The Whites: A Novel (37 page)

“In a dream.”

Milton Ramos

The evening had started out OK enough, Anita and Ray bringing Sofia and a little friend to meet him at a diner in Staten Island so that he could hand over his care package of new clothes, DVDs, and favorite animals. His daughter seemed excited to see him, crawling into his lap to eat her low-fat mock sundae, but the whole time he feared that at the end of the meal she wouldn’t ask him to take her home, not that he would have done it.

At first, Sofia’s new friend had thrown him. The kid, Jen or Jan, a scrawny little thing with no more personality than a hamster, lived two houses down the street from Anita, and the girls, once introduced, had apparently become instant blood sisters and were, in fact, having a sleepover tonight. Sofia had never had a sleepover in her life, let alone a best friend. Their caged house in the Bronx had never been a home to other kids, even for a few hours after school, and this realization made him wince.

When the bill came, Ray nearly snatched it out of the waitress’s hand. “No arguments,” he said.

“Fine with me,” Milton said.

Sofia slid off his lap and moved to the other side of the table.

“When we go home?” she said to Anita. “Can we call Marilys?” Then to her mouse of a friend: “She’s my other mom.”

“I
know
!” Jan or Jen said with delighted exasperation. “You tell me all the time!”

It was the third time Sofia had brought up Marilys since the waitress had taken their orders, and it would be the last.

“Listen to me,” Milton said, his sleeve sliding through the dregs of his dessert as he reached across and took her wrist. “Marilys isn’t your other mom. Marilys isn’t anything. She doesn’t love you, she doesn’t even care about you, OK?”

“Hey, Milton,” Ray said.

“Can you get that through your head?”

Sofia was too shocked to do anything other than stare at him in red-faced astonishment, but the other kid, after a breathless second, started to cry as if the world had come to an end.

Mortified, he got up from the table, walked out the door, and marched into the diner’s parking lot. Weaving his way through an army of parked cars to an unlit spot, he seethed in the dark for a few minutes, then pulled out his phone and called Marilys’s sister.

“This is Milton Ramos, you remember me?”

She said she did, but she didn’t sound too happy about it.

“I’m going to call you back in a half hour. When I do, you’re going give me the names, addresses, and phone numbers of everybody in your family living in New York.”

Milton stepped deeper into the shadows as Ray came out of the diner, and a moment later pulled out of the lot with a carload of mutes.

“If I call back and for any reason you don’t pick up? I’m coming back to your house. Do yourself a big favor and save me the trip.”

At eleven that evening he sat across the oilcloth-covered dinette table, glaring at Marilys and her so-called cousin Ottavio, a balding runt with amphibious eyes.

They were in Ottavio’s one-bedroom apartment in Astoria, Milton’s former fiancée and her kinsman anxiously looking everywhere but at him.

“They were going to kill him,” Marilys said numbly, staring first at Milton’s hands with their paint-rimmed nails the color of blood, then at the greasy bat he had placed between them on the table.

“Who’s they,” he said. Then:
“You,”
making Ottavio jump. “Who’s they.”

“Some individuals I got steered to wrong.”

“They were going to kill him,” Marilys repeated, forcing herself to meet his eye.

He didn’t know what angered him more, the fact that she had so heartlessly ravaged his life for money and dismissed his daughter’s need for her like it was nothing or the fact that, despite his desire to slaughter her, she was treating him like a total stranger.

“You’re living here now?”

“Just for a little bit,” her voice down to a hush.

“You really her cousin?”

“Distant,” Ottavio said, unconsciously glancing toward the sole bedroom.

“I want my money back,” he said.

“It’s gone,” Marilys said, once again staring at his bunched hands.

Milton went off into his boiling head long enough for Marilys to add, “We can start paying you back a little each week.”

We.

And the thought of having to see her, or him, every week or month to maybe collect twenty dollars here, thirty dollars there, the excuses, the no-shows, the constant, snake-headed presence of them in his life . . . 

“I don’t want your fucking money.”

He took up his bat and slowly got to his feet, Marilys raising her eyes and then asking in a breathless monotone, “What are you going to do.”

Nothing. Whether it was some perverse residual feelings he still had for her or just a failure of nerve on his part, he would do nothing.

He reached for his coat.

When it became apparent that she was in no physical danger this night, she added more softly, “Milton, I made a mistake. I’m sorry.” And then a PPS as he turned toward the door: “How’s Sofia?”

When Victor Acosta finally left the Bryant Motor Lodge at four o’clock in the morning, there was a three-woman, two-man smackdown going on in a corner of the parking lot and Milton, who had already been waiting on him for two hours, maybe longer, understood that he had no choice right now but to remain in his car. Which, he figured, was probably just as well, since he’d been hitting the thermos steady and was temporarily too drunk to not fuck this up.

While Victor was busy stowing his gear in the Range Rover, Milton, in hopes of sobering up, put all four windows down and the AC on full blast and then rolled out of the lot directly onto the southbound New England Thruway, driving from the Bronx to Queens to Brooklyn. Thirty-five minutes later, freezing but still wasted, he pulled up across the street from Victor’s apartment building on Palmetto Street in Bushwick and settled in, taking one last nip of the ’Treuse to chase the chill.

He didn’t have to wait long, Victor’s Range Rover slow-cruising right past him while he was still feeling around the floor after dropping the thermos cap. At first, it looked almost too easy, Victor parking the Ranger one block ahead, then walking back in his direction. But when Milton stepped from the car he immediately fell back against the driver’s door, weakly waved his bat at the sky, then hinged forward to puke into the roadway as Victor, wide-berthing the mess, made it to his front door unmolested and disappeared into the building.

