Read The Whites: A Novel Online
Authors: Richard Price
Most of the people whose faces were turned to the camera and could be identified had already been interviewed by Midtown South, including all of Bannion’s friends that night. Teams of detectives had either traveled out to Long Island or caught the potential witnesses at their workstations in Manhattan, not one of these sit-downs yielding a single helpful lead.
Billy reran the tape. Then ran it again, this time in slow motion. On his sixth viewing someone caught his eye—one of the commuters, exiting the throng a moment before, not after, Bannion, which made sense given that it must have taken the stupefied vic a moment or two before he realized what had already happened to him.
The figure, its back to the camera as it briefly lingered at the bottom of the frame before leaving the scene altogether, looked like nothing so much as a small, upright bear.
“They finally salvaged the tape,” Billy said.
“What tape?” Yasmeen asked from behind her desk in the university security office.
“From Penn Station.”
“I thought they had that tape.”
“The other one.”
“What other one.”
Tired of the dance, Billy showed her the printout of the shaggy form walking away from the crime scene before anyone there knew it was a crime scene.
Yasmeen looked at it, then—unconsciously, Billy assumed—glanced at her Tibetan coat draped over an empty chair.
“It was either you or Janis Joplin coming out of that crowd.”
“Do you know how many coats like this . . .”
“Don’t jerk me around,” he said wearily. “Not now, all right?”
She was a long time in responding.
“You have those two little boys,” she finally said. “Could you imagine me ever coming up to you like this?”
“I didn’t kill anybody, Yasmeen.”
“The hell you didn’t. And what did we do? Closed ranks and protected your ass.”
“It was a justified shoot. I didn’t need you to.”
“Oh yes you did, cokey boy.”
One of the other retired detectives working at the school came into the office and dropped a folder on her blotter, Yasmeen getting to work on it before he even left.
Billy sat there for a while studying the photographs push-pinned into her wall: campus trespassers, a trashed dorm lounge, the facades of problematic East and West Village bars.
“Yasmeen, the story’s going to come out one way or another.”
“Well, one good story deserves another,” she said, flicking the side of her nose.
Billy got up to leave.
“You know, Dennis, he’s a good guy, a good dad, I’ll give him that . . .”
Billy stood there, waiting for the punch line.
“But I could’ve been with you all these years, you know? I could have been your wife, Dominique and Simone could have been your daughters.”
“I’ll give you a week to get a lawyer,” he heard himself say.
“You’d do that for me?” she said sweetly, Billy almost positive she was being sarcastic.
“So you say,” Carmen said, looking down at the Penn Station printouts spread out on the kitchen table before her.
“So I know,” Billy looking at her. “And you know too.”
Carmen shifted her gaze from the table to the window. “Do you remember when I couldn’t get out of bed for close to three months? What did she do for us.”
“This has nothing to do with that.”
“No? What’s it have to do with?”
“Do I even have to answer that?”
Resting her brow in the heel of her palm, Carmen looked as if she’d rather be anywhere else than in this room with this man right now.
“Do I even have to answer that?” Billy pleaded.
“Why did you marry me,” she said.
“Why did I what?”
“What did you see in me.”
“I don’t know. I saw you. Where are we going with this?”
Carmen swept the printouts to the floor. “Jesus, Billy,” her voice clotted with tears, “sometimes people just need to be forgiven.”
More cryptic and distance-making shit from his most intimate of intimates, Billy watching her climb the stairs to the bedroom and feeling more isolated on this than ever before.
Three bodies, and so far everyone was either defying him, threatening him, or tossing off pronouncements fit for a Sphinx. Everyone acting like they had his number.
Billy called first Redman, then Whelan, got the machine for both and left the same message: one week to lawyer up. He started to dial Pavlicek’s number, then hung up in mid-dial. This one had to be face-to-face.
Not really thinking about what he would see when he walked into the private suite at the Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, Billy took one look at the patient, then turned and retreated, hoping no one inside had noticed. Out in the hallway, he caught his breath and then reentered, having no choice but to accept that the sallow-skinned, seemingly inert stick figure lying in the bed, with its distant, unresisting eyes, was, still was, John Junior, only six months ago a bear of a young man who’d often had to sidle through doorways.
Speechless, he floated across the room and stood in a corner.
“You know, I was trying to describe to Johnnie here,” Pavlicek said, his eyes never leaving his son’s face, “what it was like for us back in the nineties, the bust-ass blocks, the gangs, the dope lines going right past the precinct house, that whole rodeo.”
He was seated on the side of the bed, one hand on the kid’s thigh, the other on his forehead, as if he was afraid his son would start to levitate.
“John,” Billy whispered, “I had no idea.”
“I’ll never forget the day I bought my first building on Faile Street, five thousand dollars, the old guy running down the street with the check in his hand, ‘You’ll never make a dime!’ But then the fun began, remember? All those all-nighters, me, you, Whelan, Redman, Charlie Torreano, God rest his soul . . . Stripping, sanding, uncovering that beautiful wood, the moldings, the sconces, then that morning light coming in . . .”
Billy stepped to the bed and lightly touched Junior’s hand, the kid turning his head in response but too deep in his medicated drift to raise his eyes.
“Billy, I swear to you, twenty-six buildings later and nothing ever felt as good to me as rehabbing that first dump on Faile. Well, what the hell, I made my dent.”
There was no way Billy could bring up what he had come to say, not here and not now.
Pavlicek let him get halfway to the door. “Redman told me that you couldn’t drop the bomb on him this morning until he put his kid down,” looking at Billy for the first time since he came into the room. “So I can imagine what a bitch this must be for you right now.”
“That all can wait,” he said.
“For what, Junior to die? You’re going to make this into a death watch before you turn me in?”
“What I meant . . .”
“I know what you meant,” Pavlicek cut him off. “Just let it happen.”
Billy took a seat on the edge of the narrow visitor’s bed wedged under the far window, dress shirts and sweaters spilling out of a Gladstone bag on the blanket.
“John, what do I do.”
He had always looked up to Pavlicek for guidance; they all did.
“It looks like you’re doing it.”
“How can you make me carry this?”
“In all honesty? You weren’t exactly on my mind at the time,” Pavlicek said. “Besides, you did it to yourself. No one told you to go fucking investigate.”
“You shot Cortez?”
“Do you need me to say it?”
“I do.”
“I shot Cortez. I screwed it up, but that there was definitely me.”
“I can’t sit on three bodies,” Billy said. “I can’t live with it.”
“Then don’t.”
“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.”
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?”
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.”