The Whites: A Novel

by Richard Price

  Despite her fireballing, Billy saw that she was trembling. As was he.

  “You caught the guy?” he asked Dennis.

  “I told you three times, yes.”

  “In fact, you know what?” Carmen again. “I don’t want you to go near my face at all. Go page Kantor.”

  “Where is he,” Billy asked Dennis.

  “Forget it, Billy.”

  “Is he still here? Where is he?”

  “You know what?” Carmen said. “Screw it. Hold up a mirror for me, I’ll do it myself.”

  “You have no idea what this whack’s been putting us through,” Billy said.

  “What whack?” Dennis losing track.

  “Dennis, I just want to lay eyes on him, I won’t even go in the room.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “How about this. You don’t let me see him, I’ll walk out of here and pistol-whip the first fat-assed, do-nothing hospital guard I see.”

  “Gentlemen,” an older doctor murmured as he slid past them and into the cubicle. “So, Carmen,” he said breezily, “when can we expect the lawsuit?”

  “Pretend it’s my collar,” Billy pleaded, “and that’s Yasmeen on that table getting worked on.”

  Dennis did a quick 360 around himself. “You are not to talk to him.”

  “You got it.”

  “Not a fucking word, you hear me?”

  As they walked to the impromptu holding cell, an empty storage room down a long corridor, Dennis held firmly to Billy’s arm, his tense mantra every few steps “Remember what you promised me.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “Who. This guy? Not that I know of.”

  “Really,” Billy said lightly. “Not before, not during, not after?” Then, when Dennis tightened his grip: “I’m just curious.”

  “Just remember what you promised.”

  “You!” Billy shouted as he tried to leap over Dennis’s back and get to Carmen’s attacker, who, guarded by a uniform, was cuffed to a chair at the far end of the room. The grimy, blaze-eyed stick figure in scavenged clothing looked at Billy with calm eyes and total incomprehension.

  “What do you want from us!” Billy railed, this time with less heat. The guy was obviously a homeless nutter off his meds, if he’d ever been prescribed them in the first place.

  “You promised me,” Dennis said, his arms spread wide as he began chest-bumping Billy backward toward the door.

  “Forget it,” Billy said, lightly pushing him off before turning to leave under his own steam.

  “I am John,” the cuffed man abruptly announced in a voice so deep and booming they both jumped. “And I bring news of he who is to come.”

  The best of Pavlicek’s offered apartments was, as Carmen had predicted, a furniture-free one-bedroom in a shittier-than-usual part of the Bronx, but Billy didn’t care. This morning’s assault had thrown him into a state of shameless hyperprotectiveness, and until their stalker was caught, they were leaving Yonkers, the hell with the goddamn designated patrols, which had done nothing last night but freak out his wife, the low voices and roving flashlight beams coming through the bedroom window at all hours making her feel like a hunted animal—which, if you thought about it, was what she felt like most of the time without any help from them.

  “I was hoping so bad that was him, you know?” Billy said, perching himself on a living room windowsill that afforded him a partial view of the outfield in Yankee Stadium, one block west of the apartment. “At least it would all have been over.”

  “They’ll catch him,” Pavlicek said restlessly. “She’s home now?”

  “I had to drag her out of there, but yeah, she’s home.”

  “Doctors and nurses, they always make the worst patients, right? They think they know everything, then when something happens to them they get all pissy and embarrassed. They’re like two-year-olds, tell me I’m wrong.”

  For a man seeing a hematologist he seemed to be moving pretty good today, Billy thought, the guy roaming in a tight, repetitive circuit like a big cat in a small cage.

  “All right, look, I’ll get my guys to bring some furniture in from the warehouse, but it might take a day or two. Meanwhile, I’m having my security guy come up to the house and hook you up with a CCTV.”

  “John . . .”

