Revolver

by Duane Swierczynski

  Jim stares at her.

  “Especially considering that parolee is now dead?”

  Baby Blue

  May 14, 2015

  The funeral dinner at Staś’s house comes to its slow, awkward end. Nobody wants to be here, but nobody seems to be in a hurry to separate, either.

  Cary is absolutely and embarrassingly shitfaced. Jean makes excuses as she tries to pry him away from the small table serving as the bar, which excuses do nothing to disguise that he’s calling her a harpy and a controlling cunt. The Captain sits in the corner, either lost in his own reveries or astral-projecting his body to another place. Will seems all twitchy about being away from his expensive toys in his downtown lair, so Claire says her goodbyes and heads back to Center City.

  Which means it’s Audrey’s turn to go.

  She asks Barry if he minds giving her and her grandma Rose a ride back to her place, explaining that she wants to stay with her grandmother for a while, make sure she’s okay. Barry’s cool with that—which half-stuns Audrey. Usually when a guy puts up with an all-day family event he’s looking for a little reward for his labors. Barry, though, just rolls with it. Kind smile on his face, too.

  Good on you, Captain Save-a-Ho.

  The ride from Jenkintown doesn’t take very long. Just down Route 73 to the Boulevard to Harbison, then right on Torresdale and up one block to Bridge. Grandma Rose sits in the back, nervously, peering over Barry’s shoulder to make sure he’s going the right way. Audrey chokes down a couple of Driving Miss Daisy jokes. (Again, not the time, not the place.) Barry pulls to the side while Audrey helps Rose out of the car and across the street. Audrey runs back to kiss Barry on the cheek, tells him she’ll call later.

  “Wow, a kiss,” Barry says. “You’d better watch out. You’re getting personal.”

  “Kiss my ass,” she says with a sly smile.

  Back inside, Audrey helps Grandma settle on the couch. She’s not grief-stricken. She’s not trembling anymore. She just seems weary. Audrey can understand. It’s been an exhausting day.

  “You okay, Grandma?”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine.”

  Audrey excuses herself to go pee—for real this time. But she’s a little spooked when she pauses halfway up the staircase to glance at the framed portraits on the wall. Grandpop Stan. Her father. Staś. Two down, one to go. If you’re a policeman on this wall and your name happens to be some derivative of Stanisław, well then, you’re shit out of luck.

  Only, Staś wouldn’t kill himself. She knows this. Bethanne knows it, too. If someone killed him…who? And why? And who were those strangers at the funeral? Once she’s back downstairs, Audrey sits down next to the only source she has left. Her grandmother—the only person she knows with useful memories.

  “Grandma, do you remember the lady Dad was talking to after the funeral?”

  “Who, sweetie?”

  “Tall, dark-haired cougar, Christian Louboutin pumps, about my mom’s age. Do you know who she is?”

  “Oh, you should talk to your father.”

  “Well, I tried, Grandma, and he’s not exactly gushing with information. So I’m asking you.”

  Grandma Rose sighs. She looks at Audrey to see if there’s any chance. “She’s your father’s cousin.”

  “How come I’ve never seen her before?”

  “No, no. On his father’s side.”

  Now, Audrey is no genealogy expert, but for her father to have a cousin, Grandpop Stan would have needed a sibling. And that would be impossible, because Grandpop Stan was an orphan. No siblings, an immigrant mom who died giving birth to him, and an alcoholic father who died eight years later.

  Grandma Rose catches Audrey staring off into space, trying to do the ancestral math.

  She laughs. “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers, kid.”

  Then she rises, touches her thighs as if steadying herself, then walks to the stairs. “I’ve got something to show you. Wait here.”

  After the first five minutes, Audrey thinks maybe Grandma went upstairs to use the bathroom. You know, with a book. After five minutes more, Audrey begins to suspect that Grandma forgot whatever it was she went upstairs to fetch, then lay down and fell asleep. And by the quarter-hour mark, Audrey begins to fear the worst. That the strain of burying her firstborn grandson was too much for her big Italian heart.

