The Whites: A Novel

by Richard Price

  Unable to find work as a reporter but banking on the skills she had developed as one, she reinvented herself as a private investigator, earning just enough to take a lease on a one-bedroom walk-up near Columbia University. For a while she held on to the hope of finding her way back into the newspaper business, but that pipe dream came to an end the day she accepted an invitation to address an Ethics and Ambition seminar in the university’s J-school, the experience leaving her feeling like a still-sentient cadaver picked over by medical students in an anatomy class.

  Rather than enjoying the poetic justice of Stacey’s downfall, Billy felt torn—no, actually sorry for her, mostly ignoring the fact that she had tried to advance her career on his broken back. In fact, he had been the one to make the first move, reaching out to her with an e-mail a year after she returned to the city, and since then they had gradually, cautiously become friends. For her part, Stacey had been both astonished and humbled by his lack of vindictiveness, never once imagining that his gentle overture was motivated by anything other than old-time Christian compassion.

  When Billy finally got it up to enter the diner, he spotted her at once, sitting at a booth in the back—north of forty now, too thin, too much wine, too much late-night TV—paradiddling an unlit cigarette against the Formica and reading the paper that had shit-canned her eighteen years ago for getting it all wrong about Billy and the shooting. She was wearing a ribbed turtleneck that made her look even bonier than she was and accentuated her slightly scoliotic posture. Her hair, a blond so ashy that it was impossible to tell how gray it might be turning, was pulled back in a short, rubber band–bound ponytail, and her watchful eyes were, as always, a little too quick, as if she were jonesing for something she couldn’t have. She’d been a golden girl once, and she took her tumble hard.

  “Hey, how’s it going,” Billy said as he took a seat.

  “The meat’s so tough that it got up off the plate and beat the shit out of the coffee, which was too weak to defend itself.”

  “No kidding.”

  “The PI business sucks. I hate the people who hire me, and I hate the people they want found.”

  “I hear you.”

  “Never serve a subpoena on a guy holding a pan of bacon. I put up my arm to protect my face and ruined a perfectly good North Face coat.”

  “Good thing it was a cold day,” he said mildly, then, wanting her to get to it: “So . . .”

  “I’m back to writing.”

  “For money?”

  “Not much, but you bet.”

  “Good for you.” This could take a while.

  “I’m writing an online sex column.”

  “A what?”

  “For this e-zine, Matterhorn.”

  “What’s an e-zine?”

  “Don’t worry about it—my nom de plume is Lance Driver.”

  “A guy?”

  “A guy advising other guys.”

  “Wow, that’s . . .”

  “Yesterday I advised some moke that if your girlfriend wants to stick a finger up your ass it doesn’t mean she thinks you’re a fag.”

  “No?”

  “It means she’s curious, she wants to know your body.”

  “OK,” Billy said. “How far up?”

  Stacey finally lit her cigarette, took a quick drag, and then put it out before they could arrest her.

  “I draw the line at the first knuckle.”

  “OK,” shifting in his seat. “So what did you want to talk to me about?”

  “I have a new boyfriend.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I’m forty-five and I have a boyfriend, he’s fifty-seven and he has a girlfriend. I mean, what the fuck, right?”

  Whatever it was that she had to share, it was making her very nervous, although calling Stacey nervous was like calling water wet. When she was in a state like this it was cruel to rush her.

  “The boyfriend, what’s he do?”

  “He edits Matterhorn.”

  “He’s good to you?”

  “That’s a very considerate question.”

  “Yes? No?”

  Stacey looked off. “He’s no stranger to the vine.”

  “How much?”

  “Two bottles, maybe a little more. He’s a sweet drunk, but it’s like talking to a small child towards the end of the evening.”

  “Did you try AA?”

  “I can’t even get him to Triple A.”

  “He’ll lose you.”

  “He’ll die is what he’ll do.”

  “Threaten to walk out.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Threaten?”

  “Walk out. I haven’t had a boyfriend in eight years. I like caring about what I look like again. I like being spooned.”

  “Sounds like a problem there, Stace.”

  The waiter finally came over, the guy sporting a reddish-gray comb-over and an apron up to his sternum.

  “Try the grape jelly omelet.” Stacey coughed. “It’s excellent.”

  “Just coffee.” Then, turning back to her: “Not that I don’t enjoy seeing you, but why am I here?”

  “Are you ready for this?”

  Billy waited.

  “You remember Memori Williams had this twin sister?”

  “Shakira, right?” Billy took one of Stacey’s cigarettes; this couldn’t be good.

  “Shakira Barker. How twins can have different last names I’ll never understand.”

  Billy envisioned that couch in the living room again, Memori’s head in Tonya Howard’s lap, the entry wound above her right eye like an erupted raspberry.

  “Last I heard, Shakira was doing better,” he said hopelessly, “taking one of those mothering classes from the Children’s Initiative.”

  “Yeah, well.” Stacey took a breath. “Not no more.”

  Billy just stared at her: This is why I screen your calls, this is why I . . .

  “What happened.”

