The Whites: A Novel Read online

“Yeah, I did, him and a few others.”

  “Can I ask why?”

  Billy knew the worst thing he could do was lie. “I was over at the Four-six wrapping up my Fives on a shooting. I had some time to kill, so I looked up a few bad guys from back in the day.”

  MacCormack looked off, smiling in temporary retreat.

  “Like Facebooking old girlfriends,” Billy said. “Why do you want to know?”

  MacCormack let the question hang in the air, Billy not liking that at all.

  “OK,” Billy said, suddenly too nervous to wait him out, “I’m guessing that since Cortez is too stupid to be running any kind of crew or moving enough weight to be worth your while otherwise, he’s your CI, most likely in deep for you with some bigger fish, and right now you’re coming up here to see if he’s into some of kind of outside jackpot that he neglected to tell you about. But I’m just guessing.”

  “Hang on a sec,” MacCormack said, then walked away to make a brief phone call.

  The CSU van finally rolled up, the emerging detectives heading to the mini-mart with their kits and cameras, probably unaware that the tall young man visible through the plate-glass window and looking as if he were ready to ring up a beer was their body.

  “Look,” Billy said when MacCormack came back, “it was just curiosity on my part. I probably shouldn’t have run him and I’m sorry I did, but number one, I’m not looking to fuck anybody’s play here, and two, you’re coming to me at three in the morning about this and not answering any of my questions, so maybe you can just tell me this . . . Am I in some kind of jam here?”

  MacCormack hesitated, looking at Billy as if sizing him up. “He just needs to be protected right now.”

  Billy nodded, masking his relief, then became angry with himself for showing his ass like that.

  “Protected,” he said. “You know what this guy did, don’t you?”

  “You mean the Del Pino homicide?” MacCormack pulled out a pack of Winstons.

  “All I can think, he must be one hell of a snitch.”

  MacCormack stared at Billy for a moment longer in that assessing way, then just shrugged, game over.

  “I tell you, with CIs?” he said, offering Billy a cigarette. “I try to think of it like this: all those Nazi scientists working on the V-2 rocket, we snatched them up like draft picks, us or the Reds, freedom or world enslavement. That was the stakes, so all is forgiven, welcome to Texas. I mean, Christ, some of those krauts wound up on postage stamps.”

  “Eric Cortez as Wernher von Braun,” Billy said. “That there’s a keeper.”

  MacCormack semi-laughed, then slipped back into the Firebird.

  Billy stared at the Phoenix decal on the trembling hood for a moment, then just said it: “He’s not dead, is he?”

  “Cortez? No,” MacCormack said, giving Billy a look that made him wish he’d kept his mouth shut.

  MILTON RAMOS

  She was throwing him all night.

  First she wanted to do something in bed that they never did before and that made him blow his top in about two minutes flat.

  Then, still turned on by what they’d just done, they went at it again—they were strictly one-shot lovers, and so that was a second first—Marilys moaning all the way through. Normally they were so silent that you could be sleeping in the same room with them and not wake up, so that right there was a third first, all three groundbreakers coming to pass in about twenty-five minutes.

  They were both by nature physically modest people, so even though they had just fucked like banshees, when she finally came out of the bathroom still naked, Milton had no idea where to rest his eyes. And instead of immediately getting dressed like she always did, Marilys just sat on the edge of the bed without making any move for her clothes.

  “Hey, Milton.”

  He had never heard her say his name out loud; somehow they managed to live amicably under the same roof for forty to fifty hours a week without ever saying each other’s names, and he’d be lying if he said her doing so now didn’t make him feel uncomfortable.

  “What’s up,” still looking away from her water-dappled skin.

  “I’m pregnant.”

  His first reaction was that she had just become pregnant in the last half hour, which was maybe why she had taken so long in the bathroom.

  “What do you mean?” The question sounded stupid, he knew, but still.

  She didn’t answer.

