The Whites: A Novel (33 page)

A silence came down, everyone staring at the table until Billy couldn’t take it anymore.

“John, what’s wrong with you.”

“I lost you,” Pavlicek blinking at him.

“I’m right here.”

“Then be more specific.”

“The hematologist.”

Carmen looked from one to the other.

“I know you’re seeing him.”

“Me? No.”

“John Pavlicek,” Billy said. “I’m sorry, but I have the records.”

“Junior.”

“What?”

“That would be John Pavlicek Jr.,” Pavlicek said. “It’s called T-cell prolymphocytic leukemia, no one beats it, and it’s fast. Six months at the outside.”

“No!” Carmen’s voice fluty with shock.

“Are you sure?”

“I come back from a two-week business trip four months ago, December sixteenth, I hear him in his bedroom, I walk in there,” looking directly at Billy now. “I thought he had got stomped by a gang. Rings around his eyes, lumps and bruises all over his body, he can barely move, raise his eyes to me.”

“Wait,” Billy’s hand out like a stop sign, “hold on, you told me . . .”

“I know what I told you,” he said flatly.

Carmen started to cry, the sight of a weeping nurse bringing home the death sentence for Billy.

“So,” Pavlicek sighed, “you ask around to Yasmeen, to Whelan, to Redman, do you know what happened to this animal, to that animal, do you think Pavlicek caught some kind of disease and lost his mind, do you think . . .”

“John, you have to understand . . .”

“Who the fuck cares, Billy. I mean, where’s the scales, where’s the justice in it?”

Billy closed his eyes, dreamed of sleep. “Are you telling me something?”

“I’m
asking
you something.” Pavlicek leaned across the table and touched the back of his hand. “Because from where I’m sitting? If God or whoever else could just point a finger at a kid like John Junior, then all bets are off, because no one’s minding the store. So, someone like me, what you do is, you take care of all your unfinished business, you do what you have to do to balance the books, so that maybe, just maybe, when the time comes, you might manage not to jump in the grave with him.”

“Sometimes with that kind of leukemia . . .” Carmen began, then faded.

“My boy will be rotting in the earth while Jeffrey Bannion is getting laid? I don’t think so. While Eric Cortez is going to a Yankees game? While Sweetpea Harris is becoming a father?”

“What are you telling me,” Billy repeated numbly.

“You’re a detective,” Pavlicek said. “You figure it out.”

Billy went away again, came back. “John, I swear to God, you know how much I love you, and I’m devastated for your son, but if you killed any of those . . .”

“You’ll what, you’ll lock me up?” Pavlicek finished his coffee and got to his feet. “You want to hear the worst, the very worst about this fucking type of leukemia he’s got?” Looking around the kitchen as if trying to decide what to smash first. “The median age at onset is sixty-five. Imagine that.”

They sat in silence long after the Lexus had disappeared.

“You’re not going after him, are you?” Carmen finally asked.

Billy didn’t answer.

“
Are
you?”

“Can you give me a goddamn minute?”

Carmen punched him so hard his arm went dead.

“Jesus,
Billy!” she wailed, shoving back her chair and leaving the room.

Later that day, unable to sleep, Billy returned to Columbia Presbyterian, headed over to the information desk, and asked for John Junior’s room. He dreaded seeing the kid in the state his father had described, but after Pavlicek’s visit he had no choice.

The clerk sent him up to the oncology ward, where a nurse—once Billy had said that he was Junior’s uncle and showed her his ID—told him that Junior had been checked out a few days ago. For a fleeting moment Billy thought that meant he was on the mend.

“He’s home?”

“Transferred to Valhalla.”

“To
where
?” Billy thinking she had chosen a sick way of telling him that Junior had died.

“The Westchester County Medical Center in Valhalla.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“It’s just closer to his family,” she said breezily enough, but he’d been around nurses for the last twenty years of his life: John Junior was never going home again.

On his way back down the corridor, Billy noticed, through open suite doors, that some of the patients’ rooms had second beds that sat lower to the floor and on collapsible legs for easier storage. On one, an older woman in street clothes was sleeping next to her daughter’s sickbed. In another suite, a man was unpacking a suitcase as his wife watched him with near-lifeless eyes. He had slept on one of those beds himself for two nights at Lenox Hill after Carmen had given birth to Declan.

Billy returned to the nurses’ station. “Family can sleep over?”

“If they want,” the nurse said.

“How about the Pavlicek boy?”

“Johnnie? When we had him, his dad just about moved in. Very nice man, given the circumstances.”

“Slept here every night?”

“I think that’s why he moved his son. The commute was too hard on him.”

“Did he need to sign in?”

“Only if he was coming in after visitors’ hours.”

Without too much cajoling, Billy got her to find the guest log for March 17, the night of Bannion’s murder. Pavlicek had signed in at nine p.m.

“Do they sign out when they leave?”

“No need.”

“So if, say, a visitor wants to go home at midnight, two in the morning . . .”

“Then they go.”

Which left him with nothing.

“All right, then,” offering his hand.

“Tell the Pavliceks I’m still praying for them,” she said, her responding grip startlingly strong.

Back home, Billy headed upstairs to take another shot at sleep, passed his father’s open bedroom door, and wandered in. Billy Senior lay on his bed, fully dressed for a change but snoring, flayed sections of the
New York Times
scattered around him on the bedspread.

