Samaritan

by Richard Price

  “So I take it this Danielle is news to you.”

  Claire shrugged.

  “It’s understandable. You know, loyalty to her mom and all.”

  “It’s fine.”

  Claire seemed impatient for the elevator to come; jamming her hands in her jeans pockets and restlessly dancing in place as if they were standing inside a meat locker.

  Actually, Nerese hadn’t quite rung for it yet, just palmed the button to forestall the bum’s rush.

  “You had kind of a reaction when Ruby said he gave money to the mother.”

  “Ray. He always says ‘I just want to make a dent.’ But what he really wants to do is make a splash. There’s a big difference. Paying for a funeral . . .”

  “I would say that was pretty decent of him,” Nerese said, offended by the woman’s above-it-all tone.

  The elevator began its clanking ascent from the lobby on its own.

  “Ray likes to save people, you know, sweep them off their feet with his generosity. It’s a cheap high if you’ve got the money, but basically it’s all about him.”

  “Yeah well, that character flaw most likely eluded the family he helped.”

  Claire folded her arms across her chest, gave Nerese that minutely upticked smile from her photo.

  “You sure you don’t have any problem around him knocking boots with this Danielle?” Nerese just saying it to get under her skin.

  The elevator groaned open, a tall slope-shouldered fiftyish man rearing back in surprise from Nerese, then smiling at Claire, a set of house keys in his hand.

  “I’m sorry.” Claire blinked at Nerese. “What was the question?”

  Chapter 11

  Hospital—February 15

  Nerese walked into the monitored-care ward with a headful of calculated banter, but one look at her audience and the script just blew off the page. Ray was sitting upright as if lashed to the headboard, his smudge-pot eyes haunted and blank, the encircling purple mask breaking down now into the marbled ambers and browns of overripe tropical fruit. But the skin show was both typical and not as bad as it looked; what caught her up short was the impression she had that his immobility was both purposeful and absolute, as if there were a coral snake asleep in his hair, as if one sudden or imprudent move would reduce his pain-packed skull to shards.

  “The fuck, Ray.” Nerese stood gawking at him from the foot of the bed.

  Taking a moment to find her, he slowly raised his left hand in greeting like a feeble pope.

  “It’s global,” he murmured.

  “Global. What’s global?”

  He continued to raise that same hand until it was above his head then traced an encircling halo.

  “Tell him it’s global.”

  Nerese walked out to the nurses’ station. “Can you tell me what’s going on with him?” chucking a thumb back toward Ray’s bed.

  “The neurologist is on his way.”

  “But what’s his status, what’s the deal today?”

  “The neurologist is on his way.”

  Reentering Ray’s glass-lined stall, Nerese went right into his multicolored face. “Ray, what’s going on.”

  His eyes slid past her hunkering presence and tracked the progress of something moving along the baseboards: dustballs, elves, mice or maybe, just maybe, she thought once again, he was putting her on, ducking her.

  “Ray,” Nerese near shouted, “Ray, I saw Ruby. I talked to Ruby.”

  “No,” he murmured. “Why.”

  “She’s scared for you. She’s terrified of this bastard coming back to finish what he started.”

  Ray almost imperceptibly shook his head from side to side. “He won’t. Tell her.”

  “How can I tell her that?” Nerese came kissing close, then pulled back, Ray’s breath suffused with his deterioration. “I can’t guarantee that.”

  “When’s your son coming to see me,” he slurred dreamily.

  “What?”

  “I’ll get him in college.” Then: “Oh . . .” raising a time-lapsed hand to the side of his head, saliva sizzling through clenched teeth.

  Nerese was struck by the oddly detached thought that if Ray were to die before she could make an arrest, the case would automatically be taken from her, kicked across town to County Homicide; the investigators over there, she knew from past experience, probably not even interested in reading her notes, let alone keeping her as part of the team.

  “You know, Ray, I don’t even need to come back here anymore to do what I have to do on this,” Nerese was back to shouting. “But I just keep hoping you’re either going to grow a pair of balls or come to your senses and just tell me who the fuck did this to you.”

