The Whites: A Novel

by Richard Price

  “You all right?”

  “I just told you.”

  “I mean otherwise.”

  “It’s a funny day. I’m late for a meeting.”

  “A meeting here?” Billy not sure whether he was still too jacked to keep track of the conversation or it was just careening off point on its own.

  The elevator arrived, Pavlicek silently giving him his back as he stepped inside.

  “Hey, what’s your doctor’s name?”

  “What for?” Pavlicek towering over everyone else in the car.

  Billy tapped his own heart. “You’re not the only one.”

  “Go to someone up by you,” Pavlicek said as the door began to close. “My guy’s not all that.”

  The sixteen-year-old Yemeni kid lay flat on his back, arms flung wide, staring up with his one unexploded eye at a cardboard placard taped to the ceiling: “SCREW THE DOG—BEWARE OF OWNER.” Above the words was a caricature of a stubble-jawed bruiser aiming a hand cannon at the viewer, the circumference of the muzzle almost as big around as the guy’s head. The real shooter—who had accidentally killed his best friend while showing off his father’s gun, which had been hidden beneath the cash register—was on the floor too, sitting at the end of a food aisle. Glaze-faced and weeping, he was being interviewed by Alice Stupak, squatting on her hams as she attempted to gently tweeze out his version of events.

  As Billy stood by the front window debriefing the first uniform on the scene, Gene Feeley came into the store with a young man, not a cop, the kid involuntarily inhaling when he first saw the body.

  “Back in the day the homicide rate around here was so high, Jackie, that the precinct had to split in two just to keep pace with the bodies,” Feeley explained. “But those days are dead and gone, so they say, although I would no sooner walk down the street unarmed around here than I would if I was living in Iraq.”

  “What’s going on, Gene?” As far as Billy knew, Feeley had the night off.

  “My sister’s kid, he’s doing a paper for his journalism class, I thought I’d help out.”

  “No kidding,” Billy said, thinking, The guy never shows up when he’s supposed to, now he starts showing up when he isn’t.

  “Uncle Gene,” the kid said, taking in the gun cartoon directly over the body. “Look at that.”

  “Go on over there,” Feeley said, taking his nephew’s iPad. “I’ll take your picture, you can tweet it on Facebook.”

  “Maybe you should wait until they finish,” Billy said.

  “No problem, Billy,” one of the CSUs said, raising up from the body and taking the iPad from Feeley. “Go ahead, Gene, get in with the kid.”

  A moment later, the store owner, the hem of his pajama bottoms peeking out from beneath his trouser cuffs, finally stumbled into the store, his gun permit held out before him like a magic charm. Avoiding looking at either the dead kid or his son, he walked right past Billy to Feeley, the most senior-looking cop on the set.

  “Talk to her,” Feeley said, chucking a thumb at Stupak, who was coming back up to the front.

  “Talk to me? What’s wrong with you?” she snapped. “Your hearing aid on the fritz?”

  “Watch your mouth,” Feeley said, heading for the door.

  “Where are you going?” she squawked, her arms outstretched in mock bewilderment.

  “I got to be somewhere.”

  “Somewhere where,” she blew. “You’re here, here’s where you got to be, so how about you stun the shit out of everybody and do your fucking job for a change.”

  “Alice,” Billy pulling her back.

  “You better talk to her,” Feeley said to Billy.

  “Talk to me?” The front door shut with a jingle.

  “Alice . . .”

  “Talk to me?”

  “Take it easy, he’s off tonight.”

  “Oh yeah?” she said, grabbing the store owner by the arm and steering him off to a neutral corner. “How can you tell?”

  MILTON RAMOS

  He sat in his den. He had a den now, damp-smelling in a way he couldn’t eradicate but a den nonetheless. He didn’t even know what a den was when he was a kid. And not just a den: he had a house, a goddamn house, was the unencumbered owner of a two-story, three-bedroom, mock mock-Tudor. Of course, the neighborhood was so shitty that he had to enclose the entire exterior in decorative iron security grilles, which made it look like a birdcage for a pterodactyl, but it was his, earned and paid for. And he had Sofia, sitting next to him now, watching, for the second evening in a row, Pocahontas. He must have seen that thing seventy-five times, Snow White, Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty, Mulan, and all the others at least as many times as that. But he never grew bored, because what he was really doing was watching her watch the movie.

