Samaritan

by Richard Price

  “He doesn’t see a shrink and it looks like the guy doesn’t even have a regular doctor, which is none too bright once you hit forty. Questions?”

  “Go ahead.” Nerese broke off a section of doughnut, put it down, picked it up, put it down.

  “OK. Employment. And this is somewhat interesting. From ’87 to ’90 he was a public school teacher, English, Fannie Lou Hamer High School in the Bronx. Then from ’90 to ’93 he was driving a cab for an outfit called Orion, then from ’93 to ’95, get this, he was a polygrapher for an outfit, also New York, called Truth and Justice, did mostly employment screens, then from ’95 to ’97 he was back driving a cab for two garages, first DMG then Scorpio.”

  “He went from teaching high school to driving a cab?” Nerese started doodling, a whirling stroke like a tornado.

  “OK,” Sugar flipped a page. “According to the Special Investigations office over at the New York Board of Ed? He was facing some kind of disciplinary hearing, so it could have been one of those you-can’t-fire-me-I-quit deals.”

  “A hearing for what?”

  “Apparently, back in ’90 he took thirty kids and went AWOL on a class trip.”

  “How’d you . . . They never release that shit.”

  “Yeah, well, I was calling from the chancellor’s office, so it was strictly in-house.” Sugar patted himself on the head.

  “Then drove a cab again after the polygraph gig?”

  “Yeah, but then get this. From ’98 to 2001 he worked out in LA for a company called Satchmo Productions, was a staff writer on that TV show Brokedown High? The guy starts pulling down four, count ’em, four grand a week. Left that gig, God knows why, and other than the volunteer teaching thing over at the Hook? Basically, he’s been unemployed ever since. Or, given his financials, maybe a better word is ‘retired.’”

  Nerese kept doodling.

  “You want the financials?”

  “Sure.”

  “OK.” He turned a page. “AmEx and MasterCard combined averages from seven to fifteen hundred a month, no distinct purchasing patterns to speak of, mostly restaurants, bookstores, music stores, the odd TV or microwave at P. C. Richard, Moviefone tickets here and there, a few clothing stores, no favorite bars, no masked charges, you know, dummy corporations for whores, lap dances, massages, any kind of sex or sex-related products.

  “Has, at present, three hundred and four thousand dollars in a Prudential-Bache money market account, down from an opening balance of three hundred seventy-seven, six months ago, no further deposits, so it’s most likely what he could save from that high-priced writing job out in LA, living off it like his own trust-fund baby. No stocks, bonds, any kind of investments, shares or partnerships . . . OK. The mortgage on Othello Way runs him fourteen hundred and eighty bucks a month, lays out another thirteen hundred per in child support, has never missed a payment on either one. OK,” turning the page. “Withdraws, roughly another five thousand a month, deposits it into a checking account at First Dempsy for, I’m guessing cash machine access, you know, general out of pocket and to pay the smaller bills, cable, gas and whatnot, however, last month he transferred sixteen thousand, not five, could be to cover holiday expenses, could be something else, but that’s the one thing I don’t have yet, the canceled checks from the First Dempsy account. My guy in the proof department over there’s on vacation, but I should have it for you in a few days.”

  Sugar nudged the Plexiglas bowl toward Nerese. “Candy cane?”

  “So what do you think?” Nerese had filled the page with tornadoes, dollar signs and “Satchmo.”

  “Well, if it was me, what I’d like to know”—Sugar pulled his elbows back, a hollow pop emanating from his sternum—“is how you go from driving a cab to raking in four Gs a week writing a television show. And then I’d like to know, who in their right fucking mind walks out on that kind of cheddar, comes back to Dempsy fucking New Jersey with their hands in their pockets whistling Dixie.”

  “Anybody out there have anything to say about it?”