  But no, here she comes back down the stairs, carrying a scrapbook Audrey’s never seen before.

  “Your grandfather would have a fit if he knew I kept this,” Grandma says. “It’s the only picture I have of the two of them.”

  Audrey leans over her grandma’s shoulder as she flips through the pages. The old cellophane crackles with each turn. At first, Audrey can’t parse what the hell she’s looking at. Yellowed newspaper advertisements, black-and-white burlesque photos. Then she stops on a raven-haired dancer with a bosom like twin torpedoes.

  “Can you believe that?”

  Those eyes. That smile.

  Holy crap.

  “That’s not…that’s not you, is it?”

  “Time’s a bitch, isn’t it?”

  “And you give me shit about my tattoos?” Audrey asks.

  “Tattoos are hideous. Men don’t want to see tattoos. They want to see your skin.”

  “So wait wait. You were a stripper?”

  Grandma recoils as if she’s been slapped. “Audrey! I was what they call an exotic dancer. No one saw anything else except your grandfather.”

  “Where the hell is this? Looks pretty swank, Grandma.”

  “Midtown. That’s where all the hot clubs were after the war.”

  Audrey reaches over and flips back a page or two to look at the addresses on the clippings. Yeah, sure enough—Twelfth Street, Thirteenth Street, Spruce, Pine, Camac, the heart of what is now called the Gayborhood. Pretty much right where Will and Claire chose to shack up. She wishes Staś were alive right now for many reasons, but mostly so she could tell him that just a few short blocks away from McGillin’s, Grandma Rose used to shake her moneymaker.

  “Jesus.”

  “And here’s what I wanted to show you.”

  A five-by-seven black-and-white, showing a bar. Classy joint, from the looks of it. Loads of liquor along the mirrored bar. Brass foot rail. Girls in fancy-ass vintage dresses (though, duh, Audrey thinks, they weren’t vintage back then) and swells in suits.

  “What year was this?”

  “Nineteen fifty-one,” Grandma says as she taps one of the guys in the suits. “There’s your grandfather.”

  Hello, Stan Walczak, you suave son of a gun you.

  She taps another swell.

  “And that’s James. His brother. You should ask him what happened to your grandfather.”

  Walk the Line

  May 1, 1965

  On the first of May Stan Walczak and George Wildey find themselves back where they started—the scene of a riot waiting to happen.

  “Yeah, let’s go to the top brass, let’s report it,” Stan mocks. “Wonderful idea.”

  “Hey,” George says, “at least they let us keep the leather jackets.”

  Crazy thing is, their meeting with the chief inspector two weeks ago seemed like an unqualified success. The CI listened to their stories, with George taking the lead and Stan chiming in with corroborating observations. There seemed to be a team of white heroin pushers selling huge amounts all over North Philadelphia. Worse still, this team seemed to have access to police files. They knew where to make the deals without worry about police involvement. If they weren’t rogue cops themselves, then they appeared to have help from someone within the department.

  The CI was by turns horrified and intrigued. Stan and George were especially pleased when he assured the officers that he’d look into this personally.

  A week later they were bumped from the special post-riot squad and rotated back into street patrol, no explanation given. “Orders from on high.” Either there was a conspiracy, or they’d breached some kind of
departmental etiquette and needed to be taught a lesson.

  The last day of April they receive new orders: report to Girard College at 4 a.m. the very next morning—a Saturday. Police informants claim that Cecil B. Moore plans to lead a gang of protestors over the ten-foot wall that rings the college, so Commissioner Leary dispatches one thousand cops to guard every inch of that wall. Undeterred, Moore changes his mind and leads a roving band of picketers to march nonstop along the wall, singing “We Shall Overcome.”

  Standing around in the hot sun in his leather jacket, Stan sees that the police outnumber the protestors pretty much twenty to one. “This is a load of shit,” he tells Wildey, who has to agree with him. Nothing but cops, spread out around the campus perimeter wall. Moore, a former marine with a fondness for cigars and silk suits, keeps the protestors in lockstep like a military unit. Nobody on either side is gonna step out of line, not in front of the TV cameras or newspaper guys, anyway. Wildey, meanwhile, keeps an eye out for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who’s in Philadelphia for the next few days. Maybe he’ll stop by the wall. “Would be pretty cool to see him.”