Taking a seat at the small desk his father had brought with him from his last home, Billy scanned the spines of the books that lined the top shelf. Beside the old man’s poets were luridly written original guides to nineteenth-century New York City; a first-person account of the Civil War draft riots of 1863; a hardback reissue of
1866 Professional Criminals of America;
and three fat novels about Ireland written by Thomas Flanagan, two of which Billy had actually read and somewhat enjoyed.

“Which is catching your eye?” Billy Senior murmured from the bed.

“Dad, you know me.” Billy blushed.

“The dummy act doesn’t become you,” Senior said. “I’ve been telling you that since you were a kid.”

“You know me,” Billy unthinkingly repeated. Then, catching himself: “Must be an echo in here.”

“What’s on your mind?”

“Why does something have to be on my mind for me to come visit?”

Billy Senior quietly waited him out, his eyes unwavering, reducing his son, as in the old days, to a bucket of tells.

“Dad, let me give you a hypothetical situation,” he began, then faltered. “If you knew that a certain friend crossed the line . . .”

“Which line?”

“The legal line . . . And you were having a real problem looking the other way . . .”

Flat on his back, his father frowned at the ceiling. “Is this friend on the Job?”

Billy didn’t answer, which was answer enough.

“How good a friend is he?”

“Like a brother.”

“Then first off, you have to ask yourself what would happen to him.”

Billy felt his heart lurch, but he wasn’t sure in which direction. “No matter what he did?”

“It’s that bad?”

Again, Billy didn’t answer.

“What are we talking about, mass murder?”

“Just some nonsense,” he said, getting to his feet. “I should sleep.”

“That was fast,” his father said.

“No, I’m just . . .”

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah, no, I’m great.” Billy patted his father’s arm, turned, and was halfway out of the room when the old man began talking to him as if he were still seated.

“Back in June of sixty-four, there was a cop in Harlem, I won’t say his name, he’s passed anyhow, and this individual, he killed someone pretty much in front of his partner.”

Billy sat back down.

“A pimp, had some Indian moniker, Cochise, Cheyenne, Geronimo, maybe. They had him in the back of the patrol car, and he starts mouthing off, just wouldn’t stop. So this cop, let’s call him Johnson, it was at night, he drives over to Morningside Park, drags him out, busts him up bad, and leaves him there to die, which he did.”

“Because the guy was mouthing off?”

“Well, that and because there wasn’t a girl in this man’s stable over sixteen, because he had a habit of slashing Achilles tendons when any of them tried to run away from him, because he was so arrogant that he threatened Johnson’s family. And yeah, because he wouldn’t shut the hell up back there.”

“What happened to him?”

“What happened to who.”

“Johnson.”

“Nothing.”

“Walked away clean?”

His father propped himself up with a second pillow. “You have to understand, my son, the summer of sixty-four was red hot uptown, and this Cochise individual had more enemies than a Roman emperor. The squad pretty much went through the motions of looking into it for a few days, but nobody really gave a damn, and then a lieutenant from the One-nine, Tom Gilligan, shot and killed a fifteen-year-old black kid in the street, and we had almost a week of rioting on our hands, so the pimp was totally forgotten.”

“Johnson’s partner didn’t say anything?”

“I can’t say what it’s like now, but back then? You looked the other way. Always.”

“How about the partner, what happened to him?”

The old man was so long in answering that Billy almost repeated the question.

“Looking back after all those years?” his father finally said. “He could’ve been a better father to his kids, maybe, a better husband to his wife, but other than that?” Looking Billy in the eye now. “He sleeps like a rock.”

Walking into Harlem Hospital at three a.m. in order to follow up on an agg assault that had come into the office an hour earlier, Billy wandered the halls until he found his point man, Emmett Butter, standing outside one of the ORs, notebook in hand, watching as a trauma team worked on his victim.

“What do you got.”

“Bekim Ismaeli,” Butter reading off his notes, “nineteen, stabbed twice in the chest.”

“Is he likely?”

“Wobblin’.”

“Where’d it happen.”

“They’re not sure, they said they were walking on either St. Nicholas or Amsterdam, all of a sudden five or six black guys jumped out of a car, stabbed Ismaeli, snatched his chain, then took off.”

“Who’s they.”

“What?”

“‘
They
were walking.’ Who was walking.”

“The other Albanians, his buddies. They brought him in.”

“Can any of them ID the car?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Make, color, nothing?”

“Apparently not.”

“Guys are walking down a street, middle of the night, five, six other guys jump out of a car, stab their friend twice, steal his chain, then jump back into the car and take off.”

“Apparently.”

“And these friends who brought him here, not one of them knows what street they were on, and nobody can even say what color car it was. Do I have that right?”

“Apparently,” Butter looking away now.

“What does that sound like to you.”

“Like they’re selling a story.”

“I agree. So where are these Albanian friends?”

“They left.”

“They left. Did you interview any of them?”

“Just as far as I told you. Then I went to check with the doctor and when I came back out they were kind of gone.”

“Kind of gone. You got their names though, right?”

“I was about to,” Butter said, blushing with humiliation, then: “I’ll put it all in the report.”

“How about you don’t.”

“What?”

“Do everybody a favor and say you got here after they left.”

“Yeah?” Butter looking at him now with dog’s eyes.

“But we’re clear about what happened in here, yes?”

“Yeah, yes.”

“My people get to screw up once.”

“I understand,” Butter said, then again: “I understand.”