  She was built like him, like her late mother, and she came in for her share of schoolyard torture. When he had been the porker back then, the teasing had quickly ended after the ringleader lost two of his brand-new front teeth to a cross pipe on the monkey bars. But she was a girl, and he had no idea how girls were supposed to deal with that kind of cruelty and so he let her watch slim pretty young females being rescued from their tormentors by handsome boys, night after night after night. A real father of the year.

  Big, fast, and devoid of mercy—ever since he was a kid, that had been the rap on him. Everyone outside his family had always been afraid of him—in school, then later on the street, then later on the Job, even though he had never provoked a fight in his life. Devoid of mercy, devoid of humor, devoid of personality. But he loved deep if not demonstrably: his mother, his two brothers, and his wife, all gone now. And this kid right here, who—fortunately, he guessed—had been an infant when her mother passed.

  “Give me a sip,” she said, nodding to the glass of Yellow Chartreuse in his hand.

  “Cut it out.”

  “I want some,” she wheedled in a high teasing voice, the same ritual every night.

  “It’s medicine, I told you that.”

  “I’m sick,” dropping her forehead to his arm. “Please?”

  He dipped a finger in the glass and touched it to her tongue. “It’s bedtime, go upstairs.”

  “Carry me.”

  “I can’t, my back hurts,” he said, wincing.

  “Maybe you had too much medicine.”

  Milton winced again, this time for real. “Go ahead, Marilys is waiting, I’ll come up later.”

  Moving like Creeping Jesus, Sofia reluctantly headed for the stairs, placing one foot then the other on each riser, groaning like an old lady before stepping up to the next. One foot then the other, her nightly protest march.

  “Go ahead now.”

  Milton switched to ESPN, then reached for the lined sheet of yellow paper on the coffee table, so obsessively handled today that it was starting to blacken along the folds. He left it unopened in his lap.

  He tried to concentrate on the last five minutes of the Nets-Thunder game, but his thoughts drifted, as they often did after a few shots, to Sofia’s mother, Sylvia, seven years earlier the victim of a hit-and-run driver on Bronx Park East, directly in front of the geriatric hospital where she had worked for a radiologist.

  If he had to describe their eight-year marriage in two words, if he was allowed to go back in time and rescript their wedding cake, he would choose, in sky-blue icing, Good Enough, as in good enough companions, good enough lovers, good enough parents. Good Enough, as in if God or some fortune-teller had told him, early on in their relationship, that Sylvia was to be his mate until the end of his days, he wouldn’t have complained. Except the end of her days came first.

  Marilys Irrizary, Milton’s housekeeper and Sofia’s five-days-a-week stand-in mother, had a distinct tread: halting and striving for cat-burglar light, as if just leaving the bedroom of a colicky baby. But she was a short, solid, broad-foot Guatemalan, and he could always hear her on the move from anywhere in the house.

  She came into the den and stood directly behind where he sat on the
couch.

  “She’s waiting for you.”

  “I’ll be up,” draining his ’Treuse without turning to look at her.

  “I finished everything I could, but there’s still stuff in the dryer.”

  “You’re going home?”

  She leaned over his shoulder for the empty glass on the coffee table, the sweetish tang still hanging in the air.

  “I could stay.”

  Most witnesses at the scene of the accident, the vehicular homicide, disagreed on the make and model, let alone the color, of the car. One old guy was able to come up with a description of the plate, which he said was out of state, had a tree splitting the numbers against a blue-orange sunset.

  “Or I could go.”

  Visiting that half-cocked witness on the sly two days later, Milton asked him how he could possibly remember the tree splitting the digits against a blue-orange sunset yet not recall any numbers or letters off the same.

  3-T-R, left side of the tree, the old man said. It had come back to him that very morning on the toilet.

  Make and model?

  Black maybe gray Accord or Camry, those cars to him like two peas in a pod.

