The Whites: A Novel

by Richard Price

  “Saying what.”

  Cardozo threw Billy a quick helpless look, then stepped away to regroup.

  At first, Billy didn’t understand why he was refraining from volunteering information about the stalker in order to help refocus the investigation. And then he did: simply put, he felt ashamed.

  As far as he knew, they had all been victimized, but somehow over the course of the last few weeks, the innocence of the people living under his roof had gradually come to feel tainted, as if they all in some way deserved what had been happening to them. It was a classic reaction, he knew, the victim falling into self-loathing and self-blame, but now that the family contagion had reached out and claimed Victor, he felt as guilty as if he had swung the bat himself. And Carmen—sitting there so uncharacteristically withdrawn—had to be feeling something of the same.

  “These kids . . .” Cardozo said, taking out his notepad.

  “Kids?”

  “These individuals. Any names? Street tags?”

  “There’s two,” said another friend, wearing a Bucknell T-shirt. “I know them by sight.”

  “And the other one,” the weight lifter said. “The moron with the hat.”

  “How about this,” Cardozo said, stowing his pad. “Why don’t you all come in, we’ll set you up with some photo trays, then we can do a ride-by around the Knickerbockers, see if you can maybe make some IDs that way.”

  “You know what?” Bucknell said. “Forget it. We’ll take care of it ourselves.”

  “How about you don’t,” Billy volunteered.

  “Do you know how many assault complaints we filed with your precinct this year?” Bucknell wheeling on Billy. “Do you know how many times I’ve been in that building? You people just don’t give a shit.”

  “First I’m hearing about it,” Cardozo said.

  “Exactly.”

  Billy looked to Richard, hoping that he could help cool out his friends, and saw that the anger in his eyes was beginning to give way to exhaustion and sorrow. Reaching through the scrum, Billy took his arm and steered him to a second couch, directly opposite his wife.

  “He’ll be all right,” Billy said.

  “How do you know?”

  “You know how I know? I’ll tell you how I know.” Billy hesitated, then: “The nurses’ station. If Victor was in any kind of touch-and-go situation, all those nurses over there, they’d of been throwing our crowd a lot of looks by now, trying to figure out how to handle us in case things turn out bad. And I’m just not picking up that vibe from them, so relax.”

  It was total bullshit, but it seemed to do the job, Richard faintly nodding, then sliding back deeper into the cushions. Nurses: Billy stole another peek at his wife, not six feet away from them but still so pulled into herself that he doubted she had heard one word of his nonsense.

  “So when are the twins coming?” he asked Richard.

  “What?”

  “When are . . .”

  “Ten days,” he said, then, sitting up: “Jesus.”

  “I’ll come over,” Carmen said dully. Raising her eyes to him, she added, “Every day.”

  Leaving his wife and Richard behind, Billy went along with everyone else to the 8-0. Once there, unable to bear withholding information about the family nightmare any longer, he took Bobby Cardozo aside.

  “I need to talk to you about something.”

  “About what, the gay thing?” Cardozo whispered. “I said the guy didn’t look gay. What the fuck, it was a compliment.”

  Billy’s cell rang—Carmen—Billy stepping away from Cardozo to take the call.

  “Hey,” her voice as flatlined as it was when he left her.

  “What’s going on?”

  “He’s out of surgery. It went OK.”

  “Good. Excellent.”

  “I’m sleeping here tonight,” she said.

  “OK.”

  “I need you to do me a favor. When you get home make up a bag with some clothes and my meds. You know which ones?”

  “The Traz and the Cymbalta.”

  “The Traz and the Abilify.”

  “When did you go on Abilify?”

  “Can you just do it for me? Give it to Millie, let her take your car, punch in the address on the GPS for her, and send her over.”

  “All right, I’ll be home in about two hours.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Carmen, what’s wrong?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I mean besides. You’ve been in a trance for days.”

  The silence on the other end was so absolute that Billy thought she had hung up on him.

  “Hello?”

