of coffee. He looks up as they enter, terror in his eyes. He’s about to face some kind of music.
“Officers, this young man’s got something important to tell,” the pastor says, “and would like your promise that this conversation will be kept confidential. His name is Terrill Lee Stanton.”
Jim Kicks In a Door
November 3, 1995
One busted garage door yields one extremely nervous scumbag.
Scumbag tries blasting past Jim. Almost makes it, too, the speedy little fucker. But Jim has girth on his side, and the garage doorway isn’t very wide. He blocks the kid’s path, grabs up a bunch of his shirt, and hurls him against the cinder-block wall, knocking the air out of him.
“You in a hurry to get somewhere, Timmy?” Jim asks.
Aisha fielded the anonymous tip—a twenty-two-year-old kid was supposedly in a Fishtown bar last night bragging about the pretty blond jogger he’d banged early yesterday morning. “She fucked him but wouldn’t give him her phone number, so he choked her out and left her on the street.” What’s his name? Timmy Hoober, that’s H-double-O-B-E-R. What’s your name? “Eh, I don’t want to get involved in this.” Sir, it’s very important that we— “Look, I ain’t giving you my name. But you can find Timmy…” and then he rattled off this address quick and hung up.
One Miranda reading later Timmy Hoober is cuffed in the back of their car. Aisha keeps an eye on him while Jim snaps on some gloves and does a quick check of the rest of the garage. Forensics is on its way, but sometimes a quick scan can give him something he can use in the interrogation room. Something like this…little leather ditty bag, the kind you’d find in a traveling businessman’s luggage. Jim zips it open. Needle, spoon, baggie—he’s a junkie. Good to know. He’ll be twitchy soon enough.
Jim dumps the kit in a Ziploc, then steps back outside, looks around. Across from the garage, an older man peeks out from behind the curtains. Jim waves. The guy ducks back behind the curtains, not curious at all about the pair of detectives who just yanked a skinny punk out of his garage. Yeah, hello, anonymous caller.
“What do you think?” Aisha asks as they wait for a couple of uniforms to guard the garage until forensics can arrive.
“I think he’s a skinny little knucklehead,” Jim says.
“I mean about him being our guy.”
“I’m not sure that knucklehead there could have overpowered our girl.”
“He could have surprised her. Knocked her on the head before she even knew he was coming. Dragged her down the steps, did his thing…”
“Let’s talk to him before we jump to any conclusions.”
Jim will say one thing—Timmy is awfully quiet back there. The whole ride down to the Roundhouse he doesn’t ask a single question. Not even what am I being charged with. Almost always the sign of a guilty mind.
DNA won’t be the home run in this case.
They’ve got the two semen samples from Kelly Anne, and Timmy let them swab the inside of his cheek for a sample. But processing it for any kind of hit will take weeks. And that’s only if it’s a five-alarm rush job, with the mayor’s office begging the state police (who have the best labs—even better than the Feds) to hurry with the samples. Same goes for anything the forensics guys will find in the garage. Whatever they find on this front will be useful to the DA’s office in a trial somewhere down the line.
Right now, though, it does jack shit for Jim.
Now it’s all about Jim in a room with this guy. Reading him. Working on him.
(You wish you had Terrill Lee Stanton in this room so you could work on him, don’t ya, Jim?)
He sends in Aisha first, for the basics, get him comfortable. They don’t have one of those fancy fish tanks you see on TV cop shows with the one-way glass. All they have is a square conference room they all share. There’s no recording gear, either. Aisha picks up the receiver of a phone, rests it on the table with the line open while Jim sits in his cubicle and listens in. When it’s Jim’s turn, they’ll switch.
Timmy Hoober claims to be a “delivery guy,” only he won’t say for who.
“You live in that garage?” Aisha asks.
“My friend Bobby lets me stay there.”
“Tell me about Bobby.”
Robert Haas, twenty-five or twenty-six—Timmy doesn’t know for sure. He’s also a delivery guy, handyman. Jim makes notes as Aisha digs more details out of him. Hoober, it seems, squats in the detached garage out behind his friend Bobby’s place, where Bobby lives with his alcoholic divorced father. Most likely the man Jim saw at the window and the source of their “anonymous” tip.
Jim makes a call. B
oth Hoober and Haas have jackets. Car theft mostly, some B&E, a few assaults. (Pretty much Terrill Lee Stantons in training, Jimbo. Ask them about the bars they case.) He sends a car out to pick up Haas. Meanwhile, Aisha pops out of the conference room. “He’s all yours.”
