The Whites: A Novel (39 page)

The body, belly-down on the carpet in a pool of not quite dried blood, was crammed into a corner of the room as if Appleyard had tried to escape his killers by crawling through the wall. There were multiple stab wounds to his back and buttocks. Rigor had locked his mouth into a savagely wide grin.

As the two CSU techs turned him over, they all saw that he was still holding his last hand, five cards clutched tight in a frozen grip beneath his chin.

“What’s he got?” Billy asked.

One of the techs carefully prized the arm away from the body. “Aces and eights. Just like Wild Bill.”

“Bullshit,” Whelan said.

“Take a look.”

Whelan stooped over the body and squinted at the hand.

“A pair of threes,” he announced. “You assholes.”

“Dead man’s hand, baby,” the tech laughed.

“Who’s Wild Bill?” Stupak said.

Moments later, as the techs started to inventory the frontal devastation, a small intact balloon of intestine began to peep shyly out of a puncture wound above Appleyard’s navel, then slowly began to expand, those in the know quickly covering their noses and mouths before it could burst.

Wanting to avoid the explosion of stench, Billy retreated into the bedroom, which, like the rest of the small four-room apartment, had been utterly ransacked—plants torn out of their pots, underwear, shirts, and sweaters hanging from open dresser drawers, along with VHS porn tapes and an upended shoe box that had been filled with small serrated-edged snapshots from Appleyard’s childhood in Puerto Rico.

Whelan wandered in and picked up a ripped-out peace lily, the soil that was still clinging to its roots drizzling onto the unmade bed.

“How much money you think he could’ve hid in this pot, thirteen dollars?”

“You sure this was about the lottery?” Billy asked.

“Of course it was. Fuckin’ guy. I told him a thousand times, you heard me yourself.”

Whelan picked up one of the old photos fantailed around the shoe box, a black and white of the victim as a little kid standing with his mother by a seawall.

“I swear, when God said he was passing out brains, Appleyard heard ‘trains,’ didn’t want any, and hid under a table.”

“Any thoughts on the actors?”

“Yeah,” Whelan said, “but not here.”

When they left the apartment, the hallway was filled with tenants.

“He’s dead?” a neighbor asked Whelan.

“You bet.”

“See, I told him,” another one said.

Whelan clapped his hands once. “Everybody, just go back home.”

“This
is
my home.”

“Inside.”

“You’re not the boss of me.”

“Got February’s rent together yet, Alvin? How about March?”

“Jimmy, you disrespect me like that?”

“Whoever owes me two months’ rent. Inside.”

Out on the street, they slipped into Whelan’s cigarette-smelling Elantra.

“There’s these shitheads, the Alvarez brothers, in 2015 over there,” pointing to another prewar across the street, also with a deep H-block entrance. “Out of the blue they’ve been buddying him up all this last week like a lost cousin.”

“Apartment?” Billy writing.

“Fifth floor’s all I know. The youngest brother, Marcus, just got back from upstate, Tomas I once caught trying to jimmy a storage lock in my building with a gravity knife.”

“So prints are on file.”

“You could say that.”

“Anybody else?”

“Around here?” Shrugging as he reached for the door handle. “Start with them.”

Stepping from the Elantra back out onto the street, Billy wandered to the rear of the car, paused to light a cigarette, then saw the bullet holes in the trunk, moonlight brightening their jagged edges, some curling in, some curling out.

“Come here,” he said.

Whelan came around, regarded the constellation of punctures, then lit a cigarette himself.

“Can you pop it, please?”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Jimmy.”

“You think there’s something in there?”

Billy stared at him.

“If you want to be a prick about it, get a warrant.”

“Sweetpea wasn’t even yours.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You did it for Redman?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Then, again, before Billy could say anything more, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Deaf to the occasional horns and blind to the oncoming headlights, Billy took a brief walk down the center of Fort Washington Avenue, his hands clasped on top of his head.

Yasmeen was in Florida when Eric Cortez was shot. Pavlicek was at the hospital with his son when Bannion died all over Penn Station. Sweetpea ended his days in the boot of Whelan’s car. He himself was at a crime scene in Manhattan when Curtis Taft was being hog-tied in the Bronx.

Redman had been telling the truth after all, but only the partial truth. They were all in on it, but no one was anywhere near the scene when their own demons had gone out of the picture.

They had swapped Whites.

Two hours later, as he and Stupak were escorting Tomas and Marcus Alvarez out of their apartment house for questioning, the uncuffed brothers shouting in each other’s face not to say shit, Billy saw that Whelan had made no effort to move his car from in front of the building, their entire convoy having to walk past it in order to get to the waiting van.

Milton Ramos

The call from Anita came in as he was sitting on the side of his bed, rewrapping the Ace bandage on his empurpled thigh, Victor’s boot print there still so clearly defined on his flesh that he could have accurately ordered him a pair of shoes.

“Milton, your daughter left three messages on your phone. Why aren’t you calling her back?”

“I’ve been drowning in work,” he said, reaching for the Chartreuse on his night table. “Is she OK?”

“Other than you not calling her, she’s fine.”

Milton threw back a shot, got up, and began looking for his car keys. “Is she mad at me for last night?”

“She hasn’t said anything.”

Dropping to the floor, he felt around beneath the bed. “I have to apologize for my behavior. I was upset.”

“It’s OK. I just figured with all the terrible stress you have on you right now.”

He stopped moving. “What do you mean.”

“That gang contract.”

