Samaritan

by Richard Price

  “Two years of horseshit followed by a job in city housing if you know the right people.”

  Nerese gestured at the book bag, the copious notes. “That doesn’t look like horseshit to me.”

  Danielle didn’t answer, started chewing on her thumbnail, waiting.

  Over by the counter Nerese spotted two men whom she’d personally arrested in the last year and a half and three others whom she knew to have been locked up in that same time span; the Red Robin Diner was in walking distance of the County Correctional Center and was often the first stop for just-released inmates or those lucky enough to make bail.

  “You know I’m from Hopewell, too,” Nerese said as the turkey cheeseburger came to the table with suspicious speed and the coffee cups were refilled.

  “Ammons in Four Building,” Danielle said. “My mother told me.”

  “You’d be too young to remember us.”

  “You had a brother Antoine, he was gay, right?” Danielle asked carefully.

  “Yeah, uh-huh,” Nerese said. “Although I do believe the correct term back then in Hopewell was faggot.”

  “My mother said he beat up my brother Harmon once in Big Playground.”

  “Hey, Toni beat up everybody. Just because you’re a faggot doesn’t mean you’re a fairy.”

  “What kind of counseling did you want to study again?” Danielle drained her second cup of coffee.

  Nerese shrugged. “It’s just us Hopewell girls talking here.”

  “Right.” Danielle turned her head away, biting down on a smirk.

  “So, Danielle, talk to me.” Nerese leaned forward on her elbows.

  “About . . .”

  “Guess.”

  “Hey, you called me.”

  Nerese sighed heavily, then, “So how did Freddy take to you sleeping with Ray while he was stuck in County?”

  “Whoa.” Danielle reared back, the blood coming to her face.

  “I’m sorry. Am I going too fast?” Nerese kept up the eye contact.

  “No,” Danielle said, after a moment of pulling herself together. “No. He had it coming.”

  “Ray did?”

  “Freddy did.” She seemed to relax for the first time all evening.

  “Did he ever react to any of your other boyfriends while he was away?”

  “Step Two,” Danielle said. “When interviewing a suspect or witness, always try to come off like you know more than you actually know.”

  “That’s good.” Nerese laughed, fending off a third cup of coffee.

  “Look, I’m really sorry about what happened to Ray, he was a very sweet guy.” Danielle was almost chatty with relief now that the bottom line had been broached. “But you’re wasting your time studying Freddy for this.”

  “Well,” Nerese shrugged, “maybe you’re right. I mean, I ran his sheet and there’s no real pattern of violence on it. But there is that one body, indicted or not. And we do have a situation here, you know, the three of you . . .”

  “Hey.” Danielle leaned forward. “Ray broke up with me.”

  “Yeah, so . . .” Nerese shrugged. “Did Freddy know about you and Ray?”

  “Probably.”

  “Probably?”

  “Hey, he gets locked up like that, he knows the drill.”

  “The drill.”

  “Look. I know my husband inside out, and I’d never put another human being in harm’s way like that.”

  Nerese just stared at her; the intermittent clatter of dirty dishes tossed into a gray rubberized busing bin punctuated the silence.

  “You got to do better than that,” Nerese finally said. “Make me a believer.”

  Danielle frowned at her cup for a moment, then came up bright-eyed. “Tell me when it happened, then ask me where Freddy was.”

  “OK. Two weeks ago Tuesday, where was Freddy . . .”

  “Two Tuesdays ago? He was home with me.”

  “Yeah, OK.” Nerese laughed. “That takes care of that.”

  “Ask me if anybody saw us.”

  “OK,” gesturing for Danielle to proceed.

  “My son. He was sick. Came home sick from school.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Twelve. Almost thirteen. Nelson.”

  Nerese remembered the boy from Carla’s apartment, the name from her chat with Brenda Walker. “If I need to, can I speak to him?”

  “Not without me there.”

  “You’d have to be there. It’s the law.”

  “Then hell yeah, no problem.”

  “Do me a favor. Just, lay out that Tuesday for me. What did you do, where’d you go. Get me off your back.”

  Danielle studied her for a wary moment. “Well, I didn’t see my family till about seven o’clock because I had classes until six-thirty.”

