Samaritan

by Richard Price

  “Because I don’t know anything,” she moved her arm out from under Nerese’s touch.

  “Hey, I’m not here looking to hurt you or your family, but I am going to find out who did this.”

  “I hope you do,” another shrug.

  “Does Danielle usually see other men when Freddy’s in jail?”

  Carla exposed her lower teeth, dark and twisted at the bottom of her mouth. “Now, I just told you I don’t know who did this to the man. But if you feel the need to, you can come at me fifty different ways to hear me say it fifty different times, or you can hear me say it just this once, it’ll come out to the same thing. I, don’t, know.”

  “No, I hear you, I hear you,” Nerese said amiably. She took great pride in the thickness of her skin, the job oftentimes boiling down to sitting there calmly until the interviewees exhausted themselves blind throwing every kind of insult and self-righteous hugger-mugger at you imaginable. “What’s Freddy like with your daughter?”

  “He’s her husband,” Carla said, as if Nerese were too thick to live.

  “Is he the emotional type? Physical?”

  Not liking this question either, Carla sank down into herself like a big-breasted bird on a wire.

  “Well, I’ll tell you.” Nerese took another sip of water. “What I don’t understand is, like you yourself said, Danielle, she’s holding down a job, taking classes over at DCC, raising a son, and this Freddy, he’s been locked up, I believe this last was his fourth trip to County? So my question is, why is she still with him?”

  “Are you married?” Carla surprised Nerese by looking right at her on this.

  “Not anymore,” she said warily.

  “Me neither.” Carla flicked her cigarette out the window. “How many of your girlfriends still live under the same roof with the father of their children.”

  It was more of a challenge than a question and Nerese didn’t think it was necessary to respond.

  “Yeah, I thought so,” Carla said. “Same with my friends. How old are you.”

  “Forty-one.”

  “Forty-one.” Carla lit another cigarette. “You like being alone?”

  “I have family,” Nerese grudgingly answered.

  Carla waved that away with a sweep of her hand. “Do you like being alone?”

  “Tell me Freddy didn’t do this,” Nerese said with more heat than she’d have liked.

  “If he did, you can throw his ass right back in jail, I wouldn’t shed a single tear. But as I told you before, I just don’t know, so instead of wasting my time with this, why the hell don’t you just ask him?”

  Chapter 17

  Hospital—February 19

  After exiting the hospital elevator on the sixth floor, Nerese halted directly outside the monitored-care ward, overcome by a premonition that she was about to discover that her time had run out, that in her absence Ray had departed for the far shore. But when she finally crossed the threshold and approached his stall, to her great relief she saw that he was still in town, marginally at least, the poor bastard lying there today head-wrapped, immobile, but open-eyed, tracking her expressionlessly from the prison of his own body.

  “How you feeling, gorgeous?” Nerese muscling the bounce into her voice but worried, sensing that she’d need to be right on top of him today to have any kind of meaningful communication.

  Ray swallowed, a slow and painful exercise, his face contorting with the effort.

  Nerese’s gaze strayed to the night table where she saw Freddy Martinez still wedged under the Weeping Monk, untouched since she had placed him there the day before.

  She slipped the photo free and held it before Ray’s face. “Hey, look who’s here,” making it dance.

  He stared at it impassively, Nerese wondering if Martinez still had the goatee from two years ago, but then Ray must have made the connection, goatee or no, because he closed his eyes again and attempted to turn his head to the side.

  “What . . . ”

  Ray opened his eyes, stared at the night table.

  Nerese blocked his view with Freddy again. “This is him, right?”

  Ray closed his eyes.

  “Oh yeah,” Nerese crowed falsely.

  Eyes still shut, Ray shook his head infinitesimally, either in denial or in woe.

  “No, huh?” Nerese almost in his ear. “Your face tells me different.”

  Breathing deep, Ray stared at the Weeping Monk.

  “Look at it again.” Nerese propped it upright against the wooden carving. “All I need for you to do is nod, and it’s a done deal.”

  “No.” A hoarse shadow of a whisper.

