Revolver (12 page)

“There were
two
shooters?”

Audrey lifts her Bloody, clinks Sta
ś
's glass on the table, then takes a long swallow. Bet you don't have a cold case like this, Stoshie.

By the time Audrey returns to the apartment she's had two more Bloodies, two Yuengling backs. But Claire is up waiting for her, plush robe wrapped around her body, cigarette between her middle and ring finger. There are a half dozen dead ones in the ashtray. She's Philadelphia's last unrepentant smoker, and clearly she's been up for a while now.

“So you talked to Sta
ś
,” Claire says. She doesn't bother to phrase it as a question, because she knows the answer. Knows what Sta
ś
told her
would happen.

Audrey nods as she fishes a beer from Will's fridge. Oooh, a Blue Point Toasted Lager. Probably buys his beer by the six-pack so he can enjoy the variety.

Claire nods in return. Good, good. “So I'll be driving you to the airport tomorrow.”

“Not exactly,” Audrey says, cracking the cap off the top.

“What do you mean?”

Now it's time for the hard sell.

Audrey explains her independent study project, how important the project is to her academic future, what she's discovered, and how she needs to stay here for at least a few more days to do some more fact-finding. Maybe a little more, certainly no more than a week, and hopefully you guys would be cool with that…?

“Actually, Audrey…” Claire says, letting the thought finish itself.

“Seriously? I can't stay here?”

“It's not my apartment.”

“Okay. So fucking
Will
won't let me stay here?”

“You're putting me in a very awkward position.”

Awkward? How about being in no position? She doesn't have the money or credit for a hotel. If the Captain hadn't sprung for her plane ticket, she would be back in Houston right now. What is she supposed to do?

“Mom…come on.”

“Oh, when you want something I'm Mom. Otherwise, I'm just dumb old Claire.”

“What did he say? I want your bitch adopted daughter out now? Do I have time to collect my things, or should I report to the sidewalk immediately?”

Claire takes a final drag on her cigarette before mashing it out in the ashtray. Will's probably trying to get her to stop smoking, too. Keep up the good fight, Mom. Don't let the bastards change everything.

“I'm sure you'll figure out something, Audrey,” she says. “You always do.”

And with that, Claire rises and makes her way to the bedroom. Will's bedroom, that is, which is situated next to Will's guest room, which currently contains Audrey's things…at least for the next 120 seconds. Because she's getting the fuck out of here
immediately
.

Audrey wanders toward Broad Street, then walks around City Hall and its giant off-white boner tower with the jaundiced-yellow clock in the center. As she rounds the other side, Audrey waves at the ten-foot-tall statue of former mayor Frank Rizzo, who is stuck waving back for all eternity. “Yo, Frank.”

She tries her grandma again on the phone. Gets the answering machine with the voice message that hasn't changed since 1990 or so, as far as Audrey can tell. Come on, Grandma Rose, answer. It's not
that
late.

As she's cutting through the City Hall courtyard, something catches her eye: the two memorial tablets devoted to Philly's fallen officers.

She stares at the police memorial, which is off to the right, near the East Market Street portal. So many dead cops, they needed to build a second memorial to keep going.

Audrey runs her fingers down the names and finds
STANISłAW WALCZAK
.

And
GEORGE W. WILDEY
.

Audrey runs her numb fingertips over the stubby brass letters of her grandfather's name.

Don't know if you're out there, or up there, or whatever, Grandpop. This is your granddaughter speaking. I'm not using your death to get ahead, I swear. If anything, I'm using your death to avoid drowning.

So help me out here.

Let me figure this out.

If he's up there listening, Audrey has no idea. Because there is no reply. No soft whispers. No lightning claps. No acknowledgment whatsoever.

She fishes two bucks and a quarter out of her bag and rides the El all the way to the end of the line, Bridge and Pratt. Not a great neighborhood. A thriving drug corner just up Bridge Street. She doesn't want to stand around all night waiting for a bus, so she decides to blow five more bucks on a cab out to Ditman Street. It's going to suck staying out here in Frankford for the week.

