The Whites: A Novel (7 page)

“Is Mr. Brown coming?”

“Redman’s got a funeral service uptown,” Billy said.

“And the lovely Ms. Assaf-Doyle?”

“As per usual, she’ll be coming when she comes.”

Which was twenty minutes later, swooping to the table like a rush breath, her enormous dark eyes beneath blue-black hair, wet and combed straight back as if she had just come from a workout, and wearing, as always, her trademark hippie coat, calfskin shearling trimmed with vaguely Tibetan embroidery and frogged buttons.

“Where’s mine?” Yasmeen said, looking at the empty glasses.

Cunliffe snapped his fingers, and a fresh round appeared as if the waiter had it behind his back all along.

“My job this week?” Shrugging off her coat. “I had a girl in the dorms from India, lost her virginity to some douchebag in the Village, the guy made a tape and now he’s threatening to send it to her parents if she stops putting out, so I had to go up to his skank-ass crib and scare the piss out of him, like, call out the dogs of war, right? Oh, and today? They had me investigating a missing sweater, anyways,
besahah’,
” draining her shot. Then: “So, Billy, you caught the Bannion job?”

“Four in the morning.”

“Penn Station, a real clusterfuck, right? Any leads?”

“At this point, ask Midtown South. I’m just the night porter.”

“You ever see that movie? I almost asked for my money back.”

“What movie,” Whelan said.

“Anyways, here’s to Bannion,” hoisting her second glass. “When bad things happen to bad people.”

“Hear, hear.”

“First Tomassi, then Bannion,” she said. “It’s like justice started peeking under the blinds.”

“When people say ‘hear, hear’ like that,” Whelan said, “do they mean ‘hear’ like to hear something? Or like, ‘Hey, over here.’”

“Whoa, wait.” Billy held up his hand. “Brian Tomassi? What happened to him?”

“Are you serious?” Whelan said. “Do you not read the papers?”

“Just say.”

“You know that stretch of Pelham Parkway by Bronx House where him and his crew chased Yusuf Khan in front of the cab?”

“Yeah, and . . .”

“Take two giant and one umbrella step south of there, Tomassi, two a.m. in the morning, tweakin’ like a beacon, steps off the curb and becomes one with the 12 bus.”

“When was this?”

“Last month.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

Laughing, Billy nodded to Whelan. “You push him?”

“I would’ve, you better believe that.”

Billy remembered, the day after it happened, Whelan telling him that when the panic-stricken Khan, running blindly across the four-lane northbound parkway, had been struck by a muscle car doing sixty-five, the sound of the impact had been loud enough to set off car alarms for blocks around.

“Hey, what’s the last thing that passed through Tomassi’s mind after he got creamed by that bus?” Yasmeen asked.

“His ass,” Pavlicek grunted, his first words since they had all sat down. “Christ, if you’re going to tell stupid fucking jokes . . .”

Once again Billy noticed that he seemed on the verge of tears. “You OK, big guy?”

“Me?” Pavlicek brightened a shade too fast. “You know what I was doing today when I called you? Going through one of my buildings with an exorcist. I got a Chinese contractor to gut the place, his people go in, they come right back out fifteen minutes later saying it’s haunted, no way they’re going back in. So I went and hired an exorcist.”

“The Chinese are the worst,” Yasmeen said, “they’re so superstitious.”

“You ever see a Chinaman commit suicide?” Whelan added. “They don’t believe in quick and painless.”

“Where’d you get the exorcist?” Billy asked.

“This lady runs a smoke shop near my house. She’s some kind of Wiccan with a sideline in ghostbusting.”

“She’s for real?”

“She knows what’s expected of her, puts on a good show. Comes with flashlights, humidifiers, wind chimes, Enya tapes . . .”

“Who you gonna call . . .”

“Only thing is, they have their gods and we have ours.”

“We have gods?”

They waited for Pavlicek to continue, but he seemed to have lost interest in his own story.

“So did it work or not?” Billy asked.

“What.”

“The exorcism.”

“It’s ongoing,” Pavlicek said, looking off.

“So, Billy, how’s your family?” Yasmeen catching his eye—Let it be—then downing her third or maybe fourth shot.

