The Whites: A Novel

by Richard Price

  “Apartment?” Billy writing.

  “Fifth floor’s all I know. The youngest brother, Marcus, just got back from upstate, Tomas I once caught trying to jimmy a storage lock in my building with a gravity knife.”

  “So prints are on file.”

  “You could say that.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “Around here?” Shrugging as he reached for the door handle. “Start with them.”

  Stepping from the Elantra back out onto the street, Billy wandered to the rear of the car, paused to light a cigarette, then saw the bullet holes in the trunk, moonlight brightening their jagged edges, some curling in, some curling out.

  “Come here,” he said.

  Whelan came around, regarded the constellation of punctures, then lit a cigarette himself.

  “Can you pop it, please?”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Jimmy.”

  “You think there’s something in there?”

  Billy stared at him.

  “If you want to be a prick about it, get a warrant.”

  “Sweetpea wasn’t even yours.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You did it for Redman?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Then, again, before Billy could say anything more, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Deaf to the occasional horns and blind to the oncoming headlights, Billy took a brief walk down the center of Fort Washington Avenue, his hands clasped on top of his head.

  Yasmeen was in Florida when Eric Cortez was shot. Pavlicek was at the hospital with his son when Bannion died all over Penn Station. Sweetpea ended his days in the boot of Whelan’s car. He himself was at a crime scene in Manhattan when Curtis Taft was being hog-tied in the Bronx.

  Redman had been telling the truth after all, but only the partial truth. They were all in on it, but no one was anywhere near the scene when their own demons had gone out of the picture.

  They had swapped Whites.

  Two hours later, as he and Stupak were escorting Tomas and Marcus Alvarez out of their apartment house for questioning, the uncuffed brothers shouting in each other’s face not to say shit, Billy saw that Whelan had made no effort to move his car from in front of the building, their entire convoy having to walk past it in order to get to the waiting van.

  MILTON RAMOS

  The call from Anita came in as he was sitting on the side of his bed, rewrapping the Ace bandage on his empurpled thigh, Victor’s boot print there still so clearly defined on his flesh that he could have accurately ordered him a pair of shoes.

  “Milton, your daughter left three messages on your phone. Why aren’t you calling her back?”

  “I’ve been drowning in work,” he said, reaching for the Chartreuse on his night table. “Is she OK?”

  “Other than you not calling her, she’s fine.”

  Milton threw back a shot, got up, and began looking for his car keys. “Is she mad at me for last night?”

  “She hasn’t said anything.”

  Dropping to the floor, he felt around beneath the bed. “I have to apologize for my behavior. I was upset.”

  “It’s OK. I just figured with all the terrible stress you have on you right now.”

  He stopped moving. “What do you mean.”

  “That gang contract.”

  “Contract . . .” Crouching there confused, then remembering his story, rising to his knees. “I have to ask you again. Sofia, do you still want her?”

  “Do I want her?” Anita sounded unsure of his meaning. “Sure, she’s a delight.”

  “Good,” returning to his search.

  “Just give me an idea of when you’ll be taking her back.”

  “It’s almost over,” he said, spotting the car keys in one of his tossed-off shoes.

  “I just don’t understand why you don’t call her.”

  He was pretty sure he could drive.

  The cemetery was one of those unending necropoli that lined the ride into the city from JFK, a crowded mouthful of gray teeth, unkempt and askew. But up close, say, if you found yourself kneeling before a loved one or two or three, it wasn’t that bad. And that’s where he found himself, in a catcher’s squat before the stones of his mother and two brothers, desperate to get his bearings.

  He was no great master planner of revenge, no fiendish calculator; he was nothing more than an increasingly violent and out-of-control wreck whose hands shook all the time now from drinking, nothing more than a raging borderline wet-brain, so constantly tired these days that he could barely get in or out of bed. And assuming they had recovered his bat from the scene, it would only be a matter of days before they matched his prints.

  In high school, his English teacher didn’t think anyone in class could get through Moby-Dick without tossing the book out a window, so she had brought in a Betamax tape of the movie, drawn the blinds, and played it on a roll-down screen. Most of the students were bored stupid by the black-and-white film, but not him. He had been riveted by the metal-eyed captain, his blazing doggedness, and in the end, when he went down into the sea strapped to the beast that he had lived to kill, it had struck Milton as the perfect outcome.

  And that’s how it should end between him and Carmen.

  Sofia was with the right people, and this patch of earth, right here among his brothers and his mother, looked so inviting. He was so tired, all the time now. He just had to move fast before he was unable to move at all.

  CHAPTER 16

  When Billy returned to the funeral home the next morning, Redman and his wife, Nola, were sitting on facing folding chairs across the aisle from each other in the darkened chapel, both staring at the carpet while Rafer flew around the room waving a cosmetic stippling brush in his hand.

  “It’s ten in the morning,” Redman said. “I was expecting you at dawn.”

  Nola stood up and left.

  Billy waited while Redman got to his feet, took the brush back from his son, then lifted him in his arms.

