The Whites: A Novel (13 page)

As well she should. When he had heard that Taft, less than a year after the murders, was getting married, Billy and Whelan, who was about to retire in any event, put on suits and crashed the wedding. Right after the minister asked if anyone objected, Billy sang out, “Right over here, because that bastard is a baby-killing triple murderer. He did it once, he’ll do it again.”

They got their asses good and kicked that day; half the wedding party, both male and female, were correction officers related by blood to Taft. But it was worth it just to ruin the ceremony—or maybe not, given that the incident led to his being transferred to Night Watch, his second banishment to the underworld, most bosses believing that working any kind of steady midnights was just this side of a firing squad.

“So,” Billy said amiably, “I just want to know, how’s it working out for you two, everybody happy?”

“You have no right to be accosting me,” her voice as stiff as her posture.

“I just want to ask you, does he ever wake up in the middle of the night all covered in sweat and screaming his head off? You know what I’m talking about, right?”

She waved to the same security guard across the floor, but Billy re-tinned him without even looking in his direction, the man once again backstepping to his post.

Billy felt light as a feather, out-of-his-mind spontaneous. “How’s he as a dad?” nodding to the stroller, kid number three from what he’d heard. “A real disciplinarian I’ll bet.”

She attempted to walk away, but Billy, astonishing himself, blocked her escape.

“One last bed question: does he ever get up, say, about six in the morning, come back about an hour later, a little winded, maybe a little bloody? I’m just curious.”

“I work for Christian Outreach,” her voice suddenly a hoarse, teary mess, “I
help
people, and you have no right to talk to me like this.”

No, he didn’t; suddenly red-faced, Billy turned from her without another word and walked away.

Finally striding across the central atrium toward the exit, Billy was startled to see Pavlicek coming in through the revolving doors, moving like a sleepwalker, his eyes off-center and shining as he made his way through the slanting beams of captured sunlight to the elevator banks.

“John!”

“Hey,” Pavlicek said flatly, turning to Billy as if they had just seen each other an hour ago.

“What are you doing here?” Billy’s voice still burbling with adrenaline.

“My doctor’s here.”

“You OK?”

“Yeah, just some tests.”

“Tests for what?”

“Cholesterol’s through the roof.”

“Yeah? What’s he got you on, Lipitor? Crestor?”

“Vytorin.”

“Jimmy Daly takes that. He says it’s a lifesaver.”

“Tell me about it.”

“You’re not here to see Curtis Taft by any chance,” Billy asked, his voice sly-dog low.

“Curtis Taft works here?” Pavlicek blinked.

Billy took a moment, then: “He’s a patient. I just about put my hands around his throat.”

“Still fucking with him, huh?” Pavlicek sounded elsewhere, his eyes over Billy’s shoulder as if there was bigger game to be had.

“You all right?”

“I just told you.”

“I mean otherwise.”

“It’s a funny day. I’m late for a meeting.”

“A meeting here?” Billy not sure whether he was still too jacked to keep track of the conversation or it was just careening off point on its own.

The elevator arrived, Pavlicek silently giving him his back as he stepped inside.

“Hey, what’s your doctor’s name?”

“What for?” Pavlicek towering over everyone else in the car.

Billy tapped his own heart. “You’re not the only one.”

“Go to someone up by you,” Pavlicek said as the door began to close. “My guy’s not all that.”

The sixteen-year-old Yemeni
kid lay
flat on his back, arms flung wide, staring up with his one unexploded eye at a cardboard placard taped to the ceiling: “
SCREW THE DOG
—
BEWARE OF OWNER
.” Above the words was a caricature of a stubble-jawed bruiser aiming a hand cannon at the viewer, the circumference of the muzzle almost as big around as the guy’s head. The real shooter—who had accidentally killed his best friend while showing off his father’s gun, which had been hidden beneath the cash register—was on the floor too, sitting at the end of a food aisle. Glaze-faced and weeping, he was being interviewed by Alice Stupak, squatting on her hams as she attempted to gently tweeze out his version of events.