  “Hard to get a straight answer.” Sugar flipped some pages. “I talked to three people—two said he just quit, happens all the time, high burnout rate, guy’s a good guy, everybody wishes him well. The third said, well, he wouldn’t say straight out, but there might have been an incident, maybe not, of a, get this, a racial nature. Something said at a party, some kind of, of misunderstanding or misinterpretation or . . . I couldn’t . . . Usually I got people talking till my ears bleed, but I don’t know. I got all the names and numbers for you if you want to take a crack at it, but frankly I don’t think anything out there followed him back to New Jersey just to go upside his head. If I were you? I’d stay local, canvass the neighbors, talk to the kids at the Hook, other teachers or, even more to the point, I’d just ask him what the hell happened and keep asking until he’ll tell you just to fuckin’ get rid of you. That’s what I’d do.”

  Nerese looked down at her open pad, “racial” having joined “Satchmo,” the doodles and the dollar signs.

  “So,” Sugar said, sliding the folder across the table, Nerese lost in thought until the silence caught her attention. Snapping to, she fished the check out of her purse: three hundred dollars, a third of Sugar’s usual fee.

  “So how’s Darren doing?” he asked, palming the check.

  “You asked me that already,” Nerese responded with a little bit of an edge—despite the massive discount, three hundred dollars for anything not life and death was a painful amount of money. “How’s your guy?”

  “Taylor?” Sugar’s face came alive. “Come here.”

  Rising from the dinette, Nerese followed him into the living room, a six-piece chocolate-brown velour sectional-and-easy-chair ensemble camouflaged atop a chocolate-brown wall-to-wall rug so new she could still smell the nap.

  “Check it out.” Sugar gestured to a large trophy nesting between Blockbuster video boxes on a shelf over his television: first place in an under-eighteen kick-boxing tournament at the Jersey City Boys Club.

  “The kid’s a monster.” Sugar beamed.

  Nerese’s gaze strayed to a framed yearbook photo of Taylor Sugar; Nerese as always doing a double-take at rediscovering that Sugar, never married, and still more or less an urban redneck, had an adopted son who was either Asian or Hispanic, he’d never tell which.

  “That’s great, Bobby.”

  “Wait. Check it out . . .” And before she could stop him, Sugar turned sideways and pulled down his sweatpants to mid-thigh, revealing a brown-and-amber bruise which, despite a few days’ worth of fading, still resembled a fully articulated human foot.

  “Taylor was practicing in the kitchen, and me as usual with my head up my ass? I just come around the corner and walked right into it. Look . . . ,” touching himself right below the hip. “You can still make out all five toes.”

  A luxury development built on reclaimed marshland abutting the Hudson River, Little Venice was politically part of Dempsy proper but geographically a long, lonesome mile from the nearest residential or commercial district of the city.

  There was a security shack and a remote-controlled gate at the entrance to the development, the guard obliged to phone the tenants before allowing their visitors on the grounds. But given the vast and porous wasteland that enveloped this checkpoint it was too much to hope for that there should be a record of Ray receiving any guests the day of the assault, especially if they had come to do him dirt.

  As Nerese came through the gates, manned today by a retired cop she knew by face but not by name, the air became redolent of a heady mix of river tang and churned earth, and she found herself on a fragile ribbon of asphalt hemmed in by hillocks of backhoed dirt, each mound posted as the future site of a pool, tennis court, health club or recreation center—each one a rest stop for the gulls, overrun with cracked clam shells, construction debris and its own random greenery—weeds, moss, Arms to Heaven and whatever else took root via neglect.

  The houses themselves, which began a
half-mile beyond the checkpoint, were a picturesque scrunch of vaguely Tudor four-story structures that brought to Nerese’s mind the movie-set village terrorized by the Frankenstein monster, with a touch of Popeye waterfront thrown in to acknowledge their proximity to the river.

  Standing before Ray’s third-floor apartment with the key supplied by the management office already in the lock, she abruptly changed her mind about reading his place first, and opted instead for ringing the bell of his nearest neighbor, a Mrs. Kuben, who had discovered Ray sprawled and seizing just inside his own doorway and had made the call to 911.

  The woman who eventually made it to the door was in her seventies, tall but crooked at a fifteen-degree angle from osteoporosis, her piled hair frosted and filigreed a brilliant rusty orange.

