Samaritan (8 page)

Running one through the VCR—that big flat-screen TV like visual morphine—she discovered that
Law & Order
was, in fact,
Law & Order
; Nerese both relieved and a little frustrated, this room not telling her shit.

Before moving on to the rear quarters of the apartment, she hunkered down over the remains of the vase, only thin splinters and powdery nuggets remaining, the larger pieces having been removed to a crime lab, dropped into a ten-gallon terrarium with a dollop of Krazy Glue and fumed overnight in order to raise fingerprints. The results had been unhelpful, just Ray and his parents. The vase had had a bulbous base and a long thin neck, the thing most likely swung like a bat by that neck, which, the crime lab had told her, was missing from the accumulated pieces, probably snapping off on impact, the doer most likely taking it with him.

Moving to the kitchen she found shrink-wrapped chicken parts and raw vegetables in the refrigerator—Ray actually cooking his own meals; some vitamins in there too, along with a half-full bottle of Heineken.

As she knocked off the rest of the beer for him, she noticed five twenty-dollar bills sticking out from beneath a blender on the kitchen counter, plain as day—so much for a robbery, although when things got out of hand people tended to bolt, so . . .

The bathroom was spotless, no hairs in the tub or sink, Ray starting to get on her nerves now.

The medicine cabinet contained Advil, Mylanta, Donnatal—an antispasmodic for the gut that her mother used—and Ventolin, an asthma inhalant. There were no condoms—Nerese thinking about Ray’s light-skinned girlfriend—and, in keeping with Bobby Sugar’s report, no medication for HIV or any other STD—no evidence of a life-altering, revenge-inspiring medical condition.

Above the toilet, matted vertically in the same elongated rectangular frame, were three taxi licenses: the top one, Usher Mittnacht looking out at her from 1935; the middle, Arthur Mitchell from 1958—Artie; Nerese had been dead-on in remembering the glasses and pompadour—and, holding up the other two, Raymond Mitchell, 1990, Ray looking a little fucked-up there, hollow-eyed and slack-mouthed—but who wouldn’t feel that way posing for a hack permit, third generation in a row like evolution spinning its wheels.

This photo, however, given the tissue trauma he had sustained from the assault, offered to Nerese her first clean read of what Ray looked like as an adult. His face vaguely reminded her of an African mask, long and tapered with a small full mouth and slightly protruding heavy-lidded eyes—bedroom eyes, her mother would have called them. Yet despite their sleepy aspect, and despite the depressing circumstances behind the photo op, there was a distinct sense of almost too much alertness in his gaze, a constant monitoring quality that suggested to her that Ray hadn’t had an unself-conscious moment in his life.

He had nice hair, though, dark and swirly, lying about his head in thick lazy piles like carelessly coiled ropes.

In the bedroom there were more hand-labeled videos piled around a second TV—all
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
and
Angel
—Nerese not even bothering to give them a test drive, and in a night table drawer she found two joints, one half-smoked, both withered and weightless with age, Nerese muttering out loud, “At least finish the fucking thing, Ray,” and a small bottle of baby oil, which once again made her think of Ray’s lady friend although, considering the petrified joints, maybe he just suffered from dry elbows.

In the closet, all of the clothes were mainstream retail—Gap, Levi’s, Banana Republic—no whips, leather, garter belts or boas, but in one of the corners hung a square-cornered multi-hangered plastic clothes protector like a zippered tent, inside which were a dozen skirt suits and pantsuits, most of them cut from thick nubby material, couch material, the patterns and colors simultaneously garish and dull—the type of clothes respectable older women wore once sex was off the program; Nerese assumed these items had belonged to Ray’s mother. And that, she declared to herself, was that.

But back in the living room, with the sunlight beaming in at a slightly different angle than before, Nerese noticed another bit of wall art that had eluded both her and the crime scene dusters: two greasy handprints, now highlighted by the rays, situated about ten feet to the left of the front door, flush to the surface, roughly five feet high and spaced approximately eighteen inches apart.

Facing the wall and letting her own hands hover over the rough outlines, she found that if she stepped back a little without moving her upper body, she was in a perfect stance to be frisked, and utterly vulnerable to a head shot coming from either side of the plate or from behind.

And if that blow were in fact coming up on the left side of the head, which was where Ray had caught it, the force and the direction of the impact would land her directly in the pile of medical and investigative debris on the floor.

A little spooked by her re-creation, and thinking that she had pretty much gotten all she could from an eyeball read of the scene for now, Nerese was granted one last discovery when she wound up skating on a sheet of paper that lay camouflaged on one of the large white floor tiles as she headed for the door.

