Free Expiration Date by Duane Swierczynski Page B

before “Mr. Roboto” made it embarrassing to like Styx.
    I finished my beer and wondered if maybe I really was losing my mind, and imagining all of this. Maybe I was the one lingering in a coma, victim of a drug problem I wasn’t even aware I had.
    At the bottom of a milk crate I found a scrapbook. It had big obnoxious brass rings holding the thick velvet cover and the stiff, crinkly pages together. It was the kind of photo album where you peel up the plastic, from left to right, place your photos on the white sticky backing, then smooth it back down. Unless you had the patience and steady hand of a sober monk, you’d always end up with crinkles. And it looked like Grandpop Henry had tied one on when he slapped this thing together.
    I flipped through the pages for a few minutes before I realized I had been absolutely wrong about my father’s death.

VI
     

     

This Could Be the Last Time
     

     
     
     
     
     

My father, Anthony Wade, the Human Jukebox, played three sets at Brady’s, from nine until about eleven forty. That’s when some witnesses say twenty-year-old William Allen Derace—because all killers come with three names—walked into Brady’s, sat down, ordered a mug of Budweiser and a sirloin steak.
    He sat in a booth alone, and watched my father, the Human Jukebox, perform some Stones, Doors and Elvis cover songs. Derace’s steak remained untouched; it sat on top of wax paper in its red plastic basket until after the cops had come and gone. He did not drink any of his Bud.
    And then at approximately 11:45, five minutes before my father was set to take a break, and in the middle of a guitar solo during his cover of the Rolling Stones’ “The Last Time,” Billy Allen Derace walked up to the stage, smiled, showed my father the steak knife in his hand, muttered something, then began to stab him in the chest.
    By the second knife blow my father’s aorta had been punctured, and he had probably gone into shock, but he still managed to lift his Guitorgan to parry the third strike. The Daily News had published a photo of the guitar, with a slash mark running down its black lacquered body and into the fret board. Derace stabbed my father a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, then a final seventh time before a pair of off-duty firefighters pulled him away from the stage and subdued him. Derace, however, managed to wriggle free and escape through the back alley.
    The whole thing took about thirty seconds.

     
    Billy derace wasn’t drunk. He hadn’t consumed so much as a swallow of beer. The mug he’d ordered, which sat on the table, was untouched.
    And my father’s death wasn’t a brawling “accident.” Multiple witness interviewed by the Philadelphia Police Department, the Philadelphia Bulletin and the Philadelphia Daily News said that yeah, that crazy Billy Derace just strolled up to the tiny stage and started stabbing him in the chest with the steak knife. My dad didn’t even have the chance to throw a punch. Moments later, Billy Derace was beaten to the ground.
    Not long after, Billy Derace somehow vanished.
    Police found Billy Derace at his then-current residence—nearby Adams Institute, which was (and is) one of the top psychiatric hospitals in the country. It has been around since 1813, first known as the Asylum for Persons Deprived of the Use of Their Reason, and later as Frankford Asylum for the Insane, and then finally the more PC-sounding Adams Institute, named after a wealthy family who had owned a buttload of farmland nearby and later lent their name to an adjacent avenue.
    Two cops walked into the room with handcuffs and guns, but Billy Derace already had restraints around his wrists and ankles.
    And he’d had them on for much of the past twenty-four hours, removed only for a sponge bath.
    Derace, the doctors at the Adams Institute told police, was near comatose, with occasional fits and seizures. He was bound to the bed for his own protection.
    One doctor was quoted: Mitchell DeMeo.
    No, Dr.