The Whites: A Novel

by Richard Price

  “Really.”

  Billy stopped reading.

  “I was assigned to his security detail in sixty-three when he came to the United Nations.”

  “You’re still straining, Mr. Graves.”

  “He was a very short guy, you know.”

  “Better. Keep your shoulders back.”

  “Loved the ladies, that was the biggest headache with him.”

  “Dad, are you kidding me?”

  “I had dealings with Khrushchev back then, too. I was on the Manhattan Bridge surveillance detail in sixty-one when he came up the East River on the SS Baltika, into, I believe, Pier 71.”

  Dates names numbers, Billy’s heart rising.

  “They had a floating high school docked next door at Pier 73, Food and Maritime Trades, and I had to go over and tell the principal that with the big Commie coming, he had to shut down classes for a few days and, brother, he was not too happy to hear that, but the students took it like Christmas in July.”

  “Keep your shoulder blades back, imagine they’re trying to shake hands across your spine.”

  “Do you remember the name of that principal?” Billy just testing.

  “Frank Stevenson, a real no-nonsense guy, but you had to be, with some of those kids he had.”

  “How about the boat.”

  “What boat?”

  “That housed the school.”

  “It was a ship, not a boat. A mothballed Liberty, the John W. Brown. The navy donated it to the city in 1946.”

  “Dad, you never told me any of this,” Billy grinning and grinning. “This is history.”

  “You want history? How about Fidel Castro staying at the Hotel Theresa up on a Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street? Do you know those Cubans were smuggling live poultry into the top-floor suites? Did you ever try to catch a chicken with your bare hands? It can’t be done. Your mother had to give me rubdowns for a week.”

  “You’re killing me,” Billy still grinning like a mule.

  “Don’t forget to breathe, Mr. Graves.”

  “So, Charlie, how’s my little sister doing these days?” he asked Milan.

  “Your sister?”

  “She says you’re off the sauce for good. Is that true?”

  “Sauce?” Milan looking to Billy.

  “Just roll with it,” Billy muttered, going back to his mindless magazine.

  “Yes, I’m off the sauce.”

  “Well, you better be, because if I have to come up there and get her again, this time there’s going to be some laying on of the hands, my friend, that I can promise you.”

  As he was adjusting his father’s seat belt in the parking lot behind the rehab center, Jimmy Whelan called, Billy stepping away from the car to talk.

  “What are you doing right now.”

  “Driving my father.”

  “Oh yeah? How’s he doing?”

  “The same.”

  “Same is better than worse. Listen.” Whelan’s voice dropped. “I need to talk to you about something.”

  “About Pavlicek?” the question just popping out of Billy without cerebral clearance.

  “Pavlicek?” Jimmy sounding caught up short. “What about him?”

  “Nothing,” Billy said, burning to bring up the blood specialist but afraid of being asked how he had come across the information. “What did you want to talk about.”

  “Remember that movie Fort Apache?”

  “With John Wayne, right?”

  “What John Wayne. Fort Apache, The Bronx. They’re doing a remake. Billy Heffernan’s got an in with the people involved, and he asked me if I was interested in working on it.”

  “As what?”

  “Some kind of consultant. You know, because of what we were doing around there back then.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “Money for nothing and chicks for free, right?”

  “Could be.”

  “Why’d you mention Pavlicek?” Whelan asked, but Immaculate Conception was trying to ring through and Billy had to end the call.

  After arranging a time to review the parking lot tapes with the head of school security, then taking a few minutes to calm himself down, Billy called Whelan back from a traffic jam on the Saw Mill River Parkway.

  “Something going on with Pavlicek?” the first thing out of Jimmy’s mouth. “I need to know.”

  “Forget it,” Billy said, Pavlicek now the last thing on his mind.

  “You all right? You sound off.”

  “I’m trying to drive here.”

  “Don’t bullshit me.”

