Revolver

by Duane Swierczynski

  Sleep doesn’t come easy. But when it does, it’s time to wake up and shower and pull on the shirt and the Sam Browne belt and the shoes and go out and do it all over again.

  “We gonna catch another game, Pop?”

  “I don’t know, Jimmy.”

  Doesn’t know if he wants to bother.

  On top of everything else, the Phils have completely fallen apart, as if the riot jinxed things. Sometimes Stan thinks he fell asleep in late August and woke up in an alternate universe. And in this version of Philadelphia, nothing is allowed to go right.

  One night they’re driving their big red machine by Twenty-Third and Lehigh, near Connie Mack. George tells Stan to stop, look at that. Stan hits the brakes, but before he can look, Wildey’s out of the car and running across the street to where three white guys are beating an elderly Negro.

  Stan scrambles out of the car to follow. Wildey yells for them to stop. Before Wildey can reach them, however, all three muggers turn their attention back to Wildey.

  Now, Wildey expected the sight of a squad car and a couple of badges to stop these assholes from putting the beatdown on an old man.

  These assholes, however, don’t seem to care about badges. They do the math. They like their odds. One of them shouts,

  “Kick his black ass!”

  As Stan tries to clear the distance between them, he can see his new partner’s split-second decision-making. Wildey’s right hand, briefly reaching for the gun strapped to his hip. But what’s he going to do—shoot one? These guys are jacked up on rage. If a badge won’t stop them, the sight of a gun won’t do it, either. And you never draw unless you’re prepared to put them all down. Does he really want to kill three assholes?

  Instead Wildey reaches for his baton.

  Stan, still breathing heavy and running, reaches for his, too.

  Wildey’s stick has barely cleared leather when one of the punks launches a lucky shot across the side of his head. He staggers for a second before another tackles him, knocking him to the ground. Now comes the part where they’ll try to kick him unconscious.

  But they’ve forgotten about his partner.

  Stan whips his stick around and cracks the nearest punk across his shoulders. That drops him. He whimpers like a whipped dog. A shot across the sternum brings the second mugger to his knees. Guy looks around for the car that just hit him. The third thinks Stan is distracted and serves up a haymaker that would knock most men off their feet. But Stan is not most men. He may not be fast, he may not be smart, he may be a terrible piano player, but he has one skill that sets him apart from the rest of the force: he’s a tough-ass Pole who can take a punch. And he can give just as good as he gets.

  So when Stan absorbs the blow, he straightens back up and releases the same amount of kinetic energy at his attacker, concentrated in his fist, which obliterates the cartilage in the mugger’s nose with a loud and messy pop.

  Mugger snuffs blood, staggers backward, drops.

  Stan attends to his fallen partner, helps him to his feet.

  “You’re pretty slow, partner,” Wildey says, “but you one strong Polack.”

  “And you’ve got a glass jaw.”

  Wildey taps his chin, blood running down his lips. “Still intact. Heh heh heh.”

  “Come on, let’s bring these schnudaks in.”

  “What’s schnudak mean?”

  “Probably what you think it means,” Stan tells him.

  There’s downtime, of course. Any cop will tell you—a lot of the time you’re just sitting around waiting for shit to blow up. Even the Jungle has its long stretches of nothing, when the hot night seems to just broil and residents are too exhausted to fight, fuck, or steal.

  So they are compelled to talk. Or rather, Wildey is compelled to talk, with Stan trying to figure out the magic answer that will shut him up for just a few minutes. Three weeks in and he’s still not adjusted to the last-out shift. Instead of sleeping next to Rosie, arm curled around her, he’s shacked up with this guy.

  Who won’t shut up, even while they’re eating their lunch at 3 a.m.

  “What is that?” Wildey asks, pointing at Stan’s sandwich.

  “Liverwurst.”

  “Shit looks like cat food, man. Doesn’t smell much better, either.”

  What is Stan supposed to say to that? Hey, do you want a bite? Stan continues eating. Wildey, meanwhile, is chowing down on two sloppy peanut butter and jelly sandwiches he most likely made himself.

