The Whites: A Novel

by Richard Price

  At first Billy was baffled, but then he realized that his father had been talking to his replacement driver, and that Ramos was the one who had been torturing them for weeks.

  Milton, she had called him.

  There was a glass snow globe from Jiminy Peak on the windowsill, a brass candlestick on a side table, the snow globe closer but still too far away.

  “Tell me why you did it,” Ramos said.

  Carmen tried to raise her eyes to Carlos, couldn’t. “Milton, I’m scared to look at him. Please.”

  “Carlos, buddy, come on over to me,” Billy said. “Ramos, be a good guy, just let him come.”

  “Tell me why you did it.”

  “I never meant to,” she said. “You have to believe that.”

  “Ramos, be a good guy . . .”

  “Why.”

  “Ramos, you do something here, how much time do you think you’ll ever have to be with your daughter? She’s already lost her mother, you told me yourself.”

  “Why.”

  “Because he broke my heart,” Carmen said, her voice barely carrying across the room.

  “He what?” Ramos cocked his head, draped an arm atop Carlos’s shoulders.

  “Think it through,” Billy said, eyes back to roaming for weapons.

  “Broke my heart.”

  “Broke your heart,” Ramos said. “He got you pregnant?”

  “No.”

  “But he was fucking you.” More a question than a statement.

  Carlos started to fidget under the weight of his arm, but Ramos was too absorbed to even notice.

  “Be cool, buddy,” Billy said to his son.

  “He never even looked at me but once,” Carmen said.

  Out the window, Billy saw a fleet of patrol cars and a Yonkers ESU van rolling up to the house, their presence, prayed for earlier, now heightening his sense of danger.

  “I was fifteen years old,” Carmen said heavily. “They came up to me on the stoop, he had just hurt my feelings, I was mad, and I said what I said.”

  Astonishingly, understandably, Carlos fell asleep against Ramos’s shoulder.

  “You were fifteen, he had just hurt your feelings . . . And you just said what you said,” Ramos recited to himself. “Hurt your feelings? That’s it?”

  “You want a better story?” Carmen softly crying now. “I don’t have one.”

  The house phone rang; hostage negotiators for sure, Billy knew, no one making a move to answer it.

  “You know something?” Ramos said to Carmen, his voice filled with wonder. “I believe you. Fifteen years old . . . I don’t know what I was expecting to hear all these years.”

  The fax line began to ring in the den, followed by Carmen’s cell phone in the hallway.

  “Would it be too little for me to say that I pray for him every day of my life?” she asked listlessly.

  “Yeah,” Ramos getting to his feet, the Glock rising in his fist, “it would.”

  Before Billy could launch himself, his father reappeared in the doorway, this time with his ancient .45 double-gripped and leveled at the back of Ramos’s head. When Ramos wheeled to the threat, then kept coming, Billy Senior fired, although the fucking thing might as well have had a BANG flag pop out. Billy lunged for the snow globe on the windowsill, then giant-stepped forward and cracked it against Ramos’s near temple, sending him milk-eyed to the floor, the side of his face shining with viscous liquid and glitter.

  For a moment, Carmen just stood there as if still lost in whatever they had been talking about; then, snapping out of it, she scooped Carlos from the couch, screamed, “Billy, come!” and when he wouldn’t—his father was in the house too—remained in the doorway, her legs trembling like jackhammers, until he shoved her out of the house, toward the cops.

  Having no idea where the Glock had gone, Billy snatched his father’s .45 out of his hands, then dropped down to straddle Ramos’s broad back, the sheer breadth of it stretching the tendons in his groin.

  Billy Senior headed up the stairs.

  “Dad!” Billy yelled, but the old man kept climbing.

  With all the phones in the house continuously ringing as if to announce a royal wedding—all the phones except, strangely, Billy’s own—Ramos began to come around, his eyes slowly opening and closing like something in a terrarium. Billy pressed the .45 hard into the nape of his neck, then searched him for his cuffs. Nothing.