Then again, Audrey thinks, maybe this will bring her closer to her grandfather. You know, that fourth source that Susan Cheever was talking about. He was living at 2046 Bridge when he was killed. He ate here, slept here, dreamed here. Maybe staying in his house will reveal some kind of new dimension.

But when Grandma Rose opens the door, smiles nervously, and says, “Your mother called,” Audrey realizes she's screwed.

Rosie nudges Stan. “Honey, wake up. Someone's here to see you.” Stan groans. It's still afternoon. Hours before his shift at least. He can tell by the bright sunlight stabbing him in the eyes. When he sits up he's dizzy. He reaches over on the floor for his pants. The belt buckle bangs against the metal frame of the bed. He's about to ask Rosie who it is, but she's already left the room.

There's no rock music playing, so Jimmy isn't even home from school yet. What the hell's going on?

Pants on, belt buckled lazily, Stan shuffles out of the room and ambles downstairs.

Turns out, it's Wildey, fully dressed for work, standing in his doorway. “Hey, partner.” Stan with no socks or shoes, no shirt, and self-conscious about the way his lower gut hangs over his belt buckle.

“Hey, Wildey. What's going on?”

“How about LBJ, huh? No real surprise there, I guess. Though I didn't think he'd bury Goldwater like that.”

Yesterday was Election Day. The president won by a landslide. Not that it matters to Stan. Who the hell cares about which person sits behind that big desk in the Oval Office? They're all the same, the politicians. But Stan knows better than to get into it with his partner, who has yet to meet a topic he doesn't love to expound upon.

Rosie eyes his partner suspiciously. She's waiting to hear what this is all about, too.

“I was just telling your wife here how great it's been working with you these past few months,” Wildey finally says. “I'm even getting used to the liverwurst sandwiches.”

“Uh-huh,” Stan says. Then after a pause, “So what's going on?”

“Let's talk about it in the car.”

“It's a little early, isn't it?”

Wildey's eyes widen slightly. He doesn't want to raise his voice in front of the missus here, but…

“This, uh,
can't
wait.”

The door opens behind Wildey. It's Jimmy, home from school, backpack slung over his shoulder. He looks at his pop, then at the stranger in the police uniform.

“You're Officer Wildey, aren't you?”

Wildey looks at Stan and beams with pride. “Boy even pronounces it correctly.” He turns his attention back to Jimmy and extends a hand. “How are you doing, young man?”

Jimmy reaches up and shakes his hand, a little bit of awe in his expression. He has this man's photo up on his wall, but seeing him in real life is something else. While Stan goes back upstairs to dress, Rosie does the best she can, offering Wildey a cup of tea while he waits. Stan can hear the conversation through the floorboards.

“Do you take sugar and milk?”

“Yeah, honey, lots of both, thank you.”

“My pop said you go to the Cadillac Club. What's that like?”

“Two teaspoons, Mr. Wildey?”

“Call me George, please. And that would be fine. Young James, how do you know about the Cadillac Club?”

“I hear about it on WDAS. The Cadillac, the Zanzibar, all those places.”

“Your daddy didn't tell me you had such fine taste in music.”

“How much milk…er, George?”

“I'll take care of it, Mizz Walczak. Unless I can call you Rose?”

“Well, the Beatles and the Stones were influenced by soul music so I figured I'd go straight to the source and listen to what they're listening to.”

“Of course…Rose is fine.”

“Smart man. So who are you digging?”

Stan doesn't hear the rest of the conversation because he splashes cold water on his face in an attempt to shock himself back to full consciousness. He brushes his teeth, then combs and parts his thinning blond hair. By the time he gets downstairs Jimmy is showing Wildey the LP collection by the stereo console. Stan sees his Sinatra, Crosby, Como, Mathis records out. Wildey sips his tea, then points, looking at Stan.

“Johnny Mathis? For real? You make your family listen to this stuff?”

“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:

“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.”

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. Both 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 pretty 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…)