The Whites: A Novel Read online

  Whelan looked good for forty-six, a lean, sometime weight lifter with a full head of brown hair, a big nose, and the exaggerated mustache of a gunslinger. Which wasn’t too far off: by the time he’d retired he held the record for justifiable shots-fired incidents of any active police officer in the NYPD. Toward the end of his career, he was transferred to the Crime Scene Unit, one of the least likely places where a detective could find a reason to pull his weapon, but even with that squad he managed to get into a shootout, having wandered into a three a.m. bodega robbery while on a coffee run two blocks away from an indoor doubleheader being processed by his CSU team in the New Lots section of Brooklyn.

  Dressed tonight in a dagger-collared cherry leather car coat and flare-bottom jeans, he was standing in front of the geriatric twin elevators, barking at a toffee-colored tenant with vaguely Asiatic eyes and a whippet mustache, the guy shoulder-toting a duffel bag as if on shore leave.

  “What are you doing?” Whelan snapped.

  “Spreading the joy!” His whiskey-hoarse voice just shy of a shout.

  “The joy? Are you crazy? Get your ass back upstairs.”

  “How you doing, sirs!” the guy said, turning to Billy and Pavlicek and extending his free hand. “Esteban Appleyard.”

  Whelan abruptly walked away, shaking his head as if he had just about had it with this idiot.

  “What you got in there?” Billy asked.

  Appleyard opened his duffel to display mini-bottles of Rihanna Rebelle perfume, half-pints of Alizé VS cognac, and cellophane-wrapped packs of White Owl cigarillos.

  “Have a cigar.” Appleyard beamed.

  “I don’t smoke,” Billy lied.

  “I’ll be in the car,” Pavlicek muttered, wheeling so abruptly that he nearly collided with Whelan, who was steaming back for more Appleyard.

  “Where’s the money?”

  “They gonna wire it to my bank.”

  “When.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Whelan turned to Billy. “This guy just won ten million playing the lottery, can you believe that?”

  “For real?”

  Billy knew Whelan’s irritation had nothing to do with envy. Taking his super’s job to heart despite his run-and-gun résumé, Jimmy always projected this scolding vibe toward the more obliviously self-destructive members of what he considered his flock.

  One of the elevators groaned open and a woman sporting an African head wrap stepped out, her arms filled with folded laundry.

  Appleyard dug in his duffel and pulled out a bottle of perfume. “For you, Chiqui.”

  “I don’t wear that,” she said sharply, as angry at him as Whelan.

  “Give me a kiss.”

  “You should move out of here,” rearing back from his ninety-proof breath. “Everybody knows.”

  Looking to the lobby, now stripped of nearly all of its original 1920s furniture and mirrors, Billy was surprised to see Pavlicek still in the house, slumped over on the lone couch, his head sunk into his hands as if he were too exhausted to make it back out to the street.

  “You got a car?” Whelan asked Appleyard.

  “Buyin’ one. I like that Maybach, like Diddy got. A nice chocolate brown.”

  “Can you even drive?”

  “Drove a truck out of the poultry terminal for fourteen years before I got shot that one time,” yanking down his sweater collar to show the skid-mark scar on his collarbone.

  Whelan pulled out a set of keys, stuffed them in Appleyard’s pocket. “You know my car?”

  “The Elantra?” Appleyard sniffed. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in that.”

  “You go upstairs and pack. You take my car and go up to my cabin in Monticello for a week. Figure out where you want to live, what you’re gonna do with yourself, because around here, they’re gonna eat you alive.”

  The woman nodded in agreement.

  “Naw, man.” Appleyard waved him off. “People know me.”

  “Exactly. Somebody comes to my door three days from now, says there’s a smell from 5D? I don’t want to find you, see some three-legged alligator tortured you for your ATM code, left you with a screwdriver in your ear.”

  “Yeah, well.” Appleyard’s duffel slipped from his grip, the perfume and cognac bottles clinking on the smooth stone floor. “I can’t see that.”

  The African tenant finally took off, crossing the lobby on her way to the front door, Pavlicek not even raising his eyes to her as she glided past the couch, her voluminous housecoat brushing his knees.

