The Whites: A Novel (11 page)

That’s not a nice question, Anthony, she said, still not looking up.

What’s your favorite team?

The Red Sox.

Boooo . . . 

Do you like Big Papi?

I am Big Papi.

And again: Did you ever kill anybody?

I said no.

(Two, but they had it coming. Three.)

And now this here, the Daughters of Jacob Assisted Living Center, the air redolent of boiled hot dogs and Lysol, Mantovani strings drifting through the halls like musical Haldol, old folks sitting alone in the lobby just staring at air, filling him with anger at their AWOL kids. Before he could even make his way to the elevator banks, and not for the first time, one old lady, confusing him with some José from building services, asked him when he was coming to fix her radiator.

His aunt Pauline had her own small suite—at least he had been able to swing that for her—and as she went on and on about a gluey Hawaiian salad she had been served the week before, he sat on her living room couch and took in the art on display: a bowl of silver and gold papier-mâché fruit, a plaster pair of life-sized praying hands, two—count ’em—two ceramic menorahs, a glazed and mounted ram’s horn, and a framed print of a fiddler floating sideways above an off-balance ghetto. Aunt, excuse, Tante Pauline had stayed in the faith, if only sentimentally, unlike her sister, Milton’s mother, who married a PR to spite her parents. On the other hand, his father had married his mother to spite her parents, too. It was a match made in hell, and if his old man’s this-time-for-good disappearance when Milton was ten was not exactly a cause for celebration, it wasn’t nearly enough of a blow to throw anyone off their feed.

“So, you didn’t bring Sofie?” Pauline asked.

“Sofia. She has school. I’ll bring her on the weekend.”

Seated across from him on an oversized throne chair, her hands clasped atop her kettle-drum midriff, his aunt tracked his gaze to the framed photos of his, and her, dead family members, the images scattered across the side tables and windowsills.

“I talk to them all the time,” she said.

“Me too.”

“In the middle of the night, sometimes I wake up and see my sister standing in a corner of the room.”

“I see all of them.”

“Your brother was such a sweetheart.”

“Which one,” although he knew. Little Man had been everybody’s favorite.

“That day killed your mother.”

“Killed my other brother too.”

“Who, Edgar?”

“Yes,” he said slowly, “your oldest nephew.”

“Edgar was always so surly.”

Milton stood up, took a little walk around the coffee table to settle himself.

“He took care of us, Aunt Pauline. My mom with her circulation, half the time she couldn’t even make it out of the house.”

“You were pretty surly back then, too. The both of you. But look at you now, a real man who doesn’t forget his family.”

“Family’s everything.”

“I can’t even get my own children to visit me, but you come by like clockwork.”

Of course he did. Pauline had taken him in for three years, right after the slow-motion massacre had come to an end, the move from the Bronx to her home in Brooklyn most likely saving his life.

He drew a breath before shifting gears. “Aunt Pauline, when you would come and visit us back then, do you remember a girl in our building, Carmen? Puerto Rican, about fifteen years old?”

“Carmen?”

“Maybe spent time with Little—with Rudy?”

“Carmen . . .”

“Skinny, big eyes, long hair.”

“Wait, Carmen. From downstairs. Her mother was Dolores.”

“Right. Did you ever see her with Rudy?”

“Dolores?”

“Carmen.”

“What, like together?”

“Like anything, holding hands, making out, arguing maybe.”

“Dolores had a son too, Willy? William?”

“Victor. But let’s stick with Carmen.”

“He was supposed to be a little, you know, that way, the boy, not that it bothered me.”

“Aunt Pauline,” Milton said, waving his hand. “Carmen. Did you ever see her with Rudy.”

“I can’t remember.”

“Think hard.”

“I wish I could.”

“No problem.” It was a long shot anyhow.

“Why are you asking about Carmen all of a sudden?”

“Nothing.” Milton shrugged, trying to keep his voice as casual as he could. “I thought I maybe saw her. It was probably somebody else.”

But was it really her? Oh yeah, you bet. How could he ever forget those tea-stained big eyes, pulled down sad at the corners like the eyes of the lost and burning girls on the
Anima Sola
postcards that used to turn him on when he was a kid. He’d even had a crush on her for a hot minute when her family had first moved into the building, a sense memory so galling and torturous to him now that it made him want to rip out his brain.

He glanced at the sunburst clock over Pauline’s head: two-thirty, teatime. He went to the refrigerator and poured her a brimming glass from the half gallon of Gallo Family Zinfandel she kept in there.

“Seventy-four years old, I’m finally an alkie,” she said, her standard line whenever he did the honors.

“You’ll live.”

“Why did you and your brother always call Rudy Little Man?”

“Because everybody else in the family topped out at five-eight, then Rudy gets born and he’s all of a sudden six-three.”

“I don’t get it.”

His eyes turned dull as nickels.

“Whatever happened to Dolores?” Pauline asked.

“I heard she got cancer,” Milton said, “about two years after the . . .”

After the what: tragedy? He hated that word, it reeked of, what . . . Fate? Inevitability? Bullshit. Tears and a turn for home? Fuck you. Surrender to the mysteriousness of the Great Mysterian?

Surrender; what can ya do.

Plenty.

“And they never found those bastards who killed him,” she said.

“No, they didn’t, Tante Pauline.” Milton rising, this time to leave. “And they never will.”

Chapter 4

By the time Billy arrived at the scene of a double shooting on the Lower East Side directly across the street from the Alfred E. Smith Houses, both victims, conscious and looking more pissed than traumatized, were being gurneyed into separate ambos as a mixed crowd of club kids and born-heres took snaps with their iPhones.