  “Senseless,” he muttered, then looked away.

  “Excuse me?” Nerese waited, then plowed on. “For example, I can just go to see Carla Powell over in Hopewell and from there over to see her daughter Danielle. I mean, I guess I could go to see Danielle first since she’s the one you’re banging, or were banging, stop me if I’m wrong.”

  Ray closed his eyes.

  “But I need to work from the outer circles in towards the center. That’s the way I’ve been taught to do it, and that’s the way I like to do it because with every face-off I just get stronger and stronger so that by the time I get behind a closed door with my bull’s-eye? I just know too much, and it’s over.”

  Ray appeared to lose himself in the pain, delicately bringing his fingertips to his temples, eyes moving laterally under lightly fluttering lids as if he were about to receive a message from the beyond.

  “See, right now I’m liking the idea of some pissed-off boyfriend or husband didn’t appreciate your taking his honey over to Little Venice like that. Or if this was some kind of setup, you know, some kind of half-assed extortion, somebody seeing how easy that thirty-two hundred came, squeezing you a few days later for another seventy-three in cash, we’re still talking the immediate family and now you’re too embarrassed to come forward on it because you let your dick get you into this mess.”

  Nerese waited, Ray still taking dictation from the dead.

  “Now, I don’t really know this Powell family per se, just vaguely from back when we were kids, but I do know that this Reggie? The son you buried? He was an overdose, so that doesn’t bode well in terms of casting aspersions on the lot, but in any event, I hope one way or the other I’m looking for someone connected to that house because otherwise the list of potential doers is like the phone book.”

  Ray stared off, unresponsive.

  “Did you really give Carla Powell thirty-two hundred dollars to bury her son?”

  He grunted, gave up a small smile.

  “Shit, you do that for a stranger, where’d you bury your mother, the Pyramids?”

  “Money,” Ray grunted through his teeth.

  “What about it.”

  “Weighs you down.”

  “How we doing?” A doctor Nerese had never seen before breezed into the stall and, like the other one, went directly for Ray’s eyes.

  “The President is George W. Bush,” Ray said, the slurring in his speech giving Nerese knots.

  “Good. How about the first President?”

  “Of the United States?”

  “Of wherever you want.” The doctor stepped back to size up the package.

  “Washington,” Ray said. “Booker T. Washington. Booker T. and the MGs.”

  “‘Green Onions.’” The doctor smiled, flipping up the bottom of the blanket and running a Babinski, Ray’s toes now spastically arching and splaying.

  “What’s going on?” Nerese asked.

  “Little of this, little of that. He’s scheduled for a CT later today.” Then, to Ray, “How are the headaches?”

  “Bad.”

  “Global or banded?”

  “Global,” Nerese and Ray said together.

  “Are you the catching detective here?”

  “Yes I am.”

  “Can you hold your hands straight up over your head?”


  Nerese was momentarily thrown by the request until she saw Ray lethargically comply, both hands wavering at high noon.

  “Close your eyes please?” the doctor stepping back watching Ray’s arms shift slightly, as if buffeted by wind.

  “Well, I’ll tell you.” He addressed Nerese in a lowered voice without taking his eyes off his patient. Ray’s right arm, the extremity directly affected by his left-side injury, began to drift, floating down to twenty past the hour, Ray seemingly oblivious to the movement. “If this was my case and I was still needing information from the vic?” The neurologist finally turned to face her. “I’d shake a leg.”

  Back down in the hospital lobby, Nerese ran into Ruby and her mother as they headed for the elevators.

  “Hey!” She gave the kid a real smile, took hold of her long-fingered hand. “You here to see your dad?”

  Ruby nodded, her face trembling like a raindrop on a leaf.

  “You know, I have to tell you,” Nerese threw a wince into her voice as she spoke to the mother through the daughter. “I just came from trying to see him myself? The thing is, he’s kind of sleeping right now, which the doctors told me is very important. And, it’s not my place, I realize, but maybe today’s not such a good time to visit,” flicking a glance Claire’s way, Spare your daughter a freak-out; Ray’s ex breathing deep but otherwise keeping it together.

