The Whites: A Novel Page 2

  “You got it in there?” Woody barked from the hallway. “I know you got it in there.”

  “Just go back and watch your TV,” Stupak’s voice coming through the closed door.

  When the girlfriend finally stood upright from the hamper, she held the silver medal in her hands, as big around as a coffee saucer.

  “See, when he gets his drink on he wants to pawn it and start a new life. He did it already a few times, and how much you think he got for it?”

  “A few grand?”

  “A hundred and twenty-five dollars.”

  “Can I hold it?”

  Billy was disappointed in how light it was, but he felt a little buzzed nonetheless.

  “See, Horace’s OK most of the time, I mean, I certainly been with worse, it’s just when he gets his hands on that Cherry Heering, you know? The man has got a alcoholic sweet tooth like a infant. I mean, you could get a good bottle of fifty-dollar cognac or Johnnie Walker Black, leave it on the table, he won’t even crack the seal. Something tastes like a purple candy bar? Watch out.”

  “I want my damn medal back!” Woody yelled from farther away in the apartment.

  “Sir, what did I just say to you?” Stupak’s voice flattening with anger.

  “Start a new life . . .” the girlfriend muttered. “All the pawnshops around here got me on speed dial for when it comes in. Hell, he wants to take off? I’ll loan him the money, but this here is a piece of American history.”

  Billy liked her, he just didn’t understand why a woman this lucid didn’t keep a cleaner house.

  “So what do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing. I’m sorry they sent you. Usually some uniform guys from the precinct come up, mainly just because he was a famous athlete, and we play Where’d she hide it this time, but you’re a detective, and I’m embarrassed they bothered you.”

  When they opened the bathroom door, Woody was back in the living room, sprawled on the vinyl-covered couch watching MTV with the sound off, his jellied eyes dimming into slits.

  Billy dropped the medal on his chest. “Case solved.”

  Walking with Stupak to the elevators he checked the time: three-thirty. Ninety more minutes and the odds were he’d have gotten away with murder.

  “What do you say?”

  “You’re the boss, boss.”

  “Finnerty’s?” Billy thinking, What the hell, you cannot not celebrate, thinking, Just a taste.

  “I always wanted to go to Ireland,” Stupak shouted over the music to the dead-handsome young bartender. “Last year we had reservations and everything but, like, two days before the flight my girlfriend came down with appendicitis.”

  “You can always get on a plane by yourself, you know,” he said politely enough, looking over her shoulder to wave at two women just coming through the door. “It’s a very friendly country.”

  And that was that, the guy leaning across the wood to buss the new arrivals and leaving Stupak to blush into her beer.

  “I’ve never been to Ireland myself,” Billy said. “I mean, what for, I’m around Micks all day as it is.”

  “I never should’ve said ‘girlfriend,’” Stupak said.

  His cell rang, not the Wheel, thank God, but his wife, Billy race-walking out onto the street so she wouldn’t hear the racket and start asking questions.

  “Hey . . .” his voice downshifting as it always did when she rang him this deep into the night. “Can’t sleep?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did you take your Traz?”

  “I think I forgot but I can’t now, I have to get up in three hours.”

  “How about you take a half?”

  “I can’t.”

  “All right, just, you know, you’ve been here before, worse comes to worse, you’ll have a tough day tomorrow but it won’t kill you.”

  “When are you coming home?”

  “I’ll try and duck out early.”

  “I hate this, Billy.”

  “I know you do.” His cell began to vibrate again; Rollie Towers on line two. “Hang on a sec.”

  “I really hate it.”

  “Just hang on . . .” Then, switching over: “Hey, what’s up.”

  “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.”

  “Fuck you, what do you got.”

  “Happy St. Patrick’s Day,” said the Wheel.

