Richard Price - The Whites

It was one in the afternoon on the day after she had boarded the bus to JFK and he was still waiting for her call from Guatemala City. At first he told himself, Third-world country, travel chaos, shitty to nonexistent cell service, there could be a million reasons. But after a few hours of thinking about all the cash she was carrying, third-world country began to morph into abduction, chaos into rape, and bad cell reception into murder .

Deciding that he didn’t want any of her mojo collection in his house, he unpacked what he had just packed, then went to work emptying her medicine chest, another cabinet of curiosities, including a few unmarked jars that he wouldn’t open on a bet. But he found no over-the-counter items and, more jarringly, no pharmacy-filled vials, no recognizable medications — every bathroom cabinet on earth held doctor-prescribed meds — which meant she either didn’t take any and was as healthy as she looked or she was too poor to take proper care of herself and was medicating on the medieval plan, the mystery of the absent meds once again hammering home to him how little, after all these years, he actually knew about her.

His cell rang, not Marilys but Peter Gonzalez, a half friend of his from the TSA.

“She wasn’t on United, American, or Delta. There were four other airlines flying out of the New York area with a connecting flight to Guatemala last night and this morning, but I figured those three were both direct and had the cheapest fares so…”

“So…” Milton sat on her bed.

“Aeromexico out of JFK last night had two Irrizarys on their manifest, a Carla and a Maria — are you sure Marilys is her legal name? It could be a nickname, a childhood name, or something.”

“Hang on,” he said, putting the phone down and quickly rustling through her garbage until he found a rent receipt and a Con Ed bill.

“Yeah, Marilys Irrizary, keep looking.” Then: “Hello? You still there?”

“You’re welcome,” Gonzalez said.

“Sorry. Thank you.”

Going back to packing, he returned to her closet and then went through her dresser, both of which were half empty, leaving Milton struck by how few actual possessions she had. Lastly he collected her crucifixes, icons, and religious statuary: Saints Michael, George, Lucy, and Lazarus, the Infant of Atocha and Our Lady of Guadalupe, all the usual suspects. Then, after surveying the rest of the apartment one last time and not finding anything else worth taking, he began to carry her stuff down to the street, needing only four trips to complete the job, six medium-sized boxes going into the back of a rented U-Haul with a capacity for ten times that amount.

Gonzalez called back a few hours later, while Milton was in the process of unpacking those same boxes in his house.

“Spirit, Avianca, Taca, Copa, no Irrizarys on any of them.”

“All right,” Milton said. “Thank you.”

Fighting down panic, he busied himself with unwrapping her saints until he dropped and shattered the Black Madonna and Child, at which point he lost his shit in earnest.

Whatever happened to her, it had happened here.

She had never even made it out of the city.

“We can’t start looking until forty-eight hours,” Turkel, the lone detective on duty in the Missing Persons Unit said. “You know the drill.”

Milton had never been on the customer side of a squad room desk before, and he hated it.

“You can’t jump the clock for me?” Redundantly flashing his tin.

“Last time I did someone a favor, they put me on desk duty for three months.”

“What am I asking here,” Milton said, thinking, You’re behind a fucking desk right now.

“Look, how about you fill out the report, give it to me, if she’s still missing tomorrow midnight, give me a call and I’ll bump her to the top of the list.”

Twenty minutes later, while still waiting for Turkel to find the right form, Milton left the office and returned to his squad in the 4–6.

“I understand where Missing Persons is coming from with the forty-eight-hours rule,” Milton said, sitting between mountains of manila folders on Dennis Doyle’s couch. “But I’m not talking about some teenage runaway here, and I was hoping you could reach out to somebody for me.”

He knew his boss didn’t like him, would have happily had him transferred out of the squad in a heartbeat if he could, but Milton couldn’t think of anyone else to go to on this.

Doyle leaned back in his office chair, his head encircled by the framed portraits of his own bosses on the wall behind him.

“Who do I know there,” he said, scowling into the middle distance, then picking up his phone, putting it down, picking it up again. “I got the guy. Remember that Night Watch sergeant was in here that morning I was asking you for the 494s on Cornell Harris?”

Milton slid his ass to the edge of the sofa. “Vaguely.”

“Billy Graves, he spent a lot of years in the ID Squad, he’s got to have a few friends in Missing Persons.”

Milton got to his feet.

“Boss, you know what? Maybe I’m hitting the panic button too early on this.”

“Your call.” Doyle shrugged.

“I appreciate it though, thank you,” he said, walking back into the squad room.

“Who is she, anyhow?” his boss called out after him.

Back in Marilys’s apartment, he scoured dressers, drawers, and trash receptacles for anything that could help him find her, turning up nothing beyond those bullshit elixirs, a never-used datebook, and a set of keys that didn’t fit her door. It was only after overturning half the furniture and getting down on his stomach with a Maglite to peer beneath whatever he couldn’t move that he discovered the three phone numbers written in pencil on the wall above her mini-fridge.

The first was to a local deli, the second to a Chinese restaurant that delivered, but the third, with an outer-borough area code, was to an older female Hispanic with good English.

“Good afternoon, this is Detective Milton Ramos from the New York Police Department Missing Persons Unit. I’m looking for a Ms. Marilys Irrizary?”

“Not here.”

“Who am I talking to?”

“Who am I talking to?”

Milton took a breath. “Detective Milton Ramos, NYPD, your turn.”

“Anna Goury,” then: “Josepha Suarez.”

“Which.”

“Both.”

“Do you know Ms. Irrizary?”

“Ms.?” Sardonically dragging out the z sound. “Yeah, she’s my sister, what’s going on?”

And when Milton, overwhelmed by the question, was unable to answer, she asked, “Are you really a cop?”

Anna Goury/Josepha Suarez lived with her husband, three kids, and what Milton thought might be a wolf in a federally funded prefab ranch house on Charlotte Street in the former anus mundi section of the Bronx, all six rooms of her home spotless to the point of parboiled. She looked a lot like Marilys, but then again all Indio women of a certain age seemed to him born of the same womb.

The three small cups of rocket-fuel Bustelo she served him at the kitchen table both helped and hindered his getting the full story out, breaking down his inbred reticence but making him stammer.

“I don’t understand,” she said after he finished. “Why would she be going to Guatemala?”

“Why? I told you, to bring back…”

“Our mother? Our mother’s dead fifteen years,” she said. “Besides, we’re from El Salvador.”

“Hold on, hang on,” the sweat caught in his mustache suddenly reeking of coffee.

“Well, all I can say is,” Goury/Suarez delicately rotating her demitasse cup on the smooth tabletop, “I hope you didn’t give her any money.”