Samaritan (7 page)

The houses themselves, which began a half-mile beyond the checkpoint, were a picturesque scrunch of vaguely Tudor four-story structures that brought to Nerese’s mind the movie-set village terrorized by the Frankenstein monster, with a touch of Popeye waterfront thrown in to acknowledge their proximity to the river.

Standing before Ray’s third-floor apartment with the key supplied by the management office already in the lock, she abruptly changed her mind about reading his place first, and opted instead for ringing the bell of his nearest neighbor, a Mrs. Kuben, who had discovered Ray sprawled and seizing just inside his own doorway and had made the call to 911.

The woman who eventually made it to the door was in her seventies, tall but crooked at a fifteen-degree angle from osteoporosis, her piled hair frosted and filigreed a brilliant rusty orange.

“Good morning.” Nerese reflexively smiled and stepped back, her police ID alongside her face. “I’m Detective Ammons from the Dempsy PD? Can I speak to you about what happened next door?”

“You know, they tell you a place is safe,” Mrs. Kuben said, nudging a cookie-covered plate an inch closer to Nerese, who was seated across from her at the dining table. “So you move in.”

The apartment had that un-lived-in feel that Nerese sometimes encountered in old people’s digs, the rooms spotless but reeking oppressively of camphor, her eyelids fluttering against the fumes.

“The catching detective says you made the call to 911 at a quarter past five in the evening. Does that sound about right?”

“If that’s what they say,” she shrugged.

“Well let me ask you, how’d it come about that you found him?”

“I went to take out the garbage, saw his door was half-open, and, believe me, I mind my own business, but I went to knock, because we live in the world we live in as I’m sure you know, and there he was”—she put a hand over her mouth and slowly shook her head—“lying in his blood, shaking like a leaf.”

“Unh,” Nerese grunted in sympathy. “OK. Let me ask . . . Before then, at any time that afternoon, did you hear or see anything out of the ordinary, you know, through the walls, out in the hallway, an argument, raised voices, a person, people that you hadn’t ever seen before, or . . .”

The medics had said that Ray could have been lying there for as long as two hours before this woman had come upon him.

“Like I told you already,” Mrs. Kuben said, “I mind my own business.”

“No, I understand, I understand, but sometimes you just can’t help it. A loud noise, an unfamiliar face, anything . . .”

“No,” leaning back and folding her arms across her chest.

“How about your husband?”

“My husband?” Mrs. Kuben threw her a tight smile. “For forty-three years the man ran an empire. Now he has his name, address and phone number pinned to his shirt before he leaves the apartment.”

“That’s rough,” Nerese said heavily, then leaned forward. “Tell me something I should know.”

“Something you should know?” The older woman fought down a smile at the challenge as Nerese’s eye strayed to the photo gallery lining the dinette walls: children, grandchildren, immigrant ancestors—the past, present and future all taken to the same framer and laminated diploma-style onto identically irregular slabs of heavily varnished wood.

“I’ll tell you something you should know. His parents? He bought them that place three years ago. Two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. Paid the monthly maintenance, the utilities, everything, OK? In October, Jeanette, the mother . . . It happened quick. So, he comes back from California or New York, I don’t know which, to bury, you know, and to be with his father.”

Nerese heard a shuffling noise from the back bedroom, the dry whisk of slippers on a carpetless floor.

“Except his father, Artie, he can’t wait to get the hell out of here. So the son winds up stuck with the apartment, and instead of putting it on the market he decides to move in, which”—giving the cookie plate a quarter-turn to re-entice Nerese—“I think was a mistake. This isn’t any place for a young person to set up house.”

“Artie,” Nerese murmured, vaguely remembering Ray’s father from Hopewell, glasses and a pompadour; a bus driver, a cab driver . . . “Where’d he go?” She took a bite of something else, the filling prune or fig, and almost spat it out into her palm.

“Where?” Mrs. Kuben crossed her arms over her chest. “Olive Branch, Mississippi. It’s a snowbird setup like West Palm or DelRay, but a little cheaper, a little younger. And frankly I don’t blame the man. His wife’s not cold in the ground two minutes and the widows around here, they started lining up for him like he was the Early Bird Special. Came at him with everything they had—bank statements, plane tickets, summer homes. He told me this one individual, he wouldn’t say who but I can guess, not one week after the funeral she comes and drags him over to her apartment, pulls him into the bedroom, throws open a walk-in closet and shows him all the clothes left over from the first mister—suits, jackets, silk shirts, cruise wear—tells him she can have everything altered, can you believe that?”