With a bellyful of adrenaline from her near spill, she picked up the sheet and found on the flip side a masterfully drawn caricature, done in ballpoint ink, of a preadolescent homie, some ghetto Dondi, clothes comically oversize, the kid floppy as a puppy except that he was brandishing an enormous hand cannon—specifically, an anatomically correct Glock 19—aiming it directly at Nerese, the legend printed deco-style beneath his feet: “What’s Mine Is Mine.”

Pocketing the drawing, she finally left the apartment.

Outdoors again, she inhaled a low-tide stench, funky but evocative, coming off the conjunction of river and bay. And she thought about Ray, ex-cabbie, ex–TV show writer, up there in his apartment surrounded by seniors, watching endless taped TV shows, cooking dinner for himself and seeing his daughter, what . . . one night a week? Two weekends a month?

Then Ray the other way—inner-city public school volunteer with money to burn, hooking up with some other-tribe girlfriend, bringing her around, bringing around her other-tribe kids, “wild Indians,” she guessed his half-crazed neighbors would call them; bringing around at least one young male street acquaintance who might or might not be the hard-core artist in her pocket, bringing around whoever and whoever and whoever had put him against that wall, intent on sending him into the black land.

Standing there under the drifting cry of the gulls, Nerese looked out across the Hudson to the skyline of lower New York. Then, turning around, she took in the Gothic spires of the Medical Center in downtown Dempsy. Little Venice was roughly equidistant from both—but despite the toney digs, the views, the peaceful primacy of bird caw and sun-dappled water, she experienced not so much a sense of exclusivity, as that of being stranded.

Chapter 6

Hospital—February 12

“Can you tell me where you are?” the neurologist asked in an impersonal singsong as he shined a light in Ray’s left eye to see if the right pupil would sympathetically dilate—the consensual reflex, Nerese thought it was called.

“Our Lady of Perpetual Misery,” Ray snapped, no real humor in his voice.

“Can you spell the word ‘house’ backwards?” slowly withdrawing the light to test for distance adjustment.

“Sure I can,” Ray said, then defiantly clammed up.

“Can you do so, please?” In that same impervious lilt.

“E, S, O . . . E-S-U-O-H.”

“OK. Can you tell me the name of the President?” The light gliding from far left to far right.

“President of
what
 . . .”

“The United States?”

“Davy Crockett.”

“Can you tell me the name of the President of the United States, please?”

“Oh give me a fucking break!” Ray brayed like a mule, his voice crackling with exasperation, dehydration and maybe a little something else—something not fully arrived yet.

Refraining from announcing her presence until the neurologist finished his bedside exam, Nerese was shocked at the change in Ray over the last twenty-four hours. The good news was that he was more alert; the bad, that he was nearly out of control with agitation.

His skin, merely sallow the day before, was now the color of air-hardened cheese, and even through the empurpled mask of ecchymosis that raccooned his eyes she could plainly pick up the hollow pockets of shadow deepening under his blood-drowned whites, the Decadron-induced sleeplessness, or once again, something as yet unannounced, starting to ferociously take its toll.

She was desperate for the neurologist to finish up so she could get to work here.

“Are you experiencing any headaches?” the doc murmured as he flipped up the bottom of the blanket to expose Ray’s feet.

“You mean besides you?” Then, “Hey!” aimed at Nerese as he finally noticed her standing quietly beyond the pale.

“Hey, gorgeous.” She gave him back a discreet wave, once again musing on the fact that because of the nature of his injuries she could stare at his face all day long and still not have any idea of what he normally looked like.

“Are we done yet?” Ray asked with a sprightly rage.

“Almost,” the neurologist murmured, running a pencil-shaped metal rod up the sole of one foot.

“That’s the Babinski test?” Nerese asked cautiously.

“Babinski reflex,” running the other foot, Ray barely responding to the pressure.

If his toes had splayed and arched that would have been bad news, otherwise known as a positive or negative Babinski, she could never remember which.

“He’s looking good, huh?” she ventured.

“So far,” the guy not turning to her. “Hold your hands out directly in front of you and close your eyes, please?”

Ray thrust his arms forward, his hands bunched into fists.

“Close your eyes, please?”

Ray looked to Nerese in exasperation.

“Close your eyes, please?”

Ray finally did as he was told, looking now, with his stitched bashed and multicolored face, his lightly shut eyelids and his double straight-arm, like a caricature of the Frankenstein monster.

“Hold them steady, please?”

Ray stiffened slightly at the elbows to lock himself in as the doctor, sliding the flat of his hand between the extended fists, lightly batted them back and forth as if to widen the gap.

“Steady, please?”

Fuming ostentatiously, Ray complied as the doctor continued his fluttery assault.

“Steady . . .”

