By the time they leave, it’s close to dinnertime. They stop at a pub inside Thirtieth Street Station. The Captain orders himself a Caesar salad and a beer, buys his daughter a cheeseburger deluxe and a beer. He refuses to spring for a Bloody. She pouts a little. He ignores her.
They watch busy commuters rush up and down the halls. Better to wait here anyway. The Schuylkill Expressway will be a parking lot this time of day.
“So,” the Captain says, “do you have everything you need?”
“Hardly,” she says around a mouthful of meat, onions, pickles, and brioche bun. She power-chews, swallows. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Listen,” the Captain says. “I know you’re proud of what you found on that bar, but do you know how old it is? How many shoes and knees and umbrellas and god knows what have chipped away at that thing over the last century?”
“I can tell a bullet path from a dent, Dad,” she says. “You’re paying good money for me to learn this shit.”
“You,” he says, “are assuming there were no other bullets fired in that bar at any other point in time.”
“Unlikely,” Audrey replies. “The coloration was consistent. I’d be willing to testify in court that those bullets were fired at the same time.”
The Captain sighs. “I just don’t know what you’re hoping to find.”
“Gee, I don’t know, Dad…the truth? Why do I have to explain this to you? This is what you did for a living!”
“You want me to reopen a fifty-year-old case just because you found some bumps and scratches on a bar?”
The Captain stabs at his Caesar salad like it’s personal. Audrey drains her beer, nods at the bartender for another, and, when he approaches, bats her eyes and quietly asks for a Bloody Mary, please? Bartender nods. Dad just shakes his head.
Whatever, dude. Benefits of not being able to drive.
“Let me turn this around for a minute,” the Captain finally says. “Let me tell you what I’ve found out about you.”
“Me?”
“The number that keeps calling. It was unlisted, so I had someone run it.”
Down at the Roundhouse, while she was waiting forever…oh man, so diabolically crafty, Cap. The man is old, but he still has some moves.
“Congratulations,” Audrey says. “Or you could have saved us five hours and just, oh, I don’t know, asked me.”
“Tried that. You told me it was Sister None of My Business. I disagreed. You live in my house, it becomes my business.”
“You’re kidding, right? I’ve been living in your house for a grand total of three hours!”
Other boozing commuters turn to look at them. The Captain doesn’t care. He leans in closer.
“Who are Mr. and Mrs. Jamie Tennellson?”
“You’re such an asshole.”
“I’m an asshole for asking questions? You told me you had two roommates. You didn’t tell me they were a black married couple in their late fifties.”
“What does it matter that they’re African-American?”
“It doesn’t, Audrey,” he says. “But it matters that you’re not telling me the truth. I assume the money for rent I send you goes to the Tennellsons, correct?”
No, not correct, Audrey thinks. But screw him. This kind of shit is exactly why she’s kept her life—her real life—quiet for the past two years.
“You want me to keep going, or do you want to tell me the story?”
“I want you to go fuck yourself,” Audrey says, and leaves.
Once again Audrey finds herself on the Market-Frankford Elevated, rumbling down the tracks, listening to a computerized voice tick down the old familiar stations. Erie-Torresdale. Church. Margaret-Orthodox.
The El is turning out to be remarkably handy whenever she has a blowout with one of her parents. A ride straight back to the Northeast, all for only two bucks and change. Not counting bus transfer.
Which she needs, because she’s not in the mood to walk from Bridge and Pratt all the way up to her father’s house in Mayfair.
As she rides the 66, she realizes she doesn’t have a key. But that’s okay. She knows a way or two to sneak back into the ol’ family manse. Mainly through the basement.
Where her father keeps his scrapbook o’ murder.
Okay, she’s willing to admit that she’s furious, and inclined to think the worst of her father at this particular moment. But c’mon. It was awfully strange for him to be so uninterested in his father’s murder, no? Especially after she told him what she’d found?
He wouldn’t let her look at the scrapbook. Only flipped through it fast. Explaining it to her.
She needs that book.