  “I can’t believe you don’t have one. In fact, it boggles my mind. First thing I did when I bought my pile was put in a system. I wouldn’t have my family set foot in there until it was wired like the Pentagon, are you kidding me? Christ, Billy, you haven’t seen enough shit in the last twenty years? You think you’re immune? No one’s immune. None of us.”

  “When you’re right, you’re right,” Billy said, just trying to calm him down. “Thank you.”

  Pavlicek took a seat on one of the radiators, dropped his head, and ran his hands through his hair. When he looked up again it was like a sleight of hand, his expression having morphed from fiercely agitated to helplessly bewildered.

  “How are you feeling these days?” Billy asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know, your cholesterol.”

  “My what? I’m good.”

  “Good. Glad to hear it.”

  “So, how are the boys,” Pavlicek said, just to say something.

  “They’re boys,” Billy answered in kind.

  “Kids. All we want in life is for them to be happy, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “I mean, what are we asking.”

  “I know.”

  “John Junior, do you remember all the grief he put me through? With the rehabs, the dealing, the graffiti collars, dropping out of school . . . And that fucking room of his, I’d walk in, him and all his friends reeking of skunk, looking like red-eyed morons, ‘Hey Mister P,’ sitting there with the sideways hats over their ears. ‘Hey, kids! Who knows what century it is? A hundred bucks to whoever can tell me what fucking century we’re in or even just what planet we’re on,’ they’re like, ‘Uh, duh, uh . . .’”

  “I remember,” Billy said, recalling John Junior in his teens, an oversized bruiser like his father but in reality a sweet-tempered con artist who’d rather munch than punch.

  “But I tell you, last year?” Pavlicek back to pacing. “I come home one day, he’s there, says to me, Read this, and it’s an acceptance letter from Westchester Community College. I didn’t even know he applied. He says he wants to take some business classes, then get something going for himself. I tell him, Come work for me, you’ll learn more about starting your own business than ten colleges, he says no, he wants to do it on his own. I say, If you work for me you’ll earn enough money to hit the ground running, he says, Dad, all due respect? It’s important for me to do this without help from you. Can you believe that? I was so proud of him I wanted to bust.”

  “Hey, it was his time and he recognized it,” Billy said. “Many don’t.”

  “What’s that?” Pavlicek tilted his chin to the side pocket of Billy’s sport jacket, Sweetpea’s purple Missing poster still peeking out like gaudy origami.

  Billy passed it over.

  “Cornell Harris,” Pavlicek read, then: “That’s Sweetpea, right?”

  “Looks like he pulled a Houdini,” Billy said. “Or got Houdinied, more likely.”

  “What the hell do you care?”

  “I’m not saying I do.”

  “Worry about your family.”

  “What do you think I’m doing here?”

  “Worry about your kids.” Pavlicek started to balloon again, his voice bouncing off the bare walls.

  Billy stopped answering, refusing to engage.

  “This fuck? Are you kidding me?” Pavlicek crumpled the poster, then tossed it backhand into a corner. “Piece of shit . . .”

  Hoping he would storm himself out, Billy remained seated and watchfully silent until Pavlicek suddenly made his move, coming toward him so fast that he didn’t even have time to raise his hands. But instead of throwing a punch, the big
man blew right past him and without another word stormed out of the apartment, the flung-open door pockmarking the plaster of the tiny vestibule before slamming back into its frame on the rebound.

  Trying to calm himself, Billy gazed out the window at the clean geometry of the distant stadium grass for a moment, then, turning away, picked Sweetpea’s poster up off the floor and dialed the number that hung in multiples from the bottom.

  Donna Barkley was a short, thick, snub-faced woman to begin with, and her company-issued maroon blazer did her no favors, her fingers barely peeking out of the too-long sleeves, the jacket’s center back vent angling out over her high and wide butt like an awning.

  “Hey, how are you,” Billy said, rising from his white plastic chair in the cement pocket park alongside the office building where she worked as a security guard.

