The Whites: A Novel Page 3

  Billy had met Carmen when he was in the Identification Squad posted to the ME’s office, having been sent there from anti-crime as a form of internal exile after the shooting. She had come in that day to identify Damian Robles, until his OD, thirty-six hours earlier, her living husband.

  Despite being a heroin addict, Robles had been a mixed martial arts professional with a ridiculously chiseled physique, and it embarrassed Billy to admit that two days after death the guy still looked better than Billy did on the best day of his own life.

  Dead was dead, however, and twenty minutes after first laying eyes on her, as they stood side by side staring at the corpse through a long rectangular window, he just came out and said it: “What were you doing married to a lowlife like that?”

  But instead of going for his face or screaming bloody murder, she calmly answered, “I thought he was what I deserved.”

  Within a month they were leaving clothes in each other’s apartments.

  Within a year they were sending out save-the-dates.

  Her initial attraction to him, or so he thought at the time, was a no-brainer: sudden widow looking about and glomming onto the protective policeman standing by her side. Billy had always been a sucker for any kind of My Hero vibes when they occasionally came his way, but in truth he had fallen in love purely because of her looks and the way she sounded: her huge, smudge-rimmed eyes in a heart-shaped face, her skin the color of light toast, and that voice—lazy and smoky when she felt that way and backed by a deep and easy laugh that made him drowsy with pleasure. Lust was there from the beginning, but every other long-playing thing—trust, tenderness, companionability, et cetera—had only come about with time.

  Not that living with her was any walk in the park. Her mood swings were fierce, and she was prone to savage dreams, often waking him up with her sleep talk, semicoherent tear-choked pleas to be left alone. And what he at first thought was a temporary desire for a protector in her life had over the years morphed into a river of visceral, mostly inarticulate need for him, a neediness he never quite understood but responded to with everything he had. She could never wear him out with her demands; there was something about her that made him want to be the best possible version of himself. He loved her, loved to come through for her, loved that what he had always thought of with embarrassment as his flatline personality, his bland stolidness, could become the rock in the raging sea of another soul’s life.

  Still, there was something inside her he could never quite get at. Sometimes he felt like a knight assigned to protect a maiden from a dragon that only she could see, and so he paid attention to the words when she cried out in her sleep, when her half-panicked rants became less coherent and maybe closer to the bone, but he was not a particularly analytical individual, so all his secret studying came to nothing. And given that he had been raised in a home in which he’d been taught to take people as they were, no questions asked, a home in which the character trait prized above all else was an Apache level of forbearance, he would die before straight up asking his wife of twelve years, the mother of his two sons, Who Are You.

  “Where are the survivalists?” he called from the car.

  “You’re taking them?” she asked.

  “Yeah, but I left a body at Penn Station, so I got to go back right after.”

  “I can take them.”

  “No, just where are—”

  “Declan!”

  Billy’s all-night eyelids butterflied in pain: Carmen’s initial solution for finding anyone was to yell.

  Stalling for a last heartbeat of inaction, he let his gaze stray to their front porch, where Carmen’s green nylon St. Patrick’s Day banner, all shamrocks and wee people, snapped in the wind, one day past its expiration date, although Billy knew that by dinnertime it would be replaced with the Easter banner, bunnies and parti-colored eggs on a backdrop of powder blue.

  “I’ll get them,” he finally said, climbing out of the car like a man with prosthetic hips.

  The interior of the house was a rambling, amiable mess—a war chest’s worth of boys’ toys and sports gear strewn around the living room, smothering the worn brocade couch and matching easy chairs; a big yellow eat-in kitchen with its painted-wood “country” table perpetually covered with bills, circulars, condiments, and the odd hat or glove; three thin-walled bedrooms all crying out for a fresh coat of paint; and a sunken den that for some reason always smelled like mushrooms. And wherever one looked was evidence of Carmen’s obsession with country cornball: real, ceramic, or papier-mâché Indian corn and pumpkins resting on every available surface, homely homilies inscribed on chain-hung plaques, farm-stand-purchased whirligigs, milkmaids painted on wooden ovals, and enough framed sketches of barnyards, thatched cottages, and lonely rural lanes to fill a Hallmark museum.

