“Uh-huh,” Nerese said, staring at the stark, undeniable crucifix.
“You want something to drink?” Tom shifted from side to side. “I want something to drink.”
Nerese got up and followed him into the kitchen.
He opened the refrigerator to reveal a synthetic bouquet of knockoff-brand sodas: orange, grape, lemon-lime, root beer.
Despite the last ten years of sobriety, White Tom retained many of his junk-head proclivities: the sweet tooth for candy bars, glazed doughnuts, sodas, sugar-laden coffee and more coffee—vats of it. He couldn’t pass a pay phone without flicking the coin return, still stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of salvageable debris—rubber, copper, iron, aluminum—all of it cash on the hoof at a scrap yard. He assembled the day’s paper out of cast-off sections in diners and coffee shops, and he still walked around with a set of works, although these days they were for shooting insulin, not scag.
Preceded by the dry-whisk shuffle of flip-flops on linoleum, Arletta entered the kitchen wearing a poncholike housedress, a heavy gold crucifix nesting in the bony hollow at the base of her throat.
“Lettie, you remember Nerese, right?”
Arletta nodded without changing her expression, took one of the sodas and retreated back down the hallway.
Nerese had never cottoned to that woman. An ex-junkie like her husband, these days she worked at the Armstrong Houses Homework Club, aka the youth center. She was a well-respected figure in the life of the projects, known for a program she had started there designed to combat juvenile nihilism with manners. She believed in salvation through the practice of common courtesy, through ritualized consideration of others. Nerese was all for anything of a positive nature, but the woman was a humorless pill; had the grim-lipped visage and burning eye of the A.A./N.A. proselytizer. Plus, it was hard to forget Arletta from the brief time when Nerese had worked vice and Tom’s future wife had been out there all night in front of the abandoned section of the Dempsy Medical Center wearing nothing but shorty pajamas, platform shoes and a copper wig, the part in which slowly revolved like a nocturnal sundial hour after hour as she made her way in and out of the backseats of cars.
In those days, Arletta had weighed maybe a hundred pounds, but she was easily double that now, more in danger of a heart attack than any kind of sexually transmitted disease.
Nerese knew that she was being hard on a soul who had basically clawed her way up from degradation and oblivion to some kind of purposeful life, but she just didn’t like the bitch and that was that.
White Tom and Arletta: ebony and ivory; dope, in Nerese’s experience, the Great Equalizer, the only thing that truly brought people together across the color divide. And she was far from alone in her thinking on this.
She knew, for example, that Port Authority cops set up on the Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel, if desperate or bored enough, would always stop a car coming through from New York if the occupants were males of different races—reasoning that the only motive a white man and a black man would have to cross a state line together was to score. It would always be a two-bit bust, users not dealers, but the cops would be on the money just enough times to justify the perpetuation of this policy.
Ebony and ivory; even White Tom and her brother Antoine got thick as thieves around dope about six months after the big fight.
“So what’s up with Freddy that you’re asking?” Tom said, then, before she could formulate a deflecting answer: “Oh. You know his brother-in-law Reggie? Reggie Powell? He OD’d a few weeks back, or so they say. I personally think he was given a hot shot, but I heard his people were having trouble coming up with the scratch to bury him and this Hopewell guy from the heyday threw his mother a check for thirty-five hundred zorts to get him in the ground. What was the guy’s name?” Tom rapped his cane on the floor. “Roy. Roy. Ray. No, yeah. Ray. Ray.”
“Ray Mitchell,” Nerese said, then instantly regretted it.
“Ray Mitchell? Yeah, I don’t remember him.”
“He was a few years older than us.”
“That was a good deed, though, right? But now wait. I heard that that guy took a real beating. He’s in a coma or something?”
“Not quite that bad.”
Tom looked at her; click, click, click. “Oh.”
“I’m just exploring things.”
“But why would Freddy . . .”
“I’m just exploring.”
“Unless he was banging Freddy’s wife or something.”
Caught off guard, Nerese hesitated half a beat.
