The Whites: A Novel (17 page)

“Nothing wrong with rhythm and blues, my friend. Some of those singers were true bards.”

Billy had to smile. The designation “bard” had always been his father’s highest form of praise, synonymous with “sublime” and just a shade under “godlike.”

“Dad, do you remember my friend Jerry Hart? After his freshman year at Fordham he came home and told his father that he wanted to be a poet. You know what Mr. Hart said to him? ‘Anybody’d write a poem would suck a dick.’ Excuse my French.”

“Cocksucker,” Senior said without heat.

“What?” Billy had never heard his father say anything worse than “shit,” and rarely that.

“Cunt licker.”

The boys stopped playing.

“Cocksucking motherfucking kike-faced little nigger boy.” Another bland delivery.

Billy signaled for Millie to bring the kids into the house.

“Dad, what’s happening.”

“Are you going to read to me?” his father said.

“What?”

“You said you’d read me something,” gesturing to the Yeats still in Billy’s hands.

“What just happened.”

“Happened with what?” Senior’s eyes remained clear and untroubled.

Billy took a moment. “All right,” he finally said. “Hold on.”

Flipping through the Yeats, nervously rejecting poem after poem as being either too long, too beyond his understanding, or having too much unpronounceable Gaelic, he defaulted to the horror poem of his youth. But after quickly scanning the first few lines—the wildly spiraling falcon, the blood-dimmed tide, each image troubling him more than they ever had before, and then returning to “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold”—he closed the book.

“I tell you what,” he said, rising to his feet. “How about I recite ‘The Face on the Barroom Floor.’ That one I can do from memory.”

Somebody had angrily scrawled “dope house” with a broad Sharpie above the apartment 6G peephole in the Truman Houses.

“The quality goes in before the name goes on,” the CSU tech standing next to Billy said before entering the scene.

The living room was devoid of furniture, empty save for a few scattered, overfull ashtrays and some still-burning candles set in juice glasses here and there. An emaciated blond woman, looking sixty but most likely around thirty, lay star-fished face-up on the linoleum, a welt of gunpowder-stippled flesh beneath her left collarbone the only sign of violence done to her that was not self-inflicted. Another CSU tech, squatting by the body, gripped her by the jaw and rolled her head from side to side, ran his rubber-gloved fingers roughly through her lank hair, and then unbuttoned her blouse, all in search of other entry wounds.

Before anyone thought to stop her, another young mummy, her eyes looking awl-punched into her head, wandered in through the partly open front door, said, “I forgot my purse,” laid eyes on the dead girl, “Oh, April, you still here? I thought . . .” then swirled to the floor.

“We was just sitting around passing the peace pipe, that’s all, nobody hurting nobody,” the revived woman, Patricia Jenkins, said through a billow of exhaled smoke to Billy and Alice Stupak as they all sat in a stairwell down the hall from the dead girl in 6G.

“All of a sudden this boy comes in with a rifle, says for everybody to give it up, but we’re all skyin’ so nobody wanted to do that. Donna asked him if he maybe just wants to party with us instead, and he says, ‘You disease-drippin’ bitches?’ He takes all the rock we got left, then goes through everybody’s shit for money, cell phones, and whatnot.”

She paused for another lungful of smoke, ran a shaky finger across her brow. “He already turned to go, got a hand on the damn doorknob, April says, ‘Shit, I bet that ain’t even loaded,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh God . . .’”

Billy glanced at Stupak, neither of them wanting to distract her yet by taking notes.

“That boy, he hears that, he just turns around slow, sticks out that rifle like stickin’ out a arm, got the bullet end almost right on her, and bang. Then he leaves like he should of done if April had kept her mouth shut. Then we all like froze until he’s gone, then we go too.”

Still smoking, she lowered her forehead onto the heel of her palm, closed her eyes, and wept a little.

“All right, Patricia,” Stupak began, easing out her pad, “I know you want to get this guy as badly as we do, so help us out here. The shooter, was he white, black, Hispanic . . .”

“Lightish Dominican.”

“Dominican. Not, say, Puerto Rican, or . . .”

“Dominican.”

“And when you say a kid . . .”

“Like, high-school-dropout age.”

The fire door to the stairwell opened, all three turning to see Gene Feeley, the elusive war horse, size up the party and then, hands in pockets, lean against a cinder-block wall directly behind Stupak’s back.

Alice took a moment, her temples pulsing with anger. “This guy, do you remember what he was wearing?”

“A orange sweat suit, tops and bottoms.”

“Any words or images?”

“Said ‘Syracuse’ up the leg and across the chest.”

Feeley coughed, shifted his feet, Billy watching him like a hawk.

“How about hair? Long, short . . .”

“Had, like, a short crop brushed forward like a Caesar cut, and those devil sideburns, you know, like a pencil line going down his jaw from each side then meet up under his chin, and he had a little mascara on his eyebrows like the boys now do to make them darker.”

“Beautiful. And, other than what you told us already, can you think of anything else he said?”

“Not really.”

“OK, Patricia,” Stupak’s eyes bright with the hunt. “How about you come with us to the precinct so we can show you some photo arrays?”

“Can I smoke there?” she asked. “Last time I couldn’t smoke.”

“No problem,” Alice said, rising and reaching out to help the woman to her feet.

“Hey, Patricia,” Feeley said, still leaning against his wall. “Before you go, you don’t happen to know this kid’s name, do you?”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “Eric Cienfuegos, he lives upstairs in apartment 11C.”

“There you go,” he said to Stupak, then sauntered back out to the hallway.

“I want a transfer,” she announced to Billy the moment Feeley was gone.

