Expiration Date (15 page)

The next morning, detectives questioned a shop employee named Tyrell “Cooker” Beaumont, who casually told a friend in a bar that he knew one of the Frankford Slasher’s previous victims. He also said he was with his girlfriend in his apartment the night of April 27, and both had seen a thin young white man with red hair lurking around the seafood store.

The only problem: Beaumont’s girlfriend denied being with him that night. Two eyewitnesses, both prostitutes, placed Beaumont at the scene of the crime, with a large utility knife tucked in his belt, right around the time of the murders. To make matters worse, Shauyi Tan, Beaumont’s former employer at the seafood shop, testified that he had told her, “Yeah, maybe I killed her.” Then, a moment later, recanted. He was arrested a day later.

Despite the fact that previous eyewitnesses tagged the Frankford Slasher as a young redheaded white dude (Beaumont was African-American), many locals breathed a sigh of relief.
They caught the guy.

Then came the murder of thirty-eight-year-old Wendy Simons, stabbed twenty-three times, and found in her Arrott Street apartment, just blocks away. Beaumont was in jail, awaiting trial, at the time.

Beaumont was tried and convicted of the murder of Carol Strauss in December 1990, based solely on eyewitness accounts. He was not tried for the other Frankford Slasher murders. Technically, those seven other murders—eight, including Patty Glenhart—are still unsolved. Whether the Wendy Simons murder was a copycat killer, or the real Frankford Slasher, remains unknown. “I was railroaded,” Beaumont said after hearing the verdict. “I didn’t kill Carol Strauss. I did not even know Carol Strauss. I was implicated by prostitutes, that is, pipers, that the police put up.”

I thought I remembered the facts of the case fairly well; it had been a big deal to me when it finally appeared. It was the kind of story that made me want to be a journalist.

But now I looked at the sidebar again, did a quick count and saw there were fifteen victims.

No. That couldn’t be right. When I wrote this piece, it was only nine.

I swear to God it had been only nine.

Fifteen was an absurdly high number. Did Gary Heidnick have that many victims? Did most serial killers?

“I think you need to see someone. My dad knows someone who would talk to you, keep it discreet.”

“I’m not crazy.”

“I know that, Mickey. I just think you’ve been living in your head too much lately. You need some help climbing out of it.”

Did I make this stuff up? Was my subconscious mind putting on one hell of a show for me whenever I nodded off to sleep? When you look at it from the outside, from the other side of the glass, there was a compelling case for insanity. Only I was experiencing these things. Only I had proof. It could all be happening in my head, like Meghan said.

But I knew it wasn’t. It was real. Senses don’t lie. Not like this.

Meghan touched my shoulder.

“There’s also the pill.”

“What
about
the pill?”

“I have a friend who works for a drug company. One of the big ones. As a favor, he ran a few tests on the pill you gave me.”

“You did what? Oh crap, Meghan. Why did you do that? You have no idea where it came from, and what it was…”

“Neither did you. And you popped it in your mouth.”

“I thought it was Tylenol.”

“The first time. But you kept taking it, even though you had no idea what it might be.”

“Okay, good point.”

“Thank you.”

There was a quiet Old West–style standoff moment. She was waiting for me to draw, I believe, so she could expertly shoot the pistol out of my hand before twirling her own gun and replacing it smoothly in her holster. But I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction. She’d have to speak first. And she did.

“Do you want to know what the pill contained?”

“Sure.”

“Nothing but sugar. It was a placebo. Meant for use as a control in pharmaceutical studies. Dan sees them all the time. Took him about five minutes to figure it out.”

“Right. Which just goes to prove my main point that I am not on drugs. I may be on cheap beer, I might be a junkie when it comes to peanut butter and apples, but I’m not on drugs.”

Meghan squinted.

“Peanut butter? Is that why your skin has this strange jaundiced tinge to it?”

“I also haven’t been out of the apartment in a while.”

“Anyway, that doesn’t prove you’re not on drugs. It just proves you’re not on
those particular
drugs, because they’re nothing but sugar.”

“Jesus H. Christ on a stick. You moved me in! Did you see a box marked random drug paraphernalia? Did you see a bunch of syringes come tumbling out of an old shoe box?”

“What…you think I’d go through your things?”

“You told me yourself: you’re a snoop.”

“Touché.”

I used the few moments of silence to run Meghan’s evidence through the tired and confused computer encased inside my skull. Let’s say she’s right. The pills do jack shit. They’re nothing but sugar. I was having ridiculously vivid dreams of wandering the streets of Frankford in the early 1970s all on my own. Patty Glenhart’s story had been lurking in my subconscious for years now, waiting for the right dream/hallucination. And maybe it was the same thing with Billy Derace. Clearly I needed some kind of closure, so my brain supplied it. Just like I did with my college essay freshman year.

Wait.

I looked at Meghan.

“I’ll be right back.”

The name on the downstairs mailbox for apartment 2-C was hynd, not derace. It had been scrawled on a paper mailing label, not a plastic strip with white punched letters. I started scraping the label away with my left thumbnail. Maybe there was some trace beneath. Come on, rules of space and time. Throw me a bone here.

Meghan padded down the stairs.

“What are you doing?”

