The Whites: A Novel

by Richard Price

  Billy walked into the kitchen to fix himself a double double, praying that his father would just keep his mouth shut and not make him weep. He didn’t return to the living room until he heard the front door close; when he did, the sight of his Glock sitting on the coffee table in front of Carmen pulled him up short.

  “Where’d he go?”

  “Outside.”

  “What do you mean, outside. He left?”

  “He’s waiting for you.”

  Billy looked out the window and saw the dope-confiscated Firebird gurgling at the foot of the driveway, MacCormack behind the wheel and the passenger door open.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” she asked.

  “I have no idea,” he said, walking out of the house.

  The state-run nursing home in Ozone Park smelled like cooking diapers. Eric Cortez was in the dayroom, Velcroed into a wheelchair, his face a soft balloon over his withering torso, his eyes, beneath a strapped-on hockey helmet, the popped silver of a gaffed fish.

  “For the seizures,” MacCormack said, nodding to the helmet.

  “What happened?”

  “He was shot in the head about three months ago and left for dead. A kid, actually the kid’s dog, found him in a trash bag behind a housing project up in Dutchess County.”

  “When I ran him I didn’t see anything about this.”

  “It’s not our investigation, plus we weren’t too eager to post it in case someone was interested in finishing the job.”

  “What kind of hitter’s going to have access to the system?”

  MacCormack stared at him.

  “Are you serious?”

  “The bullet was a 135 grain Speer Gold Dot from a Smith and Wesson .38, standard police issue.”

  “So what? We don’t have a monopoly on that. Plus he was a snitch.”

  “What do you think, he was the only one we were running? And when he stopped showing up for our meets, none of the others knew shit. Then we got the call from Dutchess. So when you went online looking for him . . .”

  “So you’re looking at cops?”

  Neither of them was looking at Cortez anymore.

  “One of the people we interviewed said that he overheard our friend bragging on knowing about a protection-for-pay racket coming out of a Brooklyn precinct about two weeks before he caught a bullet. Maybe he wasn’t just bragging.”

  “So you’re looking at cops?” Billy having no memory of just saying this.

  “We’re vetting a few.”

  “Anybody looking good for it?”

  MacCormack didn’t answer.

  “But that’s where you’re looking . . .”

  MacCormack cocked his head. “Why, you think we should be looking somewheres else?”

  “Do I? No, I’m just curious.” Then: “I wish I could call this a tragedy.”

  Taking Billy by the elbow, MacCormack led him to the lobby. “It’s most likely one of the crew he was ratting on, but if it wasn’t, if there’s something to this protection ring, I mean, that trumps anything else going and we want to cover our bases.”

  When they got back to Yonkers thirty minutes later, Billy’s father was sitting on the porch reading the newspaper, his mouth hanging open in concentration.

  From the driver’s seat, MacCormack ducked his head to take in all the TARU cameras trained on the house and the street.

  “Something tells me the worst thing I could’ve done today was take away your guns.”

  The girl sat on her narrow bed in the sour-smelling suite, grinding her knuckles into bonemeal. A shoe box filled with Saran Wrapped twists of coke and Ziplocs of pot sat on her desk, and a hollowed-out copy of Gravity’s Rainbow packed with tens, twenties, and hundreds lay open on her dresser.

  “Gravity’s Rainbow, I never heard of that,” Yasmeen said as she photographed the cash. “Is that a good book?”

  “I never read it.” The girl’s numb gaze was locked onto the wedge of the Brooklyn Bridge visible from the dormitory window. “It’s my dad’s favorite.”

  Yasmeen silently hip-bumped Billy out of the way as she photographed the shoe box. He was there but not there, NYPD not allowed anywhere on campus without the permission of the university.

  “Can I call my dad?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Billy caught the eye of the roommate, who had started the ball rolling with a complaint to her therapist in the school’s Wellness Center.

  “Don’t look at me,” she said in a clipped Punjabi trill. “She’s the drug dealer.”

  Two more school security officers, both retired detectives like Yasmeen, sauntered into the room, their faces immobile with boredom.

