Richard Price - The Whites

It was one of those fortuitous early mornings when Billy was able to crawl into bed a half hour before Carmen had to get up, the bakery warmth of her body coming at him as he raised the quilt, making him both alert and drowsy. Still asleep, she rolled into him, a heat-radiant breast fanning flat against his ribs, an equally hotted-up thigh carelessly flung over the front of his suddenly ridiculous boxers. But she was still lightly snoring, and with the kids about to overrun the base camp it was better for him to concentrate on the stray curls of her hair that had managed to find their way up into his nose. It was all he could do not to sneeze.

“So you’re calmed down about Taft now?” she asked him thirty minutes later.

“Yeah, but I think I want to do this thing,” Billy watching her from the bed as she slipped into her whites.

“You should,” turning away from him to brush her hair.

He could hear both boys flying out of their bedroom as if someone had shouted, “Incoming.”

“But why should I?”

She took a breath. “Because you want to. Because it would make you feel better. Because it’s good karma.”

“It’s not like we’re rolling in dough.”

“Well,” applying mascara now, which as far as he was concerned was like applying black paint to coal, “we’re not exactly on the street either.”

Something containing liquid shattered in the kitchen, neither of them reacting.

“So you really think I should?”

“I think you want my permission or something.”

“I don’t need your permission.”

“I agree.”

“So I should do it, right?”

“Who.”

“Billy Graves, looking for Miss Worthy.”

Hearing his flat Irish municipal accent from the other side of her door, and most likely assuming he was just another Hudson County homicide detective, Edna Worthy — the grandmother of Martha Timberwolf, the girl murdered by Memori Williams’s twin sister, but really by Curtis Taft, if you wanted Billy’s opinion — called out, “It’s open,” letting him into her Jersey City apartment without so much as looking away from the TV.

She apparently made ends meet as a baby farmer, three subsidized foster kids roaming her overheated living room like cats, although as old and heavy as she was, she could barely rise off the couch.

“Can I sit?” Billy asked.

She gestured vaguely to the left side of the room, nothing there like a chair.

At first glance, Miss Worthy, a TV remote in one hand, a cell phone in the other, seemed unaffected by the catastrophic loss that had been visited on her only two days earlier, Billy chalking up her indifferent demeanor to a long, tragedy-packed life; it wasn’t as if he hadn’t witnessed this kind of non-reaction in people before. But then he noticed the carefully arranged semicircle of plastic-framed photos on the Cheerios-littered coffee table in front of her, the murdered girl staring back at her grandmother from all of her ages, toddler to confirmation to junior high school cap and gown, the face consistently heavy and glum, as if she had known her fate from the day she was born.

“Martha was the only blood to me left,” Miss Worthy eventually said, reaching across herself to pick up a toddler who came close enough for her to grab. “Now she’s gone, too.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Billy said.

“She helped me take care of these kids, and so how am I supposed to do that now. This ain’t a hotel, but you should have seen where they was before.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again, glancing at a card table strewn with the silver-foiled leftovers of a half dozen condolence casseroles.

“Well, they all going back now. Except maybe this one here,” lifting up the kid in her lap like a kitten. “She looks like Martha a little, maybe she can grow up to be some kind of conversation to me, but it’s gonna be a race between her growing up and me growing down.”

“I hear you.”

“So what do you want to know I ain’t already said ten times to the other detectives?” Miss Worthy asked, palming crumbs off the girl.

“Nothing, really. I just came by to offer to help you with the burial, you know, if you need it.”

Miss Worthy finally looked at him straight on, her cat’s-eye glasses catching the light. “You police or not? ’Cause if you’re not, I’m calling them right now,” holding up the business card of the last sport-jacketed individual before Billy to come into her home.

When Billy entered Brown’s Family Funeral Home, Redman, draped in his work apron, was displaying, from the breastbone up, a man in his fifties to two of his younger relations in the middle of his living-roomturned-chapel. Not ten feet away, Redman’s son, velcroed into his activity walker, watched SpongeBob on a fifty-four-inch flat-screen, the volume insanely high, although no one seemed to be bothered by it.

“That don’t look like him,” the male of the two said.

“Did you see him when they brought him in here?” Redman asked.

“I’m just saying…”

“If you want, I can try to put him back the way he was,” winking at Billy.

Billy sidled up to the TV and turned down the volume. A few minutes later, unhappy but not sure what to do about it, the relations left the building without saying goodbye.

“So what’s up?” Redman asked, whipping the sheet off the lower half of the body, revealing a makeshift diaper fashioned from a tall kitchen Glad bag in order to capture any post-embalming leakage.

“I want you to bury someone for me.”

“Who.”

“A murder vic, sixteen years old, her people don’t have dime one.”

Redman’s wife, Nola, came in with a shopping bag of clothes: brown suit, white shirt, a tie, socks, and shoes, the suit and socks still bearing their price tags from Theo’s Discount House of Men.

“Where is she now?”

“Well, she lived in Jersey City.”

“So, Essex County morgue?” Redman began muscling the pants up over the Glad-bag diaper, the effort making his face bead with sweat.

“I assume.”

“That’s out of state.”

“So?”

“That’s extra.”

“You want my E-ZPass?”

Redman propped the body into a sitting position so that Nola could get its arms into the shirt, their son now rolling across the room while chewing on a take-out menu.

“How much do you want to spend?”

“How do I know?” Billy said. “How much does it cost?”

“Depends on the casket, the wood, the lining, the vault, the service, I assume you want a minister, some kind of celebrant, pallbearers, limo and a hearse out to the cemetery, do you have a cemetery lined up?” waiting on his wife to finish the buttoning. “Then there’s the pickup, the body prep, burial clothes if you need them, flowers, printed programs, you want those memorial T-shirts? I have a guy for that, then there’s the grave marker, the plot, the opening, the closing, the death certificate…”

“Just help me out here, OK?”

Redman wrestled the shirt tails into the pants, lifting the body off the gurney with one hand in order to do it, then stepped away to mop his brow while his wife threaded and then knotted the tie.

“Who’s this kid to you?” he asked.

“Collateral damage from Curtis Taft. It’s a long story.”

Redman looked at his wife for a nonverbal business discussion, which ended when she abruptly took off to corral her son as he threatened to topple the cosmetics cart, a rolling jungle of wigs, makeup jars, brushes, palette knives, and cotton swabs.

“I can put something together for seven K,” he finally said.

“Seven. Are you high?”

“You want to take your business up the street? There’s four parlors in the next two blocks, anyone offers you under that they’re going to put her in a cereal box, take her out to the cemetery on the bus.”