Richard Price - The Whites

In the early days, Pavlicek did all the dirty work himself, rarely needing to do more than show up unannounced at dawn and display his holstered service revolver or a baseball bat. As his holdings grew, he began contracting out these spontaneous evictions, as he called them, to others: mainly defrocked cops, guys who had gotten jammed up for taking money or beating a prisoner or worse, losing both their badges and their pensions in the aftermath and now desperate for even the shadiest of paydays.

Once the troublemakers and deadbeats were gone, he quickly rehabbed the properties and got decent people to move in — there were always decent people — Pavlicek specifically courting the elderly on Social Security or other kinds of fixed income, as well as those who could arrange for the city or their bank to make direct rent payments to his corporation, the bottom line being that five years after retirement Pavlicek owned twenty-eight mostly beat-up but relatively violation-free properties in Washington Heights and the Bronx, had a house in Pelham Manor the length of a tanker and a personal worth of $30 million if a dime.

But if he had been blessed with wealth, he had been cursed with loss: after three years of reasonably happy marriage, his wife, Angela, had attempted to drown their then six-month-old son in the backyard wading pool. Four months later, on her first leave from the Payne-Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, she tried it again. Nineteen years later she was still institutionalized, most recently at a residential treatment facility in Michigan, not far from her parents’ home in Wisconsin. Pavlicek still grieved for her and still hated himself for being so oblivious to her pain and madness back then. As far as Billy knew, they were still married.

“You ever been out of the country?” Pavlicek asked as they cruised past the Forensic Psychiatric Center, a.k.a. the Hat Factory, on Wards Island.

“Nope,” Billy said, trying to peer through the barred windows to the Thorazine-infused prisoners within. “My dad was in England a bunch of times, did a tour in Vietnam.”

“That’s him. Plus, war doesn’t count.”

“Been to Puerto Rico with Carmen to see her grandmother once.”

“Puerto Rico is part of the U.S. Plus, visiting family doesn’t count.”

“Then I guess I’ve been living in my ass for forty-two years. What’s your point, big shot?”

“Did I ever tell you about the time I went to Amsterdam with John Junior?”

“You went to Amsterdam?”

“Four years ago I was invited to talk at an urban renewal conference there, and I wanted to bring him. He was sixteen, it’s a cool city, sort of, so he says, ‘I’ll let you take me to Amsterdam…’”

“Let you.”

“‘… let you take me if you get stoned with me there. Nick Perlmutter went with his dad last year and told me they got wasted together.’ Says to me, ‘Hey, at least you’ll know who I’m getting high with.’”

“You did not do that.”

“I’m sorry, you never got high?”

“With my kids?”

“Your kids are little, Billy. It’s different later, it’s like trying to hold back water with your hands. Trust me.”

“You still don’t have to smoke up with them.”

Pavlicek shrugged.

Feeling a little scandalized, Billy shut up.

“In any event, we got there, made a beeline to the nearest coffee bar, sat outside facing this plaza, platz, or whatever, Junior’s all showing off how he can read a pot menu like a wine list, orders us something supposedly mild, a few hits and we’re both zotzed. It was fun at first — we couldn’t figure out how to take our picture, holding the camera every whichaway, laughing, you know, stupid stoned. Finally this Dutch lady inside the bar takes pity on us, comes out and does the honors. Two American morons getting high in Amsterdam, never seen that before. We’re laughing our balls off for about a half hour, then the paranoia just shuts us down like, blam. I mean like a solid hour of Can’t Talk, sitting there wondering how do we find the fucking hotel, Prinzengracht, Schminzenstrasse, where’s the Anne Frank House and are we bad half-Jews if we blow it off, how do we even just, like, stand up. Hours like that, then Johnnie finally turns to me, says, ‘Well, this wasn’t one of my better ideas, was it.’ He flies home the next day, it’s really a nothing city, but I’m stuck doing the panels. I felt horrible… I mean, OK, you’re right, what kind of pandering asshole has to curry favor with his kid like that. But you know what? A week later I finally come home and I see that on his bedroom door Johnnie had taped blowups of all the photos of us that the Dutch lady took, and goddamn didn’t it look like we had a blast. And now when we… It always plays for a laugh when it comes up in conversation, between the pictures and the way we tell it to people. It’s like, after a while, the two of you are like a comedy team. And you forget, I forgot, how bad it felt, I just…”

Billy heard a sudden rasp of tears in Pavlicek’s voice that he had no idea how to interpret and so he held his peace until they got where they were going, twenty strained minutes later.

The Riveras, like everyone else on City Island, lived on one of the short streets branching off the sole avenue that ran like a spine for two miles from the land bridge to the Long Island Sound. Their house, a run-down Victorian gingerbread, was at the tail end of Fordham Street, the lapping waves audible from every room. The family had two views: the Sound at a point where New York and Connecticut met underwater, and the ruins of the house directly across the way, not a hundred feet opposite, behind which the body of their son Thomas was found five years earlier, discarded and torn. The house was now in the midst of being demolished by the new owners, the walls collapsed in a violent heap, jagged spears of lumber shooting out in all directions like an abstract expression of its own notoriety.

Ray Rivera, now sixty pounds heavier than the night his son was discovered, stood on his lawn with Billy and Pavlicek, chain-smoking and staring at the wreckage across the way. His wife, Nora, was somewhere inside their house, undoubtedly aware of the visit but declining to come out. To Billy most of Rivera’s new obesity seemed to be in his upper body and face rather than his gut, in the multi-tiered pouches under the eyes, the softening flesh of his broad chest, and the forward slump of his thick shoulders. Billy had seen this transformation before in parents who struggled daily with the violent death of a child. After a few years that emotional heaviness could visually de-sex a couple, leave them looking more like each other than if they’d lived into their nineties together.

“You know, I have real mixed feelings about that shit pile coming down.” Rivera coughed wetly into the side of his hammy fist, took another drag. “I keep thinking, Maybe they’re destroying evidence, or maybe a shred of his soul is still in there.”

“He’s not there anymore, Ray,” Pavlicek said. “I know you know that.”

Billy saw movement behind a second-floor window in the Rivera house: Nora up there, hours every day looking across the street.

“People asked us why we didn’t move away, but it would have been like abandoning him, you know?”

Suddenly the window opened and Nora Rivera leaned out, red-faced, cawing: “Why didn’t they move away!”

Pavlicek raised a hand in greeting. “Hey, Nora.”

The window slammed like a gunshot.

“You know, I know people, and I could’ve made some calls, anytime I wanted. Once a guy called me. But if I wanted that Jeffrey kid dead, I would have done it myself.”

“That’s not you, Ray.”

“I mean, do you have any idea how many times I sat on that porch with a piece of steel in my hand? I always drank my way out of it.”