The Whites: A Novel Read online

  “And the average life expectancy was what?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Billy, I’m playing with you,” he said, waving to Carmen, who was watching them from the living room window.

  “You know, Victor, your sister, she’s a real high-wire act but she’s got heart by the mile.”

  “I know.”

  Billy lit a cigarette, inhaled, then twisted his mouth to divert the smoke.

  “So why is she always so tough on you?”

  “She’s ashamed.”

  “Of you?”

  “Of herself, don’t ask me why. Because she left me to take care of our so-called father down south? I was thirteen. And now I’m thirty-six, you know?” Shrugging the whole thing off. “But I do know this. Whenever she acts like she’s trying to push me away? She’s in a lot more pain than I am.”

  Billy felt like crying.

  “I don’t know,” Victor said, taking his car keys out of his jacket, “with the twins on the way? I find myself thinking about family all the time, and I just want her to feel good about being my big sister. Even for a minute.”

  Billy nodded, then leaned in close as if Carmen could hear him through the living room glass. “Can I ask you something? How freaked are you really about these new kids of yours?”

  “Not too,” Victor said, waving goodbye to his sister in the window.

  Tomika Washington, a tall, slender, light-skinned woman looking to be in her fifties, was stretched out in her bathrobe on the carpetless floor of her railroad-flat living room, the rawhide bootlace that had done the deed still around her neck. A rolled towel was propped under her head, as if to make her comfortable, and a washcloth was carefully draped like a veil over her face, as if to prevent her from staring at her killer—both gestures, Billy knew, textbook signatures of remorse.

  With Butter and Mayo canvassing the neighbors and the Crime Scene Unit stuck in traffic, Billy was alone with the body when he heard a knock at the door. On the off chance that the actor had slipped the barricade in order to come back and apologize to his victim, Billy drew his gun before opening up and was surprised to see Gene Feeley, his elusive butterfly of love, standing there in what had to be the last Botany 500 three-piece suit in existence.

  “You have Tomika Washington in there?” Feeley asked. Then, sliding past Billy: “I just want to see her.”

  “You know her?”

  Ignoring the question, Feeley stood motionless over the body for a moment as if paying his respects, then dropped into a squat and delicately parted the lower half of her bathrobe.

  “You looking for something, Gene?”

  “That right there,” pointing to a fading tattoo of a bird high up on her thigh. “You see that? That was his brand.”

  “Whose brand?”

  “Frank Baltimore,” he said, closing her robe as carefully as he had opened it. “He was kind of a player around here for a few years in the eighties, used to stamp his bags with a blackbird, same for a girl or two like Tomika here.”

  “She was hooking for him?”

  “Never. Well, not for him—I mean, yeah, on her own, later, but she was strictly his girl before that. He found her down in Newport News on one of his dope runs when she was seventeen, beautiful kid, brought her back up and threw her a crib in Lenox Terrace. She told me she thought she was living in a fairy tale.”

  “She told you.”

  “Before I was transferred to the Queens Task Force after Eddie Byrnes got shot, I was in Narcotics up here and I had occasion to bring her in a couple of times, see if there was any kind of conversation we could have about Frank. She didn’t know shit, but she never gave me grief about getting picked up, had these country manners, didn’t know how not to be friendly, just never really got the hang of this place, you know? And when Frank finally went upstate she got tossed out on her ass, a down-home kid ashamed to go home. Oh, it was a bad time for her, first she got dope sick, which is when she started turning tricks, and then when rock came on the scene? I would see her on the street, down to about ninety pounds . . . But even then she always had that smile for me, always that well-brought-up-southern-girl thing going on, and when she’d get picked up by the cops she had my number and I’d try to get her out of whatever jam she was in, but it was hopeless. Anyways,” kneecaps popping, Feeley rose to his feet, his eyes still saying goodbye, “I heard she finally got herself clean a few years ago through some church program, so good for her.”

