Richard Price - The Whites

“I’ll get them,” he finally said, climbing out of the car like a man with prosthetic hips.

The interior of the house was a rambling, amiable mess — a war chest’s worth of boys’ toys and sports gear strewn around the living room, smothering the worn brocade couch and matching easy chairs; a big yellow eat-in kitchen with its painted-wood “country” table perpetually covered with bills, circulars, condiments, and the odd hat or glove; three thin-walled bedrooms all crying out for a fresh coat of paint; and a sunken den that for some reason always smelled like mushrooms. And wherever one looked was evidence of Carmen’s obsession with country cornball: real, ceramic, or papier-mâché Indian corn and pumpkins resting on every available surface, homely homilies inscribed on chain-hung plaques, farm-stand-purchased whirligigs, milkmaids painted on wooden ovals, and enough framed sketches of barnyards, thatched cottages, and lonely rural lanes to fill a Hallmark museum.

All of this occasionally set Billy’s teeth on edge, but given his wife’s childhood and early adolescence in the cracked-out Bronx of the late 1980s, her later teen years in the notorious East Metro section of Atlanta, and her current job as a triage nurse in the St. Ann’s knife-and-gun-club ER, he didn’t have the heart to question her taste in decor. In fact, he couldn’t care less what the house looked like, as long as it made her happy. All he cared about was his books, the shelves in the den filled with crime novels written mainly by ex-cops, retirement for dummies self-help volumes, sports memoirs, and real estate study guides, these last foisted on him by John Pavlicek, who was hell-bent on hiring him to help run his empire of apartment buildings the moment Billy put in his papers.

Looking for the kids, Billy came upon his six-year-old, Carlos, sitting on the side of his bunk bed dressed in full camo, staring at his seventy-eight-year-old grandfather asleep under the kid’s X-Men blanket. Billy’s dad was a well-remembered city-wide Chief of Patrol who had first made his name as a foot soldier with the Tactical Patrol Force, a.k.a. Riot Squad, during the anti-war, let-it-burn days of the late ’60s. These days, however, the old guy tended to go in and out of thinking that his grandsons were both Billy and that he was still living in his first home in Fordham Heights with his dead wife. Additionally, he often got up and crept into someone else’s bed in the middle of the night, either one of the kids’ or Billy and Carmen’s, making pajamas mandatory sleepwear for one and all.

“Let’s go, buddy.”

“Is Grandpa gonna die?” Carlos asked calmly.

“Not today.”

Eight-year-old Declan, also wearing camo from boots to forage cap, was on his knees in the living room, trying to get the pet rabbit out from under a couch with a hockey stick, the huddled, personality-less thing hissing and sneezing like a Komodo dragon.

“Dec, just leave him there.”

“What if he bites an electric cord?”

“Then we’ll have rabbit for dinner. Let’s go.”

Just as they finally left the house, Billy’s cell rang, the division captain again, and he locked himself in the car before the kids could get inside and screw his play.

“Hey, boss.”

“Where are you at?”

“Midtown South doing the bullets and waiting for some of the witnesses to revive.”

“Why’d you let them clean up the scene?”

“Because it’s Penn Station, you have fifty thousand people walking through.”

“It’s a crime scene.”

“Again, it’s Penn Station. It’s the crossroads of the Western world.”

“What are you, Radio Free America? Since when does Transit call the shots?”

“This time they were right.” Then adding: “In my opinion.”

“How about the security tapes.”

“Computer glitch.”

“Computer glitch.”

“They sent them over to TARU.”

“Dad!” Declan belted out, slapping the car window.

“Billy!” Carmen came over with the frozen basketball. “What the hell are you doing? They’re going to be late!”

“Who was that?” the division cap asked.

“Boss, one of the wits just gave up a name. I’ll call you back.”

After dropping off the boys at their school, Billy headed back into the city, wrote up his bullets for the day-tour detectives in Midtown South — it was their headache now — debriefed a few bosses, fended off a police shack reporter, ducked a TV camera, and got back in the car. When he finally re-returned to the house at one p.m., Millie Singh, the alleged housekeeper, was watching Mob Wives Chicago with his father in the living room, neither of them acknowledging his presence.

Millie barely knew her way around a mop, prepared spicy Indo-Caribbean dishes that would tear your throat out, and tended to take naps on the job. But back in the day she had been the only one in their moonscape of a precinct with guts enough to take the stand in a gang-related homicide, and as a result she’d had to sleep in her bathtub in order to protect herself from the nightly gunshots coming through her windows, until Billy and the others moved her into one of Pavlicek’s newly renovated buildings. Ten years later, at roughly the same time that Billy’s father had first been diagnosed with dementia, Millie’s teenage daughter moved back to Trinidad to live with her father and she lost her job at Dunkin’ Donuts. Hiring her as their housekeeper had seemed like a good idea at the time, and in all fairness to Millie, the kids loved her, she loved his dad, and she was in possession of a valid driver’s license. Besides, Carmen liked to do her own housecleaning, if you could call it that.

Billy stepped into the kitchen, poured himself half a milk glass of vodka and cranberry juice — the only thing that could put him to sleep at this hour — and went into the bedroom. He stowed his Glock 9 on the top shelf of his closet behind a shoe box filled with old bank statements, and with a last burst of energy called Pavlicek to give him a heads-up about Bannion.

“Hey.”

“I heard,” Pavlicek said.

“What do you think,” Billy said, crawling into the cool swan boat of a bed.

“That there’s a God after all.”

“It was a freaky scene.”

“I heard that too.”

“Heard from who?”

“The drums.”

“Do the Riveras know?”

“I called them this morning.”

“How’d they take it?”

“The mister was cool, Mom not so good. I’m going out to City Island to see them later.”

“Good.” Billy’s eyes felt like sandpits.

“I want you to come with me.”

“John, I’m sleeping.”

“You saw the dead fuck. They might need to ask you things.”

“Come on, this is private with you and them.”

“Billy, I’m asking you.”

He gargled the last of his drink, crunched on a sliver of ice. “Make it about six, I just got into bed.”

“Thank you.”

“You owe me.”

“Afterwards we can pick up Whelan, then head downtown to the restaurant.”

“The dinner’s tonight?”

“Yes sir.”

“OK, let me sleep.”

“Hey,” Pavlicek held on, “what’s the most bullshit word in the English language.”

“Closure.”

“Give that man a cigar,” Pavlicek said, then hung up.

He had forgotten all about the dinner, the monthly steak house reunion of the self-christened Wild Geese, seven young cops averaging three years on the Job, fresh to anti-crime in the late ’90s, a tight crew given a ticket to ride in one of the worst precincts of the East Bronx. Of the original seven, one had moved to Arizona after retirement, and one had died from a three-pack-a-day habit, leaving a hard-core five: Billy, Pavlicek, Jimmy Whelan, Yasmeen Assaf-Doyle, and Redman Brown.