The Whites: A Novel Page 4

  An hour after his phone call with Pavlicek, Billy was dreaming about Jeffrey Bannion—nude and adrift in an oversized bell jar filled with red punch—when one of the kids came home from school and slammed the front door as if he were being chased by wolves. A moment later he heard Carlos yelling at his brother, “You quit so I win!,” followed by Carmen shouting, “What did I tell you about yelling in the house!”

  Even so, Billy managed to fall back asleep for half an hour, until the sheets began to rustle and Carmen, naked, nuzzled into the small of his back, her left hand reaching around to burrow into his boxers. Billy was so tired he thought he would die, but her hand on his prick was her hand on his prick.

  “We had three kids brought in with gunshot wounds three days in a row,” she murmured in his ear. “Turns out the second kid shot the first for shooting someone in his crew, the third shot the second in retaliation, and the best friend of the second shot the third for the same reason. It was like the bonehead Olympics. Anything going on down there?”

  “Give me a second, will you?”

  After twelve years they were doing pretty good, he thought, hitting it twice a week more often than once, and they seemed to be putting on weight apace of each other, also not so bad, Carmen still able to pull off wearing a two-piece, although Billy kept his T-shirt on at the beach. In the beginning, there wasn’t a physical position or a sexual fancy off-limits, but as they grew more comfortable with each other, it always seemed like straight-up missionary, after a little of this and a little of that, unfailingly ended with both of them afterward euphorically raiding the refrigerator in search of the next fun thing to do.

  “So,” she said.

  And in a rush of bleary optimism Billy decided that maybe he didn’t need to sleep this week after all.

  MILTON RAMOS

  The handcuffed drunk in the backseat had lost three thousand dollars betting on the NCAA Final Four and decided that it was the fault of his wife’s face, which he promptly set to rearranging.

  “March Madness. I was you, that would be my defense,” Milton’s partner said without turning around.

  “Fuck her, and fuck you.”

  “You know what? Stick with that attitude, because judges hate sincere remorse.”

  “And what are you?” the drunk said, squinting at Milton sitting silently behind the wheel.

  “Excuse me?” Seeking the guy’s eyes via the rearview mirror.

  “You know what SPIC stands for?” The drunk leaned forward, his alcohol-fueled malice expanding, searching. “Spanish Indian Colored. Otherwise known as Greaser, Savage, Nigger. Put them all together you get one big fucking unibrow Monkey. You.”

  Milton pulled the car over alongside Roberto Clemente Park, then turned off the ignition. He sat there for a moment with his hands palms up in his lap.

  “Can we not do this?” his partner asked with an air of resignation.

  “Ook, ook,” from the rear seat.

  Milton popped the trunk via the lever beneath the steering wheel, got out, and walked to the back of the car.

  “The fuck’s he doing?” the drunk asked.

  “Shut up,” the partner said, sounding both angry and a little depressed.

  The rear door opened abruptly and Milton lifted the prisoner out of the car by his elbow. In his free hand he carried a telescoping baton and a grease-smudged towel.

  “The fuck are you doing?”

  Without answering, Milton frog-walked his prisoner into the maw of the park until he found what he considered a suitable spot. Not too open, not too constricted, and branches low enough to grip.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Down, please?”

  “What?”

  Milton popped him in the chest and the drunk was suddenly lying faceup in the grass, his shoulders on fire from the impact of landing with his hands cuffed behind his back.

  “Jesus, man, what are you doing?” Near-pleading now, his voice suddenly much closer to sober than a few minutes earlier.

  Milton knew he should never have been given a gold shield. It was a misguided reward for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, a barbershop during a holdup in his own Bronx neighborhood when two assholes with .38s had come in while he was buried in aprons, towels, and shaving cream. The shop was a known numbers drop, easy pickings, and after they kneecapped one of the barbers, Milton kicked his chair around on its swivel and started shooting from beneath his polyester body bib, which promptly caught fire. By the time his barber whipped off the flaming sheet he had second-degree burns on his left arm and thigh.

