The Whites: A Novel

by Richard Price

“Are you serious?”

  “Tell me you’re not asking for my permission.”

  But he was, he had been asking for permission all along from everyone: from Carmen, from his father, from Redman and Whelan and Yasmeen, and having finally received it from Pavlicek, no less, he felt the tension go out of his body like air from a slashed tire.

  “After Taft in the apartment,” Pavlicek said, “you said to me, ‘This is how you honor your son?’”

  “John, in all fairness . . .”

  “You think I don’t understand what I did? You think I don’t know there’s a price to pay? So let me pay it.”

  “All right,” Billy said after a while. “All right.”

  “Let me be done with it.”

  “All right,” Billy said yet again. Then: “I gave the others a week to lawyer up.”

  “A week’s fine.”

  John Junior whispered something indecipherable to Billy’s ears but not to his father’s, Pavlicek slipping a straw through the spout of a water bottle, then raising his son’s head just enough for him to take a few sips without drowning. Junior then said something else Billy couldn’t understand but that made his father nod in agreement.

  The room descended into silence, Billy watching Pavlicek alternately minister to his son and just hang at his side, the ticking of an unseen clock underscoring the stillness.

  “Yasmeen’s pulling the coke card,” Billy finally said. “She said she’d use my history.”

  “She’s full of shit,” Pavlicek said without looking at him.

  Billy got up, walked over to the bed, then bent down to kiss John Junior’s forehead. “I should go.”

  “What the hell,” Pavlicek said. “I made my dent.”

  MILTON RAMOS

  He had always been somewhat indifferent about what he wore to work. Usually it was one of the three sport jackets he had bought from Men’s Wearhouse the week he’d been promoted to detective, a white or blue dress shirt, pleated chinos or gabardines, and, always, the black Nike lace-up boots—good for running if the need arose and sober-looking enough to pass inspection. But tonight he was going for the suit, charcoal wool and last worn when he had spoken to Sofia’s third-grade class on career day—what a clown show that was—a nice blue knit tie, and a pink broadcloth button-down from his one trip to Brooks Brothers. But he would no sooner swap out the Nikes for any other footwear than he would exchange his Glock for a slingshot.

  Just past midnight, after finally nailing the Windsor knot he’d been striving for, he threaded his holster through his belt, slipped his flask into his ankle holster, dropped a mini-bottle of Scope into his inside jacket pocket, and left the house.

  Forty-five minutes later, he walked into the Fifteenth Precinct, headed for the desk, and presented his ID to the duty sergeant.

  “It’s been a while,” he said. “Where’s the Night Watch office again?”

  CHAPTER 17

  Tonight’s hell mouth seemed to be situated in Union Square, three runs to that area in less than five hours. The first, at one a.m., on Irving Place, involved the discovery of a middle-aged lawyer who had been found nude, bound, and asphyxiated facedown in his own bed, the word ABUSE with either an R or a D at the end—a mystery for the day tour—carved into his back with a scissor blade. The second run, coming in at three, was in response to the theft of a two-hundred-pound bluefin tuna worth seven thousand dollars from the kitchen of a sushi restaurant on Park Avenue South. And the third and hopefully last run of the night, coming in at four-thirty, was a nonfatal double knifing in the park proper, directly beneath the statue of Gandhi, the actor on that one a seventy-five-year-old panhandler, the victims two drunken tourists from Munich who thought it would be a real howl to hand the old piss-bum a pre-euro ten-mark German note instead of a few American dollars.

  “You should have seen them, laughing at me like they was giving a cell phone to a monkey,” Terence Burns said over a five a.m. Coke in the Sixth Squad interview room a few blocks from the scene. Bug-eyed and sporting a steel-colored goatee, he was nearly doubled over with arthritis but somehow still agile as a cat. “Like I wasn’t gonna know what a motherfuckin’ deutsche mark looks like. Hell, I seen plenty, I had plenty, and I spent plenty when I was over there with the Fortieth Tank back in sixty-one.”

  “You were there?” Billy both liking the guy and needing the distraction.

