Expiration Date

I barely had time to process the name before that familiar dizzy feeling washed over me. No, no, not now. Not now! I slammed my fists into the wall, as if slamming my fists would help me stay there just a few seconds longer so I could think…

Billy Allen Derace? That twelve-year-old redheaded kid downstairs was going to grow up and stab my father to death?

Of course he was.

I wasn’t even conscious for two seconds before Meghan was leaning over me, whispering in my ear. Her breath was sweet and warm. I could feel sweat beading on my skin, my cheeks and forehead burning and the veins in my head throbbing.

“Hey genius, it didn’t work.”

The levels of exhaustion in my bones and muscles and head were unreal. Maybe I’d been overdoing the pills. Maybe the loss of sensation in my arm and fingers was just the beginning—a herald of things to come. Maybe Grandpop Henry had taken too many pills and ended up in his coma.

“Yeah.”

I tried to roll over. After a moment or two, I gave up. Much better to stay here on the floor. Let the sweat dry on my skin. Give the throbbing a chance to die down. Take a little more time to recover.

Meghan touched my forehead. I didn’t want her to. My forehead was sweaty, gross, hot.

“Are you saying you didn’t go back this time?”

“No, no…I did.”

“Then what happened?”

I didn’t want to answer any more questions. I didn’t want to think about butterfly effects or proof or my numb arm or Patty Glenhart or Billy Allen Derace or any of it. I just wanted the throbbing and the sweating to stop. I just wanted sleep.

“Mickey Wade, will you please answer me?”

“No. I won’t. You should go.”

“Hey, what’s wrong?”

“Just please go away. I need to rest.”

Hurt flashed in her eyes, only to be quickly erased and replaced with anger.

“Fine,” she said, and then a few seconds later I heard my apartment door slam. And a little while after that, the Frankford El thundered by, rolling into the station. Somehow I crawled up to the houndstooth couch using only one arm. I curled up best I could, trying not to think about the cushion that was still damp with Vitamin Water, trying not to think about anything.

Except the one thing I couldn’t help thinking about.

Billy Allen Derace.

I slept so long that it was evening again before I woke up. And I was still stupid with exhaustion. At least the throbbing in my head was almost gone, and the sweat had cooled and dried on my skin. On the downside, my right arm was still useless. Numb. Dead.

I fished an old scarf out of a plastic bag in Grandpop’s closet, then used it to make a lame sling for my right arm, just so it wouldn’t be hanging next to my body, flopping around as I moved. I thought about using some of my remaining cash on a proper sling. But beer was a cheaper fix. Maybe tomorrow.

The El rumbled past my windows, came to a grinding stop at the station, bringing commuters home from work. But very few of them would be climbing off the train and walking to their homes in Frankford. They would be walking down the stairs and hoping to catch the 59 or the K at the mini-terminal up Arrott Street, where they’d be transported to safer parts of near Northeast Philly. Or they’d be riding the El down to the end of the line, Bridge and Pratt, just ten blocks away, where they’d take buses to the upper Northeast or suburbs. They wouldn’t linger in Frankford any longer than they had to. Their parents may have stopped to browse some of the shops along the avenue, but those days were gone now.

I ate a plate of apples and had a few spoonfuls of peanut butter for dessert. I finished off four cans of Golden Anniversary and didn’t feel a thing.

My mom had called three times today. The first two messages were the same litany—how’s the job hunt, did you visit your grandfather, we’d really like you to come to dinner soon. The third however, was different.

Mickey, your grandfather’s awake.

Grandpop was staring at me.

His eyes would focus for a moment, then turn away, as if he was too tired to maintain eye contact. Then they’d roll, and he’d move his tongue around his dry mouth like he was preparing to speak. But no words came out. He couldn’t move his arms or legs. The only movements were in his eyes and lungs—gently inflating and pushing up against his ribs, and then deflating a moment later.

“Hi, Grandpop.”

The old man focused on me for a brief moment, and then his eyes rolled elsewhere.

