The Whites: A Novel (21 page)

“Who.”

“It’s me, don’t shoot.”

Whelan opened up wearing a towel around his waist and holding a Walther PPK.

His apartment, if you could call it that, was a converted utility room infused with that down-the-hall detergent smell and consisting, at the moment, of a single unmade bed, a mini-fridge, and a two-burner stove. The only other article of furniture was a padded workout bench, the floor around it littered with free weights and a pair of work boots. A clothesline ran on a diagonal from one corner of the room to the sole window, and the walls were bare of decoration except for a framed certificate announcing Whelan’s induction into the NYPD Honor Legion. For a fully functional middle-aged adult, the place was utterly devoid of dignity, yet Jimmy Whelan was the most unconflicted, reasonably happy individual Billy had ever known.

“So what’s going on?” Whelan asked, stuffing the Walther under his mattress and taking a pair of jeans from the clothesline.

“What I told you on the phone,” Billy said, offering him Carlos’s coat, the painted handprint now starting to flake.

“The mark of the Beast,” Whelan said.

The toilet flushed, and a moment later one of the women from the upper apartments came out of the bathroom in her underwear.

On seeing Billy she yipped and retreated, but not before he caught an eyeful of caramel-tinted mommy fat and a generous behind.

“I’ll come back.”

Whelan waved him off, fished her clothes out of the rumple of sheets, and passed them to her through the bathroom door.

“So did you talk to the cops up there?”

“And tell them what, a guy came up to my kid, said, ‘Say hello to your parents,’ and maybe, I can’t swear to it, maybe did this to his jacket?”

“Guy with a gun.”

“I don’t know that for sure.”

“Or better yet, reach out to the Chief of D’s, let him bring in a Threat Assessment Team.”

“Again, based on what.”

“Then I don’t know what to tell you.”

“I know.”

Whelan lit a cigarette and halfheartedly attempted to make the bed with his free hand. “I mean, obviously, if there’s anything I can do personally . . .”

“I appreciate it.”

“If you ever need me to, I can stay with your family,” he said, giving up on the bed.

“Let’s hope it never comes to that, but thank you.”

“Be like old times,” Jimmy said, opening the window and flicking his cigarette upward onto the sidewalk.

Back in ’97, when the news of the double shooting hit the papers and Reverend Hustle from two boroughs to the north took the ferry and set up his camp of demonstrators around Billy’s Staten Island home, Whelan, like all the other WGs, volunteered on a rotating basis to stay with him and his soon-to-be ex-wife every night, until negotiations with the mayor’s office brought the protests to an end, a full month after they had begun.

“So what do you think?” Whelan asked.

“About the guy?”

“About
Fort Apache.
”

Billy paused, a beat behind the shift in topic. “When Brian Roe was the consultant on
Missing Persons NYC
they threw him four hundred dollars.”

“A day?”

“That’s what he said.”

“I could live with that.”

“He also said as long as you keep your thoughts to yourself and don’t talk to the actors, they’ll keep you on forever.”

“As a consultant.”

“I’m just telling you what he told me.”

The tenant in the bathroom came out wearing tinted cat’s-eye glasses, jeans, and a blouse, her hair swirled up in a damp white towel like a Mister Softee cone. Whelan walked her the fifteen feet to his door, then kissed her hard on the mouth, her knee reflexively coming up like a quarterback waiting for the snap. She left still wearing the towel.

“I have to be careful,” Jimmy said. “Her husband just got out of Comstock, but I’m pretty sure he’s staying with his other wife.”

Gearing up to leave, Billy took back his son’s jacket. “So how’s your millionaire?”

“Who, Appleyard? All of a sudden he’s got three new girlfriends, two crack hos and a trannie. I’m starting a dead pool: five dollars wins you a hundred if you pick the exact day, fifty if you pick the week.”

“How about the month?”

“He won’t make it a month.”

“Do they even make crack hos anymore?”

“You should get out more.”

“All right, brother,” Billy said, stepping to the door himself.

“Why’d you mention Pavlicek today,” Whelan asked abruptly.

“I told you, it was nothing,” Billy said, turning back to the room. “Why are you so worried about Pavlicek?”

“I’m not.” Whelan lit another cigarette.

Billy took a breath, then: “You said to me, ‘Is there something going on with Pavlicek.’ You said, ‘I need to know.’”

“I said that? I never said that. You were the one that brought him up.”

Billy pondered mentioning Pavlicek’s lying about the hematologist again, then decided against it.

“So everything’s good with him?” he settled for asking.

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

When he was once again passing the laundry room on his way up to the ground floor, Whelan threw open his apartment door. “Hey, I forgot to tell you . . .”

Billy turned.

“This
Fort Apache
remake? It’s in three-D.”

Milton Ramos

His aunt Pauline, eight hours after an obliterating cerebral hemorrhage, lay on life support in the Jacobi Hospital ICU, flanked by her two speechless sons, Herbert and Stan. Out of blood deference, Milton stood at the foot of the bed, his hands resting on the guard rail. She was now a machine-breathing vegetable, and over the past few hours three separate nurses had dropped by to gently campaign for pulling the plug so that they could commence the harvesting, but neither of his guilt-ridden cousins could even bring themselves to hold their mother’s hand, let alone respond to the request.

So when a fourth nurse came by to make the pitch, Milton cut her off before word one.

“She’s ready,” he said.

Neither son protested or even looked his way.

So fucking like them . . . 