Well, no, what she really needs is the original murder book. If she tries to cite her father’s scrapbook as a primary source, her professor will pretty much laugh until she cries blood.
What if the Captain is the one who checked it out all those years ago, and it’s packed somewhere in the basement?
Come on, Audrey Kornbluth-Walczak, come out with it. Admit what you’re really thinking.
That your own father killed the man he believed murdered his father. Right then, in November 1995, just days after he was released from prison.
She thinks about her own childhood, tries to pin down when it all went wrong. Hmmm, that would be 1995, the year Terrill Lee Stanton was released on parole. The same year her parents split up. You remember the awful, drunken Thanksgiving. The Christmas your dad wasn’t around. Valentine’s Day 1996, when Claire sat you down and explained to your five-year-old self that Daddy wasn’t going to be living here much longer.
What would cause Dad to go off the deep end?
A homicide detective who planned and executed the perfect murder. That might do it.
Why would he agree to help her, then?
Because that’s what homicide cops do. They let you do all the talking, all the storytelling. They hold your hand until they reach the end of the story and boom, you’re in handcuffs waiting for Ol’ Sparky.
She roots through her father’s basement possessions looking for the real murder book, but somehow she knows she’s not going to find it down here. If her suspicions are correct, he probably burned it. Hell, maybe he burned it during the barbecue they had on the thirtieth anniversary of Grandpop Stan’s murder.
Here you go, kids, a little extra seasoning for the kielbasa.
No; that couldn’t be right. That was May 1995; Terrill Lee Stanton wasn’t released until August. She needs to find out when he died, exactly how he died, somehow trace her father’s movements around the same time…
Wait.
As usual, she’s missing the real question.
The real question is…Did Terrill Lee Stanton do it?
Based on her rough examination of the bar, the answer has to be no. Unless he held two guns and fired both at the same time, all gangsta style, at strange angles. Maybe he was one of the shooters—but if so, he had a friend. Her father’s explanation that he had an accomplice doesn’t make much sense, either. Why wouldn’t Stanton offer up this mysterious second shooter in exchange for a lighter sentence? Hell, offer up a cop killer and he could probably have cut his sentence in half.
Nope. Doesn’t make sense.
God, is she really going to do this? Follow this whole thing through to its natural conclusion—which might end with her father in handcuffs?
Audrey’s cheap-ass cell goes off. It’s a local number she doesn’t recognize. Which means it could be anybody within the city of Philadelphia, since she purged her contacts a year ago while drunk and angry one night.
It’s a gamble: what are the chances this is someone she’d actually want to talk to?
Her call log is already full of a Houston area code she doesn’t want to deal with right now.
Against her better judgment, she swipes the screen. “Impress me.”
“Aud, it’s me.”
“Me who.”
“It’s Cary.”
Her brother. His name
is only two syllables, but both are packed with sheer panic. He sounds like he’s drunk and he’s been crying.
Audrey’s internal alarm goes off: Oh God, Dad. Something happened to Dad. And here I am rummaging through his papers while he’s somewhere out there clutching his chest and falling to his knees and…
“Spit it out, Care! Is something wrong with Dad?”
“No…it’s Staś. He’s gone.”
Stubborn Stan
February 6, 1965
“Stan—come the fuck on already!”
This is it. Finally. Stan knows it as sure as he knows how to spell his last name: this is the night his partner is going to get him killed.
“Go go go go!” Wildey whisper-screams. But Stan can barely hear him as he opens the front door and takes a step inside the chilly building while Wildey climbs up the fire escape.
After weeks of false leads, their snitch, Terrill Lee, said it was happening tonight. Big heroin deal on the top floor of a four-story apartment building at Twenty-Second and Diamond. Wildey got all excited. Here we come, white wolves. Let’s finally see your faces.
Stan’s not so sure. What reason do they have for heading up to this apartment building anyway? The word of a self-described agitator who says he likes to see stuff burn? Could be a trap waiting for them up on the fourth floor, for all he knows. Stuff the pigs, two-for-one special.
