The Whites: A Novel (32 page)

“You should talk to somebody,” he said.

“I am talking to somebody, you moron, I’m talking to you.”

They sat there in silence for a long moment, ignoring the few students starting to wander in for lunch.

“I just want to stop having these dreams about my kids,” she said, tagging the waiter for a third beer. “Sometimes I wish I never had kids, so many bad things can happen to them, but it never bothered me when I was in sex crimes, just now. This fucking menopause, maybe it’s a good thing to have your period, a little blood loss every month, you know, like a pressure valve. How about Carmen, she’s not menopausal yet, right? What is she, forty?”

“Thirty-eight.”

“She’s so lucky.”

“Maybe it’s not menopause,” he said. “Maybe you’re pregnant.”

“Right. Do me a favor, ask your wife how long this thing lasts.”

“She’s a triage nurse.”

“I don’t know, Billy, you’re all worried about Pavlicek? Maybe you should worry a little about me instead.”

“You’ll be all right,” he said, running out of safe things to say.

Milton Ramos

Thirty minutes into packing up Marilys’s one-and-a-half-room apartment, Milton more than got it: of course she was half a loon when it came to believing in her own bad dreams, the place was a virtual botanica, the high shelves above the two-burner stove and the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink housing a riot of spirit oils: Ogun, Pajaro Macua, 7 African Powers, Angel de Dinero, Angel de Amor, and Amarra Hombre, a.k.a. Hold Your Man, the last two also in mist form. And then there were the jars of spiritual floor wash in the back of the closet: Court Case, Steady Work, Money Shower, Chain Breaker, Do What I Say, Obey Me, Adore Me, and, once again, Hold Your Man, Milton wondering as he packed if she had been sneaking some of these concoctions into his house all along, washing the floors and walls but most important, he knew, the door frames, thresholds, and windowsills, in an effort to land him. He was fine with that, flattered in fact, but now that the potions had done their job, where the hell was she?

It was one in the afternoon on the day after she had boarded the bus to JFK and he was still waiting for her call from Guatemala City. At first he told himself, Third-world country, travel chaos, shitty to nonexistent cell service, there could be a million reasons. But after a few hours of thinking about all the cash she was carrying,
third-world country
began to morph into
abduction, chaos
into
rape,
and
bad cell reception
into
murder
.

Deciding that he didn’t want any of her mojo collection in his house, he unpacked what he had just packed, then went to work emptying her medicine chest, another cabinet of curiosities, including a few unmarked jars that he wouldn’t open on a bet. But he found no over-the-counter items and, more jarringly, no pharmacy-filled vials, no recognizable medications—every bathroom cabinet on earth held doctor-prescribed meds—which meant she either didn’t take any and was as healthy as she looked or she was too poor to take proper care of herself and was medicating on the medieval plan, the mystery of the absent meds once again hammering home to him how little, after all these years, he actually knew about her.

His cell rang, not Marilys but Peter Gonzalez, a half friend of his from the TSA.

“She wasn’t on United, American, or Delta. There were four other airlines flying out of the New York area with a connecting flight to Guatemala last night and this morning, but I figured those three were both direct and had the cheapest fares so . . .”

“So . . .” Milton sat on her bed.

“Aeromexico out of JFK last night had two Irrizarys on their manifest, a Carla and a Maria—are you sure Marilys is her legal name? It could be a nickname, a childhood name, or something.”

“Hang on,” he said, putting the phone down and quickly rustling through her garbage until he found a rent receipt and a Con Ed bill.

“Yeah, Marilys Irrizary, keep looking.” Then: “Hello? You still there?”

“You’re welcome,” Gonzalez said.

“Sorry. Thank you.”

Going back to packing, he returned to her closet and then went through her dresser, both of which were half empty, leaving Milton struck by how few actual possessions she had. Lastly he collected her crucifixes, icons, and religious statuary: Saints Michael, George, Lucy, and Lazarus, the Infant of Atocha and Our Lady of Guadalupe, all the usual suspects. Then, after surveying the rest of the apartment one last time and not finding anything else worth taking, he began to carry her stuff down to the street, needing only four trips to complete the job, six medium-sized boxes going into the back of a rented U-Haul with a capacity for ten times that amount.

Gonzalez called back a few hours later, while Milton was in the process of unpacking those same boxes in his house.