  “Well, that’s probably good advice, then,” Claire said in a tone of strained breeziness.

  Ruby took back her hand, made a quick swipe at her eyes.

  “You know your dad’s gonna be OK, right?” Nerese, despite being shorter than Ruby, needed to duck her head in order to get into the girl’s eyes. “You know that, right?”

  Ruby nodded, but remained mute, as if to speak was to lose it.

  “We’ll come back, see him tomorrow,” Claire said lightly. “Hey, Ruby? Maybe you want to leave that with Nerese, she can put it on your dad’s night table for when he wakes up, what do you think?”

  Without making eye contact, Ruby handed over the nearly spherical Weeping Monk from her gods and goddesses collection.

  “I’ll go right back up there now,” Nerese said, rotating the softball-sized sculpted wood and discovering that the kid had minutely inked ST. SIMON’S HAWKS onto the monk’s bowed back, converting his prayer robe into a varsity jacket.

  “We’ll come by tomorrow,” Claire repeated. Then, moving closer to Nerese, her voice became hoarse and shaky. “He’s a good guy, you know? Take care of him, OK?”

  Nerese watched mother and daughter navigate the lobby traffic until they dissolved into sunlight; then she headed back up to six.

  Ray’s eyes were open as Nerese reentered his stall, but they appeared glazed and sightless.

  Carefully setting the monk on the corner of his night table she turned to leave.

  “You know what I just remembered?” addressing her in a low slurry monotone as if she had never left the room.

  “What.” Nerese stood by the edge of the bed.

  “That day you were caught spray-painting by the housing cops and all the kids from Big Playground started following you and ranking you out?” He paused for breath. “Your brother Antoine was with them. He walked in the pack like the two of you weren’t even related. He wasn’t shouting out any shit like the rest of them, but he wasn’t telling anybody to shut up either . . . And then about halfway to the management office he lost interest and went back to the basketball courts.”

  “What else do you remember,” Nerese said, easing herself down on the side of the bed, Ray staring off.

  “I remember you were wearing mustard-colored shorts, kind of linty . . . And sky-blue plastic sandals.”

  “Linty,” Nerese said.

  “How would I remember that . . . Is that from this?” He languidly gestured upward.

  “So I guess you were a part of that crowd too,” she said without heat.

  “Yeah, I was. But I didn’t call you out, tease you or anything. You were just in such deep shit and I wanted to see what would happen to you,” taking another rest, then: “It was more like I was riveted by it.”

  “What else do you remember?”

  “I remember,” his chapped lips working, “I remember one of the two cops? He kept turning around and trying to shoo us away, saying how we should all be ashamed of ourselves for making fun of you like that, but when he turned on us, all we did was scatter a little, then when he turned forward again we just regrouped and kept following. He couldn’t really do anything about it.”

  “Which cop was it?”

  “What?”

  “Which cop was the one who tried to shoo everybody away. The white cop or the black cop?” Nerese telepathically egging him on: The white one, the white one, the white one . . .

  “The white cop,” he said. “The white one.”

  “No kidding,” Nerese growing hot-eyed, thinking, Of course; grateful for this confirmation, this gift.

  “Do you remember his name?” She was holding her breath now, Ray taking forever on it, then, “No.”

  “No problem . . .” Nerese unthinkingly stroked his hair, regarded him with a welling tenderness. “Ray, please let me get some payback for you on this.”

  But he responded by instantly shutting himself down again; she could feel it through her fingertips.

  “My gut says it was a boyfriend or a husband pissed off about you bringing his squeeze back to Little Venice for some sex, wasn’t it . . .”

  A waste of breath, but no matter. She felt doubly indebted to him now, sticking to him like glue.

  Chapter 12

  Danielle—January 15

  Danielle entered the apartment in Little Venice trailing two boys: Nelson, twelve, and Dante, an eight-year-old who just took off, flying around the place like his ass was on fire.