  “Didn’t I just say that? Had a good time too for most of it,” Burns said. “The whores used to call us hamburgers, the white boys, cheeseburgers. They’d see a bunch of us coming to the club, they’d start throwing out all the shitkickers, ‘No cheeseburger! Hamburger only!’”

  “For real?”

  “Oh I’m always for real.”

  “Another Coke?”

  “Fanta if you got it,” Burns said. “Grape or orange.”

  Billy went out of the room to hit the vending machine and returned with a Mountain Dew.

  “So what else was going on back then?” he asked.

  “What else? You don’t know your history? You don’t know about Checkpoint Charlie?”

  “I heard of it.”

  “You don’t know nothing about the tank standoff with the Russians? I was a machine gunner, they had me set up outside the hatch of a M-48 staring right into the cannon of a T-55 for sixteen motherfuckin’ hours, couldn’t have been more than seventy-five yards away. I swear, as scared as I was? If I hadn’t been so drunk, we’d of had World War Three right then and there.”

  Returning to the park to pick up a copy of the Crime Scene Unit report, Billy noticed that the small trucks from upstate and New Jersey had begun to arrive for the Union Square Greenmarket, the vaguely hippieish farmers dragging out their folding tables and canopies in the predawn dark. He also saw one of his supplementals, Milton Ramos from Dennis Doyle’s squad in the 4-6, standing on the edge of the scene watching the techs stow their gear.

  Billy had been trying to keep his distance from the guy all tour; like a number of one-offs, there was something not quite right about him. He seemed to be both on edge and spacey, plus Billy was pretty sure that he’d been slipping off fairly steadily to drink. Not that Ramos would have been the first detective on Night Watch to sweeten the long hours and boredom that way; Feeley’s eyes often looked like two cherries floating in buttermilk, but that was Feeley.

  The CSUs, both female, were hunched over the hood of their van now, sorting through their report forms.

  “So how was the great tuna robbery,” Billy asked Ramos. “Anything fishy about it?”

  “I think it was an inside job,” Ramos said flatly.

  He was short and thick but too powerfully built to be called fat, his slitted features hidden beneath thick brows and a permanently impassive expression. Billy had him pegged as a complete loner, on the job and off, the type of uncommunicative humorless near blank that made everyone in his home squad uncomfortable.

  “You know,” Ramos said, looking around the park, “I used to work midnights my first two years, but now? I don’t know if I could handle it anymore. How does your wife put up with it?”

  “She’s a nurse,” Billy said, “she can put up with anything short of me having a second family.”

  “Oh yeah? What kind of nurse?”

  “ER, but over the years she’s done it all.”

  “Done it all, seen it all . . . Easygoing?”

  Billy gave him a look. “Philosophical about things,” he lied.

  “Philosophical.” Ramos nodded, still looking away. “Shit happens.”

  “Something like that.”

  Billy saw Stupak, coming from the Irving Place homicide, enter the park and head toward the tents and tables, waiting for someone to open up.

  He raised his cell to call her.

  “She always want to be a nurse?” Ramos asked.

  “What?”

  “Your wife.”

  “What is this, an interview?”

  “No, I’m sorry, I just . . . My wife? She passed
seven years ago.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Billy said, killing the call.

  “Yeah. Hit-and-run.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “We have a daughter, she’s eight,” he said, then: “If the mother’s dead and you say ‘we,’ is it ‘We have a daughter’ or ‘We had a daughter’?”

  The guy was definitely sauced, but he was talking about losing his wife.

  “Grammar wasn’t my strong suit,” Billy said.

  “You have kids?”

  “Two boys.”

  “Two boys, double the trouble.”

  Billy impatiently checked the time, six-fifteen in the a.m., the crime scene techs still hunched over the hood working up their reports.

  “Back when we were kids?” Ramos moved closer to him. “Me and my brother, we were the terror of the neighborhood.”

  “Oh yeah?” Billy tried to call Stupak again. “What neighborhood was that?”

  Ramos either didn’t hear him or didn’t want to answer.