  “Just, not now, OK?” she said, then added, “I’m sorry,” sounding like she meant it.

  Billy found Cardozo pulling up mug shots on a desk monitor.

  “This kid here?” he said, tapping a shave-headed teenager with a wandering eye. “He’s a stone skull-cracker. Pipes, rebar, a golf club one time. Told me that he didn’t like guns because they could get you in trouble.”

  “Just hold off on all that for a bit,” Billy said, pulling up a chair. “You need to hear this.”

  It took close to half an hour for him to lay it all out: the accosting of his son, the abduction of his father, the red assault on his porch, the entire systematic and now expanded tormenting of his family.

  “I don’t see it,” Cardozo said. “With all the three-legged meat eaters we got running around this precinct? I’m shopping local.”

  Yasmeen rang him at home as he was sorting through Carmen’s side of the medicine chest.

  “You called me yesterday?” she said.

  “I did?” Then, remembering the world as it was before this morning: “Yeah, I did.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Again?”

  “Just . . .”

  “Jesus, I talk to you more than my husband. What are you trying to do, get back with me?”

  “Right.”

  “Just say, we’ll get a room.”

  “Cut it out.”

  “With how stressed I am? No shit, let’s go.”

  “I seriously need to talk to you.”

  “You don’t even have to kiss me.”

  “Where are you going to be today,” Billy said. “I’ll come to you.”

  “Redman’s nuts. I shot Eric Cortez? Are you on drugs?”

  They were sitting on a bench overlooking the playground in Riverdale where Yasmeen’s younger daughter, Simone, was trying to master double Dutch with some other girls.

  “You know what? I don’t like to talk about people, but since he’s already talking about me? I think Redman’s smoking his own product.”

  “What product,” Billy shielding his eyes from the unfamiliar midday sun.

  “Embalming fluid. Dipping his cigarettes in that shit. It’s like eating your brain with an ice cream scoop.”

  “Redman doesn’t smoke.”

  “Then maybe you’re doing dip. What the fuck, I shot Eric Cortez?”

  Billy sat with his arms draped along the top slat of the bench, listening to the kids behind the mesh fence shrieking as if they were about to be butchered.

  “You’re drinking like you want to kill yourself, Yasmeen, why is that.”

  “Because I already said to you I’m going through life changes and I’m depressed. I confessed to you about that. I confided in you about that. And now you’re going to use it to accuse me of some bullshit like this? Who do you think you are?”

  Billy slumped forward on the bench, his head in his hands. “Tell me again about your night sweats, how you wake up thinking you’re all bloody, how someone’s going to hurt your kids,” his voice monotone with gloom.

  Yasmeen sat there for a moment, her lower face flexing and bulging as if her mouth was stuffed with marbles.

  “I tell you what,” she said, getting to her feet, “here’s what you do. You go to your good buddy in Brooklyn Narcotics and s
hare your, your findings with him, you tell him all about me fucking up the Del Pino investigation, you tell him all about my nightmares and my drinking, you tell him how Cortez being brain-shot just about makes me wet, and then you let him come for me, how’s that.”

  Yasmeen went to the fence, collected her protesting daughter, then walked past him on her way out of the park. “You’re like some stranger to me, you know that?”

  And then she was gone, Billy sitting there, thinking, So are you. Thinking, So are you all.

  After a busted four-hour sleep and a tasteless dinner Billy found himself watching a football game on NFL Classics, his sons in full peewee league gear, cleats to helmets, seated on either side of him. They were all strung out, Billy over everything and the kids just because they had—no, they were—exquisite antennae when it came to in-house agitation.

  The game, from 2012, was a great New York Giants come-from-behind victory, 41–34 over Tampa Bay, but when watching these old games, Billy never told his boys the final score in advance; it would be like telling a joke punch line first. Tonight, unfortunately, that meant subjecting them to three Eli Manning second-quarter interceptions with no hope in sight; by the second pick, Carlos began to cry, which got Declan, also on the verge of tears, throwing a punch and hurting his hand on his younger brother’s helmet, and before Billy could intervene they were both wailing like paid mourners while blindly trading shots across the bow of his gut.