  “Something happened with my kid,” this too coming out of him without any mental vetting.

  “What happened with your kid?”

  Billy didn’t want to talk about it in front of his father, but the old man was down for the count.

  “Jimmy,” Billy keeping his voice low, “I’m freaking six ways to Sunday.”

  Although his meeting with security wasn’t until four, Billy was back at Immaculate Conception at two-thirty, the first of the parents to arrive for the pickups. For the next forty-five minutes, he studied every car coming into the lot until a side door of the building opened and the students began to exit, the youngest first, those not bus-bound lined up against the side of the building until each was retrieved by a minder.

  Billy hadn’t told his kids he was coming, and he watched as Carlos ran to his designated bus unaccosted, no one taking the slightest interest in him, least of all some wide-bodied, red-handed possible cop. The person who did catch his eye, though, was the teacher with a clipboard posted by the bus’s folding yellow doors, the guy chanting, “No pushing, no pushing,” as the kids scrambled up the short stairs to their seats.

  The bus monitor turned out to be the school’s remedial reading specialist, Albert Lazar, a short, erectly trim middle-aged man who projected an air of constant alertness, although that just could have been his slightly hyperthyroidic eyes.

  “Like I said, I wasn’t on bus detail yesterday, we’re on a rotating schedule for that.”

  “I understand,” Billy said, “but were you in the parking lot at all?”

  “We all are at release time, it’s required.”

  “OK, how about this: just looking around yesterday, did you happen to notice anyone that struck you as unusual?”

  “Unusual meaning . . .”

  “Maybe someone who looked a little out of place.”

  “Like what, a homeless person?”

  “Like anybody,” Billy not wanting to lead with a more specific description.

  “Well, there were some nuns from the Poor Clares down from Poughkeepsie.”

  “Who else.”

  “A boy’s divorced parents apparently got their signals crossed and showed up for him at the same time. They started arguing in the lot, then they both left without him. That turned a few heads.”

  “Who else.”

  “That’s about it.”

  “Any men?”

  “Men?”

  “Man. Maybe some guy, walking around, you’re thinking . . .”

  “You know . . .” Lazar hesitated.

  “Just say.”

  “There was someone I hadn’t seen before, could’ve been some kid’s father, but I don’t think so.”

  Billy took a breath and asked for a description.

  “I’d say a little taller than me, but not much, heavyset, dark, Hispanic, Italian maybe.”

  Billy felt a surge, his exhausted body having trouble handling it. “What was he wearing?”

  “A dark suit, nothing fancy, shirt and tie.”

  “How about his hair? Curly, straight, dark . . .”

  “Dark, I guess,” then: “He could’ve had a mustache, but he looked so Mediterranean I might be putting it on him.”

  “Did he speak to anyone?”

  “Not that I noticed.”

  “Why don’t you think he was a parent coming to pick up his kid?”

  “There’s not that many fath
ers doing the afternoon pickups and I pretty much know them all, at least by sight.”

  “All right,” Billy winding down, pulling his card out of his wallet. “Anything else you can tell me about him? Just off the top of your head. Anything . . .”

  “Yeah, actually, there is,” Lazar said, taking the offered card but not looking at it. “He struck me like someone in the security business.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You know, the way he carried himself, very alert and no-nonsense. It’s hard to explain.”

  “You just did,” Billy said woodenly. He tapped his card. “Anything else you can remember, night or day.”

  He hadn’t identified himself as an NYPD detective, just as a concerned parent whose son might have been approached by a stranger on school grounds, and he saw the teacher’s face darken as he read the new information.

  For an instant Lazar looked at Billy searchingly, then shut himself down.

  “Something else?” Billy asked mildly.

  “No,” his eyes reading, Yes.

  Billy lingered, giving Lazar a moment to say what was suddenly so troubling to him, but the teacher stepped into the bus to handle some rowdiness and that was that.