  “If I could have, I would have, you better believe that,” he finally said. “Fact of the matter is, I can carry a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound body across this room from the prep table to the casket, no problem, but if I go more than a block to buy a beer? I need a walker. End of the day? All I could do was disappear him.”

  “Could you put Rafer down, please?”

  Redman gave him a look as if Billy were about to slap on cuffs.

  “I can’t talk about this with the kid in your arms,” Billy said.

  Bending stiffly from the waist, Redman complied, Rafer taking off for his grandfather’s cubicle, where the old man was once again playing poker on his computer.

  “What do you mean, disappear him,” Billy said. “Disappear him how.”

  “He left here in a casket. Underneath someone else.”

  “Underneath who.”

  “That girl you had me bury.”

  “You did that to her?”

  “I did it to him.”

  All he needed was an exhumation order, find out if Martha Timberwolf had any company beneath her stone. And when the forensics came back on Whelan’s trunk, they were bound to find something.

  “You knew what Whelan was up to before he did it?”

  “I got up one morning, went out back for a smoke, and there’s Sweetpea Harris laying in the yard. And that’s all I’m saying about it.”

  “Did you ask him to do it?”

  “I said that’s all I’m saying about it.”

  “How about the others.”

  “Which others.”

  “I want to know who did who.”

  “Why.”

  “Why?”

  Redman opened a box of cheap hand fans advertising the funeral parlor, then began depositing them on chair seats.

  “I’m just curious,” Billy said. “Did you embalm him?”

  “Either that or let him stink up the joint.”

  “
Jesus Christ, Redman, where’s your heart?”

  “Where’s yours. You pursue this, you’ll be taking people away from their kids, so where’s yours,” he said, walking off before Billy could walk out.

  At Maimonides, Victor was asleep in his bed, Richard lying next to him, wide-eyed but withdrawn. On a sofa at the opposite end of the room, Carmen was also asleep, hands curled under her chin, her face pressed so deeply into a cushion that he had to resist moving her head back.

  Billy stood against a wall, dutifully stared at the three of them until he thought he would go crazy.

  Who did who . . .

  Stepping out into the hallway, he called Elvis Perez.

  “Are you in?” he asked.

  “For about an hour or so. What’s up?”

  “Do you still have the tapes from Penn Station?”

  “Of course.”

  “I never took a look at the one under the information boards.”

  “That’s because I told you it’s a waste of time.”

  “I’m leaving now.”

  “Really, if I thought . . .”

  “I’m leaving now.”

  “Where’s Waldo, right?” Perez said, standing over Billy’s shoulder as they viewed the rescued tape of the scene beneath the LIRR track information board. “See what I’m saying?”

  Billy had to agree: the scrum of plastic-derby-wearing revelers was so tight under the board that when he was finally able to ID his vic, Bannion was already leaving bloody shoeprints on his way to the subway, dead man jogging.

  “Where’s Waldo in hell,” Elvis said.

  When Perez left with his partner on a witness interview run, Billy remained at his desk and reran the tape. Again, nothing, just Bannion popping out of the periphery and taking off. There were others coming and going under the board besides Bannion: staggerers, stragglers, latecomers to the party, and those who just wandered away as if having lost interest in getting home. But not one of these wanderers, all leaving the crowd at the same time or just after Bannion made his stumbling dash to nowhere, exhibited any kind of suspect body language, no one running or even walking off at anything more than a dawdling pace, no one even glancing back at the crowd they had just left.

  Most of the people whose faces were turned to the camera and could be identified had already been interviewed by Midtown South, including all of Bannion’s friends that night. Teams of detectives had either traveled out to Long Island or caught the potential witnesses at their workstations in Manhattan, not one of these sit-downs yielding a single helpful lead.

  Billy reran the tape. Then ran it again, this time in slow motion. On his sixth viewing someone caught his eye—one of the commuters, exiting the throng a moment before, not after, Bannion, which made sense given that it must have taken the stupefied vic a moment or two before he realized what had already happened to him.

  The figure, its back to the camera as it briefly lingered at the bottom of the frame before leaving the scene altogether, looked like nothing so much as a small, upright bear.

  “They finally salvaged the tape,” Billy said.

  “What tape?” Yasmeen asked from behind her desk in the university security office.

  “From Penn Station.”

  “I thought they had that tape.”

  “The other one.”

  “What other one.”

  Tired of the dance, Billy showed her the printout of the shaggy form walking away from the crime scene before anyone there knew it was a crime scene.

  Yasmeen looked at it, then—unconsciously, Billy assumed—glanced at her Tibetan coat draped over an empty chair.

  “It was either you or Janis Joplin coming out of that crowd.”

  “Do you know how many coats like this . . .”

  “Don’t jerk me around,” he said wearily. “Not now, all right?”

  She was a long time in responding.

  “You have those two little boys,” she finally said. “Could you imagine me ever coming up to you like this?”

  “I didn’t kill anybody, Yasmeen.”

  “The hell you didn’t. And what did we do? Closed ranks and protected your ass.”

  “It was a justified shoot. I didn’t need you to.”

