I took the child’s game and dog cage, she took Pharaoh and held the umbrella over all of us out to the car. The croquet set was very light. I remember thinking that it must have been made from balsa wood.
Maybe Idabell thought my head was made from the same material.
She might have thought it, but she was wrong.
CHAPTER 18
ALL THIS AIN’T over no dog,” I said.
We were driving south and west toward B. Shay’s apartment house. Pharaoh was so excited to be with Idabell that he was leaping around the car and barking. I had to stop the car and make her put him in his cage.
“All what, Easy?” she asked.
“Your husband, your brother-in-law.”
“I don’t know what happened,” she said, rising a little from her dozing posture. “For about three weeks Holland was really upset. He was mad and said terrible things to me. You know I’m from a good family, I’m not used to men using language the way he did. And then he was mad at Pharaoh. It’s true. I left because he wanted to kill my little baby.”
“What was he mad about?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe it was something with a business deal he had with Roman.”
“What kind of business were they in?”
“Roman was a gambler. He didn’t have a real job. He did business ventures now and then but mainly he gambled. He played in Gardena and Reno and Vegas.”
“And what about Holland?” I asked.
“I loved him,” she said. “I mean he was kind and sweet. We’d go out to a movie and then walk back to his house speaking to each other in French. My parents are Guianese but I learned French in school because I came here so young. Holly came when he was a child too but he learned French at home. Sometimes we’d talk all night long. He loved it that I was a teacher. He was proud of me. He’d take me everywhere and say to everybody that I was an educator and that I worked among black children to educate them.”
A police car moved up alongside of us as we went. The cop in the passenger’s seat shone a powerful flashlight on me and then on Idabell. He turned to his partner, they said a few words, and the car turned off onto the next cross street.
“He sounds nice,” I said. “What did he do for a living?”
“He managed paper routes in Hollywood.”
“What?”
“He used to get up early in the morning and go down to his paper shack on Olympic and prepare the paper boys for their bicycle routes. He had six boys doing morning routes, seven in the afternoon, and three who did street sales. He did the whole Sunday route on his own with two helpers.”
“Used to? He give it up?”
“Then Roman came,” Idabell said. “Holly quit after he saw how flashy Roman was with his deals and his gambling.”
“Holland get into that line’a work?”
“He didn’t know what he wanted to do. One day he was going to trade the T-bird in for a Cadillac and go into the limousine business; the next day he was going to be a musician. Roman killed Holland.”
“He did?”
“I don’t know if he actually did it, but when Roman came to town Holly went crazy. He would have done anything to outdo his brother.”
“That’s how come they were dressed like each other?”
“It was only since Roman came,” the schoolteacher said again. “Roman always wore snakeskin shoes and one of three tweed coats, or a black jacket. After Holly saw how he lived he bought the same things, he even spent four hundred dollars on shoes. I told him that he shouldn’t try to copy his brother. But he just told me that the same clothes looked better on him. They were identical twins but Holly was always saying that he was taller and more handsome.”
“Sounds crazy,” I said.
Idabell didn’t deny it.
“Roman really wasn’t a bad guy. He was full of himself though—Holly hated that. He wanted everybody to look at him the way they looked at Roman.”
“But you said that they worked together.”
Ida’s face flashed hard for a moment but then turned soft and tired again. She shook her head and blinked twice before saying, “I don’t know anything about that.”
“Were they close as kids?”
She nodded lazily. “Roman was two minutes older than Holland. Their parents came to Philadelphia from Guiana. When I met Holland, Roman was in the army, stationed in Europe.
“The first time I ever met Roman was here in L.A. That’s when Holly got all crazy. He wanted to go to parties all the time. There’d be drugs, people were having sex in the bedrooms right on top of our coats.” She was waking
