The Whites: A Novel

by Richard Price

Billy was quiet, waiting for more. Then: “How am I supposed to let him get away with this.”

  “Who, the lone gunman?”

  “What?”

  “You think we all sent Pavlicek out there like that?”

  “What then.”

  “All of us.”

  Billy swiped at his caked jaw with a shaking hand. “Who’s all of us.”

  “Pavlicek didn’t do anything more than his part.”

  “‘All of us.’ Including you?”

  “Why not me?”

  “Look at you,” Billy said cruelly.

  And then he was aloft, Redman holding him two feet off the ground with those harpooner’s arms, the guy wheeling so fast on his cracked hips that Billy hadn’t even felt the long fingers slip under his arms.

  “Why not me?” Redman holding him up in the air like a baby.

  “Put me down, please?”

  Redman deposited him in a folding chair, Rafer immediately raising his arms to his father: My turn.

  “You did Sweetpea,” Billy said. “Bullshit. The wit said the doer had straight hair. Nothing about a fucking Afro.”

  Redman picked up his son, held him in one arm. “That wit was six floors up and off-his-ass high. You said so yourself.”

  Billy grabbed a rag and swiped at his face, but the makeup had turned to cement. “His girlfriend said she heard a white voice over the cell.”

  “Do I sound, do I ever sound like some mush-mouth street nigger to you?”

  “You kind of did, right there,” Billy said.

  Rafer started to wail.

  “What you cryin’ for, man?” Redman hitch-limped over to the Samsung and found something on the Cartoon Network.

  Billy went momentarily south, checking his watch—ten p.m.—wondering if this kid even had a bedtime.

  “Why,” he said.

  “Because it felt right. It felt fair.”

  “Why.”

  “Pavlicek’s boy. We all known him since he was wearing a diaper. First of the kids born to us.”

  “Redman . . .”

  “It’s not like playing God, because me personally? To tell you the truth, the only time I believe in God is when something shitty happens, like Little Man here and his g-tube or John Junior catching leukemia. I’m in here sending people off three, four times a week to meet Jesus or whoever, but . . . You know what I believe in? Earth. Dirt. This right here. All the rest is a story. I guess I’m in the wrong business.”

  “So everybody . . .”

  “Was in on it.”

  Billy went away again, telling himself that there had always been something off about Redman. Look how he chose to make a living, look how many wives he’d had, look how many kids . . .

  “Billy, we all saved each other’s lives one time or another, including me yours.”

  And to let the kid play around dead bodies all day . . . Redman and his wife—what was the child-rearing philosophy here?

  “Billy,” Redman bringing him back, “I am telling you all this because it’s over.” He held his long basketball hands in front of his belt, gently tamping down the air like shushing a baby. “So let it be.”

  Billy made it back home by midnight, but unwilling to go in and risk a conversation with Carmen tonight, he parked halfway down the street, intending to sit tight until the bedroom window went dark.

  An hour into the wait, he reached for his notebook and made out the chart:

  Redman—Sweetpea

  Yasmeen—Cortez

  Pavlicek—Bannion

  Tomassi’s death by bus kept Whelan’s name off the chart, and Curtis Taft didn’t make it either, though Pavlicek had served him up to Billy hoping he would complete the sweep. But as he continued to sit there and study the neat matchups, he began to wonder if Redman, in order to protect Pavlicek, had been selling him a story back at the chapel, thinking that if Billy bought the conspiracy angle and thought he’d have to bring down three friends instead of just one, he might lose heart and walk away.

  The 24/7 directed patrol unit cruised past his car without noticing him in the driver’s seat, slowed down in front of the house, but never came to a stop in order to allow the cops to get out and inspect the grounds. It was the third pass he had observed since parking here, each more lax than the one before.

  As he reached for his cigarettes on the dash, the pack slipped through his fingers and landed between his feet. When he bent over to retrieve them, his forehead touched the steering wheel and that was that, Billy sitting up an hour later with a pink streak above his eyes as vivid as a brand.

