Richard Price - The Whites

“What else did he say.”

“Nothing, he just left.”

“Did he say… Did anybody else see him?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did he look like?”

“I don’t know.”

Billy’s bathrobe felt like an oven.

Declan, bored with waiting for his brother to return to the basement, came upstairs. He, too, was stripped to his underpants.

“Did you see the man who talked to your brother?”

“Yeah.”

“Did he talk to you?”

“No.”

“What did he look like?”

Declan extended his arms sideways and puffed up his cheeks.

“Fat?”

“Biggish.”

“What else.”

“He was, he had a mustache.”

“What else.”

“He had a big head, bigger than yours. But less hair in the front of it.”

“Good. What color was he?” Billy couldn’t imagine anything in the refrigerator that wouldn’t make him vomit.

“Kind of brown.”

“Brown like Mommy or brown like Uncle Redman?”

“White-brown, like Mom. I don’t call her Mommy anymore, it’s babyish.”

“No it’s not,” Carlos said.

“OK, OK, what was he wearing?”

“A jacket.”

“And a tie,” Carlos added, pulling on his balls.

“A jacket and a tie. What else.”

“Pants,” Carlos said.

“And he had a lump,” Declan said.

“What do you mean?”

“A lump,” Declan touching his left hip where Billy carried his gun. “Like yours.”

When Carmen came home from the hospital at eight that evening, Billy was still in his bathrobe. An hour earlier it had been all he could do to feed the boys and his father their cut cantaloupe and Stouffer’s microwaved dinners.

“Are you kidding me?” she shouted from the living room, then marched into the kitchen. “This is a hundred-and-twenty-dollar jacket. Carlos!”

“Easy, it’s not his fault,” Billy said. Going on three hours of sleep, his head was a boiled egg. “Some guy came up to him in the school parking lot, said, ‘Say hello to your parents,’ and, I’m guessing, did this to the jacket.”

“What do you mean, some guy. What guy?”

“That’s what I’d like to know.”

“Nobody knew him?”

“I’ll have to ask tomorrow.”

“Why tomorrow?”

“The kids don’t know. It’s better to go back there at the same time, see who’s around.”

“What did he look like?”

“From what I could get out of them, he sounds some kind of Latin, heavyset, maybe a cop.”

“A cop?”

Billy hesitated, then: “He could have been carrying,” wincing the second it came out of his mouth.

“A gun?” Her eyes as big as dishes.

“Possibly, but maybe I’m just…”

“Jesus God,” putting her fingertips to her mouth. “You sure he was a cop?”

“I’m not sure of anything. Like I just said…”

“Well, how old was he?”

He couldn’t believe he hadn’t asked that earlier, though it probably wouldn’t tell him anything about the guy’s profession.

“Hey, Carlos!” he shouted up the stairs.

The kid came down wearing a Knicks jersey over pajama bottoms.

“The man who talked to you, was he older than me, younger than me, the same age…”

“I don’t know.”

“Declan!”

Carlos’s older brother came down wearing a Scream mask, just what Billy needed.

“How old was the man you saw.”

“I don’t know.”

“Guess.”

“Your age? Mommy’s, Mom’s age?”

Billy turned to his wife. “Anything else?”

Carmen didn’t answer.

“All right, guys, go back upstairs,” he said, not wanting them to get infected.

He moved to the sink and ran some water over his face. When he turned back around Carmen was robotically setting the table for breakfast.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“Look,” she said, straightening up, a stack of plates tucked into her ribs like a football. “He said, ‘your parents,’ he didn’t say our names.”

“So?”

“So maybe he doesn’t even know us. Maybe he’s just some random whack who wandered into the parking lot. Or a parent the kids don’t know. Or it wasn’t him.”

“Wasn’t who.”

“The guy who put the paint there. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe Carlos just backed up…”

“Into what, a wide-open adult hand covered in red paint?”

“How about the father of that kid Declan punched?”

“The guy’s in a wheelchair.”

“How do you know?”

He knew because he had gone over to their house on the sly to pay for a new pair of glasses. “I just heard.”

“Then how about you?” she asked, dealing out the plates.

“How about me what?”

“Is there anybody on the Job…”

“I thought about it. There’s nobody.”

Carmen dropped a juice glass with her right hand, caught it six inches from the floor with her left.

“And you?” he said as lightly as he could. “Anyone giving you a hard time? Maybe at work?”

“Everybody gives me a hard time at work.”

“How about a cop. They’re in and out of that ER all day. Any of them hit on you?”

“Constantly.” Then, clutching her stomach: “Should we call the police?”

Billy took a breath. “I am the police.”

“May I wake thee?” the Wheel inquired, darkening Billy’s doorway at two in the morning.

“This better be good,” Billy said, a pillow over his head as he lay in a fetal curl on his joke of an office couch. He had never been this tired so early in the tour.

“We got a guy just brought his kid into Metropolitan, says he accidentally dropped her.”

“What’s a kid,” still not moving.

“Four months.”

The young, disheveled-looking father of the injured infant, still in his bedclothes, was slim and tall, six-three, four, maybe more, although the anxious crook of his neck on this night seemed to shave a few inches off him as he paced the littered floor of the Metropolitan Hospital ER.

“He said the wife had a family emergency in Buffalo,” the patrol sergeant told Billy. “Left him with the kid for a few days.”

Billy’s jacket buzzed, a text from Carmen at two-thirty in the morning:

can i burn the coat

“You know who that is, right?” the sergeant said, gesturing to the agitated pacer as Billy texted back.

absolutely not

“What? No, why?”

“You follow high school hoops?”

“It’s all I can do to follow the pros.”

“Aaron Jeter, played power forward for DeWitt Clinton about four years ago, took them to two state AA championships. You couldn’t open the sports pages back then without there’s a picture of him banging under the boards.”

Billy took another look at the guy, this time noticing the outsized shoulder caps that topped his lean frame.

“Huh. And so where’s he at now?”

“Now?” the sergeant shrugged. “Now he’s here.”

Alice Stupak, who put out a sympathetic, feminine vibe that she could turn on and off like a faucet, was usually the go-to detective for interviews of this kind, and she waited for the high sign to start working the guy. But Billy, after all that had happened today, wanted this one for himself.

“How are you doing, I’m Detective Graves,” Billy having to look up as he introduced himself. The hand that enveloped his was as big as a first baseman’s mitt. “You’re Aaron Jeter, right?”

“What? Yeah,” he said, staring anxiously over Billy’s head to the closed-off rooms beyond the nurses’ station.

“See, I’d be lying to you,” Billy said, “if I pretended like I didn’t know it already.”

Jeter seemed deaf to the flattery, still riveted by whatever was happening beyond the screens.