Revolver

by Duane Swierczynski

  Outside, the early-May morning sun is high and hot in the sky. Audrey looks down at the memorial plaques. A day later, the caulk has completely dried. Someone’s already flicked a cigarette butt on it, and ashes spray out over Officer Wildey’s name.

  Audrey crouches down, picks up the butt, flicks it into the street. Goddamned savages in this town.

  “Ahhh,” Counter Guy says. “The service yesterday, I get it. That was for your grandfather?”

  Audrey nods solemnly.

  “Which one is he?”

  Audrey taps her boot on Stanisław Walczak’s name.

  “The Polish one.”

  “Walczak,” he says, blurring the cz into a long z.

  “Uh-uh. Pronounced wall-CHAK. Nobody ever says it right.”

  “Walczak,” he says again, getting it right.

  “There you go.”

  Pizza Counter Guy looks down at the fresh plaques for a while.

  “So what happened?”

  They’re back inside now. Audrey’s giving him the tour—as if she didn’t set foot in this place for the first time yesterday. But she’s been reading all morning and boning up on the essentials.

  “Here’s what I know. It happened around three in the afternoon. All those mirrors weren’t here back then. Just plain old wood paneling. Grandpop Stan and his partner were at the bar, talking, having beers, their backs to the side door behind us.”

  “Drinking on the job?”

  “They were supposed to be on picket detail.”

  “Wait—did you say this was back in sixty-five? By picket detail, do you mean the Girard College protests?”

  “Yeah. And if I had a crap detail like that, I think I’d go drinking, too.”

  “That wasn’t crap. That was historic.”

  “So is my thirst some nights. Anyway, stop interrupting me. You’re supposed to be my sounding board.”

  “Oh, am I?” Smile on his face now.

  But Pizza Counter Guy barely has the last syllable out before Audrey puts an index finger to his lips. She smiles sweetly, but her eyes say Shut the fuck up. Pizza Counter Guy purses his lips reflexively, which makes it look like he’s kissing her finger.

  “Yes, you are.”

  Audrey removes her finger. There’s an uncomfortable moment where they’re forced to acknowledge that yes, he just sort of kissed her finger. But then she moves on.

  “Anyway, there are only three witnesses. The bartender and two old drunks at a couple of tables in the back—I’m guessing right where your kitchen is.”

  Audrey turns and points to the door on the Seventeenth Street side. “The shooter enters here, pistol in his hand. Bartender sees him first, said ‘shit’ or something. Which got Grandpop’s attention.”

  Audrey points to the mirror behind the bar.

  “Now, remember—those mirrors weren’t there. So Grandpop had to turn around to see what was going on. So did his partner. I’m guessing this is the moment this dickbag saw that he was about to stick up a bar with two cops sitting about ten feet away.”

  “Were they in uniform?”

  “Two sources say yes, one doesn’t say. Either way, I’ve gotta think my grandpop tells the idiot he’s a cop. And at that point, the smart thing would have been to drop the gun and run, right? Not this asshole. He opens fire.”

  Audrey stands up, walks to the side door. She turns to Pizza Counter Guy, fingers on her right hand making a gun.

  “The shooter empties his gun into my grandpop, Wildey, and the bartender. Six bullets. Pshew. Pshew. Pshew.”

  She clears the distance between them, then drives her index and middle fingers into the flesh directly above Pizza Counter Guy’s left nipple.

  “Ow.”

  “First shot, right to the heart.”

  Her fingers hover in front of Pizza Counter Guy’s lower belly.

  “Second shot, to a few inches lower, in the gut.”

  She pokes. Hard. He cringes, a little self-conscious about the flab there.

  “So then Wildey pulls his gun and is lifting it to return fire when the killer hits him with the third bullet, right in the throat. Wildey squeezes off a shot…”

  Audrey walks back across the bar to the Seventeenth Street door, points to the wood frame.

  “…that misses the shooter’s head only by a few inches, according to the two drunks in the back.”

  Audrey slowly spins with her finger-gun, and now the other customers are really giving her worried looks.