  And then the older boys came charging out of the building like their hair was on fire. He refrained from calling out to Declan, allowing him to board with his brother. Not that he didn’t want to take them home, want to keep them close right now, but he was desperate to see the tape, the security officer waiting for Billy in his office.

  The system was badly in need of an upgrade, the retrieved footage from the parking lot as grainy as an evaporating dream. Billy was unable to make out anyone’s face, although he could track the progress of bodies across the lot.

  “Are you kidding me?” Billy turned to the security man, Wayne Connors, a retired Westchester County state trooper.

  “Hey, I tell them every week, I know Chinese take-outs with better surveillance equipment than us. You know what they say to me? We don’t have the money. I say, What if something was to happen out there.”

  “Something did happen out there,” Billy said.

  On the third viewing he found who he was looking for, the guy built square and low to the ground, his back to the camera as he walked in front of the buses before stopping and bending briefly next to a kid—was it Carlos? who could tell?—so briefly that he could have simply been picking something off the asphalt or tightening a shoelace. Then, as he began to rise, he casually reached out to that kid’s back or shoulder as if for support and calmly walked out of the frame.

  “Look,” Connors said after Billy had filled him in, “with the description you gave me plus what I saw just now, I think I have pretty good eyes on this guy. I’ll post one of my people out there starting tomorrow.”

  “Great,” Billy said, turning to leave.

  Connors could post an army out there, this guy wasn’t coming back. He’d done what he’d done knowing that Carlos’s parents would see it and react, so no way he’d risk a return visit.

  The question was, Where would he show up next.

  At ten in the evening, Billy entered Whelan’s apartment building and went down to the endless basement, its roughly plastered walls painted the color of dried blood. He walked past the pungent laundry room, past the caged storage bins filled with broken furniture and bust-ass suitcases, past the chained-up snow blowers and shovels and swapped-out radiators, until he reached the super’s apartment, the peephole on its scuffed door dangling by one screw like a gouged eye.

  “Who.”

  “It’s me, don’t shoot.”

  Whelan opened up wearing a towel around his waist and holding a Walther PPK.

  His apartment, if you could call it that, was a converted utility room infused with that down-the-hall detergent smell and consisting, at the moment, of a single unmade bed, a mini-fridge, and a two-burner stove. The only other article of furniture was a padded workout bench, the floor around it littered with free weights and a pair of work boots. A clothesline ran on a diagonal from one corner of the room to the sole window, and the walls were bare of decoration except for a framed certificate announcing Whelan’s induction into the NYPD Honor Legion. For a fully functional middle-aged adult, the place was utterly devoid of dignity, yet Jimmy Whelan was the most unconflicted, reasonably happy individual Billy had ever known.

  “So what’s going on?” Whelan asked, stuffing the Walther under his mattress and taking a pair of jeans from the clothesline.

  “What I told you on the phone,” Billy said, offering him Carlos’s coat, the painted handprint now starting to flake.

  “The mark of the Beast,” Whelan said.

  The toilet flushed, and a moment later one of the women from the upper apartments came out of the bathroom in her underwear.

  On seeing Billy she yipped and retreated, but not before he caught an eyeful of caramel-tinted mommy fat and a generous behind.

  “I’ll come back.”

  Whelan waved him off, fished her clothes out of the rumple of sheets, and passed them to her through the bathroom door.

  “So did you talk to the cops up there?”

  “And tell them what, a guy came up to my kid, said, ‘Say hello to your parents,’ and maybe, I can’t swear to it, maybe did this to his jacket?”

  “Guy with a gun.”

  “I don’t know that for sure.”

  “Or better yet, reach out to the Chief of D’s, let him bring in a Threat Assessment Team.”

  “Again, based on what.”

  “Then I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “I know.”

  Whelan lit a cigarette and halfheartedly attempted to make the bed with his free hand. “I mean, obviously, if there’s anything I can do personally . . .”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “If you ever need me to, I can stay with your family,” he said, giving up on the bed.

