Revolver (11 page)

Outer Jim commands:
No. Don't be an idiot. There are a million reasons you shouldn't do this. You shouldn't even be out here this morning.

And in the end, Outer Jim wins. He has a murder case to solve. This sorry old man? He's not going anywhere.

While he's been gone, Aisha's been busy.

Robert Raymond Farrace, turns out, has priors. B&E guy, picked up a bunch of times over the last ten years.

And as it turns out, he's still behind bars, so there goes that idea.

Jim and Aisha split the next jobs at hand. Aisha goes through Kelly Anne's friends and/or possible boyfriends, while Jim works on a timeline of her movements the last day of her life. He scrawls out times and puts them on a dry-erase board. This part of the job always reminds him of high school. The paper's already way late, and all you're doing is racing to catch up.

And then sometimes, you get a free pass from the teacher.

Aisha rushes into their cubicle all excited.

“Think I've got something good here.”

Audrey arrives at the pizza joint bright and early and relatively hangover-free, fully prepared to tear it the hell apart.

Hey, it's not her fault she has to do a little remodeling. The new owners should have kept it a bar.

She's relieved she didn't have to sleep with Pizza Counter Guy to get him to open up extra early. Not that he isn't handsome—he is. Warm smile and soft eyes. But Audrey's got too much crazy in her life to invite more. What exactly is she supposed to do with a Pizza Counter Guy here in Philadelphia when she has ongoing drama back in Houston?

Audrey crouches down, mini-crowbar in hand. She tucks one end under a lip of paneling and begins to pry. Hard, fast, quick, move move move. She needs this bar naked and quick.

KEEERRRAAAAAAK.

She can tell Pizza Counter Guy is normally a very chill dude, but you can see him getting all worked up.

“Whoa! Take it easy!”

“Sorry, man, but I told you we had a deadline.”

“Yeah, but you're denting the hell out of that stuff.”

“Look, I'm going to put everything back the way it was. I've got a hammer and everything. Coolio?”

Pizza Counter Guy blinks.

“Did you just use the word
coolio
in terms of asking me if I agree?”

Audrey doesn't reply.

KEEEERRAAAAAAAK.

This, appropriately enough, used to be a shotgun bar.

Main entrance off Fairmount, side entrance off Seventeenth. Long skinny place. Bar running down one side, almost all the way to the back. Rows of bottles in front of the mirror. A couple of tables in the back. But the main business was done at the bar, on stools. Tile floor. Little off-white square tiles, interrupted by a small burst of blue and green tiles in a geometric pattern.

The bar, though. It's beautiful. What a crime to cover it up with these cheap panels.

Legend has it that this place was the preferred watering hole of poet and writer Charles Bukowski back in the mid-1940s when he worked at the Fairmount Motor Works. Bukowski supposedly used it as the basis for the Golden Horn in his original screenplay for
Barfly,
which would star Mickey Rourke. (Audrey has a friend who insists the movie is pronounced
Barf-lee.
) The name of the bar back in Bukowski's day has been lost to time. Nor did it have a name back when her grandfather was shot to death here.

Pizza Counter Guy watches her work. What else does he have to do? It's 7 a.m. and he doesn't have to start slinging dough for another two hours.

“What's with the string?”

What's with the string is that Audrey is approximately 2,500 miles from her college campus and is unable to use the university's fancy-pants 3-D laser scanner that would map this entire pizza joint in a couple of hours. Audrey loves it. The thing spins around, making millions of ridiculously accurate measurements. The end result: 360 degrees of cold hard data. The entire crime scene on your laptop.

So instead, she has to go old-school.

“It's highly technical,” she says. “You wouldn't understand.”

Pizza Counter Guy says uh-huh.

She might be a lousy student, but Audrey remembers quite a lot from her forensic science classes. Her favorite six words, courtesy of her favorite professor: “We're basically a bag of water.”

In terms of a bullet striking a human being.

(He made this awesome
SPOFFFF
sound effect while slowly bringing his splayed hands apart.)

Audrey truly enjoys shooting guns into ballistic gelatin, which is the closest you can get to human tissue. She loves ballistic gelatin so much she wants to slice it up and grill it, put it on a bun.

But back to the double murder at hand.