But despite his internal grousing, Stan huffs it up the stairs—there’s no elevator in this place. Wildey proposed a two-front attack, to make sure nobody goes scurrying out the back door. Said his cop daddy John Quincy raided more speakeasies during Prohibition than anyone else on the force, and he learned one important lesson: cover all exits, always. Stan didn’t say it out loud, but he’s sure his own father would have something to say about that.
The stairs seem to go on forever. The paint on the walls is dirty and chipped, the rug worn down to a thin ghost of itself. He’s sure nobody’s bothered with maintenance in this place since the 1940s, when the neighborhood started going black. The halls smell like grease—foreign cooking full of exotic ingredients.
Finally Stan reaches the fourth floor, finds the apartment—4B. He pulls his service revolver, then puts his ear up against the door. Male voices, murmuring. Some sharp laughter, hah hah hah. You’re not going to be laughing in a second. As he takes a step back, Stan tastes copper in his mouth. His own blood. This can’t be a good sign. He steels himself for the job ahead. Just boot the door, point your gun, tell everyone to stick up their hands. You know, the kind of stuff Jimmy thinks you do all the time. Hero cop stuff.
Then comes a loud crash—glass breaking.
And a battle cry:
“Freeze, motherfuckers!”
Oh shit, Stan thinks. What the hell—Wildey agreed that Stan would take lead, catch ’em off guard, then Wildey would open a window and come in.
As Stan leans back, putting his weight on his back leg, ready to take down the door—
It opens.
Two white guys in dark suits holding guns stand in the open doorway, both just as surprised to see Stan as he is to see them.
“Well, shit,” one of the white guys says. He has a buzz cut, thick eyebrows, and beady eyes. “This is an awkward situation.”
Stan walks them back into the room at gunpoint. They’ve already lowered their weapons, telling him to take it easy. Stan ignores them, calls out to his partner. “Wildey, you all right?”
Wildey, meanwhile, has his revolver pointed at three Negro men dressed like they’re headed out for a night on the town. One of them, a thick-necked bulldog of a man, has a shotgun pointed back at Wildey.
“You said you had this under control,” the bulldog says.
“Shut up, Sam,” says one of his colleagues. “Not another word!”
Wildey looks the bulldog in the eye. “How about it, Bey-Bey? You want to put down that gun, or do you want to do something stupid?”
Bey-Bey squints as he cocks his head slightly. “I know you?”
Stan doesn’t like this at all. That bulldog’s shotgun could cut Wildey in half and send both pieces of him flying back out the way he came.
“Yeah, I know you, Bey-Bey,” Wildey says. “How many times did I pinch you for robbing craps games back in West Philly? Surprised to see you uptown.”
“Wildey,” he says with a tone of recognition.
“Now why don’t you put down that gun and let’s talk about what we’re gonna do next.”
But what Samuel “Bey-Bey” Baynes is going to do next is rack his shotgun with a loud KA-CHAK. His two partners tense up. Holy shit, is he really gonna kill this cop right here in this apartment?
Stan forgets about the white guys and turns his revolver on Bey-Bey. “Don’t do it, motherfucker,” he says.
“We’re okay, Stan!” Wildey says. “Bey-Bey isn’t stupid.”
Bey-Bey is not stupid. But he’s also not about to go down for this. There’s a ton of heroin in this apartment and he knows it’s enough to sink him. Which is why he suddenly aims his shotgun at the ceiling and pulls the trigger. KA-BLAM.
The plaster above their heads explodes—white shit rains down on their heads. Wildey recoils from the blast, which is what Bey-Bey wanted, because now he’s charging forward, using his shotgun as a battering ram.
Stan is about to squeeze the trigger when the two white guys seize the opportunity to tackle him, knocking him off his feet.
The length of Bey-Bey’s shotgun smashes into Wildey’s forearms and forces his body back through the shattered windows and onto the fire escape.
Stan doesn’t see what happens next because the two white guys are punching and kicking the crap out of him. It feels like he’s tumbling around in a clothes dryer along with a couple of bricks—there’s no way to anticipate where the next painful blow will land. Yet Stan holds tight to his gun. You never, ever let go of your gun. The punches and kicks he can take. But if one of these bastards picks up one of their own guns, he’s going to have to defend himself. And he doesn’t want to have to shoot somebody tonight—not if he can help it.
