The Whites: A Novel

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The Whites: A Novel Page 32

by Richard Price


  “Carmen . . .”

  “But I killed him. Nobody could tell me different. I knew what I knew before I knew it . . . ‘4F,’ I said.”

  “Carmen, listen to me, the killers were the killers.”

  “Billy, don’t.”

  “They’re the ones who had the guns.”

  “Billy, I’m begging you . . .”

  “Carmen, you were a kid, fifteen, you said so yourself.”

  “The cops came to our door later that day, doing a canvass of the building, nobody could figure out why this basically no trouble to anyone boy was executed. And when they came to our apartment I hid in the bathroom while they talked to my mother, and when they left I told her that I saw the killers, I talked to them, and first she turned white, then, without even giving me two minutes to pack or say goodbye to my brother, she dragged me out of the apartment and into a cab for Port Authority, and put me on a bus to live with my father in Atlanta. And when I was down there I heard that Milton and Edgar killed the guys that killed their brother, then later I heard that Edgar was killed in return, and that their mother died soon after, and now, now Milton’s gone.”

  “He’s gone? He was here to kill you.”

  “And now you understand why.”

  “Carmen, how many lives have you saved in that hospital. How many people are still walking the earth because of you.”

  “So, whatever the law thinks of me, and it doesn’t think anything of me at all about this, I know what I did.”

  Billy’s impulse was to once again try to defend her from herself, but he finally accepted the fact that all he’d be doing was causing her more pain.

  “So,” she said after a long moment, “you tell me about Pavlicek, about Yasmeen, about Jimmy Whelan, what they did and why. But I’ve got more souls to answer for than any of them, and I live with that every day. I see the Ramos family every day, I say I’m sorry to them so many times in my head from morning to night it’s like I have a chemical disorder.”

  Billy finally, cautiously, lay down next to her.

  “I know you want to give me absolution, Billy, but you don’t have that power. I wish you did.” Then: “But at least now you know.”

  Too early the next morning, Billy found himself sitting alone at the kitchen table, staring out the window at the askew backboard in the driveway, his coffee as cold as a pond. Immediately after unloading to him about her part in the destruction of the Ramos family, Carmen had proceeded to pass out, was still passed out, Billy checking the wall clock, fifteen hours later. He couldn’t count the times he’d seen that in murderers who’d finally owned up to what they had done—straight back to the cell and their first peaceful sleep in weeks, months, years. You couldn’t wake them with grenades.

  His phone rang—Redman—Billy killing it directly.

  The day before, Yasmeen and Whelan had tried to call him too. If he had picked up for either of them, his guess then was, the conversation would center strictly on asking how his family was doing. For them to ask where he was at in regards to turning them in, so soon after what he’d been through, would have been a grievous error in judgment on their part and they’d know that. Nonetheless, the seven-day grace period he had given them to get ahead of their situations was more than half over, but as far as he knew not one of them had even walked into a lawyer’s office yet, let alone stepped into a precinct with a story to tell. His take was that they were all banking on the trauma, hoping that in the aftermath of what had happened to him and his family he would be thrown into such a state of emotional chaos that he would no longer have the time, the brain cells, or the heart to follow through on his own ultimatum.

  Hearing the thump of his father’s New York Times landing on the porch, Billy opened the door and saw a Chevy Tahoe sitting silently at the foot of his driveway, Yasmeen staring out at him through the windshield.

  At least she knew enough not to come to the door.

  Billy walked down the driveway, taking his coffee with him, and settled into the passenger seat without a word.

  She had barely brushed her hair and was wearing nothing more than a heavy sweater thrown over pajamas, the first time he’d seen her without the Tibetan coat in months.

  “Hey, I called you so many times, you didn’t answer, I just had to come by.”

  Billy looked at his watch: five forty-five a.m.

  “I know, I’m sorry, I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I just want to know how everybody’s holding up.”

  “We’ll get through.”