My mom was in the room with us. She’d left work early that afternoon when she received the call from the hospital, and waited here until I showed up. Now it was my turn, she said.

Turn for what, exactly?

There was little love lost between my mother and her father-in-law. She felt obligated to invite him to family events—and my grandpop almost always accepted, perhaps out of the same, misguided sense of obligation. But they rarely spoke, except to say “Merry Christmas” or “Yeah, Happy Easter” or my grandpop to ask where my mom was keeping the beer, or my mom to ask Grandpop if he wanted more potato salad. Sometimes I thought she kept up the charade for my benefit, that I shouldn’t be deprived of my Wadcheck heritage.

She reached out to hug me.

“Why don’t you come for dinner later?”

I only half-hugged her back—mainly because I had shoved my dead right hand into my jeans pocket. Letting it hang loose would be suspicious, and putting it up in my scarf sling would seal the deal. Mom would frog-march me down to the ER in seconds.

“We’ll see.”

“We have to talk, Mickey. About your grandfather. And what to do with him.”

He was staring at us.

“Mom, he’s right here, you know.”

“I know that. Anyway, try for six. You can just walk up Oxford…”

“I know where you live.”

“Funny, you don’t act like it.”

“Yeah, Mom. Bye.”

Another five minutes passed before I’d worked up the courage to start asking questions. Grandpop, limited to eye contact, seemed to encourage me. He’d shoot me a stare, as if to say Well, get on with it before giving up and rolling his eyes and taking another labored breath.

“Grandpop, I found the pills.”

This got his attention. Dead stare.

“I’ve used the pills. I’ve walked around in the past, just like you must have.”

Dead stare.

“I also looked through your papers and found the files about my dad.”

Dead stare.

“I also know who used to live downstairs.”

That finally provoked a reaction. Grandpop’s eyes narrowed. His mouth moved like he was trying to pry a piece of bread from the roof of his mouth, but he couldn’t.

“What were you trying to do? Were you trying to prevent dad’s murder?”

Grandpop’s chest rose more quickly now. His eyes darted to the door, then back to me. He opened them wide, and then they rolled away again, like he was lost in exhaustion.

“What were you going to do?”

There was a rumbling in his throat now—an animal growl that started low and gradually increased in volume. His right hand trembled and began to close in a loose fist.

“Grandpop? I need to know what you were going to do.”

His eyes opened again and locked on mine. His jaw dropped a fraction of an inch.

Then he slowly turned his head and there was nothing.

After another twenty minutes, I left the hospital and walked back to the apartment.

I’d had enough.

Enough of the pills. Enough of the calls. Enough of the past. I put the plastic bottle of pills back in the medicine cabinet and, after a few minutes of deliberation, I slipped the padlock through the steel eye on the medicine cabinet and snapped it shut.

There were more calls from my mom but I ignored them. No, I would not be joining my mom and her boyfriend for dinner in Northwood this evening. I would be staying home and dining on apples, peanut butter and a new six-pack of Golden Anniversary I’d purchased just for the occasion. Which pretty much broke the bank, but so what.

I’d had enough of the past.

The only music I had in the apartment was my father’s old albums. My CD player was in storage, and the disk drive on my laptop was broken. But I didn’t want to listen to any of my father’s music. Nothing old. Not now.

The only books I owned were musty old crime paperbacks and collections of classic journalism—most of them picked up at that mystery bookstore on Chestnut Street. I used to walk in with twenty bucks, and the proprietor, Art, would send me out with a small shopping bag full of beat-up paperbacks. The appeal was simple: the novels acted like little portals into the past. I’d had enough of that to last me for a while.

The journalism and memoirs, too, were vintage: Hunter Thompson. Charles Bukowski. Joan Didion. John Gregory Dunne. Pete Dexter. Ancient history. Journalism was dying.

Everything around me was drowning in the past. The scrapbooks, full of old photos.