  Day two, Sunday, is more of the same. Endless marching, singing, chanting. Wildey hears that at night, when the reporters go home, cops will chant back in response to “We Shall Overcome”—“oh no you fucking won’t”—and smack their batons on the metal barricades in front of the main campus gates. There’s no sign of Dr. King, much to Wildey’s disappointment.

  Day three, Monday, still no Dr. King. Stan’s feet are killing him, an ache that seems to shoot up his legs and spine. What makes the pain worse is that all this standing around seems to be for nothing. And just when Stan thought he was finally adjusting to the last-out shift, here he is working days. When he comes home at night, he’s too tired to play with Jimmy or talk to Rose for long. He forces down supper, tries to sleep, can’t, has a few beers, tries again to sleep, can’t, and before long it’s time to report back to work.

  Day four is more of the same. Stan begs for a day off—but request denied. Moore’s marchers continue their endless loops around the campus. Stan begins to think he’s going to spend the rest of his career guarding this stupid wall. The cops and the protestors are locked into an angry stalemate. Nobody can leave until the protestors go home, and the protestors won’t go home until Girard College opens its gates to black kids.

  Day six, though, Wildey surprises him. “I’ve been doing some digging this week and I think I’ve hit the mother lode.”

  “What are you talking about? Digging what?”

  “I’ve been doing some investigating on my own and I think I’ve got another source who’ll talk to us.”

  Stan’s about to ask him source for what when he realizes that Jesus Christ, Wildey’s still after the Jungle Wolves.

  “We’re gonna meet him tomorrow—he’s over at Eastern State.”

  “Your source is a con? And we’re supposed to just trust him?”

  “We can at least hear him out?”

  “When are we supposed to do this?”

  “Noon. Our badges will get us access. I’ve already called the prison.”

  “We’ll be here tomorrow.”

  “No we won’t,” Wildey says with a grin. “Because we’ll be playing hooky.”

  That night Rosie makes gołąbki, stuffed cabbage rolls in red sauce, one of Stan’s favorite meals and one that Jimmy loathes. The name refers to a Polish word for pigeon, which to Jimmy’s mind makes it all the more disgusting. He sticks to the side dish of mashed potatoes and only pretends to eat the gołąbki by cutting open the cabbage and chopping into the ground beef and rice mixture a little. He asks to be excused, which is fine with Stan because he wants to talk to Rosie alone.

  “I’m taking off work tomorrow,” Stan says. “But I’m still going to work. George and I have to check on something.”

  He’s told her nothing about chasing white drug dealers and murderers through the Jungle. He’s never brought his work home before, and he’s not going to start now. She’s made it clear that all she wants is for him to come home safe from his shift; the details don’t matter. But he’s got to tell her something, since he’ll be leaving the house in his civilian clothes.

  “Check on what?” Rosie asks.

  Stan doesn’t want to lie to her, either. The one time he did almost ended them ten years ago, and he doesn’t want to be in that position ever again.

  “We’ve got a snitch who might be able to tell us about a bunch of crimes we’re trying to solve.”

  Rosie nods, cuts some cabbage with the flat of her fork. “Why do you have to take off work to talk to this man?”

  “He’s over at Eastern State Penitentiary. We want to look like we’re just old friends visiting so the other prisoners don’t assume he’s a rat. You understand?”

  She does, and they finish their meal without another word. Stan drains the rest of his beer, pitches the empty can into the garbage, then plucks another one from the fridge and takes it to his recliner, where his Evening Bulletin is waiting. Upstairs, Jimmy picks at his guitar strings, the same riff over and over again. Ordinarily Stan would yell up and tell him to close his goddamned door, but he’s too tired to get into it right now. He sips his beer, leans back and tells himself he’s just going to close his eyes for a minute.

