The Whites: A Novel (36 page)

“We had a guy brought in last week?” she said, staying in the game. “He was so cranked on PCP he shattered both of his femurs just by tensing his legs. We go to lift him off his gurney, he jumps up and starts running down the hall like a track star. Didn’t feel a thing.”

Billy bent over and started to retch.

Carmen offered him an unwashed cereal bowl from the sink.

“I’m good,” he said, accepting it.

“So where are you at?” she asked.

“With what.” Billy blinked, hoping to duck the subject.

Choosing to let it be, at least for now, Carmen handed him three Advils and a glass of water.

“I want you to go over to Saint Joseph’s for an X-ray.”

“Right now I need to sleep,” he said. Then, gingerly probing his jaw: “Thank you.”

While Carmen was upstairs changing into her work whites, Redman called.

“I need to come by,” he said.

“What for?” As if he couldn’t guess.

“I need to talk to you. I’ll drive up.”

“Hang on,” Billy said, putting the receiver to his chest. He’d had enough of visitors, announced and unannounced, coming to sit or stand in his kitchen and dump all kinds of dark drama on his head.

“I tell you what,” raising a hand to Carmen as she walked out of the house, “I need to take care of something, then I’ll come down to you, how’s that sound.”

“All right,” Redman said reluctantly. “Just, until you get here? Don’t do anything.”

Billy walked out the front door a few minutes later, intending to take the paint-stiffened clothes over to the Yonkers precinct that was overseeing the directed patrols. At first he was startled to see Carmen still on the porch, then not, given her missing banner.

“I saw that when I came in,” he said as offhandedly as he could. “Some kids must’ve taken it last night.”

But rather than raise hell about it, she seemed distracted, barely acknowledging that he had said anything at all. Then he saw what she was focused on: a rivulet of red paint that he’d missed earlier had settled into the seam between house and porch, looking like a boundary line on a map.

She walked to her car, unlocked the driver’s door, then spoke to him without looking his way. “I don’t want Millie picking up the kids from school this afternoon,” she said numbly. “You do it.”

The night-vision surveillance footage from the previous evening, both chalky and luminous, was eerie enough to pass for paranormal activity. Billy watched the tape three times, the mysteriously launched garbage bag sailing as clumsily as an overweight turkey through the fuzzy air before erupting on his porch and spewing out its contents.

“Those patrols are bullshit. I want a twenty-four-hour posting in front of the house,” Billy said, regretting the “I want” as soon as it came out of his mouth.

“Not happening.” The detective, Evan Lefkowitz, shrugged.

“What do you mean, not happening.”

“We’re undermanned as it is.”

Billy reached into the bag of clothes lying on an unoccupied desk, pulled out the pair of girls’ corduroy pants, and held it in his fist.

“Let me tell you what that guy did. He sat on his ass until he saw your doughnut eaters roll by, knew he had a good fifty-five minutes, ate a sandwich, did the crossword, bloodied up my porch, took a piss, washed his car, and went home. I want, I need,
my family
needs, a twenty-four-hour fixed post.”

“Doughnut eaters?”

Billy took a breath. “Look, I’m sorry about that, I swear to you I’m not one of those NYPD assholes who thinks every cop outside the five boroughs is some eeba-geeba related by blood to Barney Fife.”

Without excusing himself, Lefkowitz stepped off to talk to another detective about a different issue, Billy taking it to mean that maybe his Mayberry riff had been a little too lovingly delivered.

“Hey, this is my town too,” he said when Lefkowitz returned. “I’m living my life here, raising my kids here, paying my taxes, and all I’m asking you for is just a little bit more protection.”

“Like I said, we’re undermanned as it is.”

“All due respect, but could I speak to your boss?”

“She’ll just tell you the same.”

“Nonetheless . . .”

“Fine by me,” Lefkowitz said, walking away. “She’ll be in next week.”

As Billy came up on Brown’s Family Funeral Home that night, Redman, wearing a full-body apron and latex gloves, was standing in the narrow doorway swapping cash for Chinese takeout with a delivery boy.

“You mean to tell me you’re OK walking the streets like that?” Redman said without raising his eyes from the exchange.

“Like what?”

“Don’t you have a mirror at home?” Redman counted out his change. “Come in here.”

Once they were inside the chapel, Redman had Billy take off his shirt and lie down on a somewhat clean gurney. Then, reaching into his cluttered cosmetics cart, he found a jar of Standard Caucasian camouflage cream and went to work on the constellation of bruises that, between Pavlicek and Carmen, had erupted across Billy’s face since the morning.

“You ever notice how the storefronts line up in this neighborhood?” Redman said. “Dunkin’ Donuts, Popeyes, Roy Rogers, Ashley Stewart’s big women shop, then a funeral parlor, all cheek to cheek like a de-evolution cartoon.”

“They have fat people in Nebraska too, last I heard,” Billy said, wondering when they were going to get to Pavlicek.

“My point being,” Redman stepping back to assess his work, then peeling off his gloves, “I had two bodies coming in this week, a five-hundred-pounder and a four, but when I added the weight of the casket I realized that my front steps would collapse, so I had to farm them out to Carolina Home up the block because the director over there was smart enough to put in reinforced steel.”

Rafer came rolling into the room, made two quick circuits around his father, then charged at an old man sporting a Masonic fez and apron, who was lying in his casket parked by the piano.

“So.” Billy sat up and reached for his shirt. “Why am I here.”

Redman took a limping stroll around the chapel, straightened out a few folding chairs, then slowly came back.

“Look, I’m going to save you a lot of trouble.”

“How’s that,” Billy said, feeling the cadaver cream starting to grip.

“It’s done.”

“What is.”

“All what you’ve been looking into.”

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.”