The Whites: A Novel

by Richard Price

  “And you?” he said as lightly as he could. “Anyone giving you a hard time? Maybe at work?”

  “Everybody gives me a hard time at work.”

  “How about a cop. They’re in and out of that ER all day. Any of them hit on you?”

  “Constantly.” Then, clutching her stomach: “Should we call the police?”

  Billy took a breath. “I am the police.”

  “May I wake thee?” the Wheel inquired, darkening Billy’s doorway at two in the morning.

  “This better be good,” Billy said, a pillow over his head as he lay in a fetal curl on his joke of an office couch. He had never been this tired so early in the tour.

  “We got a guy just brought his kid into Metropolitan, says he accidentally dropped her.”

  “What’s a kid,” still not moving.

  “Four months.”

  The young, disheveled-looking father of the injured infant, still in his bedclothes, was slim and tall, six-three, four, maybe more, although the anxious crook of his neck on this night seemed to shave a few inches off him as he paced the littered floor of the Metropolitan Hospital ER.

  “He said the wife had a family emergency in Buffalo,” the patrol sergeant told Billy. “Left him with the kid for a few days.”

  Billy’s jacket buzzed, a text from Carmen at two-thirty in the morning:

  can i burn the coat

  “You know who that is, right?” the sergeant said, gesturing to the agitated pacer as Billy texted back.

  absolutely not

  “What? No, why?”

  “You follow high school hoops?”

  “It’s all I can do to follow the pros.”

  “Aaron Jeter, played power forward for DeWitt Clinton about four years ago, took them to two state AA championships. You couldn’t open the sports pages back then without there’s a picture of him banging under the boards.”

  Billy took another look at the guy, this time noticing the outsized shoulder caps that topped his lean frame.

  “Huh. And so where’s he at now?”

  “Now?” the sergeant shrugged. “Now he’s here.”

  Alice Stupak, who put out a sympathetic, feminine vibe that she could turn on and off like a faucet, was usually the go-to detective for interviews of this kind, and she waited for the high sign to start working the guy. But Billy, after all that had happened today, wanted this one for himself.

  “How are you doing, I’m Detective Graves,” Billy having to look up as he introduced himself. The hand that enveloped his was as big as a first baseman’s mitt. “You’re Aaron Jeter, right?”

  “What? Yeah,” he said, staring anxiously over Billy’s head to the closed-off rooms beyond the nurses’ station.

  “See, I’d be lying to you,” Billy said, “if I pretended like I didn’t know it already.”

  Jeter seemed deaf to the flattery, still riveted by whatever was happening beyond the screens.

  “And your daughter?” Billy asked, as he gripped him lightly by a long, fluttering bicep.

  “My daughter what,” Jeter said, as Billy began walking him across the floor.

  “Her name.”

  “Nuance.”

  His cell began to tremble again, Billy quick-checking Carmen’s latest:

  why not

  Well, there was no answering her now.

  “Nuance,” he repeated automatically, then, reengaging: “That’s a beautiful name.”

  Billy steered Jeter into a small, claustrophobic examination room that most detectives favored when responding to calls here—even the hospital staff referred to it as the Box—then took a seat on a backless rolling chair, the only place to park other than the examination table.

  “So how are you holding up?” Billy asked, sliding his chair to the center of the room, effectively cutting it in half.

  “Holding up?” Jeter’s eyes moist and wandering. “I’m holding up bad.”

  “Of course you are,” Billy said. “You’re her dad.”

  “Is she going to be OK?” Staring at the shut door. “I mean, what are they saying?”

  Billy had no idea. The CAT scan machine was down, and the radiologist hadn’t gotten around to looking at the X-rays yet.

  “All I can tell you is they’re going to do everything they can.”

  “Good, that’s good.”

  As Jeter tried to figure out where to situate himself, Billy gave him the once-over again, taking in the wrinkled pajama bottoms and T-shirt, the slippers, his uncombed hair sticking up like a frozen splash of tar.