  “I can’t imagine, that must have been such a nightmare for you.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “No, I understand,” she said quickly. “I understand. I should go home,” running her palms along the top of her steering wheel but making no move to start up the car.

  She had no more driven up here to ask after his family than she had come for the latest NBA scores, the musk of her anguish growing so intense that he had to crack his window.

  “Sorry,” she said, “I just ran out of the house.”

  “This picture,” Billy tapping the laminated photo of her daughters that hung from the neck of her rearview mirror, “was that always there? Or did you just put it up this morning?”

  “No,” she said faintly, “that’s just my girls, you know.”

  The first oriole of the season caught his eye, a dash of bright against the early spring drab.

  “Just my girls,” she murmured, looking off.

  He removed the photo from its bead chain, flipped it into her lap. “You see them? What the hell were you thinking?”

  “It was do what I did or go kill myself. Better a mother in Bedford Hills than in a grave.”

  “I can’t hear this shit,” he said, reaching for the door handle.

  Yasmeen grabbed his hand. “You don’t think I know what I did?” she warbled. “You think I didn’t know how I’d be after that? But at least I’m alive. It was me or him.”

  “Which him.”

  “What?”

  “Cortez or Bannion.”

  “I didn’t go near Cortez,” she said.

  “So, clean hands on that one, right?”

  Up on the porch, Milton Ramos was leaning against the front door at an impossibly low angle, his rigid body inches from the ground, Billy taking him in and then lifting his eyes to the bedroom window, to Carmen up there desperately trying to exorcize her history via hibernation.

  And all he wanted to do right now was join her.

  All he wanted to do right now was to be free of himself, free of all the bodies, and tend to his family.

  “What happened to your coat,” he said his gaze still fixed on the window.

  “What? I burned it.”

  “Just as well.”

  “What do you mean?” she said quietly.

  “I mean, next time you buy a jacket, take a girlfriend.”

  “Billy, say what you mean,” Yasmeen tilting toward him now, as taut as a bird.

  Billy took a sip of the cold coffee, then opening his door, tossed the rest onto the driveway.

  “You know,” he said, “sometimes when I draw a slow night and I can duck out early, I’d be coming around that curve right about now, sliding for home.”

  “Billy, please . . .”

  “Sitting out here like this?” he said. “It’s like I’m waiting for myself to show up.”

  “Fucking Billy,” Yasmeen blurted as she keyed the ignition. “Fucking Billy.”

  The unexpected blast of Mariah Carey coming through the car speakers made her scream.

  Enough.

  “You get a lawyer yet?” he said, turning off the radio.

  “There’s a guy,” she said sullenly. “I’m going to see him today.”

  “Save your money,” he said, finally stepping out of the car.

  “What?”

  But she knew what, Yasmeen clamping a hand across her mouth like a muzzle, the tears running over her knuckles.

  “
And do your crying at home.”

  Carmen stumbled into the kitchen an hour later, her face a blur.

  “How long was I out for?”

  “Long enough.”

  “Then why am I still so exhausted?” she said, wandering over to pour herself some coffee.

  “I heard Victor’s going home tomorrow,” he said.

  “He is.”

  “Does he know?”

  “About Milton?”

  “About you,” he said.

  “Me? No. I couldn’t ever tell him.”

  “Well, maybe you can now.”

  “Now I need to.”

  “Just wait a little while until he settles in with the babies.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Of course.”

  “Yasmeen drove up this morning.”

  “This morning?” Lowering herself into the chair next to his. “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “She stayed in her car.”

  “Did you talk to her?”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “And?”

  “And it’s over,” he said.

  “Over. What do you mean, ‘over.’” Then: “With just her or all of them?”

  Billy shrugged.

  They sat in silence for a while, Carmen joining him in looking out at the backyard.

  “I’m glad,” she finally said. “Thank you.”

  He wanted to say that he didn’t do it for her, but who knew.

  Milton Ramos reappeared, this time sitting on the living room couch, immobile yet full of murderous despair.