  “And stop handing that shit out or you won’t even make it to two days. What’s wrong with you?”

  “How much you want for the cabin and the car,” Appleyard asked, peeking into the duffel for spillage. “Because I know you want something.”

  “For a week?” Whelan said, squinting at the ceiling. “Fifteen hundred.”

  “And I’m supposed to worry about everybody else takin’ me off, huh?”

  “Make it two thousand and I’ll come with you.”

  “Charge me for you to come to your own house? You got a TV up there?”

  “Of course.”

  “They sell groceries up there?”

  “No, everyone crawls around eating grass.”

  “Bars?”

  “You stay out of bars.”

  “Naw, I’m gonna stay right here,” handing Whelan back his keys. “This is my block.”

  “I tell you what,” Whelan said. “I’ll sell you the car for twelve grand.”

  “I don’t think so.” Appleyard laughed, then hauled the duffel back up on his shoulder and took off down the hall to knock on doors.

  As they finally headed out to the street, Pavlicek falling in with them silently, Billy’s cell rang, Stacey Taylor again, Billy killing this call from her too.

  Collin’s Steak house was situated in the financial district on a small cobblestoned lane lined with landmark nineteenth-century merchants’ homes and low shebeens named after Irish poets, the whole plunked down like an antique snow globe dwarfed and surrounded by a futuristic ring of office towers. They were the first to arrive, and the publican Stephan Cunliffe, a Belfast transplant who by blood mandate loved cops and writers, brought over a tray of Midleton shots before they had even taken their seats.

  “Sláinte,” Cunliffe said, hoisting his own.

  Although Irish himself, Billy could live the rest of his life without hearing that particular toast again.

  “Is Mr. Brown coming?”

  “Redman’s got a funeral service uptown,” Billy said.

  “And the lovely Ms. Assaf-Doyle?”

  “As per usual, she’ll be coming when she comes.”

  Which was twenty minutes later, swooping to the table like a rush breath, her enormous dark eyes beneath blue-black hair, wet and combed straight back as if she had just come from a workout, and wearing, as always, her trademark hippie coat, calfskin shearling trimmed with vaguely Tibetan embroidery and frogged buttons.

  “Where’s mine?” Yasmeen said, looking at the empty glasses.

  Cunliffe snapped his fingers, and a fresh round appeared as if the waiter had it behind his back all along.

  “My job this week?” Shrugging off her coat. “I had a girl in the dorms from India, lost her virginity to some douchebag in the Village, the guy made a tape and now he’s threatening to send it to her parents if she stops putting out, so I had to go up to his skank-ass crib and scare the piss out of him, like, call out the dogs of war, right? Oh, and today? They had me investigating a missing sweater, anyways, besahah’,” draining her shot. Then: “So, Billy, you caught the Bannion job?”

  “Four in the morning.”

  “Penn Station, a real clusterfuck, right? Any leads?”

  “At this point, ask Midtown South. I’m just the night porter.”

  “You ever see that movie? I almost asked for my money back.”

  “What movie,” Whelan said.

  “Anyways, here’s to Bannion,” hoisting her secon
d glass. “When bad things happen to bad people.”

  “Hear, hear.”

  “First Tomassi, then Bannion,” she said. “It’s like justice started peeking under the blinds.”

  “When people say ‘hear, hear’ like that,” Whelan said, “do they mean ‘hear’ like to hear something? Or like, ‘Hey, over here.’”

  “Whoa, wait.” Billy held up his hand. “Brian Tomassi? What happened to him?”

  “Are you serious?” Whelan said. “Do you not read the papers?”

  “Just say.”

  “You know that stretch of Pelham Parkway by Bronx House where him and his crew chased Yusuf Khan in front of the cab?”

  “Yeah, and . . .”

  “Take two giant and one umbrella step south of there, Tomassi, two a.m. in the morning, tweakin’ like a beacon, steps off the curb and becomes one with the 12 bus.”

  “When was this?”

  “Last month.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  Laughing, Billy nodded to Whelan. “You push him?”

  “I would’ve, you better believe that.”