  Choke Down the Rage

  November 6, 1995

  Jim doesn’t go home until very late Sunday night. He just drives, aimlessly, blindly, only returning at dawn to shower and change his clothes before heading back to the Roundhouse. Claire says nothing, not wanting to start a fight. He’s grateful. On his way out Audrey runs up to him and clamps her entire body onto his lower leg like a deadweight, begging him not to go to work today. “I have to, sweetie,” he says. “Daddy has to go.”

  Aisha tells him he looks like shit. Jim thanks her for that observation. They go through the timeline again, and the list of possible boyfriends, and she brings up the JDH initials again and Jim stares at her and says he has nothing. Then they go back through it again and Aisha says this isn’t going anywhere—maybe it’s those two knuckleheads after all. Jim says yeah, maybe. Let’s press ’em, see what we got.

  And with those words, Jim knows that this is the beginning of the end.

  Later that day word leaks to the media that the police have two “persons of interest” in custody and that they’re on the verge of confessing.

  This is not true. The deliverymen maintain their innocence. Aisha pushes harder, even when the DNA comes back and it’s not a match.

  Jim says nothing.

  He tries to convince himself he’s doing nothing wrong. Kelly Anne was a fact-checker. Let’s examine the facts. Does he know for a fact that John DeHaven raped and murdered Kelly Anne Farrace, used her own keys to break into her apartment, changed her into jogging clothes, then dumped her body in a stairwell on Pine Street? Maybe if he had a forensic trial establishing all this. But he doesn’t. So there’s no way to be sure. Because John DeHaven is not a person of interest.

  In this city, killers go free all the time.

  Just look at Terrill Lee Stanton.

  That evening Jim drives over to 2046 Bridge Street and tells his mother they have to talk. She offers him some leftovers, coffee, tea, maybe some sweets—but Jim doesn’t want any of that right now. He just wants the truth.

  “Yes, your father had a brother,” she says quietly.

  “Sonny Kaminski.”

  His mother nods.

  “Jesus Christ, Ma, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Your father didn’t want anyone to know. He never even told me. I only found out because Sonny told me after your father died.”

  Now Jim remembers. Of course. He was there at his father’s funeral. Lots of guys in suits were there, paying their respects to Pop, but until this moment he didn’t remember that “Sonny Jim” Kaminski was one of them, putting his hands on Jim’s shoulders, squeezing them, almost massaging them, telling him everything was going to be o
kay, which of course Jim knew was a lie.

  “You’re named after him, you know. Your father didn’t want anything to do with his old family but he couldn’t resist.”

  The old family—the Kaminskis, his mother explains. Stan ran away from home when he was just a boy, leaving his younger brother behind. He was always torn up about that, but how could he bring his brother along? Stan was just a kid himself; staying alive on the streets would be difficult enough. He changed his last name to the name of a lodger they once had: Walczak. He always said he became a cop because his father was a bad man and he wanted to make up for it.

  Beyond that, he never liked to talk about the job much. Being a policeman just became a way to make ends meet.

  “Your father didn’t want you to know,” Rose says. “I always hoped that when you got older, he would change his mind. But then he—”

  “I have an uncle,” Jim says. “I have an entire family I didn’t know about.”

  Something occurs to his mother. “How did you find out? Who told you?”

  Jim says, “I was working on a case with his daughter.”

  Fight the Future

  May 15, 2015

  As Audrey walks down Front Street she rehearses the words in her head, but there’s no way it doesn’t sound funny.

  Hi, uh, Mr. Kaminski, it looks like I’m your great-niece and I think you might know who killed my grandfather and his partner back in 1965.

  Sonny Jim Kaminski lives on Kenilworth, just two blocks below South Street. It’s a surprisingly beautiful block just beyond the edge of downtown. Back in the day—“the day” being the summer of 2005 or so—Audrey and her asshole friends in high school used to troll South Street and its tattoo and piercing parlors, its bars, its sex shops. Everyone told them South Street was over, but fuck you, man. It’s over for you because you’re old.