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
