Richard Price - The Whites

“You knew what Whelan was up to before he did it?”

“I got up one morning, went out back for a smoke, and there’s Sweetpea Harris laying in the yard. And that’s all I’m saying about it.”

“Did you ask him to do it?”

“I said that’s all I’m saying about it.”

“How about the others.”

“Which others.”

“I want to know who did who.”

“Why.”

“Why?”

Redman opened a box of cheap hand fans advertising the funeral parlor, then began depositing them on chair seats.

“I’m just curious,” Billy said. “Did you embalm him?”

“Either that or let him stink up the joint.”

“Jesus Christ, Redman, where’s your heart?”

“Where’s yours. You pursue this, you’ll be taking people away from their kids, so where’s yours,” he said, walking off before Billy could walk out.

At Maimonides, Victor was asleep in his bed, Richard lying next to him, wide-eyed but withdrawn. On a sofa at the opposite end of the room, Carmen was also asleep, hands curled under her chin, her face pressed so deeply into a cushion that he had to resist moving her head back.

Billy stood against a wall, dutifully stared at the three of them until he thought he would go crazy.

Who did who…

Stepping out into the hallway, he called Elvis Perez.

“Are you in?” he asked.

“For about an hour or so. What’s up?”

“Do you still have the tapes from Penn Station?”

“Of course.”

“I never took a look at the one under the information boards.”

“That’s because I told you it’s a waste of time.”

“I’m leaving now.”

“Really, if I thought…”

“I’m leaving now.”

“Where’s Waldo, right?” Perez said, standing over Billy’s shoulder as they viewed the rescued tape of the scene beneath the LIRR track information board. “See what I’m saying?”

Billy had to agree: the scrum of plastic-derby-wearing revelers was so tight under the board that when he was finally able to ID his vic, Bannion was already leaving bloody shoeprints on his way to the subway, dead man jogging.

“Where’s Waldo in hell,” Elvis said.

When Perez left with his partner on a witness interview run, Billy remained at his desk and reran the tape. Again, nothing, just Bannion popping out of the periphery and taking off. There were others coming and going under the board besides Bannion: staggerers, stragglers, latecomers to the party, and those who just wandered away as if having lost interest in getting home. But not one of these wanderers, all leaving the crowd at the same time or just after Bannion made his stumbling dash to nowhere, exhibited any kind of suspect body language, no one running or even walking off at anything more than a dawdling pace, no one even glancing back at the crowd they had just left.

Most of the people whose faces were turned to the camera and could be identified had already been interviewed by Midtown South, including all of Bannion’s friends that night. Teams of detectives had either traveled out to Long Island or caught the potential witnesses at their workstations in Manhattan, not one of these sit-downs yielding a single helpful lead.

Billy reran the tape. Then ran it again, this time in slow motion. On his sixth viewing someone caught his eye — one of the commuters, exiting the throng a moment before, not after, Bannion, which made sense given that it must have taken the stupefied vic a moment or two before he realized what had already happened to him.

The figure, its back to the camera as it briefly lingered at the bottom of the frame before leaving the scene altogether, looked like nothing so much as a small, upright bear.

“They finally salvaged the tape,” Billy said.

“What tape?” Yasmeen asked from behind her desk in the university security office.

“From Penn Station.”

“I thought they had that tape.”

“The other one.”

“What other one.”

Tired of the dance, Billy showed her the printout of the shaggy form walking away from the crime scene before anyone there knew it was a crime scene.

Yasmeen looked at it, then — unconsciously, Billy assumed — glanced at her Tibetan coat draped over an empty chair.

“It was either you or Janis Joplin coming out of that crowd.”

“Do you know how many coats like this…”

“Don’t jerk me around,” he said wearily. “Not now, all right?”

She was a long time in responding.

“You have those two little boys,” she finally said. “Could you imagine me ever coming up to you like this?”

“I didn’t kill anybody, Yasmeen.”

“The hell you didn’t. And what did we do? Closed ranks and protected your ass.”

“It was a justified shoot. I didn’t need you to.”

“Oh yes you did, cokey boy.”

One of the other retired detectives working at the school came into the office and dropped a folder on her blotter, Yasmeen getting to work on it before he even left.

Billy sat there for a while studying the photographs push-pinned into her wall: campus trespassers, a trashed dorm lounge, the facades of problematic East and West Village bars.

“Yasmeen, the story’s going to come out one way or another.”

“Well, one good story deserves another,” she said, flicking the side of her nose.

Billy got up to leave.

“You know, Dennis, he’s a good guy, a good dad, I’ll give him that…”

Billy stood there, waiting for the punch line.

“But I could’ve been with you all these years, you know? I could have been your wife, Dominique and Simone could have been your daughters.”

“I’ll give you a week to get a lawyer,” he heard himself say.

“You’d do that for me?” she said sweetly, Billy almost positive she was being sarcastic.

“So you say,” Carmen said, looking down at the Penn Station printouts spread out on the kitchen table before her.

“So I know,” Billy looking at her. “And you know too.”

Carmen shifted her gaze from the table to the window. “Do you remember when I couldn’t get out of bed for close to three months? What did she do for us.”

“This has nothing to do with that.”

“No? What’s it have to do with?”

“Do I even have to answer that?”

Resting her brow in the heel of her palm, Carmen looked as if she’d rather be anywhere else than in this room with this man right now.

“Do I even have to answer that?” Billy pleaded.

“Why did you marry me,” she said.

“Why did I what?”

“What did you see in me.”

“I don’t know. I saw you. Where are we going with this?”

Carmen swept the printouts to the floor. “Jesus, Billy,” her voice clotted with tears, “sometimes people just need to be forgiven.”

More cryptic and distance-making shit from his most intimate of intimates, Billy watching her climb the stairs to the bedroom and feeling more isolated on this than ever before.

Three bodies, and so far everyone was either defying him, threatening him, or tossing off pronouncements fit for a Sphinx. Everyone acting like they had his number.

Billy called first Redman, then Whelan, got the machine for both and left the same message: one week to lawyer up. He started to dial Pavlicek’s number, then hung up in mid-dial. This one had to be face-to-face.

Not really thinking about what he would see when he walked into the private suite at the Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, Billy took one look at the patient, then turned and retreated, hoping no one inside had noticed. Out in the hallway, he caught his breath and then reentered, having no choice but to accept that the sallow-skinned, seemingly inert stick figure lying in the bed, with its distant, unresisting eyes, was, still was, John Junior, only six months ago a bear of a young man who’d often had to sidle through doorways.