The Whites: A Novel

by Richard Price

  He knew his boss didn’t like him, would have happily had him transferred out of the squad in a heartbeat if he could, but Milton couldn’t think of anyone else to go to on this.

  Doyle leaned back in his office chair, his head encircled by the framed portraits of his own bosses on the wall behind him.

  “Who do I know there,” he said, scowling into the middle distance, then picking up his phone, putting it down, picking it up again. “I got the guy. Remember that Night Watch sergeant was in here that morning I was asking you for the 494s on Cornell Harris?”

  Milton slid his ass to the edge of the sofa. “Vaguely.”

  “Billy Graves, he spent a lot of years in the ID Squad, he’s got to have a few friends in Missing Persons.”

  Milton got to his feet.

  “Boss, you know what? Maybe I’m hitting the panic button too early on this.”

  “Your call.” Doyle shrugged.

  “I appreciate it though, thank you,” he said, walking back into the squad room.

  “Who is she, anyhow?” his boss called out after him.

  Back in Marilys’s apartment, he scoured dressers, drawers, and trash receptacles for anything that could help him find her, turning up nothing beyond those bullshit elixirs, a never-used datebook, and a set of keys that didn’t fit her door. It was only after overturning half the furniture and getting down on his stomach with a Maglite to peer beneath whatever he couldn’t move that he discovered the three phone numbers written in pencil on the wall above her mini-fridge.

  The first was to a local deli, the second to a Chinese restaurant that delivered, but the third, with an outer-borough area code, was to an older female Hispanic with good English.

  “Good afternoon, this is Detective Milton Ramos from the New York Police Department Missing Persons Unit. I’m looking for a Ms. Marilys Irrizary?”

  “Not here.”

  “Who am I talking to?”

  “Who am I talking to?”

  Milton took a breath. “Detective Milton Ramos, NYPD, your turn.”

  “Anna Goury,” then: “Josepha Suarez.”

  “Which.”

  “Both.”

  “Do you know Ms. Irrizary?”

  “Ms.?” Sardonically dragging out the z sound. “Yeah, she’s my sister, what’s going on?”

  And when Milton, overwhelmed by the question, was unable to answer, she asked, “Are you really a cop?”

  Anna Goury/Josepha Suarez lived with her husband, three kids, and what Milton thought might be a wolf in a federally funded prefab ranch house on Charlotte Street in the former anus mundi section of the Bronx, all six rooms of her home spotless to the point of parboiled. She looked a lot like Marilys, but then again all Indio women of a certain age seemed to him born of the same womb.

  The three small cups of rocket-fuel Bustelo she served him at the kitchen table both helped and hindered his getting the full story out, breaking down his inbred reticence but making him stammer.

  “I don’t understand,” she said after he finished. “Why would she be going to Guatemala?”

  “Why? I told you, to bring back . . .”

  “Our mother? Our mother’s dead fifteen years,” she said. “Besides, we’re from El Salvador.”

  “Hold on, hang on,” the sweat caught in his mustache suddenly reeking of coffee.

  “Well, all I can say is,” Goury/Suarez delicately rotating her demitasse cup on the smooth tabletop, “I hope you didn’t give her any money.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Rolling onto his own street after a four-thirty a.m. police shooting in Herald Square had extended his tour nearly until noon, Billy was so jacked from all the liquid speed he had ingested that he clipped a neighbor’s garbage can and then just kept on driving, his house at the end of the curved block shimmering like a mirage. Oddly enough, the sight of Pavlicek’s Lexus parked in his driveway settled him down rather than sending him over the edge, artificial adrenaline, in the end, no friend to genuine alertness.

  They were having coffee in the kitchen, Carmen in her nursing whites, Pavlicek in dry-cleaned jeans and a sport jacket.

  “I didn’t know Carmen went to Monroe,” Pavlicek said as if Billy had been sitting with them all along. “Did you know that?”

  “Well, yeah, she’s my wife,” he said carefully, looking to her for a read on the situation.

