Read Online The Whites: A Novel by Richard Price - Free Book Online

pissed myself.”
    “Yeah?” Whelan apparently his only listener.
    “Listen to me,” Billy said, leaning forward. “The bodies were discovered by Tonya Howard’s new boyfriend when he came to the house about five, six hours later, and by the time we got there, rigor was going pretty good. We found Memori and Tonya in the living room and we thought that was it, but when I opened the bathroom door . . .” Billy wiped his dry mouth. “See, when Taft lived with Tonya, whenever he would discipline the little one he’d always take her into the bathroom, and that’s where he took her to shoot her that morning, and after he shot her he stuck her head and shoulders in the toilet. Like I said, rigor had set in and we couldn’t get her out, so we had to use a sledgehammer to shatter the porcelain. So, ‘Broken toilet,’ the lady said. Don’t ask me how.”
    “Then what happened.”
    “I brought her back to the projects and let her into the apartment, see if she could maybe pick something up in the air.”
    “Did she?”
    “Nope.”
    “What did she say when she saw the broken toilet?”
    “Just nodded, like, ‘I told you so.’”
    “She got you on the running water, too,” Whelan said, “if you want to be technical about it.”
    “That too, I guess.”
    “You write her that letter?”
    “I’m working on it.”
    “The thing about the younger brother,” Pavlicek suddenly said, addressing his clasped hands. “The one who went away for it? Truly stupid people are the toughest to interview because they can’t tell when you’ve talked them into a corner. ‘Forensics says he was killed with a golf club, Eugene. Is there a golf club in the house?’
    “‘I don’t know.’
    “‘Well, we found one.’
    “‘OK.’
    “‘We found your fingerprints on it.’
    “‘OK.’
    “‘So how could you not know there was a golf club in the house?’
    “‘I don’t know.’
    “‘Do you like to play golf?’
    “‘No.’
    “‘So then, once again, I have to ask, how’d your fingerprints come to be on the shaft?’
    “‘I don’t know . . .’”
    Pavlicek took a breath, his gaze going from his hands to his untouched shot glass. “I remember, I tried to get Jeffrey’s goat, so I ask him, ‘It can’t be easy living with a retard for a brother.’ You know what he says to me? ‘You should try it.’”
    He reached for his Midleton’s, threw it back.
    “A real sweetheart,” he muttered, then shut himself down, not once in his story having raised his eyes to his friends, leaving Billy to wonder whether maybe Bannion’s murder had him deeply crashing, like a postpartum Ahab if the author had allowed him to kill the whale and go home to his family.
    “Fuck you, with your ‘I’m all heart,’” Yasmeen bawled, suddenly deeply drunk and in tears. “Why do you always have to make me feel so bad?”
    Before Whelan could respond, she tilted into Billy, slurred in his ear, “Sometimes I can still taste you,” then lowered her forehead to the table and went to sleep.
    “I think for Jeffrey,” Pavlicek said to no one, “Thomas Rivera, his brother Eugene, the whole thing was like snapping a tablecloth.” Then, thickly, “If anybody had it coming, right?”
    Billy and Whelan looked at each other blankly before raising their eyes to the waiter, who had finally come by to pass out menus and announce the specials.
    Billy’s first run of the night didn’t come in until just before dawn, an assault in a flower shop on a beat-up stretch of upper Broadway where Harlem became Hamilton Heights, the roughness of the neighborhood offset by its heart-stoppingly abrupt view of the Hudson River, which seemed to leap up to meet the cresting avenue. Given the limbo hour, Billy’s partner of choice was Roger Mayo, a hollow-eyed, scoop-chested chain-smoker in his eighth year on Night Watch, a borderline mute, a mystery, no one in the squad having any idea where he came from or where he went afterward. But Mayo was