  Billy remembered, the day after it happened, Whelan telling him that when the panic-stricken Khan, running blindly across the four-lane northbound parkway, had been struck by a muscle car doing sixty-five, the sound of the impact had been loud enough to set off car alarms for blocks around.

  “Hey, what’s the last thing that passed through Tomassi’s mind after he got creamed by that bus?” Yasmeen asked.

  “His ass,” Pavlicek grunted, his first words since they had all sat down. “Christ, if you’re going to tell stupid fucking jokes . . .”

  Once again Billy noticed that he seemed on the verge of tears. “You OK, big guy?”

  “Me?” Pavlicek brightened a shade too fast. “You know what I was doing today when I called you? Going through one of my buildings with an exorcist. I got a Chinese contractor to gut the place, his people go in, they come right back out fifteen minutes later saying it’s haunted, no way they’re going back in. So I went and hired an exorcist.”

  “The Chinese are the worst,” Yasmeen said, “they’re so superstitious.”

  “You ever see a Chinaman commit suicide?” Whelan added. “They don’t believe in quick and painless.”

  “Where’d you get the exorcist?” Billy asked.

  “This lady runs a smoke shop near my house. She’s some kind of Wiccan with a sideline in ghostbusting.”

  “She’s for real?”

  “She knows what’s expected of her, puts on a good show. Comes with flashlights, humidifiers, wind chimes, Enya tapes . . .”

  “Who you gonna call . . .”

  “Only thing is, they have their gods and we have ours.”

  “We have gods?”

  They waited for Pavlicek to continue, but he seemed to have lost interest in his own story.

  “So did it work or not?” Billy asked.

  “What.”

  “The exorcism.”

  “It’s ongoing,” Pavlicek said, looking off.

  “So, Billy, how’s your family?” Yasmeen catching his eye—Let it be—then downing her third or maybe fourth shot.

  “Good, you know, I mean my father’s not getting any better, but . . .”

  “My dad once tried to talk me into letting him come to live with us? I had his ass in a home before he got the first sentence out.”

  “You’re all heart there, Yazzie,” Whelan said.

  “What do you mean, I’m all heart? The guy was a psycho. He used to get drunk and burn us with cigarettes. I got a heart. Why do you always want to make me feel so bad?”

  “Yasmeen, I’m kidding.”

  “No, you’re not,” she slurred. Then, after a too-long beat: “Fucking Whelan. You always make me feel bad. What did I ever do to you?”

  She then proceeded to descend into one of her legendary sulks, Billy knowing from experience that there was a good chance they wouldn’t hear from her for the rest of the evening.

  Yasmeen was the only woman Billy knew who could match his wife mood swing for mood swing. They even looked alike, although Yasmeen’s coloration came from her Syrian father and Turkish mother, which had made being constantly addressed as mami and automatically spoken to in Spanish out on the street agitating enough for her to more than once ask for a transfer to a more upscale precinct. But she was a fierce friend, dressing down his first wife in the street directly in front of the demonstrators who had driven her to leave him after his shooting—well, that wasn’t such a hot idea—then, years later, when Carmen was going through a particularly black spell, taking in their kids for an entire summer until his wife was back on her feet.

  So Billy would put up with any kind of stormy behavior that came his way, but with Yasmeen now brooding in her tent and Pavlicek halfway to a morose coma of his own, the table suddenly had the energy of a brownout.

  “Can I tell you something?” Billy began, trying to plug the gap. “You talk about exorcisms, I never told this to anybody before because it embarrassed me, but about six months into trying to nail Curtis Taft? Carmen convinced me to consult a psychic.”

  “Get out,” Whelan stepping in like a straight man.

