Samaritan

by Richard Price

  “How do I know? I know because I know.” Ray indestructible, the night a joy. It was a good thing he had done earlier for Carla and her family; a great good thing; Ray fleetingly beatific, experiencing himself somehow as both the benefactor and the recipient.

  Carla would come around; Ray thinking of her trapped, stricken expression, the sudden violence of swatting her grandson; then thinking of Danielle, her Chinese hunter tattoo, her soft pillowy “Oh.”

  “Dad, what was Dub’s brother’s name?”

  “Terrance. But everybody called him Prince.”

  “Did everybody have a nickname?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “What was yours?”

  “Mine? ‘Ray.’”

  “Tell me the others.”

  “There was like a thousand kids, Ruby,” Ray said happily, as if they were still here, packing the playground. “How many do you want?”

  Ruby threw him a look, guarded and greedy.

  “All,” she said.

  Chapter 10

  Ruby—February 14

  Ray’s ex-wife and their daughter lived in a loft on Bond and Broadway, three floors over a skateboard megastore, in a souklike neighborhood lined with vaguely hippyish street vendors, dump-and-fly three-card monte games and too many sneaker stores; the foot traffic, at least on this mild Saturday, a nonstop salmon run of mostly high school–aged kids from the outer boroughs, Long Island, Westchester and New Jersey.

  Nerese loved downtown New York but invariably lost her head in the face of its abundance. By the time she was buzzed into the Bond Street building, she was carrying two shopping bags, one filled with bootleg videos and homemade earrings for herself, the other containing two probably counterfeit Triple 5 Soul sweatshirts for her son.

  Ray’s ex, an indifferently dressed, thin, pale, clear-eyed woman whose long hair was in mid-transit from red to gray, met her at the door.

  “Hi, I’m Claire,” offering her hand.

  “Hey there, Claire. I’m Nerese.” She had to put down her stuff in order to shake, and the other woman’s nonreactive glance at the goodies peeking out of the bags made her feel as if she had come through the Holland Tunnel on the back of a mule.

  Claire led her through a narrow dark hallway that abruptly opened up into a vast window-lined space; opened up into an explosion of sunlight so exalted and airy that Nerese just dropped her shopping bags again like overweight luggage and involuntarily drifted off into a dream of new beginnings.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” Claire moved to the far end of the room, the kitchen end.

  “Water’s good.”

  If she had a place like this, a space like this, Florida wouldn’t even be a thought. But then, almost gratefully, she noticed the water-buckled ceiling above the kitchen area, the damp flaking chevrons of plaster running down the walls between a few of the windows; heard the street life three floors below coming through way too loud and clear. Not that she didn’t have six kinds of water damage in her own home; and not that it wasn’t Bonehead Central 24/7 right outside her own living room window. However . . .

  Drawn by the low drone of a television, Nerese spied, through a door barely ajar, Ray’s daughter sitting on a bed, surrounded by schoolwork.

  But as if intuitively reacting to danger, Claire, carrying the requested glass of water, swiftly came between Nerese and her daughter’s bedroom and pointedly closed the door.

  Then, still carrying Nerese’s glass, she led her to a long pinewood table in the main room.

  Protective, controlling, probably a little pissed off and/or frightened: Nerese knew the type, knew that if she wanted to get anywhere near the kid, she was not to ruffle or challenge this woman in any way.

  “You know, Claire, I have to say”—Nerese stroked the rough planks of pine—“this is like my dream home.”

  “Yeah, well, beware what you wish for.”

  “No, I hear you, I hear you.”

  The table was centered by a tall cylindrical glass vase, which held a half-dozen austere sprigs of bittersweet. Nerese had never really thought about that before, branches instead of flowers, and it struck her, like everything else in this loft, as both exciting and right.

  “Can I ask what you do?”

  “I write children’s books,” Claire said.

  “Any I might have heard of?”

  “I don’t know. Do you read children’s books?” Claire asked, a little too innocuously, her face bright-eyed and tight.

  “Used to,” Nerese responded in kind. “My son’s eighteen now.”

  “They grow fast, don’t they.”