  “My parents went there in the sixties, they met in tenth-grade journalism class,” looking past Billy into the living room. “How’s that for staying power.”

  “Must have been a whole different school in those days,” Billy said, still trying to catch Carmen’s eye.

  “No, they told me it was crap back then too.”

  “He was asking me if I remembered any of the teachers,” Carmen said. “I told him I didn’t even remember going there.”

  “Yeah, you never talk about it,” Billy too tense to take a seat in his own kitchen. “So, John, to what do we owe the honor?”

  “Hey, look at this guy,” Pavlicek beaming as Declan wandered into the kitchen, then pulling the boy close. “How old are you, now?”

  “Eight.” Always a sucker for adult attention, Declan didn’t resist, standing there between Pavlicek’s legs, an expectant half-smile on his face.

  Billy finally caught his wife’s eye: What gives? Carmen, thrown by the query, just shrugged.

  “You got a girlfriend yet?” Pavlicek asked.

  “I hate girls,” Declan said, stating a fact.

  “Yeah? What’s your favorite team?”

  “The Rangers.”

  “Baseball Rangers or hockey Rangers.”

  “Hockey. I hate the baseball Rangers.”

  “My boy’s sport was football.”

  “I like football. I’m on a team,” Declan said, then walked out of the room.

  “What a guy you have there,” Pavlicek said to the space between the parents.

  “Well, yours is no slouch,” Carmen said.

  “Yeah,” Pavlicek said faintly, smiling down at his coffee.

  Billy finally took a seat. “So, John, what’s up?”

  Pavlicek took a breath, then folded his hands on the table. “Do you remember that Memory Keepers national convention Ray Rivera was talking about that time on City Island?”

  “I know that group,” Carmen said. “We give them a conference room for their meetings. So sad, you know?”

  “Well, I went there as a guest of the Bronx-Westchester chapter, the one that meets at St. Ann’s,” nodding to Carmen. “It was in a Marriott outside of St. Louis and the first night they had a ceremony in this huge banquet hall, fifty, sixty tables, maybe five hundred parents from all the local chapters coast to coast. And, once everyone got settled, they passed out these cheap see-through plastic roses attached to batteries, one to a family, then they turned out all the lights in the hall and started to project a slide show onto a movie screen up front, sort of a death carousel. Each slide was a photo of someone’s murdered child, could be anywheres from an infant to a forty-year-old, with name, birth date, then the ‘murdered’ date, printed below. ‘Murdered,’ not died, not killed. They’d hold the photo for twenty seconds or so, and when you saw your son’s or daughter’s face up there, your grandchild’s, you turned on your battery-powered rose. One by one, those roses going on in the dark, here, over there, in the corner, in the back, and all the while they’re playing this sappy theme music over the sound system, Michael Bolton, Celine Dion, the Carpenters, Whitney Houston, roses clicking on for infants, gangbangers, little girls, teenage boys, grown women, black, white, Chinese, “You Light Up My Life,” murder date, rose, “Memories,” murder date, rose, “Close to You,” murder date, rose, “I Will Always Love You,” murder date, rose, murder date, rose . . . And people for the most part were pretty composed, but every once in a while a face would come up on the screen and you’d hear somebody gasping in the dark or moaning, then race-walking out of the room. I think they had an understanding, if you’re going to lose
it, you need to leave, because it could create a chain reaction . . . So, the ceremony is going on and on, more and more roses lighting up this huge grief cave, and by the end of the slide show the whole room was, like, blazing with roses, I mean that fucking slide show went on for something like an hour and a half—twenty seconds a life, you do the math.”

  A silence came down, everyone staring at the table until Billy couldn’t take it anymore.

  “John, what’s wrong with you.”

  “I lost you,” Pavlicek blinking at him.

  “I’m right here.”

  “Then be more specific.”

  “The hematologist.”

  Carmen looked from one to the other.

  “I know you’re seeing him.”

  “Me? No.”

  “John Pavlicek,” Billy said. “I’m sorry, but I have the records.”

  “Junior.”

  “What?”