  “So you came home at seven?” Nerese eased a reporter’s pad onto the table, began jotting things down.

  “Yeah, at seven.” Danielle frowned at the notepad.

  “This is just”—Nerese dismissed the pad with a flicking gesture—“I have a head like a sieve.”

  “Whatever you say, Columbo.” Danielle sipped her coffee.

  “So you came home at seven. Was Freddy there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What was he like that night, you know, mood-wise.”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Why’s that?” Nerese asked, ostentatiously dropping her pen as if they were off the record.

  “Nothing illegal,” Danielle said. “Just in a bad mood.”

  “About . . .”

  “He doesn’t need an about.”

  “Still . . .”

  “He’s trying to learn day trading now, sits at his laptop from can to can’t . . . I mean, I will give him this. He is trying.”

  “OK, so you come home, Freddy’s there in a bad mood.”

  “Like Darth Vader with his helmet ripped off. I say, ‘Where’s Nelson.’ He says, ‘In bed.’ I say, ‘Why.’ He says, ‘He’s sick.’”

  “He’s sick.” Nerese casually took up her pen again.

  “I go into Nelson’s room; he’s sleeping, so I wake him up because I don’t want him disrupting his biological clock with any naps. You know, all of a sudden it’s two a.m. and he can’t sleep or something.”

  “Right.” Nerese scribbled.

  “I feel his head and he’s hot a little but I say, ‘Come into the living room, lay on the couch. You can watch some TV.’ See, normally he’s not allowed but a half-hour of television a night but I’d rather him just keep his eyes open until his bedtime. I mean, if he’s sick, I’ll write him a note for his teachers about not doing his homework but . . .”

  “Do you remember what he was watching?”

  “What else. MTV.”

  “Same by me,” Nerese said. “Drives me up a wall. So you sit down for dinner . . .”

  “Me and Freddy. I give Nelson a TV tray on the couch. We eat, Freddy goes back online and I do my homework, put Nelson in bed about eleven, go to bed myself about twelve-thirty, one.”

  “Where’s Freddy?”

  “In bed. Still with the laptop. That’s his new girlfriend.”

  “Did you talk about anything during dinner?”

  “I guess. I don’t know. Oh wait. Yeah. You know what he says to me? He says, ‘I’m sorry.’ Not during dinner but later when I’m getting ready for bed. He says, ‘I’m sorry.’”

  “For what?” Nerese said lightly.

  “That’s what I said. He says, ‘For everything.’”

  “OK,” Nerese waiting.

  “I say, ‘Gee, where’d I hear that before.’”

  “I hear you,” Nerese going all sister-sister. “But you don’t think he was referring to anything specific.”

  “Like being sorry for putting Ray in the hospital?”

  “Or whatever.”

  “Or whatever, huh?” Danielle said dryly. “I’m just trying to give you a flavor for Freddy. He keeps wanting to be something better than he is. He keeps
trying. And that’s why I’m still with him. The minute I feel like he’s given up, I’m gone. But I’m not going to walk out on someone who’s fighting for his own soul, no matter how bad that fight’s going most of the time. That’s all I meant by telling you that.”

  “OK then.” Nerese smiled, arched her back and signaled for the check.

  “That’s it?” Danielle reared back.

  “For now.”

  “That was worth turning my life upside-down with two million phone calls?”

  “Yup.” Nerese now having a foot in the door, an interview with the kid plus an orally documented record of events which would invariably be contradicted by both Nelson and Freddy—these things rarely matched up in the retelling—and each contradiction to come was an excuse to open the door wider and wider.

  Nerese weighed asking Danielle if she could speak to Nelson tonight, right now, before she changed her mind about offering up her son like that.

  “So how’s Ray doing?” Danielle asked, rearranging the contents of her book bag.

  “You go see him in the hospital?”

  “Not really.”

  “Did you call him?”

  “What are you, my mother?” Danielle snapped, but Nerese could tell she was embarrassed.

  “Why not?”

  “Why not?” Danielle stopped moving. “You got to be kidding, right?”

  “Do you think I could talk to your son tonight?”

  “Nelson?” sizing Nerese up. “Tonight’s not good.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He’s sick again.”