  She took a seat, reached into her bag for a Newport, fired up, and then turned her head away to exhale, exposing the cursive Sweetpea inked across her left carotid.

  “Arista,” Billy said, reading the insignia on her jacket. “They take care of you over there?”

  “It’s a job for pay,” still not looking at him. “I got two kids and a grandmother.”

  “I hear you,” he said, removing the crumpled Missing poster from his jacket and flattening it against the tabletop.

  “You were only supposed to tear off the phone number on the bottom,” she said, “not take the whole damn thing.”

  Billy gave it a beat, vigorously scratching his up-tilted throat. “So, let me just start by asking you a few questions, see where that takes us.”

  “Who are you with again?”

  “Like I said to you on the phone, I’m an independent investigator.”

  She gave him a look. “You got an ID?”

  He handed over his driver’s license.

  “Something with your business on it.”

  Digging into his wallet, he pulled out a card for Sousa Security, his brother-in-law’s outfit, which listed him as the assistant head of investigations, even though he never did a thing or took a dime.

  “And this is for free?”

  “I said that.”

  “Why is it free.”

  “Because,” Billy looking her in the eye, “like I also mentioned to you on the phone, we’re opening an office near Lincoln Hospital and if I can find him for you, word’ll get around and hopefully it’ll bring us clients.”

  A pigeon landed on their table, Sweetpea’s fiancée glaring at the filthy thing but making no move to shoo it away.

  “Has he ever been gone this long before?”

  Taking her cell phone out of her purse, she responded to one text, then another, Billy torn between repeating the question and just packing it in.

  “Outside of incarceration?” she finally said, still texting. “Now and then.”

  “So what made you so concerned this time?”

  “Because,” she said, stuffing her cell back into her purse, “we were talking on the phone, then some white guy called his name, and all of a sudden Sweetpea hangs up and where is he.”

  “OK, this guy . . .” he said, opening a steno pad.

  “White guy.”

  “This white guy who called his name, did he say anything else?”

  “He just said, ‘Hey Sweetpea, come over here.’”

  “Then what.”

  “Then Sweetpea said, ‘The fuck you want.’ Then the guy said, ‘Seriously, Pea, no kidding, come over here.’”

  Billy looked up from his notes. “And you’re sure the guy was white?”

  “My phone doesn’t come with eyes, but I know white when I hear it and that guy was white all day long.”

  “OK,” Billy said. “Then what.”

  “What?”

  “What did you hear next.”

  “Click.”

  “And roughly what time was this?”

  “It was three-fifteen exact, you know how I know? Because he kept yelling at me. ‘It’s three-fifteen, bitch! Where the fuck are you?’”

  “Good,” Billy back to writing.

  “Good?”

  “Do you have any idea where he was when he called you?”

  “I know that exact, too. He was just leaving my building to come get me, yelling, ‘I’m walking out right now, I’m walking out right now.’”

  “Walking out of . . .”

  “502 Concord Avenue.”

  “502,” writing, then: “This white guy, any ideas?”

  “Not per se.”

  “What do you mean, ‘not per se.’”

  She shrugged as if the question wasn’t worth answering.

  Billy hesitated, then, chalking up her truculent vagueness to a general case of whitey hatin’, moved on.

  “Was he having any problems with anyone recently?”

  “Well, he’s a talent promoter, you know?” Her voice softened for the first time. “Trying to help the community, but these kids he takes under his wing, they expect miracles.”

  “Any kids in particular?”

  “I’m just saying”—looking away—“in general.”

  “All right.” He put down his pen. “I did a little research on your fiancé before I came here, it’s a crucial part of a job like this, and I need to ask you . . .” Billy back in her eyes. “Is he still slinging?”

  She stared at him as if he were too thick to live. “I don’t want to talk out of my area of expertise.”

  “Do you want me to find him or not?”

  She continued to stare, Billy once again ready to call it a day.