As Billy stood by the front window debriefing the first uniform on the scene, Gene Feeley came into the store with a young man, not a cop, the kid involuntarily inhaling when he first saw the body.

“Back in the day the homicide rate around here was so high, Jackie, that the precinct had to split in two just to keep pace with the bodies,” Feeley explained. “But those days are dead and gone, so they say, although I would no sooner walk down the street unarmed around here than I would if I was living in Iraq.”

“What’s going on, Gene?” As far as Billy knew, Feeley had the night off.

“My sister’s kid, he’s doing a paper for his journalism class, I thought I’d help out.”

“No kidding,” Billy said, thinking, The guy never shows up when he’s supposed to, now he starts showing up when he isn’t.

“Uncle Gene,” the kid said, taking in the gun cartoon directly over the body. “Look at that.”

“Go on over there,” Feeley said, taking his nephew’s iPad. “I’ll take your picture, you can tweet it on Facebook.”

“Maybe you should wait until they finish,” Billy said.

“No problem, Billy,” one of the CSUs said, raising up from the body and taking the iPad from Feeley. “Go ahead, Gene, get in with the kid.”

A moment later, the store owner, the hem of his pajama bottoms peeking out from beneath his trouser cuffs, finally stumbled into the store, his gun permit held out before him like a magic charm. Avoiding looking at either the dead kid or his son, he walked right past Billy to Feeley, the most senior-looking cop on the set.

“Talk to her,” Feeley said, chucking a thumb at Stupak, who was coming back up to the front.

“Talk to me? What’s wrong with you?” she snapped. “Your hearing aid on the fritz?”

“Watch your mouth,” Feeley said, heading for the door.

“Where are you going?” she squawked, her arms outstretched in mock bewilderment.

“I got to be somewhere.”

“Somewhere
where,
” she blew. “You’re
here, here’s
where you got to be, so how about you stun the shit out of everybody and do your fucking job for a change.”

“Alice,” Billy pulling her back.

“You better talk to her,” Feeley said to Billy.

“Talk to me?” The front door shut with a jingle.

“Alice . . .”

“Talk to
me
?”

“Take it easy, he’s off tonight.”

“Oh yeah?” she said, grabbing the store owner by the arm and steering him off to a neutral corner. “How can you tell?”

Milton Ramos

He sat in his den. He had a den now, damp-smelling in a way he couldn’t eradicate but a den nonetheless. He didn’t even know what a den was when he was a kid. And not just a den: he had a house, a goddamn house, was the unencumbered owner of a two-story, three-bedroom, mock mock-Tudor. Of course, the neighborhood was so shitty that he had to enclose the entire exterior in decorative iron security grilles, which made it look like a birdcage for a pterodactyl, but it was his, earned and paid for. And he had Sofia, sitting next to him now, watching, for the second evening in a row,
Pocahontas
. He must have seen that thing seventy-five times,
Snow White, Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty, Mulan,
and all the others at least as many times as that. But he never grew bored, because what he was really doing was watching her watch the movie.

She was built like him, like her late mother, and she came in for her share of schoolyard torture. When he had been the porker back then, the teasing had quickly ended after the ringleader lost two of his brand-new front teeth to a cross pipe on the monkey bars. But she was a girl, and he had no idea how girls were supposed to deal with that kind of cruelty and so he let her watch slim pretty young females being rescued from their tormentors by handsome boys, night after night after night. A real father of the year.

Big, fast, and devoid of mercy—ever since he was a kid, that had been the rap on him. Everyone outside his family had always been afraid of him—in school, then later on the street, then later on the Job, even though he had never provoked a fight in his life. Devoid of mercy, devoid of humor, devoid of personality. But he loved deep if not demonstrably: his mother, his two brothers, and his wife, all gone now. And this kid right here, who—fortunately, he guessed—had been an infant when her mother passed.

“Give me a sip,” she said, nodding to the glass of Yellow Chartreuse in his hand.