  “Been asking around,” Wildey says. “Didn’t know you worked in the Wild West.”

  The Wild West, or the Midway, or whatever the nickname is these days, meant the club district in midtown. Jazz clubs, strip joints, betting parlors, all in a tight little pocket. Celebrity magnets like Frankie Bradley’s, backroom wheeler-dealer joints like Lew Tendler’s, and a dozen other sin dens.

  “Yeah, for a while,” Stan says.

  He spent his best years in the Midway district and it almost ruined him and his marriage. He doesn’t like to think about it much. The transfer to Whitetown was a godsend. He thought life had finally calmed down…until this.

  “What about you? Where were you before this?”

  Wildey chuckles. “Heh heh. Nowhere fun, that’s for sure. I think they bounced me around to whatever out-of-the-way district needed a black guy.”

  Stan nods his head like he understands, but of course he doesn’t. Was Wildey exiled? Or just rootless?

  “Glad we ended up here, though,” Wildey says.

  “You’re glad? How the hell are you glad about this?”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “I mean this is the worst kind of punishment I can imagine. This is pretty much the last place I wanna be.”

  Wildey throws his hands up as if directing traffic. “Wait a minute. You think we’re being punished? I asked for you, man. You and me, in the Double-Deuce. A plum assignment. A few weeks ago you were walking the beat in Kensington. Now you’re in a leather jacket and a car!”

  “You got us a plum assignment in the middle of Hell!”

  “Don’t you want to catch the guys who tried to drop a couch on us?”

  Stan is flabbergasted. This is all about the murzyns with the couch. He can’t believe it. Why would Wildey do this to him?

  “Look,” Wildey says. “I’m seeing this as a way to a promotion. Everybody’s paying attention to the Twenty-Second. We hustle out here, we can have our picks of spots.”

  But Stan is not looking for a promotion. He was fine where he was.

  The trick to being a cop, a veteran detective once told him, is to go home after every shift.

  That old-timer was old Rod Wiethop, a member of Smedley Butler’s famed soup-and-fish squad, raiding ballrooms during Prohibition. Stan thought Wiethop was pulling his leg—the equivalent of telling a rook to not get shot—but as time went on, he saw the simple wisdom in it. Coming home every night, or morning, or whenever your shift ends, makes all the difference. You remember why you’re working so hard. You avoid stupid mistakes or losing yourself to the job, as Stan once did.

  So every morning, Stan goes home. Some of the other guys in the Twenty-Two go out for beers at a cop bar near the Boulevard and Erie, but not Stan, who prefers to do his drinking at home. And Wildey, who says he rarely touches the stuff, heads home to Germantown. They wave goodbye and go off to opposite corners of the city.

  By the time Stan reaches Bridge Street, Rosie has already been up for hours—she doesn’t sleep much—and Jimmy is scrambling to get ready for school. Stan usually pours himself a tomato and clam juice and Rosie pretends not to see him dump some Smirnoff into the glass. The drink helps him sleep. Sometimes. He tries to get Rosie to join him, joking about the house being empty and all. She pretends to be cross with him, calling him a dirty old man, but just lets him sleep. For which Stan is grateful, because he’s usually exhausted. He’ll never get used to last-out shift.

  “Wildey wants us all to go out sometime,” Stan tells Rosie
one night as she prepares supper. Jimmy works on his math problems at the kitchen table.

  “Who’s that?”

  “You know, Rosie. George Wildey. My partner?”

  Rosie knows exactly who he’s talking about.

  “Anyway, he wants us to come over some night.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Germantown. He also keeps talking about this club over near Broad and Erie, supposed to be good music.”

  “Well, we’ll see about that.”

  “Is he talking about the Cadillac Club?” Jimmy asks.

  Stan shoots his boy the side-eye. “How do you know about the Cadillac Club?”

  “Supposed to be great music,” Jimmy says, ducking the question. “You should definitely go.”

  Rosie dishes some hot sausage and peppers onto Stan’s plate. “Well, we’ll see about that,” she says.