  “Really. With what?”

  “Not walking pneumonia. Walking something though. It’s been dragging on like forever.”

  The waitress placed the check and two foil-wrapped mint balls on the table.

  “Well, you know, the sooner I can speak to him, the sooner . . .”

  “Give him a day or two to get back on his feet. You have a card or something?” Danielle put out her hand, Nerese trying to read a stonewall in any of this, didn’t think so. Besides, at this point if she sensed any further ducking on the part of Freddy or his family, she’d just have his PO threaten him with a revocation of parole, the POs often able to swing a heavier hammer than any cop.

  “I’d very much like to talk to your son by tomorrow night,” she said, handing over her card.

  “I’m in school to around eight tomorrow.”

  “You want to make it nine, then?”

  Danielle hesitated. “Sure.”

  “Good.” Nerese laid out $8.50 on a $7.75 tab, then reluctantly added another fifty cents.

  “So how’s Ray doing?” Danielle asked again, hauling the strap of her book bag over her shoulder but waiting for a response before rising to her feet.

  “You know. Shaky. Better,” Nerese opting to downplay what he’d been through, not wanting to spook her with the direness of his injuries, the direness of the criminal charges.

  “He was one of the nicest guys I’ve ever been around,” Danielle said. “Very unselfish. I’d go over to his place with my son and a lot of the time I’d have to study and, he’s got a terrace there, it’s like heaven for me, and he’d never complain, just hang with Nelson, have a catch, tell him stories, sometimes I’d even bring my nephew. Ray never said Boo.”

  “You’d bring your son with you?” There was no revelation here; Nerese had known of this almost from the beginning; nonetheless, hearing about it directly from the mother made it difficult to keep her voice judgment-free.

  “We weren’t doing anything.” Danielle darkened. “Shit, what do you take me for?”

  Chapter 22

  Nelson—January 27

  The day had the kind of unseasonable warmth that made people fret about the greenhouse effect, sixty-one degrees in the shade; and Ray had been waiting on his terrace for the better part of an hour before Danielle finally pulled up in her Bondo-daubed Vega. The weight of her schoolbag made her stagger as she swung the strap up onto her shoulder.

  Her son, Nelson, cautiously emerged from the passenger side with the self-consciously physical jerkiness of a kid crossing an empty gym floor to ask a girl to dance.

  She had said that she would be bringing him; Ray thought he was prepared for that, and he was, in terms of no sex, but he was surprised to find himself oddly excited by the kid’s presence, too, in a way that was unclear but left him feeling vaguely embarrassed.

  At the door Danielle and Ray avoided any physical greeting; Ray wasn’t sure if it would have been any different if the kid wasn’t present, but that was OK, he told himself, really . . .

  “Check it out.” He steered her across the living room to the cement terrace, where he had set up a work station: scratch pads, pens, pencils and a spool of roll-on correction tape.

  “Oh my God, this is so nice of you,” she said in that high furry tone of gratitude that had first drawn him to her at Carla’s house.

  “Knock yourself out,” he said, then turned to Nelson. “You have homework, too?”

  “No,” Danielle said sharply, as if to a puppy, not in response to Ray’s question but to her son’s getting to know Ray’s TV. “You read your book.”

  “I left it in the car,” he murmured.

  “Oh for Christ’s sake,” she squawked, pulling a slim tangerine PC from her backpack, all the little stationery touches he had laid out for her now charmingly archaic.

  “What are you reading?” he asked the kid.

  Nelson murmured something indistinct.

  “What?”

  “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry,” mother and son said simultaneously.

  “About the black family down south? Ruby just read that.”

  “Well, I’m not going back downstairs to get it,” she said.

  “I’ll go,” Ray offered.

  “No. Let him go.” She lugged out a huge academic-press paperback, Collective Violence: A Roundtable. “Everything is half-cocked with this kid.”

  Ray had had a faint impression of this before, and Danielle seemed to be confirming it now; she was one of those people who equate a chronic tone of low-key reproach, of constant verbal sternness, with being a responsible parent. On the other hand, she knew what her son was reading, which, by Ray’s lights, was no small thing.

  “You go down and get your book, Nelson.”

