The Whites: A Novel Read online

  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.”

  “That’s no good,” writing again.

  “You ever been to Atlanta?” he asked.

  Since taking a seat next to her, the tension he felt had him speaking in a near mumble, and either she didn’t hear the question or she was just off somewhere in her head. Either way he didn’t want to ask again, didn’t want to lead her any more than that. It would be too much like begging.

  Just recognize me. Stop me in my tracks by saying my name, then drop to your knees to ask my forgiveness and explain to me through your tears why you did it. Then maybe, just maybe, we can both survive this.

  Last chance for us both.

  When he next looked at her, she was staring back at him as if he had spoken aloud, her eyes fixed with a look of unguarded intensity.

  His shortness-of-breath gambit was no longer a joke.

  “Are you on the Job?” she finally said.

  “I work for FedEx, it’s right on the form there.”

  “Huh. My husband’s a cop and I could have sworn . . .”

  “I get that a lot.”

  Recognize me, just let me see you tremble with memory, I’ll settle for that . . .

  But the moment passed. She went into her desk, brought out a blood pressure cuff, and gestured for his arm.

  Seated as close as they were, he could reach out and grip her by the throat so fast she couldn’t make a sound, couldn’t signal or even move. He could choke the life out of her before anyone even knew what had happened.

  “Your BP’s through the roof.”

  “Must be the cats,” he said hoarsely, Milton near livid with despair.

  CHAPTER 7

  When Billy got home the next morning, he was relieved to discover that Carmen was at work and the boys at school. He went directly to the refrigerator, made himself his double usual, and was asleep within the hour.

  He awoke at three-thirty to find himself back-to-back in bed with his father, who was chatting up a storm with his dead wife. The boys were somewhere in the house killing each other.

  Billy got out of bed, put on his bathrobe, and went back into the kitchen. As he shambled to the coffeemaker, he nearly tripped over Carlos’s camo jacket, which lay in a heap on the floor. When he picked it up, the jacket was tacky to the touch and smelled of paint. Holding it in front of himself by the epaulets, he discovered what he at first took to be a red five-pointed star, still in the process of drying, planted between the shoulders.

  No, not a star. The bulk of the image was more fan-shaped than round, and the five points were actually all emanating in a curved line from the top of that fan, the thing now looking more like a handprint—was a handprint, a big one.

  “Carlos!”

  The kid came up from the basement wearing nothing but his underpants.

  “What happened to your jacket?” Showing him the damage.

  “I don’t know.”

  The outline of the hand was crudely precise. Not casual. Not accidental.

  “Did anyone touch you today?”

  “Touch?”

  “Put their hand on you.” Then: “A grown-up?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know,” Billy starting to pace a little. “How about did anybody talk to you today. Other than your teachers.”

  “My friends?”

  “Not your friends, grown-ups.”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I don’t know.” Carlos shrugged, bored by the whole thing.

  Billy took a breath; was he making something out of nothing?

  As if reading his father’s mind, Carlos wheeled toward the basement, Billy half-relieved to see him go. But then he stopped at the head of the stairs and turned back around.

  “Oh, wait. A man came up to me and said, ‘Say hello to your parents.’”

  “What? Whoa, whoa . . .” Billy felt a sprung dampness on the back of his neck. “What man?”

  “By my school, he came up to me.”

  “And said what.”

  “I said already.”

  Once again, Carlos tried to make a run for the basement, this time Billy having to grab his arm.

  “Carlos!” his older brother shouted from down in the dark.

  “What do you mean ‘by’ the school,” Billy said. “In the school? Outside? Before school, after . . .”

  “When I was going to the bus home, he came up to me and said say hello to your parents but I didn’t talk to him, I swear.”

  “What else did he say.”

  “Nothing, he just left.”

  “Did he say . . . Did anybody else see him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Billy’s bathrobe felt like an oven.

  Declan, bored with waiting for his brother to return to the basement, came upstairs. He, too, was stripped to his underpants.