  “Hey, it’s okay. Just telling my pal here about how my grandfather died.”

  Pizza Counter Guy doesn’t react at all, as if people are always coming in here saying that. Audrey likes his cool, calm eyes.

  “I would not lie about something that totally ruined my family.”

  Pizza Counter Guy nods like, Okay, okay.

  “So we’re up to what, four bullets? Grandpop was struck twice, according to the newspapers. But he still managed to draw his weapon and point it at the shooter. By then the shooter had locked on him again, and the best we can tell, they fired almost simultaneously, with the shooter beating him by a second.”

  Audrey leans in close, pointing her finger-gun again.

  “Grandpop was shot in the jaw. The shooter caught a slug in the arm before firing one last time, at Wildey’s chest. Shot to the heart. Then the shooter turned and stumbled out of the bar.”

  Audrey crouches down, touches the tile floor.

  “Right here. This is where he bled out and died. This same tile floor.”

  The floor has been swept and mopped and covered in dirt and beer and ice and whiskey and slush and rock salt and everything else you’d track in from either Fairmount or Seventeenth Street. There is no trace of her grandfather left; Audrey knows this. But the tiles seem haunted anyway. Her grandfather touched them in his worst and final moments.

  Pizza Counter Guy says, “They never caught the guy.”

  “They never caught the guy.”

  “That really sucks.”

  “My dad has a theory. He thinks it was a drug dealer named Terrill Lee Stanton. But officially, in the eyes of the law, nobody was arrested or even brought in for questioning.”

  “Terrill Lee Stanton still around?”

  “Nope. Died about twenty years ago, according to my mother.”

  Audrey and Pizza Counter Guy stand across from each other, soaking it all in. The customers drift back to their conversations now that the crazy white girl seems to have finished shooting up the place.

  “So…tomorrow morning, can you open early for me?”

  “You want me to get up early on a Saturday to open a place that I don’t even own just so you can tear apart our front counter to do some magical CSI stuff? You haven’t even asked my name.”

  “Pretty much it. And I know your name.”

  “You do?”

  “Sure I do. You’re Sexy Pizza Counter Guy.”

  That gets a big silly smile out of him.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  Audrey says, “I have seven days to solve this murder.”

  “You have a week to solve a fifty-year-old murder?”

  She explains that she’s a graduate student, studying forensic science. (It’s the only thing her dad would agree to bankroll.) Anyway, she’s five months late on her winter independent project. In what amounts to an academic Hail Mary pass, she wants to see if the evidence trail points to a new suspect. There have been a lot of forensic advances since 1965.

  “All due respect to your grandfather, but it sounds like this was just a robbery gone wrong. How can you possibly solve this?”

  “The magic of forensic science, my friend.”

  “Are you hoping to exonerate Terrill Lee Stanton? Or confirm he actually did it?”

  “I’m just trying to get my degree, man.”

  Pizza Counter Guy can’t help it—he breaks out into a wide grin. Which makes him look all the more handsome.

  “See?” Audrey says. “You’re so
fucking in.”

  After the pizza shop Audrey heads to the central branch of the Free Library up on the Parkway. They still have the same microfilm/newspaper room she hated visiting back in high school for class projects—it always felt like the reading room in a prison. Duh, there’s this thing called the Internet, people, she used to say. But now she has to admit: the Internet doesn’t have everything. So much of the past is tucked away on tiny strips of film.

  She spends all day and countless quarters (pilfered from a cup in Will’s place) traveling back in time, checking out May 1965.

  There were five Philadelphia newspapers back then and all of them ran pieces about the Walczak-Wildey murders. A lot of them goofed up the details about the shooting. The cops fought back, the cops were on their knees, there was a shootout, there were only execution-style shots fired, blah blah blah. The details are sketchy, and contradictory. Some claim there were witnesses; others report no one saw what happened.

  And none of them can seem to get her grandfather’s last name right. Come on, people. There are worse Polish names out there.

  Audrey knows she’s going to need more than clips.