  He had to get to a phone and give Yonkers the green light to come on in before he lost control of the situation, but he couldn’t risk rising up with Ramos unsecured, couldn’t risk him seeing the barrel-plugged gun full-on and recognizing it for what it was, couldn’t risk him finding his own live piece somewhere in the room.

  “There’s like a fucking army out there, OK?” Billy said, trying to keep the tremble out of his voice. “So just take it easy, OK?”

  Ramos winced, then slightly, effortlessly, shifted beneath Billy’s weight, Billy knowing right then that he wasn’t physically strong enough to keep him down if it came to that.

  “Milton, right? Milton, think of your daughter, OK? Just think of your daughter and everything is going to be OK, OK?”

  Ramos was fully alert now, but he made no further effort to move, just lay there with the side of his face half-buried in the high nap of the carpet, staring off as if thinking about something unrelated.

  “Your daughter, what’s her name,” Billy chattered. “Tell me her name.”

  Clearly the calmer of the two, Ramos continued to stare off, Billy’s bulk and the pressure of the muzzle no more distracting than pecking birds on the back of a rhino.

  “Come on, Milton, tell me her name.”

  Ramos cleared his throat. “If somebody in your will is down as your kid’s guardian,” he said, his voice half-muffled by the pile, “and you go to jail instead of dying, do they still get the kid?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Billy said automatically, ducking then swiveling his head in a low search for the cast-off automatic.

  “Or does jail throw the whole guardian arrangement out the window.”

  Billy thought he saw what might be the gun lying deep under the couch, but it could just as easily have been one of the kids’ toys.

  “She likes it out there with her aunt,” Ramos continued. “I don’t want her going to foster care.”

  “Sure,” Billy babbled. “She stays wherever you decide.”

  “What do you know,” Ramos said calmly, then threw Billy off his back as easily as doing a push-up.

  The Glock, now pointed at Billy, had been under Ramos the whole time Billy had been riding him.

  “Over there,” Ramos said. “On the table.”

  Billy did as he was told, putting his father’s gun on the low coffee table.

  “The fucking thing’s plugged anyhow,” Ramos added.

  If he knew that all along, Billy thought dreamily, and his own live piece was right under his gut . . .

  “We can get out of this, no problem,” Billy said. “Just let me pick up the phone. Or pick it up yourself.”

  “Turn to the wall, please?”

  Billy did as he was told, so stupid with fear he felt high.

  “Did you know?” Ramos asked him from behind.

  “Did I know what.”

  “She never told you,” Ramos marveled.

  “Tell me what,” Billy said, then: “So tell me now. I want to know.”

  “Never said a word . . .”

  As fine cracks in the wall paint, inches from his face, imprinted themselves on his brain, as the hell choir of endlessly ringing phones faded to a weak, sickly carousel tune in Billy’s ears, Ramos took two steps back.

  “You see?” his voice tearing up blackly. “All these years, and you fucking people, you just sail on, sail on.”

  Billy tried to shut himself down and just let it happen, but then he heard Ramos stepping back farther. Then farther. Then heard the front door swing open, the murderously pregnant silence out there rushing into the house li
ke a tornado.

  He wasn’t sure what he experienced first, the staggered report of the volley or the sight of Ramos charging the ESU cops with Billy Senior’s dummy gun. Either way the outcome was the same.

  Either way the phones finally stopped ringing.

  As the house filled with footsteps and radio squawk, Billy, intent on finding his cell phone, tuned out the calming voices, shrugged off the reaching hands that were screwing with his concentration.

  “Where did it go.”

  “Where’d what go, Billy,” someone said.

  “My goddamn phone, I just had it this morning.”

  “It’s in your front pocket,” the voice said. “Why don’t you come sit down.”

  Pulling out his cell, Billy saw that there was someone on the line.

  “Who’s this.”

  “Graves, is that you?” a familiar voice said.

  “I asked who this is,” Billy said, finally allowing someone to guide him to a chair.

  “Evan Lefkowitz, Second Squad.”

  “You’re calling me?”

