Richard Price - The Whites

“I don’t have seven K.”

“I’ll ask you again, who is she to you.”

While Redman and Nola began dealing with the dead man’s socks and shoes, Billy told them the whole story, from the death of Shakira Barker’s twin sister five years earlier through her long slow nightmare transformation into a murderer herself, the victim, Martha Timberwolf, lying on a slab across the Hudson with no one to send her Home.

“I’ll do it for six,” Redman said, “and that’s costing me.”

Nola stiffened a little but said nothing.

“Thank you, I appreciate it.”

“Can you pay up front?”

“No problem.”

“Can you do cash?” Redman rolling his prep cart close and pulling a chair up to the body.

“If that’s how you want it.”

“Because that would help me.”

“Help me help you,” Billy said, watching as Redman slipped on a pair of rubber gloves, then reached into the chaos of the cosmetics cart and extracted a tube of Krazy Glue. After squeezing out thin lines of the gunk on the lacerated palms of the dead man, he used his finger to carefully coat the skin.

“What are you doing?” Billy asked.

“What, this? If I don’t put some kind of adhesive on these defensive wounds here and people start stroking this guy’s hands at the service? They could walk away with a souvenir.”

Billy took a moment, then shifted gears. “You see Pavlicek recently?”

“He came in here a few weeks ago to see how my son was doing.”

“How was he?”

“My son?”

“Pavlicek.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure, I ran into him at Columbia Pres today.”

“Oh yeah? What was he doing there?”

“He said he was seeing someone for his cholesterol.”

“I’m not surprised, are you?”

“He looked like a zombie. I swear to God, every time I see him these days, it’s like he’s on a different drug. Tell me that’s high cholesterol.”

“All I know is,” Redman carefully recapping the Krazy Glue, “men that big can’t just eat whatever they want.”

“So, this witness, so-called witness, Michael Reidy, that you interviewed — remember him?”

Sitting across the desk from Elvis Perez, a tall, vulture-necked detective working the Bannion homicide in Midtown South, Billy tried to recall the face of the blood- or ketchup-stained drunk in the Penn Station waiting room. “Sort of,” he said.

“Well, we lost him.”

“Lost him.”

“We have his address from your Fives, but he’s not there, and he’s not answering his cell, so I was wondering if you remember anything he might of said to you or you overheard that maybe didn’t make it into your notes.”

“Do you know how many people we interviewed that night?”

Perez tossed a pencil on his desk and stifled a yawn. He had the kind of droopy eyes that suggested he had never recovered from the exhausting experience of being born.

“So where are you at on this?” Billy asked.

“Nowhere, really.”

Billy gestured to the manila folder on Perez’s desk next to a small plaster statue of San Lazaro.

“May I?”

Even in the bloodiest CSU photos, Bannion retained his startling Black Irish handsomeness, the best-looking corpse Billy had seen since Carmen’s first husband.

“The ME said the wound was jagged,” Perez said, rolling his chair away from the desk and then running the flat of his hand along the inside of his thigh. “The actor was no surgeon but he knew where to cut.”

“And nothing on the perp?”

“Plenty. He was short tall black white heavy slim, came flying in on a skateboard, rolled away in a wheelchair. Are you kidding me? The guy could’ve been seven feet tall with a turban, a beard, and an AK, screaming, ‘Death to America,’ and everybody there would’ve chalked it up to the DTs.”

“How about the tapes?”

“We finally got the south plaza footage back, but all it shows is Bannion running to the subways after the fact. The tape we really need, from over by the LIRR information board, we’re still waiting on. TARU says it could take a few days, a few weeks, or never. All that state-of-the-art equipment and some asshole spills a cup of coffee. How’s that for bang versus whimper.”

“For what?”

“Forget it. You want to see what we got?”

Perez slid the disc into his desk monitor, Billy standing behind him, ignoring the buzzing of his cell.

The captured stretch of arcade between the Long Island commuter trains and the subway entrance at first appeared deserted, all the action having taken place out of the camera’s range, the grainy footage of nothing and no one evoking the bleariness of the hour. But then here came Bannion running loopily into the picture, his light blue jeans turning purple with blood, his dripping shoes leaving those dark liquid footprints until he came to a baffled stop in front of the turnstiles and started fishing through his wallet for what — his MetroCard? — fishing and fumbling, and then, just as Billy had speculated at the scene, abruptly attempting to hurdle the low barrier but suddenly locking up in midair as if flash-frozen and dropping directly on top of the turnstile before falling to the ground.

“It’s not like it’s without entertainment value,” Perez said, “but it all happened on the other end.”

“And how long for that tape again?”

Perez shrugged.

Night Watch was strictly one and done; set up the morning man and move on to the next post-midnight felony. There were simply too many runs in a night, a week, a month to keep tabs, or even remain curious, about past crimes and still have the wherewithal to focus on the next one coming down the pike. Night Watch jobs, an old boss once told Billy, were like individual tears in a crying jag.

Still…

“Do me a favor?” Billy asked. “Can you let me know when it comes in?”

That night he was saddled with another strange player doing a Night Watch one-off, Stanley Treester from the DNA Liaison Unit, and when Billy entered the Metropolitan Hospital’s trauma ER to oversee a run-of-the-mill stabbing, he found him sitting on the edge of a gurney staring intently at a damp-eyed elderly man under a blanket. The old guy, oblivious to Treester’s presence, stared off into the middle distance as if into the void.

“I messed up,” the patient said to no one.

“Who’s this?”

“I thought I knew him from when I was a kid,” Treester said, his eyes never leaving the other man’s face.

“Do you?”

“No.”

“I messed up,” the man said again.

“Does he have anything to do with the run?”

“No.”

“Then…” Billy about to tell him to get in the game, then thought better of it.

“And I’m going to hell.”

“I’ll sell you my ticket,” Billy said, before walking off to find the crime.

The actual investigation into the stabbing took about five minutes, the Samaritan who had brought the victim to the hospital confessing the moment Mayo flashed his ID, the story behind the story being two brothers, a fifth of Herradura, dominoes, and a knife.

Stacey Taylor’s call came through while the doer was being cuffed. Billy, grateful that it wasn’t the Wheel with another run, answered right away.

“It’s four in the morning, you know that, right?”

“I’m sorry, did I wake you?” she said.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing. I just wanted to see how it went today with Taft.”

“I messed up, just went in there with no game plan and messed up.”

“Yeah, well, you’re only human.”

“But I want to thank you for your help.”

“Hey, that’s how we do.”

Still on the phone, Billy momentarily went south, thinking about the last few days: Bannion, Taft, Miss Worthy, but mostly John Pavlicek, wandering into Columbia Pres like someone had hit him on the back of the head with a bag of nickels.