  All of this occasionally set Billy’s teeth on edge, but given his wife’s childhood and early adolescence in the cracked-out Bronx of the late 1980s, her later teen years in the notorious East Metro section of Atlanta, and her current job as a triage nurse in the St. Ann’s knife-and-gun-club ER, he didn’t have the heart to question her taste in decor. In fact, he couldn’t care less what the house looked like, as long as it made her happy. All he cared about was his books, the shelves in the den filled with crime novels written mainly by ex-cops, retirement for dummies self-help volumes, sports memoirs, and real estate study guides, these last foisted on him by John Pavlicek, who was hell-bent on hiring him to help run his empire of apartment buildings the moment Billy put in his papers.

  Looking for the kids, Billy came upon his six-year-old, Carlos, sitting on the side of his bunk bed dressed in full camo, staring at his seventy-eight-year-old grandfather asleep under the kid’s X-Men blanket. Billy’s dad was a well-remembered city-wide Chief of Patrol who had first made his name as a foot soldier with the Tactical Patrol Force, a.k.a. Riot Squad, during the anti-war, let-it-burn days of the late ’60s. These days, however, the old guy tended to go in and out of thinking that his grandsons were both Billy and that he was still living in his first home in Fordham Heights with his dead wife. Additionally, he often got up and crept into someone else’s bed in the middle of the night, either one of the kids’ or Billy and Carmen’s, making pajamas mandatory sleepwear for one and all.

  “Let’s go, buddy.”

  “Is Grandpa gonna die?” Carlos asked calmly.

  “Not today.”

  Eight-year-old Declan, also wearing camo from boots to forage cap, was on his knees in the living room, trying to get the pet rabbit out from under a couch with a hockey stick, the huddled, personality-less thing hissing and sneezing like a Komodo dragon.

  “Dec, just leave him there.”

  “What if he bites an electric cord?”

  “Then we’ll have rabbit for dinner. Let’s go.”

  Just as they finally left the house, Billy’s cell rang, the division captain again, and he locked himself in the car before the kids could get inside and screw his play.

  “Hey, boss.”

  “Where are you at?”

  “Midtown South doing the bullets and waiting for some of the witnesses to revive.”

  “Why’d you let them clean up the scene?”

  “Because it’s Penn Station, you have fifty thousand people walking through.”

  “It’s a crime scene.”

  “Again, it’s Penn Station. It’s the crossroads of the Western world.”

  “What are you, Radio Free America? Since when does Transit call the shots?”

  “This time they were right.” Then adding: “In my opinion.”

  “How about the security tapes.”

  “Computer glitch.”

  “Computer glitch.”

  “They sent them over to TARU.”

  “Dad!” Declan belted out, slapping the car window.

  “Billy!” Carmen came over with the frozen basketball. “What the hell are you doing? They’re going to be late!”

  “Who was that?” the division cap as
ked.

  “Boss, one of the wits just gave up a name. I’ll call you back.”

  After dropping off the boys at their school, Billy headed back into the city, wrote up his bullets for the day-tour detectives in Midtown South—it was their headache now—debriefed a few bosses, fended off a police shack reporter, ducked a TV camera, and got back in the car. When he finally re-returned to the house at one p.m., Millie Singh, the alleged housekeeper, was watching Mob Wives Chicago with his father in the living room, neither of them acknowledging his presence.

  Millie barely knew her way around a mop, prepared spicy Indo-Caribbean dishes that would tear your throat out, and tended to take naps on the job. But back in the day she had been the only one in their moonscape of a precinct with guts enough to take the stand in a gang-related homicide, and as a result she’d had to sleep in her bathtub in order to protect herself from the nightly gunshots coming through her windows, until Billy and the others moved her into one of Pavlicek’s newly renovated buildings. Ten years later, at roughly the same time that Billy’s father had first been diagnosed with dementia, Millie’s teenage daughter moved back to Trinidad to live with her father and she lost her job at Dunkin’ Donuts. Hiring her as their housekeeper had seemed like a good idea at the time, and in all fairness to Millie, the kids loved her, she loved his dad, and she was in possession of a valid driver’s license. Besides, Carmen liked to do her own housecleaning, if you could call it that.