“No,” Tom said. “Get the fuck out of here. Are you shitting me?”
At first Nerese balked, but then thinking, In for a penny . . .
“Do you know her?”
“Freddy’s wife?” He shrugged. “She’s got to be a straight shooter because I don’t even know her name. Sorry.”
“You think he’s the type who’d go after somebody like that?”
“Freddy?” White Tom humped his shoulders. “Who’s to say.”
“How about that guy he stabbed in County?”
“That was kill or be killed.”
“Guy just came at him out of the blue?”
“Out of the blue, huh?” His face narrowed with knowledge. “Where’d you hear that?”
“Kenny Howell.” Nerese already feeling like a sap. “You know something I should know too?”
“Let’s just leave it at ‘kill or be killed.’ That part’s true.”
“C’mon, what . . .”
White Tom looked away, Nerese knowing from past experience that once he had made the decision to shut down a line of inquiry it was a waste of time to push him.
“Who’d you hear about the money from?” she asked, working the other angle.
“Who’d I hear it from? Around here, are you kidding me? He might as well have given it to her live on pay-per-view. Forget about it.
“But if you’re looking hard at Freddy for this, he’s not a thief per se,” Tom said, back to propping himself up against the living room wall.
“I’m just exploring things.”
“It could be that this guy Ray stepped in and paid for the funeral before Freddy could get a chance to do the same. You know, it not even being his family, like a pride thing for Freddy, but no. I don’t . . . Scratch that, scratch that. I like the fucking-his-wife approach.”
Nerese nodded noncommittally, White Tom not really having anything for her on this.
“OK then.” She began to rise from the couch.
“But that was amazing of him to do something like that, right?” he said softly, speaking more to himself than to Nerese. “That’s a good guy. Ray Mitchell . . . Wait.” He snapped out of his musings. “He lived in Six Building. Played handball all the time. Good-looking mother. I remember his mother, too. Yeah, OK. A handball player. Ray. He’s older than us, yeah?”
“That’s what I said.” Nerese not sure whether to unpack or not.
“Now he’s an actor, right? Something?”
“A writer.”
“A writer. I should be a writer, the fucking story and a half I got to tell. So you know him, huh?”
“A bit.”
“Well, I’ll tell you. I got something in the works now, I can’t go into details, but . . .” White Tom shifted his weight to take the pressure off his dead hip. “I would very much like it if you could arrange some kind of sit down for me to talk to this guy.”
Nerese just stared.
“Neesy, people like him, it makes them feel good to help people like me.” Then: “Just think about it, OK?”
Chapter 14
Hospital—February 17
Armed with the Freddy Martinez mug shot, Nerese entered the monitored-care ward and once again felt the fist clutch the back of her blouse and yank. Ray was lying there today as if awaiting his embalmers, his head wrapped in pristine cotton, eyes shut, mouth agape, spaghetti-thin nasogastric tubing running into one taped-down nostril.
“We had t
o drill,” the neurologist said, sidling up to Nerese, arms crossed over his chest. “The bleed was starting to fill the cranial cavity, put pressure on the brain, so we needed to open her up, clip the site and evacuate the buildup. But when we got in? There was nothing to do . . . The site had closed on its own and the bleed had drained itself off into the vault. I mean, better safe than sorry, but as it turned out he needed the procedure like a hole in the head.”
“When’s he going to be good to talk?”
“To talk? To actually talk, I’m not sure. To come around, I’d say tonight? Tomorrow?”
“And he’s going to get good?”
“Should. I don’t know what kind of residual damage we’re talking about here.”
“Damage . . .”
“Physical, verbal, memory. It’s the brain. It’s like the futures market, up, down, you’re busted, you’re flush, you’re busted all over again and it’s not even time for lunch.” He cocked his head and squinted at Freddy Martinez. “That the guy?”
“Maybe. You know if anybody’s been in to visit him the last day or two?”
“Like the actor coming back to admire his handiwork?”
“Just anybody.”