  Last semester a professor of hers back in Houston passed out a New York Times Magazine essay about historical research by novelist Susan Cheever—daughter of the legendary novelist (and power-drinker!) John Cheever. She talks about four kinds of sources:

  Primary: original historical documents, such as police files, the murder book, death certificates, autopsy report, and so on. No idea how tough that would be to dig up in this case. Philly police records, especially going back fifty years, might be a little spotty. Maybe the Captain could help, but she’s not ready to make that painful and sure-to-be-awkward call quite yet.

  Secondary: the work of other writers and researchers. (The contradictory newspaper clips, for instance.) Kind of useless at this point, as Audrey is discovering.

  Tertiary: interviews with experts, other writers and researchers, or “people whose memories are useful.” Audrey loves that one. Hey there, hot stuff. That’s one hell of a useful memory you’ve got on you. But who was left who knew about May 1965? Grandma Rose and Audrey’s father. Other cops, she guesses, who aren’t dead or in the grip of dementia. We’re talking about guys in their eighties by now.

  Finally there’s the fourth kind, a more nebulous and haunting category.

  “It doesn’t have a fancy name,” Cheever wrote. “It is just going to the places where the story happened.”

  If Audrey is going to solve the murders of her grandfather and his partner, she’s going to need all four. She’s going to need to walk the streets they walked. And she’s going to have to interview people with useful memories. Who knew her grandfather and his partner back in the 1960s? And are their minds still intact?

  But most importantly, she’s going to have to tear apart that pizza joint to find out what really happened to them.

  Stan Punches

  September–October 1964

  “That’s his dick.”

  “Say what?”

  “Swear to God,” Wildey says, with the conviction of a man testifying under oath, “that guy on the corner is waving his dick around.”

  Stan tries to keep one eye on the road while using his other to look for this guy Wildey’s talking about. Somehow, Wildey sees everything. To Stan, North Philly is nothing but a chaotic blur of people doing questionable shit all the time. This is their sector. This is what he deals with every night.

  “You’re crazy,” Stan says. “Where?”

  Right there, on Broad Street, in front of the mammoth Divine Lorraine Hotel. Black folks give the white perv a wide berth as he struts like a mummer, baton in hand. Teenagers yelling and pointing at the stupid honky with his peeper out. Unbelievable.

  Stan pulls their big red machine to a halt but before the springs can finish rocking Wildey is up and out the door. They’ve been partners for exactly ten minutes and this is the job they catch. If Stan believed in omens, this would be a perfect one.

  “Hey, man, what’s going on?” Wildey says, looking around to make sure Weenie-Waggler here doesn’t have any friends nearby. Sometimes holdup crews will bait you. Or in this case, masturbate you.

  “Get away from me, you black pig!”

  Furious strokes now, like he’s trying to start a fire. His entire body quivers with pure rage.

  “Why don’t you put that thing away?”

  “Why don’t you suck on it for a while!”

  “Thanks, man, but I’ve already had supper.”

  Stan’s out of the car by this point, nervously scoping the scene. He hates uptown. Back before the war, the Lorraine Hotel used to be a fancy joint. But in 1948 it was sold to Father Divine and his Universal Peace Mission Movement. From what Stan understands, anybody could stay here—whites, blacks, men, women, whoever. A fully integrated hotel. You just couldn’t drink, smoke, screw, or curse. And you had to dress modestly.

  Maybe that’s why they kicked this guy out.

  “You don’t want to say things like that, man,” Wildey tells the guy. “Not in front of my partner.”

  “Fuck your partner!” the guy screams, stroking his cock and pointing it in Stan’s general direction. Almost as if he’s being literal.

  Stan pulls his baton, thinking, Yeah, well, mine’s bigger. One tap on the ol’ wacek and this will be over.

  “Hold on, hold on,” Wildey says, as if reading his mind. He looks over at Stan, motions with his hand. Easy. “There’s no need for that, Father.”

  Father? Did his new partner just call him Father? How old does he think he is, anyway?