“Yeah, I can, actually,” Nerese said mildly, leaving it at that.

“They wouldn’t even give him the time to grieve.”

“So what else should I know.”

“What else?”

The backroom shuffle started up again, then abruptly succumbed to the sounds of a TV commercial.

“Did he ever bring anyone into the apartment?”

“I don’t know if it’s my place to say.”

“It’s definitely your place to say.” Nerese reached across to touch the woman’s wrist.

“Well.” Mrs. Kuben gave the cookie plate another spin before getting back into it. “His daughter, of course. Ruby. A sweetheart, but why on earth a person would give their child the name of the woman who comes to clean your house is beyond me.”

“Who else . . .”

Mrs. Kuben hesitated, then: “He brought around people. Certain people.”

“Certain people?”

Mrs. Kuben looked pained now.

“What kind of people?”

“Different people at different times.”

Nerese waited.

“Look, the residents here, we’re mostly retired, we worked hard all our lives. My husband . . .”

“No no no. I understand, I understand.” Nerese, assuming now she meant nonwhites, watched her twist in the wind.

“At this stage of the game we should be entitled to our privacy, to our, our peace of mind,” the woman both angry and pleading.

Nerese shook her head like a horse, said, “Absolutely,” then settled back into waiting—the two of them suddenly engaged in a silent struggle.

“Why are you making me say something I don’t want to say,” Mrs. Kuben finally blurted, so pissed off and embarrassed now that she yanked the cookie plate away.

“Hey, if I lived here?” Nerese leaned forward, hand on heart. “I’d feel the exact same way. Just tell me about the people.”

“I don’t know.” Mrs. Kuben, defeated, looked away. “A couple of kids one time.”

“Kids. White? Black?” Nerese helping her out of the tar pit.

“The second.”

“Anybody else?”

“A young man. Not a kid, but young.”

“Black? White?”

“The first.”

“You see him more than once?”

“A few times.”

“Catch his name?”

“No.”

“How’d he seem to you?”

“To me?” She shrugged. “Civil. Neatly dressed, but for the street.”

“How were they together?”

“I don’t understand the question.”

“How were they . . . How did Ray seem around this guy?”

“You know. Happy to see him, I guess. Friendly.”

“Friendly,” Nerese repeated. “Friendly like what, pals? More than pals?” Just tossing it in the water, see what floated to the surface.

“He has a daughter,” Mrs. Kuben said coldly.

“Anybody else?” Nerese holding off on pressing for more details on the young man right now, this lady not going anywhere with her name-tagged husband.

“Well, actually, yeah. This one individual I saw him with the most. A woman . . .” Waiting for Nerese’s white-black question.

“Black?”

“That or something else. You know, very light-skinned. Attractive. She’d come by with her kids, two boys. Sometimes one boy. Sometimes alone. Her I’d see the most.”

Nerese grunted, thinking, With her kids.

“Did you catch her name?”

“No.”

“When she came by alone, was it during the day? Night?” Nerese thinking, Where there’s kids there’s a father, at least a biological one.

“Day,” Mrs. Kuben said. “Maybe night too, but like I said, come nine o’clock I’m dead as a doornail.”

Nerese reached across the table for a cookie sculpted into a seashell, dark pink, the bottom half dipped in chocolate.

“You think they were seeing each other?”

“Socially?” Mrs. Kuben asked.

“Socially,” wishing she could just ask, Was he fucking her.

“Could be,” Mrs. Kuben shrugged.

“When they were together, how did they strike you, friendly, businesslike, affectionate . . .”

Mrs. Kuben gave this some thought, then said, “Quiet.”

“Quiet?” Nerese was thrown.

“You know, well-behaved.”

“Well-behaved . . .”

Mrs. Kuben finally looked her in the eye. “Like they were hiding something.”

Skirting the brownish blood-spatter in the vestibule, the fingerprint powder–stippled shards of vase, the discarded rubber gloves, torn gauze wrappers and other detritus left by the EMS crew that worked on Ray before moving him, Nerese walked across the black-and-white tile floor of the sun-blasted living room and stepped out onto the cement-and-Astroturf terrace to gawk at the Statue of Liberty, gently hovering over its star-shaped base like a rocketship about to touch down.