  “Did you see the man who talked to your brother?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did he talk to you?”

  “No.”

  “What did he look like?”

  Declan extended his arms sideways and puffed up his cheeks.

  “Fat?”

  “Biggish.”

  “What else.”

  “He was, he had a mustache.”

  “What else.”

  “He had a big head, bigger than yours. But less hair in the front of it.”

  “Good. What color was he?” Billy couldn’t imagine anything in the refrigerator that wouldn’t make him vomit.

  “Kind of brown.”

  “Brown like Mommy or brown like Uncle Redman?”

  “White-brown, like Mom. I don’t call her Mommy anymore, it’s babyish.”

  “No it’s not,” Carlos said.

  “OK, OK, what was he wearing?”

  “A jacket.”

  “And a tie,” Carlos added, pulling on his balls.

  “A jacket and a tie. What else.”

  “Pants,” Carlos said.

  “And he had a lump,” Declan said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “A lump,” Declan touching his left hip where Billy carried his gun. “Like yours.”

  When Carmen came home from the hospital at eight that evening, Billy was still in his bathrobe. An hour earlier it had been all he could do to feed the boys and his father their cut cantaloupe and Stouffer’s microwaved dinners.

  “Are you kidding me?” she shouted from the living room, then marched into the kitchen. “This is a hundred-and-twenty-dollar jacket. Carlos!”

  “Easy, it’s not his fault,” Billy said. Going on three hours of sleep, his head was a boiled egg. “Some guy came up to him in the school parking lot, said, ‘Say hello to your parents,’ and, I’m guessing, did this to the jacket.”

  “What do you mean, some guy. What guy?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know.”

  “Nobody knew him?”

  “I’ll have to ask tomorrow.”

  “Why tomorrow?”

  “The kids don’t know. It’s better to go back there at the same time, see who’s around.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “From what I could get out of them, he sounds some kind of Latin, heavyset, maybe a cop.”

  “A cop?”

  Billy hesitated, then: “He could have been carrying,” wincing the second it came out of his mouth.

  “A gun?” Her eyes as big as dishes.

 
“Possibly, but maybe I’m just . . .”

  “Jesus God,” putting her fingertips to her mouth. “You sure he was a cop?”

  “I’m not sure of anything. Like I just said . . .”

  “Well, how old was he?”

  He couldn’t believe he hadn’t asked that earlier, though it probably wouldn’t tell him anything about the guy’s profession.

  “Hey, Carlos!” he shouted up the stairs.

  The kid came down wearing a Knicks jersey over pajama bottoms.

  “The man who talked to you, was he older than me, younger than me, the same age . . .”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Declan!”

  Carlos’s older brother came down wearing a Scream mask, just what Billy needed.

  “How old was the man you saw.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Guess.”

  “Your age? Mommy’s, Mom’s age?”

  Billy turned to his wife. “Anything else?”

  Carmen didn’t answer.

  “All right, guys, go back upstairs,” he said, not wanting them to get infected.

  He moved to the sink and ran some water over his face. When he turned back around Carmen was robotically setting the table for breakfast.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  “Look,” she said, straightening up, a stack of plates tucked into her ribs like a football. “He said, ‘your parents,’ he didn’t say our names.”

  “So?”

  “So maybe he doesn’t even know us. Maybe he’s just some random whack who wandered into the parking lot. Or a parent the kids don’t know. Or it wasn’t him.”

  “Wasn’t who.”

  “The guy who put the paint there. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe Carlos just backed up . . .”

  “Into what, a wide-open adult hand covered in red paint?”

  “How about the father of that kid Declan punched?”

  “The guy’s in a wheelchair.”

  “How do you know?”

  He knew because he had gone over to their house on the sly to pay for a new pair of glasses. “I just heard.”

  “Then how about you?” she asked, dealing out the plates.

  “How about me what?”

  “Is there anybody on the Job . . .”

  “I thought about it. There’s nobody.”

  Carmen dropped a juice glass with her right hand, caught it six inches from the floor with her left.