Like that scrapbook, full of images of my father as a soldier in Vietnam.

What’s embarrassing is how little I know about my father’s time there. I know he served two tours. I also know he volunteered for the army to avoid the draft—he was able to pick a better spot. My mother would make vague references to my dad shooting machine guns from helicopters and running through the jungle while tripping on acid. Then again, she also swore that my father had a secret Vietnamese half-family, and one day, they’d show up fresh from Saigon and demand to live in our house and eat our food.

It was the “eating our food” part that seemed to worry my mom the most.

I remember exactly one Vietnam War story, which came right from my father’s lips. I was in the basement, and a cockroach skittered across my leg. I was about five. At that age, roaches terrified the shit out of me. I screamed and bolted upstairs, and my face smashed right into my father’s hard belly. “Roach! Roach!” I was yelling.

“Hey, cool your tool,” my dad told me. “Cockroaches are nothing. In the war we had scorpions, and they’d climb in your boots when you weren’t looking. If you didn’t shake them out of your boot, you were in trouble. One guy I knew stuck his foot inside his boot, turned white, then started yelling. He died a few minutes later.”

That’s my one Vietnam story.

Now that I thought about it, our longest conversations—consider that a euphemism—were about dying or death.

My first ever memory of my father was the two of us walking next to an in-ground pool. I must have been two or three years old. No idea where we were; nobody in family could afford a three-foot vinyl pool, let alone the in-ground version.

But the pool had a cover on it, weighed down with decorative stones at the edges. I must have started to walk near the pool, because my father’s hand clamped down on my shoulder. Uh-uh, he’d said. You go in there, there’d be no more Mickey.

No more Mickey.

The best definition of death I’d ever heard.

I laid back on the couch and stared at the ceiling and did absolutely nothing except take a sip of beer every so often. I thought about my arm, and maybe the fact that I should have it checked out. This wasn’t a joke; I had three functional fingers. What kind of job was I supposed to find where I could use only three fingers?

Maybe I could be a night watchman, just like my grandpop. Maybe that mental hospital would hire me. And then some weekend, maybe not too long from now, I would just stop working and check myself in.

I swear I heard an audible snap! as the pieces fit together in my head.

Literally, it was in the last box I checked. A collection of paystubs, bound together by a dirty and cracked rubber band.

Paystubs from the Adams Institute.

So this was the hospital where Grandpop had worked from about 1989 until he retired in 2003. A mental hospital.

No, not just a mental hospital. The same mental hospital where they kept Billy Derace, the man who witnesses say stabbed my father to death in a cheap dive.

My father. Grandpop Henry’s son.

How had Grandpop been allowed to work there? Surely there had to be some kind of background check for security guards at the hospital. Then I looked down at the envelope and saw the name: Henryk Wadcheck. The world knew my murdered father as Anthony Wade. No connection there. And I’m sure Grandpop hadn’t volunteered that information.

So was he just working there for the money? Or did he have a plot in mind?

Of course he had a plot in mind.

Because in 2002, he moved to the apartment one flight up from where Billy Derace grew up.

Because he had a locked medicine cabinet with a plastic bottle full of pills that would send him back in time.

Two events could be a coincidence. Not all of this.

And as I knelt in a messy pile of boxes and papers, there was a knock at my door.

Meghan didn’t say a word. She just walked in, placed a paper bag of groceries on the cherrywood desk. She glanced down at the mess on the floor, which, through her eyes, must have looked like I was building a wino-style nest for myself in the middle of the apartment. Then she reached into her oversized Kiplinger purse, pulled out a curled stack of papers and handed them to me.

“What’s all this?”

Meghan looked at me.

“Patty Glenhart was real.”

The top sheet was a photo of the original Bulletin story I’d first read back in 1972. “Girl Missing.” Same lead, same byline, same story.

The next sheet, however, was her death notice.

“Wait—she died?”

“Keep reading.”

