Richard Price - The Whites

MacCormack stood there scanning him for tells.

“So he is dead?” Billy asked, an honest question.

“No.”

“Then I don’t get it.”

“Billy, what’s going on.”

“Carmen, just…”

“Hey, look who’s here!” Billy Senior nearly shouted as he walked into the room and slapped MacCormack on the back. “Jackie MacCormack! I thought you were in Florida!”

Billy watched as MacCormack went into his internal face file for a moment, then shook his father’s hand.

“Billy Graves, how the hell are you?”

“Never been worse,” the old man said, then wandered into the kitchen, where Millie was making his breakfast.

“What was that about?” Billy asked.

“He’s your father?” MacCormack seemed a little dazed.

“Yeah, how does he know you?”

“He doesn’t. He was with my old man in the TPF for a few years back in the sixties. I wasn’t even born yet. I just recognized him from pictures my mother keeps around.”

Billy peered into the kitchen, his father sitting there now, eating dry cereal and watching a talk show on the miniature TV that sat next to the microwave.

“He’s pretty much shot,” Billy said.

“Are you sure about that?” MacCormack still coming off slightly stunned. “Because I have to tell you, I look nothing like my dad.”

Billy experienced an all-too-familiar surge of optimism, then shut it down, the rhythm of his father’s inexorable deterioration always spiked with these cruel upticks of startling keenness that raised his hopes for a moment before dashing them with the next time-warp slippage into dementia, Billy suddenly desperate to get away from his father before the next inevitable reminder came about of what a fool he was, is, always will be around the old man, until death took him away.

Snapping back into the here and now, Billy first looked to his wife, then to MacCormack, both staring at him as if they had been following his thoughts.

“You want to collect my guns?” he said, ejecting the clip, then handing MacCormack the grip end of his Glock. “I have a Ruger in a lockbox in the basement, and my father’s old hand cannon is in his room. My wife can take you, have a blast.”

Billy walked into the kitchen to fix himself a double double, praying that his father would just keep his mouth shut and not make him weep. He didn’t return to the living room until he heard the front door close; when he did, the sight of his Glock sitting on the coffee table in front of Carmen pulled him up short.

“Where’d he go?”

“Outside.”

“What do you mean, outside. He left?”

“He’s waiting for you.”

Billy looked out the window and saw the dope-confiscated Firebird gurgling at the foot of the driveway, MacCormack behind the wheel and the passenger door open.

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” he said, walking out of the house.

The state-run nursing home in Ozone Park smelled like cooking diapers. Eric Cortez was in the dayroom, Velcroed into a wheelchair, his face a soft balloon over his withering torso, his eyes, beneath a strapped-on hockey helmet, the popped silver of a gaffed fish.

“For the seizures,” MacCormack said, nodding to the helmet.

“What happened?”

“He was shot in the head about three months ago and left for dead. A kid, actually the kid’s dog, found him in a trash bag behind a housing project up in Dutchess County.”

“When I ran him I didn’t see anything about this.”

“It’s not our investigation, plus we weren’t too eager to post it in case someone was interested in finishing the job.”

“What kind of hitter’s going to have access to the system?”

MacCormack stared at him.

“Are you serious?”

“The bullet was a 135 grain Speer Gold Dot from a Smith and Wesson.38, standard police issue.”

“So what? We don’t have a monopoly on that. Plus he was a snitch.”

“What do you think, he was the only one we were running? And when he stopped showing up for our meets, none of the others knew shit. Then we got the call from Dutchess. So when you went online looking for him…”

“So you’re looking at cops?”

Neither of them was looking at Cortez anymore.

“One of the people we interviewed said that he overheard our friend bragging on knowing about a protection-for-pay racket coming out of a Brooklyn precinct about two weeks before he caught a bullet. Maybe he wasn’t just bragging.”

“So you’re looking at cops?” Billy having no memory of just saying this.

“We’re vetting a few.”

“Anybody looking good for it?”

MacCormack didn’t answer.

“But that’s where you’re looking…”

MacCormack cocked his head. “Why, you think we should be looking somewheres else?”

“Do I? No, I’m just curious.” Then: “I wish I could call this a tragedy.”

Taking Billy by the elbow, MacCormack led him to the lobby. “It’s most likely one of the crew he was ratting on, but if it wasn’t, if there’s something to this protection ring, I mean, that trumps anything else going and we want to cover our bases.”

When they got back to Yonkers thirty minutes later, Billy’s father was sitting on the porch reading the newspaper, his mouth hanging open in concentration.

From the driver’s seat, MacCormack ducked his head to take in all the TARU cameras trained on the house and the street.

“Something tells me the worst thing I could’ve done today was take away your guns.”

The girl sat on her narrow bed in the sour-smelling suite, grinding her knuckles into bonemeal. A shoe box filled with Saran Wrapped twists of coke and Ziplocs of pot sat on her desk, and a hollowed-out copy of Gravity’s Rainbow packed with tens, twenties, and hundreds lay open on her dresser.

“ Gravity’s Rainbow , I never heard of that,” Yasmeen said as she photographed the cash. “Is that a good book?”

“I never read it.” The girl’s numb gaze was locked onto the wedge of the Brooklyn Bridge visible from the dormitory window. “It’s my dad’s favorite.”

Yasmeen silently hip-bumped Billy out of the way as she photographed the shoe box. He was there but not there, NYPD not allowed anywhere on campus without the permission of the university.

“Can I call my dad?”

“Absolutely.”

Billy caught the eye of the roommate, who had started the ball rolling with a complaint to her therapist in the school’s Wellness Center.

“Don’t look at me,” she said in a clipped Punjabi trill. “She’s the drug dealer.”

Two more school security officers, both retired detectives like Yasmeen, sauntered into the room, their faces immobile with boredom.

“So Redman said you found out Pavlicek’s seeing a hematologist?” Yasmeen asked, shrugging her Tibetan hippie coat onto the back of her chair.

“I did,” Billy said, unable to read her tone.

They were seated at the window table of a hummus café directly across the street from the dormitory.

“Is it serious?”

“I have no idea.”

A waiter came out with their orders, a bottled beer for Billy, a mug of herbal tea for Yasmeen.

“I’ve been on the wagon all week,” she said. “It’s incredible how fast your body forgives you.”

“So you don’t know anything about this?”

“About what?”

“About John.”

“I think somebody said he was having headaches.”

“What do you mean headaches, like migraines?”

“That’s all I know, and I don’t even know if I know that.”

They watched through the window as the girl was finally escorted out of the dorm by the two other school security officers and handed over to city detectives, the kid’s college career at an end barely into the second semester of her freshman year.