The Whites: A Novel (18 page)

“That’s no good,” writing again.

“You ever been to Atlanta?” he asked.

Since taking a seat next to her, the tension he felt had him speaking in a near mumble, and either she didn’t hear the question or she was just off somewhere in her head. Either way he didn’t want to ask again, didn’t want to lead her any more than that. It would be too much like begging.

Just recognize me. Stop me in my tracks by saying my name, then drop to your knees to ask my forgiveness and explain to me through your tears why you did it. Then maybe, just maybe, we can both survive this.

Last chance for us both.

When he next looked at her, she was staring back at him as if he had spoken aloud, her eyes fixed with a look of unguarded intensity.

His shortness-of-breath gambit was no longer a joke.

“Are you on the Job?” she finally said.

“I work for FedEx, it’s right on the form there.”

“Huh. My husband’s a cop and I could have sworn . . .”

“I get that a lot.”

Recognize me, just let me see you tremble with memory, I’ll settle for that . . . 

But the moment passed. She went into her desk, brought out a blood pressure cuff, and gestured for his arm.

Seated as close as they were, he could reach out and grip her by the throat so fast she couldn’t make a sound, couldn’t signal or even move. He could choke the life out of her before anyone even knew what had happened.

“Your BP’s through the roof.”

“Must be the cats,” he said hoarsely, Milton near livid with despair.

Chapter 7

When Billy got home the next morning, he was relieved to discover that Carmen was at work and the boys at school. He went directly to the refrigerator, made himself his double usual, and was asleep within the hour.

He awoke at three-thirty to find himself back-to-back in bed with his father, who was chatting up a storm with his dead wife. The boys were somewhere in the house killing each other.

Billy got out of bed, put on his bathrobe, and went back into the kitchen. As he shambled to the coffeemaker, he nearly tripped over Carlos’s camo jacket, which lay in a heap on the floor. When he picked it up, the jacket was tacky to the touch and smelled of paint. Holding it in front of himself by the epaulets, he discovered what he at first took to be a red five-pointed star, still in the process of drying, planted between the shoulders.

No, not a star. The bulk of the image was more fan-shaped than round, and the five points were actually all emanating in a curved line from the top of that fan, the thing now looking more like a handprint—was a handprint, a big one.

“Carlos!”

The kid came up from the basement wearing nothing but his underpants.

“What happened to your jacket?” Showing him the damage.

“I don’t know.”

The outline of the hand was crudely precise. Not casual. Not accidental.

“Did anyone touch you today?”

“Touch?”

“Put their hand on you.” Then: “A grown-up?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know,” Billy starting to pace a little. “How about did anybody talk to you today. Other than your teachers.”

“My friends?”

“Not your friends, grown-ups.”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“I don’t know.” Carlos shrugged, bored by the whole thing.

Billy took a breath; was he making something out of nothing?

As if reading his father’s mind, Carlos wheeled toward the basement, Billy half-relieved to see him go. But then he stopped at the head of the stairs and turned back around.

“Oh, wait. A man came up to me and said, ‘Say hello to your parents.’”

“What? Whoa, whoa . . .” Billy felt a sprung dampness on the back of his neck. “What man?”

“By my school, he came up to me.”

“And said what.”

“I said already.”

Once again, Carlos tried to make a run for the basement, this time Billy having to grab his arm.

“Carlos!” his older brother shouted from down in the dark.

“What do you mean ‘by’ the school,” Billy said. “In the school? Outside? Before school, after . . .”

“When I was going to the bus home, he came up to me and said say hello to your parents but I didn’t talk to him, I swear.”

“What else did he say.”

“Nothing, he just left.”

“Did he say . . . Did anybody else see him?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did he look like?”

“I don’t know.”

Billy’s bathrobe felt like an oven.

Declan, bored with waiting for his brother to return to the basement, came upstairs. He, too, was stripped to his underpants.

“Did you see the man who talked to your brother?”

“Yeah.”

“Did he talk to you?”

“No.”

“What did he look like?”

Declan extended his arms sideways and puffed up his cheeks.

“Fat?”

“Biggish.”

“What else.”

“He was, he had a mustache.”

“What else.”

“He had a big head, bigger than yours. But less hair in the front of it.”

“Good. What color was he?” Billy couldn’t imagine anything in the refrigerator that wouldn’t make him vomit.

“Kind of brown.”

“Brown like Mommy or brown like Uncle Redman?”

“White-brown, like Mom. I don’t call her Mommy anymore, it’s babyish.”

“No it’s not,” Carlos said.

“OK, OK, what was he wearing?”

“A jacket.”

“And a tie,” Carlos added, pulling on his balls.

“A jacket and a tie. What else.”

“Pants,” Carlos said.

“And he had a lump,” Declan said.

“What do you mean?”

“A lump,” Declan touching his left hip where Billy carried his gun. “Like yours.”

When Carmen came home from the hospital at eight that evening, Billy was still in his bathrobe. An hour earlier it had been all he could do to feed the boys and his father their cut cantaloupe and Stouffer’s microwaved dinners.

“Are you kidding me?” she shouted from the living room, then marched into the kitchen. “This is a hundred-and-twenty-dollar jacket. Carlos!”