I ignored her and continued scraping. I was Ahab, and the letters beneath this label my giant white whale. Finally the label worked itself free, but there was nothing else beneath. No blue plastic label, no white letters. Just the sticky underside of the label I’d just removed.

“Mickey?”

Except…

There. It was faint, but legible. The outlines of six letters in the grime, pressed against the cheap metal.

“Come here. Can you read those letters?”

She was in this far, why not humor me for just a few more seconds? Standing next to me, she leaned forward, squinting.

“What is this, a test? D-E-R…H…no wait, A.”

“Keep going.”

“A-C-E…Derace?”

She pronounced it to rhyme with “terrace.” Growing up, I’d always pronounced it to rhyme with “the ace.”

Either way, the letters were there. It hadn’t been a dream. I wasn’t hallucinating.

Meghan put her hand on my shoulder.

“Do you know that name?”

Even Meghan couldn’t lawyer-logic her way out of that one.

Fact: Grandpop Henry worked at the same mental institution that housed the man who killed my father with a steak knife. I produced the paystubs, I showed Meghan the
Daily News
and
Bulletin
clips.

Fact: Grandpop Henry rented an apartment in the same building where the man who killed my father grew up.

Fact: Grandpop Henry kept a bottle of white pills locked up in his medicine cabinet that sent part of their user into the past.

“I’m not letting you have that one,” Meghan said.

“Fine. Mysterious white pills that
allegedly
send the soul of their user back to the past. That okay, Counselor?”

“Conjecture. But fine, okay—let’s say these pills do what you say. What was your grandfather planning to do?”

“Kill the man who killed his son. Change reality.”

“Then why hasn’t he done it? Think about it. If he’s been taking these pills like you think he has, why isn’t your life automatically different?”

“Maybe he tried. Maybe it’s not as easy as it seems.”

“Or maybe he tried it once and it sent him into his coma, because those pills are wildly dangerous.”

I had been thinking the same thing. But I wasn’t going to let her have the point that easily.

“Conjecture.”

“Over-frickin’-ruled.”

We stared at the each for a few minutes, letting our imaginations run wild. The whole idea was ludicrous, of course. But take the pills out of the equation. There were too many coincidences piled up. My grandpop had been trying something—revenge or closure.

“The only person who knows is my grandpop. And he can’t talk. Not yet, anyway.”

Meghan looked at me.

“He might not be the only one.”

IX

Asylum Road

Once you walk up Oxford Avenue, away from the El, you enter Northwood, which has always been the nicest part of Frankford. In fact, if you lived in Northwood, you never admitted to living in Frankford.

Northwood had slightly wider streets—some of them brick-paved—with singles and twins and trees and big backyards and everything else everyone in Frankford wanted.

I grew up resenting the whole Frankford/Northwood divide. The dividing line, of course, was the Frankford El. We lived one block south of the El, in a cramped rowhome. Zero trees, a grim factory parking lot across the street.

But go just two blocks north of the El, and it’s a completely different story. Aforementioned trees and backyards. Why couldn’t my mom have moved there after my dad died? Just a few blocks away? Take a walk on the wild side, Anne. Sure, maybe the mortgage would have been a couple extra grand—maybe $11,000 as opposed to the $9,000 you’d pay in Frankford—but surely we could have swung that, right?

Couldn’t we?

Mom had moved there eight years ago, finally leaving Darrah Street. I honestly don’t know why she stayed in that house so long, other than inertia. I used to pretend that it was because she missed my father, that she couldn’t bear the idea of moving away from the house they’d shared. But if that was true, she never let on. She almost never talked about him, and packed up every photo of him and put them in the hutch in the dining room. Maybe it was the lingering memory of my father, but I just think she hated the idea of moving.

So she’d traded a standard issue Frankford rowhome for the slightly more upscale standard Northwood twin. Instead of neighbors jammed up against both sides of her home, now she had a single neighbor jammed up against only one side of her home.

“More wine, Meghan?”

“No thank you, Mrs. Wade.”

“There’s plenty here. And call me Anne, willya?”

“I’m okay. I have to drive later, and I really don’t have much of a tolerance. I’m kind of a cheap date.”

A mild lie from Meghan. She could hold her liquor like a bartop. She just didn’t want to insult my mother’s choice in grape-based libations. Not that she’s a snob. But chances are, the Charles family never served pinot grigio from a cardboard box.

We all stood around the kitchen—me in my arm sling, Meghan, my mother and her boyfriend—making introductions and small talk. Mom was so stunned that I brought somebody, she didn’t even notice the sling. In my twenty plus years of dating life, I’ve never brought anybody home. Ever.

But now I was happy for the witness, because Whiplash Walt was in rare form. Touching my mom’s shoulders, her back, her waist—like he was planning on killing her later and wanted to place as many fingerprints as possible, just so the Philly PD would be extra-clear on who’d done it.

Whiplash Walt was a lawyer, just like Meghan’s father, but they inhabited two totally different planes of existence. Nicholas Charles Esq. regularly lunched with the mayor and the Philadelphia political elite. Whiplash Walt spent his days handing out cards to anybody wearing a puffy neck brace within a five-mile radius. Whiplash, as his name might imply, did personal injury. It was how he’d met my mom, in fact. She tried to sue the hospital where she’d worked as an accountant for a slip-and-fall thing. She’d lost the case, but won Whiplash.