Samaritan

by Richard Price

  “So you can understand why we need to have this conversation now.”

  “I have my demons, no doubt, but you’re talking to the wrong person.”

  A ruddy piss-bum staggered up to the table, his face a hairy blur. Apparently having abandoned human speech some time ago, he simply put out his hand. Nerese waved him off, but Freddy slipped him a dollar. The guy toddles off down Fifth Avenue with the bill sticking out of his fist like a flower.

  “You know, Freddy . . . Can I call you Freddy?”

  He shrugged.

  “Freddy, you say you didn’t do it, and to be honest, at this point in time I’m inclined to believe you,” she said with as straight a face as she could manage. “I mean, I studied your sheet and other than”—she nodded to the scar on his forehead, which, she realized, looked just like the Nike logo—“other than that one incident, which I was told was a matter of self-defense, there’s no violence there, no history.” Nerese leaned forward, adding more intimately, “However, there are those who think differently. Unfortunately, they happen to be my superiors.” Nerese wasn’t even sure if she had any superiors in this limbo time. “And in order for me to move on, I have to get them off my back. Now, the only way I can do that, is to clear you, so . . .”

  “Help me help you,” he said dryly.

  “More or less.” Nerese stuck in the gambit. “Well, let me just ask you . . . You say you had nothing to do with it. OK. Do you maybe have any thoughts on who did?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Anybody. Friends, business associates, guys in County who would’ve, you know, maybe given the rumors, have taken it upon themselves out of friendship or loyalty to you . . .”

  “One.” Freddy held up a finger. “You can stop calling them rumors. And two . . . Do you honestly think I would discuss with another man the subject of my wife’s infidelity? I’m only here talking to you about it because being on parole you pretty much have me over a barrel.”

  “I’m just saying, you didn’t even have to talk to anybody. Someone could’ve . . . Look, I’m trying to help you out here. Give me some names. Friends, business associates . . .”

  “You want me to give you the names of my business associates?” Freddy smiled incredulously.

  “OK. For starters, who’d you bunk with in County this last go-round. C’mon, you dragged me over to New York, don’t make me do all the work here.” Nerese doing Ol’ Man River now, but also belatedly thinking, Who would be a better witness to Freddy’s mental state in the days before his release?

  “My bunkie in County? Some cretin couldn’t figure out how to open and close his Velcro jumpsuit. A real arch-criminal. You know, now that I think of it? That’s definitely the guy.”

  “OK. Let’s go the other way. Give me somebody who can vouch for you.”

  Freddy shrugged, reversed knees.

  Another bum came by, disconcertingly fine-boned under the scabs and dirt, his hair either in dreadlocks or just hopelessly matted.

  Once again Nerese waved him off, but Freddy, trapped by his audience, grudgingly forked over another buck.

  “All right.” Nerese sighed, pulling out her notepad as if it weighed a ton. “Let’s do this the ABC way. Where were you on February seventh.”

  “What day of the week was that?”

  “Two Tuesdays back. Two days after you were released.”

  Freddy thought about it, then not too furtively studied some passing skirts.

  “C’mon, Freddy. Stay with me.”

  A squirrel jumped on and off the table in the space of a heartbeat; the both of them jerking in shock, then covering it up.

  “I was at home.”

  “All day? All night?”

  “Tuesday mornings I go to see my PO. Cassandra Wiggins. You can verify it with her. After that I came home, most likely made myself some lunch, who the hell remembers from almost three weeks ago, but then I definitely went for a run.”

  “A run. A jog?” Nerese thinking that opened up the road to anywhere and anything.

  “See, understand something. In County? You can lift weights, you can play basketball, you can work out on the bags. The one thing you cannot do, is run. So the one thing that tells me I’m out of there is that I can run. So I do.”

  “You ran. By yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “From where to where?”

  “If I knew that someday I’d be having this conversation, I would’ve had a camcorder strapped to my head.”

  “From where to where,” Nerese repeated, her pen motionless above the pad.

  “From my house to County and back. Six miles.”

  “You ran to the county jail?”