  He checked the time: two a.m. The bedroom window was dark.

  Stepping from the car, he discovered that the asphalt beneath his feet was dappled with dried paint—the leakage from the clothes bag before it had been thrown onto his porch. Whoever had done the deed last night had chosen the same observation point as he had, a spot far enough away to avoid detection but near enough to track the life of the house.

  Using the Maglite he kept in his glove compartment, Billy tracked the drippings from his car toward his house until they came to a stop thirty yards out from the front porch. Here the spatter took on a roughly circular pattern, the elongated drops at the outer edges suggesting that the actor, having picked this place for a launching pad, had then gone into a hammer-throw spin to build up enough centrifugal force to hit his mark ninety feet away.

  Billy sat in his father’s rocker on the porch, imagining their stalker, their Fury, whipping that goddamn bag around and around himself before letting it fly, just sat there running and rerunning the film until he found himself suddenly flooded by a powerful halo of light, the search beam of the directed patrol car coming by for its three-thirty a.m. look-see.

  When Billy raised his hand, they cut the beam and slowly rolled off, but not before the driver called out, “Here, I’m full,” and then tossed something onto the lawn. Once the car was out of sight, he walked through the damp grass and found a crumpled paper bag, inside of which was a half-eaten doughnut.

  When he finally entered the sleeping house, the silence was so absolute that it created its own sound, a high even hiss like static from a distant source. Walking into the kitchen, Billy decided, once he opened the freezer, that he didn’t need a drink tonight—well, maybe just a pull—wiping his lips afterward, then heading for the stairs.

  Soft-stepping into the bedroom, he jumped when he saw Carmen in silhouette sitting on a chair beneath the window, her hands flat on her thighs.

  “What are you doing?” he whispered. “What’s wrong?”

  “I saw him,” she said.

  “Saw who?” Then: “You saw him? Where.”

  “In a dream.”

  MILTON RAMOS

  The evening had started out OK enough, Anita and Ray bringing Sofia and a little friend to meet him at a diner in Staten Island so that he could hand over his care package of new clothes, DVDs, and favorite animals. His daughter seemed excited to see him, crawling into his lap to eat her low-fat mock sundae, but the whole time he feared that at the end of the meal she wouldn’t ask him to take her home, not that he would have done it.

  At first, Sofia’s new friend had thrown him. The kid, Jen or Jan, a scrawny little thing with no more personality than a hamster, lived two houses down the street from Anita, and the girls, once introduced, had apparently become instant blood sisters and were, in fact, having a sleepover tonight. Sofia had never had a sleepover in her life, let alone a best friend. Their caged house in the Bronx had never been a home to other kids, even for a few hours after school, and this realization made him wince.

  When the bill came, Ray nearly snatched it out of the waitress’s hand. “No arguments,” he said.

  “Fine with me,” Milton said.

  Sofia slid off his lap and moved to the other side of the table.

  “When we go home?” she said to Anita. “Can we call Marilys?” Then to her mouse of a friend: “She’s my other mom.”

  “I know!” Jan o
r Jen said with delighted exasperation. “You tell me all the time!”

  It was the third time Sofia had brought up Marilys since the waitress had taken their orders, and it would be the last.

  “Listen to me,” Milton said, his sleeve sliding through the dregs of his dessert as he reached across and took her wrist. “Marilys isn’t your other mom. Marilys isn’t anything. She doesn’t love you, she doesn’t even care about you, OK?”

  “Hey, Milton,” Ray said.

  “Can you get that through your head?”

  Sofia was too shocked to do anything other than stare at him in red-faced astonishment, but the other kid, after a breathless second, started to cry as if the world had come to an end.

  Mortified, he got up from the table, walked out the door, and marched into the diner’s parking lot. Weaving his way through an army of parked cars to an unlit spot, he seethed in the dark for a few minutes, then pulled out his phone and called Marilys’s sister.

  “This is Milton Ramos, you remember me?”