  “What are you hitting him for?” he squawked at Declan. Then, turning to Carlos: “What you crying for?”

  Neither kid had the words or the self-control to stop belting the other, which resulted in him pushing them off to the far sides of the couch.

  “Everybody stop hitting and crying, all right? Just, please, OK?”

  Pausing the game, he waited for them to subside. He knew he should turn the TV off altogether before the third interception sent them completely over the edge, but he also wanted them to hang in there, so that they could experience the thrill of the fourth-quarter comeback. So they all could.

  “You guys want to keep watching or do you want to go play?”

  “Watch,” Declan wept.

  “Watch,” Carlos said, aping his brother’s tragic delivery.

  “You sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have that new game upstairs you could play.”

  “Watch,” Dec said in a shuddery hush.

  “Watch.”

  “OK, watch,” reaching for the remote. Then: “You know what? Let’s see it tomorrow instead.”

  No one protested.

  “Tomorrow will be better.”

  And it would be, Billy intending to fast-forward the DVR’ed version directly to the fourth quarter for them, all joy and no pain.

  John MacCormack called an hour later as Billy was coming out of the kids’ bedroom after having told them their favorite story, about the time when, as a rookie, he had chased down and subdued a riderless police horse in Times Square—leaving out, as he always did, the most heroic part of the adventure, the fact that he was off-his-ass drunk at the time, otherwise he’d have never been so idiotic as to bolt from his window seat at the bar and start running like a maniac down Broadway.

  “Just thought you might want to know,” MacCormack said, “Eric Cortez went out of the picture.”

  “What happened?”

  “Pulmonary infection. The fucking guy survives being left outdoors overnight, brain-shot in January weather, then goes and gets pneumonia in a warm hospital three months later.”

  “So now it’s a homicide?”

  “So now it’s a homicide,” MacCormack said. “Just grabbing at straws here, you sure you don’t have anything for me?”

  “Wish I did,” Billy said, surprised by a surge of protectiveness toward Yasmeen.

  “All right then.”

  “Let me ask you, what day was he found?”

  “Cortez? The fifth, why?”

  “January fifth?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “No reason,” Billy said. “Thanks for the update.”

  As soon as he got off the phone with MacCormack he began putting a call through to Yasmeen, then hung up and called her husband instead, Dennis blowing up at him halfway through “Hello.”

  “What the hell did you say to her today? She came home half out of her mind.”

  “What did she say I said?”

  “She didn’t, but what the fuck, Billy, she’s just starting to do good again.”

  “It was nothing, just some bullshit I was thinking I wanted to talk to somebody about, but I shouldn’t have picked her. Can you apologize for me?”

  “Apologize yourself.”

  “No, you’re right, you’re right, I’ll call her. Everything OK otherwise?”

  “Same ol’,” Dennis sounding calmer.

  “So, the reason I called you, she said you took your family to Florida?”

  “Yeah, Boynton Beach, to spend New Year’s with my parents. And people say I don’t know how to party, can you imagine that?”

  “I hear you . . . How long were you down there?”

  “From like the thirtieth to the eighth. Why?”

  “I was thinking of taking the kids, they’ve never been.”

  The thirtieth to the eighth, Billy thinking, Good news for her. Thinking, Fucking Redman. And back to thinking: All Pavlicek, all the time.

  He had the option of taking the night off, but he didn’t want to be alone, didn’t want to think about Pavlicek, Victor, the stalker, his father, or even his wife, and so, with Millie sleeping over and the slapdash 24/7 patrols at least going through the motions, he drove into the city at midnight, hoping, for a change, that the general malice out there would keep him busy until the morning.

  But in the way of these things, the night, as of three in the morning, was another dud—a home invasion on West Forty-sixth Street in which the home invader got his ass beat by the home owner, and a brawl at Complications, a pole-dance club on the West Side Highway where a few visiting Memphis Grizzlies had been throwing back Dom and stuffing hundreds, although none of them were involved in the fight.

