Samaritan (2 page)

Part I

Contrecoup

Chapter 1

Ray—January 4

Entering Paulus Hook High School for only the second time since graduation twenty-five years earlier, Ray approached the security desk, a rickety card table set up beneath a blue-and-gold Christmas/Kwanza/Hanukkah banner, which still hung from the ceiling in the darkly varnished lobby four days into the New Year.

The uniformed guard standing behind the sign-in book was a grandmotherly black woman: short, bespectacled, wearing an odd homemade uniform of fuzzy knit watch cap, gray slacks and a commando sweater, a khaki ribbed pullover with a saddle-shaped leather patch straddling the left shoulder.

“You got a visitor’s pass?” she asked Ray as he hunched over the sign-in sheet.

“Me? I’m here to guest-teach a class.”

“They give you a teacher’s ID?”

“A what?” Then, “No . . .”

Straightening up, he was struck with a humid waft of boiled hot dogs and some kind of furry bean-based soup that threw him right back into tenth grade. “Today’s my first day.”

With all regulation classrooms booked at this hour, Ray had been offered the faculty lounge to conduct his volunteer writers’ workshop, but in his anxiety for this thing to come off he had shown up too early, walking in on four real teachers brown-bagging it around a long conference table that centered the room.

Despite his stranger status, not one of them even looked his way, and after standing inside the doorway for an awkward moment, he quietly maneuvered himself behind a large scuffed desk wedged into a corner and just sat there waiting for the period-ending bell.

The teachers, all men, seemed to be working their way through a hit list of rotten apples.

“Rosario?”

“Out.”

“Jenkins?”

“Out.”

“Fanshaw?”

“Out. I talked with his mother and I think he’s out of the house, too.”

“Maldonado?”

“Out. I just told him. I swear, that kid does ‘Bewildered’ better than anybody on two feet. ‘Mr. Rosen, what I do? Suspended! Why?’ Because you’re on your own fuckin’ planet, Edgardo . . .”

“How about Templeton . . .”

“I’m giving him one last chance.”

“Aw, he got to you with that smile, huh?”

“Nah, nah nah, I just said, ‘Hey Curtis, there’s a new statute on the books—Consorting with Known Morons. I see you with Dukey, Ghost, or any of that crew? I don’t care if it’s a country mile from school property. You’re vaporized.’”

“Vaporized?”

“Don’t worry, he understood me loud and clear.”

They were either ignoring him or simply letting him be, Ray scanning the walls, taking in the student artwork; mostly crude cut-felt mosaics featuring idyllic tableaus of urban positivism: a black family eating dinner together, multicolored neighbors planting a community garden, big brown kids reading to little brown kids.

When the bell finally rang, the teachers at the table groaned to their feet, as reluctant to go back to the classrooms as any of the students.

Three of them filed out of the lounge without ever acknowledging him, but the last one made a stop at the desk, leaning forward on his knuckles to offer a confidence.

“I would rate ninety-six percent of the kids in this school from OK to Great; the other four percent are just stone fucking assholes taking up space and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Alone now, Ray took in the disembodied sound track of the students out in the halls, a steady murmurous stream of agitation, punctuated by squawks, bird caws and bellows.

Five minutes went by, the muffled hullabaloo gradually fading away out there, yet he found himself still facing an empty room.

To conceal how awkward and vaguely embarrassed he was beginning to feel, he began fiddling with his cell phone; checking for messages, calling the sports hotline, the 970 weather forecast; played with his datebook; then scribbled down a few introductory notes for his phantom students; coming off busy as hell, yet when the school’s principal, Bill or Bob Egan, knocked on the open door of the empty lounge, Ray almost shot to his feet with relief.

Despite his office, the principal, whom Ray vaguely remembered coming in as a new English teacher way back when, struck him as a knockabout guy: knobby-faced, silver-haired, sporting an inexpensive suit and a broad blue tie patterned with New York Giants football helmets.

Swinging around one of the chairs from the conference table, Egan sat facing Ray across the catercorner desk.

“So I understand you’re from Hopewell Houses originally,” he said, hauling one leg up across the other, the weak afternoon sun hitting his exposed shin, making the fish-white skin there gleam like marble.

“Originally,” Ray said, waiting for more.

“I’m from the Howard Houses myself. Used to be half-Irish back then. It was never a picnic but it wasn’t like it is now.”

“No kidding,” still waiting.

“And you graduated from here, what . . . the late seventies?”

“Seventy-eight.”

“Seventy-eight. That’s great, just great. And for how long were you a writer on that show?”

“Three years,” Ray said, understanding now that all this Q and A was nothing but a preamble to an apology.

“Three years,” Egan mused. “Out in LA?”

“Yup.”

“I spent some time in San Diego when I was in the navy, but I never made it over to LA. Got any new projects in the works?”

“Not really,” that question always weighing a ton. “Just kind of recharging my batteries for now.” Then, to speed things along, “Other than, you know, teaching this class here.” He gestured to the empty conference table.