  By the time Billy and most of his squad made it to Penn Station and then to the long, greasy, lower-level arcade that connected the Long Island–bound commuter trains to the subway platforms at the opposite end, the cops who were on the scene first, both Transit and LIRR undercovers, had taken control of the situation better than he would have expected. Not sure what to preserve of the one-hundred-yard blood trail, they had cordoned it all off with tape and garbage cans like a slalom run. They had also miraculously managed to round up most of the sodden homebound revelers who had been standing under the track information board when the assault occurred, corralling them into a harshly lit three-sided waiting room off the main concourse. Taking a quick peek into the room, Billy saw the majority of his potential witnesses sitting on hard wooden benches gape-mouthed and snoring, chins tilted to the ceiling like hungry baby birds.

  “Looks like the guy got slashed under the board here, took off running, and ran out of gas by the subway,” Gene Feeley announced, his tie unknotted and dangling like Sinatra at last call.

  Billy was surprised to see Feeley there at all, let alone first detective on the scene. But then again, this was Feeley’s thing, the old-timer usually disdaining any run unless there were at least three dead or a shot cop, front-page stuff.

  “Where’s the body?” Billy thinking he’d be lucky to see his kids by dinnertime.

  “Just follow the yellow brick road,” Feeley said, pointing to the red-brown sneaker prints that marked the way like bloody dance-step instructions. “It’s one for the scrapbooks, I’ll tell you that.”

  They arrived at the subway turnstiles just as a southbound express pulled into the station, more pie-eyed revelers disembarking onto the platform, ho-shitting, laughing, stumbling, blowing vuvuzelas, everyone assuming the wide-eyed stiff was just drunk except for the two middle-aged detectives from the Crime Scene Unit who had opted to take the subway to work, their forensics kits making them look like down-at-the-heels salesmen.

  Billy snagged a wandering Transit detective. “Listen, we can’t have trains stopping here right now. Can you call your boss?”

  “Sarge, it’s Penn Station.”

  “I know where we are, but I don’t want a fresh herd of drunks stomping all over my scene every five minutes.”

  The victim lay on his side, neck and torso compressed into a hunch, his left arm and leg thrust straight out before him as if he were trying to kick his own fingertips. It looked to Billy as if the guy had been trying to jump the turnstile, bled out mid-vault, then froze like that, dying in midair before dropping like a rock.

  “Looks like a high hurdler just fell off the front of a Wheaties box,” Feeley said, then wandered off.

  As a CSU tech began teasing the wallet out of the victim’s formerly sky-blue jeans, Billy stopped marveling at his live-action lava cast and took his first good look at his face. Mid-twenties, with wide open, startled blue eyes, arched pencil-thin eyebrows, milk-white skin, and jet-colored hair, femininely handsome to the point of perversity.

  Billy stared and stared, thinking, Can’t be. “Is his name Bannion?”

  “Hold the phone,” the tech said, pulling out the guy’s driver’s license. “Bannion it is, first name—”

  “Jeffrey,” Billy said, then: “Fuck me sideways.”

  “Why do I know that name?” the CSU tech asked, not really interested in an answer.

  Jeffrey Bannion . . . Billy immediately thought of calling John Pavlicek, then considered the hour and decided to wait at least until daybreak, although Big John might not mind being woken up for this one.

  Eight years earlier, a twel
ve-year-old boy named Thomas Rivera had been found beneath a soiled mattress in the tree house of his City Island neighbors, the Bannions. He had been bludgeoned to death, the bedding atop his body spattered with semen. John Pavlicek, back in the late ’90s Billy’s partner in anti-crime but at the time of the murder a detective assigned to the Bronx Homicide Task Force, was called in when the body was found by a cadaver dog three days after the boy went missing.

  Jeffrey Bannion’s oversized, learning-disabled younger brother, Eugene, admitted to the jerking off—the tree house was where he always went for that—but said that when he discovered the boy, he was already dead. Nineteen-year-old Jeffrey told Pavlicek that he himself was sick in bed that day, said Eugene had already told him that he had done it. But when the cops turned the lights on the younger Bannion, Eugene not only stuck to his story but couldn’t even begin to speculate on how Thomas Rivera had come to be in the tree house or talk about what kind of weapon had done the deed, no matter how much trickery or cajoling the Homicides employed, and it made no sense that a fifteen-year-old that dim could hold out on them.

