The Whites: A Novel (3 page)

“Looks like a high hurdler just fell off the front of a Wheaties box,” Feeley said, then wandered off.

As a CSU tech began teasing the wallet out of the victim’s formerly sky-blue jeans, Billy stopped marveling at his live-action lava cast and took his first good look at his face. Mid-twenties, with wide open, startled blue eyes, arched pencil-thin eyebrows, milk-white skin, and jet-colored hair, femininely handsome to the point of perversity.

Billy stared and stared, thinking, Can’t be. “Is his name Bannion?”

“Hold the phone,” the tech said, pulling out the guy’s driver’s license. “Bannion it is, first name—”

“Jeffrey,” Billy said, then: “Fuck me sideways.”

“Why do I know that name?” the CSU tech asked, not really interested in an answer.

Jeffrey Bannion . . . Billy immediately thought of calling John Pavlicek, then considered the hour and decided to wait at least until daybreak, although Big John might not mind being woken up for this one.

Eight years earlier, a twelve-year-old boy named Thomas Rivera had been found beneath a soiled mattress in the tree house of his City Island neighbors, the Bannions. He had been bludgeoned to death, the bedding atop his body spattered with semen. John Pavlicek, back in the late ’90s Billy’s partner in anti-crime but at the time of the murder a detective assigned to the Bronx Homicide Task Force, was called in when the body was found by a cadaver dog three days after the boy went missing.

Jeffrey Bannion’s oversized, learning-disabled younger brother, Eugene, admitted to the jerking off—the tree house was where he always went for that—but said that when he discovered the boy, he was already dead. Nineteen-year-old Jeffrey told Pavlicek that he himself was sick in bed that day, said Eugene had already told him that he had done it. But when the cops turned the lights on the younger Bannion, Eugene not only stuck to his story but couldn’t even begin to speculate on how Thomas Rivera had come to be in the tree house or talk about what kind of weapon had done the deed, no matter how much trickery or cajoling the Homicides employed, and it made no sense that a fifteen-year-old that dim could hold out on them.

Pavlicek liked the older Bannion for it from the jump, but they couldn’t shake his sick-bed story, and so the younger brother went to the Robert N. Davoren juvenile center at Rikers, a Bloods, Ñetas, and MS-13 petri dish, where he was placed in Gen Pop without the requisite psych eval, a big oafy white kid who tended to throw indiscriminate punches when he was freaked, and his murder, only five days into his incarceration, racked up nearly as many headlines as that of the boy he had allegedly killed.

Within days, despite Pavlicek’s full-bore campaigning, the Rivera homicide was marked “closed by arrest,” formally shutting down any further investigative work. Shortly after that, Jeffrey Bannion packed his bags and moved in with various relatives out of state. At first, Pavlicek tried to swallow his frustration by burying himself in other jobs—although he never lost touch with Thomas Rivera’s parents and he never lost track of Bannion’s whereabouts—but when he learned, through connections, of two incidents of assault in which the vics were preadolescent males, one in each of the small towns Jeffrey was living in at the time, neither investigation leading to an arrest, his obsession with nailing this kid returned in raging full effect.

Eventually Bannion moved back to New York, sharing a house in Seaford, Long Island, with three friends. Pavlicek, still on him like Javert, reached out to both the Seventh Precinct in neighboring Wantagh and the Nassau County Detective Bureau, but either Jeffery had kept his nose clean or he had gotten even slicker with age. The last anyone had heard of him—and most galling of all—was that he had recently applied to the auxiliary PDs of a dozen Long Island townships and had been offered training by three.

“My supervisor wants to know how long we have to be shut down for,” the returning Transit detective said.

“We’ll be as fast as we can be,” Billy said.

“He says we got to mop that blood up out there by five-thirty, same for removing the body. That’s when the commuters start coming in earnest.”

Clean it up or preserve it . . . Clean it up or preserve it . . . Somebody will complain; somebody always complains.

