The Whites: A Novel (6 page)

“Nope,” Billy said, trying to peer through the barred windows to the Thorazine-infused prisoners within. “My dad was in England a bunch of times, did a tour in Vietnam.”

“That’s him. Plus, war doesn’t count.”

“Been to Puerto Rico with Carmen to see her grandmother once.”

“Puerto Rico is part of the U.S. Plus, visiting family doesn’t count.”

“Then I guess I’ve been living in my ass for forty-two years. What’s your point, big shot?”

“Did I ever tell you about the time I went to Amsterdam with John Junior?”

“You went to Amsterdam?”

“Four years ago I was invited to talk at an urban renewal conference there, and I wanted to bring him. He was sixteen, it’s a cool city, sort of, so he says, ‘I’ll let you take me to Amsterdam . . .’”

“Let you.”

“‘. . . let you take me if you get stoned with me there. Nick Perlmutter went with his dad last year and told me they got wasted together.’ Says to me, ‘Hey, at least you’ll know who I’m getting high with.’”

“You did not do that.”

“I’m sorry, you never got high?”

“With my kids?”

“Your kids are little, Billy. It’s different later, it’s like trying to hold back water with your hands. Trust me.”

“You still don’t have to smoke up with them.”

Pavlicek shrugged.

Feeling a little scandalized, Billy shut up.

“In any event, we got there, made a beeline to the nearest coffee bar, sat outside facing this plaza, platz
,
or whatever, Junior’s all showing off how he can read a pot menu like a wine list, orders us something supposedly mild, a few hits and we’re both zotzed. It was fun at first—we couldn’t figure out how to take our picture, holding the camera every whichaway, laughing, you know, stupid stoned. Finally this Dutch lady inside the bar takes pity on us, comes out and does the honors. Two American morons getting high in Amsterdam, never seen that before. We’re laughing our balls off for about a half hour, then the paranoia just shuts us down like, blam. I mean like a solid hour of Can’t Talk, sitting there wondering how do we find the fucking hotel, Prinzengracht, Schminzenstrasse, where’s the Anne Frank House and are we bad half-Jews if we blow it off, how do we even just, like, stand up. Hours like that, then Johnnie finally turns to me, says, ‘Well, this wasn’t one of my better ideas, was it.’ He flies home the next day, it’s really a nothing city, but I’m stuck doing the panels. I felt horrible . . . I mean, OK, you’re right, what kind of pandering asshole has to curry favor with his kid like that. But you know what? A week later I finally come home and I see that on his bedroom door Johnnie had taped blowups of all the photos of us that the Dutch lady took, and goddamn didn’t it look like we had a blast. And now when we . . . It always plays for a laugh when it comes up in conversation, between the pictures and the way we tell it to people. It’s like, after a while, the two of you are like a comedy team. And you forget, I forgot, how bad it felt, I just . . .”

Billy heard a sudden rasp of tears in Pavlicek’s voice that he had no idea how to interpret and so he held his peace until they got where they were going, twenty strained minutes later.

The Riveras, like everyone else on City Island, lived on one of the short streets branching off the sole avenue that ran like a spine for two miles from the land bridge to the Long Island Sound. Their house, a run-down Victorian gingerbread, was at the tail end of Fordham Street, the lapping waves audible from every room. The family had two views: the Sound at a point where New York and Connecticut met underwater, and the ruins of the house directly across the way, not a hundred feet opposite, behind which the body of their son Thomas was found five years earlier, discarded and torn. The house was now in the midst of being demolished by the new owners, the walls collapsed in a violent heap, jagged spears of lumber shooting out in all directions like an abstract expression of its own notoriety.

Ray Rivera, now sixty pounds heavier than the night his son was discovered, stood on his lawn with Billy and Pavlicek, chain-smoking and staring at the wreckage across the way. His wife, Nora, was somewhere inside their house, undoubtedly aware of the visit but declining to come out. To Billy most of Rivera’s new obesity seemed to be in his upper body and face rather than his gut, in the multi-tiered pouches under the eyes, the softening flesh of his broad chest, and the forward slump of his thick shoulders. Billy had seen this transformation before in parents who struggled daily with the violent death of a child. After a few years that emotional heaviness could visually de-sex a couple, leave them looking more like each other than if they’d lived into their nineties together.