  “That would be John Pavlicek Jr.,” Pavlicek said. “It’s called T-cell prolymphocytic leukemia, no one beats it, and it’s fast. Six months at the outside.”

  “No!” Carmen’s voice fluty with shock.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I come back from a two-week business trip four months ago, December sixteenth, I hear him in his bedroom, I walk in there,” looking directly at Billy now. “I thought he had got stomped by a gang. Rings around his eyes, lumps and bruises all over his body, he can barely move, raise his eyes to me.”

  “Wait,” Billy’s hand out like a stop sign, “hold on, you told me . . .”

  “I know what I told you,” he said flatly.

  Carmen started to cry, the sight of a weeping nurse bringing home the death sentence for Billy.

  “So,” Pavlicek sighed, “you ask around to Yasmeen, to Whelan, to Redman, do you know what happened to this animal, to that animal, do you think Pavlicek caught some kind of disease and lost his mind, do you think . . .”

  “John, you have to understand . . .”

  “Who the fuck cares, Billy. I mean, where’s the scales, where’s the justice in it?”

  Billy closed his eyes, dreamed of sleep. “Are you telling me something?”

  “I’m asking you something.” Pavlicek leaned across the table and touched the back of his hand. “Because from where I’m sitting? If God or whoever else could just point a finger at a kid like John Junior, then all bets are off, because no one’s minding the store. So, someone like me, what you do is, you take care of all your unfinished business, you do what you have to do to balance the books, so that maybe, just maybe, when the time comes, you might manage not to jump in the grave with him.”

  “Sometimes with that kind of leukemia . . .” Carmen began, then faded.

  “My boy will be rotting in the earth while Jeffrey Bannion is getting laid? I don’t think so. While Eric Cortez is going to a Yankees game? While Sweetpea Harris is becoming a father?”

  “What are you telling me,” Billy repeated numbly.

  “You’re a detective,” Pavlicek said. “You figure it out.”

  Billy went away again, came back. “John, I swear to God, you know how much I love you, and I’m devastated for your son, but if you killed any of those . . .”

  “You’ll what, you’ll lock me up?” Pavlicek finished his coffee and got to his feet. “You want to hear the worst, the very worst about this fucking type of leukemia he’s got?” Looking around the kitchen as if trying to decide what to smash first. “The median age at onset is sixty-five. Imagine that.”

  They sat in silence long after the Lexus had disappeared.

  “You’re not going after him, are you?” Carmen finally asked.

  Billy didn’t answer.

  “Are you?”

  “Can you give me a goddamn minute?”

  Carmen punched him so hard his arm went dead.

  “Jesus, Billy!” she wailed, shoving back her chair and leaving the room.

  Later that day, unable to sleep, Billy returned to Columbia Presbyterian, headed over to the information desk, and asked for John Junior’s room. He dreaded seeing the kid in the state his father had described, but after Pavlicek’s visit he had no choice.

  The clerk sent him up to the oncology ward, where a nurse—once Billy had said that he was Junior’s uncle and showed her his ID—told him that Junior had been checked out a few days ago. For a fleeting moment Billy thought that meant he was on the mend.

  “He’s home?”

  “Transferred to Valhalla.”

  “To where?” Billy thinking she had chosen a sick way of telling him that Junior had died.

  “The Westchester County Medical Center in Valhalla.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “It’s just closer to his family,” she said breezily enough, but he’d been around nurses for the last twenty years of his life: John Junior was never going home again.

  On his way back down the corridor, Billy noticed, through open suite doors, that some of the patients’ rooms had second beds that sat lower to the floor and on collapsible legs for easier storage. On one, an older woman in street clothes was sleeping next to her daughter’s sickbed. In another suite, a man was unpacking a suitcase as his wife watched him with near-lifeless eyes. He had slept on one of those beds himself for two nights at Lenox Hill after Carmen had given birth to Declan.

  Billy returned to the nurses’ station. “Family can sleep over?”

  “If they want,” the nurse said.

  “How about the Pavlicek boy?”

  “Johnnie? When we had him, his dad just about moved in. Very nice man, given the circumstances.”