“Wish I had a bunny suit for this one,” Jim says.
“What?” Aisha says.
“Nothing,” he says. “Some story my pop once told me.”
The movie and TV cliché is that a good cop can crawl into the mind of a killer. That’s not the case with Jim. The last thing he wants to do is step inside some scumbag killer’s head. No, his preferred method is to lock eyes with the monster and wear him down until the truth finally comes tumbling out.
He doesn’t mean beatings. That doesn’t help anything. People will lie to avoid pain just as easily as tell the truth. But when you look someone in the eye, you’ve got some kind of tractor beam going. You’re letting him know you know. And you’re not going to stop gnawing on this particular bone until the marrow of truth is exposed.
(Maybe you should flash your badge, talk your way into his room, be there, sitting on the edge of his ratty-ass bed, when he comes home from the soup kitchen.)
“So why did you pick her?”
Timmy breaks eye contact after 1.2 seconds.
“I didn’t pick anybody. You gotta let me out of here, man. What the fuck is this about?”
“No, you saw her and liked her. What was it about her, though? Maybe her hair. You like blondes?”
Timmy shakes his head. “What are you talking about?”
“I know, I know,” Jim says. “I’m just messin’ with ya. Because you’re an ass man, aren’t you?”
“Aren’t you narco?”
A few more back-and-forths like that and it becomes clear that either Hoober here is a gifted liar or he doesn’t know anything about Kelly Anne Farrace. We’ll see soon enough, Jim thinks. The old man called in the tip for a reason. Maybe it was a cover for his own boy, Bobby. Feed the cops this clueless scumbag, keep the attention away from his own kid.
They let Timmy cool in the conference room for a while. They can hold him for up to forty-eight hours before charging him, and the mook hasn’t asked for a lawyer yet.
Jim is at his desk, replaying the mental footage of Terrill Lee Stanton walking down Erie Avenue, when his desk phone rings. But it’s not the call from the CSU that he’s been expecting.
“Give me some good news, my Polish brother,” Sonya says.
Jesus. Jim knows word travels fast around the department, but he didn’t know it extended to the halls of the mayor’s office as well. He supposes Sonya has more than one friend in the Roundhouse. Makes sense; her power broker father got to where he is by making plenty of friends around town.
“Come on, Sonya, you know how this works,” Jim says, more than a little exasperated. “Let me do my job.”
“I hear you’ve got two very good suspects.”
“Two? Where did you hear that?”
She ignores the question. “Just keep me updated. And this goes without saying, but whatever resources you need, you got it. You need the state police forensics lab, I’ll get them to roll out the red carpet.”
“Believe me, Sonya, you’ll be my first call.”
Not, as the kids say.
The rest of the afternoon is full of conflicting evidence. Robert Haas turns out to be just as goofy and clueless as his young pal, assuming he’s being hauled in on a drug charge. But at least he’s heard of Kelly Anne Farrace. His father kept talking about it yesterday—“such a waste of a fine piece of ass,” his son quoted him as saying. Jim’s beginning to think that Haas’s father called in that tip about Hoober because he wanted the little bastard out of his detached garage.
But just before Jim can talk to Aisha about shaking them loose, forensics comes back with not only hair samples that seem to match Kelly Anne’s hair type and color, but her missing jogging pants—black, ripped, and stuffed into the bottom of a wastebasket. This changes everything. Haas and Hoober, in a rare moment of clarity, decide to clam up and lawyer up. Jim and Aisha plot a new strategy: connecting the dots between the Idiot Twins’ movements on the night of the first into the morning of the second. It might be tedious, but it’ll get them there.
Which is good, because around 4:30 p.m. Jim excuses himself, tells Aisha he has to take care of something. Aisha, who’s too good a detective not to realize that this is the second day in a row her partner has been pulling this shit, simply nods and says she’ll update him with any news.
She probably thinks I’m banging that woman from the mayor’s office, Jim thinks.
Good. It’s better than the truth.
Hello, motherfucker.
Jim watches as Terrill Lee Stanton emerges from the Erie-Torresdale El station, hands in his pockets, head down. For a moment the old man seems to consider stepping into a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts, but seems to think better of it, then crosses Kensington Avenue toward Erie. Headed home after a long day of ladling or whatever the fuck it is they do in soup kitchens.