  “‘No.’” Nerese flushed. “No what . . . No, I won’t help myself? No, I’m too scared? No, the guy fucked me up so bad I can’t remember? No what.”

  Ray swallowed another razor, his face contorting with the effort.

  “The man put a hole in your head, Ray. Just nod, for God’s sake.”

  “No.” Another lip reader’s special.

  Nerese eased herself down onto the edge of the bed, fighting off a depression-induced wave of fatigue.

  “I don’t know, Ray, this whole thing, I understand, I appreciate that you wanted to do a good deed or whatever, but that entailed going in there and laying a fat-ass check on a woman living in a place eighty percent of which is on some kind of public assistance, in a place that’s got no walls, your business is out on the street before you are, that isn’t bad enough, the money-flush white boy starts boning the woman’s daughter, that’s out on the street, gets to her husband in County faster than a speeding bullet, and so for me, sitting here right now the amazing thing isn’t that you got beat for your troubles but that you only got beat once. Now, I like this guy for what put you here, and unless you give me another name, I’m going straight to his parole officer and getting him violated.”

  “You can’t,” Ray whispered.

  “I can’t?” Nerese reared back in mock surprise.

  “Not without a complaint.” Ray stared off, red-faced with the effort.

  “Then complain,” leaning into him.

  “No.”

  “No. OK. You know what, then? Fuck you. I will let his murderous ass come back down on you and finish off what he started, you brain-whacked son of a bitch.” Nerese hissed in his ear. “And believe me, I have seen it happen, some strong-arm psycho go down and down on the same vic time after time like they’re a goddamn soda machine. And won’t your daughter have fun, feeding her dad like a baby, pushing him through the park or whatever the fuck shape he’ll leave you in what is wrong with you.” Nerese fighting off a powerful urge to straight-out beg, the victim himself the true mystery here, intractably blocking her way home.

  “Tweetie,” Ray said hoarsely, then faded, his lower face dropping away from his teeth like the hinged jaw of a marionette. “Tweetie,” seeking out her eyes as he hauled himself back up to the surface. “What if I had it coming,” the question an atonal balloon.

  Nerese studied the beseeching fright mask before her, tried to connect it to the hack license photo in his apartment, couldn’t.

  “Nobody has this coming,” she said.

  Two orderlies and a nurse came into the stall and began detaching Ray from his IV and fingertip vital-signs monitor, moving swiftly and efficiently, one of the orderlies squatting to release the catch that would make the bed mobile.

  “Where’s he going?” Nerese asked.

  “It’s time to put Humpty Dumpty back together again,” the nurse said, standing behind the head of the bed as if it were a dogsled, gesturing for the two orderlies standing in front to move on out.

  “What were you doing messing around with her to begin with,” Nerese asked hopelessly as Ray, like a prince on his royal barge, glided past her into the hallway. “It’s just ass,” she called out after him. “You’re not supposed to die for it.”

  Chapter 18

  Danielle—January 20

  “I don’t know how else to ask this,” Ray said stari
ng at Danielle’s gleaming compact torso, “but what are you?”

  The scent of vanilla was everywhere: the nape of her neck, in her brass-tinted hair, her mouth, between her legs, on his own fingers and belly, rising from the sheets like a mist.

  “What do you mean, what am I . . .” She lay on her side, her head propped on a cupped palm. Since the sex ended she hadn’t looked at his body once.

  “I mean, you know, ethnically.” He wanted to say “racially,” but thought “ethnically” a softer word.

  “Well, that’s an interesting question.” Her legs brushed against each other with a dry slishing sound. “I have one grandfather, he was Dominican, a grandmother who’s black, still alive, and another grandmother who was, I’m pretty sure, a Russian Jew.”

  “How about the other grandfather?”

  “The other grandfather? He was a sailor.”

  “Really,” Ray said, witless with desire. He wanted to touch the crest of her hip where her body began to swoop in then roller-coaster back out again at the base of her rib cage, but the fucking was over for now and he wasn’t sure where he stood.

