Richard Price - The Whites

His aunt Pauline, eight hours after an obliterating cerebral hemorrhage, lay on life support in the Jacobi Hospital ICU, flanked by her two speechless sons, Herbert and Stan. Out of blood deference, Milton stood at the foot of the bed, his hands resting on the guard rail. She was now a machine-breathing vegetable, and over the past few hours three separate nurses had dropped by to gently campaign for pulling the plug so that they could commence the harvesting, but neither of his guilt-ridden cousins could even bring themselves to hold their mother’s hand, let alone respond to the request.

So when a fourth nurse came by to make the pitch, Milton cut her off before word one.

“She’s ready,” he said.

Neither son protested or even looked his way.

So fucking like them…

After his mother and brothers died and Pauline had brought him into her home, he had shared a bedroom with these two for years, but despite his status as a first cousin, they couldn’t get past the tragedy he brought into the house with him, or maybe it was just his mixed-race jungle face, or maybe like most everyone else he knew they were intuitively scared of him. Whatever the reason, they had never accepted him as anything but a nerve-racking boarder, as welcome into their lives as an untethered bear.

At least Pauline had taken him in with an open heart; her only bone of contention, then and always, was his sullen demeanor. Not that she didn’t understand.

After the nurse left, a volunteer grief counselor came by and touched his arm. “It’s so hard to let a loved one go. But you have to take comfort in the fact that even though she might be leaving you physically…”

“Talk to them,” chucking a thumb toward his cousins, then leaving for the street.

He wouldn’t attend or even help with the funeral; they could at least handle that. He had pulled the plug, and that was enough.

Herbert and Stan: if they weren’t dead to him before, they sure as hell were now, letting him call down the Reaper on their own mother like that…

Loss and loss and loss, each one unasked for, each one, come the end of the story, concluding with his hands gripping a scythe.

“Hey, stranger!” his cousin Anita, like his aunt, one of the decent ones, instantly recognizing his voice on the horn after a year without contact. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I haven’t talked to you in a while.”

“I know! How’s Sofia?”

“You should see her.”

“I’d love to.”

“How about we come visit sometime.”

“Say when.”

She’ll go to better people .

“Soon.”

Loss and loss and loss, Milton seeing that house in Yonkers again, that smooth-sailing home.

Why should they be happy.

Billy didn’t find out about Sweetpea Harris having gone missing until a two a.m. playground shooting of a sixteen-year-old in Fort Tryon Park took him and Mayo over the Macombs Dam Bridge to Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx.

The victim’s brothers were sitting in a small, dreary waiting room, three of them, mute and seething, visions of payback already playing in their eyes. They knew everything there was to know about what had gone down but he would have had better luck interviewing statues, and after twenty minutes of listening to himself talk, Billy got up from a coffee-stained couch with a blank notepad, just hoping that the aforementioned payback would occur after eight in the morning when he was heading up to Yonkers.

It was on his way back to the nurses’ station that he first caught sight of the two homemade Missing posters push-pinned into the community announcements board, each featuring a low-resolution photo of Sweetpea Harris on purple printer paper that was bottom-fringed with tear-away phone number tabs, as if announcing the availability of a dog walker. Billy took one of the posters, stuffed it into his coat pocket, and moved on down the line.

An hour later, after one of the doctors came out of the OR and told Billy that the vic would pull through, he returned to the visitors’ room to see if the good news would maybe, just maybe, get the brothers talking. But they were already gone, Billy once again praying that the drama to come wouldn’t play out until he was safely back in his own bed.

As he was leaving the hospital, intending to head back to Manhattan and monitor the canvass around the crime scene, he nearly ran into an army of the victim’s other relatives bursting through the front door, those in front half-carrying the overcome grandmother as if she were their flagship. Billy was there for three additional hours, none of these further interviews yielding anything more than vaguely ominous variations on “They know who they are” and “I warned him” type pronouncements. Finally, the vic’s fourteen-year-old stone-faced sister chin-signaled for him to follow her into the ladies’ room, where she locked herself in a stall for a few minutes, flushed, and then left without ever saying word one.

The folded Post-it was perched on top of the toilet paper dispenser, the name and address of the shooter written in strawberry-scented neon pink with a swannish hand. Two hours later, armed with a search warrant, Billy followed six Bronx ESU cops into a Valentine Avenue apartment, catching the fifteen-year-old actor already dressed for school, his mouth filled with Franken Berries, his gun in an Angry Birds book bag.

Taking the kid to the nearest precinct, the 4–6, Billy handed him over for processing, then dragged himself upstairs to the empty predawn squad room in order to start banging out the requisite blizzard of paper. And when the day tour started rolling in at eight, he was still at it, blinking violently into the computer screen, his fingertips fluttering with the hour.

“What are you doing here?”

Billy looked up from his commandeered desk to see Dennis Doyle, a take-out coffee in one hand, a folded Daily News tucked up next to his ribs.

“What’s it look like,” he said, flicking a finger against the screen.

“Come take a break,” Dennis said, walking to his office.

Billy followed him inside, planting himself next to a stack of manila folders on the lone couch.

“So how’s she doing?”

“Not great,” Dennis said, opening his paper.

“The drinking?”

“Everything.”

A burly, expressionless detective came into the office without knocking, dropped a new folder on Dennis’s desk, and left the room.

“You know, she called me the other day, told me Raymond Del Pino’s sister named her baby after her,” Billy said.

“I know, Rose Yasmeen.”

“She told me Yasmeen Rose.”

“I’m sure she did,” Dennis said, glancing at the fresh reports.

“Still, no one ever middle-named a kid after me, you know?”

“It’s the least they could do, after all she’s been through.”

“Listen, while I’m here…” Billy took Sweetpea’s Missing poster out of the side pocket of his sport jacket and handed it over. “You know anything about this?”

Dennis read it and shrugged.

“Look at the guy,” Billy said.

“Cornell Harris?”

“Sweetpea Harris.”

“Redman’s Sweetpea?”

“He told me Harris was half-living with his girlfriend on Concord Avenue. That’s you, so I’m thinking maybe she came in here to file a report.”

“Hey, Milton,” Dennis called out.

The detective came back in the room.

“Can you check the 494s for this guy?”

“Nothing there.”

“Don’t you want to check?”

“I was here when his sisters or whoever came in to file on him, but it was only twenty-four hours and they never came back, so…”