  Wearing dry-cleaned jeans and a white T-shirt under a red bolero jacket, she gingerly wandered about, lightly touching things, her perfume, that vanilla musk, laying down a heavy sweetish track wherever she went.

  Unlike Dante, the older boy, Nelson, pretty much hung at her side from the door on in.

  He had a big head, this Nelson kid, accentuated by smudgy rings around cautious intelligent eyes and a monkish high-walled bowl-cut that left him with a stranded bird’s nest of wavy hair at the crown.

  “Oh Ray, this place,” Danielle said, her voice husky with want.

  When he first picked them up at the Hopewell Houses he was eager to show off where he lived, but now, embarrassed by that eagerness, the cheap-shot easiness of impressing them, he was eager for them to go.

  Besides, even as he tried to reenvision his digs through Danielle’s eyes, he couldn’t shake how much he hated it here, his parents’ apartment always feeling dead to him—militantly color-coordinated as it was, in plum and gray; more like a first-class airline lounge than any kind of home.

  “Nelson,” Danielle said, “could you imagine . . .” She let her fantasy hang.

  The boy shrugged and did an about-face, clearly embarrassed by her saying his name out loud like that.

  Nelson had three cut-glass studs in his left ear, wore an oversized Jets jersey and clown-sized baggy jeans, but Ray could tell the kid’s heart wasn’t in it.

  He wasn’t drawn to Dante, the eight-year-old too hyper, too much like an unknotted balloon, but Nelson had that hungry-hearted watchful aura that Ray always responded to, that made him keen to connect, to let the kid know he wasn’t out there on his own.

  And the boy also made him ache for Ruby. Often when he was around children not his own he experienced sharp pangs of sentiment cut with a panic about “losing her,” whatever that might mean, which tended to make him much more focused on the kids in the room than on whatever adults were around.

  “Ray.” Danielle gave him that unnerving straight-on stare. “I would die for this place.”

  Her hair was drawn up into a topknot so taut that it lifted the outside corners of her eyes.

  On th
e other hand, maybe all his misty-eyed kid focus this evening was nothing but self-generated smoke to cover the fact that he hadn’t been alone with a woman, not just sexually but socially, for a little more than a year.

  Danielle slid back the glass door and stepped out onto the cement terrace which faced the Statue of Liberty and the moon-bleached water.

  “Check it out,” both Danielle and Ray said simultaneously to Nelson, Danielle indicating the view, Ray pointing to the full-length funhouse mirror that he had brought back with him from Los Angeles.

  “Or whatever,” he quickly demurred, but Nelson gestured for his mother to hang on as he made his way in front of the silver-chipped undulating surface, instantly turning himself into a dwarf with a five-foot forehead. Fighting off a grin, the kid looked like his mouth was stuffed with grapes.

  “You remind me of my daughter,” Ray said easily.

  Nelson looked stricken.

  “You know, I mean in a masculine universal way,” Ray scrambled. “I can tell, you got that watchful thing going on, kind of guy likes to lay back in the cut, check out all your options before you finally make your play.” Shit-talking in a way that would make Ruby cringe. Then more soberly, “It’s a compliment, Nelson.”

  “It’s a compliment, Nelson.” Dante mimicked him in a deep dull voice, the kid just materializing, a wooden veal mallet from the kitchen in his left hand.

  “Whoa!” Dante jerked back from his image in the funhouse mirror, then promptly took out his dick, the glass giving him back a foot-long loop of Turkish taffy.

  Nelson ran out of the living room with a hand over his mouth. Hearing him howl a moment later from the far end of the apartment, Ray became faintly repulsed by the kid’s need to flee.

  Sidling up to Danielle on the terrace, Ray rested his forearms atop the guard rail.

  “Is that the Trade Center?” she asked, pointing to the hemispheric glow of floodlights across the river.

  “Yeah. Not much to see,” he said quietly.

  They stood in silence for a moment, watching the silhouette of a titanic crane move jerkily behind the waterfront skyline like a prehistoric forager.