  Her body was on the heavy side but solid; thick-waisted, blunt-toed, with small high breasts that were almost lost in the expanse of her chest and wide swimmer’s shoulders. And she was strong—stronger than him; he’d never been in bed with a woman so physically powerful before—and she used that strength to make him come, leisurely almost absently riding him with a controlled density of muscle that made him despair of dragging things out.

  But in fact, the sex, at least in spirit, had been over and done with well before she had ever thrown a leg over him and began the too-short ride.

  When he had brought her over to the apartment a few hours earlier, for what he had hoped would turn out to be some slow-boat-to-China fuckery, he was jarred to discover that the initial aura of pillowy gratitude with which she had driven him wild on so many levels in their first two encounters had completely evaporated.

  And once in bed, Ray, recognizing a lost cause when he saw one, knew it as such for sure soon after he had worked his way south from her tattooed throat to between her legs. Glancing back up at her after a few languid minutes beneath the rise of her belly, he saw that she had pretty much vacated the premises; her expression was composed, absent, her eyes open and gazing off as if trying to remember something, the remnants of a to-do list, perhaps.

  There was nothing cruel or willful in her sexual distance; just a wall of preoccupation that he instantly and accurately knew to be unbreachable, but which also turned him atomic with want. And the hell of it was that, even though she was lying in bed now as detached as if she were waiting for a bus, he was pretty sure she’d go at it again if he wanted to; now, later today, tomorrow, probably anytime up to a few days before her husband was released—Ray at his deluded worst didn’t belive her “three strikes, you’re out” speech—but it would be in the spirit of holding up her end of a deal, and her continued unreachableness would make him insane; make him feel as isolated as if he had lived in one of those talking tombs he had his students imitate from Spoon River Anthology.

  “Do you know in eight years of marriage I never fucked around once?” he semi-announced in an ass-backwards effort to get her to talk about her husband, about the big picture here. “And it wasn’t like we had this great sex life, you know, never-ending passion. You sleep with someone long enough you know every square inch of their body. After a while, it’s like getting turned on by staring at yourself in the mirror.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Danielle said mildly, rattling him.

  “No, I mean, the sex was fine, I’m not saying . . . It’s just, for me, you start screwing around, you can either lie or you get all candid about it. You choose candid, next thing you know you’re both doing it, you have this, understanding, quote unquote, it’s worse than being best friends, so I decided right out of the gate, in for a penny, in for a pound.”

  “In for a pound,” she lightly aped him, once again bumping him off balance. “Let me ask you something,” blocking her body with a pillow. “Why’d you do that for my family.”

  “Do what . . .”

  Danielle waited.

  “Because I could.”

  “Bullshit. Why.”

  Ray wondered how honest he could be, decided that saying he had paid for her brother’s funeral at least in part to impress his daughter was too much.

  “Because money’s only money and it was a good way for me to come home.”

  “Home. You still think of Hopewell as your home?” Squinting with skepticism.

  “It’s like, you can live under many roofs in this life? But you’re always only from one place,” he decreed, half believing it.

  “She’s going to pay you back, you know.” Danielle still sizing him up as she said it.

  “If it’ll make her feel better about taking it, fine. But I don’t really care. I mean, I’d never lend money to someone, if they wound up stiffing me it would make me crazy. For me, it’s like Hi-Yo Silver, and go. See you when I see you. I’m not in it for the static.”

  “Not for nothing, but do you really think you can do things for people, help them out then just walk away like nothing sticks to you? No offense, but I think that’s incredibly naive on your part.”

  “Nonetheless.” Ray attempted to shrug it off, everything out of her mouth like a broomstick tossed in the path of a runner. “Do me a favor, make sure she knows that, OK?”

  “Yeah, OK,” she said, still not buying it; not buying him.

  Her foot grazed his leg, an accident, and he just came out with it. “I need for you to tell me about your husband.”

  “You want to know about Freddy?”