After a few blows, however, it becomes clear that the white guys are more interested in hightailing it out of here. One of them scrambles out of the doorway, headed for the stairs. “Come on!” he shouts to his partner, Buzz-Cut Guy.
Oh no you don’t. Stan reaches out and grabs a fistful of pant cuff, which is enough to catch Buzz-Cut off guard and bring the man down hard. He scratches against the worn carpet with his fingernails, trying to claw his way up to a standing position, but Stan’s already climbing up the guy’s legs, his revolver still in his right hand. If he can reach the guy’s head, he can give him a good wallop and take the fight out of him.
But Buzz-Cut turns and swings a fist across the top of Stan’s head. Which hurts. A lot. He tastes blood in his mouth again. Buzz-Cut wriggles loose, his knees and elbows knocking on the floor as he tries to get up.
“Let go, you stupid asshole!”
Then he’s free. Stan, though, catches him again at the top of the stairs, grabbing his pant cuffs, but both of them go tumbling down, limbs flailing around in a mutual effort to slow their descent. The blows seem to come from all angles. After a while it’s hard to tell what’s a step and what’s a fist or an elbow.
Stan, however, maintains a viselike grip on his revolver.
And by the time they both reach bottom, Buzz-Cut is twisted up in a ball with Stan pointing his weapon at him, telling him he’s under arrest.
By the time Stan has Buzz-Cut in cuffs and is back on the ground floor, other red cars from the Twenty-Second have shown up—neighbors must have heard the shotgun blast and called it in. Stan pushes Buzz-Cut toward a pair of uniforms, then runs around the side of the building, yelling for his partner.
Wildey, though, is already on the ground, dragging an unconscious Bey-Bey along the alley floor, away from the fire escape. Wildey’s shirt is untucked and his face and arms are bleeding but he’s smiling anyway.
&nb
sp; “That was fun,” he says. “Let’s do it again.”
Sorry Jim
November 5, 1995
When Jim opens his eyes Sunday morning he’s fully prepared for it to hurt. He knows this one’s going to be especially bad because he doesn’t clearly remember going to bed last night—not putting his glass in the sink, not undressing, not slipping under the covers, none of it. After a certain point, it’s a complete blank, and it takes a ridiculous amount of booze for Jim to get there.
The last things Jim remembers are returning home with Staś, hands shaking with rage, praying nobody will notice. Claire telling him Michael Sarkissian of Metropolitan magazine left a message. (“Are they writing something about you?” she asked. “I hope not,” he replied.) And calling Sarkissian back.
Sarkissian giving him grief about meeting on a Sunday, but Jim insisting—telling him there’s something important about Kelly Anne that he needs to run by him.
Sarkissian joking, asking, “Do I need a lawyer?”
Jim, enjoying the few seconds of panicked silence on the line while he hesitates before replying. “No, I don’t think so. Just want to do a little fact-checking.”
And then going to his basement office to read through his murder scrapbook and fantasize about what he’ll say to Terrill Lee Stanton face to face the next time they meet up. Because there will absolutely be a next time.
You fucking coward.
You didn’t even tell him your name.
“Detective Jim Walczak, fuckhead—you murdered my father.”
Well, no more pussyfooting around. You’ve been keeping this cold little ball of hate in your guts for thirty years now. Time to let some of it out. Murdering son of a bitch owes you that much, at least. The courtesy of an explanation. An apology.
Something.
Jim remembers pouring vodka over ice and reading through the clippings, the familiar headlines all over again. TWO COPS SLAIN IN FAIRMOUNT BAR. And NO ANSWERS IN DOUBLE COP MURDER MYSTERY. Jim put on the Rolling Stones and poured another vodka rocks—the first one seemed to have simply vanished—and traveled back to that Friday in May 1965 all over again. What would his twelve-year-old self tell him to do, now that he knows his father’s killer is just a few miles away?
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