As another mob staggered off the latest 2 train into Penn Station, a teenage girl stared goggle-eyed at Bannion for a second, looked up searchingly into her boyfriend’s eyes, then wheeled and puked onto the platform, adding her DNA to the mix.

“It’s a bad night for this,” the Transit cop said.

Stepping back into the seamy arcade, Billy stared down the length of the tape. Other than the still-congealing blood, the killing floor—a debris field of candy wrappers, Styrofoam cups, the odd article of clothing, a shattered liquor bottle barely held together by the adhesive on its label—gave up too much and nothing at all.

As CSU continued to bag and photograph, as the LIRR and Transit detectives and his own crew began to work the waiting room, wandering among the semiconscious potential wits like a squadron of visiting nurses, Billy noticed that one of the commuters sleeping there had what appeared to be blood on his Rangers jersey.

He took a seat next to him on a wooden bench, the kid’s head tilted back so far it looked as if someone had slit his throat.

“Hey you.” Billy nudged him.

The kid came out of it, shaking his head like a cartoon animal just whacked with an anvil.

“What’s your name.”

“Mike.”

“Mike what.”

“What?”

“How’d you get the blood on you, Mike?”

“Me?” Still whipping his head from side to side.

“You.”

“Where . . .” Looking at his jersey, then: “That’s blood?”

“You know Jeffrey Bannion?”

“Do I know him?”

Billy waiting, One Mississippi, two . . . 

“Where is he,” the kid asked.

“So you know him? Jeffrey Bannion?”

“What if I do?”

“You see what happened?”

“What? What are you talking about, what happened?”

“He’s been stabbed.”

The kid shot to his feet. “What? I’ll fucking kill them.”

“Kill who.”

“What?”

“Who do you want to kill.”

“How the fuck should I know? Who did it. You leave them to me.”

“Did you see it?”

“See what?”

“When was the last time you saw him? Where was he, who was he with.”

“He’s like a brother to me.”

“Who was he with.”

“How should I know. What am I, his bitch?”

“His what? Where do you live.”

“Strong Island.”

“More specifically.”

“Seaford.”

“Who else was with you, point out your posse.”

“My posse?”

“Who, sitting here, in this waiting room, was with you tonight, everybody going home to Seaford.”

“I’m no rat.”

“I’m asking who are his friends.”

Mike turned his head as if it were on a rusty turret, taking in half the dull-eyed commuters around him.

“Ey,”
he blared. “You hear what happened?”

No one even turned his way.

“Anybody carrying anything tonight?” Billy asked.

“Like weed?”

“Like a weapon.”

“Everything’s a weapon.”

“How’d you get that blood on you, again?”

“What blood,” the kid said, touching his face.

“Was anybody in your pos . . . was anybody beefing with anybody tonight?”

“Tonight?” The kid blinked. “Tonight we’re going into the city.”

Billy decided to send him and everybody else to Midtown South in order to sleep it off, then be reinterviewed. His guess was that these interviews would yield nothing. He was also pretty sure that with half the eastern seaboard stomping through the crime scene like migrating wildebeests, the forensics would be useless as well. His money was on the surveillance tape.

He called it in to his division captain, the guy instantly starting to quack like a duck as if Billy had killed Bannion himself, worked for a while with the Transit cops down by the subways and the LIRR detectives under the track information board, and then, praying for a money shot, climbed the stairs to the cramped room where the monitors were set up, only to be told by the tech on duty that the master hard drive that uploaded all the security footage had been damaged by a coffee spill a few hours before and the only way to salvage the film at this point was to send it out for file retrieval, a process that could take days, if not weeks.

Back down on the floor, needing one of his squad to supervise the witness transport, Billy started to approach Feeley but balked when he saw him yakking it up with a white-haired deputy inspector, the two of them probably swapping memories of their time together chasing Pancho Villa. He went looking for Stupak instead and found her standing in front of a riot-gated calzone shop interviewing a maintenance worker.