  “Oh yes you did, cokey boy.”

  One of the other retired detectives working at the school came into the office and dropped a folder on her blotter, Yasmeen getting to work on it before he even left.

  Billy sat there for a while studying the photographs push-pinned into her wall: campus trespassers, a trashed dorm lounge, the facades of problematic East and West Village bars.

  “Yasmeen, the story’s going to come out one way or another.”

  “Well, one good story deserves another,” she said, flicking the side of her nose.

  Billy got up to leave.

  “You know, Dennis, he’s a good guy, a good dad, I’ll give him that . . .”

  Billy stood there, waiting for the punch line.

  “But I could’ve been with you all these years, you know? I could have been your wife, Dominique and Simone could have been your daughters.”

  “I’ll give you a week to get a lawyer,” he heard himself say.

  “You’d do that for me?” she said sweetly, Billy almost positive she was being sarcastic.

  “So you say,” Carmen said, looking down at the Penn Station printouts spread out on the kitchen table before her.

  “So I know,” Billy looking at her. “And you know too.”

  Carmen shifted her gaze from the table to the window. “Do you remember when I couldn’t get out of bed for close to three months? What did she do for us.”

  “This has nothing to do with that.”

  “No? What’s it have to do with?”

  “Do I even have to answer that?”

  Resting her brow in the heel of her palm, Carmen looked as if she’d rather be anywhere else than in this room with this man right now.

  “Do I even have to answer that?” Billy pleaded.

  “Why did you marry me,” she said.

  “Why did I what?”

  “What did you see in me.”

  “I don’t know. I saw you. Where are we going with this?”

  Carmen swept the printouts to the floor. “Jesus, Billy,” her voice clotted with tears, “sometimes people just need to be forgiven.”

  More cryptic and distance-making shit from his most intimate of intimates, Billy watching her climb the stairs to the bedroom and feeling more isolated on this than ever before.

  Three bodies, and so far everyone was either defying him, threatening him, or tossing off pronouncements fit for a Sphinx. Everyone acting like they had his number.

  Billy called first Redman, then Whelan, got the machine for both and left the same message: one week to lawyer up. He started to dial Pavlicek’s number, then hung up in mid-dial. This one had to be face-to-face.

  Not really thinking about what he would see when he walked into the private suite at the Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, Billy took one look at the patient, then turned and retreated, hoping no one inside had noticed. Out in the hallway, he caught his breath and then reentered, having no choice but to accept that the sallow-skinned, seemingly inert stick figure lying in the bed, with its distant, unresisting eyes, was, still was, John Junior, only six months ago a bear of a young man who’d often had to sidle through doorways.

  Speechless, he floated across the room and stood in a corner.

  “You know, I was trying to describe to Johnnie here,” Pavlicek said, his eyes never leaving his son’s face, “what it was like for us back in the nineties, the bust-ass blocks, the gangs, the dope lines going right past the precinct house, that whole rodeo.”

  He was seated on the side of the bed, one hand on the kid’s thigh, the other on his forehead, as if he was afraid his son would start to levitate.

  “John,” Billy whispered, “I had no idea.”

  “I’ll never forget the day I bought my first building on Fai
le Street, five thousand dollars, the old guy running down the street with the check in his hand, ‘You’ll never make a dime!’ But then the fun began, remember? All those all-nighters, me, you, Whelan, Redman, Charlie Torreano, God rest his soul . . . Stripping, sanding, uncovering that beautiful wood, the moldings, the sconces, then that morning light coming in . . .”

  Billy stepped to the bed and lightly touched Junior’s hand, the kid turning his head in response but too deep in his medicated drift to raise his eyes.

  “Billy, I swear to you, twenty-six buildings later and nothing ever felt as good to me as rehabbing that first dump on Faile. Well, what the hell, I made my dent.”

  There was no way Billy could bring up what he had come to say, not here and not now.

  Pavlicek let him get halfway to the door. “Redman told me that you couldn’t drop the bomb on him this morning until he put his kid down,” looking at Billy for the first time since he came into the room. “So I can imagine what a bitch this must be for you right now.”

  “That all can wait,” he said.

  “For what, Junior to die? You’re going to make this into a death watch before you turn me in?”

  “What I meant . . .”

  “I know what you meant,” Pavlicek cut him off. “Just let it happen.”

  Billy took a seat on the edge of the narrow visitor’s bed wedged under the far window, dress shirts and sweaters spilling out of a Gladstone bag on the blanket.

  “John, what do I do.”

  He had always looked up to Pavlicek for guidance; they all did.

  “It looks like you’re doing it.”

  “How can you make me carry this?”

  “In all honesty? You weren’t exactly on my mind at the time,” Pavlicek said. “Besides, you did it to yourself. No one told you to go fucking investigate.”

  “You shot Cortez?”

  “Do you need me to say it?”

  “I do.”

  “I shot Cortez. I screwed it up, but that there was definitely me.”

  “I can’t sit on three bodies,” Billy said. “I can’t live with it.”

  “Then don’t.”