Idabell.
BONNIE CALLED and I told her that she could come back in the morning.
“The kids need to be with you, Easy,” she said. Her voice was so soft and caring. It had the promise of daylight and love; it was like the lie of peace and brotherhood that had hoodwinked so many of my kind.
SHE BROUGHT THEM home at just past midnight. She was driving my car, which Primo had fixed. Jesus went right up to his bed and Feather fell asleep on Bonnie’s lap. She wanted to see the TV.
“I wanna see if he’s still alive,” she kept saying.
Somehow she didn’t hear it when we told her that he’d stay dead.
“WHY’D YOU KILL Holland?” It was past three. Bonnie and I were lying together in the bed, fully dressed.
She sat up and asked, “What?”
I didn’t have the strength to sit; I couldn’t even repeat the question.
“What?” she asked again.
“It’s okay, Bonnie. Nobody else knows. And I don’t plan to tell anyone.”
“Tell them about what? What are you saying?”
“It was when I saw that lipstick kiss you left on the note for me,” I said. “That’s when I knew for sure.”
She shook her head, and I got up on one elbow to face her. I was tired.
“Holland had a big kiss, that same dark color, on his face.”
If I wasn’t sure before, I was then. Bonnie’s look of dismay gave her away.
“That’s not enough, I know, but I was already half sure when I saw that broken green glass in your trash. You might have had the same kinda glasses as your friends, but probably not. All I wanna know is if you kissed Holland before or after you shot’im.”
Bonnie put her hand over her mouth.
“He … “ she said.
“Holland?”
“Yes. Yes. He called me after he got home. When he found Ida gone he called me looking for her. I told him that she was gone; that she had left the state. I thought that that would send him off looking for her. But instead he said that he wanted me to come over to his house right then.”
“Why?” I felt sorry for her in spite of myself.
“He said that he had the forms I’d filled out the night I went back to the airport, the night I forgot those damned carpet balls. Roman kept the copies that the customs official gave me. He said that he had the balls too. They had official seals glued to them. He said that if I didn’t come over right then he’d give it all to the police.”
“And you went?”
“He was excited when I got there. He told me that he wanted sex and for that he’d give me back the things he had.”
“Did you do it?”
She didn’t want to nod. “I didn’t … he raped me. He took me to the bedroom and made me…. He had this big black knife.”
I remembered the pillows piled high in the center of the bed, the blood on the sheets, and the cut that I thought was a pimple above her breast.
“It was over in just a minute. Holland was laughing kind of crazy. He was all sweaty and his eyes were shiny, like he had a fever. He put on his clothes and then when I asked him for the carpet balls he laughed and told me that I was going to work for him. He said that I owed him because of what Ida did.”
“And so you killed him?”
“He said that I was going to be his new wife now that Roman was dead and Ida was gone. He made me get dressed. He made me sit on his lap and kiss him. It was like you said. I got the gun from his drawer while he was in the bathroom. I shot him. I did.”
“He told you that Roman was dead?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“And then you called Idabell at the school and told her, right?”
“I told her to come over but I didn’t say that Holly was dead. We packed her things. I took my carpet balls and she took the croquet set. I took the glass because I just didn’t know what to do with it.” She looked me in the eye as if to say that she couldn’t help it; that she’d had to kill him.
I was in no place to pass judgment.
I SLEPT ON THE SOFA that night. In the morning I drove her back home while the country mourned JFK.
I went to Arno T. Lewis from Bonnie’s house and told him that I couldn’t find Idabell. He told me that they’d identified Idabell’s corpse the night before.
I had found, I said, that Bill Bartlett was Holland’s partner in the little paper route business that worked out of the shack that held the stolen goods. A few days later there was an account in the paper of how Roman and Holland and Bartlett were in business stealing from the schools. Roman, who had obtained his job under an alias with forged references, had abused his power as a nighttime building consultant. In a falling-out among thieves, the article speculated, Bartlett had killed Roman and then Holland. Later on, after meeting with Bartlett at Whitehead’s restaurant, Idabell Turner was found dead.
Traces of heroin had been found and Bartlett was being sought for questioning. However, his house had been
