The Whites: A Novel Page 7

  “So wow, adopting,” he scrambled. “Where from?”

  “Brazil,” Victor said.

  “Brazil, huh. Boy? Girl?”

  “One of each.”

  “Twins?”

  “Can’t break up a set,” Richard said, unlocking the driver’s-side door.

  My husband . . . Billy had never thought of himself as having a problem with gay marriage, but he still couldn’t quite wrap his head around another man uttering those two words.

  “Did you tell your sister it’s two?”

  “I would’ve,” Victor said, “but I was afraid her heart couldn’t handle the joy.”

  “Anyways, that’s terrific, really great,” Billy said, then added by way of apology: “You want us to throw you a baby shower or something?”

  At least that got them smiling.

  When he returned to the house, Carmen was still standing wedged into her corner of the kitchen.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “Heather has two daddies,” she muttered, looking away.

  “I don’t get it, your brother comes over with such big news, you couldn’t even give him a hug or something?”

  “Guess not,” she said defiantly but starting to tear up a little.

  “Just tell me what’s going on.”

  “Why does something always have to be going on with you?” she snapped, then walked out of the kitchen, up the stairs, and into the bedroom, closing the door behind her.

  And that’s where they left it. That’s where they always left it when it came to Victor and, if he thought about it, so much else.

  At five in the evening, Billy walked into Brown’s Family Funeral Home, on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard. The chapel, a glorified living room, fluorescently lit and lined with folding chairs, was standing room only and awaft in dope smoke. A twenty-two-year-old banger tagged Hi-Life, who had been shot dead in retaliation for an earlier retaliation, lay in his coffin in a front corner of the chapel facing his people, most of whom were wearing oversized rest-in-peace T-shirts silk-screened with a photo of Hi-Life sitting on a stoop. A second laminated RIP snapshot on a bead chain hung off their necks like a backstage pass.

  Walking down the room-length particle-board partition that divided the chapel from a line of office cubicles, Billy passed Redman’s elderly father in the first cubicle, Redman Senior leaning back in his chair playing computer poker. In the second cubicle, Redman’s twenty-three-year-old fifth wife, Nola, was lying on a daybed reading a book in her Côte d’Ivoirian accent to Redman’s seventh or eighth son, Rafer, a toddler with a gastrointestinal feeding tube inserted into his stomach. And then finally, in the last cubicle, was the man himself, all six foot five of him, hunched over his desk slurping lo mein from a take-out carton, the spindly wire bookcase behind his back filled with unclaimed cremains in cardboard urns going back to the 1990s.

  “There he is,” Redman said, extending an absurdly long-fingered hand but remaining in his chair due to the bullet that had drilled him through both hips five years earlier.

  “Christ,” Billy said, waving away the chronic in the air.

  “They pay like everybody else.”

  “You ever hear of secondhand smoke?”

  “That’s just a story they tell you.”

  “A conspiracy, you mean.”

  “You said it, not me.”

  “Like seat belts?”

  “Government can’t tell me to buckle up. I break some bones, that’s my problem.”

  “Don’t tread on me.”

  A toddler wearing a Hi-Life T-shirt down to her sneakers wandered in, then wandered back out unattended.

  “How was dinner last night?”

  “Not to be funny,” Billy said, “but it was like a funeral.”

  “Not over Bannion, I hope. You all should have been Riverdancing up and down the block.”

  “What can I say, the whole thing was just off.”

  “I heard he was exsanguinated?”

  “Never seen anything like it. Apparently he just bled out in midflight, came down like a shop sign.”

  “Exsanguinated . . . Makes my job easier.”

  “Not mine. I had me a blood trail long as a Nantucket sleigh ride.”

  An elderly woman, also in a Hi-Life tee, wandered the hall while coughing up her lungs. They both watched as she pulled back a heavy curtain drawn across the end of the corridor and found herself staring at a legless body lying on a prep table like a three-hundred-pound mound of pancake batter, a nine-inch steel syringe jammed into the jawbone through the side of the gape-locked mouth.

  “Oh.”

  “Bathroom’s near the front,” Redman said. “The other way.”

