The Whites: A Novel (8 page)

Wading to the sidewalk through double- and triple-parked cruisers, they passed the open back doors of an ambulance and saw a young chunky Latina sitting inside, a sepia necklace of fingerprints around her throat.

“How she doing?” Mayo asked an EMT.

“She’s pissed.”

Leaving Mayo to take her statement, Billy headed to the scene of the crime, the florist shop a cramped, ramshackle affair with wind-riddled, rotten wooden moldings around the door frame and the sole display window. The low-ceilinged selling floor was covered with cracked linoleum, and the near-empty flower refrigerator was overhung by a roughly built half-loft, the squeak and groan of shifting feet up there nearly drowning out the soft jazz playing somewhere behind a battery of poinsettias and greeting card spin racks down below.

Climbing a short flight of raw pine stairs, Billy found himself in a cell-like, three-walled bedroom, cops and medics obscuring his view of the perp, Wallice Oliver. The guy was a frail, bare-chested seventy-year-old with a pharaonic goatee, wheezing asthmatically as he sat slumped on the side of a narrow bed. The towel draped around his neck made him look like a geriatric boxer.

As an EMT inserted a spirometer in Oliver’s mouth to gauge his lung capacity, Billy took inventory of his surroundings. In one corner a gold saxophone perched upright in its stand; in another stood a spindly desk, its blotter covered with a scatter of prescription bottles, a jar of olive oil, an ankh, a crucifix, and a Star of David. Scotch-taped to the walls were two photographs of Oliver as a younger man, one of him onstage with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the other of him performing in Sun Ra’s Arkestra.

Billy made his way through the milling uniforms to the bed.

“You want to tell me what happened?”

“I already said all that.” Oliver reared back to peer up at him.

“Just one more time.”

“She come in once, like around Valentine’s Day,” pausing to take a hit of Primatene Mist, “says she was looking to buy a plant for her mother, young girl, looked around, didn’t buy nothing though, walked out, then came back a hour later, asked if I needed any help in here, and to tell you the truth I just barely support myself with this, you know? So she leaves again, then comes back a third time that night, knocks on the door right as I’m turning out the lights, steps inside, drops to her knees, puts me in her mouth, says, ‘Daddy, you let me live up there, you can have me anytime you want.’ Next thing I know I’m a man again, but she’s Satan and everything in my life’s all fucked up. I had a wife was a schoolteacher, a nice crib, moved out on them both to be up here under a seven-foot ceiling with her. I can’t even straighten my back no more, and I tell you I will put up with a lot of meanness just to have a hard dick again, but the things she said to me tonight?” Oliver bowed his head, kneaded his waxy, amber fingers. “I have never been hurt by words like that in my life.”

Leaving the scene an hour later, the rising sun accentuating the emptiness of the street, Billy heard his cell go off, Stacey Taylor again, this time a text:

i know u r screening my calls dont

Milton Ramos

I’m not even going to ask you who threw the shot, because I know you didn’t see, right?”

Milton was talking to the head-bandaged Shakespeare Avenue banger, who was sitting up on his wheel-locked gurney in the trauma room of the St. Ann’s ER.

“Where my clothes at,” the victim ducking and weaving in an effort to look past Milton, standing less than a foot away from him in the curtained-off space. “Call the damn nurse.”

Milton gave it a beat, watching dispassionately as the traumatized tissue around Carlos Hernandez’s bullet-creased temple finally began to balloon in earnest, forcing the thick gauze dressing to slowly rise like a bloody soufflé.

“You know what?” he finally said. “Don’t tell me. Take care of it yourself, or at least let him get another crack at you and finish what he started, because God’s truth?” Milton shut his notepad. “I don’t give a shit.”

“Yeah, see? You going psychological on me.”

“Really, I’m not. I mean this from the bottom of my heart, soldier boy
,
I don’t give a shit. Just try not to let it go down near a playground or on a basketball court, that’s all I ask.”

