Filthy Frankie was to have been best man at the marriage of Murfin and Miss Bzowski and doubtless would have been had he not been found floating in the Monongahela River on the wedding day, the back of his head blown off by a shotgun blast.
Frankie’s connections Back East (New York) started feuding over the spoils with his connections Out West (Las Vegas) and the feud developed into a minor war that left dead bodies about. Murfin, forced to take sides in the war, unfortunately chose the wrong side. As a result he was hailed before a grand jury, but with the aid of an expensive lawyer he managed to escape being indicted. However, it cost him his job, his savings, and his treasured 1957 yellow Cadillac convertible.
Burdened, or perhaps blessed, with a young wife who was expecting their first child Murfin took the only job he could get. It was obtained for him in a Pittsburgh steel mill by his father-in-law. It was a job that required Murfin to rise early, work hard, get his hands dirty, and he loathed it. He soon saw that union officials had to work nowhere nearly as hard as did the rank and file members and within a year he was secretary-treasurer of his local union.
Soon after that he went on the steelworkers’ payroll as a full-time organizer. He was an excellent organizer and in 1960 when he was twenty-two he switched to the Public Employees Union. By the time he was twenty-six he was the PEU’s Director of Organization.
“You know,” he said as we drove east on Pennsylvania Avenue, “that was the best goddam job I ever had in my life, that time when I was with Frankie.”
“You’re lucky you didn’t get killed,” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said, “if Frankie could’ve stayed alive, there’s no telling where I might be today.”
“Vice lord of Pittsburgh, huh?”
He looked at me. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Not a thing,” I said.
When we got to Twelfth and Pennsylvania Avenue we turned right, drove a block, and started looking for a place to park. The house number that Audrey had given me was in the middle of a block that so far had resisted the renaissance of Capitol Hill which seemed bent on turning the area into another Georgetown. The renaissance meant, in effect, that a house that a speculator bought for $15,000 in 1970 would, with a little renovation, command an $80,000 price today.
The block that we parked in was a sullen stretch of row houses, most of them three stories tall and most of them in evident need of paint. It was largely an all-black block lined with aging cars. Some of the cars had no wheels and some of them had no doors and nearly all of them that had no wheels or doors had no glass. Some kids played in and near several of the cars but they didn’t play very hard. At three o’clock on an August afternoon in Washington it was too hot to play hard.
When we got out of the Mercedes Murfin made sure that all of the doors were locked. He loosened his tie and I wondered whether he had picked it out that morning while he was still asleep. It was a big, wide fat orange and green tie that screamed and fought for attention with a French blue shirt, a reddish plaid jacket, and lilac windowpane slacks. I also wondered if Murfin were colorblind. It was something that I had often wondered.
The house that we were looking for was in a little better condition than most of its neighbors. It was three stories tall with an English basement and somebody had bothered to give it a coat of fresh white paint and put new screens on all the windows. The house also boasted a covered porch with a wooden railing. A man in an undershirt sat on the porch in a tilted-back kitchen chair, his feet up on the railing, a can of beer in his hand. He was a black man of about sixty with close-cropped white frizzy hair. He sat underneath a dime-store sign that advertised rooms for rent.
Murfin and I headed for the cement walk that split the narrow, shallow front yard in half and led to the house. The yard had a few patches of brown grass that seemed to have given up and died in the August heat. The rest of the yard was hard-packed brown dirt in which nothing could grow. For decoration there were a few empty bottles that nobody had bothered to collect yet.
We heard the scream when we were about twenty feet from the walk that led to the house. The man on the porch heard it, too, because the front legs of his tilted-back chair came down on the porch floor with a hard crack. He turned his head as if he could look into his house and see who was screaming.
The screen door flew open and she burst out of the house, all pale brown and dark red from the blood that ran from her nose and mouth down her chin to her throat and her breasts. She raced down the steps of the porch to the sidewalk and paused. She looked down at herself and touched the blood that had reached her bare breasts. She stared at the blood for a moment and then almost absently wiped it on the side of her leg. The leg was bare, too, as was the rest of her. Sally Raines was naked.
I yelled, “Sally!” and she looked my way, but I don’t think she really saw me. Her eyes jumped from me back to the house. She threw her head back and screamed again. It was a long scream that rang of terror and panic and near hysteria.
In the middle of her scream the door opened and the two men with the guns came out. They wore ski masks. One mask was blue and the other was red and I remember thinking that ski masks in August must be hot and sweaty.
The man with the red mask waved his gun almost idly at the white-haired black man who still clutched his can of beer. The black man shrank back, pressing himself against the wall.
The man in the blue mask moved quickly and smoothly down the three porch steps. He went into a crouch and used both hands to aim his pistol. It was a revolver with what looked like a six-inch barrel. He aimed it at Sally Raines.
She stopped screaming and started to run. She ran down the sidewalk. I snatched up an empty pint bottle that had once contained Old Overholt, a pretty good rye. I threw it sidearmed and I threw it hard. The bottle glittered, spinning in the August sun as it flew at the man in the blue ski mask who was aiming his pistol at Sally Raines. It hit him high on the left arm. A lucky throw. It didn’t make him drop his pistol. It just made him look at me. He changed his stance with a jump and came down in a crouch again, his pistol aimed at my head or my heart. It was hard to tell. I didn’t move.
The other man, the one in the red ski mask, glanced our way almost casually and then slowly raised his pistol with both hands. He took his time. He shot Sally Raines twice in the back and once in the head as she ran down the sidewalk. The first bullet struck her in the small of the back and her arms went out and up toward the sky as though there was something up there that she wanted to touch. The second shot slammed into her left shoulder and spun her around in a curiously graceful motion, almost like a pirouette. The third shot went into her face, just below her left eye, and she may have been dead by the time she crumpled to the ground although they say that it takes longer than that to die.
The man who had shot Sally Raines looked at Murfin and me. Then he moved over and touched the other man on the shoulder. The other man nodded and started backing toward the house, still pointing his gun at me. The two men turned and disappeared through the screen door, letting it slam behind them.
I didn’t move for a while. Neither did Murfin. The man on the porch slowly raised his beer can to his mouth. Another screen door slammed. It seemed to come from the rear of the house. A moment or two later we heard a car engine start. And then we heard a car drive off.
They started coming out of their houses then. They came singly and in groups of two or three to stare down at the dead young woman who lay awkwardly on the sidewalk. At first they murmured about it and then their voices rose as they started telling each other what had happened. One of them, a woman of about fifty, started to sob.