  Billy stepped into the kitchen, poured himself half a milk glass of vodka and cranberry juice—the only thing that could put him to sleep at this hour—and went into the bedroom. He stowed his Glock 9 on the top shelf of his closet behind a shoe box filled with old bank statements, and with a last burst of energy called Pavlicek to give him a heads-up about Bannion.

  “Hey.”

  “I heard,” Pavlicek said.

  “What do you think,” Billy said, crawling into the cool swan boat of a bed.

  “That there’s a God after all.”

  “It was a freaky scene.”

  “I heard that too.”

  “Heard from who?”

  “The drums.”

  “Do the Riveras know?”

  “I called them this morning.”

  “How’d they take it?”

  “The mister was cool, Mom not so good. I’m going out to City Island to see them later.”

  “Good.” Billy’s eyes felt like sandpits.

  “I want you to come with me.”

  “John, I’m sleeping.”

  “You saw the dead fuck. They might need to ask you things.”

  “Come on, this is private with you and them.”

  “Billy, I’m asking you.”

  He gargled the last of his drink, crunched on a sliver of ice. “Make it about six, I just got into bed.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You owe me.”

  “Afterwards we can pick up Whelan, then head downtown to the restaurant.”

  “The dinner’s tonight?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “OK, let me sleep.”

  “Hey,” Pavlicek held on, “what’s the most bullshit word in the English language.”

  “Closure.”

  “Give that man a cigar,” Pavlicek said, then hung up.

  He had forgotten all about the dinner, the monthly steak house reunion of the self-christened Wild Geese, seven young cops averaging three years on the Job, fresh to anti-crime in the late ’90s, a tight crew given a ticket to ride in one of the worst precincts of the East Bronx. Of the original seven, one had moved to Arizona after retirement, and one had died from a three-pack-a-day habit, leaving a hard-core five: Billy, Pavlicek, Jimmy Whelan, Yasmeen Assaf-Doyle, and Redman Brown.

  They had been something else back then, preternaturally proactive, sometimes showing up at the trouble spots two steps ahead of the actors, and they were decathletes, chasing their prey through backyards and apartments, across rooftops, up and down fire escapes, and into bodies of water. Many cops administered beatdowns as a penalty for being made to run, but the WGs got high off the chase, often treating their collars post-arrest like members of a defeated softball team. They thought of themselves as a family, and family membership was extended automatically to those in the neighborhood they liked: the owners of bodegas, bars, barbershops, and take-out joints, but also the numbers runners—the numbers going back to the Bible as far as they were concerned—a few of the old school reefer men, and a handful of restaurateurs who had secret gaming rooms upstairs or in the basement where the WGs could throw some bones and drink for free.

  As far as stolen goods went, fell-off-a-truck merchandisers oftentimes offered NYPD courtesy discounts on everything from kids’ backpacks to designer pantsuits to power tools. A drink here, a standing hump there, a cut-rate cashmere pullover now and then—no one in the Wild Geese took money, demanded a sin tax, or even lost their civility. Although they were periodically called on to corral a few for the requisite trip to the Tombs, they generally tolerated whores who were reasonably discreet and, as an added bonus, funny. Nonviolent junkies were left on the street and used as informants. Their dealers, however, were fair game.

  And if one of the family got hurt by a bad player—a street girl having her eye blackened or finger broken by her Slapaho Mac Daddy, a Wild Geeser catching a paintball or pellet-gun round in the back, a casino operator or bodega owner taken off by the local mokes—then they would all descend as one, and the beatdowns and banishments would commence. It was all about family; they would do the job as required, but they would really step to the fore for those they deemed “worthy,” given that some people in the East Bronx, as elsewhere, as everywhere, would always try to get high to escape, want a little extracurricular loving, chase a money dream scribbled in numbers across a crumple of paper. Not all cops were as laissez-faire in their attitude toward the outriders of the precinct, but the Wild Geese, in the eyes of the people they protected and occasionally avenged, walked the streets like gods.