  Pavlicek liked the older Bannion for it from the jump, but they couldn’t shake his sick-bed story, and so the younger brother went to the Robert N. Davoren juvenile center at Rikers, a Bloods, Ñetas, and MS-13 petri dish, where he was placed in Gen Pop without the requisite psych eval, a big oafy white kid who tended to throw indiscriminate punches when he was freaked, and his murder, only five days into his incarceration, racked up nearly as many headlines as that of the boy he had allegedly killed.

  Within days, despite Pavlicek’s full-bore campaigning, the Rivera homicide was marked “closed by arrest,” formally shutting down any further investigative work. Shortly after that, Jeffrey Bannion packed his bags and moved in with various relatives out of state. At first, Pavlicek tried to swallow his frustration by burying himself in other jobs—although he never lost touch with Thomas Rivera’s parents and he never lost track of Bannion’s whereabouts—but when he learned, through connections, of two incidents of assault in which the vics were preadolescent males, one in each of the small towns Jeffrey was living in at the time, neither investigation leading to an arrest, his obsession with nailing this kid returned in raging full effect.

  Eventually Bannion moved back to New York, sharing a house in Seaford, Long Island, with three friends. Pavlicek, still on him like Javert, reached out to both the Seventh Precinct in neighboring Wantagh and the Nassau County Detective Bureau, but either Jeffery had kept his nose clean or he had gotten even slicker with age. The last anyone had heard of him—and most galling of all—was that he had recently applied to the auxiliary PDs of a dozen Long Island townships and had been offered training by three.

  “My supervisor wants to know how long we have to be shut down for,” the returning Transit detective said.

  “We’ll be as fast as we can be,” Billy said.

  “He says we got to mop that blood up out there by five-thirty, same for removing the body. That’s when the commuters start coming in earnest.”

  Clean it up or preserve it . . . Clean it up or preserve it . . . Somebody will complain; somebody always complains.

  As another mob staggered off the latest 2 train into Penn Station, a teenage girl stared goggle-eyed at Bannion for a second, looked up searchingly into her boyfriend’s eyes, then wheeled and puked onto the platform, adding her DNA to the mix.

  “It’s a bad night for this,” the Transit cop said.

  Stepping back into the seamy arcade, Billy stared down the length of the tape. Other than the still-congealing blood, the killing floor—a debris field of candy wrappers, Styrofoam cups, the odd article of clothing, a shattered liquor bottle barely held together by the adhesive on its label—gave up too much and nothing at all.

  As CSU continued to bag and photograph, as the LIRR and Transit detectives and his own crew began to work the waiting room, wandering among the semiconscious potential wits like a squadron of visiting nurses, Billy noticed that one of the commuters sleeping there had what appeared to be blood on his Rangers jersey.

  He took a seat next to him on a wooden bench, the kid’s head tilted back so far it looked as if someone had slit his throat.

  “Hey you.” Billy nudged him.

  The kid came out of it, shaking his head like a cartoon animal just whacked with an anvil.

  “What’s your name.”

  “Mike.”

  “Mike what.”

  “What?”

  “How’d you get the blood on you, Mike?”

  “Me?” Still whipping his head from side to side.

  “You.”

  “Where . . .” Looking at his jersey, then: “That’s blood?”

  “You know Jeffrey Bannion?”

  “Do I know him?”

  Billy waiting, One Mississippi, two . . .

  “Where is he,” the kid asked.

  “So you know him? Jeffrey Bannion?”

  “What if I do?”

  “You see what happened?”

  “What? What are you talking about, what happened?”

  “He’s been stabbed.”

  The kid shot to his feet. “What? I’ll fucking kill them.”

  “Kill who.”

  “What?”

  “Who do you want to kill.”

  “How the fuck should I know? Who did it. You leave them to me.”

  “Did you see it?”

  “See what?”

  “When was the last time you saw him? Where was he, who was he with.”