“Cut it out.”

“I want some,” she wheedled in a high teasing voice, the same ritual every night.

“It’s medicine, I told you that.”

“I’m sick,” dropping her forehead to his arm. “Please?”

He dipped a finger in the glass and touched it to her tongue. “It’s bedtime, go upstairs.”

“Carry me.”

“I can’t, my back hurts,” he said, wincing.

“Maybe you had too much medicine.”

Milton winced again, this time for real. “Go ahead, Marilys is waiting, I’ll come up later.”

Moving like Creeping Jesus, Sofia reluctantly headed for the stairs, placing one foot then the other on each riser, groaning like an old lady before stepping up to the next. One foot then the other, her nightly protest march.

“Go ahead now.”

Milton switched to ESPN, then reached for the lined sheet of yellow paper on the coffee table, so obsessively handled today that it was starting to blacken along the folds. He left it unopened in his lap.

He tried to concentrate on the last five minutes of the Nets-Thunder game, but his thoughts drifted, as they often did after a few shots, to Sofia’s mother, Sylvia, seven years earlier the victim of a hit-and-run driver on Bronx Park East, directly in front of the geriatric hospital where she had worked for a radiologist.

If he had to describe their eight-year marriage in two words, if he was allowed to go back in time and rescript their wedding cake, he would choose, in sky-blue icing,
Good Enough,
as in good enough companions, good enough lovers, good enough parents.
Good Enough,
as in if God or some fortune-teller had told him, early on in their relationship, that Sylvia was to be his mate until the end of his days, he wouldn’t have complained. Except the end of her days came first.

Marilys Irrizary, Milton’s housekeeper and Sofia’s five-days-a-week stand-in mother, had a distinct tread: halting and striving for cat-burglar light, as if just leaving the bedroom of a colicky baby. But she was a short, solid, broad-foot Guatemalan, and he could always hear her on the move from anywhere in the house.

She came into the den and stood directly behind where he sat on the couch.

“She’s waiting for you.”

“I’ll be up,” draining his ’Treuse without turning to look at her.

“I finished everything I could, but there’s still stuff in the dryer.”

“You’re going home?”

She leaned over his shoulder for the empty glass on the coffee table, the sweetish tang still hanging in the air.

“I could stay.”

Most witnesses at the scene of the accident, the vehicular homicide, disagreed on the make and model, let alone the color, of the car. One old guy was able to come up with a description of the plate, which he said was out of state, had a tree splitting the numbers against a blue-orange sunset.

“Or I could go.”

Visiting that half-cocked witness on the sly two days later, Milton asked him how he could possibly remember the tree splitting the digits against a blue-orange sunset yet not recall any numbers or letters off the same.

3-T-R, left side of the tree, the old man said. It had come back to him that very morning on the toilet.

Make and model?

Black maybe gray Accord or Camry, those cars to him like two peas in a pod.

The case wasn’t Milton’s, of course, the visit enough to get him suspended for hindering the investigation of the local squad, although probably not really, given the mitigating circumstances, emotional duress, extreme grief, et cetera. Nonetheless, he kept the news of the partial plate to himself.

From one flight above, the front door opened, then closed, followed by the jingle of keys in the lock, Marilys heading for home.

Three weeks after Milton’s talk with the eyewitness, a middle-aged male with a suspended driver’s license lay on his deathbed in Cherokee County Memorial Hospital after suffering grievous wounds in a car accident. Aaron Artest, an individual who lived in Queens but had unexpectedly returned to his hometown of Union, South Carolina, about the same time as Sylvia’s funeral, told investigators that an old rust-bodied sedan with heavily tinted side windows had pulled up next to his gray Accord—plate 3TR-AM7—as he was driving alone on Highway 150. The unseen driver kept apace for a minute or so, as if to make sure he had Artest’s attention, before poking a shotgun out of the passenger window, which, naturally, inspired Artest to haul ass. Then his brakes, which had been serviced not even a month before, on the day he left New York, must’ve somehow given out.