  “Look, I know this isn’t the greatest of circumstances,” Billy said easily, “but I just have to tell you, you had to be the best high school forward I have ever seen.”

  “That was a long time ago,” Jeter perching tentatively on the edge of the table, then popping right up. “Can we go back outside?” Nearly begging him. “They’re supposed to tell me how she’s doing.”

  Billy’s jacket buzzed with another text.

  “Hey, listen, do you by any chance remember a kid played for Truman, Gerry Reagan?” Truman, Reagan, Billy’s imagination leaning toward the presidential tonight. “He was my nephew. I mean, he still is.”

  “Who?” Jeter spinning like a top. “Can they find me in here? I have to know what’s happening.”

  “He hated covering you, said it was the most humiliating experience of his life.”

  “Jimmy who?”

  “So did you get to play after Clinton?”

  “Huh? Yeah, just a year in Belgium.”

  “Still, better than most, right?”

  “Hey, look . . .”

  “So what are you doing with yourself these days. You working?”

  “Working?”

  “Are you employed.”

  Jeter stared at him like he thought he was nuts. “I’m a warehouse man at Trumbo Storage.” Then: “Why are you asking . . .”

  “Trumbo Storage, the big red brick building with the clock tower, right? Where’s that, Bushwick?”

  “Sunset Park. Listen . . .”

  “Sunset Park, I remember when that area was nothing but gangs and strip clubs. But not so much now, right?”

  “I don’t . . .”

  “Can I ask you what time you usually punch in?”

  “Do I what? I don’t know, seven, look I’m worried about my daughter, could we please . . .”

  “Yeah, no, of course,” Billy easing out his notepad. “So tell me what happened tonight.”

  Jeter exhaled. “Like I told already, we were playing, you know, like I was tossing her up a little, just a tiny bit, catch her, toss her. She loves that, makes her laugh every time.”

  “And . . .”

  “And my cell rang and so I turned my head for a second, you know, thinking it was my wife . . . and she just slipped through my hands. I just turned for a second, not even that.”

  “And when was this, timewise . . .”

  “I don’t know, about an hour, hour and a half ago? Nobody’s telling me nothing in here, is that bad?”

  “They’re just busy. So an hour and a half ago, say about one a.m.?”

  “I brought her right in, I mean, look at me,” grabbing the thighs of his pajama bottoms.

  “No, you did the right thing, absolutely.”

  Again his phone began to tremble with a text, Billy afraid to look at it, afraid to turn it off.

  “So I take it you live in the neighborhood?”

  “Hundred and Fourteenth and Madison, the Tubman Houses.”

  “And you punch in at seven, so, East Harlem to Sunset Park, you need to wake up around, what, five? Five-thirty?”

  Jeter hesitated, then quietly said, “I don’t need that much sleep.”

  “But still, what were you doing up with her at one in the morning?”

  “She’s a little colicky, you know?”

  “Yeah, no, I had that with both my kids, it’s like a nightmare, right?”

  “It’s not their fault,” he said, the corners o
f his eyes starting to bead.

  “Of course, it’s heartbreaking, those little things suffering like that.”

  As Jeter’s tears continued to collect, Billy gave him a moment to live with his thoughts, to go to town on himself.

  “You know what my nephew always said about you?” Billy asked softly. “He said you were the best natural ball handler he ever saw. Said it was like you had that rock on a string.”

  “Made all-city three years running,” Jeter’s tears coming freely now.

  “I can believe it. But then, Aaron,” Billy rising from his chair, putting his hand on Jeter’s shoulder, “I just have to ask . . . How can an elite athlete like you, a master baller good enough to play pro in Europe, how the fuck can a guy with hands like yours drop his own four-month-old baby . . .”

  “I told you, the phone rang . . .”

  “And she’s colicky, crying all night.”

  “She’s colicky.”

  “One in the morning, you have to get up, what time did we say? Five? Five-thirty?”