Utterly jazzed, she just stood there, elbows on the rail, wondering if there was anyone in the world who couldn’t be made happy by the sight of moving water, imagining herself waking up here, opening her eyes and there it would be, tossing up diamonds, slapping itself silly and making every day feel like Day One.

Then, reentering the apartment from the terrace, she gave the living room a fresh look. Minus the caustic reek of mothballs, and discounting the faint arcs of black fingerprint powder that still clung to the front door and the wall around it like the mysterious markings of a prehistoric civilization, the place had the same vaguely geriatric un-lived-in feel as Mrs. Kuben’s digs next door; everything color-coordinated and spotless to the point of sterility, as if cleanliness itself were a school of style.

Giving Ray the benefit of the doubt, she imagined that he had simply left everything the way he found it when he moved in three months ago; the only two objects that caught her eye as probably coming in with him were an old-time full-length funhouse mirror mounted on a wall in a heavy wooden frame, the ancient silvering on its bulbous rolling surface peeled and browning in all four corners; and, at the opposite end of the man-toy spectrum, a fifty-four-inch flat-screen television, the whole of it no thicker than a hardcover book and so recently purchased that a few minute shreds of static-charged packing foam still clung to the gunmetal-gray frame.

Taking her time, looking for whatever, she began to roam the room as if she were in a museum, first checking out what hung on the walls. Three paintings: one, a hokey Paris street scene, all slanted umbrellas, quaint cafés and the base of the Eiffel Tower; two, a portrait of an aged Jew, gray-bearded, shawl-draped, an open prayer book in his gnarled hands; and last a stylized portrait of a wistful waif fondling a flower, the long-necked child so almond-eyed, almond-headed, that she seemed more alien than orphan.

The only thing that spoke of Ray on these walls was a certificate announcing his Emmy nomination for writing
Brokedown High.
Nerese had heard enough about the show by now, but in truth had never seen it save for a few minutes now and then while channel-surfing, although she could imagine easily enough what it was like.

Beneath this framed smidgen of prestige, on a low corner table that filled the square gap created by two couches positioned at right angles to each other, a modest accumulation of variously shaped vases sprouted like a miniature skyline; the original location of the one snatched up as a weapon indicated by a relatively dust-free circle.

The large TV centered a floor-to-ceiling wall unit that extended the length of the living room, Nerese perusing the shelves now: novels, biographies, no double-takes there; a few hundred CDs; fifty or so movies on tape, mainstream stuff—
Braveheart, West Side Story
and the like—Nerese popping a few from their boxes to see if the cassette inside was in fact what the packaging advertised; everything checking out, no secret porno stash; and then she came upon two framed photos nestling on a shelf, one of his daughter—Ruby, Mrs. Kuben had said—playing basketball for her school; a graceful lanky thing, caught here airborne and arched like a bow during the tip-off. Her opposite number was a black girl with flying hair extensions who matched Ruby’s taut symmetry like they were twin folds of an inkblot, both kids wide-eyed, mouths agape, the basketball a pebbled moon inches above their extended fingertips.

The second photo was a head shot of Ray’s ex-wife, blue-white skin, long reddish hair carelessly arranged and clear confident eyes, her mouth thin but with the slightest uptick at the corners as if she were politely listening to a long-winded joke she had heard before, Nerese intuiting by the combination of bone structure and facial expression that this woman had no ass on her whatsoever.

There were two possibilities here regarding this photo: either Ray was still hung up on his ex or he just wanted to give his daughter a little visual continuity while playing musical houses; Nerese hoped it was the latter.

Opening a cabinet beneath the television she came across the liquor stash: mostly kiddy shit, pimp shit—Amaretto, Boggs Cranberry Liqueur, Midori, retsina, whatever the hell that was—the only serious contender a quart of Seagrams, but it was three-quarters full, and dusty.

In an adjoining cabinet Nerese discovered a stack of unboxed videos, maybe two dozen, each cassette neatly labeled,
NYPD Blue, Law & Order, Oz, The Sopranos,
general title followed by the series number, episode title and airing date.