  “Slept here every night?”

  “I think that’s why he moved his son. The commute was too hard on him.”

  “Did he need to sign in?”

  “Only if he was coming in after visitors’ hours.”

  Without too much cajoling, Billy got her to find the guest log for March 17, the night of Bannion’s murder. Pavlicek had signed in at nine p.m.

  “Do they sign out when they leave?”

  “No need.”

  “So if, say, a visitor wants to go home at midnight, two in the morning . . .”

  “Then they go.”

  Which left him with nothing.

  “All right, then,” offering his hand.

  “Tell the Pavliceks I’m still praying for them,” she said, her responding grip startlingly strong.

  Back home, Billy headed upstairs to take another shot at sleep, passed his father’s open bedroom door, and wandered in. Billy Senior lay on his bed, fully dressed for a change but snoring, flayed sections of the New York Times scattered around him on the bedspread.

  Taking a seat at the small desk his father had brought with him from his last home, Billy scanned the spines of the books that lined the top shelf. Beside the old man’s poets were luridly written original guides to nineteenth-century New York City; a first-person account of the Civil War draft riots of 1863; a hardback reissue of 1866 Professional Criminals of America; and three fat novels about Ireland written by Thomas Flanagan, two of which Billy had actually read and somewhat enjoyed.

  “Which is catching your eye?” Billy Senior murmured from the bed.

  “Dad, you know me.” Billy blushed.

  “The dummy act doesn’t become you,” Senior said. “I’ve been telling you that since you were a kid.”

  “You know me,” Billy unthinkingly repeated. Then, catching himself: “Must be an echo in here.”

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “Why does something have to be on my mind for me to come visit?”

  Billy Senior quietly waited him out, his eyes unwavering, reducing his son, as in the old days, to a bucket of tells.

  “Dad, let me give you a hypothetical situation,” he began, then faltered. “If you knew that a certain friend crossed the line . . .”

  “Which line?”

  “The legal line . . . And you were having a real problem looking the other way . . .” />
  Flat on his back, his father frowned at the ceiling. “Is this friend on the Job?”

  Billy didn’t answer, which was answer enough.

  “How good a friend is he?”

  “Like a brother.”

  “Then first off, you have to ask yourself what would happen to him.”

  Billy felt his heart lurch, but he wasn’t sure in which direction. “No matter what he did?”

  “It’s that bad?”

  Again, Billy didn’t answer.

  “What are we talking about, mass murder?”

  “Just some nonsense,” he said, getting to his feet. “I should sleep.”

  “That was fast,” his father said.

  “No, I’m just . . .”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, no, I’m great.” Billy patted his father’s arm, turned, and was halfway out of the room when the old man began talking to him as if he were still seated.

  “Back in June of sixty-four, there was a cop in Harlem, I won’t say his name, he’s passed anyhow, and this individual, he killed someone pretty much in front of his partner.”

  Billy sat back down.

  “A pimp, had some Indian moniker, Cochise, Cheyenne, Geronimo, maybe. They had him in the back of the patrol car, and he starts mouthing off, just wouldn’t stop. So this cop, let’s call him Johnson, it was at night, he drives over to Morningside Park, drags him out, busts him up bad, and leaves him there to die, which he did.”

  “Because the guy was mouthing off?”

  “Well, that and because there wasn’t a girl in this man’s stable over sixteen, because he had a habit of slashing Achilles tendons when any of them tried to run away from him, because he was so arrogant that he threatened Johnson’s family. And yeah, because he wouldn’t shut the hell up back there.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “What happened to who.”

  “Johnson.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Walked away clean?”

  His father propped himself up with a second pillow. “You have to understand, my son, the summer of sixty-four was red hot uptown, and this Cochise individual had more enemies than a Roman emperor. The squad pretty much went through the motions of looking into it for a few days, but nobody really gave a damn, and then a lieutenant from the One-nine, Tom Gilligan, shot and killed a fifteen-year-old black kid in the street, and we had almost a week of rioting on our hands, so the pimp was totally forgotten.”