  Well, Billy told himself, what did you expect.

  And if Carmen hadn’t seen him yet, she’d see him soon enough.

  “I think I got up too early,” he said.

  “Me too,” she said, reaching for, but missing, his hand. “Let’s go back to bed.”

  The call from Stacey Taylor came a week later.

  “I need to tell you something.”

  “What’s that.”

  “Have breakfast with me. It’s a long story.”

  “Give me the headline.”

  “Just have breakfast with me,” she said. “You’ll be glad you did.”

  “You said that the last time.”

  “This time I mean it.”

  “I have a therapy session at two.”

  “Physical?”

  “Family.”

  “Where.”

  “West Forties.”

  “Then come after.”

  “Your whale, Curtis Taft?” she said to him over a four p.m. breakfast in another one of her tin-can diners. “He shot his girlfriend last night.”

  “Girlfriend or wife?” Billy asked, thinking of Patricia Taft, big and stately, pushing a stroller that day through the atrium of the hospital.

  “Girlfriend.”

  “You have a funny definition of good news.”

  “She’ll live,” Stacey said, fondling an unopened pack of Parliaments, “but he also clipped the first EMT coming through the door, so he’s most likely going away just this side of forever.”

  So, yeah, good news, he guessed, but it left him flat. “He got away with a triple,” he said. “Skated like Brinker.”

  “You catch them for what you catch them for,” she said. “You told me that.”

  “Memori Williams, Tonya Howard, Dreena Bailey,” he said loudly enough to turn heads.

  And Eric Cortez, Sweetpea Harris, Jeffrey Bannion, if he was taking a true tally.

  The food came, two omelets that were so oily they looked shellacked.

  “So, in other news,” sliding her plate to the side. “I’ve been hearing some wild rumors.”

  “About . . .”

  “Bad guys getting taken out by frustrated cops.”

  “Frustrated, huh?” Billy thinking, Maybe the center would hold for them and maybe not, but if she had really called him here hoping he would help her out, she was dreaming. He would no more talk to her about any of his friends than they would have talked about him eighteen years earlier.

  Ignoring the food, he took a sip of coffee. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “You know I can’t say.”

  “Journalistic ethics?” he said with more of an edge than he’d intended.

  The dig deflated her like a pin. “Yeah, well, we used to hear bullshit rumors like this all the time back at the Post. They rarely came to anything.”

  He wanted to remind her that rarely wasn’t the same as never, that eighteen years ago, when she was young and mad ambitious, words like rarely, unlikely, implausible would never have slowed her down—but what would have been the point.

  The woman sitting across from him—gray in face and grown so bony in middle age that he could count the knobs of her spine through her pullover—just didn’t have the heart for the chase anymore; rarely, these days, justification enough for her to fold her tent and go home to her wine and her cigarettes and her death-wish drunk of a boyfriend.

  “I need to tell you something,” he said, before he could stop himself.

  “Tell me something?” Stacey looking at him warily, not liking his suddenly breathy tone.

  “It’s about me and you,” Billy thinking, She can get back in the game with this. Get back in the game and redeem her good name.

  “Can I go outside for a smoke first?” she nearly pleaded, her eyes pierced with dread.

  Her resistance to finally hearing the words that would vindicate the last two punishing decades of her life at first baffled him, then sobered him. What the hell was he thinking? The consequences for his family and for himself . . .

  “Forget it, it’s nothing.”

  He knew she wouldn’t press, and she didn’t, Stacey masking her relief by pretending that something out on the street had caught her eye. And Billy, playing his part, started attacking his eggs as if they were edible.

  “Let me ask you something,” she said after a while. “Whether you were or weren’t high that day and that psycho with the pipe was still bearing down on you like that . . . Would you have done anything differently?”

  “Hypothetically?” he said. “No, I don’t think so.” Then: “No, I wouldn’t.”

  Stacey went back to gazing out the window, her thin features vanishing in the late afternoon sunlight that slanted through the glass.