  She said she did, but she didn’t sound too happy about it.

  “I’m going to call you back in a half hour. When I do, you’re going give me the names, addresses, and phone numbers of everybody in your family living in New York.”

  Milton stepped deeper into the shadows as Ray came out of the diner, and a moment later pulled out of the lot with a carload of mutes.

  “If I call back and for any reason you don’t pick up? I’m coming back to your house. Do yourself a big favor and save me the trip.”

  At eleven that evening he sat across the oilcloth-covered dinette table, glaring at Marilys and her so-called cousin Ottavio, a balding runt with amphibious eyes.

  They were in Ottavio’s one-bedroom apartment in Astoria, Milton’s former fiancée and her kinsman anxiously looking everywhere but at him.

  “They were going to kill him,” Marilys said numbly, staring first at Milton’s hands with their paint-rimmed nails the color of blood, then at the greasy bat he had placed between them on the table.

  “Who’s they,” he said. Then: “You,” making Ottavio jump. “Who’s they.”

  “Some individuals I got steered to wrong.”

  “They were going to kill him,” Marilys repeated, forcing herself to meet his eye.

  He didn’t know what angered him more, the fact that she had so heartlessly ravaged his life for money and dismissed his daughter’s need for her like it was nothing or the fact that, despite his desire to slaughter her, she was treating him like a total stranger.

  “You’re living here now?”

  “Just for a little bit,” her voice down to a hush.

  “You really her cousin?”

  “Distant,” Ottavio said, unconsciously glancing toward the sole bedroom.

  “I want my money back,” he said.

  “It’s gone,” Marilys said, once again staring at his bunched hands.

  Milton went off into his boiling head long enough for Marilys to add, “We can start paying you back a little each week.”

  We.

  And the thought of having to see her, or him, every week or month to maybe collect twenty dollars here, thirty dollars there, the excuses, the no-shows, the constant, snake-headed presence of them in his life . . .

  “I don’t want your fucking money.”

  He took up his bat and slowly got to his feet, Marilys raising her eyes and then asking in a breathless monotone, “What are you going to do.”

  Nothing. Whether it was some perverse residual feelings he still had for her or just a failure of nerve on his part, he would do nothing.

  He reached for his coat.

  When it became apparent that she was in no physical danger this night, she added more softly, “Milton, I made a mistake. I’m sorry.” And then a PPS as he turned toward the door: “How’s Sofia?”

  When Victor Acosta finally left the Bryant Motor Lodge at four o’clock in the morning, there was a three-woman, two-man smackdown going on in a corner of the parking lot and Milton, who had already been waiting on him for two hours, maybe longer, understood that he had no choice right now but to remain in his car. Which, he figured, was probably just as well, since he’d been hitting the thermos steady and was temporarily too drunk to not fuck this up.

  While Victor was busy stowing his gear in the Range Rover, Milton, in hopes of sobering up, put all four windows down and the AC on full blast and then rolled out of the lot directly onto the southbound New England Thruway, driving from the Bronx to Queens to Brooklyn. Thirty-five minutes later, freezing but still wasted, he pulled up across the street from Victor’s apartment building on Palmetto Street in Bushwick and settled in, taking one last nip of the ’Treuse to chase the chill.

  He didn’t have to wait long, Victor’s Range Rover slow-cruising right past him while he was still feeling around the floor after dropping the thermos cap. At first, it looked almost too easy, Victor parking the Ranger one block ahead, then walking back in his direction. But when Milton stepped from the car he immediately fell back against the driver’s door, weakly waved his bat at the sky, then hinged forward to puke into the roadway as Victor, wide-berthing the mess, made it to his front door unmolested and disappeared into the building.

  Just as well, just as well.

  When his vomiting came down to a few ropy strands of saliva and his eyes began to lose their strained filminess, he slowly raised himself up and took a few raw breaths.

  Just as well . . .

  Then, unbidden: I don’t want your fucking money.