“Good, you know, I mean my father’s not getting any better, but . . .”

“My dad once tried to talk me into letting him come to live with us? I had his ass in a home before he got the first sentence out.”

“You’re all heart there, Yazzie,” Whelan said.

“What do you mean, I’m all heart? The guy was a psycho. He used to get drunk and burn us with cigarettes. I got a heart. Why do you always want to make me feel so bad?”

“Yasmeen, I’m kidding.”

“No, you’re not,” she slurred. Then, after a too-long beat: “Fucking Whelan. You always make me feel bad. What did I ever do to you?”

She then proceeded to descend into one of her legendary sulks, Billy knowing from experience that there was a good chance they wouldn’t hear from her for the rest of the evening.

Yasmeen was the only woman Billy knew who could match his wife mood swing for mood swing. They even looked alike, although Yasmeen’s coloration came from her Syrian father and Turkish mother, which had made being constantly addressed as
mami
and automatically spoken to in Spanish out on the street agitating enough for her to more than once ask for a transfer to a more upscale precinct. But she was a fierce friend, dressing down his first wife in the street directly in front of the demonstrators who had driven her to leave him after his shooting—well, that wasn’t such a hot idea—then, years later, when Carmen was going through a particularly black spell, taking in their kids for an entire summer until his wife was back on her feet.

So Billy would put up with any kind of stormy behavior that came his way, but with Yasmeen now brooding in her tent and Pavlicek halfway to a morose coma of his own, the table suddenly had the energy of a brownout.

“Can I tell you something?” Billy began, trying to plug the gap. “You talk about exorcisms, I never told this to anybody before because it embarrassed me, but about six months into trying to nail Curtis Taft? Carmen convinced me to consult a psychic.”

“Get out,” Whelan stepping in like a straight man.

“Some old Italian lady up in Brewster, I mean, I was so desperate at that point . . . So I call her up, go to her house, I swear she looked just like Casey Stengel. Hey, how you doing, thanks for seeing me, and I walk into the living room, the walls are covered with appreciation letters from different police departments around the country, maybe a few from Canada, another from some town in Germany. It was pretty impressive until you go up close and read one: ‘It has come to my attention that you might possibly have been of some assistance in the as yet unsolved homicide death of fill-in-the-blank. Thank you for your time and enthusiasm. Sincerely, Elmo Butkus, Chief of Police, French Kiss, Idaho.’ But whatever, I’m there. I sit on the couch, she’s in a rocking chair, I was told to bring some objects belonging to the vics, so I hand over a barrette belonging to the four-year-old, Dreena Bailey, Memori Williams’s iPod, and Tonya Howard’s Bible. I tell her what we think happened, Taft coming in there around sunrise, three shots and just walking out, going home, getting back in bed with his still-asleep girlfriend.

“She says to me, ‘OK, here’s how it works. I’m gonna sit here and think about what you just told me, and I’m gonna get a little worked up and I’ll say things, a word, a phrase, and you write everything down. Whatever I say.’ And then she says, ‘Now, the things I’ll be saying? I don’t know what any of it means, they’re like pieces of a puzzle that you got to put together, OK? You’re the detective, not me, OK?’

“I say OK.

“‘And oh, wait,’ she says, ‘by the way, I never charge cops for helping them, that’s my civic duty, all I ask in return is a letter from you on your police department stationery thanking me for my assistance.’ I say, ‘Yeah sure no problem, let’s go, let’s go.’ And then she starts rocking in the chair, rubbing Dreena’s barrette, and lets it rip. ‘Four years old, that poor little kid, she never had a chance, she’ll never see her mother again, or play jump rope, that evil cocksucker, that fucking . . . BUTTER!’

“I almost jumped out the window she shouted it so loud, but I write down ‘Butter,’ then she’s off again. ‘What kind of cold-blooded scumbag would take the life of . . . RUNNING WATER!’ OK, writing it down, ‘Running water.’ I mean, everything in the world is near running water, a river, a sink, a sewer, I mean, are you serious? Then she starts going on about Memori. ‘Fourteen-year-old girl, her whole fucking life in front of her, this vicious pig, this miserable piece of shit, this . . . TIRES!’