  “Good morning.” Nerese reflexively smiled and stepped back, her police ID alongside her face. “I’m Detective Ammons from the Dempsy PD? Can I speak to you about what happened next door?”

  “You know, they tell you a place is safe,” Mrs. Kuben said, nudging a cookie-covered plate an inch closer to Nerese, who was seated across from her at the dining table. “So you move in.”

  The apartment had that un-lived-in feel that Nerese sometimes encountered in old people’s digs, the rooms spotless but reeking oppressively of camphor, her eyelids fluttering against the fumes.

  “The catching detective says you made the call to 911 at a quarter past five in the evening. Does that sound about right?”

  “If that’s what they say,” she shrugged.

  “Well let me ask you, how’d it come about that you found him?”

  “I went to take out the garbage, saw his door was half-open, and, believe me, I mind my own business, but I went to knock, because we live in the world we live in as I’m sure you know, and there he was”—she put a hand over her mouth and slowly shook her head—“lying in his blood, shaking like a leaf.”

  “Unh,” Nerese grunted in sympathy. “OK. Let me ask . . . Before then, at any time that afternoon, did you hear or see anything out of the ordinary, you know, through the walls, out in the hallway, an argument, raised voices, a person, people that you hadn’t ever seen before, or . . .”

  The medics had said that Ray could have been lying there for as long as two hours before this woman had come upon him.

  “Like I told you already,” Mrs. Kuben said, “I mind my own business.”

  “No, I understand, I understand, but sometimes you just can’t help it. A loud noise, an unfamiliar face, anything . . .”

  “No,” leaning back and folding her arms across her chest.

  “How about your husband?”

  “My husband?” Mrs. Kuben threw her a tight smile. “For forty-three years the man ran an empire. Now he has his name, address and phone number pinned to his shirt before he leaves the apartment.”

  “That’s rough,” Nerese said heavily, then leaned forward. “Tell me something I should know.”

  “Something you should know?” The older woman fought down a smile at the challenge as Nerese’s eye strayed to the photo gallery lining the dinette walls: children, grandchildren, immigrant ancestors—the past, present and future all taken to the same framer and laminated diploma-style onto identically irregular slabs of heavily varnished wood.

  “I’ll tell you something you should know. His parents? He bought them that place three years ago. Two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. Paid the monthly maintenance, the utilities, everything, OK? In October, Jeanette, the mother . . . It happened quick. So, he comes back from California or New York, I don’t know which, to bury, you know, and to be with his father.”

  Nerese heard a shuffling noise from the back bedroom, the dry whisk of slippers on a carpetless floor.

  “Except his father, Artie, he can’t wait to get the hell out of here. So the son winds up stuck with the apartment, and instead of putting it on the market he decides to move in, which”—giving the cookie plate a quarter-turn to re-entice Nerese—“I think was a mistake. This isn’t any place for a young person to set up house.”

  “Artie,” Nerese murmured, vaguely remembering Ray’s father from Hopewell, glasses and a pompadour; a bus driver, a cab driver . . . “Where’d he go?” She took a bite of something else, the filling prune or fig, and almost spat it out into her palm.

  “Where?” Mrs. Kuben crossed her arms over her chest. “Olive Branch, Mississippi. It’s a snowbird setup like West Palm or DelRay, but a little cheaper, a little younger. And frankly I don’t blame the man. His wife’s not cold in the ground two minutes and the widows around here, they started lining up for him like he was the Early Bird Special. Came at him with everything they had—bank statements, plane tickets, summer homes. He told me this one individual, he wouldn’t say who but I can guess, not one week after the funeral she comes and drags him over to her apartment, pulls him into the bedroom, throws open a walk-in closet and shows him all the clothes left over from the first mister—suits, jackets, silk shirts, cruise wear—tells him she can have everything altered, can you believe that?”

  “Yeah, I can, actually,” Nerese said mildly, leaving it at that.

  “They wouldn’t even give him the time to grieve.”

  “So what else should I know.”

  “What else?”

  The backroom shuffle started up again, then abruptly succumbed to the sounds of a TV commercial.