  “So Redman said you found out Pavlicek’s seeing a hematologist?” Yasmeen asked, shrugging her Tibetan hippie coat onto the back of her chair.

  “I did,” Billy said, unable to read her tone.

  They were seated at the window table of a hummus café directly across the street from the dormitory.

  “Is it serious?”

  “I have no idea.”

  A waiter came out with their orders, a bottled beer for Billy, a mug of herbal tea for Yasmeen.

  “I’ve been on the wagon all week,” she said. “It’s incredible how fast your body forgives you.”

  “So you don’t know anything about this?”

  “About what?”

  “About John.”

  “I think somebody said he was having headaches.”

  “What do you mean headaches, like migraines?”

  “That’s all I know, and I don’t even know if I know that.”

  They watched through the window as the girl was finally escorted out of the dorm by the two other school security officers and handed over to city detectives, the kid’s college career at an end barely into the second semester of her freshman year.

  “This job is such bullshit, I swear to God,” Yasmeen said.

  Billy took a sip of beer, brushed someone else’s crumbs from the tabletop. “And what do you hear about Eric Cortez these days?” he asked.

  “Cortez? I haven’t checked on him since forever.”

  “No?” Looking out the window.

  “But I still see Raymond Del Pino’s family a few times a year. It’s so hard for them to get over losing him, you know?”

  “So you don’t know he’s in a nursing home out in Queens.”

  “Cortez is?” Yasmeen perked up. “Really? Why?”

  “He was shot in the head and stuffed into a garbage bag upstate.”

  “That’s . . . Are you shitting me? Wow.”

  “His brain’s a bucket of mush, and the only time he can move is when he has a seizure.”

  “If I go visit him, can I bring my camera?”

  “You know how I know? They investigated me to see if I was the actor. They wanted to collect my guns.”

  “You?” dumping a ton of Splenda in her mug. “Why you?”

  “They thought the shooter might be a cop. So when I ran his name, they thought I might be trying to track him down to finish what I started.”

  “You ran his name? Why’d you run his name?”

  “You know what they asked me? If I had any leads for them.”

  “And you said . . .”

  “That I didn’t.”

  “But why the fuck did you run his name to begin with?”

  “Because this is freaking me out.”

  “What is?”

  Billy took her napkin and wrote:

  Tomassi Bannion SweetP Cortez

  Yasmeen’s phone rang. “Excuse me,” she said, pulling it out of her coat pocket, then half-turning away.

  Even with the cell pressed to her ear Billy could make out the tinny wail of her younger daughter’s voice.

  “What’s wrong,” Yasmeen asked wearily, massaging her temple. “OK, whoa, who’s pinching you . . . Jacob. Fat Jacob or Black Jacob . . . Is he there? Put him on the phone . . . Just, Simone, if you don’t put him on the phone right this s
econd,” rolling her eyes at Billy. “Is this Jacob? This is Simone’s mommy. Listen to me, you know that monster that lives under your bed? Your parents tell you he’s not real, but they’re lying to you. Not only is he real but he’s a friend of mine, and if you lay one more finger on my daughter I will make sure he comes out from under there when you’re asleep tonight and sucks your eyes right out of your head, you hear me? Yes? Good. Now give the phone back to Simone . . . Stop crying and give the phone back to Simone.”

  Yasmeen hung up. “I hate bullies.”

  “Is he dying?” Billy asked.

  “Is who dying.”

  “Pavlicek.”

  “Is Pavlicek dying? Is that what you just asked me?”

  “He’s my friend, if you know something I don’t know just say.”

  “Huh,” Yasmeen starting to flush as she snatched up Billy’s list of Whites. “So, what are you asking, do I know if he’s got some kind of fatal sickness that made him lose his rudder and go rogue on all these scumbags?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Billy’s turn to flush. “I just want to know how sick he is.”

  “The guy’s healthy as a horse, he’s worth something like thirty million dollars, and he lives like a king.”

  “That’s good,” he said. “That’s what I want to hear.”