“In a bullet murder, there is no area of evidence more important than the autopsy,” said the same professor. “With the wounds, you can infer the trajectory of the bullet.”

Well, as the song goes,
she ain't got no body
. Unless she goes for a double unearthing. Which would please exactly nobody.

“Examination of the victim's clothing is a very important part of that autopsy.”

No clothes, either.

Nor fingerprints…nor prime-time TV's favorite, blood splatter.

Which is fine, because all that bullshit is “more art than science,” according to one of her profs. The fingerprint lecture was particularly eye-opening. Everyone grows up thinking that no two sets of fingerprints are alike. Well, guess what, chief: that all depends on the methods of taking said fingerprints. With the most commonly used methods, parts of fingerprints can be so similar that two different chumps can be linked to the same latent print. No cop wants to admit it, but it's true.

Just talk to the sorry asshole who was almost convicted of the Madrid train bombing back in 2004. Whose fingerprints kinda sorta matched the ones found at the scene. Only…he had nothing do with it.

As another professor put it: “There's just not enough science in forensic science.”

The same professor: “Folks, it's all about angles and distances.”

That, Audrey can do.

Hence the string, scissors, and tape. All pilfered from Will's apartment.

She's going to retrace the path of each bullet fired in this joint over fifty years ago. And while the bar isn't made of ballistic gelatin (and if it were, for the record, it would quickly become Audrey's favorite bar
ever
), a huge slab of heavy wood can hold a bullet trail almost as well. Sure, there are decades' worth of nicks and bumps and cracks. But they're easy to distinguish from bullet holes.

“The essence of good forensic science?” her favorite professor once asked. “Look at the competing explanations of an event. Like Sherlock Holmes once said, if you can rule out the impossible, whatever remains—however seemingly improbable—must be the truth.”

Audrey kneels down, scissors and string in hand, and begins to work.

“Back up, kid,” she says. “I need to work.”

Pizza Counter Guy raises his hands in surrender, takes a few long and slow steps backward.

As Audrey works, Pizza Counter Guy, leaning against a table, arms folded, fires questions at her anyway. He probably should be in the back, hurling a circle of dough into the air or whatever, but he seems fascinated by what she's doing.

“So your last name is Kornbluth. Does this mean you have a husband?”

Snip snip.

“No, it means I have an asshole father. I was born a Walczak, but I took my mother's maiden name a few years ago.”

“Wow that's fairly…hard-core.”

“Well, Dad's a pretty hard-core asshole. He's a cop, by the way. Retired, but knows a guy who knows a guy, if you know what I mean.”

“I'm not sure I know what you mean.”

“I'm sure you know exactly what I mean, Pizza Counter Guy.”

“I have a name, you know.”

“That's nice. Everybody does. But please. Shut the fuck up.”

Snip snip.

Tape tape.

She's basically working in reverse, starting with the bullet hole and tracing its path backward. It's not as simple as a straight line, of course. There's air resistance, wind, good ol' gravity. And that's assuming the bullet was in pristine condition. Imperfect bullets can tumble and yaw. Or maybe the shooter loaded the wrong caliber, which can really screw with your spin rate and velocity.

But she can get into the weird physics shit later. You have to start with the bare bones—how many bullets were fired, and where did they come from?

Right away, Audrey realizes there are issues with the stories in the newspaper.

“No way.”

“What?”

She doesn't need fancy physics. After all, she can count.

When Audrey returns to the apartment from an honest day's labor of snipping and taping and conjecturing, she's surprised to learn she has a guest. There he is. On the couch, ankle resting on his knee, arm sprawled over the back,
Mad Men
style.

“We need to talk,” her older brother Sta
ś
says.

Fucking Cary,
Audrey thinks. Can never, ever, keep his mouth shut. Then again, she's as much to blame for telling him in the first place.

Audrey doesn't reply. Instead, she ticks off an invisible count on her fingers.
One two three four.

“Audrey, are you listening to me?”

She continues the count.
Five six seven eight nine ten,
while nodding her head and pursing her lips in mock astonishment.

“What the hell are you doing?” Sta
ś
finally asks, exasperated.

“Counting words,” Audrey says. “You know what? That's the most you've spoken to me in five years. Impressive, really. You're practically gushing, Stoshie.”