  “That blackbird tat?” Billy just had to say it. “It’s kind of in a hard-to-know-about place, Gene.”

  At first Feeley threw him a hard look, then shrugged. “If I wasn’t so afraid of catching the Package in those days? Me and her, we could of had a little something. We came pretty close once or twice, but . . . you know, what can I tell you, it wasn’t to be.”

  “Any ideas about the actor?”

  “With the towel, the washcloth, I’m thinking it’s someone close, a relative maybe. She has a nephew in the halfway house on a Hundred and Tenth and Lenox, Doobie Carver, a real nutcase. If you’ll allow me, I can take it from here.”

  “All yours,” Billy said, happy to see him seize the initiative on any run, for any reason.

  Feeley stepped to the door, hesitated for a beat, then turned back to the room.

  “I have to tell you,” gazing down at Tomika Washington so intently that Billy wasn’t quite sure who he was addressing, “I know I can be a real hard-on, and you don’t have the juice to tell me to do shit, but you’re a good boss, you respect your people, you don’t have a political bone in your body, and you don’t ever pass the buck. So,” finally meeting Billy’s eye, “after tonight? If you want me gone, I’ll put in the call myself.”

  “How about you stay,” Billy heard himself say.

  “I would appreciate that,” Feeley said solemnly, offering his hand.

  “Does this mean you’re going to start showing up when you’re supposed to?”

  Feeley threw him another look—Don’t press your luck—then bent down one last time to Tomika Washington. “Take care, honey,” he said.

  MILTON RAMOS

  She was supposed to come over at nine the next morning for the money to cover her airfare, but instead Marilys showed up at seven-thirty, Milton opening his eyes to see her standing red-faced and trembling at the side of his bed.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m so stupid,” she whispered, her voice clotted with tears. “She doesn’t have a passport. She doesn’t have anything.”

  “Who’s she.”

  More drunk than hungover, Milton sat up, stood up, and then had to sit back down as the Chartreuse rebooted.

  “My mother, why am I so stupid.”

  “OK, all right,” grinding the heels of his palms into eyes. “What time is it?”

  Marilys dropped down alongside him, her shoulders as slumped as his own. “This was a bad idea.”

  “OK, so you’ll go get her when she gets one.”

  “No. I mean getting married.”

  “Getting married is a bad idea? Since when?”

  “Last night I dreamed the priest was blessing us and my mother just crushed.”

  “Crushed?”

  “Like a flower, when they speed up the movie and you see it bloom then dry up then crush down to nothing. To dust, because she wasn’t there.”

  “Wasn’t where,” his skull like a soft-boiled egg.

  “There when we got married. She died in her house because she wasn’t with us.”

  He took a deep breath, and his back teeth tasted bile. “Listen to me”—taking her hand—“you had a dream. It’s a dream.”

  “No.”

  “Everybody has bad dreams. You should see some of mine.”

  “Mine always come true. Always. When I was a girl, I dreamed one of my brothers was in the hospital, and the next day he broke his back. When I was married the first time, I dreamed my husband got cancer, and I buried him in a year.”

&nb
sp; “Then whatever you do, don’t ever dream about me,” Milton joking to smother his growing panic.

  Leaning into him, Marilys broke down, her boiling tears searing his skin.

  “OK. How about this: we work on getting your mother a green card, a passport, or whatever. Meanwhile you come live with me, have the baby, but we wait to get married until you can bring her over.”

  “No.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Milton starting to sweat. “Why not.”

  “We live like a man and a woman, maybe the same thing happens to her.”

  “I feel like a prisoner of your brain right now, you know that?” Despite the sharpness of his tone, he meant it more as a plea than a rebuke, though she seemed not to have heard him at all.

  “We can’t do it.” Then, looking up at him like Our Lady of Sorrows: “Maybe I should just go back to work for you, live by myself.”

  “You’re killing me.”

  “Maybe I should just go back to live with her.”