  “So what else, you think he misses the good old action-packed days of yesteryear? He’s bored? The fuck is wrong with you, Billy.”

  “I don’t know where you’re going with this.”

  “Where I’m going with this?”

  “I just asked about his health.”

  “And why the hell were you running Cortez to begin with. Who told you to do that. And Sweetpea? Denny said you were walking around with some fucking Missing poster for Sweetpea Harris. And yeah, I was being nice about it before, but you hired some PI to investigate John’s medical records, didn’t you.”

  Having fucked everything up now, elephant-stomped across every line, Billy belatedly opted for silence.

  “But you know what?” Yasmeen shrugged her coat back on as if about to storm out. “Even if you’re not a paranoid delusional and somebody out there’s taking these shitheads out, so what? Who cares? Animals like these?” Jabbing at his list as she rose to her feet. “They tend to breed. And so when they go young? It’s called the trickle-down effect, our gift to the future.”

  “Are you hearing yourself?” Billy sputtered.

  “Are you hearing yourself?”

  The conversation was over.

  “Fucking Billy.” Yasmeen dropped back into the chair, her eyes suddenly shining like wet steel.

  “What’s wrong.”

  “Besides listening to you?”

  “Besides listening to me.”

  A tremor set up house in the fingers of her right hand and Billy passed her the rest of his beer, which she drained like a Viking. He ordered her another.

  “Yazzie, what’s wrong.”

  “I’m sorry I’m just so tense all the time these days,” swiping at her eyes with the dirty suede sleeve of her coat. “I think I’m going through menopause.”

  “What are you talking about, menopause, you’re forty-three.” Billy grateful for the change of subject.

  “It could be early onset, you know? I lay in bed at night, I’m hot I’m cold I’m clammy I’m burning. I’m driving Dennis crazy.”

  “You always drive Dennis crazy.”

  “I have nightmares about my kids, all these bad things happening to them. I sit up in bed sometimes, I’m drenched, the whole bed. And my first thought is that it’s blood, I’m covered in blood, but since about three months ago, I don’t even get my period anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t miss having it, but all this other shit that goes along with losing it? And I think animals can sense it. We went down to Florida right before New Year’s to visit Dennis’s parents? I took Dominique to feed these ducks and they went crazy, chased us, I swear to God it had to be a mile. If I had my gun we’d of had duck for dinner, the whole family. I just want it to be over.”

  “You should talk to somebody,” he said.

  “I am talking to somebody, you moron, I’m talking to you.”

  They sat there in silence for a long moment, ignoring the few students starting to wander in for lunch.

  “I just want to stop having these dreams about my kids,” she said, tagging the waiter for a third beer. “Sometimes I wish I never had kids, so many bad things can happen to them, but it never bothered me when I was in sex crimes, just now. This fucking menopause, maybe it’s a good thing to have your period, a little blood loss every month, you know, like a pressure valve. How about Carmen, she’s not menopausal yet, right? What is she, forty?”

  “Thirty-eight.”

  “She’s so lucky.”

  “Maybe it’s not menopause,” he said. “Maybe you’re pregnant.”

  “Right. Do me a favor, ask your wife how long this thing lasts.”

  “She’s a triage nurse.”

  “I don’t know, Billy, you’re all worried about Pavlicek? Maybe you should worry a little about me instead.”

  “You’ll be all right,” he said, running out of safe things to say.

  MILTON RAMOS

  Thirty minutes into packing up Marilys’s one-and-a-half-room apartment, Milton more than got it: of course she was half a loon when it came to believing in her own bad dreams, the place was a virtual botanica, the high shelves above the two-burner stove and the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink housing a riot of spirit oils: Ogun, Pajaro Macua, 7 African Powers, Angel de Dinero, Angel de Amor, and Amarra Hombre, a.k.a. Hold Your Man, the last two also in mist form. And then there were the jars of spiritual floor wash in the back of the closet: Court Case, Steady Work, Money Shower, Chain Breaker, Do What I Say, Obey Me, Adore Me, and, once again, Hold Your Man, Milton wondering as he packed if she had been sneaking some of these concoctions into his house all along, washing the floors and walls but most important, he knew, the door frames, thresholds, and windowsills, in an effort to land him. He was fine with that, flattered in fact, but now that the potions had done their job, where the hell was she?