  “Let’s hope it never comes to that, but thank you.”

  “Be like old times,” Jimmy said, opening the window and flicking his cigarette upward onto the sidewalk.

  Back in ’97, when the news of the double shooting hit the papers and Reverend Hustle from two boroughs to the north took the ferry and set up his camp of demonstrators around Billy’s Staten Island home, Whelan, like all the other WGs, volunteered on a rotating basis to stay with him and his soon-to-be ex-wife every night, until negotiations with the mayor’s office brought the protests to an end, a full month after they had begun.

  “So what do you think?” Whelan asked.

  “About the guy?”

  “About Fort Apache.”

  Billy paused, a beat behind the shift in topic. “When Brian Roe was the consultant on Missing Persons NYC they threw him four hundred dollars.”

  “A day?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “I could live with that.”

  “He also said as long as you keep your thoughts to yourself and don’t talk to the actors, they’ll keep you on forever.”

  “As a consultant.”

  “I’m just telling you what he told me.”

  The tenant in the bathroom came out wearing tinted cat’s-eye glasses, jeans, and a blouse, her hair swirled up in a damp white towel like a Mister Softee cone. Whelan walked her the fifteen feet to his door, then kissed her hard on the mouth, her knee reflexively coming up like a quarterback waiting for the snap. She left still wearing the towel.

  “I have to be careful,” Jimmy said. “Her husband just got out of Comstock, but I’m pretty sure he’s staying with his other wife.”

  Gearing up to leave, Billy took back his son’s jacket. “So how’s your millionaire?”

  “Who, Appleyard? All of a sudden he’s got three new girlfriends, two crack hos and a trannie. I’m starting a dead pool: five dollars wins you a hundred if you pick the exact day, fifty if you pick the week.”

  “How about the month?”

  “He won’t make it a month.”

/>   “Do they even make crack hos anymore?”

  “You should get out more.”

  “All right, brother,” Billy said, stepping to the door himself.

  “Why’d you mention Pavlicek today,” Whelan asked abruptly.

  “I told you, it was nothing,” Billy said, turning back to the room. “Why are you so worried about Pavlicek?”

  “I’m not.” Whelan lit another cigarette.

  Billy took a breath, then: “You said to me, ‘Is there something going on with Pavlicek.’ You said, ‘I need to know.’”

  “I said that? I never said that. You were the one that brought him up.”

  Billy pondered mentioning Pavlicek’s lying about the hematologist again, then decided against it.

  “So everything’s good with him?” he settled for asking.

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  When he was once again passing the laundry room on his way up to the ground floor, Whelan threw open his apartment door. “Hey, I forgot to tell you . . .”

  Billy turned.

  “This Fort Apache remake? It’s in three-D.”

  MILTON RAMOS

  His aunt Pauline, eight hours after an obliterating cerebral hemorrhage, lay on life support in the Jacobi Hospital ICU, flanked by her two speechless sons, Herbert and Stan. Out of blood deference, Milton stood at the foot of the bed, his hands resting on the guard rail. She was now a machine-breathing vegetable, and over the past few hours three separate nurses had dropped by to gently campaign for pulling the plug so that they could commence the harvesting, but neither of his guilt-ridden cousins could even bring themselves to hold their mother’s hand, let alone respond to the request.

  So when a fourth nurse came by to make the pitch, Milton cut her off before word one.

  “She’s ready,” he said.

  Neither son protested or even looked his way.

  So fucking like them . . .

  After his mother and brothers died and Pauline had brought him into her home, he had shared a bedroom with these two for years, but despite his status as a first cousin, they couldn’t get past the tragedy he brought into the house with him, or maybe it was just his mixed-race jungle face, or maybe like most everyone else he knew they were intuitively scared of him. Whatever the reason, they had never accepted him as anything but a nerve-racking boarder, as welcome into their lives as an untethered bear.