  “In Guatemala? Are you crazy?”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  Milton shot to his feet, then immediately sat back down. “What about the baby?”

  “It’s still our baby.”

  “I know that,” he snapped, then, casting about for the next anchor: “What about Sofia?”

  She put her head in his lap, her hand clutching his hip.

  “Jesus Christ, what about me?”

  She began to cry, her hot tears this time turning him on, which only increased his panic.

  “OK,” he said, not raising her head. “Let’s think this through. Who do you know in Guatemala.”

  “My family,” she said, then: “What do you mean?”

  “All right, your cousin the travel agent, who does he know?”

  “I don’t know who he knows.”

  “You know what I mean by ‘knows’?”

  “I think so,” she said, then: “Yeah, I do.”

  “How about you call him.”

  “He doesn’t open up until ten.”

  “Then call him at ten.”

  But it was only eight, and they sat in coiled silence on the bed until nine. Then, without any preliminary communication, they began to go at it—and whether it was the overlay of doom in the air or just the emotional rawness of the last ninety minutes, when he finally rolled off her they were both crying like babies.

  At ten, she went down into the den to make the call, leaving him damp-skinned in his bed. He loved the idea of making a family with her, yet until now he had never thought he actually loved her. But something had changed this morning. Milton Ramos was officially in love with Marilys Irrizary. If he had a pocket knife he would carve it into a tree.

  Forty-five minutes passed before he heard her coming back up to the bedroom door, forty-five minutes during which he had been afraid to so much as blink. But when she appeared in the doorway her relieved laughter came to his ears like a flock of butterflies.

  “He said he has a friend.”

  “Dreams,” Milton said. “You’re crazy, you know that?”

  “Maybe,” she answered, her face near radioactive with joy.

  Her travel agent cousin on Fordham Road in the Bronx had told her that he would be able to swing a round-trip ticket for her, Newark to Guatemala City and back, and a one-way ticket for her mother, all for fifteen hundred dollars, which was a good deal compared to the prices posted online. But in exchange for the deep discount, he wanted to be paid in cash.

  Whatever.

  The wincer came later in the day when Marilys called him at work to say that her cousin had made some calls to a law firm in Guatemala City with embassy connections and found out that the package price for getting her mother a passport and a U.S. work visa, both delivered within forty-eight hours of payment, would be eighty-five hundred American dollars.

  Milton’s first reaction was to balk altogether, his second to negotiate the fee. Unable to do that, and fearful of losing his crazy, superstitious amorcita forever over a few thousand bucks, he bit the bullet, went down to his union’s pension loan unit, and withdrew the money.

  Whatever whatever whatever.

  At seven in the evening the line for the JFK express bus, which began across the street from Grand Central Station, was nearly two blocks long, the waiting travelers looking antsy and drawn in the early twilight gloom.

  “It would have been easy for me to drive you,” Milton said for the sixth time.

  “I like the bus,” Marilys said, leaning into him for warmth. “The bus always gives me good luck.”

  Fifteen minutes behind schedule, the sleek, oversized carrier appeared at the crest of Thirty-ninth Street and Park, and then just sat there through three green lights, torturing the people waiting two blocks below on Forty-first.

  “Anyways”—handing her a gift-wrapped package—“it’s for your mother, from me and Sofia.”

  Instead of stashing the present in her bag, which would have frustrated him, she opened it on the spot, flapping out the hemp-colored serape he had bought from a Guatemalan street vendor in the West Village.

  “Milton, it’s beautiful.”

  “I didn’t know her size, but it’s basically a bath towel with a neckhole so . . .”

  Marilys put her hands to the sides of his face and kissed him in front of everybody, Milton still a little awkward with her new full-frontal affection but starting to get used to it just fine.

  The bus began to roll downhill to the waiting crowd, but so slowly that it caught a red light while still a block away, some people around them audibly groaning in frustration.