“You have to ask the nurses. I’m like the Road Runner around here, you know, Meep-meep.”
“OK.”
Nerese stood at the foot of the bed and watched Ray breathe, his lips parched and peeled, his chest almost imperceptibly rising and falling beneath the smock.
There was a very good chance that they had left his skull open to allow for easier access in case there was another buildup in fluid. Nerese momentarily wondered where they would keep the disc of removed bone until the time they saw fit to permanently plug the hole.
Her business was done here for the day, her next stop in the tour a sit-down with Carla Powell—Danielle’s mother, Freddy’s mother-in-law; then, after Carla, Danielle; after Danielle, the birthday boy himself, Freddy Martinez, that sit-down resulting in payback, vindication and a one-way trip to the Sunshine State. But the sight of Ray in his present state kept her rooted to the spot, leached her of all confidence, all purpose. Abruptly seized by a notion that if she were to let him out of her sight right now, if she were to leave his bedside, he would never regain consciousness, never live to see her bring it home for him, she wound up taking a seat. After a few interminable minutes of stilted silence, of simply sitting there watching Ray suspended in his own ether, she began to talk to him.
“You know,” Nerese murmured self-consciously, leaning in close, “I’ve been thinking about how pissed off I am at everybody these days, bitching about this that and the other, and I kind of concluded that that’s pretty much symptomatic of pre-retirement around here in general. Because, if I think about it? If I think back, I can’t ever remember one cop, no matter how much they loved the Job, who didn’t leave bitter, leave pissed off at the department, you know, just like me.”
Like the last man on earth still reflexively obeying traffic lights, Nerese found herself pausing, waiting for a response.
“But the thing is? I love being a cop. Even with all the bullshit, the politics, the pettiness, the racial shit—I mean, hey, after twenty years I got enough chips on my shoulder to build a fucking tree house—I love it, and, I don’t want to retire. I mean what can I possibly get into out there that’s got half the juice of what I’m doing now, you know what I’m saying?
“Greatest show on earth. You said it yourself. Run to trouble instead of away from it. Nothing like it in the world.”
A nurse came in to check Ray’s IV. Nerese leaned back, her face half-turned, until the woman was finished. She then leaned forward again, elbows on knees, her voice now directed to the space between her feet.
“That being said, I did run into this one fucking asshole yesterday over at County Narcotics?” Nerese’s teeth locked at a slant. “I mean what kind of hypocrisy is it that a guy taking anabolic steroids by the fistful can bust some bonehead street kid’s got thirty dollars’ worth of weed in his sock. Where’s the justice in that? I mean, we all have our demons, we all do shit that’s fucked up or abusive or bad judgment or whatever, but this guy, Billy Herman? I had a run-in with him about three years ago, or actually the problem is, I didn’t have a run-in, should have had a run-in with him about three years ago . . . I mean, shit, man, seeing him again?”
Nerese leaned back, covered her mouth with an arched hand—what the hell was she doing?—then shrugged. Fuck it. She had never been able to get this one out.
“See, three years ago I got put on loan to County Narcotics, the city and county tend to move us around like checkers. So, you know, first they check to see if Butchie and Antoine are locked up, which they were at the time, and I temporarily go over to County for a series of summertime raids.
“And, OK, it’s going, it’s going, until finally this one night? It’s August, hot night, we hit this apartment in Armstrong, supposed to be a full-blown crack factory in there.”
Nerese tilted forward, her voice once again furtively directed to the floor.
“OK, so, everybody, we’re all vested up, hearts pumping, guns out, we go through the door, like boom . . .
“What’s in there? Six scagged-out junkies, pipes, needles, triple-beam scales, all kinds of paraphernalia but no dope. A handful of bullets but no gun. It’s like ninety-nine degrees, we’re all wearing those heavy Kevlar vests but there’s no air-conditioning, no fan. And because it’s a ground-floor apartment we have to keep the windows shut and locked, not that anybody there was even physically capable of trying to escape . . . OK, so, we spend the better part of an hour tearing up this hot, greasy, stinky four-room roach palace, got these six skeletons sitting on the sofa all cuffed together, gonna be back on the street before we finish the fucking paperwork . . .