  The quiet way she said it, with the smallest pause beforehand, told him that she was utterly alive to the drama, that what was going down here was probably a time-honored routine, a ritual between husband and wife involving crime, punishment, purge and forgiveness, and that he was merely a player, a disposable second banana—that in fact, his disposal was most likely critical to the climax.

  But it had been so long for him . . .

  “Just tell me what’s going on,” he said cleanly. “And don’t tell me it’s over, OK?”

  A pager went off in the heaped rumple of her clothes on the floor and she stretched across his belly to pluck it from her jeans, the impersonal pressure of flesh on flesh turning his thoughts into white noise.

  She scowled at the number coming up on her beeper. “Pass me the phone please?”

  Sitting up cross-legged now, she frowned at her nails as she waited for her call to ring through.

  “Nurse’s office?” She reared back in surprise at the greeting. “Yeah, hi, this is Danielle Martinez, Nelson Martinez’s mother? Did you just page— Is he there? Can I talk to him?” running a long-nailed hand through her short hennaed mane. “What’s wrong, Nelson . . . You got a 58. A 58 what . . . You’re in the nurse’s office because you failed a test? . . . No. No. You had the flu last month. Did you study for . . . Nelson, if you didn’t understand what you were studying, why didn’t you say something? . . . To me, to your teacher. Which teacher is it . . . Who? That woman should be teaching like I should be in the circus. I’ll talk to her. I’ll . . . Well, if you don’t want me to step up for you then why are you calling me? . . . What do you mean ‘just to tell me’? Couldn’t you just tell me when you got home?”

  Ray flinched at that, Nelson’s misery coming through loud and clear.

  “Are you missing a class right now? OK. I want you to hang up the phone, tell the nurse you feel better and get your ass back in class . . . No. Right now, Nelson. Right now . . . I love you too. Go.”

  Danielle hung up and stretched across Ray again to replace the phone on the night table. “He’s such a mama’s boy. ‘I got a 58, I got a 58,’” miming her son in a whispery bass. “What’s he got to call me for?”

  “I don’t know. He probably feels like crap and you’re his mom.” Ra
y said it as lightly as he could, afraid the obviousness of it all would in some way backfire on him.

  “No, I’m sorry, I will fight to the death for my son when it’s called for, but he’s getting a little too old to not start sucking it up when shit doesn’t break his way. See, that’s why I’m so pissed at his father . . .”

  “Freddy?” Ray said quickly, all thoughts of Nelson gone like smoke into a vacuum.

  “Yeah,” Danielle responded, looking at him, Nelson fading a little for her, too. “About Freddy, what did you want to know?”

  “Be me,” Ray said. “What do I want to know.”

  “You have to be more specific,” she said, loving this.

  “C’mon, give me a break.”

  “Shit, I’ll tell you all of it.” She shrugged. “I don’t owe that bastard anything . . . I mean, you talk about marriage and faithfulness and sex and all that? Do you know I have been with my husband for exactly half my life? Since tenth, grade. I mean, it’s not like I haven’t been out in the world. We must’ve gone off, gotten back a dozen times in the last fifteen years. Mostly it’s his fault. He disappears now and then, finds some short-term shortie for himself, or says he needs to get his head together, otherwise known as sulk, or he gets locked up again, and for me, that’s the bad one, that’s right on the line with unforgivable, although I always do, and once or twice, it’s me. I got to get away, can’t breathe with all the bullshit in the air. But the thing is, we’ve made up so many times? It doesn’t even feel like making up anymore. It’s more like we’ve just come back from separate vacations at the exact same time. ‘Hey, how you doing.’ We don’t even make promises to each other, you know, ‘I’ll never do that again,’ or, ‘This the last time, baby, I really learned my lesson’ or whatever. It’s just time to get back to each other until the next time.”

  Gone Off: Ray thinking, That’s what I am here, Danielle’s latest Gone Off.

  “But I tell you, the worst time when he left? Was right after I had Nelson. He disappeared for four months, said he had to be alone to prepare himself for fatherhood, can you believe that shit? And to this day I don’t know what he did or where he went for that time, but when he came back he was most definitely still unprepared for fatherhood. Still is.