Nerese knew he was looking for one of the arms to involuntarily fall away from the other: pronator drift it was called, a sign of incipient paresis on the side of the body opposite the trauma site, the blinkered patient not even aware that he was flunking, but Ray seemed to be hanging in just fine.

“OK, then,” the neurologist said, then simply walked away, Ray calling after him, “Don’t I even get a fucking lollipop?”

Nerese waited a beat for this latest profanity to stop reverberating through the ward before she dropped her shoulder bag, shrugged off her coat and sat in what she already thought of as her chair.

“You always curse people out like that?”

“Like what,” Ray said.

“How you feeling today.”

“Me? Freaked. Bored. I can’t read, I can’t watch TV, I try to listen to books on tape but I can’t, I can’t . . . I go off somewheres, or I get hung up on some sentence or phrase, next thing I know I missed half a chapter,” the words rattling out of him like rocks down a chute.

Nerese saw no evidence of a book, a television or a cassette player, didn’t think the last two would even be permitted in a ward like this, and concluded that Ray had been either hallucinating or dreaming about these activities.

“You getting any visitors?”

“You.”

“How ’bout your daughter?”

“No. I don’t want her here. Are you kidding me? I look like fuckin’ Linda Blair. I mean
look
at this.” Tapping the shaved and sutured patch of scalp. “It’s like a fuckin’ helipad up there. So no. No Ruby. She’d completely flip.”

“That’s too bad,” Nerese said gently.

“I mean, I talk to her on the phone, but, you know, that’s not . . . She’s thirteen, so it’s, How’s school. Good. How’s Mom. Fine. How’s tricks. Good. I don’t think kids start using full sentences until they graduate college, and they’re incapable of asking you about
your
motherfucking day until they’re thirty-five. So, I know, it’s like, I know she’s very . . . She’s, she’s suffering over this, but I don’t see how coming here . . .”

“What do you mean, she’s suffering?” Nerese going to work.

“‘What do you mean, she’s suffering?’ ” Ray mimicking her note for note. “And by the way, talking about kids? As soon as I’m presentable? I want you to bring your son in to see me. You know, because you were talking full-boat scholarship or the Army, right? It just so happens that I write
great
recommendations for college, been doing it since I was a high school teacher, so let me just talk to him, get a sense of where he’s coming from, and I will do him right.”

“Great,” Nerese said, thinking, In a pig’s ass.

“I think that’s my true art form, the college recommendation, plus you know, with the cachet of the TV show under my feet? You know, the scholastic and secular? All’s I need is a little face-to-face for inspiration, then forget about it, anywhere he wants to go. In like Flynn.”

“OK then,” Nerese dismissing all this self-trumpeting as Decadron-tongue.

But even if Ray’s offer had been a sober one, Nerese would never have taken him up on it. Butchie, Antoine, her mother, her uncle and especially she herself, when appropriate, were all part of the arsenal of charm-and-disarm; Darren was off-limits. Using his name in the course of an investigation always gave her the creeps; made her feel like something bad was about to happen. Even the little she had semi-complained about him to Ray during her first visit to the hospital left her with a faint sense of dread, and now that she and Ray were officially reacquainted, Nerese doubted that she’d ever voluntarily bring up her son’s name again.

“Anyways”—Nerese arched her back—“I got to tell you, your place, Ray?” She brought bunched fingertips to her lips and blew a kiss. “Out of sight.”

“Thanks,” he said with off-balance tentativeness, then, “What?”

“What do you mean, ‘What.’” Nerese rolled up her sleeves.

“What were you doing in my place?”

“It’s my crime scene.”

“Oh no. No
way.
”

“It’s my catch.”

“Tweetie,” things moving a little too fast for him now. “What the fuck, don’t you have anything better to do?”

“Actually, I don’t.” She leaned forward. “See, the department? Once you’re down to six months and a wake-up—you know, getting ready to put in your papers? They automatically reclassify you as functionally insane and yank you from the rotation. Start assigning you shit like driving blood samples to the state lab in Sea Girt, or reorganizing the filing system for the gambling squad, because they don’t want anybody out on the street who’s distracted, you know, got one eye on the clock or going through some kind of midlife identity crisis. That’s no good. That can be dangerous. And as far as my situation vis-à-vis the job right now? They have me mostly on this public school circuit, giving talks, like, the po-lice is your friend, watch out for peer pressure, don’t be a dropout, drugs are bad for you . . . You know, like there’s one kid left on the planet that hasn’t heard this shit a million times before.”

She was losing him to his discomfort, Ray licking his dry lips, eyes going wide left then wide right as if his optical stalks were hot-wired to a metronome.

