Maybe he killed Idabell and he knew that the postmark would be after her death.
None of that mattered though. I wanted to read those letters and so I took them.
I bolted the fire door, intending to burn the letters if anyone tried to break in on me.
Then I sat down to read. The first letter was in the lovely hand of Idabell Turner. The words were barely contained by the blue lines of the classroom essay paper. It was dated on the morning we made love.
To the Police, the Public Prosecutor, and the Criminal Courts of the state of California:
I. Idabell Turner/Gasteau, do hereby state that my husband, Holland Bonaparte Gasteau, has threatened my life and that I am in such fear of him that I am fleeing my home, my job, and any friends that know both me and my husband. I leave this letter, and a letter from him to me, in case Holland finds me and murders me without a witness to point at him.
Idabell Turner
Holland’s letter was also handwritten, printed actually. The script was larger than in the note I’d found in his wallet but there was still that angry slashing slant to his words. He’d used such force with his ballpoint that the paper was torn in spots.
I am a man Idabell
Not a henpecked thing for you and your friends to mock. It’s me who you have to support and stand behind. Not your girlfriends and not that damn dog.
You will do what I tell you to do. And you will be at home waiting for me even if I don’t come back all night or all weekend. And if I do come back at three in the morning and you’re not there then I will come out after you with my pistol. And if I find you with another man I will kill him too.
I’m writing you this letter instead of talking because I love you and I don’t want to hurt you. Because you might get me mad and then I’ll have to hurt you and I don’t want that. So I want you to read this letter and hear everything I have to say before you give me any of your mouth. Because all I want to hear from you is—Yes Holly.
I’ll be home later on. You better be here.
The letter wasn’t signed but I was sure that it was genuine. I was also sure that he’d meant every word. He loved his wife; he wanted her to happily be his slave; he would kill her if she didn’t accept her role.
Idabell had waited a month too long to run away. She should have done it on the night she got that letter. The minute the pistol appeared on that page it was bound to go off.
I folded the letters and put them in my pocket. There was no reason to give them to the police. They didn’t prove a thing that would help me.
I HAD COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN about Ace when he caught up with me on my way to the parking lot and Mouse’s car.
“Mr. Rawlins,” he called from far off. “Mr. Rawlins.”
I watched the small man approach me across the blacktop. He took the baseball cap from his head when he reached me.
“Mr. Rawlins, I have something to talk to you about.”
“Is it important, Ace? I got things on my mind.”
“I think so.”
“What, then?”
“Newgate called me to his office yesterday. When I went there he was with that Sergeant Sanchez fellah. They, uh, they started asking all kinds of questions about you, Mr. Rawlins. They wanted me to be a Benedict Arnold and give you away. Sanchez wondered if there was anything I could tell him about you.”
“Like what?”
“If you stole something, maybe. If you broke the rules with some of the children.”
“Naw.” I believed it but I didn’t want to.
“Yes, sir. But I told them that I didn’t know a thing except that you were the best boss I ever had.” There was passion in his voice that I’d never heard from him before.
“Well thanks, Ace, uh, thank you.”
“But I mean it, Mr. Rawlins. I’ve worked for a lotta people down here in Los Angeles. And up until you I didn’t have much use for them. The way they put a hand on your shoulder and pat you like you weren’t no more than a dog. The way they tell you things like they knew it all and you were just stupid. But I like you, Mr. Rawlins, because you make it a good place and when people get harsh you don’t come down on me even if I did something wrong. Like that time I left the window in the electric shop open. All you told Mr. Sutton was that it was a mistake. You told him that you allow for mistakes.”
I had forgotten the incident. I had misjudged Ace. What else had I lost or missed?
“So I’m gonna tell you something, Mr. Rawlins,” Ace said. “You know I don’t talk to the cops much. I mean, they’re okay for traffic and like that but if you start testifying the police will find some reason to turn it around on you.”
I had never heard him say as much in the whole time he’d worked for me.
“I won’t tell the cops, but I’ll tell you just in case it means something to ya.”
“What’s that, Ace?”
“That man who was killed in the garden. He had a key to the fence. I seen’im go into the garden four or five weeks ago. It was that week I was opening up early for you. You know I came in a whole two hours early because I was so nervous that I’d get something wrong. I didn’t dare do the boiler without going through all the steps of bleeding it out first. Anyway, that’s when I saw him.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“If something happened I would have, but I didn’t know. I didn’t want to get into any trouble if nothing was wrong.”
All the times I distrusted Ace, all the times I saw his respect as guile—now all I saw was a kindred spirit; a man trod on by his history, his poverty. A man who knew that the people in power wouldn’t notice his broken bones, or if they did, they would blame him for his own misery.
I put out my hand and said, “Thanks, man.”
CHAPTER 33
GRACE PHILLIPS LIVED on Pinewood Terrace down below Adams. When John was helping her to look for a place I told him about a woman I knew, Mrs. Grant, who’d been looking for a long-term tenant. Grace took the little cottage huddled behind Mrs. Grant’s house. You had to walk through the driveway to get there.