  “What are you doing,” Billy asked Stupak.

  “Where are you?”

  “By the Gandhi statue waiting on CSU. Bring me a coffee, cream and sugar, and a buttered roll.”

  “You know,” Ramos plowed on, “before she died, my wife was an X-ray technician at Beth Abraham for five years, so I know a little about nurses. And, the little I know is that they’re not like cops, you know what I’m saying? You don’t become a nurse because your mother and grandmother were nurses, so forgive me for getting personal and you can just tell me to mind my own business, but I’m curious, why do you think your wife became a nurse?”

  “Now I’m supposed to say, ‘Because she likes to help people’?”

  “Not at all, I was just wondering if there was any one moment where she, you know, like an event or something . . .”

  Billy gave him another long look.

  “Like with me,” Ramos said quickly, “I never thought I was going to be a cop, I was a troubled kid, a fighter. But when I was seventeen, I lost my mother and two brothers all like within a month’s time, and I needed a place to hide.”

  “What do you mean, hide.”

  “Not hide, more like I needed a structure, you know, be part of something that would give me all the dos and don’ts, keep me from going over to the dark side. It took a few years, but here I am.”

  “Here you are,” Billy said, not liking this guy at all, him and his copious tragedies.

  One of the techs finally came over, peeled off a copy of the report for Billy, then headed off to the greenmarket with her partner.

  “Beautiful, right?” Ramos said, as the sun began to paint the tops of the ancient office buildings at the western edge of the square.

  Billy loathed sunrises; he knew them as cruel mirages, each one a false promise that a tour had come to its end when, in fact, depending on the time of year, there were anywhere from one to three hours left for that phone to ring with a fresh disaster. Sunrises, like Ramos here, made him tense.

  They made him feel fucked with.

  “Listen to me,” Billy said abruptly. “You’ve had liquor on your breath all night.”

  Frowning, Ramos looked away.

  “I’m not going to write you up, but I don’t ever want to see you on my tour again. In fact, you can take off right now, I’ll sign you out when I get back to the office.”

  At first, Ramos didn’t respond, his frown deepening into a scowl, but then he began nodding his head as if having come to some kind of decision.

  “I apologize,” he said quietly, turning back to Billy and handing over the keys to the squad sedan, “and I appreciate the courtesy.”

  Ramos walked off toward the Fourteenth Street subway entrance without another word, Billy watching him all the way, wondering if he had been too hard on the guy.

  Then, tired of waiting for Stupak to deliver his breakfast, he wandered over to the market himself, where he discovered that almost all the cops involved in the three wee-hour local felonies were now cruising the food stalls as intensely as if they were at a gun show.

  Walking into the house with two biodegradable bags filled with agave-sweetened muffins, crullers, and doughnut holes, it seemed to Billy that the only one up and about was the six-year-old, Carlos sitting in the dining room and eating the breakfast he had made for himself: a teacup of orange juice and an unthawed Eggo.

  “Where’s your mother?” Billy asked, dropping the waffle into the toaster. “Is she still sleeping?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where’s your brother?”

  “At Theo’s house. He slept there on a sleepover.”

  Through the kitchen window Billy saw his father sitting on a lawn chair beneath one of the TARU cameras in the backyard, the old guy, as usual, reading the New York Times.

  “How’s Grandpa today?”

  “I don’t know,” Carlos said, then: “A teacher in my school got quit.”

  “What do you mean, got quit?”

  “He’s not a teacher anymore.”

  “Oh yeah? What teacher.”

  “Mr. Lazar.”

  “Mr. Lazar quit? Or got fired?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why?” He couldn’t imagine that the school would can him for being gay.

  “He hurt some guy,” Carlos said.

  “What do you mean, hurt. Hurt what guy?” Billy trying to remember the name of Lazar’s potential blackmailer.

  “He got took away,” Carlos said.

  “Lazar?”

  “Mr. Lazar.”

  “Who took him away?”

  “The police guys at release time. I’m going to the basement. Dec said there’s a mouse.”