“Anybody looking to go out of the picture?” he asked Stupak.

“Doubt it. They were both howling pretty good before you got here.”

“Anything on the shooter?”

“You’re looking at them,” Mayo said.

“Which?”

“Both.”

“Yeah?”

“It looks like they were walking from opposite ends of Oliver,” Stupak said, “and decided to jack each other at the same time. It’s all on camera and we recovered the guns.”

“Spy versus Spy, except they’re both black,” Mayo said, then, having filled his word quota for the night, stepping to the corner for a smoke.

“So my question to you, boss,” Stupak said, “are they perps or victims?”

Billy thought about it a moment. “They’re perptims.”

“You think this is funny?” a young Hispanic woman snapped, her eyes shimmering with anger.

“Hey, how’re you doing, did you know either of these guys?” Stupak asked easily, making her disappear into the Smiths. “Can you bring her back here please?” she asked a uniform.

Billy’s cell thrummed inside his sport jacket, a fresh text from Stacey:

can you please answer my calls please

thats the only way to get me to stop

He knew her enough to know that this was true and it was time to get it over with. To brace himself he went into an all-night bodega and came out chugging a Turbo Tea.

“Hey, it’s me.”

“Jesus, he lives.”

“Sorry, my phone’s been . . .”

“Don’t, don’t, don’t.”

Was it the energy drink that made the cigarette taste so good or the other way around? “So what’s up. You OK?”

As usual after building up a case against returning Stacey’s calls, now that he was actually talking to her, he couldn’t remember what the big deal was.

“Yeah, but I need to tell you something,” she said.

“What’s that.”

“Have breakfast with me. It’s a long story.”

“Give me the headline.”

“Just have breakfast with me.”

“Stacey . . .”

“You’ll be glad you did. Well, maybe ‘glad’ isn’t the right word.”

That right there was the big deal.

Five hours later, Billy sat in his parked car outside the tin can of a diner in Mount Vernon where he was to break bread with Stacey Taylor. He smoked one cigarette, then another, delaying as long as possible the sit-down to come. Seeing her was always a wrenching experience, the psychic equivalent of returning to a battlefield with your former enemy years after the bloodbath that had scarred you both, eager to reach out but unable to rid yourself of the lingering acid that still bit at the back of the throat.

In 1997 Stacey had been a young reporter for the
New York Post,
an aggressive up-and-comer who glommed onto Billy’s notorious double shooting in the Bronx, attempting to make her journalistic bones by investigating the rumor that he’d been high when he pulled the trigger. Backed by two independent eyewitnesses, both willing to go public, both claiming to have seen him doing blow in the rear of an Intervale Avenue bar an hour before the shooting, as well as two more witnesses who wouldn’t go on record but corroborated the statements of the two who would, Stacey went in and made a hard pitch to her editors, touting the thoroughness of her background checks on her sources, then bombarding them with reports about police abuse in the area, anecdotal evidence that was as easy for her to gather out on the street as picking daisies.

In the end, she needn’t have tried so hard. One week earlier, the
Post
had lost out to the
Daily News
on the suicide of a retired police lieutenant in a Queens dope motel, and her editors were hot to get back on top. The story was page one for two days running, so when it all fell apart shortly after, everyone involved got scorched, but no one as badly as Stacey. In the end it came down to those background checks: in her anxiety about losing her scoop to the time-sucking demands of a thorough vetting of her sources, she hadn’t done them at all.

The real background checks—conducted, embarrassingly enough, by the
Daily News
—revealed that one of the on-record eyewits was the brother of a heroin dealer Billy had sent upstate, while the other had twice before born false witness against cops as payback for his own slew of arrests in that precinct. As for the two others who would only talk off the record, no one had seen them since the article hit the stands.

With Stacey caught flat-footed in her lie, and with no hard evidence to back up her account, the story was quickly buried, although never retracted. Within the week she was out the door, the story behind her story having become its own newsworthy story, the subject of self-examining op-ed pieces across the country and not a few panel discussions.

Excoriated for unhesitatingly scuttling a good cop’s reputation to further her own, emotionally whittled to a nub by her disgrace, and unable to support herself even if she chose to make a stand, Stacey moved back in with her parents in Rochester. With her father’s help, she became a part owner of a food truck christened My Hero, which was more or less permanently stationed across the street from the SUNY Brockport dormitory complex. After two years of full-time sandwich making in this drizzly exile, she endured another blow when both her parents died in a collision with an ambulance at an intersection three blocks from home. She spent the first two weeks after the funeral living alone in their house hoping for a visitation, then put it on the market. A few months later, temporarily flush with the proceeds of the sale, a small inheritance, and the buyout money she received from selling her share of My Hero, she quietly returned to the city.

Unable to find work as a reporter but banking on the skills she had developed as one, she reinvented herself as a private investigator, earning just enough to take a lease on a one-bedroom walk-up near Columbia University. For a while she held on to the hope of finding her way back into the newspaper business, but that pipe dream came to an end the day she accepted an invitation to address an Ethics and Ambition seminar in the university’s J-school, the experience leaving her feeling like a still-sentient cadaver picked over by medical students in an anatomy class.

Rather than enjoying the poetic justice of Stacey’s downfall, Billy felt torn—no, actually sorry for her, mostly ignoring the fact that she had tried to advance her career on his broken back. In fact, he had been the one to make the first move, reaching out to her with an e-mail a year after she returned to the city, and since then they had gradually, cautiously become friends. For her part, Stacey had been both astonished and humbled by his lack of vindictiveness, never once imagining that his gentle overture was motivated by anything other than old-time Christian compassion.