Samaritan by Richard Price Read Free Book Online Page B

consecutive life sentences for contract murders on behalf of various New Jersey crime families.
    “Nonetheless, by the time Jackie was twenty-five, he had been supposedly drug-free for over a year, he was engaged, had even reconciled with Stubby. In fact, Stubby had got him an apprentice card with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which meant very good money and solid job security back then. Still does, in fact . . .
    “But the night before Jackie’s wedding, April 23, 1965, a tragic mystery came about which at this point in time I can safely say will never be solved.” Ray was back to enjoying himself.
    “April twenty-third, three a.m. Jackie’s brother Benny rings our doorbell, we were living in Hopewell by then, wakes up my parents.
    “Apparently earlier in the day, Jackie had had an argument with Stubby, stormed out of the house and vanished.
    “So around midnight Benny had been sent out to track his brother down, which basically meant hitting all the old dope spots, hunting down all of Jackie’s allegedly ex-running buddies, and checking out all the emergency rooms. No Jackie anywhere. Finally he had called the county morgue at Dempsy Medical, described his brother over the phone, blond, six-four, two-thirty, the morgue said, ‘Yeah, we got someone like that, come on down and make an ID.’
    “And so Benny had come to our house, I couldn’t have been more than five, six years old at the time, to ask, to beg my parents to go with him to the morgue because he just couldn’t bear to see . . .
    “Well, they all went, and yes, it was Jackie on the slab; an overdose.
    “And then Benny turned to my parents again. ‘I have to go home and tell my father. Could you please come with me.’
    “So somewheres around sunrise they all go to Stubby’s house to break the news. They walk in and the first thing they see is that all the hallway mirrors are covered with sheets. And when they come upon Stubby in the living room? He was barefoot and sitting on a wooden crate, had a skullcap on his head, a yarmulke. He was sitting shivah, which is what Jews do when they’re in mourning for a family member.
    “They had come by to
break
the news, but Stubby was already set up. He looks at them, says, ‘He’s dead, right?’ He just knew.
    “Stubby lived another twenty years, but to the day he died he never told anyone what he and Jackie had argued about that made him so sure that this kid was going to go out and basically kill himself right before his wedding.”
    The class seemed drawn in, just one girl scowling at her nails.
    Mrs. Bondo’s face was an arrangement of downward-pointing arrowheads, looking as if she was having an incredibly difficult time keeping her mouth shut.
    “And so, for me, if I was in this class? What I would probably try to play around with, would be to imagine the conversation that took place . . .” And here Ray faltered, sensing in the pit of his gut how wildly inappropriate this “example” was, the whole saga so complex, lurid and melodramatic. “The, the conversation that took place between this mean little bastard . . .” The class flinched at his language, but Ray was too wretchedly embarrassed to care. He couldn’t believe that Bondo hadn’t shut him down halfway through this mess. “The conversation between this psychological child abuser, who after years and years of being hurtful and hateful to this poor overgrown kid growing up under his roof, was now finally, finally trying to do the right thing by him . . . and the kid himself, an emotionally screwed-up, con-man junkie jailbird hustler. What went wrong? Who said what to who that would make my cousin go and fall off the earth like that right before his wedding?”
    “Maybe he didn’t want to get married,” Altagracia, the girl studying her nails, said.
    Myra, the smart quiet one, raised her hand. “Well what do we write about if no one in our families has a drug problem?” Saying it with