Just as well, just as well.

When his vomiting came down to a few ropy strands of saliva and his eyes began to lose their strained filminess, he slowly raised himself up and took a few raw breaths.

Just as well . . .

Then, unbidden:
I don’t want your fucking money.

Why did he say that to her? It was
his
fucking money. She might have scammed him out of it, but he had said
your money,
as if she had taken his sense of self along with the cash. Had date-raped his brain. And he had just walked out the door, don’t mind the wet spot.

He slammed the bat into his own car door, was about to do it again, do anything to fend off his other memory of tonight—Sofia’s shell-shocked silence, her stunned poke-hole of a face—when the magnified clack of a turned latch abruptly brought him back, Milton looking up to see Victor returning to the street with a small dog.

It was like he was asking for it.

Like he was insisting on it.

The dog, some kind of small pug, immediately squatted and pissed on the pavement, the streetlight too bright right there to risk anything. But when Victor turned the corner, Milton, keeping his distance and sticking tight to the shadowed building fronts, followed. They walked in a two-man stagger nearly the length of the street before Victor, absorbed in his dog’s doings, came to a complete stop with his back to him.

The distance between them was next to nothing, but he was still too wasted to close in fast, and the broadcasted wheeze of his lungs, the sloppy scrape of his bat against the pavement had Victor fully turned around and reaching for something on his belt before Milton could make contact.

And then came the invisible jolt to his torso, a white wallop of phosphorescent pain emanating from somewhere between his left hip and armpit that lifted him like a backhand into the side of a building. But he was too drunk and too determined to let it distract him for long, and after shutting down what needed to be shut down, Milton once again began to close in. The dazzling burn in his side made it difficult for him to really bring the bat around like he wanted, and the lead-pipe impact of the heavy-booted side kick that Victor delivered to his thigh at some point didn’t help, but when he was done, Carmen’s brother lay curled at his feet, blood bubbling from his nostrils each time he took a breath, an ivory shard of bone that had broken through the sleeve of his shirt winking in the moonlight.

By the time Milton managed to circle around and slowly drive past the scene, a small crowd had already formed: dope fiends, joggers, dog walkers, and what have you, everyone on their cells, either calling out or making iPhone videos, the flashers of an approaching ambo lighting up the street like a midway. From the car, he spotted his bloodied bat lying up against the curb, but there was nothing he could do about that now.

It wasn’t until an hour later, while standing outside the cage-gate of his house and woozily patting himself down for the keys, that he finally noticed the dual Taser darts still buried between his ribs, their attached wires dangling down his side like extruded nerves.

Chapter 15

There were six people in the visitors’ waiting room outside the OR of the Maimonides Medical Center: Billy, Carmen, Bobby Cardozo, a detective from the 8-0 Squad, and three of Victor and Richard’s friends—gym rats, by the look of them—everyone waiting for Victor to come out from under the knife. The damage—a shattered left humerus, a fractured right collarbone, the left lung pierced by the lowest and smallest of his three broken ribs—was gruesome, the only good news being that the actor had stayed away from his head.

“Bobby, can you get prints off the bat?” Billy asked Cardozo, whose black eyes, goatee, and kettle-drum gut made him look like a villain in a silent movie.

“We’re sending it to the lab this afternoon. So, hopefully.”

Richard Kubin came into the waiting room with a vending-machine coffee, his anger making him look broader and taller than Billy had ever seen him.

“Your friend . . .” Cardozo began.

“My husband.”

“He carried a Taser?”

“You would too if you saw where he worked.”

“I’m just asking.”

“Look, we know who did this,” a short, red-bearded weight lifter said.

They didn’t, but Billy did, as did Carmen, who, rather than browbeating Cardozo and the entire hospital staff, was sitting silently on a tatty couch, staring at her hands.

“These little mutants from the Knickerbockers,” the bearded guy said. “They sport-hunt us like we’re their personal buffalo herd.”

“What are you talking, gay bashers?” Cardozo reared back. “You sure? I pass your friend Mr. Acosta on the street, I’m not thinking gay.”

“Meaning what,” Richard snapped.

“I’m just saying,” Cardozo retreated.

“Saying what.”

Cardozo threw Billy a quick helpless look, then stepped away to regroup.

At first, Billy didn’t understand why he was refraining from volunteering information about the stalker in order to help refocus the investigation. And then he did: simply put, he felt ashamed.

As far as he knew, they had all been victimized, but somehow over the course of the last few weeks, the innocence of the people living under his roof had gradually come to feel tainted, as if they all in some way deserved what had been happening to them. It was a classic reaction, he knew, the victim falling into self-loathing and self-blame, but now that the family contagion had reached out and claimed Victor, he felt as guilty as if he had swung the bat himself. And Carmen—sitting there so uncharacteristically withdrawn—had to be feeling something of the same.

“These kids . . .” Cardozo said, taking out his notepad.

“Kids?”

“These individuals. Any names? Street tags?”

“There’s two,” said another friend, wearing a Bucknell T-shirt. “I know them by sight.”

“And the other one,” the weight lifter said. “The moron with the hat.”

“How about this,” Cardozo said, stowing his pad. “Why don’t you all come in, we’ll set you up with some photo trays, then we can do a ride-by around the Knickerbockers, see if you can maybe make some IDs that way.”

“You know what?” Bucknell said. “Forget it. We’ll take care of it ourselves.”

“How about you don’t,” Billy volunteered.

“Do you know how many assault complaints we filed with your precinct this year?” Bucknell wheeling on Billy. “Do you know how many times I’ve been in that building? You people just don’t give a shit.”

“First I’m hearing about it,” Cardozo said.