  “He’s like a brother to me.”

  “Who was he with.”

  “How should I know. What am I, his bitch?”

  “His what? Where do you live.”

  “Strong Island.”

  “More specifically.”

  “Seaford.”

  “Who else was with you, point out your posse.”

  “My posse?”

  “Who, sitting here, in this waiting room, was with you tonight, everybody going home to Seaford.”

  “I’m no rat.”

  “I’m asking who are his friends.”

  Mike turned his head as if it were on a rusty turret, taking in half the dull-eyed commuters around him.

  “Ey,” he blared. “You hear what happened?”

  No one even turned his way.

  “Anybody carrying anything tonight?” Billy asked.

  “Like weed?”

  “Like a weapon.”

  “Everything’s a weapon.”

  “How’d you get that blood on you, again?”

  “What blood,” the kid said, touching his face.

  “Was anybody in your pos . . . was anybody beefing with anybody tonight?”

  “Tonight?” The kid blinked. “Tonight we’re going into the city.”

  Billy decided to send him and everybody else to Midtown South in order to sleep it off, then be reinterviewed. His guess was that these interviews would yield nothing. He was also pretty sure that with half the eastern seaboard stomping through the crime scene like migrating wildebeests, the forensics would be useless as well. His money was on the surveillance tape.

  He called it in to his division captain, the guy instantly starting to quack like a duck as if Billy had killed Bannion himself, worked for a while with the Transit cops down by the subways and the LIRR detectives under the track information board, and then, praying for a money shot, climbed the stairs to the cramped room where the monitors were set up, only to be told by the tech on duty that the master hard drive that uploaded all the security footage had been damaged by a coffee spill a few hours before and the only way to salvage the film at this point was to send it out for file retrieval, a process that could take days, if not weeks.

  Back down on the floor, needing one of his squad to supervise the witness transport, Billy started to approach Feeley but balked when he saw him yakking it up with a white-haired deputy inspector, the two of them probably swapping memories of their time together chasing
Pancho Villa. He went looking for Stupak instead and found her standing in front of a riot-gated calzone shop interviewing a maintenance worker.

  As soon as he told Stupak what he wanted done, her glance reflexively went to Feeley. “What,” she muttered, “General Grant too busy prepping for Gettysburg?”

  No one liked having Feeley on the squad, but no one liked him less than Alice, a hater of both the old boy network and shirkers in general. It was personal, too: despite her sixteen years on the Job, including seven in Emergency Services and three with the Violent Fugitive Apprehension Team, the old bastard took way too much pleasure in addressing her now and then as Babydoll.

  Once Stupak was on her way, Billy fielded another overwrought call from his division cap, followed by one from the squad commander of Midtown South. Then, at seven a.m., with the scene secured and none of the possible witnesses in any shape to talk, Billy decided to sneak back to Yonkers just long enough to take his kids to school.

  At this hour the traffic on the northbound Henry Hudson Parkway was mercifully light, and by seven forty-five he was turning onto his street. As he pulled up to the house, he saw Carmen standing on a six-foot ladder in front of the carport, trying to extract the deflated basketball jammed between the portable hoop and the backboard, the thing having been stuck like that since January, when it became too cold for the kids to play.

  “Just poke it, Carm.”

  “I tried. It’s in too tight.”

  Sitting behind the wheel in a half-trance of exhaustion, Billy watched her try to muscle the ball free, the morning sun turning her polyester nurse’s whites the color of ice.

  She was his second wife. His first, Diane, an African-American art therapist, had left him in the wake of the highly publicized protests over his accidental and near-fatal shooting of a ten-year-old Hispanic boy in the Bronx. In all fairness, the bullet that hit the kid had first passed through its intended target, a Dusted giant armed with an already bloodied lead pipe. At first, Diane, only twenty-three at the time to his twenty-five, tried to hang fire with him, but after the papers picked it up and a Bronx reverend with a fat press book set up a month-long protest vigil around their Staten Island home, she gradually came apart and then bailed.