The Whites: A Novel (20 page)

“A million things.”

“Besides sickle-cell anemia.”

“All kinds of vitamin deficiency, B12, folic acid, iron, et cetera, thrombocytosis, that’s excess platelets, thrombocytopenia, that’s low platelets, polycythemia, excess red blood cells, anemia, pernicious or otherwise, which is low red blood cells, leukocytosis, excess white blood cells, neutropenia, low white blood cells, all kinds of coagulation disorders, blood vessel abnormalities, hemophilia, scurvy, leukemia, acute and chronic, an encyclopedia of various syndromes, genetic or otherwise . . .”

Billy stared at him, then looked to Stacey.

“He’s just a really good hypochondriac,” she said.

“That means I’ll live into my nineties,” he said, sipping his nine a.m. Heineken.

Stacey looked away.

Billy left a few minutes later, drove home, and called Immaculate Conception. He left a message for the school security officer, asking for a meeting to review yesterday’s footage of the parking lot, then fixed himself his usual Cape Codder, got into bed, and stared at the ceiling, his head a blender.

Early afternoon found him in a small physical therapy clinic on the banks of the Cross County Parkway, thumbing through a two-month-old
People
magazine as his father worked on his core strength with a young Serbian physical therapist on the other side of the mirrored room. Ferrying the old man here twice weekly for his sessions was the most stultifying chore in the world, but Billy insisted on doing it himself.

“Milan, are you old enough to remember Marshal Tito?” Billy Senior asked the therapist.

“He died when I was very young,” the kid said. “Try not to tense your neck.”

“His real name was Josip Broz.”

“Really.”

Billy stopped reading.

“I was assigned to his security detail in sixty-three when he came to the United Nations.”

“You’re still straining, Mr. Graves.”

“He was a very short guy, you know.”

“Better. Keep your shoulders back.”

“Loved the ladies, that was the biggest headache with him.”

“Dad, are you kidding me?”

“I had dealings with Khrushchev back then, too. I was on the Manhattan Bridge surveillance detail in sixty-one when he came up the East River on the SS
Baltika
, into, I believe, Pier 71.”

Dates names numbers, Billy’s heart rising.

“They had a floating high school docked next door at Pier 73, Food and Maritime Trades, and I had to go over and tell the principal that with the big Commie coming, he had to shut down classes for a few days and, brother, he was not too happy to hear that, but the students took it like Christmas in July.”

“Keep your shoulder blades back, imagine they’re trying to shake hands across your spine.”

“Do you remember the name of that principal?” Billy just testing.

“Frank Stevenson, a real no-nonsense guy, but you had to be, with some of those kids he had.”

“How about the boat.”

“What boat?”

“That housed the school.”

“It was a ship, not a boat. A mothballed Liberty, the
John W. Brown
. The navy donated it to the city in 1946.”

“Dad, you never told me any of this,” Billy grinning and grinning. “This is history.”

“You want history? How about Fidel Castro staying at the Hotel Theresa up on a Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street? Do you know those Cubans were smuggling live poultry into the top-floor suites? Did you ever try to catch a chicken with your bare hands? It can’t be done. Your mother had to give me rubdowns for a week.”

“You’re killing me,” Billy still grinning like a mule.

“Don’t forget to breathe, Mr. Graves.”

“So, Charlie, how’s my little sister doing these days?” he asked Milan.

“Your sister?”

“She says you’re off the sauce for good. Is that true?”

“Sauce?” Milan looking to Billy.

“Just roll with it,” Billy muttered, going back to his mindless magazine.

“Yes, I’m off the sauce.”

“Well, you better be, because if I have to come up there and get her again, this time there’s going to be some laying on of the hands, my friend, that I can promise you.”

As he was adjusting his father’s seat belt in the parking lot behind the rehab center, Jimmy Whelan called, Billy stepping away from the car to talk.

“What are you doing right now.”

“Driving my father.”

“Oh yeah? How’s he doing?”

“The same.”

“Same is better than worse. Listen.” Whelan’s voice dropped. “I need to talk to you about something.”

“About Pavlicek?” the question just popping out of Billy without cerebral clearance.

“Pavlicek?” Jimmy sounding caught up short. “What about him?”

“Nothing,” Billy said, burning to bring up the blood specialist but afraid of being asked how he had come across the information. “What did you want to talk about.”

“Remember that movie
Fort Apache
?”

“With John Wayne, right?”

“What John Wayne.
Fort Apache, The Bronx
. They’re doing a remake. Billy Heffernan’s got an in with the people involved, and he asked me if I was interested in working on it.”

“As what?”

“Some kind of consultant. You know, because of what we were doing around there back then.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“Money for nothing and chicks for free, right?”

“Could be.”

“Why’d you mention Pavlicek?” Whelan asked, but Immaculate Conception was trying to ring through and Billy had to end the call.

After arranging a time to review the parking lot tapes with the head of school security, then taking a few minutes to calm himself down, Billy called Whelan back from a traffic jam on the Saw Mill River Parkway.

“Something going on with Pavlicek?” the first thing out of Jimmy’s mouth. “I need to know.”

“Forget it,” Billy said, Pavlicek now the last thing on his mind.

“You all right? You sound off.”

“I’m trying to drive here.”

“Don’t bullshit me.”

“Something happened with my kid,” this too coming out of him without any mental vetting.

“What happened with your kid?”

Billy didn’t want to talk about it in front of his father, but the old man was down for the count.

