“Your brothers are Antoine and Butchie and your mother is Olive.”
“That’s right,” she said in a more sober tone, sizing him up now.
“So how are they?” Ray trying so hard but sounding to himself like a cordial robot.
“Nah nah nah,” she growled. “Don’t get me goin’ there. How’s yours? How’s your folks?”
“My mother’s dead, my father’s down in Mississippi.”
“Aw, I liked your moms, Ray. She was like a movie star.”
“Yeah,” he said. “She thought so, too.”
“Man, I hate this hospital . . .” Nerese hunkered in, her voice dropping to a confidential drawl. “Can I tell you what happened to me here one time?”
Ray’s ex-wife finally got up from the couch and pushed the elevator button, refueling his struggle over how to greet them.
“Ray, you got to hear this . . . Ray.” Nerese touched his hand to bring him around. “Last December, right before Christmas? Me and my partner, Willy Soto, we caught a job up in the Heights, some old Irish lady, her live-at-home son had broke her nose, right? So we bring her here, but we can’t find the son. Turns out the guy was an ex-cop about forty years old, a juicer, OK? So, all right, we get an order of protection for her, a warrant for him. Now, I went back to the building and interviewed this woman’s neighbors, found out that the guy, when he got his load on? He used his mother like a regular punching bag but she never once complained, called 911, asked him to move out, nothing. And, you know, when I heard that, I knew she was gonna protect her little baby no matter what, right? So, back in the hospital I go to the lady in the next bed, give her my card, tell her if your roommate’s red-nosed Sonny Boy shows up, you page me.”
“Huh,” Ray declared, trying to fall into the story, but at the same time becoming aware of a vague sense of shame starting to creep up on him, curling in wisps around his heart.
“Anyways, the next day, I get the page, the eagle has landed. Me and Willy, bang, we race down here, catch him in the room hanging over his mother’s hospital bed, yelling in her face, something about money. So we drag him out to the hallway, you know, trying to cuff him up?
“All of a sudden the nurses, the doctors, the visitors, everybody starts yellin’ at us, ‘Hey! Hey! What are you doing to him! We’re calling Security! Somebody call Security!’ You know, because Willy’s black too, so all they saw was two thugs pounding on a white man, read us as some kind of middle-aged gangbangers, crackheads, or whatever. Then Sonny Boy starts screaming, ‘Get this fat black bitch off me!’ At which point I’m like, Fuck the handcuffs, and I just start whaling on him because Ray, I am not that fat. But in any event, here comes Security, me and Willy, we got our hands full with this guy, neither one of us can get to our shields, next thing we know we’re fighting with Security too! It took fif-teen minutes for them to get it through their thick racist-ass skulls that we were cops. And that sonofabitch almost got away from us again, can you believe that?”
“Yes.”
“Sure you can. And after that? I came here every day to visit that nice old lady to try and drill it into her head that her son was a mortal danger to her. But don’t you know soon as she went home she had him move right back in with her?
“And six months later, guess what happened . . .”
“He killed her,” Ray said.
“Nah. She’s fine.” Nerese waved him off. “Him, on the other hand, he got good and oiled one night, wound up run over by a PATH train. Toot-toot. Peanut butter.” Nerese laughed. “God is good, huh?”
“Tweetie,” Ray said. “You’re a cop.”
“Yeah, but what’s even better”—she leaned in closer, rubbing her hands—“right now I’m your cop. So what happened?”
And just like that, she lost him, his bloodred eyes sliding away from her in a sullen glaze.
The catching detective had told her that Ray wouldn’t cooperate, which, in the always hopping city of Dempsy, New Jersey, automatically dropped the case into the Fuckit file.
“What happened, Ray,” waiting out both his willful reticence and the typically slow reaction time of a concussed victim. “Can you remember what happened?”
Having interviewed countless blunt force trauma vics over the last two decades, Nerese had a reasonably good idea of what she was dealing with here, the lacerated scalp resting atop either a so far bloodless brain contusion or a small intracranial bleed; anything more dire, and the skull would have been burr-holed to clip the bleed and evacuate the overflow.