“Easy Rawlins, is that you?” The voice came from behind the opaque sheen of her front-door screen.
“Hello, Mrs. Grant,” I said, squinting at the doorway.
“She givin’ a party back there?” the screen door asked.
“Not that I know of,” I said. “I just come by to shout at her.”
“You might have to raise your voice pretty high,” Clara Grant said. She pushed the screen door open with the rubber tip of her cane. The light on her face revealed why she hid behind that door. She’d been laid low by stroke. Her pear-shaped, walnut-brown face was cut in two by the broken vessel. Half made of warm brown wax that was flowing down from the skull; half left to wonder why she couldn’t do what she used to do.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“She always got a pack’a yowlin’ dogs back there yappin’ an’ carryin’ on.”
“Somebody back there now?” I asked.
She made a gesture that would pass as a nod. “I don’t exactly know who but I heard footsteps a while ago. You know I nap when the sun come in.”
“Okay now, Mrs. Grant. See ya later.”
At another time I would have offered to come by and see after her now and then. But my working life kept me away from the everyday country kind of living that I had known in Texas and Louisiana. It bothered me that I couldn’t be of more help, but I had chosen my path—and I followed it down to Grace Phillips.
THE DOOR TO THE COTTAGE was open. There was a baby crying somewhere in another room. I rapped lightly on the doorjamb.
“Anybody home?” I called.
A woman’s scream was cut short, punctuated by a blow.
I rushed into the house through a room of cheap imported wicker furniture. I heard another wail and went through the door, into a bedroom that was almost all bed.
She was on the floor, arms around his knees and begging, “Please, I got a cough,” pre
tending to hack a little. Bertrand Stowe was holding a medicine bottle high over his head; his sternest face looking down upon her.
In the middle of the jumbled-up bed was a naked brown baby, howling and waving both hands and feet.
Stowe caught me out of the corner of his eye and turned, fearful of who I might be. At that moment Grace yelled and leapt at the bottle in Stowe’s hand.
“Stop it!” he shouted. He unleashed a clubbing slap that knocked her down on the bed, almost on top of the child.
He raised his hand but I moved in and pushed him down. He rose up to fight me but I pushed him down again. When Grace went to go after the bottle in his hand I grabbed her around the waist and yelled, over her screams, “Pour it down the drain! Pour it down the drain!”
It took him a moment but then he knew what I was saying. He went into the small bathroom that was next to the bedroom and poured the green fluid into the commode.
“Nooooooo,” Grace cried, just like the dying witch in The Wizard of Oz.
She fell to the floor, weeping. Bertrand slumped down beside her.
I picked up the baby. He was a powerful boychild with strong legs and arms. He struck me again and again with his fists and feet. I rubbed the top of his head and made deep sounds in the pit of my throat; all the time aware of my supervisor and his junkie girlfriend.
The baby needed a quiet moment, so did the adults. Bert and Grace stayed on the floor, dumb and drained.
After a while the baby stopped his crying and gave me the kind of stunned look that babies get when they receive pleasure from an unfamiliar source. I sat down on the bed, putting him across my lap, and rubbed his back. After a while his eyes stuttered shut.
I laid him in the center of the bed and we three adults then went into the other room.
Grace moaned, “My baby, my baby.”
Stowe and I sat down on a dilapidated wicker couch and Grace lay crying at our feet. Her eyes were bloodshot and watery. Her skin had taken on a blue hue. Her chapped lips were blood-flecked from Stowe’s slaps. And her mouth never stopped moving, though very few intelligible words came out.
“What’s happenin’ here, Bert?” I asked my boss.
“She wanted to quit, Easy. She wanted it. I thought that she had quit months ago but then I found out that, that she had been getting it from a friend but now that was cut off. I came over to help her quit.”
Grace raised up and said, “Please, Easy. Tell’im t’lemme go. Please. Please.”
“You shouldn’t hit her,” I said as if she wasn’t there.
“I had to stop her.”
“You should just hold her back. You should just hold her an’ tell’er that you’re tryin’ t’help. Hittin’ ain’t gonna help a thing.”
“I know,” he said. “I just, I just …”
Grace’s moan turned from general despair to a kind of painful retching. She crawled, then staggered to her feet and made it to a door behind the couch. We could hear her vomiting into the kitchen sink and then the sound of the tap running.
Bertrand got up. “I better go see about her,” he said.
The baby started whimpering after a while. Grace cried along with him from the other room. That was as close as she could come to being a mother right then.
WE UNDRESSED GRACE. I could tell that Bertrand was still crazy for her because he kept trying to shield her breasts and pubic hair from my sight. I wanted to tell him that he could have all of that junkie—I didn’t want any.
She didn’t actually fall asleep but closed her eyes lying there next to her blood child. In that darkness she writhed with the pains of withdrawal.
“How long you been here?” I asked Stowe.
“All day.”
“How long you plan to stay?”
“I don’t know.”