  When the doors sighed open a few moments later and the passengers began to get on, Marilys continued to linger with him, until, worried about her missing the flight, he hustled her onto the bus himself.

  It wasn’t until she was well on her way out to the airport and he was most of the way back to the Bronx that Milton realized what an idiot he’d been.

  Who the hell sends a gift of Guatemalan clothing to a person already living in Guatemala?

  CHAPTER 12

  Having caught yet another pain-in-the-ass, last-minute run, this one a nonfatal stabbing in an East Village halfway house, Billy finally walked through his front door at ten the next morning to find John MacCormack from Brooklyn Narcotics sitting across from Carmen in the living room, two untouched coffees between them.

  “I thought I saw a Firebird up the street,” Billy looking to his wife, who imperceptibly shook her head in warning, as if he needed any kind of high sign here.

  “My supervisor says I should have pushed you harder the other night,” MacCormack said.

  “Pushed me harder about what.”

  “He was talking about collecting your guns, but I told him that was probably an overreaction.”

  “An overreaction to what.”

  MacCormack slowly got to his feet. “I need to ask you again,” going into Billy’s eyes. “What’s your interest in finding Eric Cortez.”

  The only one seated now, Carmen repeatedly ran her palms down the thighs of her jeans, her face quizzical and tense.

  “You know what?” Billy’s all-night exhaustion helped keep him calm. “I told you that the first time you asked me. What I also told you was that I had, I have, no intention to mess with anybody’s play. So. You want to collect my guns? I don’t know what the fuck for, but bring in your people and go at it.”

  “Is he dead?” MacCormack asked.

  “What?”

  “You asked me the other night if Cortez was dead. Why.”

  “Carm, let me talk to him in private.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

  “Why,” MacCormack said again.

  “Because animals like him tend not to have long lives and I hoped he was. But if I thought asking you would put me in any kind of jackpot, I would’ve kept my mouth shut. I’m twenty years on the Job, how stupid do you think I am?”

  MacCormack stood there scanning him for t
ells.

  “So he is dead?” Billy asked, an honest question.

  “No.”

  “Then I don’t get it.”

  “Billy, what’s going on.”

  “Carmen, just . . .”

  “Hey, look who’s here!” Billy Senior nearly shouted as he walked into the room and slapped MacCormack on the back. “Jackie MacCormack! I thought you were in Florida!”

  Billy watched as MacCormack went into his internal face file for a moment, then shook his father’s hand.

  “Billy Graves, how the hell are you?”

  “Never been worse,” the old man said, then wandered into the kitchen, where Millie was making his breakfast.

  “What was that about?” Billy asked.

  “He’s your father?” MacCormack seemed a little dazed.

  “Yeah, how does he know you?”

  “He doesn’t. He was with my old man in the TPF for a few years back in the sixties. I wasn’t even born yet. I just recognized him from pictures my mother keeps around.”

  Billy peered into the kitchen, his father sitting there now, eating dry cereal and watching a talk show on the miniature TV that sat next to the microwave.

  “He’s pretty much shot,” Billy said.

  “Are you sure about that?” MacCormack still coming off slightly stunned. “Because I have to tell you, I look nothing like my dad.”

  Billy experienced an all-too-familiar surge of optimism, then shut it down, the rhythm of his father’s inexorable deterioration always spiked with these cruel upticks of startling keenness that raised his hopes for a moment before dashing them with the next time-warp slippage into dementia, Billy suddenly desperate to get away from his father before the next inevitable reminder came about of what a fool he was, is, always will be around the old man, until death took him away.

  Snapping back into the here and now, Billy first looked to his wife, then to MacCormack, both staring at him as if they had been following his thoughts.

  “You want to collect my guns?” he said, ejecting the clip, then handing MacCormack the grip end of his Glock. “I have a Ruger in a lockbox in the basement, and my father’s old hand cannon is in his room. My wife can take you, have a blast.”