  Wildey turns his attention back to the perv.

  “I’m telling you, man, you shouldn’t curse around my partner. He’s new on the force.”

  Weenie-Waggler is confused. He doesn’t cease his stroking, but it most definitely slows down a little.

  “And you know what he did before joining the force? He was an ordained minister. Isn’t that right, Father Walczak?”

  Stan blinks. Has Wildey lost his mind along with this guy? What the hell is he talking about, ordained minister?

  But as Weenie-Waggler’s face drops and goes ashen, Stan gets it.

  “You really should put that away, my son,” Stan says in a low, calm tone.

  “Oh god, I’m sorry, Father! I didn’t know, I didn’t know,” Weenie-Waggler stammers as he tries to tuck his cock back into his trousers. It’s still too stiff to go in. All that blood refuses to dissipate, despite the presence of a man of the cloth.

  “Father, you’ve gotta help me.”

  Stan looks at Wildey. Wildey nods at Stan’s baton.

  “Help him out.”

  Stan sighs, then raises the baton over the perv’s head.

  “Yeah, go in peace to love and serve the Lord.”

  The guy drops to his knees, and finally his fervor appears to flag.

  As they’re pulling away, Stan tells his partner, “Nice one.” Wildey belly-laughs. “We ever in a tight spot with a black guy, you do the same for me, okay?”

  This is the kind of shit they deal with at first.

  And when Stan gets home the next morning and tells Jimmy the story about the guy with his wacek out, Rosie gets mad. He can’t win.

  Their bailiwick is the Jungle. Last-out shift, 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.

  Stan Walczak knows this is his punishment, and he’s just going to have to deal with it. He should have expected that his low-key tour of Whitetown couldn’t go on forever. Hauling in boozehounds and busting up small-time numbers rackets is the cushiest assignment you can get in Philadelphia, outside of the Far Northeast or Chestnut Hill. Stan and Taney had their routine down, no surprises, no hassles. They took the expected payoffs—not too much, not too little.

  Now Stan has to learn everything all over again in a neighborhood that is actively trying to burn itself down. How are you supposed to help people like that?

  They sell it to him as a promotion, of course. Sinc
e Stan and Wildey showed “extreme bravery” in pursuit of the rioters who dumped a flaming couch on top of poor Billy Taney, they were named part of a special “riot area detail,” which is essentially the 420 worst blocks in North Philly. If there were any embers of the riot left, the detail was to stomp ’em out immediately. There would be zero tolerance for shit from now on.

  The reaction at home to his “promotion” is mixed. Jimmy thinks the new assignment is exciting—but then again, he labors under the delusion that his father’s some kind of cop like on Dragnet. The kid’s devoured everything he could about the riots and asked Stan endless questions. Jimmy thinks his cop dad is famous, single-handedly stopping the looting and burning before it engulfed the entire city. He also likes the fact that his dad now wears a leather jacket to work, because technically the riot squad is a part of the highway patrol.

  Rosie, on the other hand, is mortified. She grew up in a South Philly neighborhood that butted up against a black neighborhood, and her family would regale Stan with stories of how awful it was with all those moolies around. Now Rosie listens to her suburban cousins who think black people are going to bring about the end of the world. Get out now, they say. Move to Montgomery County, they say.

  “We can move, Stanisław.”

  “Where, Rosie?” he asks, full well knowing the answer.

  “Up in Telford,” she says. “We can have a real backyard for Jimmy. And be closer to my sisters.”

  “What the hell would I do up in Telford? And how would we afford it?”

  She hugs him around his chest. He feels her large, heavy breasts press into his stomach. This is calculated, but he doesn’t mind.

  And to be honest, Stan concedes she has a point. He wonders how much longer he can go on. Stan’s been on the force since ’51, and it’s another seven years until he can think about retirement. Can he survive that long without his new murzyn partner getting him killed?

  This is what he wonders about every morning in September when he drags his exhausted body home just in time for breakfast and to see Jimmy for a few minutes before he walks over to St. Bart’s.