  “Oh.” She turned and wandered off without looking at them.

  “Got to get a door put up,” Redman said, resuming his dinner.

  Rafer, now in a wheeled Elmo activity baby walker, came flying into his father’s cubicle and had to be intercepted before he crashed into the cremains stand.

  “Slow your roll there, Little Man,” Redman said, wincing from the sudden movement.

  It pained Billy to see him so fragile; back in the early days, Redman had once saved his life by catching him one-handed after he fell from a corroded fifth-floor fire escape while they were trying to hit a dope apartment through a bedroom window. Redman, coming up behind him, had been one story below, and he had snagged one of Billy’s arms on his way down and held him like that, Billy’s feet pinwheeling forty feet above the sidewalk, until he could grab onto something with his other hand. The memory of that aborted plummet could still make him shoot up in bed at four in the morning.

  “Is he getting any better?” Billy asked, nodding to Rafer and unconsciously touching his own gut.

  “No.”

  Redman had never been one to countenance blather, so Billy was at a loss for something else to say on the subject.

  “See that shine-head nigger in there?” Redman pointed out a trimly built middle-aged man seated in the chapel sporting a bow tie and an inexpensive but impeccable white suit, his shaved scalp gleaming under the cheap chandelier as if Turtle Waxed. “Antoine Davis-Bey. That’s the eel that got Sweetpea Harris out from under the rock.”

  “I fought the law and the law lost,” Billy said, bracing for another Sweetpea diatribe.

  “You know, I saw him last week, Harris. Came right in here for a friend’s funeral, had the gall to come up to me at my desk and ask me how I’ve been, you believe that? ‘Detective Brown! That leg still hurting you?’” Redman rearing back from his dinner in disgust. “He’s been locked up a few times since killing Salaam, but I heard the last time he was smart enough to claim he had a drug problem, avoided jail for rehab, although some people would say sitting in a group circle eight hours a day and getting yelled at by every idiot and their cousin is worse than six months on a prison barge.”

  In Billy’s estimation, Redman, for all his unrelenting focus on bringing Sweetpea Harris to justice, was less obsessed with his homicidally peevish White than he was with the victim, Salaam Pridgen. Like Redman himself way back when, Salaam had been a fifteen-year-old high school phenom already being courted by college scouts, a too-skinny kid with cheetah speed who, as Redman would tell anyone who would listen, owned the most explosive first step to the basket he’d ever seen. A detective in Harlem at the time of the murder eight years earlier, Redman had been watching the boy play since ninth grade, for Rice, for the Gauchos, and even, now and then, in pickup games, anywhere from Marcus Garvey Park to some random one-hoop half-court attached to the ass end of an elementary school.

  Redman had no trouble talking about these things to one and all, including the mute bodies he daily prepped for Homecoming, but only Billy and a few others knew that in addition to his interest in the kid, he had been sweet on Salaam’s mother. In between wives at that time of his life, Redman had struck up a casual friendship with her while going to her son’s games. For a while it looked like the friendship wo
uld lead to something more, but then her son’s death turned her from a smart and vigorous woman with an appetite for the world into a dead-eyed stutterer who took forever to turn to the sound of her own name.

  “You repped this piece of shit too?” Redman grunted to Antoine Davis-Bey, who had materialized in the doorway of the cubicle.

  “Black and poor,” Davis-Bey said, winking at Billy.

  “Black and poor, huh? That’s a eight-thousand-dollar casket, and his people paid in cash.”

  “You’re up, you’re down. See how they’re doing six months from now,” tossing Billy a second wink, as if getting Redman’s goat was everyone’s idea of fun.

  “You know what they call four hundred lawyers chained up and thrown into a volcano?” Redman said.

  “Hey, guys,” Billy said.

  “And let me just ask,” the lawyer checking the time on his oversized watch, “that eight thousand dollars, whose pocket is it in now?”

  “How about I take that bow tie, twist it around your neck a few times, let go, and see if you spin around the room.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Billy said, “you’re like my kids.”

  “He started,” Bey winking at him one last time and then heading out.