  At the end of Stacey’s tale, Billy was staring at his ashy coffee, his jaw askew with fury.

  “I need you to find someone for me,” he said.

  “I thought you would,” Stacey sliding a single sheet of paper across the table. “Got the horse right here.”

  Billy speed-scanned the document and learned that Curtis Taft was still working for the same security outfit that had employed him at the time of the triple homicide and was now living in Co-op City in the Bronx, although the place to find him this week was neither work nor home but at Columbia Presbyterian, where he was recovering from surgery on a perforated ulcer.

  “I thank you for this,” holding up the sheet.

  Stacey shrugged and then looked away, Billy sensing the mortification that still coursed through her veins over the long-ago debacle that had ended her career.

  “Seriously,” Billy said, his own mortification equal to hers, given that she’d been right about him all along: when he had fired the shot that killed a man and then entered the groin of the ten-year-old boy who had been standing behind him, he was coked to the gills. All the WGs were that night, a fact they would keep to themselves until the day they died.

  “So, Mr. Taft, how are we feeling today?” Billy’s voice burbling with rage-induced pep as he whipped back the curtain that curved around the hospital bed. The sight of his White made Billy tingle with a rush of dazed energy, made his eyes brim with light.

  “Aw, you again,” Curtis Taft moaned, rolling his fleshy head away.

  Billy couldn’t believe it: the guy had nearly doubled in size since the murders, his torso so inflated that his arms looked like flippers.

  Taft attempted to reach across himself in order to press his call button, but Billy grabbed his wrist.

  “Perforated ulcer, huh? Goddamn, from what I hear you can get that from smoking, but you smoking? Shit, you don’t even eat off plastic as far as I remember, right? Everything had to be in stone bowls, incense all over the place, a real my-body-is-my-temple-type individual. So, my theory is,” poking the
soft mound of dressing across Taft’s belly, “this right here? I think it’s just Tonya and those kids in there getting to work on you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Graves, get the fuck out of here.” He reached for the call button again, Billy this time yanking it out of the wall.

  “What’s going on over there,” the old guy on the other side of the curtain called out.

  Billy stepped over and raised the volume on his ceiling-suspended TV.

  “So,” flopping down on the side of Taft’s bed, “you hear what happened to Memori Williams’s twin sister, Shakira?”

  “Who’s Memori,” Taft said, then, barking to his roommate: “Yo, call the nurse station.”

  “Oh c’mon, you got to remember Shakira, real wallflower type? Well, that wallflower just killed a sixteen-year-old girl last week, stabbed her through the lungs with a bread knife over in Jersey City, can you believe that? She’s in Hudson County CC right now, but she’ll wind up in Clinton Correctional Institute for Child-Eating Psycho Bitches—that is, if they aren’t full up, in which case they’ll put her in Bellehaven, that temporary women’s wing they got out there in Sparta, but the ACLU is trying to get that shut down because of the rapes. We’ll see.”

  “I don’t know no Shakira nobody.” Then, attempting to sit up, barking: “I told you call the fucking nurse.”

  Billy shoved him back down, Taft grimacing through his close-cropped beard. “Now, Memori was a handful, no doubt, fighting in the cafeteria, cutting school, running away from home, always with a boy, but Shakira, she was no trouble to anybody, fourteen years old and never been kissed, had all the answers in class but too shy to raise her hand. But soon as you killed her sister . . .”

  “I din’t kill nobody, and you know it.”

  “. . . as soon as you killed her sister, all of a sudden she starts banging with the Black Barbies, gets caught with a razor in her mouth going through the metal detectors, threw a chair at a teacher, they finally sent her to a social worker, the lady says to her, ‘Kira, what happened to you?’ You know what she said back? ‘Well, somebody’s got to be my sister.’”

  “Graves, you just pissed off because you ain’t police enough to catch a fuckin’ cold. Cops like you, you just grab the first nigger you see and hope for the best. Well, it didn’t work out so well, did it.”

  “Anyways, Curtis, that was five years ago and now the kid’s a nineteen-year-old murderer with two babies of her own, and she is as fucked as fucked gets. It would probably have been better if she was in the apartment that morning and you put a bullet in her head too, because this, this is gonna be one slow-motion death she’s facing in there. So, as far as I’m concerned, they are all in there,” poking his sutured gut again, “all those angry females chewing you up from the inside out. And when they finally cut you open to see what killed your ass, you know what they’re going to find? Teeth marks, motherfucker, nothing but teeth marks.”

  “You stop that bullshit right now,” Taft said more quietly, his eyes going a little bit wide.

  “Tell me you don’t feel them,” Billy pressed. “Look at me and tell me you don’t feel them.”

  Gingerly touching his gut as if something might pop out, he looked at Billy full-on, no resistance, after all these years, no resistance, Billy’s heart slamming as he scrambled to seize the moment.

  “You were raised in the church, right? I remember interviewing your sister, she said you all were.”

  “So,” Taft said carefully.

  “So you believe in God?”

  “Who don’t believe in God.”

  “Know your Bible?”

  “Some,” Taft said, still palming himself.