“Easy, it’s not his fault,” Billy said. Going on three hours of sleep, his head was a boiled egg. “Some guy came up to him in the school parking lot, said, ‘Say hello to your parents,’ and, I’m guessing, did this to the jacket.”

“What do you mean, some guy. What guy?”

“That’s what I’d like to know.”

“Nobody knew him?”

“I’ll have to ask tomorrow.”

“Why tomorrow?”

“The kids don’t know. It’s better to go back there at the same time, see who’s around.”

“What did he look like?”

“From what I could get out of them, he sounds some kind of Latin, heavyset, maybe a cop.”

“A cop?”

Billy hesitated, then: “He could have been carrying,” wincing the second it came out of his mouth.

“A gun?” Her eyes as big as dishes.

“Possibly, but maybe I’m just . . .”

“Jesus God,” putting her fingertips to her mouth. “You sure he was a cop?”

“I’m not sure of anything. Like I just said . . .”

“Well, how old was he?”

He couldn’t believe he hadn’t asked that earlier, though it probably wouldn’t tell him anything about the guy’s profession.

“Hey, Carlos!” he shouted up the stairs.

The kid came down wearing a Knicks jersey over pajama bottoms.

“The man who talked to you, was he older than me, younger than me, the same age . . .”

“I don’t know.”

“Declan!”

Carlos’s older brother came down wearing a
Scream
mask, just what Billy needed.

“How old was the man you saw.”

“I don’t know.”

“Guess.”

“Your age? Mommy’s, Mom’s age?”

Billy turned to his wife. “Anything else?”

Carmen didn’t answer.

“All right, guys, go back upstairs,” he said, not wanting them to get infected.

He moved to the sink and ran some water over his face. When he turned back around Carmen was robotically setting the table for breakfast.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“Look,” she said, straightening up, a stack of plates tucked into her ribs like a football. “He said, ‘your parents,’ he didn’t say our names.”

“So?”

“So maybe he doesn’t even know us. Maybe he’s just some random whack who wandered into the parking lot. Or a parent the kids don’t know. Or it wasn’t him.”

“Wasn’t who.”

“The guy who put the paint there. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe Carlos just backed up . . .”

“Into what, a wide-open adult hand covered in red paint?”

“How about the father of that kid Declan punched?”

“The guy’s in a wheelchair.”

“How do you know?”

He knew because he had gone over to their house on the sly to pay for a new pair of glasses. “I just heard.”

“Then how about you?” she asked, dealing out the plates.

“How about me what?”

“Is there anybody on the Job . . .”

“I thought about it. There’s nobody.”

Carmen dropped a juice glass with her right hand, caught it six inches from the floor with her left.

“And you?” he said as lightly as he could. “Anyone giving you a hard time? Maybe at work?”

“Everybody gives me a hard time at work.”

“How about a cop. They’re in and out of that ER all day. Any of them hit on you?”

“Constantly.” Then, clutching her stomach: “Should we call the police?”

Billy took a breath. “I am the police.”

“May I wake thee?” the Wheel inquired, darkening Billy’s doorway at two in the morning.

“This better be good,” Billy said, a pillow over his head as he lay in a fetal curl on his joke of an office couch. He had never been this tired so early in the tour.

“We got a guy just brought his kid into Metropolitan, says he accidentally dropped her.”

“What’s a kid,” still not moving.

“Four months.”

The young, disheveled-looking father of the injured infant, still in his bedclothes, was slim and tall, six-three, four, maybe more, although the anxious crook of his neck on this night seemed to shave a few inches off him as he paced the littered floor of the Metropolitan Hospital ER.

“He said the wife had a family emergency in Buffalo,” the patrol sergeant told Billy. “Left him with the kid for a few days.”

Billy’s jacket buzzed, a text from Carmen at two-thirty in the morning:

can i burn the coat

“You know who that is, right?” the sergeant said, gesturing to the agitated pacer as Billy texted back.

absolutely not

“What? No, why?”

“You follow high school hoops?”

“It’s all I can do to follow the pros.”

“Aaron Jeter, played power forward for DeWitt Clinton about four years ago, took them to two state AA championships. You couldn’t open the sports pages back then without there’s a picture of him banging under the boards.”

Billy took another look at the guy, this time noticing the outsized shoulder caps that topped his lean frame.

“Huh. And so where’s he at now?”

“Now?” the sergeant shrugged. “Now he’s here.”

Alice Stupak, who put out a sympathetic, feminine vibe that she could turn on and off like a faucet, was usually the go-to detective for interviews of this kind, and she waited for the high sign to start working the guy. But Billy, after all that had happened today, wanted this one for himself.

“How are you doing, I’m Detective Graves,” Billy having to look up as he introduced himself. The hand that enveloped his was as big as a first baseman’s mitt. “You’re Aaron Jeter, right?”

“What? Yeah,” he said, staring anxiously over Billy’s head to the closed-off rooms beyond the nurses’ station.

“See, I’d be lying to you,” Billy said, “if I pretended like I didn’t know it already.”

Jeter seemed deaf to the flattery, still riveted by whatever was happening beyond the screens.

“And your daughter?” Billy asked, as he gripped him lightly by a long, fluttering bicep.

“My daughter what,” Jeter said, as Billy began walking him across the floor.

“Her name.”

“Nuance.”

His cell began to tremble again, Billy quick-checking Carmen’s latest:

why not