“You know, I have real mixed feelings about that shit pile coming down.” Rivera coughed wetly into the side of his hammy fist, took another drag. “I keep thinking, Maybe they’re destroying evidence, or maybe a shred of his soul is still in there.”

“He’s not there anymore, Ray,” Pavlicek said. “I know you know that.”

Billy saw movement behind a second-floor window in the Rivera house: Nora up there, hours every day looking across the street.

“People asked us why we didn’t move away, but it would have been like abandoning him, you know?”

Suddenly the window opened and Nora Rivera leaned out, red-faced, cawing: “Why didn’t
they
move away!”

Pavlicek raised a hand in greeting. “Hey, Nora.”

The window slammed like a gunshot.

“You know, I know people, and I could’ve made some calls, anytime I wanted. Once a guy called me. But if I wanted that Jeffrey kid dead, I would have done it myself.”

“That’s not you, Ray.”

“I mean, do you have any idea how many times I sat on that porch with a piece of steel in my hand? I always drank my way out of it.”

“Is there anything you want to ask me about Jeffrey Bannion?” Billy offered.

Rivera ignored the question. “Last year we went to the national Memory Keepers convention, Johnny here came with us,” nodding to Pavlicek. “They had a bunch of workshops and seminars, and I sat in on a support group for fathers with murdered kids.” Rivera took another moist drag on his cigarette. “And this guy, some old biker from Texas, he said he sat in on the execution of his son’s murderer in Huntsville. Said it didn’t make a difference. Called it a letdown. But I’m not so sure that would’ve been the case with me.”

“Ray,” Pavlicek said gently, “we have to go.”

“Our pastor says Jesus wants us to try and forgive, but I’ll tell you, these last few years? I’m all about the God of the Jews.”

They came upon Jimmy Whelan in the lobby of the apartment house where he lived and worked as the super, a run-down prewar with a deep H-block courtyard on Fort Washington Avenue. At this hour the food odors of three continents crept down the elevator shaft like fog.

Whelan looked good for forty-six, a lean, sometime weight lifter with a full head of brown hair, a big nose, and the exaggerated mustache of a gunslinger. Which wasn’t too far off: by the time he’d retired he held the record for justifiable shots-fired incidents of any active police officer in the NYPD. Toward the end of his career, he was transferred to the Crime Scene Unit, one of the least likely places where a detective could find a reason to pull his weapon, but even with that squad he managed to get into a shootout, having wandered into a three a.m. bodega robbery while on a coffee run two blocks away from an indoor doubleheader being processed by his CSU team in the New Lots section of Brooklyn.

Dressed tonight in a dagger-collared cherry leather car coat and flare-bottom jeans, he was standing in front of the geriatric twin elevators, barking at a toffee-colored tenant with vaguely Asiatic eyes and a whippet mustache, the guy shoulder-toting a duffel bag as if on shore leave.

“What are you doing?” Whelan snapped.

“Spreading the joy!” His whiskey-hoarse voice just shy of a shout.

“The joy? Are you crazy? Get your ass back upstairs.”

“How you doing, sirs!” the guy said, turning to Billy and Pavlicek and extending his free hand. “Esteban Appleyard.”

Whelan abruptly walked away, shaking his head as if he had just about had it with this idiot.

“What you got in there?” Billy asked.

Appleyard opened his duffel to display mini-bottles of Rihanna Rebelle perfume, half-pints of Alizé VS cognac, and cellophane-wrapped packs of White Owl cigarillos.

“Have a cigar.” Appleyard beamed.

“I don’t smoke,” Billy lied.

“I’ll be in the car,” Pavlicek muttered, wheeling so abruptly that he nearly collided with Whelan, who was steaming back for more Appleyard.