  “You bet. Get there, take a long long look, give it my back and I’m gone.”

  The late winter sun began to dip behind the skyscrapers, the deserted plaza slipping into shadow.

  “You went straight from your house to County and back. No detours, no doglegs?”

  “What, you mean like to Little Venice?”

  Freddy flinched as soon as he’d said it; too clever by half.

  “Why would Little Venice come into this?” she asked, seeing the self-disgust in Freddy’s face.

  He pulled a pair of sheer leather driving gloves from his pocket, deliberately flexed them onto his hands.

  “Hello?” Nerese stared at his profile.

  “Look. If thoughts were deeds this would be a barren planet.”

  She contemplated the glistening horizontal scar above his brow.

  “I have never laid eyes on that man in my life,” he added.

  “Ever talk to him?”

  Freddy hesitated, then: “No.”

  “Had to think about it, huh?”

  “Not really,” a lingering wisp of self-reproach in his tone.

  “Not really?” Nerese fished around in her purse, and pulled up Ray’s phone records. “I have four collect calls from County going to his house the week before you got out. Three on the first of February and one on the third.”

  The foot traffic along Fifth Avenue began to build as the hour approached five; Freddy staring without appetite now at the homeward-bound ass.

  “They were to my wife,” he finally said, each word bitten bloody.

  “No kidding.” Nerese leaned forward, her shoulders rippling with cold. “How did you know she’d be there?”

  Freddy’s jaw locked, his face pulled askew.

  “Freddy?”

  “Because she wasn’t at her mother’s house and she wasn’t at work.”

  “But how did you know that was the third option?” Nerese pushed. “Huh?”

  “Like I said, people talk,” he muttered.

  “But these calls you made.” Nerese squinted at the sheets in her hand. “She was over there on two separate days in the last week of your incarceration. That’s two days that you know of, Jesus . . .”

  Nerese then let the silence come down, wanting Freddy to use the quiet time to feed the flames.

  “I’m just curious,” she said, closing her notebook. “When you called his house? Who accepted the charges, Ray or your wife?”

  He took a deep, deliberate breath, turned from the street to Nerese. “Look,” fixing her with fiercely clear eyes, the white line of his mouth. “I deal drugs. You know that. I deal weight. You know that too. And with those two things, you know everything about me that’s relevant from a police point of view. I had nothing to do with that assault. You catch me on the other? I’ll come in like a baby. Catch me on the other, and I’m yours. But if you want to lock me up, it’s going to have to be for that, because I did not do this assault and I will not go down for it.”

  He took another long fuming breath to keep himself in check, those eyes never leaving her face.

  “Now . . . You’re into my shit and there’s nothing I can do about it. I have to accept that because of the life I chose. Rules of the game. But you tell me what I have to do in order to get you off my back on this other thing, and I will do it.”
He cocked his head. “Help me help you help me.”

  Nerese shrugged as if they were just shooting the breeze. “Come in and take a polygraph.”

  “No. No way. There’s a twelve and a half percent margin of error on those things. Forget it.”

  “What if I said you could pick the questions?” Nerese just wanting to get him in the House.

  “No. And don’t ask me hypothetically what questions I’d pick if I went for it. That trick is older than the hills. No. No. No. What else. You want a list of everybody I had contact with in jail? You’d go insane. You want a list of my friends on the outside? I don’t have any. You want a list of people I do business with? Giving that to you would be like slitting my own throat. You want to talk to people in my family? My guess is you did that already. However, if you want to be thorough about it, I’ll give you my brother’s address and phone number in Boston, my sister’s in Bayonne, my mother’s in Atlantic City and my father’s in St. Raymond’s Cemetery. What else . . .”

  Nerese pondered threatening to expose him as a County informant, but that would be the last of all last resorts. Right now she just needed him lawyer-free and talking.

  “So you came back from running,” she said.