“You gonna stay here till your wife leave you?” I asked. “You tryin’ to get rid of her?”
“No.”
“But you gonna spend the night here?”
“I, I … I hadn’t thought.”
There was a phone next to the bed. I dialed the number and Alva answered, “Hello.”
“Hey, Alva.”
“Who’s this?”
“It’s Easy.”
“Okay, Easy,” she said. “I’ll go get him.”
There was a moment’s hesitation in her voice. That little gap of silence told me everything Alva thought about me. I was a menace, a threat, a violent piece of John’s past that she hadn’t been able to cut out—yet.
“Yeah?” John said when he got on the line.
“I got a problem, John.”
“My car?”
“No, man. Your car was okay the last time I saw it. No. It’s Grace.”
John didn’t want to hear about an old girlfriend. Alva wanted to hear about it even less. But he was the only one I knew who would sit with Grace through the worst of it.
“A friend’a hers is coming,” I told Bertrand Stowe. “The man who told me about your problems before.”
Stowe nodded, yielding to the necessity of the situation.
“Who was her connection?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Don’t lie to me now, Bert. It’s not the time to lie.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Yes you do too.”
He wanted to keep his secret but the pressure of all that pain in someone he loved had worn away his resolve. “It was the man who got killed at your school.”
“Roman Gasteau?”
“Yes,” he sighed. “He was … Lonnie’s father.”
“Who?”
“The baby. Roman was his father. I made a deal with Roman when Grace left him. I gave him a job.”
“A job?”
“Yes. Nighttime building consultant. I gave him the master keys to the district and a salary of eight hundred dollars a month. He promised to leave Grace alone.”
“That man had the keys to my school?”
“He had keys to all the schools.”
“So he’s the one been stealin’?”
All Stowe could do was to steal glances at my eyes.
“That why you killed him?” I asked.
“I didn’t kill anybody. All I did was to give him a job in return for his promise that he’d leave Grace and Lonnie to me.”
“Are you crazy? All the cops got to do is read his name in the records and you’re busted.”
“They won’t find his name in the files.”
“Oh? And why not?”
“Because I hired him under another name. Landis Defarge. He used the name Landis Defarge.”
“You hired a man who had your girlfriend on heroin for a job under an alias—but you know his real name. And now that man is dead at one of your schools.” With each word Stowe wilted more.
“I didn’t know that she was back on drugs until after he was dead,” Bert said. “Ask her if you don’t believe me.”
I didn’t mean to laugh.
“What possessed you to do all that, Bert?”
“It was the child,” he said earnestly. “I couldn’t let Lonnie be brought up in that kind of life. I know I was wrong. I know it but it would have been worse any other way.”
“Except now they might look at you for murder.”
“Well,” he said, “I didn’t kill him.”
“How about her?”
“No.”
“You know that for a fact? Cop was askin’ me was there anybody at the school at four or five in the morning. Where were you?”
Bertrand’s mouth started to tremble.
“Honey,” Grace said.
“Yeah, babe,” he answered. Yeah, babe.
“Could you hold me please?”
Bertrand ignored me and my questions to mold his body around the woman who gave his life its spark.
JOHN AND ALVA CAME TOGETHER. I think Stowe was relieved that he didn’t have to leave his woman with a solitary man.
Alva took the baby in her arms and John
sat down next to Grace on the bed. When she started acting up he said, “Lay down and be quiet, Grace. Ain’t nobody got time for your noise.”
She did what she was told. John had a powerful presence about him. Not many a man, or woman, would tell him no.
WHEN I WAS LEAVING, John came to the door and asked, “Where’s my car, Easy?”
“I got it parked somewhere, John. Don’t worry, I’ll have it back to you by day after tomorrow.”
Out on the street Stowe asked me, “What are you going to do, Easy?”
“Save my ass.”
“What do you have to do with it?”
“More than I want. I’ll tell ya that. You go on home, Bert. Go on home and I’ll call ya about Grace. Don’t worry, John’ll take care of her.”
“Thank you,” he said.
I left him trying to start his car.
CHAPTER 34
BONNIE WAS IN THE KITCHEN when I got there. She was talking to Jesus while Feather fooled around with Pharaoh. There was a pile of freshly made chocolate chip cookies on the table.
“What’s goin’ on here?” I asked from the doorway.
They were all smiles and giggles.
“Hi, Daddy,” Feather said. “We made cookies.”
Bonnie looked proudly down on my girl.
Something good had happened while I was gone. I tried to remember the last time in my life that someone, other than Jesus, took care of something for me, without me having to ask; the last time that I could lay back and relax, sure that someone else was at the wheel. I thought all the way back to my childhood but I couldn’t remember it still.
Don’t look too close, a voice said in my head. I shuddered and blinked and turned away from Bonnie Shay.
“What’s wrong, Easy?” she asked.
“Nuthin’,” I said.
“Huh?” Feather said, voicing the question for everyone in the room.
“Nuthin’,” I said again. “Here, let me throw some dinner together.”
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