“Jimmy,” Billy keeping his voice low, “I’m freaking six ways to Sunday.”

Although his meeting with security wasn’t until four, Billy was back at Immaculate Conception at two-thirty, the first of the parents to arrive for the pickups. For the next forty-five minutes, he studied every car coming into the lot until a side door of the building opened and the students began to exit, the youngest first, those not bus-bound lined up against the side of the building until each was retrieved by a minder.

Billy hadn’t told his kids he was coming, and he watched as Carlos ran to his designated bus unaccosted, no one taking the slightest interest in him, least of all some wide-bodied, red-handed possible cop. The person who did catch his eye, though, was the teacher with a clipboard posted by the bus’s folding yellow doors, the guy chanting, “No pushing, no pushing,” as the kids scrambled up the short stairs to their seats.

The bus monitor turned out to be the school’s remedial reading specialist, Albert Lazar, a short, erectly trim middle-aged man who projected an air of constant alertness, although that just could have been his slightly hyperthyroidic eyes.

“Like I said, I wasn’t on bus detail yesterday, we’re on a rotating schedule for that.”

“I understand,” Billy said, “but were you in the parking lot at all?”

“We all are at release time, it’s required.”

“OK, how about this: just looking around yesterday, did you happen to notice anyone that struck you as unusual?”

“Unusual meaning . . .”

“Maybe someone who looked a little out of place.”

“Like what, a homeless person?”

“Like anybody,” Billy not wanting to lead with a more specific description.

“Well, there were some nuns from the Poor Clares down from Poughkeepsie.”

“Who else.”

“A boy’s divorced parents apparently got their signals crossed and showed up for him at the same time. They started arguing in the lot, then they both left without him. That turned a few heads.”

“Who else.”

“That’s about it.”

“Any men?”

“Men?”

“Man. Maybe some guy, walking around, you’re thinking . . .”

“You know . . .” Lazar hesitated.

“Just say.”

“There was someone I hadn’t seen before, could’ve been some kid’s father, but I don’t think so.”

Billy took a breath and asked for a description.

“I’d say a little taller than me, but not much, heavyset, dark, Hispanic, Italian maybe.”

Billy felt a surge, his exhausted body having trouble handling it. “What was he wearing?”

“A dark suit, nothing fancy, shirt and tie.”

“How about his hair? Curly, straight, dark . . .”

“Dark, I guess,” then: “He could’ve had a mustache, but he looked so Mediterranean I might be putting it on him.”

“Did he speak to anyone?”

“Not that I noticed.”

“Why don’t you think he was a parent coming to pick up his kid?”

“There’s not that many fathers doing the afternoon pickups and I pretty much know them all, at least by sight.”

“All right,” Billy winding down, pulling his card out of his wallet. “Anything else you can tell me about him? Just off the top of your head. Anything . . .”

“Yeah, actually, there is,” Lazar said, taking the offered card but not looking at it. “He struck me like someone in the security business.”

“Meaning?”

“You know, the way he carried himself, very alert and no-nonsense. It’s hard to explain.”

“You just did,” Billy said woodenly. He tapped his card. “Anything else you can remember, night or day.”

He hadn’t identified himself as an NYPD detective, just as a concerned parent whose son might have been approached by a stranger on school grounds, and he saw the teacher’s face darken as he read the new information.

For an instant Lazar looked at Billy searchingly, then shut himself down.

“Something else?” Billy asked mildly.

“No,” his eyes reading, Yes.

Billy lingered, giving Lazar a moment to say what was suddenly so troubling to him, but the teacher stepped into the bus to handle some rowdiness and that was that.

And then the older boys came charging out of the building like their hair was on fire. He refrained from calling out to Declan, allowing him to board with his brother. Not that he didn’t want to take them home, want to keep them close right now, but he was desperate to see the tape, the security officer waiting for Billy in his office.

The system was badly in need of an upgrade, the retrieved footage from the parking lot as grainy as an evaporating dream. Billy was unable to make out anyone’s face, although he could track the progress of bodies across the lot.

“Are you kidding me?” Billy turned to the security man, Wayne Connors, a retired Westchester County state trooper.

“Hey, I tell them every week, I know Chinese take-outs with better surveillance equipment than us. You know what they say to me? We don’t have the money. I say, What if something was to happen out there.”

“Something did happen out there,” Billy said.

On the third viewing he found who he was looking for, the guy built square and low to the ground, his back to the camera as he walked in front of the buses before stopping and bending briefly next to a kid—was it Carlos? who could tell?—so briefly that he could have simply been picking something off the asphalt or tightening a shoelace. Then, as he began to rise, he casually reached out to that kid’s back or shoulder as if for support and calmly walked out of the frame.

“Look,” Connors said after Billy had filled him in, “with the description you gave me plus what I saw just now, I think I have pretty good eyes on this guy. I’ll post one of my people out there starting tomorrow.”

“Great,” Billy said, turning to leave.

Connors could post an army out there, this guy wasn’t coming back. He’d done what he’d done knowing that Carlos’s parents would see it and react, so no way he’d risk a return visit.

The question was, Where would he show up next.

At ten in the evening, Billy entered Whelan’s apartment building and went down to the endless basement, its roughly plastered walls painted the color of dried blood. He walked past the pungent laundry room, past the caged storage bins filled with broken furniture and bust-ass suitcases, past the chained-up snow blowers and shovels and swapped-out radiators, until he reached the super’s apartment, the peephole on its scuffed door dangling by one screw like a gouged eye.