  Even in his state of low shock, he would not insult her by asking if she was sure it was his.

  “OK,” he said carefully, then: “What are you thinking?”

  Her blue-black Indio hair, instead of being brushed straight back from her face as usual, had been carefully combed into long wet bangs that made her look a few pounds lighter, a few years younger.

  “Because whatever you’re thinking, I’ll help you out.”

  “Thanks,” still making no move to cover herself.

  “I mean, now is not a good time for me, but anything I can do.”

  Much to his relief, she finally began reaching for her clothes.

  “But so just tell me, what are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking it’s a boy.”

  “You can tell, huh?”

  “I have two sons, seven brothers, and seven uncles. It’s a boy.”

  “OK.”

  He felt stoned, but not so badly that he couldn’t deal.

  She stopped reaching for her clothes and looked at him full-on. “Look, I don’t want nothing from you and I’m OK raising him on my own, but that means I got to go back to Guatemala to be with my family, so pretty soon I can’t take care of Sofia anymore, and I can’t take care of you, that’s all I’m saying.”

  “That’s too bad,” he said, both saddened and relieved.

  A few hours later, a thermos of iced Yellow Chartreuse nesting in his cup caddie, Milton sat in the rear parking lot of the Bryant Motor Lodge and watched as Carmen’s brother, Victor, pulled up in an old Range Rover, stepped out, and walked across the lot to the rear entrance, just like dozens of junkies, crackistanis, and pross-escorted johns had done since he had set up camp ninety minutes earlier. Milton had nothing against Carmen’s brother personally; in fact, in some detached way he was happy to see him, the sad undergrown gay kid he remembered from Longfellow Avenue having grown into a fairly squared-away-looking man with clear eyes and a forthright stride even at this ass-of-night hour.

  Victor had been easy to find—Milton just hadn’t ever thought of finding him before. A sociology instructor at City College, he had a website that described the paper he was working on, calling it a study of the “quasi-family dynamics” that developed over time among the drug dealers and sex workers whose base of operations was an unnamed hot-sheet motel in the Bronx. Which wasn’t hard to find either, since there was a notorious cluster directly across the New England Thruway from Co-op City, and talking to a few of the regulars along that stretch yielded not only the Bryant but Victor’s working hours, which made sense, he guessed, given what the guy was going after.

  Propping his bat in the passenger-side foot well, he slid his seat back as far as it would go, reached for the thermos, and drifted off, thinking about having unexpectedly run into Billy Graves in Dennis Doyle’s office first thing this morning. After the fight-or-flight thing passed, Milton had instinctively sized him up physically, in case it ever came to that, then calmed down enough to get a rush off Billy’s cluelessness. And then seeing him again later in the afternoon, this time gray-faced and shaking when he finally found his father, still half in his pajamas, walking his old post on Lenox Avenue like a living time capsule.

  But Milton knew that what he had committed by taking Bill Graves Sr. from the house in Yonkers, given the man’s deteriorating mental state, was both a felony and an escalation.

  And now he was here.

  Another escalation.

  In the past, his rage, his satisfaction, climaxed in one act, one deed. But because of his desire this time aro
und to keep his own life intact, he had decided on a strategy of long-term indirect payback, and in a way this was much harder on him, leaving too much time for thinking, for agonizing, for mulling over worst-case outcomes, for justifying and then retreating, retreating and then reversing.

  Even worse, Milton was coming to discover, each act of carefully doled-out chaos set up a craving in him to get to the next one. He felt a burning urge to keep jacking up the stakes, intensify the act itself, until he could achieve something akin to that sensation of finality he had always experienced, for better or worse, in the past. But he was losing faith in his ability to rein himself in before the tale told out—if he had ever had that faith in himself to begin with.

  When he’d taken Sofia to Longfellow Avenue he had thought it was to immunize himself from himself. But now, sitting here in the parking lot of Motel Hell, he realized that it had been more of a farewell tour. If things went out of control—when things went out of control, as he had always known they would—she would at least have some sense memory of the haunted house that, after twenty-three years, had finally claimed her father.