The piece was from the Philadelphia Inquirer, and dated January 8, 1987. Patricia Anne Glenhart, twenty-seven years old, found beneath a truck two blocks from Frankford Avenue, wrapped in an old overcoat. She had been sexually assaulted, stabbed thirty-seven times.

“She’s dead,” I repeated.

“Yeah,” Meghan said. “She has been for over twenty years now. Mickey, let me ask you something, and please don’t mess around with my head. Please tell me the truth.”

“Of course.”

“The day you moved here, you were joking about somebody called the Frankford Slasher. Turns out he was real.”

“I told you!”

“Do you know much about the case?”

“I grew up here, so I remember hearing a lot about it. But I also wrote a short follow-up piece for the City Press a few years ago. The murders are still unsolved, as far as the police are concerned.”

“So you’re familiar with the names of the victims.”

Another snap in my head.

“Wait—Patty Glenhart was killed by the Frankford Slasher?”

Meghan nodded.

“But it was Patricia Bennett. Her married name. But her maiden name was Glenhart.”

I flicked through the rest of the papers—which were Inquirer and Daily News accounts of the Slasher. Every article after January 1987 mentioned Patty Bennett. Meghan had highlighted the name in bright yellow.

The last piece was my own, from the City Press. It was titled “Under the El.” There was a sidebar listing the fifteen known victims. In the middle of the list was Patty Bennett’s name.

“No way.”

“You wrote the piece, Mickey. Maybe you didn’t consciously remember her name, or having read her maiden name somewhere, but your subconscious sure did. So when you started having your visions about saving some little girl, you dredged her up, and…”

“No. Not possible.”

Of course I wrote the piece. I remembered agonizing over it, because I had a simple rule about writing first-person journalism pieces: namely, don’t. But it had been the anniversary of the first Slasher victim, and I had been desperate to come up with something to fill a cover slot, and once my editor heard about it, she pretty much strong-armed me into making it a personal essay/follow-up piece. She had visions of state—maybe even national—awards; instead, it was more or less ignored except by certain Frankford business owners who called for a good month to complain.

The victims of the Frankford Slasher were considered “nobodies”—female barflies, active or retired prostitutes, or other lost souls. They hopped bars—mostly Goldie’s at Pratt Street, sometimes the Happy Tap closer to Margaret Street.

The Slasher was a few years into his work before anyone noticed the pattern. First was fifty-two-year-old Maggie Childs, who lived in Oreland, a town in Montgomery County, but was reportedly a Goldie’s regular, estranged from her husband. Her body was discovered in August 1985. Just five months later, the body of sixty-eight-year-old Carol Joyce was found on her bedroom floor, naked from the waist down, and stabbed six times, with the murder weapon still lodged in her torso. Joyce lived in South Philly, but was also a Goldie’s regular. So was sixty-four-year-old Edie Pettit, who was found stabbed to death Christmas Day 1986. Just a few weeks later, in January 1987, twenty-eight-year-old Jan White, a former go-go dancer and homeless woman who slept on the street near Goldie’s, was found beneath a truck near Dyre Street. She had been sexually assaulted, stabbed forty-seven times, and wrapped in an overcoat.

Neighbors soon put pressure on the police to catch the madman responsible for the killings.

Well over a year passed before sixty-six-year-old Janet Bazell was found stabbed to death in the vestibule of her apartment building on Penn Street near Harrison. She had been out drinking in the bars under the El, trying to forget the fact that she’d been evicted from her apartment that same day, November 11, 1988. Then, on January 19, 1989, Terry Conroy, thirty, was found in her apartment on Arrott Street, just above Griscom, cut to ribbons and wearing nothing but a pair of socks.

Witnesses started to come forward; Bazell and Conroy had been seen hanging out with a young white man, barely in his twenties. Sketches were made, circulated. No arrests came of them.

With the seventh murder came a break in the case. Carol Strauss, a forty-six-year-old woman with a history of mental illness, was found stabbed thirty-six times behind a seafood shop early in the morning of April 28, 1989.

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.”