  “Some old Italian lady up in Brewster, I mean, I was so desperate at that point . . . So I call her up, go to her house, I swear she looked just like Casey Stengel. Hey, how you doing, thanks for seeing me, and I walk into the living room, the walls are covered with appreciation letters from different police departments around the country, maybe a few from Canada, another from some town in Germany. It was pretty impressive until you go up close and read one: ‘It has come to my attention that you might possibly have been of some assistance in the as yet unsolved homicide death of fill-in-the-blank. Thank you for your time and enthusiasm. Sincerely, Elmo Butkus, Chief of Police, French Kiss, Idaho.’ But whatever, I’m there. I sit on the couch, she’s in a rocking chair, I was told to bring some objects belonging to the vics, so I hand over a barrette belonging to the four-year-old, Dreena Bailey, Memori Williams’s iPod, and Tonya Howard’s Bible. I tell her what we think happened, Taft coming in there around sunrise, three shots and just walking out, going home, getting back in bed with his still-asleep girlfriend.

  “She says to me, ‘OK, here’s how it works. I’m gonna sit here and think about what you just told me, and I’m gonna get a little worked up and I’ll say things, a word, a phrase, and you write everything down. Whatever I say.’ And then she says, ‘Now, the things I’ll be saying? I don’t know what any of it means, they’re like pieces of a puzzle that you got to put together, OK? You’re the detective, not me, OK?’

  “I say OK.

  “‘And oh, wait,’ she says, ‘by the way, I never charge cops for helping them, that’s my civic duty, all I ask in return is a letter from you on your police department stationery thanking me for my assistance.’ I say, ‘Yeah sure no problem, let’s go, let’s go.’ And then she starts rocking in the chair, rubbing Dreena’s barrette, and lets it rip. ‘Four years old, that poor little kid, she never had a chance, she’ll never see her mother again, or play jump rope, that evil cocksucker, that fucking . . . BUTTER!’

  “I almost jumped out the window she shouted it so loud, but I write down ‘Butter,’ then she’s off again. ‘What kind of cold-blooded scumbag would take the life of . . . RUNNING WATER!’ OK, writing it down, ‘Running water.’ I mean, everything in the world is near running water, a river, a sink, a sewer, I mean, are you serious? Then she starts going on about Memori. ‘Fourteen-year-old girl, her whole fucking life in front of her, this vicious pig, this miserable piece of shit, this . . . TIRES!’

  “OK, ‘Tires.’

  “‘He snuffs the life out of three young ladies and then what does he do? He goes home and crawls back in bed with his new girlfriend, like he just got up to take a piss, and can you imagine what a piece of work that stupid bitch . . . BROKEN TOILET!’

  “And, I swear on
my children, when she said that, ‘Broken toilet,’ I just about pissed myself.”

  “Yeah?” Whelan apparently his only listener.

  “Listen to me,” Billy said, leaning forward. “The bodies were discovered by Tonya Howard’s new boyfriend when he came to the house about five, six hours later, and by the time we got there, rigor was going pretty good. We found Memori and Tonya in the living room and we thought that was it, but when I opened the bathroom door . . .” Billy wiped his dry mouth. “See, when Taft lived with Tonya, whenever he would discipline the little one he’d always take her into the bathroom, and that’s where he took her to shoot her that morning, and after he shot her he stuck her head and shoulders in the toilet. Like I said, rigor had set in and we couldn’t get her out, so we had to use a sledgehammer to shatter the porcelain. So, ‘Broken toilet,’ the lady said. Don’t ask me how.”

  “Then what happened.”

  “I brought her back to the projects and let her into the apartment, see if she could maybe pick something up in the air.”

  “Did she?”

  “Nope.”

  “What did she say when she saw the broken toilet?”

  “Just nodded, like, ‘I told you so.’”

  “She got you on the running water, too,” Whelan said, “if you want to be technical about it.”

  “That too, I guess.”

  “You write her that letter?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “The thing about the younger brother,” Pavlicek suddenly said, addressing his clasped hands. “The one who went away for it? Truly stupid people are the toughest to interview because they can’t tell when you’ve talked them into a corner. ‘Forensics says he was killed with a golf club, Eugene. Is there a golf club in the house?’

  “‘I don’t know.’

  “‘Well, we found one.’

  “‘OK.’

  “‘We found your fingerprints on it.’

  “‘OK.’

  “‘So how could you not know there was a golf club in the house?’

  “‘I don’t know.’

  “‘Do you like to play golf?’

  “‘No.’

  “‘So then, once again, I have to ask, how’d your fingerprints come to be on the shaft?’