  The good news and the bad news was that their kind of high-yield police work was a fast track to a gold shield. Within five years, all the original WGs had moved on, the irony being that Billy, who was the youngest and least experienced, had been the first one to get the nod. After the double shooting, which earned him both a citation for bravery and a civilian review board hearing, the department, in its slap/caress way, decided to promote him in order to bury him—in his case, to the basement of the morgue, since the Identification Squad, like any other, was composed primarily of detectives.

  At the end of the day, some of the WGs became better detectives than street soldiers, others lesser cops behind their gold shields. Some discovered gifts never used before; others lost the opportunity to use the gifts they had had all along.

  And it was also as detectives, dispersed to various squads across the boroughs, that, like Pavlicek coming up against a Jeffrey Bannion, they had all met their personal Whites, those who had committed criminal obscenities on their watch and then walked away untouched by justice, leaving their obsessed ex-WG hunters heading into retirement with pilfered case files to pore over in their offices and basements at night, still making the odd unsanctioned follow-up call: to the overlooked counterman in the deli where the killer had had a coffee the morning of the murder, to the cousin upstate who had never been properly interviewed about that last phone conversation he had with the victim, to the elderly next-door neighbor who left on a Greyhound to live with her grandchildren down in Virginia two days after the bloodbath on the other side of the shared living room wall—and always, always, calling the spouses, children, and parents of the murdered: on the anniversary of the crime, on the victims’ birthdays, at Christmas, just to keep in touch, to remind those left behind that they had promised an arrest that bloody night so many years ago and were still on it.

  No one asked for these crimes to set up house in their lives, no one asked for these murderers to constantly and arbitrarily lay siege to the
ir psyches like bouts of malaria, no one asked to feel so helplessly in the grip of this nonstop black study that they had no choice but to pursue and pursue. But there they all were: Pavlicek forever stalking Jeffrey Bannion; Jimmy Whelan pursuing Brian Tomassi, the ringleader of a white street gang who, in the aftermath of 9/11, had chased a Pakistani kid into an oncoming car; Redman Brown stalking Sweetpea Harris, the murderer of a college-bound high school baller who had made him look bad in a playground pickup game; Yasmeen Assaf-Doyle forever tracking Eric Cortez, a twenty-eight-year-old small-time felon who had stabbed to death a reedy myopic ninth grader because the kid had talked to Cortez’s fourteen-year-old girlfriend at their school.

  And Billy himself, in his first year aboveground as a precinct detective after too many living below like a mushroom among the dead, shackled for all time to Curtis Taft, the killer of three females in one evening: Tonya Howard, a twenty-eight-year-old who had just dumped the man who would become her murderer; her fourteen-year-old niece, Memori Williams, who happened to be sleeping over the night Taft decided to get back at his ex; and Dreena Bailey, Tonya’s four-year-old daughter by another man. Three shots, three dead, then right back to bed, Curtis Taft, as far as Billy was concerned, the most black-hearted of the Whites. But so were they all, if you asked each of their star-crossed hunters.

  Twenty years after they had started out running the streets like high-topped commandos, almost all of them were living new lives. Redman got shot through the hips in a hostage situation, went out on a three-quarters medical, and took over his father’s funeral parlor in Harlem. Fast-and-loose Jimmy Whelan put in his papers before he could be fired and became an itinerant building super, living from year to year in some of the finer basement apartments of the city. Yasmeen, who couldn’t take the boss mentality, quit to become assistant head of crimes against students at a university in lower Manhattan and achieved a black belt in complaining about her new bosses over there. Pavlicek, already on the make while still in uniform, just got too busy being rich. Only Billy, the baby of the group, still hung in. He had no reason not to: as his father had declared over a raised glass on the night of Billy’s graduation from the academy: “Here’s to God, because the man had to be a natural-born genius to invent this job.”