Richard Price - The Whites

“Hey, it was his time and he recognized it,” Billy said. “Many don’t.”

“What’s that?” Pavlicek tilted his chin to the side pocket of Billy’s sport jacket, Sweetpea’s purple Missing poster still peeking out like gaudy origami.

Billy passed it over.

“Cornell Harris,” Pavlicek read, then: “That’s Sweetpea, right?”

“Looks like he pulled a Houdini,” Billy said. “Or got Houdinied, more likely.”

“What the hell do you care?”

“I’m not saying I do.”

“Worry about your family.”

“What do you think I’m doing here?”

“Worry about your kids.” Pavlicek started to balloon again, his voice bouncing off the bare walls.

Billy stopped answering, refusing to engage.

“This fuck? Are you kidding me?” Pavlicek crumpled the poster, then tossed it backhand into a corner. “Piece of shit…”

Hoping he would storm himself out, Billy remained seated and watchfully silent until Pavlicek suddenly made his move, coming toward him so fast that he didn’t even have time to raise his hands. But instead of throwing a punch, the big man blew right past him and without another word stormed out of the apartment, the flung-open door pockmarking the plaster of the tiny vestibule before slamming back into its frame on the rebound.

Trying to calm himself, Billy gazed out the window at the clean geometry of the distant stadium grass for a moment, then, turning away, picked Sweetpea’s poster up off the floor and dialed the number that hung in multiples from the bottom.

Donna Barkley was a short, thick, snub-faced woman to begin with, and her company-issued maroon blazer did her no favors, her fingers barely peeking out of the too-long sleeves, the jacket’s center back vent angling out over her high and wide butt like an awning.

“Hey, how are you,” Billy said, rising from his white plastic chair in the cement pocket park alongside the office building where she worked as a security guard.

She took a seat, reached into her bag for a Newport, fired up, and then turned her head away to exhale, exposing the cursive Sweetpea inked across her left carotid.

“Arista,” Billy said, reading the insignia on her jacket. “They take care of you over there?”

“It’s a job for pay,” still not looking at him. “I got two kids and a grandmother.”

“I hear you,” he said, removing the crumpled Missing poster from his jacket and flattening it against the tabletop.

“You were only supposed to tear off the phone number on the bottom,” she said, “not take the whole damn thing.”

Billy gave it a beat, vigorously scratching his up-tilted throat. “So, let me just start by asking you a few questions, see where that takes us.”

“Who are you with again?”

“Like I said to you on the phone, I’m an independent investigator.”

She gave him a look. “You got an ID?”

He handed over his driver’s license.

“Something with your business on it.”

Digging into his wallet, he pulled out a card for Sousa Security, his brother-in-law’s outfit, which listed him as the assistant head of investigations, even though he never did a thing or took a dime.

“And this is for free?”

“I said that.”

“Why is it free.”

“Because,” Billy looking her in the eye, “like I also mentioned to you on the phone, we’re opening an office near Lincoln Hospital and if I can find him for you, word’ll get around and hopefully it’ll bring us clients.”

A pigeon landed on their table, Sweetpea’s fiancée glaring at the filthy thing but making no move to shoo it away.

“Has he ever been gone this long before?”

Taking her cell phone out of her purse, she responded to one text, then another, Billy torn between repeating the question and just packing it in.

“Outside of incarceration?” she finally said, still texting. “Now and then.”

“So what made you so concerned this time?”

“Because,” she said, stuffing her cell back into her purse, “we were talking on the phone, then some white guy called his name, and all of a sudden Sweetpea hangs up and where is he.”

“OK, this guy…” he said, opening a steno pad.

“White guy.”

“This white guy who called his name, did he say anything else?”

“He just said, ‘Hey Sweetpea, come over here.’”

“Then what.”

“Then Sweetpea said, ‘The fuck you want.’ Then the guy said, ‘Seriously, Pea, no kidding, come over here.’”

Billy looked up from his notes. “And you’re sure the guy was white?”

“My phone doesn’t come with eyes, but I know white when I hear it and that guy was white all day long.”

“OK,” Billy said. “Then what.”

“What?”

“What did you hear next.”

“Click.”

“And roughly what time was this?”

“It was three-fifteen exact, you know how I know? Because he kept yelling at me. ‘It’s three-fifteen, bitch! Where the fuck are you?’”

“Good,” Billy back to writing.

“Good?”

“Do you have any idea where he was when he called you?”

“I know that exact, too. He was just leaving my building to come get me, yelling, ‘I’m walking out right now, I’m walking out right now.’”

“Walking out of…”

“502 Concord Avenue.”

“502,” writing, then: “This white guy, any ideas?”

“Not per se.”

“What do you mean, ‘not per se.’”

She shrugged as if the question wasn’t worth answering.

Billy hesitated, then, chalking up her truculent vagueness to a general case of whitey hatin’, moved on.

“Was he having any problems with anyone recently?”

“Well, he’s a talent promoter, you know?” Her voice softened for the first time. “Trying to help the community, but these kids he takes under his wing, they expect miracles.”

“Any kids in particular?”

“I’m just saying”—looking away—“in general.”

“All right.” He put down his pen. “I did a little research on your fiancé before I came here, it’s a crucial part of a job like this, and I need to ask you…” Billy back in her eyes. “Is he still slinging?”

She stared at him as if he were too thick to live. “I don’t want to talk out of my area of expertise.”

“Do you want me to find him or not?”

She continued to stare, Billy once again ready to call it a day.

“One last… I asked you before if you had any idea who this white guy was and you said, ‘Not per se.’ I need for you to elaborate on that ‘not per se.’”

“Not per se meaning, like, I don’t know who he is, per se.”

“But you know… what, his type?”

“Oh yeah.”

“From what, his tone of voice?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And what type would that be.”

“Your type.”

“My type…”

She fired up another Newport, took a drag, then exhaled in a slow steady stream.

“You know what Sweetpea always used to say NYPD stands for?” she said, tossing Billy’s bullshit business card on the table as she rose to her feet. “‘Not Your People, Dawg,’” having read him like a comic book from the door on in.

He was still sitting at the table when he got a call from home, the unexpected sound of his younger son’s plaintive voice making him knotty.

“Hey, buddy, what’s up?”

“I didn’t even do anything and Mom started yelling at me like I did,” Carlos said.

Billy exhaled with relief. “Well, she had an upsetting experience this morning, so don’t take it personal and just extra-behave today, all right? You and your brother both.”

“But I didn’t do anything.”

“Carlos, just do me a favor, OK?”

“OK.”