  Both perps, one shot in the throat, the other in the face, survived but went directly from Misericordia to the Tombs. The mayor and the police commissioner came to see Milton in the burn unit of that same hospital, the PC presenting him with his detective’s shield in front of cameras.

  The question put to him was “Where do you want to go.”

  Where. He wanted to go wherever he could hide.

  Patrol had always been his thing, the street his wheelhouse—frontier justice, an eye for an eye, and the culling of information through extracurricular beatdowns. He would be a terrible detective, and he knew it: not too bright with paper trails, not particularly subtle or patient in an interview room, and possessed of a freakishly violent yet icy temper when provoked.

  Since the shootout at the barbershop he’d been transferred to seven different precincts in five years. Truculent and inept, he was a burden to each squad, until he landed at the 4-6 in the Bronx. Even before Milton arrived, the lieutenant there got the message that he was doing a great job with Detective Ramos, we all appreciate it, no more hot potato. Milton’s new boss made the savvy decision to stash him in the burglary squad, which averaged thirty-five cases a month, all difficult to solve. But even in that Eeyore world of low expectation he managed to go three years without a single arrest, at which point he became the supervisor of night complaints, his job to come in at eight a.m. and farm out the complaints that had accumulated since the previous midnight to the other incoming day-tour detectives—a housecat gig that reeked of dunce cap.

  But after a long stretch in that purgatory, a new boss finally put him back in the regular squad, and six months after that there wasn’t a known actor in the 4-6 who didn’t come to dread hearing the phrase, usually spoken in a low-key, near-distracted monotone, “Get out of the car, please?”

  Milton took the dirty towel and carefully folded it into a thick band. He then straddled the drunk and laid the towel across his throat. Snapping the telescoping baton out to its full length, he perched it lengthwise along the center of the towel. Carefully stepping on the narrow end with his right foot, he pressed the steel rod into one side of the guy’s throat. Then, holding on to a branch in order to keep his balance and modulate the pressure, he placed his other foot on the handle end so that now his full weight was coming down on the Adam’s apple, that weight fluctuating between 180 and 190 pounds, depending on the time of the year and what holidays had just passed.

  The drunk’s suddenly bulging eyes turned a damp, golden red, and the only sound he was capable of making was a faint peeping like a newborn chick heard from one farm over.

  After thirty seconds or so, Milton stepped off the baton one foot at a time, then squatted and lifted the thick towel beneath; the throat was unblemished. He replaced the towel on the guy’s throat and once again balanced the baton across its center.

  “One more time?”

  The drunk shook his head, even the weak peeping sound gone.

  “Come on . . .” Milton rose to his height, found his balance again at both ends of the rod, and started seesawing. “In case I never get to see you again.”

  CHAPTER 2

  As they crossed the Triborough Bridge in Pavlicek’s cream-colored elephant of a Lexus, Billy felt like he could stand up in the shotgun seat without grazing the ceiling. For its owner, though, the oversized SUV was a necessity. Pavlicek was nearly big enough to have his own zip code, s
ix foot four, with a head as big around as a diving bell, the upper body of a power lifter, and hands that once, on a bet, had crushed a raw potato. Even with his face and frame somewhat softened by retirement and wealth, his presence still tended to make everyone around him, including Billy, behave. Big man, big car, big life.

  In Billy’s opinion, of all their original crew, Pavlicek had played the exit game most righteously. Any cop working a precinct could tell you where the money went, but Pavlicek’s genius back in the ’90s was to see where it wasn’t: in the roofless brownstone shells that had become crack squats, the decimated walk-ups, the derelict working-class ghost palaces that had peaked in the 1940s, if they had ever peaked at all. He had bought them one at a time for a renegotiated accumulation of back taxes and liens, either from the city or the desperate owners themselves, paying an average of $7,500 in the beginning, never more than $50,000 later on, once other speculators started to get in the game. And after completing the purchase, Pavlicek was good at vacating buildings, offering first cash, then violence to the squatters and junkies still cooping after the sale.