Claire, meanwhile, hovers around in the kitchen, silently bearing yet another round of sibling arguments. Will quickly spirits himself off to another room—possibly the bathroom, to hang himself.

“Let's go,” Sta
ś
says.

“I just got home.”

“This isn't your home. Come on, I need a cup of coffee.”

“There's a cozy little Starbucks a couple of blocks away, I believe. Try the Mocha Fucka Offa!”

They have the ability to go on like this for hours, it seems. So it's fortunate that Claire interrupts with a sharp “Audrey!” Both kids stop speaking and turn and look at her with sheepish expressions on their faces. Yes, even the badass Philly cop.

“For Christ's sake, go have coffee with your brother.”

You know it's serious when a Jewish lady invokes the name of Jesus to get her kids to stop fighting.

Audrey talks him into drinks at McGillin's Olde Ale House, right around the corner and one of the places she and Cary hit last night. If she's not mistaken, there's a corner where he may have puked. Audrey suggests the bar. Sta
ś
says no, a table. Oh boy. He's serious about this conversation.

Sta
ś
asks for a club soda and lime. Audrey calls him a pussy. Sta
ś
changes his order to a Jack on the rocks, Yuengling back. Audrey asks for a Bloody Mary, Yuengling back. The bartender doesn't bat an eye—a Bloody Mary at 7 p.m., sure, why not. This is the same place that serves pickle martinis every January twenty-first in honor of Ben Franklin's birthday. (Long story, don't ask.) So a Bloody Mary is nothing.

Sta
ś
blinks. “You do know it's not Sunday morning, right?”

“If it were Sunday morning,” Audrey says, “I'd be drinking the vodka straight.”

“Fair enough,” he says. There might even be a smile there.

She mentally racks up the score against Bitchanne, who probably hasn't tasted alcohol since the last time she had a slight cough. But before the drinks arrive, her brother gets serious again—down to business.

“Look, I'm going to tell you how it's going to be, and you're going to sit there and listen. This project of yours is
over
. I know you're claiming this is for school, and if that's the case, I've got access to a dozen other cold cases that are far more interesting. I'll let you see everything. Access nobody else has. You hearing me?”

“So this isn't really a conversation,” Audrey says, nodding her head. “More of an edict.”

“Call it whatever you want.”

“Well, yeah, see, I don't respond very well to edicts. Especially from you.”

Their drinks arrive. Service is lightning quick at McGillin's. The waitress asks Sta
ś
if he and his daughter would like to see menus. Audrey giggles.
You old buzzard,
she whispers. Sta
ś
says no thanks. Audrey sips her Bloody like a grade-schooler with her first Shirley Temple. My, how that refreshes!

Once the waitress is out of earshot, Sta
ś
continues. “There's something you don't know. About Dad's heart.”

The straw flicks out of her mouth. “What about Dad's heart?”

Sta
ś
: dead earnest look. “You've really got to stop this shit.”

“You asshole. What about Dad's heart?”

Oh, he's enjoying this. The man with the scoop. Sta
ś
tells her only the basics: congestive heart failure. Brought to the hospital four times over the past three years—minor heart attacks. Audrey's about to scream at him: Why didn't any of you pricks think to pick up the phone and tell me? But then she remembers she hasn't picked up the phone, either.

“So you start digging into this stuff? Now? It's going to push him over the edge. Is that what you want? To put him in an early grave?”

Audrey's still thinking about her father. Sure, he's an asshole, but she also doesn't want to have to fly back to Philly to bury him in a few weeks.

Sta
ś
leans back, takes a big swallow of his Jack. He sees her reaction and now he's all smug and satisfied—conversation over. Audrey mimics him, draining half her Bloody in a single go.

“Well,” she says, “there's something you don't know.”

“What's that?”

Audrey doesn't answer. Instead she digs into her purse for her notebook. She opens up to her crude diagram from earlier today, pressing the pages down with her palms.

“I went to the murder scene today. Took apart the counter. Spent all day tracing the ballistic trajectories.”

But Sta
ś
is already looking through her fingers at the diagram. He reaches out with both sets of fingers, pressing them down on the notebook, then spins them around so he can take a better look.

Sta
ś
is a jerk. But he's also supposed to be a really good cop. Methodical, slow, but ultimately right. He knows what he's looking at. He realizes the implications right away.