“Spirit, Avianca, Taca, Copa, no Irrizarys on any of them.”

“All right,” Milton said. “Thank you.”

Fighting down panic, he busied himself with unwrapping her saints until he dropped and shattered the Black Madonna and Child, at which point he lost his shit in earnest.

Whatever happened to her, it had happened here.

She had never even made it out of the city.

“We can’t start looking until forty-eight hours,” Turkel, the lone detective on duty in the Missing Persons Unit said. “You know the drill.”

Milton had never been on the customer side of a squad room desk before, and he hated it.

“You can’t jump the clock for me?” Redundantly flashing his tin.

“Last time I did someone a favor, they put me on desk duty for three months.”

“What am I asking here,” Milton said, thinking, You’re behind a fucking desk right now.

“Look, how about you fill out the report, give it to me, if she’s still missing tomorrow midnight, give me a call and I’ll bump her to the top of the list.”

Twenty minutes later, while still waiting for Turkel to find the right form, Milton left the office and returned to his squad in the 4-6.

“I understand where Missing Persons is coming from with the forty-eight-hours rule,” Milton said, sitting between mountains of manila folders on Dennis Doyle’s couch. “But I’m not talking about some teenage runaway here, and I was hoping you could reach out to somebody for me.”

He knew his boss didn’t like him, would have happily had him transferred out of the squad in a heartbeat if he could, but Milton couldn’t think of anyone else to go to on this.

Doyle leaned back in his office chair, his head encircled by the framed portraits of his own bosses on the wall behind him.

“Who do I know there,” he said, scowling into the middle distance, then picking up his phone, putting it down, picking it up again. “I got the guy. Remember that Night Watch sergeant was in here that morning I was asking you for the 494s on Cornell Harris?”

Milton slid his ass to the edge of the sofa. “Vaguely.”

“Billy Graves, he spent a lot of years in the ID Squad, he’s got to have a few friends in Missing Persons.”

Milton got to his feet.

“Boss, you know what? Maybe I’m hitting the panic button too early on this.”

“Your call.” Doyle shrugged.

“I appreciate it though, thank you,” he said, walking back into the squad room.

“Who is she, anyhow?” his boss called out after him.

Back in Marilys’s apartment, he scoured dressers, drawers, and trash receptacles for anything that could help him find her, turning up nothing beyond those bullshit elixirs, a never-used datebook, and a set of keys that didn’t fit her door. It was only after overturning half the furniture and getting down on his stomach with a Maglite to peer beneath whatever he couldn’t move that he discovered the three phone numbers written in pencil on the wall above her mini-fridge.

The first was to a local deli, the second to a Chinese restaurant that delivered, but the third, with an outer-borough area code, was to an older female Hispanic with good English.

“Good afternoon, this is Detective Milton Ramos from the New York Police Department Missing Persons Unit. I’m looking for a Ms. Marilys Irrizary?”

“Not here.”

“Who am I talking to?”

“Who am
I
talking to?”

Milton took a breath. “Detective Milton Ramos, NYPD, your turn.”

“Anna Goury,” then: “Josepha Suarez.”

“Which.”

“Both.”

“Do you know Ms. Irrizary?”

“Ms.?”
Sardonically dragging out the
z
sound. “Yeah, she’s my sister, what’s going on?”

And when Milton, overwhelmed by the question, was unable to answer, she asked, “Are you really a cop?”

Anna Goury
/
Josepha Suarez lived with her husband, three kids, and what Milton thought might be a wolf in a federally funded prefab ranch house on Charlotte Street in the former anus mundi section of the Bronx, all six rooms of her home spotless to the point of parboiled. She looked a lot like Marilys, but then again all Indio women of a certain age seemed to him born of the same womb.

The three small cups of rocket-fuel Bustelo she served him at the kitchen table both helped and hindered his getting the full story out, breaking down his inbred reticence but making him stammer.

“I don’t understand,” she said after he finished. “Why would she be going to Guatemala?”

“Why? I told you, to bring back . . .”

“Our mother? Our mother’s dead fifteen years,” she said. “Besides, we’re from El Salvador.”

“Hold on, hang on,” the sweat caught in his mustache suddenly reeking of coffee.

“Well, all I can say is,” Goury/Suarez delicately rotating her demitasse cup on the smooth tabletop, “I hope you didn’t give her any money.”