  “Is she gonna be OK?”

  Billy moved in close. “Aaron, look at me.”

  Can’t.

  “Aaron, if I were to scroll down the incoming calls on your cell right now, am I going to find your wife or anybody else trying to ring you at one in the morning?”

  “I don’t know it was one exactly,” his voice broken and hushed.

  “Aaron. Can’t you look at me?”

  Jeter dropped his chin to his chest, then covered his eyes.

  “Aaron . . .”

  Again, Billy let a silence come down, the room a tomb.

  “This is not me,” Jeter finally whispered. “This is definitely not me.”

  “I know,” Billy said softly, the next step to somehow get Jeter’s statement on record before he could pull his head out of his ass and start wondering out loud about his rights.

  As Jeter turned away and wept into the wall, Billy, unable to help himself, quickly glanced at Carmen’s last three texts:

  can i wash it

  can i wash it or is it evidence

  wtf answer me

  MILTON RAMOS

  Milton rolled off Marilys, sat up, grabbed a washcloth and attended to himself, averting his eyes as she rose from the towel-draped couch and walked to the bathroom in order to do her thing.

  Widow and widower, both on the north side of forty with three kids between them, over the last year they had become occasional humps of convenience, a casual pressure-relieving arrangement without the mess of a real relationship. Sometimes she wasn’t in the mood and sometimes he wasn’t, but nobody ever got their noses out of joint about it one way or the other. Besides, he was never much for kissing.

  As he heard the shower begin to run behind the bathroom door, he lay back down and thought of Carmen’s boys in the school parking lot today, bright-eyed and wild as chimpanzees, seemingly happy in their world and, as an added bonus, respectful to adults. Nice kids most likely, but when he was sizing up any child he came across for the first time there was only one question on the assessment test and one question only: were they the type who would get off on taunting Sofia?

  All he had known this morning was that he wanted Carmen to feel things, to experience things, give her a taste of what it feels like to have the most precious people in your life snatched away from you, to feel without any warning the ground buckle and split beneath your feet. But now that he had set things in motion, he realized that today was nothing, an unnerving incident that would be forgotten in a week or two. What was required here was evidence of a pattern, of an intelligent presence, an unseen wolf lurking just outside the perimeter of her life until . . . Until what?

  He had no idea how or when it should end. But he did know this: if his campaign went on long enough, he would eventually get caught and that would be the end of him. And the end of them.

  He would lose her.

  So let it go.

  Can’t.

  You will lose her.

  And then an exhilaratingly anarchic notion:

  She’ll go to better people.

  He had a half-a-half-sister in Pennsylvania who was pretty decent, and a childless cousin in Staten Island, Anita, who he liked and liked him in return. Better that Sofia go to her, but what the hell was he thinking . . .

  Marilys came back into the den, squat and stone-faced, her torso un-indented from shoulder to hip. When the two of them stood side by side they looked like matching salt and pepper shakers.

  As she slipped into her jeans, he dug four hundred dollars out of his heaped pants and passed it along to her in a tight roll. He knew four hundred was shit pay for the days and hours she put in, but she needed to be off the books, and that was all he could afford if he couldn’t deduct her come April 15.

  “The toilet’s backed up on the top floor, you need to call a plumber.”

  “All right,” shrugging into his own pants. “So what did she eat today?”

  “Carrots, like you said,” stooping to pick up his discarded washcloth.

  “Oh yeah? What else.”

  “A turkey burger without the bread.”

  “Uh-huh. What else.”

  Marilys peeled the bath towel from the couch and replaced the pillows.

  “What else.”

  “She was crying for a treat.”

  “What’s a treat.”

  “A couple of Mint Milanos.”

  “What did I tell you about that?”

  “Let me ask you,” she said, “what did you eat today?”

  And there was Marilys, who knew Sofia better than anyone, maybe even himself. But she was an employee with a family and problems of her own. Sofia was just her job.

  Nothing you did so far was even illegal.