And although the monitor showed his BP at 110 over 70 and his heart rate holding steady at 75, the IV was pumping Decadron, a powerful steroid given to control swelling of the brain, which probably meant the poor bastard hadn’t really slept since he’d been admitted and most likely immediately hooked up—no one slept on Decadron—which further meant that in addition to whatever disorientation he was experiencing, he was also probably on his way to a nice bout of sleep disorder psychosis, steroid psychosis, critical care unit psychosis, take your pick. He could also develop a subdural hematoma, the gap between the skull lining and the brain filling with expelled blood from the healing tissue, the doctors in that case, too, needing to go in drilling to relieve the pressure. Any and all of this meant she had to work fast, before he became either too estranged from reality or straight-out unconscious; any and all of this liable to happen in a blink, the emotional and medical status of brain-whack patients as treacherously unstable as the weather conditions around Mount Everest.
The problem with Nerese working fast, though, was that she was world famous for her tortoiselike pace—getting where she was going more often than not, but, as Willy Soto had once said, “Fast ain’t your speed.”
“Ray.” She took his hand in hers. “You need to tell me what happened.”
“Doorbell rings,” he finally said. “I open the door, next thing I know some paramedic’s asking me my date of birth.”
“Doorbell rings,” she nodded, reaching into one of the shopping bags and pulling out a notepad. “You got a doorman?”
“An intercom,” he said grudgingly, Nerese taking his willful surliness as a good sign, at least biology-wise.
“An intercom. So, you’ve got to buzz people up, right?”
“He must’ve rung someone else’s buzzer, got in the building that way.”
“He?”
“I’m assuming.”
“OK.” She shrugged. “‘He’ rings your doorbell. You ask who’s there? Or did you just open up the door?”
He took a long time answering, Nerese not sure if it was the head injury or Ray just trying to buy some time here.
“I don’t remember. I must’ve asked who’s there, I guess. I don’t remember.”
“Look through the peephole?”
“If I did, I don’t remember.”
“Don’t remember. OK, so you open the door. Next thing you’re in a rig heading for the hospital. So whoever did this, it’s not like you invited them inside because you’d most definitely remember that, right?”
“Right.”
“Ray . . . When you came to the door, were you carrying a big vase with you?”
“A what?” he said, then, “No.”
“You got one in the house?”
“I guess.”
“Where in the house?”
“Living room.”
“Where in the living room?”
“In a corner, between the couches.”
“See, Ray, I’m asking, because the medics told me, they come up to get you, you’re laying there, someone had smashed a big vase over your head. Blood and plaster everywhere.”
“Shit.”
“They said you were seizing up, flopping around like a fish on a dock, had a sharp chunk of plaster in your fist?” She pointed with her pen to his bandaged pinkie, Ray staring at it as if he had never realized that there was a hand at the end of that particular arm. “Almost severed your own finger there.”
He closed his e
yes, winced as if pricked, opened them.
“So let me ask you this . . . When you opened the door, was this guy by any chance carrying a big vase? You know, like waiting for you, like, ‘Surprise!’”
He didn’t answer.
“OK . . . So you must’ve gotten clocked with that vase that was sitting in the corner between the two couches, huh?”
He started to turn away from her, reaching weakly behind him to close his open-backed smock, then gave up.
“So this guy had to have entered your apartment, looked around, spotted the vase, walked over to the corner between the two couches, picked up the vase, come back up to you and . . .” Nerese mimed raising that vase over his head, slowly bringing it down in front of his face.
“Why are you making me feel like I’m the criminal,” he said without heat.
“Ray. Are you afraid of this guy?”
“What guy . . .”
“Ray.” She sighed. “You invited the guy in, or he pushed his way in, or something, but there’s no way you can tell me you have no memory of it.”
Looking overwhelmingly dejected, he finally successfully rolled on his side away from her, delicately pulling the thin blanket up to his ribs to cover himself.
“Ray, you know this guy, don’t you . . .”
He turned back to her.