  Watching him go, Billy looked toward the chapel and saw one of the eulogizers take the pulpit, three gold teeth and a blue Giants cap.

  “Hi-Life, one thing about Hi-Life, he had jokes, man, he always had jokes. Like, he was always complainin’ how his teeth was cold, right?”

  “Fucking Sweetpea,” Redman said, offering a strand of lo mein to his g-tubed toddler. “I keep waiting for someone to cap his ass.”

  “He’s still living in the neighborhood?”

  “122 West 118th, third floor rear, but I hear he spends most of his time with his quote unquote fiancée up in the Bronx.”

  “Well, if the Bronx is good at one thing, it’s hurting people,” Billy said. “He’ll get his.”

  Billy’s cell rang halfway between the funeral home and his car.

  “I got your shield here,” Yasmeen’s husband, Dennis Doyle, said. “It was under our bed, you must’ve dropped it last night when you brought her home. You want to come get it?”

  Before answering, Billy took a second to minutely analyze every dip and rise in Dennis’s voice, searching, as always, for the slightest hint of anger.

  “Hello?” Dennis said.

  There was no edge that Billy could detect. There never was, and it drove him crazy.

  “I’ll come right now.”

  Sometimes I can still taste you . . . Yasmeen’s last words to him in the steak house, and then whispered again into his ear right before she passed out for good, her arms around his neck as he lowered her fully clothed into bed. She had been way too drunk to drive after last night’s catastrophe of a reunion, and with Dennis stuck working four to midnights as a robbery sergeant in the 4-6, Billy took it upon himself to drive her home, half-carry her up to the apartment, and lay her out for the night—completely on the up-and-up, as if Dennis had been watching on a hidden monitor.

  All three had known each other since their academy days when, unwittingly, both Dennis and Billy were going out with her. Dennis was in love, Billy was not. It went on for five months like that, both boys in the dark until New Year’s Eve 1994, when Yasmeen had walked into Gordon’s, a cop bar near the academy, and both he and Dennis simultaneously moved to her. Billy got it instantly, the whole picture, and quickly, quietly stepped back, letting Dennis obliviously go forward into her arms, Yasmeen’s sad and knowing eyes staring into his over Dennis’s shoulder. And that was the end of that: No hard feelings, it was fun, you deserve the best.

  Dennis proposed to her at the bar that night when they were both blasted, the barmaids sailing unsteadily about the dim, damp room with plastic crates of free beer. At first she said no, said, Who the fuck proposes to any kind of respectable girl at some shit-face, after-hours cop bar at five in the morning? Dennis felt so bad about his terrible timing that he started to cry, and it was those idiotic tears, to Billy’s astonishment, that did it. OK, Yasmeen finally said while stroking Dennis’s hair. Sure, let’s get married. Billy saw the whole thing from the short end of the bar, and he thought it was the most pathetic proposal he’d ever witnessed—Dennis never even got off his stool.

  He thought it wouldn’t last a year, but it was going on twenty and counting: two girls, a three-bedroom terraced co-op overlooking the Hudson in Riverdale, and a summer place upstate in Greenwood Lake.

  “So how’s she feeling?” Billy asked Dennis, sitting across from him in the living room.

  “You’re looking at it,” Dennis answered, tilting his chin toward the closed bedroom door at the end of the hall, Yasmeen’s shucked-off Tibetan hippie coat still lying in front of the door like a shaggy guard dog eighteen hours after Billy had carried her inside.

  “So listen,” Dennis said, tilting forward from the edge of his couch, “I’m sorry about last night, and I thank you for bringing her home, but help me out here: what the hell happened?”

  “Hey, all I can tell you was that she was two-fisted throwing them back from the door on in. I don’t know, maybe the news about Bannion got her all agitated about Cortez again.”

  “Christ, I hope not. I swear to you, living with her when she’s on a Cortez tear? It’s like a reign of terror around here, yelling at the kids, at me, first she can’t go to sleep, then she can’t wake up, first she can’t eat, then she can’t stop. I try to get her to smoke a little weed, but even that doesn’t help.”

  “And she’s drinking like this now?”

  “She’s been going through a patch.”

  “What’s a patch.”