  Milton watched Marilys stuff her pay in her purse, then get down on her knees to retrieve her sneakers from under the coffee table.

  Housekeeper, stand-in mother, semi-girlfriend. If he went then she went away, and Sofia would be up for grabs.

  Nothing you did so far was even illegal.

  CHAPTER 8

  The next day Billy made sure he was back home in time to drive the kids to school, then sat in the parking lot to survey the terrain as they charged toward the building.

  Nothing but the same teachers, parents, and nannies he saw every morning on the days when he dropped them off. No one even vaguely resembling the rough description given to him by the boys.

  Once the lot was empty of all souls, he continued to sit for another hour before taking off for a meeting with Stacey Taylor in the city.

  Release time would be better.

  They met in a beer-damp neighborhood joint around the corner from Stacey’s walk-up a few blocks south of Columbia University. At nine in the morning she was sitting at the not-quite-deserted bar reading the Post and eating a hamburger.

  “Hey,” Billy said, taking the neighboring stool and gesturing for a coffee. “How’s it going.”

  “How’s what going.”

  “I don’t know, life, the boyfriend.”

  “The boyfriend’s asleep,” she said. “He gets up at three in the morning, has a cocktail or two, works on the magazine, and crawls back into bed at five. I could throw a flash grenade in there now, all it would do is scare the cats.”

  Billy took one look at the coffee set before him and knew it would taste like muddled cigarette butts.

  “So, Pavlicek . . .” sliding the cup to the side.

  “Pavlicek sees a doctor there, Jacob Wells, but he’s not a cholesterol man, he’s a hematologist. Been seeing him since August.”

  “Seeing him for what?”

  “That I couldn’t find out,” she said. “Can’t be anything good.”

  A too-tall, gaunt, middle-aged man sporting an old but expensive raincoat over pajamas came sauntering into the bar as if into the dayroom of a nuthouse. He had a long narrow face, nose big and sharp as a tomahawk, one eye brighter than the other. He could have run a brush through
his tangled gray-brown hair a few times, Billy thought; that wouldn’t have hurt.

  He kissed Stacey’s hair without looking at her and signaled for a beer.

  “What are you doing up?” she asked.

  “I have no idea.” He extended a hand to Billy, again without making eye contact. “Phil Lasker.”

  “Billy Graves.”

  “What would someone see a hematologist for?” Stacey asked her boyfriend.

  “A million things.”

  “Besides sickle-cell anemia.”

  “All kinds of vitamin deficiency, B12, folic acid, iron, et cetera, thrombocytosis, that’s excess platelets, thrombocytopenia, that’s low platelets, polycythemia, excess red blood cells, anemia, pernicious or otherwise, which is low red blood cells, leukocytosis, excess white blood cells, neutropenia, low white blood cells, all kinds of coagulation disorders, blood vessel abnormalities, hemophilia, scurvy, leukemia, acute and chronic, an encyclopedia of various syndromes, genetic or otherwise . . .”

  Billy stared at him, then looked to Stacey.

  “He’s just a really good hypochondriac,” she said.

  “That means I’ll live into my nineties,” he said, sipping his nine a.m. Heineken.

  Stacey looked away.

  Billy left a few minutes later, drove home, and called Immaculate Conception. He left a message for the school security officer, asking for a meeting to review yesterday’s footage of the parking lot, then fixed himself his usual Cape Codder, got into bed, and stared at the ceiling, his head a blender.

  Early afternoon found him in a small physical therapy clinic on the banks of the Cross County Parkway, thumbing through a two-month-old People magazine as his father worked on his core strength with a young Serbian physical therapist on the other side of the mirrored room. Ferrying the old man here twice weekly for his sessions was the most stultifying chore in the world, but Billy insisted on doing it himself.

  “Milan, are you old enough to remember Marshal Tito?” Billy Senior asked the therapist.

  “He died when I was very young,” the kid said. “Try not to tense your neck.”

  “His real name was Josip Broz.”