(You should be inside his place already. Let him know that you know everything about him. That there’s no escape for him. That he’s not going to have a moment’s peace until he answers for what he did.)
Jim watches the man’s every movement, looking for a tell or a tremor. You skipped that coffee. Maybe you’re hoping for a quiet drink somewhere, get your nerve up. You haven’t had a real drink in a long time, have you, killer? Maybe some of that pruno shit they brew up in toilets and plastic bags inside the Big House. But not a real drink, at a real bar. You’re probably dying for one of those.
But no. Terrill Lee Stanton climbs the stairs to his halfway home and disappears behind the door.
So what now?
Jim sits in his car for the longest time, and with every minute that ticks by, he feels more like a fool. What would his father think about this? He can almost—almost—hear the old man’s voice in his head. Go the hell home to your family. Don’t go picking fights for me.
And you know what? This is stupid. He should go home. The Kelly Anne Farrace murder is looking like it will come together sooner than later, so he should enjoy some quiet time with Claire and the kids before he’s caught up in something else. You want this motherfucker to keep you out here like a fool? He’s not going anywhere.
Jim’s hand is on the gearshift and he’s just about to put the sedan into reverse when…
The front door of the halfway house opens again.
And Terrill Lee Stanton steps outside, making a beeline for the El.
Jim hasn’t trailed anyone on foot for a while—it’s not exactly part of your daily duties as a homicide dick. But he was a beat cop long enough for it to all come back. Staying out of your target’s line of sight. Using reflections to track his movements without laying eyeballs on him (because targets can always, always feel the eyes). Using a piece of his clothing as a handy visual marker. For Terrill Lee Stanton, it’s the white tag of his Goodwill fleece, sticking up out of his collar. Hard to miss that, once you’ve decided to focus on it.
So Jim locks his car and follows his quarry up to the El tracks. Surprisingly, he’s not headed toward the Badlands (where he could score some drugs) or Center City beyond (where he could mug rich people). Instead, Terrill Lee Stanton chooses the eastbound platform, headed toward Northeast Philly.
It’s still rush hour, so it’s easy for Jim to stay in the background as he rides along with his quarry all the way to the Bridge Street Terminal, the end of the line. Terrill Lee Stanton could catch any number of buses, but he doesn’t. Instead he proceeds north on Frankford Avenue, walking along the edge of the Cedar Hill Cemetery. He crosses Cheltenham, then walks along the fringes of Wissinoming Park. Stanton didn’t hop a bus, which means his destination is somewhere nearby, but what? What’s up here?
The longer Terrill Lee Stanton marches up Frankford Avenue, the more worried Jim gets. Because eventually, they’re going to be pr
etty fucking close to his own house on Unruh Avenue.
(What if he knows you’ve been trailing him, Jimbo? What if somebody slipped him your home address, and he’s going to pay your family a little visit? Would Claire like that? Would Audrey?)
By the time Terrill Lee Stanton is crossing Harbison Avenue, Jim is all but convinced that this motherfucker is headed straight for Unruh Avenue—which is not too many blocks away. How the fuck did he get Jim’s home address? (George Wildey, Jr., got it; you have to assume everybody can get it.) Well, if this is the plan, then Terrill Lee here is in for a rude surprise when he walks up those steps and the next thing he sees is his own brains splattered over the white front door.
A block later—at Robbins Street—Jim is already fantasizing about reporting the incident to his superiors. I had every reason to believe, Deputy Commissioner, that Terrill Lee Stanton intended to inflict serious harm on my family…
But then Terrill Lee changes it up. Before he can cross the light at Robbins, he turns around and goes marching back up the block. Toward Jim. Right for Jim, as a matter of fact.
(He went back to the halfway house for the gun he’d stashed there. He led you here so he could shoot you on the street before laughing at you, then going up to Unruh Avenue to finish off your fucking family—every last one of them, the whole bloodline…)
Terrill Lee’s head is down, and stays down, as they approach each other. Jim saw no evidence of him packing heat before, but maybe it’s somewhere in that fleece jacket of his. Doesn’t matter. Jim’s right hand is wrapped around his own service revolver. If there’s going to be a shootout, Jim’s not going to stop firing until he’s sure this son of a bitch is dead and hurtling like a comet toward the flaming center of Hell.
Come on, look up. Let me see your eyes.
They’re ten feet apart.
Come on.
Five feet now.
Revolver Page 12