  That last week of September the city seems to lose its goddamned mind. The relative lull after the storm of the riots has faded away. The Phils are done, their winning summer tarnished by an embarrassing collapse over the past few weeks. THE GREAT PHOLD, one newspaper says. And all at once, Philadelphia remembers it wants to destroy itself. Break-ins. Muggings. Assaults. Armed robberies.

  And in the Jungle, lots of Negroes killing Negroes.

  The homicide dicks, with their wrinkled suits and potbellies, have a code name for it—NHI.

  No Humans Involved.

  Stan and Wildey don’t investigate any of them, of course. But as members of the mobile squad, they’re often the first responders that fall.

  “Goddammit,” Wildey says each time they roll up on another body.

  Their job is to secure the scene, grab any witnesses, and make them stay put until the homicide dicks arrive. Usually, these homicide guys are the bottom of the barrel—drunks, career burnouts, incompetents. Why throw good men at blacks killing blacks up here?

  They catch their first dead body on the first day of October.

  Just some nappy-haired kid, barely out of his teens, one bullet in the side of his head and another through his skinny guts. It’s a messy kill, right outside a crumbling pool hall with a tilting roof near Broad Street. Already a crowd has gathered.

  Bad news travels through the Jungle like telepathy. Seems like seconds after someone is shot, everybody within a three-block radius is out of their rowhomes and making their way to the scene to see for themselves. The police never have to alert next of kin; the Jungle does it for them.

  A woman, presumably the mother, touches the side of the pool hall repeatedly, like she needs to make sure it’s real, as she moves up the sidewalk toward the vic. Then she wails and falls to her knees next to the body. Stan and Wildey catch her before she can throw herself on the corpse.

  “We’re gonna take care of him, honey,” Wildey coos. “I promise, we’ll take care of him.”

  But she’s not calmed. She sees big Stan there, looming over the body, and she starts screaming at him, calling him a blue-eyed devil. As if Stan pulled the trigger on this poor kid.

  “Hey, it’s all right,” Stan says, trying his best to imitate Wildey’s soothing voice. But it comes out all wrong and infuriates the woman all the more. She doesn’t want some honky bastard telling her everything is going to be all right. What on God’s holy earth could be all right about this?

  Wildey gives him a look and holds up a hand, like Let me handle this.

  Eventually the detectives show up—white guys, of course. Potential witnesses scatter. The dicks aren’t too concerned; they don’t see any great mystery to be solved here. Wildey passes along what the mother told him, but they listen with only half an ear. Thanks, buddy.

  Back in the car, Stan is still sulking.

  “Hey, you all right?” Wildey asks.

  “I’ve never done anything to these people.”

  “It’s not you. It’s the uniform. They hate me just as much.”

  “Kind of doubt that.”

  “You know what? You’re absolutely right. They hate me even more. I’m a traitor. A brother who put on a badge and is fighting for the other team.”

  Stan says nothing.

  “Look, man,” George says, “you talk to anybody in the Jungle. I’m talkin’ anybody, from a street tough to a minister to a gospel singer to a smiling grandma sitting on her front stoop. They’ve all got one thing in common.”

  “What’s that?”

  “At some point—and I guarantee this to be one hundred percent true—some cop has treated them like shit.”

  “Come on, everybody’s been hassled by the police at some point.”

  “Uh-uh. I’m not talking about hassling somebody because they ran a light. I’m talking about cops fucking with them just because of the color of their skin. Man, it happens to me. So you’ve got to cut them a break, give ’em time. There’s good people in this neighborhood. We just have to earn their trust.”

  Stan doesn’t know what to say to that. He slips and mutters that he “never wanted to be assigned to this goddamn murzyn neighborhood.”

  “What was that?” Wildey asks. “You callin’ them Muslims?”

  “No, forget it.”

  “What are you sayin’, then? Come on, man, it’s a word I’ve never heard before. What was that, mooshin?”

  “Murzyn.”

  “That’s what I thought you said. Mooshin. That Polish?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s it mean?”

  “I think you probably know what it means.”

  Wildey blinks as if he’s been slapped. “I’m really hoping that’s not true.”