Egan looked at his wristwatch; winced. “You know I told my Language Arts people, ‘Get your kids to the workshop, it’s an incredible resource. Make sure you get them . . .’ You try to delegate responsibility around here. You try . . .” He winced. “Look, the truth of it is, getting a dozen kids in this building to commit and see through on a voluntary class? It’s like pushing a rope. But I know they want to do it. You want to shoot for tomorrow? Same time, same station. And I will personally, physically, get them in here.”

“Sure,” Ray said, the day now like chalk in his mouth.

Egan got up, shook his hand.

“Hey, we have Wall Street guys coming in here seven, seven-thirty in the morning to tutor? I call the kids at home the night before. ‘Yeah, Mr. Egan, I’ll be there, I’ll be there.’” He shrugged. “Like pushing a rope.” He shook Ray’s hand again.

“I thank you for your patience with us.”

Chapter 2

Nerese—February 9

Entering the Hook for the first time since graduation twenty-two years earlier, Detective Nerese Ammons, lugging two slide carousels featuring a freak show of murdered bodies, confiscated weapons and various drug still lifes, approached the security desk on shaky pins.

The uniformed guard, tilting back in her folding chair as she watched Nerese coming on, was Tutsi-tall and sharp as flint, the set of her eyes and mouth exquisitely unforgiving, eight silver rings dangling in a crescent along the outer shell of her right ear.

“You got a visitor’s permit?” It was more of a throw-down challenge than a question.

“A what?” Nerese half-snapped, the impersonal hostility combined with the psychic disorientation of being back in this building working on her nerves.

The guard just stared at her.

“I’m here for a special assembly,” Nerese said more evenly.

“Do you have, a visitor’s permit,” the guard said a little more loudly, a little more slowly, Nerese wondering if perhaps at some point over the years, she had locked up a member of this bitch’s family.

“Let me ask you something!” Nerese near shouted as she prowled the stage of the auditorium, mike in hand. “Let me ask you”—addressing the fistful of hyped yet surly At-Risk students who made up her audience—“who do you think, remember we’re talking the police now, who do you think, is the more dangerous of the species. Male? Or female . . .”

“Male!” the boys howled, hooted, spreading their tail feathers, but not really listening.

“Male, huh?” She laughed, the detective’s shield clipped to the waist of her dark blue skirt suit winking gold in the mahogany-stained hall. “Male, OK, male.”

Having blown off the entertaining yet useless slides after the first tray, the “Be a Leader, Not a Follower” speech altogether, Nerese was winging it this afternoon, almost free-associating.

Trailing mike cord, she walked off the stage to stand before the students in the front row.

“You.” She pointed at a big lunk slouched so low in his seat he seemed to be melting, the kid shave-headed with small turned-down ears. “Come on up here . . .”

That was enough to make the others cut loose with another twist-and-shout session, the boy tentatively rising to his feet half-smiling and fake-limping down to the police in front.

She had picked a giant; six-four, -five, towering over her self-consciously, muttering “Shut up” to his classmates in the seats.

“What’s your name . . .” She had to rear back to make eye contact.

“Jamiel.”

“Shamiel?”

“Jamiel,” then, “Shut up,” again to the seats.

“OK now,” holding Jamiel by the elbow as she addressed the others. “I’m on patrol, I come up on Jamiel here in an alley and he’s up to no good. But it’s just me and him . . . All things being equal, who do you think’s gonna come out that alley like nothing happened. Who . . .”

Some of the kids got all thinky and quiet, trying to suss it out as if it were a trick question, others spinning out to new heights, Nerese ignoring the ruckus. “Who . . .”

“You?” one girl said cautiously, the others tentatively agreeing, the alternative way too obvious.

“All things being equal, you think
me
?” She curled a hand against her chest. “
Hell,
no. Look at this ol’ boy! He can kick my behind up one side of the block and down the other . . .”

Jamiel started rocking, a hand covering his face.

“Look at him! What do you think, they teach us some supersecret karate moves? Do I look like Jackie Chan to you?”

The kids turned into popcorn.

“Look at him, and look at me. But now, and this is why I’m telling you the female is the far deadlier of the species . . . Because all things are
not
equal, and if it’s just me and him in that alley? I’m gonna do whatever I have to do to survive. If I got the time? I’ll get on my radio, call out the troops. But if I don’t? I’m goin’ right for Baby Huey,” patting the holstered Glock on her belt. “See, a male cop, he might be all macho, thinking, Yeah, I’ll take this kid down with my bare hands, and all that. But me? Unh-uh. I can’t take him like that. And I
will
survive . . . The female, boys and girls, is the far more deadlier of the species . . .”

The PA speakers affixed to the balcony booped loudly, signaling the end of the period, and the kids began to file out of the auditorium, not one of them even looking back at her over their shoulders.