  Freddy lifted and dropped his hands in exasperation, that blazingly succinct speech all for nothing. “I came home, took a shower and went online, did some day trading. I’d like to say I’m good enough at it to quit the other business, but I’m not quite there yet. If it was a typical day, which it most likely was, once again you’re asking me about almost three weeks ago, my son came home at four, my wife from school at seven, we ate dinner at eight, stayed in all night and went to sleep. Once again, what can I do to get you off my back. All I ask is that you be reasonable in your requests.”

  “Freddy, you say ‘Be reasonable’ but you won’t take a polygraph, you won’t talk about the bad guys . . .”

  “There is nothing there but wasted time for you and unnecessary jeopardy for me. Look, I know you talked to my mother-in-law, I know you talked to my wife. You probably talked to people in Hopewell. You probably talked to County Narcotics. Who’s left that could account for my whereabouts. My son? Do you want to talk to my son? You do it in front of my wife or myself and I will invite you into my home.” He was starting to calm down a little, enjoying the sound of his own righteous thoroughness.

  “I’m just curious,” Nerese said mildly. “When you called your wife at Ray’s place? What did you talk about?”

  “Ask her.” Freddy’s face stormed up again.

  “You know, when Danielle went over there she usually brought him with her.”

  “Who.”

  “Your son.”

  A fat blue vein popped up, a worm of lightning shooting from the corner of his left eye straight back to his temple, Freddy’s mouth clamping into a rictus of rage, Nerese thinking, There it is . . .

  “Did you know that?”

  Without losing her eye, he shifted his chair sideways until he sat completely to one side of the umbrella pole, giving him an unobstructed shot at her. Nerese responded by leaning a little farther back in her seat, her thumb casually wedged beneath the snap on her sidearm.

  “Did you know that, Freddy?”

  “Yes, I did,” the words small and throttled as he struggled once again to rein himself in.

  “Fine,” she said. “How about tomorrow?”

  “What?”

  “I accept your offer. Let me talk to your son. See if his recollections jibe with yours. Is tomorrow good? Say about seven, seven-thirty?”

  Without another word, Freddy got up and stalked off into the Fifth Avenue foot traffic, leaving Nerese alone in the near-frigid shadows beneath the south lion.

  “OK then,” she said to his empty chair. “Tomorrow it is.”

  Chapter 28

  Nelson—February 3

  The moment Ray opened the door he saw the speech in Danielle’s eyes, put it together with Nelson and Dante loitering behind her back and beat her to the punch.

  “It’s OK. Just leave them with me.”

  “Look, something came up. I’m so sorry, but . . .”

  “I just said, leave them with me.”

  “Just leave them with you?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You know, because I trust you so much . . .”

  “Good.”

  Nelson’s lips were less swollen today, but bristled with the short stiff tips of blood-blackened stitches. And, amazingly to Ray, the kid was dutifully carrying the glove that had failed to prevent the damage.

  “I’m under so much stress, you don’t . . .”

  “Danielle, do what you have to do.”

  At this point, Ray almost welcomed her asexual flattery, her chronic distraction.

  He still couldn’t bring himself to call it quits yet, but moments like this were helping him get there. And he damn well knew that if he didn’t walk away from her in the next few days, coming events would take care of the situation in a way that could be dangerously beyond his control.

  “And your mother, I don’t really mind, but no way she can watch them?”

  “Oh, me and her.” Danielle held up her hands. “We’re most definitely not talking right now.”

  Ray nodded sympathetically, thinking, Moms are like that when their kid marries a convict. Danielle was headed over to County this afternoon, he’d bet his life on it.

  “I’ll be like two hours,” she said.

  “Whatever.”

  “You’re the best.” She kissed him startlingly hard, almost painfully, on the mouth; once again, in front of Nelson, the kid putting his face in the glove and doing a pirouette.

  “Yeah, well, so,” Ray said meaninglessly, as the unpredictable and ardent violence in her made a shambles of his resolve to say what had to be said.

  Dante streaked into the apartment, Danielle yelling after him, “You break anything I’m not coming back to pick you up.”

  Then, to Nelson, “You watch him like a hawk,” and was gone.

  In the living room Dante had turned on MTV and was moving effortlessly, brilliantly to the beat, all shuddering shoulders, flying elbows, and with the light crossover footwork of a young Ali; Halloween-faced Nelson watching him with a covetous helplessness. But the sunlight streaming in from the terrace completely bleached out the screen.