  “Actually, you called me, us, about an hour ago, then left the line open,” Lefkowitz said. “We’ve been listening in ever since.”

  “Hey, while I have you?” Billy said brightly, waving off the hovering EMTs. “I was talking to my son earlier . . . What’s the deal with Albert Lazar?”

  A new call came in while the medics were debating whether to shoot him up with three mikes of sodium nitroprusside or let his blood pressure come down on its own.

  “Hey, Billy, Bobby Cardozo from the Eighty Squad. We finally got a match on the prints from the bat.”

  “Good,” Billy said, watching the needle go in.

  “Are you sitting down? Because you’re not going to believe your ears.”

  By the time they finally laid eyes on each other in the trauma room of Saint Joseph’s, Billy was so dizzy from the Nitropress, Carmen so bombed on Ativan, that for a while all they could do was stare.

  “Who’s got the kids?”

  “Millie,” she said, then: “Billy, I’m so sorry.”

  In the ensuing stoned silence, fragments of her conversation with Ramos began to revisit him.

  “You knew he’d be coming for you?”

  “I knew something would be coming for me,” she said. “I just didn’t know what.”

  Billy nodded, then nodded some more. “So,” clearing his throat, “who’s Little Man?”

  It took two days of her pretty much sleeping around the clock before she was prepared to answer the question, Carmen announcing her readiness on the third afternoon by coming downstairs in a long plain white nightgown, silently drinking two cups of coffee, then inviting him back upstairs.

  Once they were inside the semi-darkened bedroom, Carmen immediately slipped back under the covers. But Billy, intuiting that she might need some breathing room for whatever was to come, opted for the lone chair, lugging it across the room from its spot beneath the far window to the side of the bed.

  “When I was fifteen,” she began, “I would’ve done anything, anything to have Rudy Ramos like me, just like me. You have no idea what I thought of myself back then. My father was so rotten, such a lousy human being, and my mother was his dishrag. Then my father left her for another woman and moved to Atlanta. Which was good, I thought, because now it would get better between us, but she just, overnight, turned into this sour old widow. I would be like, ‘Mommy, be happy, you’re free,’ but no, she just, ‘Who’d want me now,’ I mean, she was good-looking, thirty-seven years old, but she shut herself down, started yelling at me and Victor nonstop over nothing, anything, just never let up . . .”

  Despite the marathon hours she had spent recuperating in this room, Billy thought he had never seen her look so exhausted, her eyes like swollen almonds beneath half-mast lids.

  “And I knew Rudy, Little Man everybody called him, from the building and from school, not ‘knew him,’ he was a year ahead of me, but . . . And I didn’t think about him all that much, then one day I just did and I couldn’t stop, it was like I had suffered a stroke, but I was nothing to him, just some ghost of a girl who lived where he lived and went to Monroe . . . He was a big deal on the basketball team, and between games and practices he’d hardly ever leave school before five o’clock, and a lot of those days I’d find things to do in the after-school program so I could go home when he did. I mean, I was so fucked up that I wouldn’t even walk on the same side of the street as him, but I’d always manage to enter the building when he did so we’d go up the stairs at the same time, and I hated that I lived one flight below him because if I lived on his floor or the one higher then that would be one more flight I’d have to be near him, just day after day like that, agonizing over how maybe tomorrow I should walk in front of him instead of behind him, behind him instead of in front of him . . . And his bedroom was right above mine, 3F and 4F, and I’d hear him walking around above my head and sometimes he’d be doing himself, and the bedsprings would creak and I’d lay down in my own bed and . . .”

  “Whoa, whoa.”

  “Billy, please, let me tell you.”

  “Carmen, I can’t hear this.”

  “Why? You’re the man I love, the father of my children, and I’m telling you things about me that I never could before.”

  “OK, OK, Jesus.”

  “What, are you jealous? He’s been dead more than twenty years.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Billy scoffed, thinking, She’s been cheating on me with this kid, walking around with him in her head since the day they met.