  “Two months, maybe?”

  “Every night?”

  Dennis opened his hands and closed them.

  “That’s not a patch, that’s forty acres and a mule.”

  “I’m talking to some people about it,” he said.

  “But she’s off Cortez?”

  Yasmeen’s White, Eric Cortez, had been—and as far as Billy knew still was—a real honey, a fully grown man who, five years earlier, had plunged a knife into the heart of thirteen-year-old Raymond Del Pino, ostensibly for talking to Cortez’s fourteen-year-old girlfriend in the junior high school cafeteria.

  That alone would have been horrific enough, but Cortez had also called his young vic twenty-four hours before the deed, just to tell him what he was going to do. Yasmeen’s squad quickly learned about the call and the caller from the victim’s friends, and in order to start building their no-witness case against Cortez they needed to get their hands on his cell. But when they showed up at the murderer’s apartment with a warrant for his phone, Cortez, sprawled on his couch with his half-wit girlfriend, glanced at the writ, laughed, and said, “That’s not my number.” And it wasn’t: in her rush to get the judge to sign off on the warrant Yasmeen had accidentally transposed two of the digits. They were back in his apartment within two hours with the proper paper, but by then Cortez had ditched the object of their desire and that was the end of that, Cortez still out there doing his thing while Yasmeen, curdled with guilt, had spent the past five years banging her head against the wall searching for new ways to bring him in.

  Dennis got up from the couch and pulled two legal boxes from under a small desk. The last time Billy had seen the Raymond Del Pino homicide cartons they were stuffed with case files, court docs, and note pads, just as they had been on the day she retired and finally snuck them out of the precinct, her overjoyed squad holding the doors for her all the way to the street. But now all they held were invoices, checkbooks, stationery, and stamps.

  “Do you have any idea how elated I was when I saw her dump all that shit?”

  “When was this?”

  “A few months ago, I come out of the elevator and there she is, throwing everything down the incinerator chute. I couldn’t believe my eyes.” Dennis glanced toward the heaped coat by the door. “I was
hoping that would be that.”

  “Look, if it’s any consolation, she wasn’t the only freak show last night.”

  “Billy, she’s not a freak.”

  “No, hey, look, you know I didn’t mean . . . But I have to tell you, Pavlicek? It was like somebody was walking around inside his head with a flashlight.”

  “Well, that’s understandable, given the thing with Bannion.”

  “You think? Let me tell you something, if it was Curtis Taft who bought the farm instead? Are you kidding me?”

  “Well, Pavlicek’s a different animal.”

  “The hell he is. Did Yasmeen ever tell you about the day we came on three Ñeta Juniors tied up and head-shot in an apartment on Southern Boulevard? Scumbags, but still, they were kids. You know what Pavlicek did? He took us all out to Jimmy’s Bronx River Cafe.”

  “People change.”

  “If you say so.”

  Behind the bedroom door, a broken-voiced Yasmeen called for her husband.

  “So how’s Night Watch?” Dennis asked, trying to ignore the softly cracked wails.

  “You know, quiet, busy, quiet, busy. How’s the kids?”

  “Good, yours?”

  “Everything’s a weapon,” Billy said as Yasmeen’s cries became more full-throated.

  “Got to have girls,” Dennis grunted as he finally, reluctantly, rose for the bedroom. “The worst thing they do is exclude each other.”

  Alone now, staring out the window at New Jersey across the river, Billy afforded himself the luxury of remembering Yasmeen in the days before that night in Gordon’s when Dennis had inadvertently pulled the plug on all their fun. They got along well enough over the months they were together, doing all the usual out-of-the-house dating stuff, but basically it was about the sex. They both swore to each other that they were the best fucks they’d ever been with, which wasn’t saying much when you’re both working-class Catholics in your early twenties, and Billy’s entire erotic repertoire consisted of sticking it in as fast as he could, withdrawing partially as fast as he could, and repeating if necessary. At the time, Dennis was even more of a sexual bumpkin than either one of them; at his bachelor party he confessed to Billy, his best man, that he knew Yasmeen was no virgin when he proposed, but he loved her too much not to forgive her.