  “C’mon, fellas, it’s really nice out,” Ray said. “Let’s go to the mall.”

  Coming into the vast, aviarylike Gannon Commons, Ray experienced the familiar pattern of elation/deflation, the liberating spaciousness of the nearly deserted three-story atrium, the bright splash of water in the unseen fountain and the endless possibilities of things, things, things to buy, quickly giving way to a psychosomatic exhaustion as first he noticed the filthiness of the floor tiles, then the limp Muzak, then the lonely kiosks, each with its own one-product inanity—Metabolife, Fragrance Hut, Piercing Palace, Pager Pagoda, Astro Gems—the solitary vendors sitting hunched over on high stools and staring at air.

  A greasy aroma drifted down from the third-floor food court—spare ribs and Cinnabons—and from the fourth level came the clamor of young schoolchildren on a class trip to one of the multiplex movies, their echoing squawks and yowls punctuated by the flat-toned blaring threats of the teachers.

  Dante, being Dante, simply took off on his own, and Ray, lacking the requisite anxiety, just let him go and find his own trouble.

  Alone with Nelson now, he began to wander past the ground-floor retail outlets, cutting loose with a monotone roll call to amuse both himself and the kid.

  “Gap Men Gap Women Gap Kids, Gap Tooth, Foot Locker, Lady Foot Locker, Athlete’s Foot, Big Foot, Trench Foot, Kay Bee, Kmart, K-Ration, K-Nine, Bed Bath and Beyond, Beyond Bed Bath and Beyond, Bed Bath and Beyond Beyond,” the unendurable predictability of what stood before them making Ray stagger until they pulled up in front of the sole independent shop, Onyx Men, a clothing store. All the mannequins in the windows were sporting
what looked like the castoff wardrobe from a Kid ’N Play House Party sequel; the colors of the day black, silver and burnt orange.

  “This is where the Soul Train dancers come for back-to-school.”

  The kid grunted, his unblinking eyes staring straight ahead.

  “You wouldn’t wear any of this stuff, would you?”

  Nelson shook his head, no. He was still lugging around the baseball glove; Ray wondered if perhaps he had been unwilling to leave it at the apartment, in case it was misconstrued as a gift return.

  “Where do you usually go to buy your clothes?”

  “I don’t know.” Nelson singsonged.

  “Who takes you, your mom or your dad?” Ray unable to stop himself from asking.

  “My grandmother.”

  “Your grandmother. You like your grandmother?”

  Nelson nodded his head in vigorous affirmation.

  “Yeah, I was crazy about mine too. Well, I told you about her and the baseball glove,” eyeing the one he had given Nelson, in a possessive headlock between the kid’s elbow and ribs. “Let me ask you, can you imagine your grandmother as a teenager?”

  “Nope.”

  “Yeah well, see, that’s funny to me, because I’m still having a hard time seeing Carla as anything but.”

  Alongside Onyx Men stood a Victoria’s Secret, and in the midst of putting together a few one-liners to toss off once they came in front of those windows, he spotted a Bookworms outlet down the hall and felt himself coming back to life.

  “Admiral, sir, over here.”

  But once Ray steered Nelson inside, he saw right off that this place was a bust, too, the literary equivalent of all the other shit in the mall: a sea of discount tables stacked with endless piles of crappy pop-up books, Star Wars spin-offs, Disney spin-offs, sandy-assed bikini calendars, topless firemen calendars, massage manuals, astrology manuals, Idiots and Dummies Guides to everything from beer to cancer; Ray hot as a pistol, wheeling to Nelson, “How the hell can you fuck up a bookstore . . .”

  Once again startled by Ray’s language, Nelson reared back; and then Dante materialized between the aisles as if summoned.

  His pants were soaked, there was a CD-size button pinned to his shirt proclaiming PUSSY POWER in bold red letters and he was carrying two books, a hardback biography of a professional wrestler named Krisis and something called The Big Book of Explosions.