  “Way too fast,” Nerese said, thinking, Not fast enough.

  “Anyways, they’re on the wall.” Claire pointed to a framed poster, Nerese rising, then reading out loud:

  “It Makes Me Laugh When . . . by Claire Draw, author of It Makes Me Mad When . . . , It Makes Me Sad When . . . , It Makes Me Feel Cozy When . . . , wow,” Nerese said, retaking her seat. “I used to write a little poetry in college; now mainly I just write checks.”

  Claire sat there, waiting.

  “OK, here’s the deal. I don’t want to be invasive, but the fact is whoever did this to Ruby’s dad, he’s still out there.” Nerese paused, trying to pick up how Claire felt about her ex, but the woman was still waiting for the meat of it.

  “So let me just ask you straight up, is there anybody or anything you can think of . . .”

  “No, not really,” answering a little too quickly for Nerese’s taste, so she just let Claire’s words hang for a while, see how she would fill the void.

  Half a minute passed in silence, Nerese trying to look pleasant while maintaining eye contact.

  “You’re kidding me,” Claire finally said.

  “About . . .”

  “Look, you can spend a few days running down whatever you need to run down about me or you can take me at my word, it’ll come down to the same thing. I had nothing to do with it.”

  Her smile, in fact, was a dazzler, filling her face with light and adding ten pounds to her frame.

  “Whoa, hey, no, I didn’t mean to imply . . .” Nerese put out a placating hand, thinking, A woman did it? That could explain his noncooperation, too.

  “Jesus.” Claire shook her head as if clearing cobwebs, this never-was accusation somehow serving to break the ice.

  “So you guys are OK with each other?” Nerese asked.

  “Me and Ray?” Claire shrugged. “We’re co-parents.”

  “Separated?”

  “Divorced.”

  “You know who’s in his life these days?”

  “Other than Ruby? I have no idea.”

  “Ruby and her dad, they have a good relationship?”

  “I guess.”

  “What.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  Once again, Nerese resorted to silence, got to Four Mississippi . . .

  “Maybe it’s just me, but Ray, he overparents. Overthinks, overreacts, overagonizes. You know the type I’m talking about?”

  “To be honest?” Nerese said. “I personally have never met the male ‘over’ type. The ones I know range from ‘under’ to nonexistent.”

  The woman didn’t laugh, but her face remained open.

  “Claire, why won’t he talk to me about what happened?”

  “No idea.”

  “Look, this is an unpleasant question, but sometimes when the victim won’t cooperate . . .”

  “He’s not a drug dealer, drug addict or a gambler. And he’s not into sexual, you know, anything, what’s it, problematical.”

  “OK—well, thank God for all that.” Nerese smiled.

  “I don’t know.” Claire shrugged. “In terms of things to be thankful for? Those are all kind of grounders.”

  “Claire, did you know that Ray and I kind of semi grew up together?”

  “You mean over in that housing project in Dempsy?”

  “Yeah,” Nerese said, thinking, That housing project . . .r />
  “Why ‘semi,’ because of the white-black thing?”

  “White-black?” Nerese thought about it. “Yeah, I guess, among other things. Claire, listen.” She hunkered in, touched the other woman’s knee, went eye to eye again. “Because she’s got her own relationship with her dad, independent of you, I’m gonna need to speak to Ruby. Now, I’ll be as brief as possible, and as sensitive as possible, but if you could see your way to going along with this, it would be much better if I could talk to her alone.”

  “Not on your life,” Claire said almost cheerfully.

  Nerese stood in Ruby’s small bedroom, the girl just thirteen but already having three lanky inches on her, showing her around while Claire stood in the open doorway, arms folded across her chest like a cop.

  The room contained a narrow bed, a work station and a wall-mounted TV. There were six bookshelves, the bottom three covered with more than a hundred miniature plaster or wood or pewter gods, goddesses and the like, the top three holding an equal number of souvenir shot glasses.

  The closet doors were covered with taped-up magazine photos of cast members from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, interspersed with a few dewy-eyed head shots of some androgynous blond actors that Nerese couldn’t identify and an equal number of shirtless black hip-hop stars, all cobblestone abdomens and jailhouse eyes.