  It was one in the afternoon on the day after she had boarded the bus to JFK and he was still waiting for her call from Guatemala City. At first he told himself, Third-world country, travel chaos, shitty to nonexistent cell service, there could be a million reasons. But after a few hours of thinking about all the cash she was carrying, third-world country began to morph into abduction, chaos into rape, and bad cell reception into murder.

  Deciding that he didn’t want any of her mojo collection in his house, he unpacked what he had just packed, then went to work emptying her medicine chest, another cabinet of curiosities, including a few unmarked jars that he wouldn’t open on a bet. But he found no over-the-counter items and, more jarringly, no pharmacy-filled vials, no recognizable medications—every bathroom cabinet on earth held doctor-prescribed meds—which meant she either didn’t take any and was as healthy as she looked or she was too poor to take proper care of herself and was medicating on the medieval plan, the mystery of the absent meds once again hammering home to him how little, after all these years, he actually knew about her.

  His cell rang, not Marilys but Peter Gonzalez, a half friend of his from the TSA.

  “She wasn’t on United, American, or Delta. There were four other airlines flying out of the New York area with a connecting flight to Guatemala last night and this morning, but I figured those three were both direct and had the cheapest fares so . . .”

  “So . . .” Milton sat on her bed.

  “Aeromexico out of JFK last night had two Irrizarys on their manifest, a Carla and a Maria—are you sure Marilys is her legal name? It could be a nickname, a childhood name, or something.”

  “Hang on,” he said, putting the phone down and quickly rustling through her garbage until he found a rent receipt and a Con Ed bill.

  “Yeah, Marilys Irrizary, keep looking.” Then: “He
llo? You still there?”

  “You’re welcome,” Gonzalez said.

  “Sorry. Thank you.”

  Going back to packing, he returned to her closet and then went through her dresser, both of which were half empty, leaving Milton struck by how few actual possessions she had. Lastly he collected her crucifixes, icons, and religious statuary: Saints Michael, George, Lucy, and Lazarus, the Infant of Atocha and Our Lady of Guadalupe, all the usual suspects. Then, after surveying the rest of the apartment one last time and not finding anything else worth taking, he began to carry her stuff down to the street, needing only four trips to complete the job, six medium-sized boxes going into the back of a rented U-Haul with a capacity for ten times that amount.

  Gonzalez called back a few hours later, while Milton was in the process of unpacking those same boxes in his house.

  “Spirit, Avianca, Taca, Copa, no Irrizarys on any of them.”

  “All right,” Milton said. “Thank you.”

  Fighting down panic, he busied himself with unwrapping her saints until he dropped and shattered the Black Madonna and Child, at which point he lost his shit in earnest.

  Whatever happened to her, it had happened here.

  She had never even made it out of the city.

  “We can’t start looking until forty-eight hours,” Turkel, the lone detective on duty in the Missing Persons Unit said. “You know the drill.”

  Milton had never been on the customer side of a squad room desk before, and he hated it.

  “You can’t jump the clock for me?” Redundantly flashing his tin.

  “Last time I did someone a favor, they put me on desk duty for three months.”

  “What am I asking here,” Milton said, thinking, You’re behind a fucking desk right now.

  “Look, how about you fill out the report, give it to me, if she’s still missing tomorrow midnight, give me a call and I’ll bump her to the top of the list.”

  Twenty minutes later, while still waiting for Turkel to find the right form, Milton left the office and returned to his squad in the 4-6.

  “I understand where Missing Persons is coming from with the forty-eight-hours rule,” Milton said, sitting between mountains of manila folders on Dennis Doyle’s couch. “But I’m not talking about some teenage runaway here, and I was hoping you could reach out to somebody for me.”