  Stan sighs. “It’s Polish for black, somebody with a dark tan. That’s it.”

  “Huh. So do you call me a mooshin?”

  “No, I call you a pain in the goddamned ass, that’s what I call you.”

  For a long couple of seconds Stan is not sure how it’s going to go. Will his new partner take a swing at him?

  Instead he belly-laughs.

  “That’s more like it,” Wildey says. “Finally the truth comes out. My partner here thinks I’m a goddamned pain in the ass! Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  Stan forces a smile.

  “You a goddamned pain in the ass, too, you know,” Wildey says.

  Stan doesn’t want to tell him that among Poles, murzyn has another connotation. Like slave—someone who toils for another. Stan’s father used to complain about all the murzyns stealing good jobs, that they should go back down to the South where they belong. He’s embarrassed to say that he heard it growing up so much, it just became part of his language. They were murzyns, weren’t they? It’d be like retraining yourself to call an apple something else. But he also knows it’s wrong, and he needs to cut this shit out. Especially around Wildey.

  By late October they’ve already got a reputation as the toughest cop duo in the Jungle. Relentless, tough, fair. Somehow word reaches the Bulletin and they send one of their best reporters, Joe Daughen, to interview them. He writes a good, tough, fair piece.

  Wildey is especially happy that they sent Daughen. Apparently he’s known in Negro circles for his fair reporting and straight shooting. A rare quality in white reporters, or so Wildey says.

  Stan, for his part, doesn’t like how the photograph turned out. His head looks three sizes too big, and he’s squinting nervously, making him look like he has two blackened eyes. All the attention, too, worries him.

  “This could backfire on us, you know,” Stan says the night the story appears, during their 3 a.m. lunch break. Stan, with his liverwurst on white. Wildey, with his peanut butter and jelly on wheat with the crusts cut off. Like he’s still in grade school.

  “How’s that, Hondo?” Wildey asks.

  “We become so well known, all the damn crooks are gonna see us coming.”

  “No,” Wildey says. “They’re gonna fear us. Which is the point. Now c’mon and finish your cat food sandwich. I’m not going to let you ruin one of the best days of my life. You kn
ow who called me after the papers hit the racks this afternoon? Carla.”

  Carla is Wildey’s on-again, off-again ex. Mother of his boy, George Junior.

  “She said I was looking all handsome and shit.”

  Jimmy is also over the moon about the article. He uses his allowance to buy a dozen copies from the newsstand at Bridge and Pratt. (The corner store had already sold out.) He sacrifices one to clip the article so that he can Scotch-tape it to the paneling in his bedroom, joining his rock band posters. And each night as he does his homework, Jimmy has Dylan and Jagger and Lennon and Walczak and Wildey looking down on him. For the first time, Jimmy tells his pop:

  “When I grow up, I think I want to be a cop.”

  Jim Investigates

  November 3, 1995

  Surprise, surprise, Jim is having a hard time focusing this morning. Could it be the fact that he was up drinking and brooding until at least three, maybe even four in the morning? He doesn’t remember going to bed.

  But now he and Aisha are standing around in the chilly medical examiner’s office, he’s got a five-alarm hangover, and the coroner is telling them he found two different types of semen inside Kelly Anne Farrace: one type in the vaginal cavity, the other in the rectum.

  “Now it’s just a matter of figuring out who came first,” he says, lifting an eyebrow, waiting for a reaction.

  “Jesus, Lew,” Jim says wearily when the fog clears and he finally gets it.

  Aisha shakes her head, disgusted.

  “What?” says the coroner. “Homicide cops don’t make jokes anymore?”

  “You’re not a parent, are you, Lew?” Jim says.

  Aisha forces the conversation back to the subject at hand. “Any signs of trauma?”

  “None that I can see. I think this was consensual.”

  “How long before she died, Baxter?”

  The coroner rubs his stubbly chin and considers this. “I’d have to say up to a day before.”

  So Kelly Anne was sleeping with somebody. Or a couple of somebodies. One of whom liked it traditional, Jim thinks, and one of whom liked it Greek.