  Billy went up to his bedroom, quietly crept past his wife, her flank beneath the sheets swelling and dipping like a chain of dunes, and stowed his weapon and handcuffs in the closet. Then, intending to call the Yonkers PD to find out about Lazar, he went back down to the kitchen.

  A few minutes later, while he was still on hold with the Second Precinct Detective Squad, the doorbell began to chime. Assuming the callers were either evangelists or Con Ed, and worried that a second round of chimes would wake Carmen, he stepped briskly into the hallway and swung the door wide to see Milton Ramos standing on his doorstep, stone-faced and thick as a stump, his razored eyes staring past Billy and into the house as if he weren’t even there.

  Thinking that he was probably stuporously drunk by now and angry about having been booted from Night Watch three hours earlier, Billy was about to try to talk him down when Ramos reached behind his back—Billy vaguely thinking for some kind of letter of complaint—and came out with a Glock.

  “Where is she,” Ramos said.

  Billy took a step outside the house, then made a big show of holding up his hands for the TARU cameras, though he had no idea whether anyone was even monitoring them.

  “Where is she,” Ramos repeated, muzzle-shoving Billy back inside as far as the living room while efficiently patting him down with his free hand even though they were both still in motion.

  So, not stuporously drunk.

  “Ramos.” He couldn’t remember his first name. “What are you doing?”

  “Where is she.”

  This time Billy heard the question. “Where’s who.”

  “Your wife.”

  “My wife?”

  “Your wife, your wife, your wife,” he said, as if fed up with a blockhead.

  “Hang on, hang on, I’m the one who gave you grief.”

  Done with the basement, Carlos wandered into the room and without looking at either Ramos or his father, took a seat on the couch and picked up the remote.

  “Hey, buddy, not now,” Billy said, his voice starting to float. “Go outside.”

  “He stays,” Ramos said, letting the kid settle in and find his show.

  “Look, just say,” Billy struggling not to plead, “what do you want.”

  “I told you already,” Ramos said. Then
, tilting his chin to the sound of footsteps coming from above, “She’s up there? Call her down.”

  “She still doesn’t recognize me.”

  Ramos was addressing Billy but his eyes were on Carmen, sitting across the room from him as stiff as a pharaoh, her own gaze fixed on the floor. “How can that be.”

  Carlos, absorbed in his cartoons, was sitting alongside Ramos on the couch now, the automatic hidden beneath a throw pillow between them.

  “What do you need the kid for,” Billy said, striving for an offhand tone. “Just let him come to me.”

  Ignoring Billy, Ramos leaned forward to get Carmen to look at him. She wouldn’t.

  “But you remember Little Man, right?” he said.

  “You’re Milton,” Carmen whispered dully.

  “Maybe I’m Edgar.”

  “Edgar’s dead,” she said in that same downcast hush.

  “So you know,” he said.

  Billy, barely listening, finally became aware that there was a real conversation going on, neither Ramos nor his wife raising their voices.

  “My whole family, in the ground, where you put them,” Ramos said to her, “and all these years I never knew why.”

  Carlos half-stood to reach for the remote again, Ramos slowly raising a hand to grab him in case he decided to bolt, but the kid fell back into the cushions on his own.

  “Milton, I’m right in front of you, I’m right here,” Carmen’s voice, despite the danger, still jarringly flat. “Please don’t hurt my son.”

  “He’s not going to hurt him,” Billy said lightly, his heart blowing like a bellows. “He’s got a daughter of his own, right?”

  The sound of the back door opening had Ramos half-rising, the automatic now down at his side. But at the sight of Billy Senior standing in the doorway, ruffled sections of the weekend paper tucked under his arm, he eased himself back down, slipping the gun once again beneath the pillow.

  “What are you coming so early for?” Billy Senior said, stepping into the den. “I’m on nights this week. Didn’t they tell you?”

  “I just came by to visit your son,” Ramos said easily. “I’ll be back for you later.”

  “Well, see you then, my friend.” Billy’s father gave a short wave and left the room the same way he came in.