“Contract . . .” Crouching there confused, then remembering his story, rising to his knees. “I have to ask you again. Sofia, do you still want her?”

“Do I want her?” Anita sounded unsure of his meaning. “Sure, she’s a delight.”

“Good,” returning to his search.

“Just give me an idea of when you’ll be taking her back.”

“It’s almost over,” he said, spotting the car keys in one of his tossed-off shoes.

“I just don’t understand why you don’t call her.”

He was pretty sure he could drive.

The cemetery was one of those unending necropoli that lined the ride into the city from JFK, a crowded mouthful of gray teeth, unkempt and askew. But up close, say, if you found yourself kneeling before a loved one or two or three, it wasn’t that bad. And that’s where he found himself, in a catcher’s squat before the stones of his mother and two brothers, desperate to get his bearings.

He was no great master planner of revenge, no fiendish calculator; he was nothing more than an increasingly violent and out-of-control wreck whose hands shook all the time now from drinking, nothing more than a raging borderline wet-brain, so constantly tired these days that he could barely get in or out of bed. And assuming they had recovered his bat from the scene, it would only be a matter of days before they matched his prints.

In high school, his English teacher didn’t think anyone in class could get through
Moby-Dick
without tossing the book out a window, so she had brought in a Betamax tape of the movie, drawn the blinds, and played it on a roll-down screen. Most of the students were bored stupid by the black-and-white film, but not him. He had been riveted by the metal-eyed captain, his blazing doggedness, and in the end, when he went down into the sea strapped to the beast that he had lived to kill, it had struck Milton as the perfect outcome.

And that’s how it should end between him and Carmen.

Sofia was with the right people, and this patch of earth, right here among his brothers and his mother, looked so inviting. He was so tired, all the time now. He just had to move fast before he was unable to move at all.

Chapter 16

When Billy returned to the funeral home the next morning, Redman and his wife, Nola, were sitting on facing folding chairs across the aisle from each other in the darkened chapel, both staring at the carpet while Rafer flew around the room waving a cosmetic stippling brush in his hand.

“It’s ten in the morning,” Redman said. “I was expecting you at dawn.”

Nola stood up and left.

Billy waited while Redman got to his feet, took the brush back from his son, then lifted him in his arms.

“If I could have, I would have, you better believe that,” he finally said. “Fact of the matter is, I can carry a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound body across this room from the prep table to the casket, no problem, but if I go more than a block to buy a beer? I need a walker. End of the day? All I could do was disappear him.”

“Could you put Rafer down, please?”

Redman gave him a look as if Billy were about to slap on cuffs.

“I can’t talk about this with the kid in your arms,” Billy said.

Bending stiffly from the waist, Redman complied, Rafer taking off for his grandfather’s cubicle, where the old man was once again playing poker on his computer.

“What do you mean, disappear him,” Billy said. “Disappear him how.”

“He left here in a casket. Underneath someone else.”

“Underneath who.”

“That girl you had me bury.”

“You did that to her?”

“I did it to him.”

All he needed was an exhumation order, find out if Martha Timberwolf had any company beneath her stone. And when the forensics came back on Whelan’s trunk, they were bound to find something.

“You knew what Whelan was up to before he did it?”

“I got up one morning, went out back for a smoke, and there’s Sweetpea Harris laying in the yard. And that’s all I’m saying about it.”

“Did you ask him to do it?”

“I said that’s all I’m saying about it.”

“How about the others.”

“Which others.”

“I want to know who did who.”

“Why.”

“Why?”

Redman opened a box of cheap hand fans advertising the funeral parlor, then began depositing them on chair seats.

“I’m just curious,” Billy said. “Did you embalm him?”

“Either that or let him stink up the joint.”

“Jesus Christ, Redman, where’s your heart?”

“Where’s yours. You pursue this, you’ll be taking people away from their kids, so where’s yours,” he said, walking off before Billy could walk out.

At Maimonides, Victor was asleep in his bed, Richard lying next to him, wide-eyed but withdrawn. On a sofa at the opposite end of the room, Carmen was also asleep, hands curled under her chin, her face pressed so deeply into a cushion that he had to resist moving her head back.

Billy stood against a wall, dutifully stared at the three of them until he thought he would go crazy.

Who did who . . . 

Stepping out into the hallway, he called Elvis Perez.

“Are you in?” he asked.

“For about an hour or so. What’s up?”

“Do you still have the tapes from Penn Station?”

“Of course.”

“I never took a look at the one under the information boards.”

“That’s because I told you it’s a waste of time.”

“I’m leaving now.”

“Really, if I thought . . .”

“I’m leaving now.”

“Where’s Waldo, right?” Perez said, standing over Billy’s shoulder as they viewed the rescued tape of the scene beneath the LIRR track information board. “See what I’m saying?”

Billy had to agree: the scrum of plastic-derby-wearing revelers was so tight under the board that when he was finally able to ID his vic, Bannion was already leaving bloody shoeprints on his way to the subway, dead man jogging.

“Where’s Waldo in hell,” Elvis said.

When Perez left with his partner on a witness interview run, Billy remained at his desk and reran the tape. Again, nothing, just Bannion popping out of the periphery and taking off. There were others coming and going under the board besides Bannion: staggerers, stragglers, latecomers to the party, and those who just wandered away as if having lost interest in getting home. But not one of these wanderers, all leaving the crowd at the same time or just after Bannion made his stumbling dash to nowhere, exhibited any kind of suspect body language, no one running or even walking off at anything more than a dawdling pace, no one even glancing back at the crowd they had just left.