Chapter 13

Rolling onto his own street after a four-thirty a.m. police shooting in Herald Square had extended his tour nearly until noon, Billy was so jacked from all the liquid speed he had ingested that he clipped a neighbor’s garbage can and then just kept on driving, his house at the end of the curved block shimmering like a mirage. Oddly enough, the sight of Pavlicek’s Lexus parked in his driveway settled him down rather than sending him over the edge, artificial adrenaline, in the end, no friend to genuine alertness.

They were having coffee in the kitchen, Carmen in her nursing whites, Pavlicek in dry-cleaned jeans and a sport jacket.

“I didn’t know Carmen went to Monroe,” Pavlicek said as if Billy had been sitting with them all along. “Did you know that?”

“Well, yeah, she’s my wife,” he said carefully, looking to her for a read on the situation.

“My parents went there in the sixties, they met in tenth-grade journalism class,” looking past Billy into the living room. “How’s that for staying power.”

“Must have been a whole different school in those days,” Billy said, still trying to catch Carmen’s eye.

“No, they told me it was crap back then too.”

“He was asking me if I remembered any of the teachers,” Carmen said. “I told him I didn’t even remember going there.”

“Yeah, you never talk about it,” Billy too tense to take a seat in his own kitchen. “So, John, to what do we owe the honor?”

“Hey, look at this guy,” Pavlicek beaming as Declan wandered into the kitchen, then pulling the boy close. “How old are you, now?”

“Eight.” Always a sucker for adult attention, Declan didn’t resist, standing there between Pavlicek’s legs, an expectant half-smile on his face.

Billy finally caught his wife’s eye: What gives? Carmen, thrown by the query, just shrugged.

“You got a girlfriend yet?” Pavlicek asked.

“I hate girls,” Declan said, stating a fact.

“Yeah? What’s your favorite team?”

“The Rangers.”

“Baseball Rangers or hockey Rangers.”

“Hockey. I hate the baseball Rangers.”

“My boy’s sport was football.”

“I like football. I’m on a team,” Declan said, then walked out of the room.

“What a guy you have there,” Pavlicek said to the space between the parents.

“Well, yours is no slouch,” Carmen said.

“Yeah,” Pavlicek said faintly, smiling down at his coffee.

Billy finally took a seat. “So, John, what’s up?”

Pavlicek took a breath, then folded his hands on the table. “Do you remember that Memory Keepers national convention Ray Rivera was talking about that time on City Island?”

“I know that group,” Carmen said. “We give them a conference room for their meetings. So sad, you know?”

“Well, I went there as a guest of the Bronx-Westchester chapter, the one that meets at St. Ann’s,” nodding to Carmen. “It was in a Marriott outside of St. Louis and the first night they had a ceremony in this huge banquet hall, fifty, sixty tables, maybe five hundred parents from all the local chapters coast to coast. And, once everyone got settled, they passed out these cheap see-through plastic roses attached to batteries, one to a family, then they turned out all the lights in the hall and started to project a slide show onto a movie screen up front, sort of a death carousel. Each slide was a photo of someone’s murdered child, could be anywheres from an infant to a forty-year-old, with name, birth date, then the ‘murdered’ date, printed below. ‘Murdered,’ not died, not killed. They’d hold the photo for twenty seconds or so, and when you saw your son’s or daughter’s face up there, your grandchild’s, you turned on your battery-powered rose. One by one, those roses going on in the dark, here, over there, in the corner, in the back, and all the while they’re playing this sappy theme music over the sound system, Michael Bolton, Celine Dion, the Carpenters, Whitney Houston, roses clicking on for infants, gangbangers, little girls, teenage boys, grown women, black, white, Chinese, “You Light Up My Life,” murder date, rose, “Memories,” murder date, rose, “Close to You,” murder date, rose, “I Will Always Love You,” murder date, rose, murder date, rose . . . And people for the most part were pretty composed, but every once in a while a face would come up on the screen and you’d hear somebody gasping in the dark or moaning, then race-walking out of the room. I think they had an understanding, if you’re going to lose it, you need to leave, because it could create a chain reaction . . . So, the ceremony is going on and on, more and more roses lighting up this huge grief cave, and by the end of the slide show the whole room was, like, blazing with roses, I mean that fucking slide show went on for something like an hour and a half—twenty seconds a life, you do the math.”