  A son. Or so she claims. Well, it was hers. And his, scientifically speaking, but mostly hers, and he wouldn’t interfere with her plans.

  As two of the motel guests came out into the parking lot to swap powder for head, he thought about how Marilys had sat on the edge of the bed tonight, her hair combed straight down like a squaw, then thought about that thing they did the first time, the noises she made that second time.

  He took another sip of Chartreuse.

  But even if he was otherwise inclined about the baby, the way things were going he wouldn’t be around to enjoy him in any event, and the kid would just become another log on the bonfire of loss.

  Somewhere near a shot went off, a car peeled out, and a man lay on his back by the dumpsters, his legs slow-peddling the air. After a long moment he managed to flip himself over, raise up on all fours, and crawl back inside the motel.

  They had always understood each other, he and Marilys, their silences pretty companionable, neither one ever a trouble to the other, although he always felt bad about not paying her more money.

  The next thought that came to Milton was so major that after reflexively grabbing for his bat, he had to step out of the car in order to clear his head.

  To avenge his family, he would be destroying what was left of it. The Ramos family would go from two here to two gone, which is to say no one left. But what if instead of Ramos obliteration they—he—went the other way and doubled their number?

  He couldn’t imagine what Edgar would say about this new way of thinking—his older brother was the only person he’d ever known whose darkness was blacker than his own, the only person who Milton had ever come close to fearing—but he was pretty sure that his mother would be weeping with relief.

  He was still standing outside his car, bat in hand, when Carmen’s brother suddenly came out of the motel, trotted to the Range Rover, and opened the passenger door. Victor grabbed a mini-recorder from the glove box, then dropped his car keys and accidentally kicked them into the night. Using the light on his cell phone, he sank into a hunch and began duck-walking all over the lot in an effort to find them, Milton watching as Victor unwittingly came in his direction, his bowed head like an offering.

  After he’d identified himself half a dozen times through the steel door of her East Harlem SRO, Marilys, wearing a polyester nightgown, cautiously opened up, the scent of her skin lotion pleasantly knocking him on his ass.

  “I should have called,” he said, eyeing the steak knife in her left hand.

  “What’s wrong?” she whispered, her eyes wide with alarm.

  “Nothing, can I come in?”

  He had never been here before, and he was surprised by the number of plants she kept, both hanging and potted, and not so surprised by the army of religious tokens: the medallions and silver icons that festooned her walls, the plaster saints that stood on her dresser and night table, Marilys’s minuscule home like Guatemala in a box.

  There was nowhere to sit but the bed.

  He took the time he needed to compose what he wanted to say, but once he got good and going he doubted he had ever uttered so many continuous words in his life.

  “So, after my, what happened to my family, I lived with my aunt Pauline for a few years, she got me to finish high school out by her, I can’t hardly remember any of my classes or teachers but I played a little football and I enjoyed that . . . Then after graduation, I worked construction off and on, was a bouncer in a few titty bars in Williamsburg when it was still like that, got hired as a bodyguard for Fat Assassin, which was a good gig until he wanted me to start lining up girls for him this one night in some club like I was his fucking sex gofer . . . I mean, as I look back on it, me swinging on him in front of his people wasn’t the smartest thing to do, but . . . And then so of course we wound up taking it out back, which turned out very bad for the both of us, you know, in our respective ways . . . After that I kind of lost myself for a year or two, the less said about that the better, until a girl in the neighborhood that I liked who was a police cadet started talking that up, and, at the time I figured, Well, that’s one way to keep myself out of trouble, but they rejected my application because I didn’t have any college. So I went to Medgar Evers in Brooklyn, but only for a year, reapplied, got in, graduated, got my shield, got married, had Sofia, as you know, lost my wife, as you know . . .” taking a breather, thinking, What else, what else . . .

