Richard Price - The Whites

“Keep your shoulder blades back, imagine they’re trying to shake hands across your spine.”

“Do you remember the name of that principal?” Billy just testing.

“Frank Stevenson, a real no-nonsense guy, but you had to be, with some of those kids he had.”

“How about the boat.”

“What boat?”

“That housed the school.”

“It was a ship, not a boat. A mothballed Liberty, the John W. Brown . The navy donated it to the city in 1946.”

“Dad, you never told me any of this,” Billy grinning and grinning. “This is history.”

“You want history? How about Fidel Castro staying at the Hotel Theresa up on a Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street? Do you know those Cubans were smuggling live poultry into the top-floor suites? Did you ever try to catch a chicken with your bare hands? It can’t be done. Your mother had to give me rubdowns for a week.”

“You’re killing me,” Billy still grinning like a mule.

“Don’t forget to breathe, Mr. Graves.”

“So, Charlie, how’s my little sister doing these days?” he asked Milan.

“Your sister?”

“She says you’re off the sauce for good. Is that true?”

“Sauce?” Milan looking to Billy.

“Just roll with it,” Billy muttered, going back to his mindless magazine.

“Yes, I’m off the sauce.”

“Well, you better be, because if I have to come up there and get her again, this time there’s going to be some laying on of the hands, my friend, that I can promise you.”

As he was adjusting his father’s seat belt in the parking lot behind the rehab center, Jimmy Whelan called, Billy stepping away from the car to talk.

“What are you doing right now.”

“Driving my father.”

“Oh yeah? How’s he doing?”

“The same.”

“Same is better than worse. Listen.” Whelan’s voice dropped. “I need to talk to you about something.”

“About Pavlicek?” the question just popping out of Billy without cerebral clearance.

“Pavlicek?” Jimmy sounding caught up short. “What about him?”

“Nothing,” Billy said, burning to bring up the blood specialist but afraid of being asked how he had come across the information. “What did you want to talk about.”

“Remember that movie Fort Apache ?”

“With John Wayne, right?”

“What John Wayne. Fort Apache, The Bronx . They’re doing a remake. Billy Heffernan’s got an in with the people involved, and he asked me if I was interested in working on it.”

“As what?”

“Some kind of consultant. You know, because of what we were doing around there back then.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“Money for nothing and chicks for free, right?”

“Could be.”

“Why’d you mention Pavlicek?” Whelan asked, but Immaculate Conception was trying to ring through and Billy had to end the call.

After arranging a time to review the parking lot tapes with the head of school security, then taking a few minutes to calm himself down, Billy called Whelan back from a traffic jam on the Saw Mill River Parkway.

“Something going on with Pavlicek?” the first thing out of Jimmy’s mouth. “I need to know.”

“Forget it,” Billy said, Pavlicek now the last thing on his mind.

“You all right? You sound off.”

“I’m trying to drive here.”

“Don’t bullshit me.”

“Something happened with my kid,” this too coming out of him without any mental vetting.

“What happened with your kid?”

Billy didn’t want to talk about it in front of his father, but the old man was down for the count.

“Jimmy,” Billy keeping his voice low, “I’m freaking six ways to Sunday.”

Although his meeting with security wasn’t until four, Billy was back at Immaculate Conception at two-thirty, the first of the parents to arrive for the pickups. For the next forty-five minutes, he studied every car coming into the lot until a side door of the building opened and the students began to exit, the youngest first, those not bus-bound lined up against the side of the building until each was retrieved by a minder.

Billy hadn’t told his kids he was coming, and he watched as Carlos ran to his designated bus unaccosted, no one taking the slightest interest in him, least of all some wide-bodied, red-handed possible cop. The person who did catch his eye, though, was the teacher with a clipboard posted by the bus’s folding yellow doors, the guy chanting, “No pushing, no pushing,” as the kids scrambled up the short stairs to their seats.

The bus monitor turned out to be the school’s remedial reading specialist, Albert Lazar, a short, erectly trim middle-aged man who projected an air of constant alertness, although that just could have been his slightly hyperthyroidic eyes.

“Like I said, I wasn’t on bus detail yesterday, we’re on a rotating schedule for that.”

“I understand,” Billy said, “but were you in the parking lot at all?”

“We all are at release time, it’s required.”

“OK, how about this: just looking around yesterday, did you happen to notice anyone that struck you as unusual?”

“Unusual meaning…”

“Maybe someone who looked a little out of place.”

“Like what, a homeless person?”

“Like anybody,” Billy not wanting to lead with a more specific description.

“Well, there were some nuns from the Poor Clares down from Poughkeepsie.”

“Who else.”

“A boy’s divorced parents apparently got their signals crossed and showed up for him at the same time. They started arguing in the lot, then they both left without him. That turned a few heads.”

“Who else.”

“That’s about it.”

“Any men?”

“Men?”

“Man. Maybe some guy, walking around, you’re thinking…”

“You know…” Lazar hesitated.

“Just say.”

“There was someone I hadn’t seen before, could’ve been some kid’s father, but I don’t think so.”

Billy took a breath and asked for a description.

“I’d say a little taller than me, but not much, heavyset, dark, Hispanic, Italian maybe.”

Billy felt a surge, his exhausted body having trouble handling it. “What was he wearing?”

“A dark suit, nothing fancy, shirt and tie.”

“How about his hair? Curly, straight, dark…”

“Dark, I guess,” then: “He could’ve had a mustache, but he looked so Mediterranean I might be putting it on him.”

“Did he speak to anyone?”

“Not that I noticed.”

“Why don’t you think he was a parent coming to pick up his kid?”

“There’s not that many fathers doing the afternoon pickups and I pretty much know them all, at least by sight.”

“All right,” Billy winding down, pulling his card out of his wallet. “Anything else you can tell me about him? Just off the top of your head. Anything…”

“Yeah, actually, there is,” Lazar said, taking the offered card but not looking at it. “He struck me like someone in the security business.”

“Meaning?”

“You know, the way he carried himself, very alert and no-nonsense. It’s hard to explain.”

“You just did,” Billy said woodenly. He tapped his card. “Anything else you can remember, night or day.”

He hadn’t identified himself as an NYPD detective, just as a concerned parent whose son might have been approached by a stranger on school grounds, and he saw the teacher’s face darken as he read the new information.

For an instant Lazar looked at Billy searchingly, then shut himself down.

“Something else?” Billy asked mildly.

“No,” his eyes reading, Yes.

Billy lingered, giving Lazar a moment to say what was suddenly so troubling to him, but the teacher stepped into the bus to handle some rowdiness and that was that.