Richard Price - The Whites

Carmen stumbled into the kitchen an hour later, her face a blur.

“How long was I out for?”

“Long enough.”

“Then why am I still so exhausted?” she said, wandering over to pour herself some coffee.

“I heard Victor’s going home tomorrow,” he said.

“He is.”

“Does he know?”

“About Milton?”

“About you,” he said.

“Me? No. I couldn’t ever tell him.”

“Well, maybe you can now.”

“Now I need to.”

“Just wait a little while until he settles in with the babies.”

“Of course,” she said. “Of course.”

“Yasmeen drove up this morning.”

“This morning?” Lowering herself into the chair next to his. “I didn’t hear anything.”

“She stayed in her car.”

“Did you talk to her?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“And?”

“And it’s over,” he said.

“Over. What do you mean, ‘over.’” Then: “With just her or all of them?”

Billy shrugged.

They sat in silence for a while, Carmen joining him in looking out at the backyard.

“I’m glad,” she finally said. “Thank you.”

He wanted to say that he didn’t do it for her, but who knew.

Milton Ramos reappeared, this time sitting on the living room couch, immobile yet full of murderous despair.

Well, Billy told himself, what did you expect.

And if Carmen hadn’t seen him yet, she’d see him soon enough.

“I think I got up too early,” he said.

“Me too,” she said, reaching for, but missing, his hand. “Let’s go back to bed.”

The call from Stacey Taylor came a week later.

“I need to tell you something.”

“What’s that.”

“Have breakfast with me. It’s a long story.”

“Give me the headline.”

“Just have breakfast with me,” she said. “You’ll be glad you did.”

“You said that the last time.”

“This time I mean it.”

“I have a therapy session at two.”

“Physical?”

“Family.”

“Where.”

“West Forties.”

“Then come after.”

“Your whale, Curtis Taft?” she said to him over a four p.m. breakfast in another one of her tin-can diners. “He shot his girlfriend last night.”

“Girlfriend or wife?” Billy asked, thinking of Patricia Taft, big and stately, pushing a stroller that day through the atrium of the hospital.

“Girlfriend.”

“You have a funny definition of good news.”

“She’ll live,” Stacey said, fondling an unopened pack of Parliaments, “but he also clipped the first EMT coming through the door, so he’s most likely going away just this side of forever.”

So, yeah, good news, he guessed, but it left him flat. “He got away with a triple,” he said. “Skated like Brinker.”

“You catch them for what you catch them for,” she said. “You told me that.”

“Memori Williams, Tonya Howard, Dreena Bailey,” he said loudly enough to turn heads.

And Eric Cortez, Sweetpea Harris, Jeffrey Bannion, if he was taking a true tally.

The food came, two omelets that were so oily they looked shellacked.

“So, in other news,” sliding her plate to the side. “I’ve been hearing some wild rumors.”

“About…”

“Bad guys getting taken out by frustrated cops.”

“Frustrated, huh?” Billy thinking, Maybe the center would hold for them and maybe not, but if she had really called him here hoping he would help her out, she was dreaming. He would no more talk to her about any of his friends than they would have talked about him eighteen years earlier.

Ignoring the food, he took a sip of coffee. “Where’d you hear that?”

“You know I can’t say.”

“Journalistic ethics?” he said with more of an edge than he’d intended.

The dig deflated her like a pin. “Yeah, well, we used to hear bullshit rumors like this all the time back at the Post . They rarely came to anything.”

He wanted to remind her that rarely wasn’t the same as never, that eighteen years ago, when she was young and mad ambitious, words like rarely, unlikely, implausible would never have slowed her down — but what would have been the point.

The woman sitting across from him — gray in face and grown so bony in middle age that he could count the knobs of her spine through her pullover — just didn’t have the heart for the chase anymore; rarely, these days, justification enough for her to fold her tent and go home to her wine and her cigarettes and her death-wish drunk of a boyfriend.

“I need to tell you something,” he said, before he could stop himself.

“Tell me something?” Stacey looking at him warily, not liking his suddenly breathy tone.

“It’s about me and you,” Billy thinking, She can get back in the game with this. Get back in the game and redeem her good name.

“Can I go outside for a smoke first?” she nearly pleaded, her eyes pierced with dread.

Her resistance to finally hearing the words that would vindicate the last two punishing decades of her life at first baffled him, then sobered him. What the hell was he thinking? The consequences for his family and for himself…

“Forget it, it’s nothing.”

He knew she wouldn’t press, and she didn’t, Stacey masking her relief by pretending that something out on the street had caught her eye. And Billy, playing his part, started attacking his eggs as if they were edible.

“Let me ask you something,” she said after a while. “Whether you were or weren’t high that day and that psycho with the pipe was still bearing down on you like that… Would you have done anything differently?”

“Hypothetically?” he said. “No, I don’t think so.” Then: “No, I wouldn’t.”

Stacey went back to gazing out the window, her thin features vanishing in the late afternoon sunlight that slanted through the glass.

“I mean, it’s not like I never think about getting back into some kind of reporting,” she said, tentatively pressing her fingertips against her throat. “But that sex advice column for men that I write? We had nine thousand hits last issue. Up from fifty-five hundred the issue before, up from three thousand the issue before that. So, I think it’s safe to say that I’m onto something.”

Billy nodded in gratitude.

“Can I go out and have my cigarette now?” she said.

Pavlicek tried to ring through as he was leaving the diner, the only one of them who hadn’t attempted to contact him in the days after Ramos. The others had stopped calling directly after his talk with Yasmeen, Billy assuming that no one wanted to risk a conversation that, if they said the wrong thing or adopted the wrong tone, might prompt him to change his mind. Yet Pavlicek hadn’t called even once, and so on the third attempted ring-through, coming forty minutes after the first, Billy yielded to his curiosity and picked up. But instead of getting Pavlicek on the other end, the voice Billy heard was Redman’s.

“It’s John Junior,” he said. “The funeral’s here on Thursday.”

Unlike the Homecoming for Martha Timberwolf, Junior’s service was standing room only.

At first, when he entered the already crowded chapel with his wife and kids, Billy wondered if he had it in him to let himself go, even just for this day. But when he saw Pavlicek, lumbering wild-eyed between the casket and Redman’s piano like a chained bear, he couldn’t help but wade through the crowd and grab him.

“It’s over now, right?” Pavlicek said too brightly, his breath rank with grief. “All over but the shoutin’.”

“Sure,” Billy said, wishing it were so.

“Come here,” Pavlicek taking Billy by the elbow and steering him to the side of the open coffin. “Look at this, can you believe this?” Touching his son’s rigid left pinkie sticking out from the folded repose of his crossed hands. “He looks like some fucking fop holding a teacup, and this here,” running a finger down the left side of Junior’s jaw, the skin there three shades darker than on the right, “and his hair, I don’t know what Redman was thinking but this kid never had a pompadour in his life.”