“You’re welcome,” she said out loud but not really put out, seized as she was by the irresponsibility of her own crackpot lecture, once again proving to herself that you could say anything you wanted in this school system—in this city, most likely—because no one ever really listened anyhow.

She had never considered herself a sour or even pessimistic individual before, and she hoped after retirement she would come back up to the light, but these last few months of endgame assignments were just straight up kicking her ass.

Coming off the stage with her Crime Doesn’t Pay slide show in a Waldbaum’s shopping bag, she noticed a gray-haired gent in a shiny suit sitting by himself toward the rear of the auditorium, and as she made her way up the aisle he rose to greet her.

“Detective Ammons?” The guy offered his hand, Nerese faltering as she stripped the gray from his hair, filled in a few facial creases.

“Mr. Egan?”

“Yeah,” cocking his head. “Do we know each other?”

“Mr. Egan.” Nerese brightened. “I was in your English class like twenty-odd years ago. Nerese Ammons?”

“Nerese?” he said tentatively, not remembering her.

“I
loved
that class. I’ll never forget, you read us parts of
Grendel
in Old English.”

“
Beowulf
?” he gently corrected.

“What did I say,” Nerese flushed, praying that he hadn’t sat through her Looney Tunes lecture.

“So you’re a detective,” he beamed. “That’s great, just great.”

“I also had two years of college,” she blurted, embarrassing herself further. “You still teaching English?”

“Well, these days I’m the principal, actually,” he said, almost apologetically.

“Hey, there you go.” Nerese smiled, but just wanting to get the hell out of there now.

“Listen,” Egan took her hand in both of his. “These kids, I can’t tell you how grateful we are for you coming in like this.”

“No problem.” Her hand slid free as she headed once again for the doors.

“Listen, Denise . . .”

“Nerese,” she listlessly corrected him, just like she had to correct every third or fourth person who addressed her by name every day of her life.

“Nerese. Sorry.” He perched on the arm of a chair. “Can I talk to you about something?”

She dropped into the hinged seat directly across the aisle from him, the two of them dwarfed by the oceanic emptiness of the hall.

“Which district do you work out of?”

“The Bow and Arrow district,” she said.

“Come again?”

“I’m ten weeks from retirement. When you have less than a half-year to go they take you out of the field, give you stuff like this.” She flapped a hand toward the stage.

“Oh yeah? Why’s that?”

“It’s a long story.” Nerese sinking, sinking.

“The reason I’m asking, Nerese, is that we had a teacher here, a volunteer no less, local guy, terrific guy, was a very successful television writer out in California, came back to town, came to us, offered to teach a writing class off the cuff, got stood up by the kids three four times in a row before I could make it happen. The guy was patient, never complained, just kept showing up until we finally got the thing airborne. Taught here for a month, like I said, a great guy, an incredible resource for us . . .” Egan took a breath, hauled one leg up across the other.

Nerese stole a peek at her watch: 2:15.

“Anyways, two days ago, the guy was assaulted, got his head bashed in pretty good. He’s laid up in Dempsy Medical. And, I made some inquiries, they don’t know what happened, who did it, but the poor bastard almost died.”

“This was in school?”

“No no no. In his apartment. Now, I know a few detectives, made some calls, but my guys, turns out they’re retired, on vacation, one guy’s under indictment apparently. The thing is, whoever did this? They’re still out there and for whatever reason there doesn’t seem to be much of an investigation going on, and you know, Jesus Christ, I’d like to see someone nail that sonofabitch.”

“No, I hear you,” Nerese said softly, thinking, Not my table.

“I mean, I feel like I owe this guy for what he did for the kids here, you know?”

“You think it was any of them?”

“His students? Nah. I mean who the hell knows these days, but no. Not really. Anyways, I’m just wondering if I could impose on you, you know, see if you could look into it, light a fire under somebody’s ass, because . . .”

“I’ll look into it,” Nerese said, just to say something, as she cautiously rose from her seat.

“That’s great, just great.” Egan offered his hand again, Nerese having to put down her shopping bag to shake.

“By the way,” she said. “Your security guard?” She nodded to the lobby. “Has got a real attitude problem.”

“Hey,” he shrugged, “she’s a security guard.”

“Nice to see you again, Mr. Egan.” And once again she began to make her way up the aisle to the doors.

“Nerese?”

She turned.

“You want the guy’s name?”

She just caught herself before asking him, What guy.

“Ray Mitchell,” he said.

“Ray Mitchell.” She nodded, embarrassed yet again; lethargy tending to perpetrate itself.

She headed for the rear doors again, stopped, turned back. “Ray Mitchell?”

He nodded.

“From Dempsy?”

“Originally,” he answered cautiously.

“How old’s this guy . . .”

“How old? I don’t know. Forty? Early forties?”

“Early forties?” Nerese put down the Waldbaum’s bag. “And you’re saying he was assaulted?”

Nerese read Egan’s awkward silence as a yes, and for the first time in months she felt within herself something akin to joy.