Free Samaritan by Richard Price

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