  The case wasn’t Milton’s, of course, the visit enough to get him suspended for hindering the investigation of the local squad, although probably not really, given the mitigating circumstances, emotional duress, extreme grief, et cetera. Nonetheless, he kept the news of the partial plate to himself.

  From one flight above, the front door opened, then closed, followed by the jingle of keys in the lock, Marilys heading for home.

  Three weeks after Milton’s talk with the eyewitness, a middle-aged male with a suspended driver’s license lay on his deathbed in Cherokee County Memorial Hospital after suffering grievous wounds in a car accident. Aaron Artest, an individual who lived in Queens but had unexpectedly returned to his hometown of Union, South Carolina, about the same time as Sylvia’s funeral, told investigators that an old rust-bodied sedan with heavily tinted side windows had pulled up next to his gray Accord—plate 3TR-AM7—as he was driving alone on Highway 150. The unseen driver kept apace for a minute or so, as if to make sure he had Artest’s attention, before poking a shotgun out of the passenger window, which, naturally, inspired Artest to haul ass. Then his brakes, which had been serviced not even a month before, on the day he left New York, must’ve somehow given out.

  “No, he didn’t fire at me,” Artest said to the cops. Then: “It looked to be a Nova, no wait, a Caprice, hang on, hold on.” Then his dying words: “Just give me a minute.”

  Milton clicked off the TV without registering the outcome, retrieved his glass, poured himself another Chartreuse, then finally unfolded the paper in his lap, the names and addresses written there writhing like eels.

  Carmen Graves. RN, St. Ann’s Hospital.

  Det. Sgt. William Graves, Manhattan Night Watch.

  684 Tuckahoe Road, Yonkers.

  Declan Ramon, 8. Carlos Eammon, 6.

  Immaculate Conception Day, 24 Van der Donck Street, Yonkers.

  Big, fast, and devoid of mercy.

  All he could say in his defense was that his older brother had been worse.

  From two floors above he finally began to hear his daughter plaintively calling out for him. He had no idea how long she’d been at it, the sleepy but insistent oscillations of her voice coming down on his ears like the offbeat siren of some alien ambulance.

  CHAPTER 5

  It was one of those fortuitous early mornings when Billy was able to crawl into bed a half hour before Carmen had to get up, the bakery warmth of her body coming at him as he raised the quilt, making him both alert and drowsy. Still asleep, she rolled into him, a heat-radiant breast fanning flat against his ribs, an equally hotted-up thigh carelessly flung over the front of his suddenly ridiculous boxers. But she was still lightly snoring, and with the kids about to overrun the base camp it was better for him to concentrate on the stray curls of her hair that had managed to find their way up into his nose. It was all he could do not to sneeze.

  “So you’re calmed down about Taft now?” she asked him thirty minutes later.

  “Yeah, but I think I want to do this thing,” Billy watching her from the bed as she slipped into her whites.

  “You should,” turning away from him to brush her hair.

  He could hear both boys flying out of their bedroom as if someone had shouted, “Incoming.”

  “But why should I?”

  She took a breath. “Because you want to. Because it would make you feel better. Because it’s good karma.”

  “It’s not like we’re rolling in dough.”

  “Well,” applying mascara now, which as far as he was concerned was like applying black paint to coal, “we’re not exactly on the street either.”

  Something containing liquid shattered in the kitchen, neither of them reacting.

  “So you really think I should?”

  “I think you want my permission or something.”

  “I don’t need your permission.”

  “I agree.”

  “So I should do it, right?”

  “Who.”

  “Billy Graves, looking for Miss Worthy.”

  Hearing his flat Irish municipal accent from the other side of her door, and most likely assuming he was just another Hudson County homicide detective, Edna Worthy—the grandmother of Martha Timberwolf, the girl murdered by Memori Williams’s twin sister, but really by Curtis Taft, if you wanted Billy’s opinion—called out, “It’s open,” letting him into her Jersey City apartment without so much as looking away from the TV.

  She apparently made ends meet as a baby farmer, three subsidized foster kids roaming her overheated living room like cats, although as old and heavy as she was, she could barely rise off the couch.