“You know, you have used my name in front of everything you’ve said to me. That’s a technique car salesmen use.”
“Ray, are you afraid of him?”
“No,” he said calmly, finally, as if not having the stamina for all this.
“You know him though, right?”
She was on the verge of repeating the question when he finally responded. “I don’t want to press charges.”
Nerese nodded, trying to read him, picking up not fear—more like embarrassment, shame; thinking, Maybe something sexual, man-man, hoping it wasn’t man-boy, Ray just wanting it to go away at any price.
“You want me to press them for you? I can do that.”
“No.”
“How ’bout I just run him for outstanding warrants? Get him like that? You don’t have to have nothing to do with it. Just give me a name.”
“No. No. No.” A weary, determined chant.
“Ray, please don’t make me go out to the lounge and get all psychological on your pretty daughter out there. ‘Did you ever see your dad have an argument with anybody. Did your dad ever seem worried about anybody. Can you think of anyone who’d want to hurt . . .’ Because I tell you, Ray, I don’t know about your wife . . .”
“Ex.”
“Whatever, but I took one look at your daughter’s sad little face out there? And I know she’s got something for me.”
His eyes reflexively shifted to the right of her, trying to see through the glass wall to the elevator banks. The girl and her mother must have left, because when he spoke again his voice was stronger. “What’s with all the videotapes?” He nodded to the shopping bags at her feet.
“We had a homicide in a Burger King down on JFK. These are from the security cameras. Twenty-four hours of people eating themselves to death.”
“Tweetie,” he said in that flat tone of his. “Last time I saw you, you were getting snatched up for spray-painting ‘White Bitch’ on the side of Eleven Building. How are you a cop.”
“C’mon, Ray,” she said softly, “I was thirteen years old.”
“How are you a cop.”
“I’m gonna save that one for down the line with you,” she said cleanly. “When I, re-know you better. Because that one there, is the story to end all stories. But I’ll make you a deal . . .”
“What’s the N. for,” nodding to her shield.
“Nerese.”
“Nerese,” he repeated. “Where’d ‘Tweetie’ come from.”
Nerese smiled; they were drifting way off subject; but if he needed to shoot the shit for a while, hear a story or two before he would give it up to her, she could do that.
“My grandmother had a cleft palate or something. That’s how she said ‘Sweetie.’”
“Sweetie,” Ray tried it on for size. “Officer Sweetie.”
“Actually, it’s Detective Sweetie. At least for the next few months. Then I’m out.”
“Out?”
“Retiring.”
“Retiring . . . What are you, forty? Forty-one?”
“Something like that. See, you can retire after twenty years, go out with half pay for the rest of your life, and believe me, I am going. This job’s for shit these days if you don’t have a political hook, which I don’t, so come this summer? I’m moving to Florida, like near Jacksonville? That’s where my mother’s people are from originally. My son’s father’s people, too. You ever been to Florida?”
“Tweetie, I’m a Jew,” he said, and from the great effort he made to smile she guessed it was some kind of joke.
“Ray, I swear to God, every time I get off the plane down there? It all slows down. Air’s all sweet . . . And, I tell my son Darren, he’s almost eighteen, I tell him if he don’t get accepted into a college with a scholarship attached, or have a real job come June? He’s going into the army, ’cause Mommy has left the building. Not that he believes me or anything. He’s just like his father, wherever he may be, a big baby, thinks I was put on this earth to stuff his face and clean his mess. But it’s not just my son. I got a ton of people I’m carrying, and I more or less need to square them all away before I go.”
She took a breather, checking Ray out, not wanting him to go south on her, his hobbled mind lagging too far behind what she was building for him here. He looked fairly sunk into himself but was still listening.
“See, I bought this house in Jersey City, about five years ago, right? I gave the upstairs to my mother, she’s so preserved in alcohol I don’t think she’ll ever die, she’s like seventy-five now and she’s up there with her brother, my uncle, he’s like seventy-eight, and downstairs it’s me and my son, OK?