Milton never saw the point of the detective squad getting involved in a gang shooting so early in the game like this, knowing that the 4-6 Street Intel Unit, on a first-name basis with every young Morlock out there, had probably already hauled in their informants. By this afternoon they would be not only smart-bombing the streets looking for the shooter but scarecrowing the two beefing crews—Shakespeare Over All and Creston On Top—from any planned retaliation and/or re-retaliation. The fact of the matter was, only two hours after getting creased, Carlos here was already old news, the only thing anybody cared about right now was minimizing the inevitable mayhem to come.

“I tell you what,” Milton said, leaning in and putting a hand on Carlos’s bare knee. “Give me a name and you get one free get-out-of-jail card, on me.”

“I ain’t in jail.”

“Not today.”

“You like putting your hand there?”

“I’d rather put it around your throat.”

Milton turned to leave.

“You supposed to give me your card,” Carlos said.

“I would, but I’m running kind of low.”

Psychology, my balls.

Coming back out into the main reception area, Milton walked past the Latina nurse manning the triage desk and up the center aisle of the waiting area, the benches eerily silent despite a full house. Reaching for the wall-mounted remote button that opened the door to the street, he hesitated, abruptly overcome with a powerful sense of having forgotten something important, the sensation like waking from an intense dream and trying to remember the fading details. He patted himself down—sidearm, notepad, wallet, keys, all there—then turned and started to retrace his steps, walking back past the triage station, getting as far as the door to the trauma room before stopping in his tracks and once again reversing his steps, this time coming back at an angle so that he could take a good look at that nurse without her noticing.

Standing in the near shadows, he stared at her, then stared some more, only snapping out of it when he felt her starting to sense his presence, at which point he put his head down and took off, not looking up until he was back out on the street, the sudden sunlight adding to his hyped sense of disorientation.

It wasn’t until a few hours later, still in a daze as he typed up the Fives on Carlos Hernandez, that he belatedly registered the name tag that had been affixed to her whites, Milton reaching for a pad and writing it down in a chittery hand:

C GRAVES

Wanting to be alone with this, he slipped into the windowless bunk room. Ignoring the two detectives lying belly-up and near lifeless in opposite corners of the fetid cell, he perched himself on the edge of an unmade bed and tried to think it through.

C Graves. The
C
he got. The
Graves,
he assumed, was her husband.

“Carmen Graves,” he said, trying it on for size.

So. Married, moved on, a few kids most likely, and a career.

Moved on.

It was enough to snatch your breath.

Chapter 3

Stepping into the house at eight in the morning, Billy came across his father and his two sons seated at the dining table eating Eggos, Billy Senior in his pajamas, the boys, as usual, in full Enduring Freedom gear from dog tags to child-sized paratrooper boots.

“See, at the college, the students, they took over two buildings, one by the blacks, you know, the Afro-Americans, the other the white radicals, the Suburbans we called them,” his father said. “I don’t think they trusted each other, or at least the blacks didn’t trust the whites. And Charley Weiss, my boss in the TPF, after two days standing around waiting for the go-ahead, he finally gets on the bullhorn, says, ‘You have fifteen minutes to vacate the building or we’re coming in after you.’”

“Dad,” Billy said.

“Now, the, the Afro-Americans, they been around the block a little more, and they know we mean what we say, so after a little trash talk from the classroom windows, they pretty much come right out. But the Suburbans? They never had any dealings with the police before, so it’s all a big adventure for them: ‘Come and get us, pigs.’”

“Pigs?” Carlos looked up from his waffle.

“Dad.”

“And whenever we had to go in someplace, Charley Weiss always put me in the first wave, ‘Send in the Big Guy,’ he used to say. Riots, blackouts, demonstrations—‘Send in the Big Guy.’”

“The Big Guy,” Declan whispered, his face shining.

“And so we went in, and we went in swinging. It was ugly, and some of us were sick about it after, but we cracked some heads that day . . .”

“Dad . . .”

“Some of those kids were crying and begging us to stop, but you get to this place in yourself, you’re so pent up with all the damn waiting, your heart’s pumping so hard . . .”

“Hey, guys . . .”