“Anyways, my point being, you know, in regard to your being laid up like this? Because you don’t want to cooperate, nobody really gives a shit what happened to you. In fact, the only reason this thing isn’t dead and buried is that I personally asked to pursue it and the Job sees it as a harmless enough activity for a lame duck like me so, the answer is, No, I don’t have anything better to do.”

“They won’t even give me so much as a chip of ice,” he said, as if not having heard a word out of her mouth. “My tongue feels like the pad on a dog’s paw.”

“They usually don’t give anything oral to head traumas until they’re out of the woods,” Nerese said. “Let me ask you something. Your next-door neighbor, Mrs. Kuben? Does her place always smell like that? It’s like a five-room mothball in there.”

“Oh man, that’s nothing,” he said jaggedly. “Did you pick up on her Ziploc fetish? Anything smaller than a piano she’s got stashed in a Ziploc bag. She buys stuff in the supermarket, you know, pasta, dry cereal, sugar, takes it out of the box, throws the box away, transfers everything to labeled Baggies. My father told me he saw her sitting at her dining table tearing open little packets of Sweet’n Low, you know, however many packets come in a box? Tearing them open, and dumping them all together into a see-through sandwich bag.”

“Can I ask you something personal? Why are you living there?”

“I don’t know,” Ray said. “When the Trade Center went down I came back from LA.”

“Came back?”

“I wouldn’t have, but I couldn’t convince Claire to let Ruby come out west to me, so . . . Anyways, I’m back not even three weeks, living in a hotel in the city, bang, my mother dies.

“So I come across the river, move in with my dad, temporarily I’m thinking, make sure he’s not alone, that he’s OK . . . Two weeks after the funeral? Guess what. The guy books. He fucking books down south, and I’m standing there by myself in the middle of the living room, just standing there like an idiot. I mean, I was glad the guy had a game plan for himself, glad I didn’t have to . . . But I was just standing there and then I figure, well, I own the place, paid for it, don’t have any other address, I’m gigless, not sure what’s next, you have to lay your head down
some
where, so . . .” He trailed off.

“Anyways,” Nerese moving in. “That Mrs. Kuben? How do I say this . . . She says you got so many, let’s call ’em people of color, marching through your doors? It’s like a stop on the Underground Railroad.”

Ray stared at her, processing, then, “Fuck her. They weren’t bothering anybody.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“Truly, truly, fuck her, that bougie-assed Ziploc-packing stick-your-nose-in-everybody’s . . .”

“Actually, the one I’m interested in, Ray, is the hootchie.”

“The what?” Ray needing another minute to integrate again, then, “And fuck you too.”

Nerese took it in stride, but let her face cloud over like he had just lost a friend; Ray instantly losing his bluster.

“Sorry.” He turned away, embarrassed.

“So who is she?”

“No.” Shaking his head, shutting this down.

“You know I’m gonna find out anyhow.”

“Why are you doing this, Nerese . . .”

Nerese, now.

“It’s easy to make me stop.”

“
Why
.” Almost shouting it.

“Why?” Nerese got up and stepped back from the bed. She had been thinking nonstop about this since the moment Mr. Egan had told her of Ray’s assault three days ago in the school auditorium, and now, right now she wanted to answer him as clearly as she could.

“Why, Ray, is because I believe in reciprocity, like I believe in God. I believe heart and soul in doing unto others as they do unto me, good
or
bad, and I make damn sure everybody around me knows it too, because let me tell you something: I have discovered that no matter what kind of shit I have to deal with, no matter what kind of animal behavior I have to contend with, it keeps me decent, it keeps the people
around
me decent, and these days, decency, simple human decency, is getting to be like hens’ teeth, OK? So if you want, I can sit here all day listening to you going on about fuck this one, fuck that one, fuck Nerese, but, you know, whether you make it hard for me or easy, the fact of the matter, like I told you the last time, is that I owe you. Sorry.”

“But I don’t
want
—”

“Ray Ray Ray,” drowning him out. “You don’t
know
what you want. Nobody . . . Hey. I walk in here yesterday you looked like someone shoved your face in a blender. I walk in here yesterday you were like two heartbeats away from slitting your wrists. And to
day
? You look even worse. Plus now you’re bouncing off the walls, motor-mouthing, cursing people out like you’re on meth or something. I mean, whoever did this to you, it’s like they drop-kicked your brain into the Twilight Zone, so . . .”

“Forget it,” folding his arms across his chest like an Indian chief, like a child.

“Ray.” Nerese took it down a peg. “That guy came into your home, lined you up against your own living room wall and tried to take you out like your head was a piñata.”

“What?”

“How can you let someone get away with that. How can you let someone violate you like that and not try to get yours back. If you don’t stand up for yourself on this, it’s gonna eat you alive. If you don’t stand up for yourself on this, it’s gonna give you
can
cer.”