“And the thing is, given that the apartment is on the ground floor? Over the course of that hour, this crowd of tenants starts to collect right outside the windows. We pull down the shades, but you can hear them laughing at us . . . I mean, hey, it happens. You win some, you lose some. I mean, we’re all pissed off, fed-up, embarrassed. It goes with the territory.
“Anyways, we can’t stay in there forever and when we leave, we know we’re going to have to walk through that crowd to the van.
“So we do. And what happens is what usually happens. The seas part, the assholes in the back rows start woofing you out, you bite the bullet and you split.
“Except, except this Billy, Billy Herman . . . I’m walking next to him as we come out of the building and, as we start walking the gauntlet? I see Billy, you know, pissed off like the rest of us, I see Billy look at this black kid maybe all of sixteen, seventeen years old, pregnant out to here . . . Billy, as he goes by her, he looks her in the eye, then looks at her big belly, and all he does, is shake his head and hiss a little, you know, like when you’re disgusted with something? Looked at her unborn child and shook his motherfucking head like, ‘Great. Here comes another one.’
“Now, he didn’t say anything to her, barely made eye contact, but when he shook his head and made that hissing sound? That young girl reacted like he had just kicked her in the belly, like he had just punched her in the face. I mean she actually staggered back like he had hit her. Can you picture what I’m saying?
“He just condemned that unborn child. He just judged and juried it in a split second but you know, I mean really, he didn’t do, you know, technically speaking, he didn’t do or even say a thing.
“And what can that girl say—‘That cop just gave my stomach a dirty look’?
“But I tell you, Ray, in a world full of shit? It was one of the worst things I ever saw, the look on that pregnant child’s face . . .
“And to this day I’m mad at myself for not calling him out, but the same with me. What could I have said, ‘Why’d you give that kid’s belly a dirty look?’ He would’ve looked at me like I was crazy. I doubt he even knew that he did it, you know what I’m saying? I mean really,
what could I have said?”
To cover her self-consciousness, Nerese began rooting around in her purse but after a moment of this mindless activity, when Ray abruptly breached the void by croaking “More,” she shot to her feet, tissues and tubes flying off her lap.
But the word had come from deep within the black pool, Ray following it up with a dream-gabble of language, a flock of nonsense, before once again subsiding into silence.
Numb, embarrassed, Nerese suddenly saw herself as if from across the room, ladling out her grief to an insensate presence with a hole in its head the size of a silver dollar, and she just fell through the earth.
As self-congratulatory as she had been the day before, during her walkabout in Hopewell, regarding the state of her life—her achievements, her responsibilities, her career; as euphoric as she had been, envisioning the beauty of going out on a last solve rooted in personal history, in the repayment of a childhood debt; sitting now at Ray’s bedside, her own ludicrously furtive monologue still resonating in her ears, she began to see everything through a violently opposite lens. The people she was so proud to support were, in fact, a grim assortment of the diseased, the deranged, the addicted and the criminal; the mortgage-free house a soggy rat-trap that she couldn’t wait to flee; her son as mewling and unformed as a newborn; and her career—twenty wounding years of little or no respect from her peers, of being regarded as a cosmetic statistic, an outsider, a nonplayer and a malcontent—forgotten but not gone.
Twenty wounding years . . .
But rather than provoking her to walk out in despair on Ray and his stonewalling ways, as she studied his assault-marbled face, his gape-mouthed exhalations, she now felt desperate to work this last case successfully, desperate for the potential of grace offered by this last clearance.
In fact, as she sat there, fighting down the impulse to shake him awake, rattle whatever brains he had left into a state of pliable alertness, she came to recognize that if for any reason she should be denied this last professional satisfaction now that she had come to fully appreciate its soul-soothing promise, it would elevate the pain of her impending retirement from run-of-the-mill bitter to near-unbearable.
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