As soon as he told Stupak what he wanted done, her glance reflexively went to Feeley. “What,” she muttered, “General Grant too busy prepping for Gettysburg?”

No one liked having Feeley on the squad, but no one liked him less than Alice, a hater of both the old boy network and shirkers in general. It was personal, too: despite her sixteen years on the Job, including seven in Emergency Services and three with the Violent Fugitive Apprehension Team, the old bastard took way too much pleasure in addressing her now and then as Babydoll.

Once Stupak was on her way, Billy fielded another overwrought call from his division cap, followed by one from the squad commander of Midtown South. Then, at seven a.m., with the scene secured and none of the possible witnesses in any shape to talk, Billy decided to sneak back to Yonkers just long enough to take his kids to school.

At this hour the traffic on the northbound Henry Hudson Parkway was mercifully light, and by seven forty-five he was turning onto his street. As he pulled up to the house, he saw Carmen standing on a six-foot ladder in front of the carport, trying to extract the deflated basketball jammed between the portable hoop and the backboard, the thing having been stuck like that since January, when it became too cold for the kids to play.

“Just poke it, Carm.”

“I tried. It’s in too tight.”

Sitting behind the wheel in a half-trance of exhaustion, Billy watched her try to muscle the ball free, the morning sun turning her polyester nurse’s whites the color of ice.

She was his second wife. His first, Diane, an African-American art therapist, had left him in the wake of the highly publicized protests over his accidental and near-fatal shooting of a ten-year-old Hispanic boy in the Bronx. In all fairness, the bullet that hit the kid had first passed through its intended target, a Dusted giant armed with an already bloodied lead pipe. At first, Diane, only twenty-three at the time to his twenty-five, tried to hang fire with him, but after the papers picked it up and a Bronx reverend with a fat press book set up a month-long protest vigil around their Staten Island home, she gradually came apart and then bailed.

Billy had met Carmen when he was in the Identification Squad posted to the ME’s office, having been sent there from anti-crime as a form of internal exile after the shooting. She had come in that day to identify Damian Robles, until his OD, thirty-six hours earlier, her living husband.

Despite being a heroin addict, Robles had been a mixed martial arts professional with a ridiculously chiseled physique, and it embarrassed Billy to admit that two days after death the guy still looked better than Billy did on the best day of his own life.

Dead was dead, however, and twenty minutes after first laying eyes on her, as they stood side by side staring at the corpse through a long rectangular window, he just came out and said it: “What were you doing married to a lowlife like that?”

But instead of going for his face or screaming bloody murder, she calmly answered, “I thought he was what I deserved.”

Within a month they were leaving clothes in each other’s apartments.

Within a year they were sending out save-the-dates.

Her initial attraction to him, or so he thought at the time, was a no-brainer: sudden widow looking about and glomming onto the protective policeman standing by her side. Billy had always been a sucker for any kind of My Hero vibes when they occasionally came his way, but in truth he had fallen in love purely because of her looks and the way she sounded: her huge, smudge-rimmed eyes in a heart-shaped face, her skin the color of light toast, and that voice—lazy and smoky when she felt that way and backed by a deep and easy laugh that made him drowsy with pleasure. Lust was there from the beginning, but every other long-playing thing—trust, tenderness, companionability, et cetera—had only come about with time.

Not that living with her was any walk in the park. Her mood swings were fierce, and she was prone to savage dreams, often waking him up with her sleep talk, semicoherent tear-choked pleas to be left alone. And what he at first thought was a temporary desire for a protector in her life had over the years morphed into a river of visceral, mostly inarticulate need for him, a neediness he never quite understood but responded to with everything he had. She could never wear him out with her demands; there was something about her that made him want to be the best possible version of himself. He loved her, loved to come through for her, loved that what he had always thought of with embarrassment as his flatline personality, his bland stolidness, could become the rock in the raging sea of another soul’s life.