  “Can I sit?” Billy asked.

  She gestured vaguely to the left side of the room, nothing there like a chair.

  At first glance, Miss Worthy, a TV remote in one hand, a cell phone in the other, seemed unaffected by the catastrophic loss that had been visited on her only two days earlier, Billy chalking up her indifferent demeanor to a long, tragedy-packed life; it wasn’t as if he hadn’t witnessed this kind of non-reaction in people before. But then he noticed the carefully arranged semicircle of plastic-framed photos on the Cheerios-littered coffee table in front of her, the murdered girl staring back at her grandmother from all of her ages, toddler to confirmation to junior high school cap and gown, the face consistently heavy and glum, as if she had known her fate from the day she was born.

  “Martha was the only blood to me left,” Miss Worthy eventually said, reaching across herself to pick up a toddler who came close enough for her to grab. “Now she’s gone, too.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” Billy said.

  “She helped me take care of these kids, and so how am I supposed to do that now. This ain’t a hotel, but you should have seen where they was before.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said again, glancing at a card table strewn with the silver-foiled leftovers of a half dozen condolence casseroles.

  “Well, they all going back now. Except maybe this one here,” lifting up the kid in her lap like a kitten. “She looks like Martha a little, maybe she can grow up to be some kind of conversation to me, but it’s gonna be a race between her growing up and me growing down.”

  “I hear you.”

  “So what do you want to know I ain’t already said ten times to the other detectives?” Miss Worthy asked, palming crumbs off the girl.

  “Nothing, really. I just came by to offer to help you with the burial, you know, if you need it.”

  Miss Worthy finally looked at him straight on, her cat’s-eye glasses catching the light. “You police or not? ’Cause if you’re not, I’m calling them right now,” holding up the business card of the last sport-jacketed individual before Billy to come into her home.

  When Billy entered Brown’s Family Funeral Home, Redman, draped in his work apron,
was displaying, from the breastbone up, a man in his fifties to two of his younger relations in the middle of his living-roomturned-chapel. Not ten feet away, Redman’s son, velcroed into his activity walker, watched SpongeBob on a fifty-four-inch flat-screen, the volume insanely high, although no one seemed to be bothered by it.

  “That don’t look like him,” the male of the two said.

  “Did you see him when they brought him in here?” Redman asked.

  “I’m just saying . . .”

  “If you want, I can try to put him back the way he was,” winking at Billy.

  Billy sidled up to the TV and turned down the volume. A few minutes later, unhappy but not sure what to do about it, the relations left the building without saying goodbye.

  “So what’s up?” Redman asked, whipping the sheet off the lower half of the body, revealing a makeshift diaper fashioned from a tall kitchen Glad bag in order to capture any post-embalming leakage.

  “I want you to bury someone for me.”

  “Who.”

  “A murder vic, sixteen years old, her people don’t have dime one.”

  Redman’s wife, Nola, came in with a shopping bag of clothes: brown suit, white shirt, a tie, socks, and shoes, the suit and socks still bearing their price tags from Theo’s Discount House of Men.

  “Where is she now?”

  “Well, she lived in Jersey City.”

  “So, Essex County morgue?” Redman began muscling the pants up over the Glad-bag diaper, the effort making his face bead with sweat.

  “I assume.”

  “That’s out of state.”

  “So?”

  “That’s extra.”

  “You want my E-ZPass?”

  Redman propped the body into a sitting position so that Nola could get its arms into the shirt, their son now rolling across the room while chewing on a take-out menu.

  “How much do you want to spend?”

  “How do I know?” Billy said. “How much does it cost?”

  “Depends on the casket, the wood, the lining, the vault, the service, I assume you want a minister, some kind of celebrant, pallbearers, limo and a hearse out to the cemetery, do you have a cemetery lined up?” waiting on his wife to finish the buttoning. “Then there’s the pickup, the body prep, burial clothes if you need them, flowers, printed programs, you want those memorial T-shirts? I have a guy for that, then there’s the grave marker, the plot, the opening, the closing, the death certificate . . .”