  “With women? There was a girl, Norma, in, I think, tenth grade, that was the first time, a few one-time things, some girlfriends, but nobody for long, my wife of course, plus I wasn’t above paying for it now and then, especially at first after she died, then you, of course, you know, the way we do.”

  What else . . .

  “I drink too much, as you know, and . . . I guess that’s it.”

  Of course that wasn’t it, but there would be time for telling the rest later.

  “So,” looking at her perched on the foot of her own bed, the hanging plants behind her head making him think of a jungle cat emerging into a clearing, “what do you think?”

  When he left forty-five minutes later, she kissed him on the mouth, which made him jerk back with surprise, then avidly lean in for more.

  All these firsts . . .

  CHAPTER 10

  There’s something terrible going on the bathroom, he can hear Carmen moaning from behind the half-open door, a low animal keen, and then he hears a frantic scrabbling on the tiles as if she’s desperately trying to get away from someone. He needs to get out of bed but he’s physically paralyzed, not even able to brush away the pillow that has slipped over his face and is preventing him from drawing breath. She calls out his name in a hopeless sob, more like a farewell than a cry for help, and it’s only with the greatest effort that he can even make a responding noise, a kind of high-pitched strangled mooing that actually, finally wakes him up. But though he is wide awake now, he still can’t move or draw breath, and Carmen is still in that small room with him, and he’s killing her, and Billy just cannot breathe or move, until suddenly he can, wrenching himself free from the bedsheets and stumbling into the bathroom, but of course there’s no one there.

  Sitting slumped and shaken on the edge of the bathtub, Billy wished—for the first time in nearly two decades—he desperately wished for a fat line of coke, the only thing he could think of to speed-vacuum his muzzy, terror-stricken skull.

  When he finally made it downstairs, the first person he saw was his father, reading the paper in the kitchen, which was as per usual until he remembered that the old guy was supposed to be at his daughter’s house.

  The slam of a car door drew Billy to the window, his sister about to back out of his driveway.

  “What are you doing, Brenda?” Wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, he stood by her car door in the early morning chill.

  His sister, having no intention of getting out
of the car, or even turning off the engine, rolled down the driver-side window.

  “I wake up this morning, I think it’s Charley laying next to me, but guess who.”

  “I should have warned you about that.”

  “Oh. And let me tell you about breakfast,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “We’re all sitting there, me, Dad, Charley, and my head-case mother-in-law, Rita, and all of a sudden Rita says to Dad, ‘So, Jeff, are we going to have relations tonight?’ You know what our father says? ‘Depends what time I get off.’ And Rita says back, ‘Well, call me when you know so I can cancel my game.’”

  Billy took a light off Brenda’s cigarette. “OK, so he thought she was Mom.”

  “Actually, he called her Irena.”

  “Who’s Irena?”

  Brenda put her car in gear. “Do you really want to know?” Then, reversing out of the driveway, “I can’t do it, Billy, I’m sorry.”

  On his way back up to the house, Dennis Doyle called, Billy listening to him for less than a minute before jumping into his own car and taking off for the Bronx.

  The first thing he noticed when he raced into the St. Ann’s ER was Carmen’s workstation chair upside down a good fifteen feet from her desk; the second was the bright red spatter of drops leading to the curtained cubicle.

  At the sight of him Carmen started yelling at the Indo-Afro-Asian interns that ringed her gurney. “Jesus Christ! I specifically said do not call my husband, as in, do not.”

  From what he could see of her partially averted face, there was a two-inch cut beneath her eye and the beginnings of a nasty shiner.

  “They didn’t call him, Carm,” Dennis said. “I did.”

  “What happened.” Billy wasn’t sure who he was addressing.

  “I think this might require some stitches,” one of the interns said.

  “What happened,” he repeated.

  “Oh for Christ’s sake, it’s a goddamn black eye!” Carmen back to barking. “Ice the goddamn thing, then let me go pick up my chair and get back to work. Jesus!”