The Whites: A Novel Read Free

curling her finger for Billy to follow.
    The halo-lit bathroom was a little too close, uncapped bottles and tubes of skin- and hair-care products rimming both the sink and the tub, used towels drooping from every knob, rod, and rack, stray hairs in places that made Billy look away. As Woody’s girlfriend began rooting around inside a full and ripe laundry hamper, Billy’s cell rang: Stacey Taylor for the third time in two days, his stomach giving up a little whoop of alarm as he killed this call from her like all the others.
    “You got it in there?” Woody barked from the hallway. “I know you got it in there.”
    “Just go back and watch your TV,” Stupak’s voice coming through the closed door.
    When the girlfriend finally stood upright from the hamper, she held the silver medal in her hands, as big around as a coffee saucer.
    “See, when he gets his drink on he wants to pawn it and start a new life. He did it already a few times, and how much you think he got for it?”
    “A few grand?”
    “A hundred and twenty-five dollars.”
    “Can I hold it?”
    Billy was disappointed in how light it was, but he felt a little buzzed nonetheless.
    “See, Horace’s OK most of the time, I mean, I certainly been with worse, it’s just when he gets his hands on that Cherry Heering, you know? The man has got a alcoholic sweet tooth like a infant. I mean, you could get a good bottle of fifty-dollar cognac or Johnnie Walker Black, leave it on the table, he won’t even crack the seal. Something tastes like a purple candy bar? Watch out.”
    “I want my damn medal back!” Woody yelled from farther away in the apartment.
    “Sir, what did I just say to you?” Stupak’s voice flattening with anger.
    “Start a new life . . .” the girlfriend muttered. “All the pawnshops around here got me on speed dial for when it comes in. Hell, he wants to take off? I’ll loan him the money, but this here is a piece of American history.”
    Billy liked her, he just didn’t understand why a woman this lucid didn’t keep a cleaner house.
    “So what do you want me to do?”
    “Nothing. I’m sorry they sent you. Usually some uniform guys from the precinct come up, mainly just because he was a famous athlete, and we play Where’d she hide it this time, but you’re a detective, and I’m embarrassed they bothered you.”
    When they opened the bathroom door, Woody was back in the living room, sprawled on the vinyl-covered couch watching MTV with the sound off, his jellied eyes dimming into slits.
    Billy dropped the medal on his chest. “Case solved.”
    Walking with Stupak to the elevators he checked the time: three-thirty. Ninety more minutes and the odds were he’d have gotten away with murder.
    “What do you say?”
    “You’re the boss, boss.”
    “Finnerty’s?” Billy thinking, What the hell, you cannot not celebrate, thinking, Just a taste.
    “I always wanted to go to Ireland,” Stupak shouted over the music to the dead-handsome young bartender. “Last year we had reservations and everything but, like, two days before the flight my girlfriend came down with appendicitis.”
    “You can always get on a plane by yourself, you know,” he said politely enough, looking over her shoulder to wave at two women just coming through the door. “It’s a very friendly country.”
    And that was that, the guy leaning across the wood to buss the new arrivals and leaving Stupak to blush into her beer.
    “I’ve never been to Ireland myself,” Billy said. “I mean, what for, I’m around Micks all day as it is.”
    “I never should’ve said ‘girlfriend,’” Stupak said.
    His cell rang, not the Wheel, thank God, but his wife, Billy race-walking out onto the street so she wouldn’t hear the racket and start asking questions.
    “Hey . . .” his voice downshifting as it always did when she rang him this deep into the night. “Can’t sleep?”
    “Nope.”
    “Did you take your Traz?”
    “I think I forgot but I can’t