  “Did he ever bring anyone into the apartment?”

  “I don’t know if it’s my place to say.”

  “It’s definitely your place to say.” Nerese reached across to touch the woman’s wrist.

  “Well.” Mrs. Kuben gave the cookie plate another spin before getting back into it. “His daughter, of course. Ruby. A sweetheart, but why on earth a person would give their child the name of the woman who comes to clean your house is beyond me.”

  “Who else . . .”

  Mrs. Kuben hesitated, then: “He brought around people. Certain people.”

  “Certain people?”

  Mrs. Kuben looked pained now.

  “What kind of people?”

  “Different people at different times.”

  Nerese waited.

  “Look, the residents here, we’re mostly retired, we worked hard all our lives. My husband . . .”

  “No no no. I understand, I understand.” Nerese, assuming now she meant nonwhites, watched her twist in the wind.

  “At this stage of the game we should be entitled to our privacy, to our, our peace of mind,” the woman both angry and pleading.

  Nerese shook her head like a horse, said, “Absolutely,” then settled back into waiting—the two of them suddenly engaged in a silent struggle.

  “Why are you making me say something I don’t want to say,” Mrs. Kuben finally blurted, so pissed off and embarrassed now that she yanked the cookie plate away.

  “Hey, if I lived here?” Nerese leaned forward, hand on heart. “I’d feel the exact same way. Just tell me about the people.”

  “I don’t know.” Mrs. Kuben, defeated, looked away. “A couple of kids one time.”

  “Kids. White? Black?” Nerese helping her out of the tar pit.

  “The second.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “A young man. Not a kid, but young.”

  “Black? White?”

  “The first.”

  “You see him more than once?”

  “A few times.”

  “Catch his name?”

  “No.”

  “How’d he seem to you?”

  “To me?” She shrugged. “Civil. Neatly dressed, but for the street.”

  “How were they together?”

  “I don’t understand the question.”

  “How were they . . . How did Ray seem around this guy?”

  “You know. Happy to see him, I guess. Friendly.”

  “Friendly,” Nerese repeated. “Friendly like what, pals? More than pals?” Just tossing it in the water, see what floated to the surface.


  “He has a daughter,” Mrs. Kuben said coldly.

  “Anybody else?” Nerese holding off on pressing for more details on the young man right now, this lady not going anywhere with her name-tagged husband.

  “Well, actually, yeah. This one individual I saw him with the most. A woman . . .” Waiting for Nerese’s white-black question.

  “Black?”

  “That or something else. You know, very light-skinned. Attractive. She’d come by with her kids, two boys. Sometimes one boy. Sometimes alone. Her I’d see the most.”

  Nerese grunted, thinking, With her kids.

  “Did you catch her name?”

  “No.”

  “When she came by alone, was it during the day? Night?” Nerese thinking, Where there’s kids there’s a father, at least a biological one.

  “Day,” Mrs. Kuben said. “Maybe night too, but like I said, come nine o’clock I’m dead as a doornail.”

  Nerese reached across the table for a cookie sculpted into a seashell, dark pink, the bottom half dipped in chocolate.

  “You think they were seeing each other?”

  “Socially?” Mrs. Kuben asked.

  “Socially,” wishing she could just ask, Was he fucking her.

  “Could be,” Mrs. Kuben shrugged.

  “When they were together, how did they strike you, friendly, businesslike, affectionate . . .”

  Mrs. Kuben gave this some thought, then said, “Quiet.”

  “Quiet?” Nerese was thrown.

  “You know, well-behaved.”

  “Well-behaved . . .”

  Mrs. Kuben finally looked her in the eye. “Like they were hiding something.”

  Skirting the brownish blood-spatter in the vestibule, the fingerprint powder–stippled shards of vase, the discarded rubber gloves, torn gauze wrappers and other detritus left by the EMS crew that worked on Ray before moving him, Nerese walked across the black-and-white tile floor of the sun-blasted living room and stepped out onto the cement-and-Astroturf terrace to gawk at the Statue of Liberty, gently hovering over its star-shaped base like a rocketship about to touch down.