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

Washington Avenue. At this hour the food odors of three continents crept down the elevator shaft like fog.
    Whelan looked good for forty-six, a lean, sometime weight lifter with a full head of brown hair, a big nose, and the exaggerated mustache of a gunslinger. Which wasn’t too far off: by the time he’d retired he held the record for justifiable shots-fired incidents of any active police officer in the NYPD. Toward the end of his career, he was transferred to the Crime Scene Unit, one of the least likely places where a detective could find a reason to pull his weapon, but even with that squad he managed to get into a shootout, having wandered into a three a.m. bodega robbery while on a coffee run two blocks away from an indoor doubleheader being processed by his CSU team in the New Lots section of Brooklyn.
    Dressed tonight in a dagger-collared cherry leather car coat and flare-bottom jeans, he was standing in front of the geriatric twin elevators, barking at a toffee-colored tenant with vaguely Asiatic eyes and a whippet mustache, the guy shoulder-toting a duffel bag as if on shore leave.
    “What are you doing?” Whelan snapped.
    “Spreading the joy!” His whiskey-hoarse voice just shy of a shout.
    “The joy? Are you crazy? Get your ass back upstairs.”
    “How you doing, sirs!” the guy said, turning to Billy and Pavlicek and extending his free hand. “Esteban Appleyard.”
    Whelan abruptly walked away, shaking his head as if he had just about had it with this idiot.
    “What you got in there?” Billy asked.
    Appleyard opened his duffel to display mini-bottles of Rihanna Rebelle perfume, half-pints of Alizé VS cognac, and cellophane-wrapped packs of White Owl cigarillos.
    “Have a cigar.” Appleyard beamed.
    “I don’t smoke,” Billy lied.
    “I’ll be in the car,” Pavlicek muttered, wheeling so abruptly that he nearly collided with Whelan, who was steaming back for more Appleyard.
    “Where’s the money?”
    “They gonna wire it to my bank.”
    “When.”
    “I don’t know.”
    Whelan turned to Billy. “This guy just won ten million playing the lottery, can you believe that?”
    “For real?”
    Billy knew Whelan’s irritation had nothing to do with envy. Taking his super’s job to heart despite his run-and-gun résumé, Jimmy always projected this scolding vibe toward the more obliviously self-destructive members of what he considered his flock.
    One of the elevators groaned open and a woman sporting an African head wrap stepped out, her arms filled with folded laundry.
    Appleyard dug in his duffel and pulled out a bottle of perfume. “For you, Chiqui.”
    “I don’t wear that,” she said sharply, as angry at him as Whelan.
    “Give me a kiss.”
    “You should move out of here,” rearing back from his ninety-proof breath. “Everybody knows.”
    Looking to the lobby, now stripped of nearly all of its original 1920s furniture and mirrors, Billy was surprised to see Pavlicek still in the house, slumped over on the lone couch, his head sunk into his hands as if he were too exhausted to make it back out to the street.
    “You got a car?” Whelan asked Appleyard.
    “Buyin’ one. I like that Maybach, like Diddy got. A nice chocolate brown.”
    “Can you even drive?”
    “Drove a truck out of the poultry terminal for fourteen years before I got shot that one time,” yanking down his sweater collar to show the skid-mark scar on his collarbone.
    Whelan pulled out a set of keys, stuffed them in Appleyard’s pocket. “You know my car?”
    “The Elantra?” Appleyard sniffed. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in that.”
    “You go upstairs and pack. You take my car and go up to my cabin in Monticello for a week. Figure out where you want to live, what you’re gonna do with yourself, because around here, they’re gonna eat you alive.”
    The woman nodded in agreement.
    “Naw, man.” Appleyard waved him off. “People know me.”
    “Exactly. Somebody comes to my door three days from now,