Richard Price: The Whites

“Ey,” he blared. “You hear what happened?”

No one even turned his way.

“Anybody carrying anything tonight?” Billy asked.

“Like weed?”

“Like a weapon.”

“Everything’s a weapon.”

“How’d you get that blood on you, again?”

“What blood,” the kid said, touching his face.

“Was anybody in your pos… was anybody beefing with anybody tonight?”

“Tonight?” The kid blinked. “Tonight we’re going into the city.”

Billy decided to send him and everybody else to Midtown South in order to sleep it off, then be reinterviewed. His guess was that these interviews would yield nothing. He was also pretty sure that with half the eastern seaboard stomping through the crime scene like migrating wildebeests, the forensics would be useless as well. His money was on the surveillance tape.

He called it in to his division captain, the guy instantly starting to quack like a duck as if Billy had killed Bannion himself, worked for a while with the Transit cops down by the subways and the LIRR detectives under the track information board, and then, praying for a money shot, climbed the stairs to the cramped room where the monitors were set up, only to be told by the tech on duty that the master hard drive that uploaded all the security footage had been damaged by a coffee spill a few hours before and the only way to salvage the film at this point was to send it out for file retrieval, a process that could take days, if not weeks.

Back down on the floor, needing one of his squad to supervise the witness transport, Billy started to approach Feeley but balked when he saw him yakking it up with a white-haired deputy inspector, the two of them probably swapping memories of their time together chasing Pancho Villa. He went looking for Stupak instead and found her standing in front of a riot-gated calzone shop interviewing a maintenance worker.

As soon as he told Stupak what he wanted done, her glance reflexively went to Feeley. “What,” she muttered, “General Grant too busy prepping for Gettysburg?”

No one liked having Feeley on the squad, but no one liked him less than Alice, a hater of both the old boy network and shirkers in general. It was personal, too: despite her sixteen years on the Job, including seven in Emergency Services and three with the Violent Fugitive Apprehension Team, the old bastard took way too much pleasure in addressing her now and then as Babydoll.

Once Stupak was on her way, Billy fielded another overwrought call from his division cap, followed by one from the squad commander of Midtown South. Then, at seven a.m., with the scene secured and none of the possible witnesses in any shape to talk, Billy decided to sneak back to Yonkers just long enough to take his kids to school.

At this hour the traffic on the northbound Henry Hudson Parkway was mercifully light, and by seven forty-five he was turning onto his street. As he pulled up to the house, he saw Carmen standing on a six-foot ladder in front of the carport, trying to extract the deflated basketball jammed between the portable hoop and the backboard, the thing having been stuck like that since January, when it became too cold for the kids to play.

“Just poke it, Carm.”

“I tried. It’s in too tight.”

Sitting behind the wheel in a half-trance of exhaustion, Billy watched her try to muscle the ball free, the morning sun turning her polyester nurse’s whites the color of ice.

She was his second wife. His first, Diane, an African-American art therapist, had left him in the wake of the highly publicized protests over his accidental and near-fatal shooting of a ten-year-old Hispanic boy in the Bronx. In all fairness, the bullet that hit the kid had first passed through its intended target, a Dusted giant armed with an already bloodied lead pipe. At first, Diane, only twenty-three at the time to his twenty-five, tried to hang fire with him, but after the papers picked it up and a Bronx reverend with a fat press book set up a month-long protest vigil around their Staten Island home, she gradually came apart and then bailed.

Billy had met Carmen when he was in the Identification Squad posted to the ME’s office, having been sent there from anti-crime as a form of internal exile after the shooting. She had come in that day to identify Damian Robles, until his OD, thirty-six hours earlier, her living husband.

Despite being a heroin addict, Robles had been a mixed martial arts professional with a ridiculously chiseled physique, and it embarrassed Billy to admit that two days after death the guy still looked better than Billy did on the best day of his own life.

Dead was dead, however, and twenty minutes after first laying eyes on her, as they stood side by side staring at the corpse through a long rectangular window, he just came out and said it: “What were you doing married to a lowlife like that?”

But instead of going for his face or screaming bloody murder, she calmly answered, “I thought he was what I deserved.”

Within a month they were leaving clothes in each other’s apartments.

Within a year they were sending out save-the-dates.

Her initial attraction to him, or so he thought at the time, was a no-brainer: sudden widow looking about and glomming onto the protective policeman standing by her side. Billy had always been a sucker for any kind of My Hero vibes when they occasionally came his way, but in truth he had fallen in love purely because of her looks and the way she sounded: her huge, smudge-rimmed eyes in a heart-shaped face, her skin the color of light toast, and that voice — lazy and smoky when she felt that way and backed by a deep and easy laugh that made him drowsy with pleasure. Lust was there from the beginning, but every other long-playing thing — trust, tenderness, companionability, et cetera — had only come about with time.

Not that living with her was any walk in the park. Her mood swings were fierce, and she was prone to savage dreams, often waking him up with her sleep talk, semicoherent tear-choked pleas to be left alone. And what he at first thought was a temporary desire for a protector in her life had over the years morphed into a river of visceral, mostly inarticulate need for him, a neediness he never quite understood but responded to with everything he had. She could never wear him out with her demands; there was something about her that made him want to be the best possible version of himself. He loved her, loved to come through for her, loved that what he had always thought of with embarrassment as his flatline personality, his bland stolidness, could become the rock in the raging sea of another soul’s life.

Still, there was something inside her he could never quite get at. Sometimes he felt like a knight assigned to protect a maiden from a dragon that only she could see, and so he paid attention to the words when she cried out in her sleep, when her half-panicked rants became less coherent and maybe closer to the bone, but he was not a particularly analytical individual, so all his secret studying came to nothing. And given that he had been raised in a home in which he’d been taught to take people as they were, no questions asked, a home in which the character trait prized above all else was an Apache level of forbearance, he would die before straight up asking his wife of twelve years, the mother of his two sons, Who Are You.

“Where are the survivalists?” he called from the car.

“You’re taking them?” she asked.

“Yeah, but I left a body at Penn Station, so I got to go back right after.”

“I can take them.”

“No, just where are—”

“Declan!”

Billy’s all-night eyelids butterflied in pain: Carmen’s initial solution for finding anyone was to yell.

Stalling for a last heartbeat of inaction, he let his gaze stray to their front porch, where Carmen’s green nylon St. Patrick’s Day banner, all shamrocks and wee people, snapped in the wind, one day past its expiration date, although Billy knew that by dinnertime it would be replaced with the Easter banner, bunnies and parti-colored eggs on a backdrop of powder blue.