  “Actually, you know what?” Ray said. “I think I have Ruby’s copy in the bedroom. Come on.” He signaled for Nelson to follow.

  Danielle returned to the balcony.

  Ray closed the bedroom door behind them.

  He had no intention of giving Nelson Ruby’s copy of Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry: with Danielle doing homework and this kid with his nose in a book, what the hell was he supposed to do? Ray scanned the room for show-and-tell, something to delight and entertain. The cards. He never got a chance to show anybody the damn cards.

  “Nelson, you like baseball?”

  The kid shrugged.

  “Me neither,” he said, opening the bottom drawer of his dresser and pulling out a couple of three-ring binders. “But this isn’t baseball. It’s baseball cards.”

  Sitting at the foot of his bed with the binders in his lap, he patted the mattress in invitation and opened one of the fatter books to reveal his collection of ’55 and ’56 Topps, eight clear horizontal pockets to the page.

  “Beautiful, right?” He passed a hand lightly across a sheet of ’55 Tigers, the head shots all set against a reddish background, the tint building gently from a dusty rose at the bottom of the card to a bloody sunset at the top, the Detroit players all gazing skyward, whatever they were looking at up there making their lips part in wonder.

  “This guy here, Ferris Fain? You know what they called him? Burrhead.”

  Ray had amassed these cards, Topps from 1952 to 1958, in the months immediately after he kicked cocaine. Newly flush with TV money and desperate for a relatively harmless surrogate obsession, he had settled on retrieving material fragments of his childhoo
d—actually, pop artifacts from the years that preceded his childhood, for some reason—first the cards, then a few years’ worth of vintage Mad magazines and Playboys, then spin-off products from early sixties TV shows: lunch boxes, board games and figurines; then mambo and cha-cha LPs, the risqué comedy albums of Belle Barth and Rusty Warren, two hundred first-edition Classics Illustrated comic books and a thousand paper cocktail napkins embossed with a variety of semi-dirty jokes.

  He found all of this fairly embarrassing, kept most of it hidden away and eventually sold it all off—all of it, that is, except the cards.

  He had never been a baseball fan, but the cards were another story. As a kid he had been a helplessly compulsive collector, and the mere sight of them thirty-five years later, even those that were manufactured before he was born, still tugged at him: Warren Spahn’s goofy grin, Wally Moon’s massive beetle brow, Hoyt Wilhelm’s pear-shaped head, the Karloffian rings around Don Mossi’s eyes, the nicknames, the flattops, the jug-handle ears, the way Bobby Richardson stared off and Junior Gilliam up—at what? And all of it set against those vivid background colors: Halloween orange, emergency yellow, hot pink, royal blue, kelly green, arterial red, all of it, even now, right now, sitting here next to a twelve-year-old stranger, the albums open on his lap, each card was as immediately and viscerally tantalizing to him as a dissolving dream.

  “You have to be a four-star moron to collect this stuff at my age, don’t you think?”

  Nelson shrugged, his hands twisted in a figure eight between his knees.

  “Thanks for saving my feelings. You wouldn’t believe the names some of these guys had.” Ray began flipping pages, juggling albums. “Cot Deal, Coot Veal, Hank Bauer, Hank Sauer, Memo Luna, Hobie, Smoky, Pumpsie, Choo Choo, Yatcha, Schoolboy, Noodles or these . . .” His fingers flying. “Alpha Brazle, Sibby Sisti, Dee Fondy, Whammy Douglas, Suitcase Harry Simpson, Vinegar Bend Mizell and this guy here, my favorite”—opening his slim book of ’53s, again to the Detroit Tigers—“Dizzy Trout. Man among fish.”

  “Huh,” Nelson managed, arching his elbows inside out, his hands still entwined between his knees.

  “How old are you again?”

  “Twelve.”

  “See this guy?” Ray flipped to Joe Nuxhall of the 1952 series Reds, his face a little out of focus against a brilliant butter-yellow background. “He pitched his first Major League game at the age of fifteen. Lasted two-thirds of one inning, gave up two hits and five walks, didn’t throw pro again for eight years, so stay in school, OK? I don’t care how many millions they want to give you. Promise me you’ll do that?”