  “Remember your Luke? Jesus coming on a man had so many demons inside of him that when He asked for his name . . . You remember what the man answered?”

  “Legion,” Taft said, his eyes unblinking.

  “Legion, that’s right. Legion. A whole fuckin’ battalion. And that’s what you’re dealing with too.”

  Taft removed his hand from his belly, placed it flat on the bed, then went still.

  “Now, you know and I know that the only way to get those angry bitches out of you before they can finish what they started is for you to make a clean breast of it and say what happened that day. Say it right now, say it to me, and they will be gone before you know it.”

  Taft kept staring at him, his mouth slowly going as round as a doughnut, just staring and staring until he apparently saw what he wanted to see in Billy’s eyes, that small quivering . . .

  “Graves,” his voice abruptly all the way back, “I got a better chance of cleaning you out in court for harassment than you got of giving me a motherfucking parking ticket. Where’s the goddamn nurse.”

  Billy yanked the pillow from under Taft’s head and held it an inch from his face. “You know how easy it would be to punch your ticket right now?”

  “But they know you’re here,” he said, shoving the pillow away with surprising strength for a man fresh out of surgery. “So what are you gonna do, huh? This a public building, you gonna kill me? Kill that man in the other bed, too? What are you gonna do. Fuck you.”

  “Hi there, everything OK?” The nurse in the doorway sounded cheerful but in charge.

  “Nah, he’s just upset over me being like this,” Taft said.

  “You’ll be fine,” she said, no one’s fool. “Are you just about done in here, sir? I think your friend—”

  “Needs his rest,” Billy finished for her, then, leaning over Taft as if to say goodbye, whispered, “You will never get rid of me,” and walked out of the room.

  Unable to leave the hospital, Billy paced the main hall atrium, now and then charging halfway back to Taft’s room, then reining himself in until a security guard finally approached him to see what was up. Flashing his ID, Billy muttered something about a sick cop, the square badge at first backing off leery, then quickly losing interest.

  And then Billy saw her, Taft’s wife, tall and gracefully obese, pushing a two-year-old in a stroller across the sun-dappled floor. He reflexively moved to her, then blocked her way.

  “Hey, Patricia, right?”

  She stopped and stared, not able to place him.

  “Bill Graves, I was at your wedding.”

  She reared back, got taller, gave him a face like a fortress. “I remember you.”

  As well she should. When he had heard that Taft, less than a year after the murders, was getting married, Billy and Whelan, who was about to retire in any event, put on suits and crashed the wedding. Right after the minister asked if anyone objected, Billy sang out, “Right over here, because that bastard is a baby-killing triple murderer. He did it once, he’ll do it again.”

  They got their asses good and kicked that day; half the wedding party, both male and female, were correction officers related by blood to Taft. But it was worth it just to ruin the ceremony—or maybe not, given that the incident led to his being transferred to Night Watch, his second banishment to the underworld, most bosses believing that working any kind of steady midnights was just this side of a firing squad.

  “So,” Billy said amiably, “I just want to know, how’s it working out for you two, everybody happy?”

  “You have no right to be accosting me,” her voice as stiff as her posture.

  “I just want to ask you, does he ever wake up in the middle of the night all covered in sweat and screaming his head off? You know what I’m talking about, right?”

  She waved to the same security guard across the floor, but Billy re-tinned him without even looking in his direction, the man once again backstepping to his post.

  Billy felt light as a feather, out-of-his-mind spontaneous. “How’s he as a dad?” nodding to the stroller, kid number three from what he’d heard. “A real disciplinarian I’ll bet.”

  She attempted to walk away, but Billy, astonishing himself, blocked her escape.

  “One last bed question: does he ever get up, say, about
six in the morning, come back about an hour later, a little winded, maybe a little bloody? I’m just curious.”

  “I work for Christian Outreach,” her voice suddenly a hoarse, teary mess, “I help people, and you have no right to talk to me like this.”

  No, he didn’t; suddenly red-faced, Billy turned from her without another word and walked away.

  Finally striding across the central atrium toward the exit, Billy was startled to see Pavlicek coming in through the revolving doors, moving like a sleepwalker, his eyes off-center and shining as he made his way through the slanting beams of captured sunlight to the elevator banks.

  “John!”

  “Hey,” Pavlicek said flatly, turning to Billy as if they had just seen each other an hour ago.

  “What are you doing here?” Billy’s voice still burbling with adrenaline.

  “My doctor’s here.”

  “You OK?”

  “Yeah, just some tests.”

  “Tests for what?”

  “Cholesterol’s through the roof.”

  “Yeah? What’s he got you on, Lipitor? Crestor?”

  “Vytorin.”

  “Jimmy Daly takes that. He says it’s a lifesaver.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “You’re not here to see Curtis Taft by any chance,” Billy asked, his voice sly-dog low.

  “Curtis Taft works here?” Pavlicek blinked.

  Billy took a moment, then: “He’s a patient. I just about put my hands around his throat.”

  “Still fucking with him, huh?” Pavlicek sounded elsewhere, his eyes over Billy’s shoulder as if there was bigger game to be had.