  In the early days, Pavlicek did all the dirty work himself, rarely needing to do more than show up unannounced at dawn and display his holstered service revolver or a baseball bat. As his holdings grew, he began contracting out these spontaneous evictions, as he called them, to others: mainly defrocked cops, guys who had gotten jammed up for taking money or beating a prisoner or worse, losing both their badges and their pensions in the aftermath and now desperate for even the shadiest of paydays.

  Once the troublemakers and deadbeats were gone, he quickly rehabbed the properties and got decent people to move in—there were always decent people—Pavlicek specifically courting the elderly on Social Security or other kinds of fixed income, as well as those who could arrange for the city or their bank to make direct rent payments to his corporation, the bottom line being that five years after retirement Pavlicek owned twenty-eight mostly beat-up but relatively violation-free properties in Washington Heights and the Bronx, had a house in Pelham Manor the length of a tanker and a personal worth of $30 million if a dime.

  But if he had been blessed with wealth, he had been cursed with loss: after three years of reasonably happy marriage, his wife, Angela, had attempted to drown their then six-month-old son in the backyard wading pool. Four months later, on her first leave from the Payne-Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, she tried it again. Nineteen years later she was still institutionalized, most recently at a residential treatment facility in Michigan, not far from her parents’ home in Wisconsin. Pavlicek still grieved for her and still hated himself for being so oblivious to her pain and madness back then. As far as Billy knew, they were still married.

  “You ever been out of the country?” Pavlicek asked as they cruised past the Forensic Psychiatric Center, a.k.a. the Hat Factory, on Wards Island.

  “Nope,” Billy said, trying to peer through the barred windows to the Thorazine-infused prisoners within. “My dad was in England a bunch of times, did a tour in Vietnam.”

  “That’s him. Plus, war doesn’t count.”

  “Been to Puerto Rico with Carmen to see her grandmother once.”

  “Puerto Rico is part of the U.S. Plus, visiting family doesn’t count.”

  “Then I guess I’ve been living in my ass for forty-two years. What’s your point, big shot?”

  “Did I ever tell you about the time I went to Amsterdam with John Junior?”

  “You went to Amsterdam?”

  “Four years ago I was invited to talk at an urban renewal conference there, and I wanted to bring him. He was sixteen, it’s a cool city, sort of, so he says, ‘I’ll let you take me to Amsterdam . . .’”

  “Let you.”

  “‘. . . let you take me if you get stoned with me there. Nick Perlmutter went with his dad last year and told me they got wasted together.’ Says to me, ‘Hey, at least you’ll know who I’m getting high with.’”

  “You did not do that.”

  “I’m sorry, you never got high?”

  “With my kids?”

  “Your kids are little, Billy. It’s different later, it’s like trying to hold back water with your hands. Trust me.”

  “You still don’t have to smoke up with them.”

  Pavlicek shrugged.

  Feeling a little scandalized, Billy shut up.

  “In any event, we got there, made a beeline to the nearest coffee bar, sat outside facing this plaza, platz, or whatever, Junior’s all showing off how he can read a pot menu like a wine list, orders us something supposedly mild, a few hits and we’re both zotzed. It was fun at first—we couldn’t figure out how to take our picture, holding the camera every whichaway, laughing, you know, stupid stoned. Finally this Dutch lady inside the bar takes pity on us, comes out and does the honors. Two American morons getting high in Amsterdam, never seen that before. We’re laughing our balls off for about a half hour, then the paranoia just shuts us down like, blam. I mean like a solid hour of Can’t Talk, sitting there wondering how do we find the fucking hotel, Prinzengracht, Schminzenstrasse, where’s the Anne Frank House and are we bad half-Jews if we blow it off, how do we even just, like, stand up. Hours like that, then Johnnie finally turns to me, says, ‘Well, this wasn’t one of my better ideas, was it.’ He flies home the next day, it’s really a nothing city, but I’m stuck doing the panels. I felt horrible . . . I mean, OK, you’re right, what kind of pandering asshole has to curry favor with his kid like that. But you know what? A week later I finally come home and I see that on his bedroom door Johnnie had taped blowups of all the photos of us that the Dutch lady took, and goddamn didn’t it look like we had a blast. And now when we . . . It always plays for a laugh when it comes up in conversation, between the pictures and the way we tell it to people. It’s like, after a while, the two of you are like a comedy team. And you forget, I forgot, how bad it felt, I just . . .”