  Why did he say that to her? It was his fucking money. She might have scammed him out of it, but he had said your money, as if she had taken his sense of self along with the cash. Had date-raped his brain. And he had just walked out the door, don’t mind the wet spot.

  He slammed the bat into his own car door, was about to do it again, do anything to fend off his other memory of tonight—Sofia’s shell-shocked silence, her stunned poke-hole of a face—when the magnified clack of a turned latch abruptly brought him back, Milton looking up to see Victor returning to the street with a small dog.

  It was like he was asking for it.

  Like he was insisting on it.

  The dog, some kind of small pug, immediately squatted and pissed on the pavement, the streetlight too bright right there to risk anything. But when Victor turned the corner, Milton, keeping his distance and sticking tight to the shadowed building fronts, followed. They walked in a two-man stagger nearly the length of the street before Victor, absorbed in his dog’s doings, came to a complete stop with his back to him.

  The distance between them was next to nothing, but he was still too wasted to close in fast, and the broadcasted wheeze of his lungs, the sloppy scrape of his bat against the pavement had Victor fully turned around and reaching for something on his belt before Milton could make contact.

  And then came the invisible jolt to his torso, a white wallop of phosphorescent pain emanating from somewhere between his left hip and armpit that lifted him like a backhand into the side of a building. But he was too drunk and too determined to let it distract him for long, and after shutting down what needed to be shut down, Milton once again began to close in. The dazzling burn in his side made it difficult for him to really bring the bat around like he wanted, and the lead-pipe impact of the heavy-booted side kick that Victor delivered to his thigh at some point didn’t help, but when he was done, Carmen’s brother lay curled at his feet, blood bubbling from his nostrils each time he took a breath, an ivory shard of bone that had broken through the sleeve of his shirt winking in the moonlight.

  By the time Milton managed to circle around and slowly drive past the scene, a small crowd had already formed: dope fiends, joggers, dog walkers, and what have you, everyone on their cells, either calling out or making iPhone videos, the flashers of an approaching ambo lighting up the street like a midway. From the car, he spotted his bloodied bat lying up against the curb, but there was nothing he could do about that now.<
br />
  It wasn’t until an hour later, while standing outside the cage-gate of his house and woozily patting himself down for the keys, that he finally noticed the dual Taser darts still buried between his ribs, their attached wires dangling down his side like extruded nerves.

  CHAPTER 15

  There were six people in the visitors’ waiting room outside the OR of the Maimonides Medical Center: Billy, Carmen, Bobby Cardozo, a detective from the 8-0 Squad, and three of Victor and Richard’s friends—gym rats, by the look of them—everyone waiting for Victor to come out from under the knife. The damage—a shattered left humerus, a fractured right collarbone, the left lung pierced by the lowest and smallest of his three broken ribs—was gruesome, the only good news being that the actor had stayed away from his head.

  “Bobby, can you get prints off the bat?” Billy asked Cardozo, whose black eyes, goatee, and kettle-drum gut made him look like a villain in a silent movie.

  “We’re sending it to the lab this afternoon. So, hopefully.”

  Richard Kubin came into the waiting room with a vending-machine coffee, his anger making him look broader and taller than Billy had ever seen him.

  “Your friend . . .” Cardozo began.

  “My husband.”

  “He carried a Taser?”

  “You would too if you saw where he worked.”

  “I’m just asking.”

  “Look, we know who did this,” a short, red-bearded weight lifter said.

  They didn’t, but Billy did, as did Carmen, who, rather than browbeating Cardozo and the entire hospital staff, was sitting silently on a tatty couch, staring at her hands.

  “These little mutants from the Knickerbockers,” the bearded guy said. “They sport-hunt us like we’re their personal buffalo herd.”

  “What are you talking, gay bashers?” Cardozo reared back. “You sure? I pass your friend Mr. Acosta on the street, I’m not thinking gay.”

  “Meaning what,” Richard snapped.

  “I’m just saying,” Cardozo retreated.