“I’ll handle it,” Billy said, wondering how.

“That’s what you always say.”

“Just let me make some calls.”

“You always say that, too.”

Burning with embarrassment, he jerked his head toward Patricia Jenkins, standing there like a scarecrow draped in laundry. “Just take her to the house.”

He found Feeley as he was getting into his car, a restored ’73 Dodge Polara, double-parked across from the scene.

“What,” Feeley looking up at him through the rolled-down driver’s window.

Billy, hunched over to be on eye level, just stared.

“She had some goddamn mouth on her the other night,” Feeley said. “Embarrassing me in front of my nephew like that.”

“Gene,” Billy began, his back killing him already, “I asked the Chief of D’s last week to take you off my hands, I told him how unreliable you are, how you undermine me and everybody else in the squad. You know what he said? He said, Just do me a favor and keep him with you, I’ll throw you another detective to pick up the slack.”

“Where the hell do you get off . . . Do you know what I’ve done on this job?”

Billy stood up to stretch, then stooped to the window again. “Actually, I do. In fact, when I first came up, my loo once pointed you out to me, said if he ever got murdered he hoped they’d throw you the case, this way, the actor’d be on death row by the end of the year.”

“Who was the loo.”

“Mike Kelley, retired from the Five-two about three years ago.”

“Kelley,” Feeley grunted. “He put in some good work there.”

Billy stood up again, took a breath, came back down. “Look, Gene, I can’t do anything about you, we both know that, but here’s what I propose. Don’t show up anymore. I’ll cover for you, sign you in, sign you out, this way you can max out your pension without wasting your time going through the motions and I can get my squad back to the way I want. What do you say.”

Feeley sat flustered for a moment, then looked at Billy with a face like a fist. “Nobody tells me what to do.”

Milton Ramos

The sisters—they had to be sisters, check out the mouths—came into the 4-6 precinct house just as Milton walked out of the vending machine room with a bag of Fritos and a can of Hawaiian Punch.

“My fiancé’s missing,” the less-big woman announced to Maldonado, the desk sergeant.

“How long,” he asked without raising his eyes from his paperwork.

“Yesterday, day before.”

“What’s his name,” still not looking up.

“Cornell Harris.”

Thinking about where he was headed shortly and what he planned to do when he got there, Milton lost his appetite and tossed the chips without opening the bag.

“Got a picture?” Maldonado blindly put out his hand.

“No,” the girlfriend said.

“Here,” her sister said, digging into her bag and taking out a snap.

The girlfriend looked at her. “Why’d you take his picture?”

“’Cause I did. So what.”

“So what?”

“This guy?” Maldonado finally looked at them. “That’s Sweetpea Harris.”

“I know.”

Milton checked the time, then took a sip of punch.

“He’s missing?” Maldonado said. “Like that’s a bad thing?”

“He ain’t like that no more,” the girlfriend said.

“He turned himself around,” her sister said.

“Like this?” Maldonado stood up, curled a hand over his head like an umbrella handle, and pirouetted.

“See, that’s why people hate on you around here.”

“Actually, they don’t,” Maldonado said, returning to his reports.

“You should ask harder about that.”

“In any event, it’s got to be forty-eight hours before someone can be considered missing.”

“That’s what it is, forty-eight hours,” the girlfriend said.

“You said yesterday,” he said.

“She meant the yesterday before yesterday,” her sister said. “That’s forty-eight hours.”

“Oh. OK.”

“Yeah, he was, we were fighting on the phone, then I heard some other guy say, ‘Hey Sweetpea, come over here.’”

“Oh yeah? Then what happened.”

“Sweetpea said, ‘Oh shit,’ and hung up.”

“This is getting to be a real mystery,” Maldonado said, again without looking at them. “Where was this?”

“I don’t know. Concord Avenue maybe?”

“Maybe?”

“I was on the phone, how do I know.”

“When.”

“Around three.”

“Last night?”

“Yeah.”

“Gotcha!” Maldonado lightly slapping his desk. “See? That’s not forty-eight hours.”

“Fuck him,” the girlfriend said. “Let’s go to Missing Persons direct.”

“They’ll tell you the same.”

As they turned to leave, raised middle fingers over their heads like pennants, Maldonado called out to them, the snapshot of Sweetpea Harris in his extended hand. “Keep it,” he said. “We already have one.”

Once the two women finally made it out the door, the desk sergeant looked over to Milton. “Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?”

Milton glanced at the wall clock again and drew a deep, shaky breath. “I got to be somewheres.”

He sat alongside her desk as she listened to his heart, a stray fingertip brushing his chest.

He thought just the boom of it would knock her off her chair.

All she had to do was recognize him and it was game over.

What could he possibly do after that?

“Turn, please?” The cold disk now pressing into his lower back.

“Sounds pretty clear,” she murmured, making a notation on his emergency room form.

“Maybe now they do.”

“Any history of bronchitis, asthma . . .”

“No.”

“Any recent injuries?”

“No.”

“Been under any stress?”

“Everybody’s under stress.”

“I’m asking about you,” finally looking up from her notes, her Pietà eyes blind in her head.

“Tell the truth, I’m feeling a little stressed right now.”

“Well sure, you’re in a hospital,” she said, looking over his shoulder to a small ruckus in the waiting room.

How about you on that front?
Milton thought.
Any stress on your end?

“How about allergies, any allergies?”

“Could be.”

“What’s ‘could be,’” looking at him again.

“I just got back from visiting my brother in Atlanta.” He almost said “my brother Rudy,” but that would make it too easy. “He bought his kid a cat since the last time and I got a little cloudy in the chest.”