After his mother and brothers died and Pauline had brought him into her home, he had shared a bedroom with these two for years, but despite his status as a first cousin, they couldn’t get past the tragedy he brought into the house with him, or maybe it was just his mixed-race jungle face, or maybe like most everyone else he knew they were intuitively scared of him. Whatever the reason, they had never accepted him as anything but a nerve-racking boarder, as welcome into their lives as an untethered bear.

At least Pauline had taken him in with an open heart; her only bone of contention, then and always, was his sullen demeanor. Not that she didn’t understand.

After the nurse left, a volunteer grief counselor came by and touched his arm. “It’s so hard to let a loved one go. But you have to take comfort in the fact that even though she might be leaving you physically . . .”

“Talk to them,” chucking a thumb toward his cousins, then leaving for the street.

He wouldn’t attend or even help with the funeral; they could at least handle that. He had pulled the plug, and that was enough.

Herbert and Stan: if they weren’t dead to him before, they sure as hell were now, letting him call down the Reaper on their own mother like that . . . 

Loss and loss and loss, each one unasked for, each one, come the end of the story, concluding with his hands gripping a scythe.

“Hey, stranger!” his cousin Anita, like his aunt, one of the decent ones, instantly recognizing his voice on the horn after a year without contact. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I haven’t talked to you in a while.”

“I know! How’s Sofia?”

“You should see her.”

“I’d love to.”

“How about we come visit sometime.”

“Say when.”

She’ll go to better people
.

“Soon.”

Loss and loss and loss, Milton seeing that house in Yonkers again, that smooth-sailing home.

Why should they be happy.

Chapter 9

Billy didn’t find out about Sweetpea Harris having gone missing until a two a.m. playground shooting of a sixteen-year-old in Fort Tryon Park took him and Mayo over the Macombs Dam Bridge to Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx.

The victim’s brothers were sitting in a small, dreary waiting room, three of them, mute and seething, visions of payback already playing in their eyes. They knew everything there was to know about what had gone down but he would have had better luck interviewing statues, and after twenty minutes of listening to himself talk, Billy got up from a coffee-stained couch with a blank notepad, just hoping that the aforementioned payback would occur after eight in the morning when he was heading up to Yonkers.

It was on his way back to the nurses’ station that he first caught sight of the two homemade Missing posters push-pinned into the community announcements board, each featuring a low-resolution photo of Sweetpea Harris on purple printer paper that was bottom-fringed with tear-away phone number tabs, as if announcing the availability of a dog walker. Billy took one of the posters, stuffed it into his coat pocket, and moved on down the line.

An hour later, after one of the doctors came out of the OR and told Billy that the vic would pull through, he returned to the visitors’ room to see if the good news would maybe, just maybe, get the brothers talking. But they were already gone, Billy once again praying that the drama to come wouldn’t play out until he was safely back in his own bed.

As he was leaving the hospital, intending to head back to Manhattan and monitor the canvass around the crime scene, he nearly ran into an army of the victim’s other relatives bursting through the front door, those in front half-carrying the overcome grandmother as if she were their flagship. Billy was there for three additional hours, none of these further interviews yielding anything more than vaguely ominous variations on “They know who they are” and “I warned him” type pronouncements. Finally, the vic’s fourteen-year-old stone-faced sister chin-signaled for him to follow her into the ladies’ room, where she locked herself in a stall for a few minutes, flushed, and then left without ever saying word one.

The folded Post-it was perched on top of the toilet paper dispenser, the name and address of the shooter written in strawberry-scented neon pink with a swannish hand. Two hours later, armed with a search warrant, Billy followed six Bronx ESU cops into a Valentine Avenue apartment, catching the fifteen-year-old actor already dressed for school, his mouth filled with Franken Berries, his gun in an Angry Birds book bag.

Taking the kid to the nearest precinct, the 4-6, Billy handed him over for processing, then dragged himself upstairs to the empty predawn squad room in order to start banging out the requisite blizzard of paper. And when the day tour started rolling in at eight, he was still at it, blinking violently into the computer screen, his fingertips fluttering with the hour.

“What are you doing here?”

Billy looked up from his commandeered desk to see Dennis Doyle, a take-out coffee in one hand, a folded
Daily News
tucked up next to his ribs.

“What’s it look like,” he said, flicking a finger against the screen.

“Come take a break,” Dennis said, walking to his office.

Billy followed him inside, planting himself next to a stack of manila folders on the lone couch.

“So how’s she doing?”

“Not great,” Dennis said, opening his paper.

“The drinking?”

“Everything.”

A burly, expressionless detective came into the office without knocking, dropped a new folder on Dennis’s desk, and left the room.

“You know, she called me the other day, told me Raymond Del Pino’s sister named her baby after her,” Billy said.

“I know, Rose Yasmeen.”

“She told me Yasmeen Rose.”

“I’m sure she did,” Dennis said, glancing at the fresh reports.

“Still, no one ever middle-named a kid after me, you know?”

“It’s the least they could do, after all she’s been through.”

“Listen, while I’m here . . .” Billy took Sweetpea’s Missing poster out of the side pocket of his sport jacket and handed it over. “You know anything about this?”

Dennis read it and shrugged.

“Look at the guy,” Billy said.

“Cornell Harris?”

“Sweetpea Harris.”

“Redman’s Sweetpea?”

“He told me Harris was half-living with his girlfriend on Concord Avenue. That’s you, so I’m thinking maybe she came in here to file a report.”

“Hey, Milton,” Dennis called out.

The detective came back in the room.

“Can you check the 494s for this guy?”