  Billy heard a sudden rasp of tears in Pavlicek’s voice that he had no idea how to interpret and so he held his peace until they got where they were going, twenty strained minutes later.

  The Riveras, like everyone else on City Island, lived on one of the short streets branching off the sole avenue that ran like a spine for two miles from the land bridge to the Long Island Sound. Their house, a run-down Victorian gingerbread, was at the tail end of Fordham Street, the lapping waves audible from every room. The family had two views: the Sound at a point where New York and Connecticut met underwater, and the ruins of the house directly across the way, not a hundred feet opposite, behind which the body of their son Thomas was found five years earlier, discarded and torn. The house was now in the midst of being demolished by the new owners, the walls collapsed in a violent heap, jagged spears of lumber shooting out in all directions like an abstract expression of its own notoriety.

  Ray Rivera, now sixty pounds heavier than the night his son was discovered, stood on his lawn with Billy and Pavlicek, chain-smoking and staring at the wreckage across the way. His wife, Nora, was somewhere inside their house, undoubtedly aware of the visit but declining to come out. To Billy most of Rivera’s new obesity seemed to be in his upper body and face rather than his gut, in the multi-tiered pouches under the eyes, the softening flesh of his broad chest, and the forward slump of his thick shoulders. Billy had seen this transformation before in parents who struggled daily with the violent death of a child. After a few years that emotional heaviness could visually de-sex a couple, leave them looking more like each other than if they’d lived into their nineties together.

  “You know, I have real mixed feelings about that shit pile coming down.” Rivera coughed wetly into the side of his hammy fist, took another drag. “I keep thinking, Maybe they’re destroying evidence, or maybe a shred of his soul is still in there.”

  “He’s not there anymore, Ray,” Pavlicek said. “I know you know that.”

  Billy saw movement behind a second-floor window in the Rivera house: Nora up there, hours every day looking ac
ross the street.

  “People asked us why we didn’t move away, but it would have been like abandoning him, you know?”

  Suddenly the window opened and Nora Rivera leaned out, red-faced, cawing: “Why didn’t they move away!”

  Pavlicek raised a hand in greeting. “Hey, Nora.”

  The window slammed like a gunshot.

  “You know, I know people, and I could’ve made some calls, anytime I wanted. Once a guy called me. But if I wanted that Jeffrey kid dead, I would have done it myself.”

  “That’s not you, Ray.”

  “I mean, do you have any idea how many times I sat on that porch with a piece of steel in my hand? I always drank my way out of it.”

  “Is there anything you want to ask me about Jeffrey Bannion?” Billy offered.

  Rivera ignored the question. “Last year we went to the national Memory Keepers convention, Johnny here came with us,” nodding to Pavlicek. “They had a bunch of workshops and seminars, and I sat in on a support group for fathers with murdered kids.” Rivera took another moist drag on his cigarette. “And this guy, some old biker from Texas, he said he sat in on the execution of his son’s murderer in Huntsville. Said it didn’t make a difference. Called it a letdown. But I’m not so sure that would’ve been the case with me.”

  “Ray,” Pavlicek said gently, “we have to go.”

  “Our pastor says Jesus wants us to try and forgive, but I’ll tell you, these last few years? I’m all about the God of the Jews.”

  They came upon Jimmy Whelan in the lobby of the apartment house where he lived and worked as the super, a run-down prewar with a deep H-block courtyard on Fort Washington Avenue. At this hour the food odors of three continents crept down the elevator shaft like fog.