The Wrong Wake

Story brief

Synopsis

Wally Krause is seventy-one, widowed, and starving — not for food, but for the feeling of being needed. So he attends the funerals of people he never met, signs the guest book with a borrowed name, and eats well for the first time all week. His late wife still sits at his kitchen table and tells him exactly what she thinks of it. Then coffee blurs a house number in the obituaries. Forty-one Chestnut, or seventy-one? He picks wrong. Inside, a grieving crime family is waiting on a cousin from Palermo they have never laid eyes on. Wally is handed a plate of manicotti, a false name, and six weeks he was never supposed to survive. The widow, Gina Salvati, sees through him in a single glance — and hires him anyway. Her underboss intends to kill her son before the leaves turn, and a decent man with no stake in the empire may be the only bodyguard money can't buy. He is catastrophically unqualified and quietly perfect for the job. He settles a war between two capos by making them write down what happened, the way he once handled two teenagers holding acid bottles. He teaches contract law as chemistry: people collide, bonds form, heat gets released, someone ends up unstable. He stops a shooting war in a penthouse by pointing out that nobody in the room has isolated a single fact. The family starts calling him the professor. The FBI starts calling him a problem. And then the arithmetic of the house comes due — because the one man Wally showed mercy to turns up dead in a two-inch item in a Tucson newspaper, and Wally finally understands what building he has been standing in. Kneeling on a warehouse floor between two gunmen, he doesn't beg. He asks a question. It buys him four seconds of doubt, and four seconds is a gap a woman can walk through.

Tone

Deadpan, warm, and quietly lethal — a working-class character study that keeps walking into an organized-crime drama and refusing to flinch. Funny until it isn't, and honest about the difference.

Setting

Present day, ninety minutes east of Allentown: a Pennsylvania funeral home, a mob kitchen table, and an Atlantic City penthouse.

This original feature screenplay by David R. Wilcox is available for option, development, or production. A complete review copy is available to qualified producers, literary managers, and development executives on request.