“OK, ‘Tires.’

“‘He snuffs the life out of three young ladies and then what does he do? He goes home and crawls back in bed with his new girlfriend, like he just got up to take a piss, and can you imagine what a piece of work that stupid bitch . . . BROKEN TOILET!’

“And, I swear on my children, when she said that, ‘Broken toilet,’ I just about pissed myself.”

“Yeah?” Whelan apparently his only listener.

“Listen to me,” Billy said, leaning forward. “The bodies were discovered by Tonya Howard’s new boyfriend when he came to the house about five, six hours later, and by the time we got there, rigor was going pretty good. We found Memori and Tonya in the living room and we thought that was it, but when I opened the bathroom door . . .” Billy wiped his dry mouth. “See, when Taft lived with Tonya, whenever he would discipline the little one he’d always take her into the bathroom, and that’s where he took her to shoot her that morning, and after he shot her he stuck her head and shoulders in the toilet. Like I said, rigor had set in and we couldn’t get her out, so we had to use a sledgehammer to shatter the porcelain. So, ‘Broken toilet,’ the lady said. Don’t ask me how.”

“Then what happened.”

“I brought her back to the projects and let her into the apartment, see if she could maybe pick something up in the air.”

“Did she?”

“Nope.”

“What did she say when she saw the broken toilet?”

“Just nodded, like, ‘I told you so.’”

“She got you on the running water, too,” Whelan said, “if you want to be technical about it.”

“That too, I guess.”

“You write her that letter?”

“I’m working on it.”

“The thing about the younger brother,” Pavlicek suddenly said, addressing his clasped hands. “The one who went away for it? Truly stupid people are the toughest to interview because they can’t tell when you’ve talked them into a corner. ‘Forensics says he was killed with a golf club, Eugene. Is there a golf club in the house?’

“‘I don’t know.’

“‘Well, we found one.’

“‘OK.’

“‘We found your fingerprints on it.’

“‘OK.’

“‘So how could you not know there was a golf club in the house?’

“‘I don’t know.’

“‘Do you like to play golf?’

“‘No.’

“‘So then, once again, I have to ask, how’d your fingerprints come to be on the shaft?’

“‘I don’t know . . .’”

Pavlicek took a breath, his gaze going from his hands to his untouched shot glass. “I remember, I tried to get Jeffrey’s goat, so I ask him, ‘It can’t be easy living with a retard for a brother.’ You know what he says to me? ‘You should try it.’”

He reached for his Midleton’s, threw it back.

“A real sweetheart,” he muttered, then shut himself down, not once in his story having raised his eyes to his friends, leaving Billy to wonder whether maybe Bannion’s murder had him deeply crashing, like a postpartum Ahab if the author had allowed him to kill the whale and go home to his family.

“Fuck you, with your ‘I’m all heart,’” Yasmeen bawled, suddenly deeply drunk and in tears. “Why do you always have to make me feel so bad?”

Before Whelan could respond, she tilted into Billy, slurred in his ear, “Sometimes I can still taste you,” then lowered her forehead to the table and went to sleep.

“I think for Jeffrey,” Pavlicek said to no one, “Thomas Rivera, his brother Eugene, the whole thing was like snapping a tablecloth.” Then, thickly, “If anybody had it coming, right?”

Billy and Whelan looked at each other blankly before raising their eyes to the waiter, who had finally come by to pass out menus and announce the specials.

Billy’s first run of the night didn’t come in until just before dawn, an assault in a flower shop on a beat-up stretch of upper Broadway where Harlem became Hamilton Heights, the roughness of the neighborhood offset by its heart-stoppingly abrupt view of the Hudson River, which seemed to leap up to meet the cresting avenue. Given the limbo hour, Billy’s partner of choice was Roger Mayo, a hollow-eyed, scoop-chested chain-smoker in his eighth year on Night Watch, a borderline mute, a mystery, no one in the squad having any idea where he came from or where he went afterward. But Mayo was also a natural nocturnal, someone Billy could count on not to fall face-first into the lap of a suspect halfway through an interview at six in the morning, which was not nothing.