  Then as quick as the feeling had come down on him it lifted, Billy recognizing that what was really getting to him was not jealousy but the realization that if he hung in for this right now, that baffling and invisible dragon he’d been protecting her from all these years might finally begin to take on form and he might not to be able to handle its appearance.

  “Are you angry at me?” she said. “Do you want me to stop? I’ll stop, I will, just tell me to.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he repeated.

  “I’m serious, Billy, I will.”

  “I’m serious, too,” he said, then forced himself to add, “I want to hear it all.”

  For a long moment, she looked at him like the liar he was, then carried on.

  “It took me maybe two months before I had the courage to say something to him, even just bullshit, and I decided this one day, I was going to say, ‘Your sweater’s so fly.’ I thought about saying ‘so tight,’ ‘so dope,’ ‘so gangsta,’ ‘ill,’ ‘phat,’ ‘snap,’ ‘the bomb,’ ‘da bomb,’ but I liked ‘fly’ the best, and at lunch I finally went up to him in the cafeteria, but instead of saying, ‘Your sweater’s so fly,’ I was nervous and I said, ‘My sweater’s so fly,’ and the kids at his table heard it and they all started laughing, and he was, he said, ‘Your sweater’s so fly?’ but looking at them not at me, ‘I’m happy for you,’ still looking at them, like to get their approval, and in that moment when he looked at them instead of me, with that stupid grin on his face? I saw him for what he was, a self-centered immature boy with a little bit of a cruel streak. But I had been in love, so the realization hit me like a train . . . I don’t know if I felt like I actually hated him? But God, did he put a hole in my chest that day.”

  Carlos came into the room, climbed into bed, curled into Carmen’s side, and quickly fell asleep. Although his son still hadn’t said a word about the other day, he’d been sleeping, since then, almost as much as his mother.

  “Later, after school, I saw him go into our building and I didn’t want to go inside, I didn’t want to walk up the stairs with him, didn’t want to be in my room and hear his creaky bed over my head, so I just sat on the stoop remembering his face when he said that, ‘Your sweater’s so fly?’ not even giving me the consideration of eye contact. And I’m just sitting there like that, feeling more and more humiliated, more and more like an invisible nothing, and then at one point I looked up and
I saw these two guys coming towards our building, and the way they were carrying themselves made me nervous. Hoodies, sunglasses on a cloudy day, hands in pockets, they looked like surveillance photos of themselves, and then they stopped a few feet away, had a conversation, then one of them came up to me, says, ‘Where’s Eric Franco live at, what apartment,’ and I knew, everybody in the building knew, Eric Franco dealt coke, but these guys didn’t look like they were there to score, they looked like trouble.”

  Carlos started to talk in his sleep, nonsense words addressed to his brother. Billy was deaf to it, but Carmen waited until her son was finished before going on.

  “But instead of giving them his apartment, 5C . . . I don’t remember consciously thinking about what could happen if I said 4F? But that’s what came out of my mouth.”

  Billy stood up.

  “Where are you going?”

  “What? Nowhere.”

  “You’re leaving?” Carmen saying it like, leaving her.

  “No, I was just stretching,” he said idiotically.

  “Can you sit down?”

  “I’m down,” he said, “I’m right here.”

  He began to reach for her hand, then withdrew, sensing that whatever she needed right now, physical contact was not on the list.

  “I don’t know if I really heard the gunshot from the fourth floor or just imagined that I did—I don’t see how I could have, it was a .22 handgun going off inside a six-story building, but all of a sudden I felt this, this gripping sensation inside my chest, and a minute or two later those two came back out of the building the same way they went in, not rushed, looking around without seeming to be. And after they walked past me they stopped and had another one of those side-mouth conversations, and I knew they were discussing what to do about me, the witness . . . I was staring at the ground, I could no more run at that moment than I could fly, I was totally theirs whatever they wanted to do with me, but when I finally managed to raise my head they were gone.”

  “Carm . . .”

  “What happened was that they rang the bell and when Rudy opened the door they shot him through the eye and the bullet went into his brain.”