  “Would you look at this,” she marveled, zeroing in on the god shelves. “Now, I know that’s Buddha, that’s a Viking, this one here’s a mermaid, but who are all these other guys?”

  “Dhurga, Lakshmi, Rama, Krishna, Hanuman, Ganesh, that’s just a dragon, and that’s the Weeping Monk.”

  “The Weeping Monk . . . Man, you like to cover your bets, huh?”

  “What?” Ruby didn’t get it. She was trying very hard not to stare at Nerese’s scarred eyebrow.

  “And what’s this trophy for?”

  “Basketball.” Ruby shrugged. She had an abundance of foamy light brown hair that fell in lazy ringlets down past her shoulders. “Everyone in the league got one. It doesn’t mean we won.”

  “Well how’d your team do?”

  “Second place.”

  “Out of . . .”

  “Eight.”

  Nerese snorted. “Good enough for me.” Then: “Ruby. You ever hear of Ruby Dee?”

  “Ruby Dee, Ruby Tuesday, Ruby Baby,” listing off tiredly.

  “Who’s Ruby Baby?”

  “It was a song my dad liked when he was a teenager.”

  “Your dad, huh?”

  Ruby’s eyes strayed helplessly to Nerese’s scar again.

  “You looking at this?” Nerese put a smile in her voice.

  “No no no.” Ruby looked mortified. “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s OK, honey,” Nerese loving this sweet kid, but then floored by what she said next.

  “Dub did that, right?”

  “Come here.” She put her arms out and Ruby obediently stepped inside her embrace, her chin touching the stocky detective’s forehead, wisps of her bounteous hair lying like a veil over Nerese’s face.

  “So you know me and your dad go back a long way, right?”

  She was holding Ruby at arm’s length now, and saw the girl’s face crumple. “What’s the matter, sweetheart?”

  “I don’t know anything,” Ruby’s voice a teary whisper.

  “Anything about . . .” Nerese starting the head games but then heard the mother rustling in the doorway behind her.

  “Well honey, can I just ask you a few questions? Because maybe you know more than you think.”

  “OK,” Ruby whispered brokenly, palming her blotched eyes.

  Normally Nerese didn’t like to go at kids this directly, but she sensed the mother was already on her toes for anything she perceived as trickery.

  “You see your dad how often?”

  “I stay with him one night a week.”

  “Yeah? What do you guys do together?”

  “Watch TV, homework, have a catch . . .”

  “Yeah? You ever do stuff with other people?”

  Ruby hesitated, flicking a worried glance in the direction of her mother. Nerese read New Girlfriend in that look and wished that Mom over there would take a small hike.

  “It’s OK, Ruby,” Claire said evenly.

  “Danielle?” Ruby said tentatively.

  “Danielle.” Nerese turned to the mother, Claire shrugging: news to her. “Danielle.” Nerese nodded. “Do you know her last name?”

  Ruby shook her head no.

  “You met her?”

  Ruby nodded yes.

  “On a scale of one to ten . . . You like her?”

  “Eight.” Her eyes then going to her mother. “Four.”

  “Six.” Nerese shrugged. “Tell me about her.”

  “She’s got a tattoo.”

  “A tattoo,” Claire muttered.

  “Yeah? What kind of tattoo?”

  “A Chinese symbol, right here.” Ruby touched the left side of her throat. “She says it means the Hunter.”

  “The Hunter, huh? OK, Ruby. What I’m gonna ask you right now is very, very important . . . Do you have a tattoo?”

  Ruby tried to smile.

  “You want to know who else had a tattoo?” Nerese asked. “My grandmother. On my father’s side. She was a nightclub dancer over in New York,” Nerese forgetting that she was in New York at the moment. “Up in Harlem. She was a part of an act called the Blackbird Follies and she had a bird tattooed up inside her leg. Can you believe that?”

  “Huh . . .”

  “She had long long legs, my grandma. As you can probably tell, I take after the other side of the family . . . So this Danielle, she and your dad get along?”

  “I guess so. He gave her mom money for a funeral.”

  “Danielle’s mom? He gave money to Danielle’s mom for a funeral?”