“Now, outside the house? I got my brother Antoine, you remember Antoine? Who, by the way, legally changed his name to Toni a few years back. Anyways, Antoine, Toni, he’s got the Package now . . .”
“Unh,” Ray softly grunted in sympathy, giving his face to her again.
“Yeah,” bobbing her head in acknowledgment. “Sometimes he’s in the hospital, sometimes he’s in jail, sometimes he’s on my couch. I’m trying to get him into this Christian Brothers hospice over in Bayonne, but he’s not quite sick enough yet . . .
“And my brother Butchie, you remember him too, right? He’s in jail. Again. But he’ll be out soon. Again. I tell him he can’t come around anymore, but he will. He likes to break in through the back door in the middle of the night. The way I find out about it is when I go down in the morning, see him dead asleep in the pantry, like to scare me half to death. He’s lucky I haven’t shot his ass . . . And you want to hear something else? I go down to Florida three months ago to see my cousins? And, as a courtesy I go visit my son’s paternal grandfather because I had heard that he was mandated into a state home for the elderly. I go in there, he takes one look at me, sits up in bed, says, ‘Flossie?’ He always thinks I’m his dead daughter Flossie. Anyways, he’s like, ‘Flossie? If you leave me here, I’ll die here . . .’ So, what the hell, I go and bring him back up with me to New Jersey, get him checked out by my doctor? Doctor says he’s got creeping dementia, it’s an early warning sign of Alzheimer’s. But Ray”—Nerese touched his arm again to keep him in this—“the man is ninety-seven years old. Ninety, seven. He ain’t got time for early warning signs of shit. So, OK. I go and stick him upstairs with my mother and uncle, and it’s like ‘Hell Up in Harlem.’”
Ray sighed, a deep chest-lifting exhalation that ended in tears. “Tweetie, I’m so fucked,” not looking at her.
She put her hand in his, and he took it.
“You want to tell me what’s going on?”
“No,” he said, “but keep talking.”
She waited a beat,
to see if he’d say anything else, then got back into it. “See, Ray, I think one of the reasons I became a police officer to begin with was to make my family keep its distance. ‘You want to be a criminal, Antoine? Butchie? You too?’ ‘Well, you know you can’t be near me no more. I’m not gonna waste time telling you shit is wrong. You just best stay away ’cause I’m on the Job and that’s that.’
“But I tell you, Ray, praise to God, I have discovered over the years that I am blessed. I am truly blessed. And so now I’m like the man in the family, carrying everybody. But I don’t know if I’m doing anybody any favors. They could probably learn to make it on their own, you know, most of them, which is good for me, because the truth be known? Yes, I am blessed, but I am also tired. I am as tired as I am blessed, and that’s no lie.
“Like, OK. You want to hear a typical day off for me? A few weeks ago, that ninety-seven-year-old man I parked upstairs? He don’t . . . He’s crazy with that dementia thing. My mother’s all like, ‘Get that man out of my house!’ Her house, right? But so, OK . . . I make some calls, cash in some favors, and I get him placed in Beth Abraham, a seniors’ home something like five blocks from the house.
“So like, last Saturday I get Darren to pack him up, I take him over to the home, sign him in, take him up to his new room, unpack, and I see my son has done his usual expert job. The man’s got no pajamas, no robe, no toothbrush, no . . . So I leave him there, go running to Caldor’s over in Gannon, get him underwear, toothpaste, I don’t even remember if the man’s got teeth, underpants, socks, a belt, slippers; store’s a Saturday madhouse, checkout line’s a mile long . . . I run back to Beth Abraham, old man’s sitting up in bed just like in Florida, ‘Flossie,’ he says, ‘if you leave me here, I’ll die here. You ain’t even a Christian no more.’
“And I want to say, ‘Oh yeah? How ’bout you save that “no Christian” shit for that forty-six-goin’-on-five-year-old poppa-was-a-rollin’-stone no-show son of yours, except, oh yeah, I don’t see him around here for you to say that to . . . In fact, I haven’t seen him around here for you to say that to since I brung your no-blood-relation-of-mine ass up from Florida three months ago.’
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