  “One last . . . I asked you before if you had any idea who this white guy was and you said, ‘Not per se.’ I need for you to elaborate on that ‘not per se.’”

  “Not per se meaning, like, I don’t know who he is, per se.”

  “But you know . . . what, his type?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “From what, his tone of voice?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And what type would that be.”

  “Your type.”

  “My type . . .”

  She fired up another Newport, took a drag, then exhaled in a slow steady stream.

  “You know what Sweetpea always used to say NYPD stands for?” she said, tossing Billy’s bullshit business card on the table as she rose to her feet. “‘Not Your People, Dawg,’” having read him like a comic book from the door on in.

  He was still sitting at the table when he got a call from home, the unexpected sound of his younger son’s plaintive voice making him knotty.

  “Hey, buddy, what’s up?”

  “I didn’t even do anything and Mom started yelling at me like I did,” Carlos said.

  Billy exhaled with relief. “Well, she had an upsetting experience this morning, so don’t take it personal and just extra-behave today, all right? You and your brother both.”

  “But I didn’t do anything.”

  “Carlos, just do me a favor, OK?”

  “OK.”

  Another incoming call flashed Pavlicek’s name across his screen, Billy ignoring it. “Everything else all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What are you doing right now?”

  “Talking to you.”

  “All right, I’ll be home for dinner, OK?”

  “OK.”

  “And everything’s OK?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your brother’s OK?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Grandpa?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All right, buddy,” he said, as Pavlicek attempted to ring through again. “I’ll see you at home, OK?”

  “You didn’t ask about Mom.”

  “I’ll see her back home too.”

  “Do you want to talk to her?”

  “I’ll talk to her at home,” Billy said, knowing all too well that when things were tense between them the phone was not their friend.

  He started to call Pavl
icek back, hesitated, and instead called Elvis Perez at Midtown South to see if there was any kind of progress on the Bannion homicide. Perez was out, so Billy settled for leaving a message.

  He sat there for a moment, thinking about Pavlicek’s afternoon flip-out over the Sweetpea poster, then looked over his interview notes, which yielded only two pieces of hard information: 502 Concord, three-fifteen a.m.

  If he were so inclined he could do a canvass for possible witnesses. But it probably wouldn’t be too smart: a detective from outside the local precinct, on his own, knocking on doors in the middle of the night to ask about Sweetpea Harris, especially if Sweetpea turned out to be dead, Billy imagining the barrage of questions that would then come his way, none of which, at this point, he would be prepared to answer, especially after having come so close to stepping in it simply by entering Eric Cortez’s name into the system.

  So, it had to be someone else, and not a cop. For a hot second he thought about hiring Sousa Security but then bagged the idea; there was something about his brother-in-law he didn’t quite trust. It wasn’t that he was a liar exactly—more like an omitter, as if the answers he gave you had to hold up in court.

  So.

  “Hey, it’s me.”

  “Hey,” Stacey’s voice high and on the shaky side.

  “I have some work for you this week if you’re up for it.”

  “Yeah, sure, absolutely,” once again sounding sunny but strained, as if someone was standing behind her with a knife.

  “Are you OK?”

  “Sure.”

  Billy hesitated, then: “Where do you want to meet?”

  “Can you come to my place?”

  In all the years they had known each other, she had never invited him to her home.

  “Yeah, no problem, what’s a good time?”

  “Now.”

  He began to smell the stale waft of old cigarette smoke coming from Stacey’s apartment midway in his wheezing climb to her floor. When he finally reached her landing, Billy took a moment to catch his breath, then followed his nose down the long hallway to 6B, where she greeted him in the open doorway with a smile so tense he thought her face would crack.

  With its dim corridors, greasy slit of a kitchen, and small living room filled with indifferent furniture and overflowing ashtrays, the apartment reeked of resignation, and it made Billy ache to think what life could have been like for her right now if she had only looked elsewhere to make her journalistic bones.