Free Samaritan by Richard Price Page A

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