“Where’s the money?”

“They gonna wire it to my bank.”

“When.”

“I don’t know.”

Whelan turned to Billy. “This guy just won ten million playing the lottery, can you believe that?”

“For real?”

Billy knew Whelan’s irritation had nothing to do with envy. Taking his super’s job to heart despite his run-and-gun résumé, Jimmy always projected this scolding vibe toward the more obliviously self-destructive members of what he considered his flock.

One of the elevators groaned open and a woman sporting an African head wrap stepped out, her arms filled with folded laundry.

Appleyard dug in his duffel and pulled out a bottle of perfume. “For you,
Chiqui.”

“I don’t wear that,” she said sharply, as angry at him as Whelan.

“Give me a kiss.”

“You should move out of here,” rearing back from his ninety-proof breath. “Everybody knows.”

Looking to the lobby, now stripped of nearly all of its original 1920s furniture and mirrors, Billy was surprised to see Pavlicek still in the house, slumped over on the lone couch, his head sunk into his hands as if he were too exhausted to make it back out to the street.

“You got a car?” Whelan asked Appleyard.

“Buyin’ one. I like that Maybach, like Diddy got. A nice chocolate brown.”

“Can you even drive?”

“Drove a truck out of the poultry terminal for fourteen years before I got shot that one time,” yanking down his sweater collar to show the skid-mark scar on his collarbone.

Whelan pulled out a set of keys, stuffed them in Appleyard’s pocket. “You know my car?”

“The Elantra?” Appleyard sniffed. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in that.”

“You go upstairs and pack. You take my car and go up to my cabin in Monticello for a week. Figure out where you want to live, what you’re gonna do with yourself, because around here, they’re gonna eat you alive.”

The woman nodded in agreement.

“Naw, man.” Appleyard waved him off. “People know me.”

“Exactly. Somebody comes to my door three days from now, says there’s a smell from 5D? I don’t want to find you, see some three-legged alligator tortured you for your ATM code, left you with a screwdriver in your ear.”

“Yeah, well.” Appleyard’s duffel slipped from his grip, the perfume and cognac bottles clinking on the smooth stone floor. “I can’t see that.”

The African tenant finally took off, crossing the lobby on her way to the front door, Pavlicek not even raising his eyes to her as she glided past the couch, her voluminous housecoat brushing his knees.

“And stop handing that shit out or you won’t even make it to two days. What’s wrong with you?”

“How much you want for the cabin and the car,” Appleyard asked, peeking into the duffel for spillage. “Because I know you want something.”

“For a week?” Whelan said, squinting at the ceiling. “Fifteen hundred.”

“And I’m supposed to worry about everybody else takin’ me off, huh?”

“Make it two thousand and I’ll come with you.”

“Charge me for you to come to your own house? You got a TV up there?”

“Of course.”

“They sell groceries up there?”

“No, everyone crawls around eating grass.”

“Bars?”

“You stay out of bars.”

“Naw, I’m gonna stay right here,” handing Whelan back his keys. “This is my block.”

“I tell you what,” Whelan said. “I’ll sell you the car for twelve grand.”

“I don’t think so.” Appleyard laughed, then hauled the duffel back up on his shoulder and took off down the hall to knock on doors.

As they finally headed out to the street, Pavlicek falling in with them silently, Billy’s cell rang, Stacey Taylor again, Billy killing this call from her too.

Collin’s Steak house was situated in the financial district on a small cobblestoned lane lined with landmark nineteenth-century merchants’ homes and low shebeens named after Irish poets, the whole plunked down like an antique snow globe dwarfed and surrounded by a futuristic ring of office towers. They were the first to arrive, and the publican Stephan Cunliffe, a Belfast transplant who by blood mandate loved cops and writers, brought over a tray of Midleton shots before they had even taken their seats.

“Sláinte,”
Cunliffe said, hoisting his own.

Although Irish himself, Billy could live the rest of his life without hearing that particular toast again.