“I put one kid down who tried to snatch my radio, rammed him in the ribs with my baton like they taught us, it hurts like hell, let me tell you, he’s laying on the ground, looks up at me, says, ‘Mr. Graves, stop, please stop . . .’ I take a good look at this kid, I’m . . . You got to be kidding me. Turns out he was the son of the people who we bought our house from when we moved out to the Island. Nice couple. Nice kid, too. Last time I’d seen him was about four years earlier, he must’ve been fourteen, fifteen, but we recognized each other that day, we surely did.”

“Did you feel bad, Grandpa?” Declan again, the story a little over Carlos’s head.

“Yeah, I did. I started yelling at him, ‘What the hell did you grab my radio for?’ He says, ‘I don’t know! I don’t know!’ I get him up, march him out of the building, take him around the corner to Amsterdam Avenue, and I tell him to go over to the St. Luke’s ER, just get lost.”

“My mom works at the ER,” Carlos said brightly.

“I tried to tell myself that these kids had it coming, that they were trying to bring us down as a great nation, but yeah, I felt bad. That day I felt bad.”

Knowing the worst was over, Billy finally retreated into his coffee, marveling, as always when he heard this story, that when his father finally retired, twenty years after those bloody sit-ins, his first job as a civilian was director of student safety at the same university.

“Anyways,” Billy Senior rising, “I have to go pick up your grandmother at the bank.”

Declan looked to Billy, then back to his grandfather. “Grandpa,” he said not unkindly, “Gramma’s dead.”

Billy Senior stopped at the door, turned to the table. “That’s not a very nice thing to say, Declan.”

Billy watched his father go out to the driveway and get in the keyless sedan, knowing he’d sit there until he forgot why he was sitting there, then come back inside.

Up in the bedroom, Billy stashed his Glock, stripped down to his boxers, and fell into bed. Fighting off sleep, he stared at the ceiling until he could hear Millie’s muffler-shot old beater coming down the street, signaling the start of her workday, which consisted of impersonating a housekeeper and, more importantly, watching daytime TV with his father. She would sit as close to Billy Senior as she could without jumping on his lap, while constantly touching his arm and commenting on the screen action, all in an effort to keep him in the here and now, which was becoming an increasingly demanding job.

In the way of these things, Billy’s father had become his child, and he was determined to parent him in the manner in which he had been parented himself—with patience, amusement when he could manage it, and an infinite tolerance for the weakness of his mind. Growing up, Billy’s mother had been just his mother, doing her duty as required, not exactly indifferent to him but more focused on raising and training his sisters, two out of three children, in her eyes, job enough. As a father, Billy Senior had been low-key but there, not much more demonstrative than his wife but a powerfully comforting presence in his son’s life nonetheless. When he was home, he was home all the way—a skill Billy had yet to master with his own family—and no fool when it came to wading through his son’s alibis regarding everything from flunking Spanish and Biology, to adolescent beer benders, to a brawl in a White Castle parking lot. He rarely punished and, in a neighborhood where half the parents seemed to treat their screw-up sons like piñatas, never with his hands. But most important to Billy, his father attended all his football games, from peewee and sandlot through varsity, without ever once shouting red-faced from the sidelines or criticizing his son’s play. In the Nassau County Youth League, when Billy had quarterbacked his team to a 3–0 midseason mark only to have his coach replace him with his own athletically inferior son, he remembered his father that Saturday morning trying to reason with the guy, but when he realized that the conversation was futile, he just shrugged and walked away, his eyes shining, on the edge of tears.

At Hofstra, which Billy attended for two years on a football scholarship, his father continued to show up in the stands, making it to the majority of the Pride’s away games, including overnight trips to Orono, Maine, and Burlington, Vermont, until it all came to an end in the spring of his sophomore year, when Billy was busted for selling weed in the dorms. His father used whatever connections he had with the Hempstead PD to prevent Billy from being formally arrested, but he made no effort to intervene when Hofstra booted him off the campus. And when Billy came home the day of his expulsion, crushed and too ashamed to ask for his parents’ forgiveness, his father, deciding that his kid’s self-laceration was punishment enough, simply asked him what he intended to do with his life. When Billy couldn’t come up with an answer, either that first night or the next, then and only then did he suggest the police academy.