  Hence the McCloskey Brothers; Nerese finally able to scratch that itch.

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake,” Claire said wearily.

  “How do you know this, honey?” Nerese asked, wishing now that the mom would fucking vanish.

  “I was there. My dad took me.”

  “Took you to . . .”

  “To her apartment.”

  “Danielle’s mom’s apartment?”

  “Uh-huh. Yeah.”

  “Jesus.” Claire again. Ruby looked worried, burdened.

  “Do you remember Danielle’s mom’s name?”

  “I’m sorry . . .”

  “No problem. Do you know where Danielle’s mom’s apartment was? What kind of building?”

  “Yeah, it was where my dad grew up.”

  “In Hopewell? The Hopewell Houses?”

  “I don’t know the name.”

  “But it was a housing project?”

  “Yeah. Right by the trains.”

  “By the trains. Was the building itself right by the trains?” Nerese envisioned four possible addresses.

  “It was my dad’s old building. The trains went right by the windows. He told me Dub’s dad used to toot the whistle when his train went by.”

  “My God, I haven’t thought about that for going on thirty years,” Nerese said softly, thinking, 1949 Rocker Drive. Danielle. Chinese tattoo. “Yeah, Dub’s dad was something else.”

  “He took you to the hospital with my dad, right?” Eyeing her scar again. “My dad was holding his T-shirt to your face to stop the bleeding,” Ruby spoke in a slightly reverential tone as if reciting a cherished tale.

  “Yes, he did.” Nerese was touched that the girl knew of this, that Ray had told her of this. “He did, indeed. Why’d your dad give Danielle’s mom money for a funeral?”

  “Because she was poor.”

  “Do you know who was being buried?”

  “Her son.”

  “Danielle’s son?”

  “No, Carla’s . . . Carla! Danielle’s mom is Carla!”

  “See? Didn’t I say you knew more than you thought?” Nerese bea
med, thinking, Carla. Carla Powell? She could still be there, generations tending to stack up in the projects these days. And Carla, Nerese vaguely recalled, had had a child when she was a teenager, possibly this Danielle. And Carla Powell was black, Nerese thought, so Danielle could definitely be the lady friend that Ray’s neighbor gabbed about.

  “Ruby? Can you tell me what race Danielle is?”

  “Race?”

  “Black, white, Latino, you know, Hispanic . . .”

  “I didn’t . . . I’m not sure. She’s kind of tan.”

  Black or Latino, there being no more whites of a sexable age in Hopewell, just a few stranded seniors. And “Carla,” “Danielle”—the names could be of either group.

  “Did you meet anybody else in Danielle’s family?”

  Ruby shrugged, turned sullen.

  “Uh-oh,” Nerese mugged, hoping against hope. “Who.”

  “Nobody,” Ruby looked away.

  “Nobody?”

  “Just some kids, little kids.”

  “Little kids. That’s it? No other grown-ups?”

  “No.”

  “No?” Nerese was almost positive that Ruby was holding something, someone, back. “Honey . . .” taking hold of her hands. “I have to get real serious with you here,” hating to do this to her, but knowing there was nothing like fear to focus a child’s mind. “Whoever did this to your dad, I’m gonna get ’em. And when I do? I’m gonna nail their behind to a tree and sell postcards. But the thing is? They’re still out there and I don’t want them coming back to hurt your dad again.” Nerese could sense the mother steaming up behind her; saw tears pop in the corners of Ruby’s eyes like glass beads. “So I just need to ask you straight out . . . was anybody mad at your father?”

  “Yeah,” she answered after a long moment, then added, “Me.”

  “You?”

  Ruby shrugged, took back her hand.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” her voice that teary climbing whisper again.

  “Enough,” Claire said, finally stepping inside the room. “Interview’s over.”

  Nerese took Ruby by the elbows, sought out her eyes, but the kid wouldn’t look at her. “You’re a sweetheart, you know that?”

  “Thank you,” she whispered, nodding quickly, pressing the heels of her palms to her eyes.

  Nerese stood in the third-floor hallway, her two embarrassing shopping bags at her feet.