  The Wheel called as he was driving back across Twenty-third Street to the office.

  “We got a stabbing homicide in the Three-five.”

  “Indoors or out.”

  “In. Fort Washington and One ninety-first.”

  “Fort Washington and One ninety-first?” Billy straightened up. “What address.”

  “I just said.”

  “The building number, for Christ’s sake.”

  By the time he showed up at Esteban Appleyard’s apartment, it was a party: CSU, patrol, Stupak, Butter, and Jimmy Whelan himself, his retired gold shield hanging by a bead chain over a pullover sweatshirt. Jimmy had no business being there, but Billy wasn’t going to say anything, and the others bought his expired tin at first sight even though he was wearing flip-flops.

  The small dining table in the living room was a tabloid tableau: two abandoned hands of cards, a knocked-over bottle of Tattoo Spiced Rum, three used glasses, and an ashtray bearing the remains of five Kool filter tips and a hollowed-out cigar wrapper that still held shreds of skunk.

  The body, belly-down on the carpet in a pool of not quite dried blood, was crammed into a corner of the room as if Appleyard had tried to escape his killers by crawling through the wall. There were multiple stab wounds to his back and buttocks. Rigor had locked his mouth into a savagely wide grin.

  As the two CSU techs turned him over, they all saw that he was still holding his last hand, five cards clutched tight in a frozen grip beneath his chin.

  “What’s he got?” Billy asked.

  One of the techs carefully prized the arm away from the body. “Aces and eights. Just like Wild Bill.”

  “Bullshit,” Whelan said.

  “Take a look.”

  Whelan stooped over the body and squinted at the hand.

  “A pair of threes,” he announced. “You a
ssholes.”

  “Dead man’s hand, baby,” the tech laughed.

  “Who’s Wild Bill?” Stupak said.

  Moments later, as the techs started to inventory the frontal devastation, a small intact balloon of intestine began to peep shyly out of a puncture wound above Appleyard’s navel, then slowly began to expand, those in the know quickly covering their noses and mouths before it could burst.

  Wanting to avoid the explosion of stench, Billy retreated into the bedroom, which, like the rest of the small four-room apartment, had been utterly ransacked—plants torn out of their pots, underwear, shirts, and sweaters hanging from open dresser drawers, along with VHS porn tapes and an upended shoe box that had been filled with small serrated-edged snapshots from Appleyard’s childhood in Puerto Rico.

  Whelan wandered in and picked up a ripped-out peace lily, the soil that was still clinging to its roots drizzling onto the unmade bed.

  “How much money you think he could’ve hid in this pot, thirteen dollars?”

  “You sure this was about the lottery?” Billy asked.

  “Of course it was. Fuckin’ guy. I told him a thousand times, you heard me yourself.”

  Whelan picked up one of the old photos fantailed around the shoe box, a black and white of the victim as a little kid standing with his mother by a seawall.

  “I swear, when God said he was passing out brains, Appleyard heard ‘trains,’ didn’t want any, and hid under a table.”

  “Any thoughts on the actors?”

  “Yeah,” Whelan said, “but not here.”

  When they left the apartment, the hallway was filled with tenants.

  “He’s dead?” a neighbor asked Whelan.

  “You bet.”

  “See, I told him,” another one said.

  Whelan clapped his hands once. “Everybody, just go back home.”

  “This is my home.”

  “Inside.”

  “You’re not the boss of me.”

  “Got February’s rent together yet, Alvin? How about March?”

  “Jimmy, you disrespect me like that?”

  “Whoever owes me two months’ rent. Inside.”

  Out on the street, they slipped into Whelan’s cigarette-smelling Elantra.

  “There’s these shitheads, the Alvarez brothers, in 2015 over there,” pointing to another prewar across the street, also with a deep H-block entrance. “Out of the blue they’ve been buddying him up all this last week like a lost cousin.”