  “I mean, it’s not like I never think about getting back into some kind of reporting,” she said, tentatively pressing her fingertips against her throat. “But that sex advice column for men that I write? We had nine thousand hits last issue. Up from fifty-five hundred the issue before, up from three thousand the issue before that. So, I think it’s safe to say that I’m onto something.”

  Billy nodded in gratitude.

  “Can I go out and have my cigarette now?” she said.

  Pavlicek tried to ring through as he was leaving the diner, the only one of them who hadn’t attempted to contact him in the days after Ramos. The others had stopped calling directly after his talk with Yasmeen, Billy assuming that no one wanted to risk a conversation that, if they said the wrong thing or adopted the wrong tone, might prompt him to change his mind. Yet Pavlicek hadn’t called even once, and so on the third attempted ring-through, coming forty minutes after the first, Billy yielded to his curiosity and picked up. But instead of getting Pavlicek on the other end, the voice Billy heard was Redman’s.

  “It’s John Junior,” he said. “The funeral’s here on Thursday.”

  Unlike the Homecoming for Martha Timberwolf, Junior’s service was standing room only.

  At first, when he entered the already crowded chapel with his wife and kids, Billy wondered if he had it in him to let himself go, even just for this day. But when he saw Pavlicek, lumbering wild-eyed between the casket and Redman’s piano like a chained bear, he couldn’t help but wade through the crowd and grab him.

  “It’s over now, right?” Pavlicek said too brightly, his breath rank with grief. “All over but the shoutin’.”

  “Sure,” Billy said,
wishing it were so.

  “Come here,” Pavlicek taking Billy by the elbow and steering him to the side of the open coffin. “Look at this, can you believe this?” Touching his son’s rigid left pinkie sticking out from the folded repose of his crossed hands. “He looks like some fucking fop holding a teacup, and this here,” running a finger down the left side of Junior’s jaw, the skin there three shades darker than on the right, “and his hair, I don’t know what Redman was thinking but this kid never had a pompadour in his life.”

  Pavlicek’s tone was crisp and snappy and jarringly unaffected by the tears that slipped down his face in sheets. “I mean, I never thought our friend was the greatest mortician on the planet, but this is ridiculous.”

  “Maybe he just doesn’t get to work much on white people,” Billy said carefully.

  “And see, I put this in,” pointing to his own gold shield tucked into a corner of the casket. “And this,” lifting out a framed photo of the two of them taken in Amsterdam a few years earlier. “And this,” a snapshot of Junior as a toddler with his mother before she tried to drown him. “I really debated putting that one in, but . . .”

  The disconnect between voice and tears continued, Billy wondering how long he could keep it up.

  “You ever read that?” Pavlicek asked, pointing to a paperback copy of Steppenwolf near Junior’s feet. “Last year he told me that it changed his life, so I tried to get through it a few times to see what he saw,” the tears finally beginning to climb into his throat, “but honestly? I thought it was crap. Anyways it’s all over now, right? All over but the shoutin’.”

  “Johnny,” Billy said, stepping back from Junior’s body. “I’m dying for you.”

  Embarrassed by his choice of words, Billy began to apologize, but he needn’t have bothered, given that Pavlicek had already turned away and was now engaged in giving Ray Rivera, father of the murdered Thomas, the same manic tour of the coffin and its contents as he had given Billy.

  They were all there with their families, those who had families: Yasmeen, Dennis, and the girls; Redman, who had prepared the body but turned the service over to his father so he could participate purely as a mourner, standing with Nola, Rafer, and two of his six or seven other sons; and Jimmy Whelan, who at least had the sense for once not to bring a date.

  They all made some sort of contact with Billy, mostly sober nods, a few terse greetings, Yasmeen going so far as to hug Carmen and make a quiet fuss over the kids. But for the most part they kept their distance, which he thought was more about letting sleeping dogs lie than anything else, and he was fine with it. He preferred it.

 

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