AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You must be very proud of them, Ms. Petrelli.” Peabody offered a hint of a smile.
“Of course I am.”
“Their school’s a clip from here,” Eve commented.
“They take the bus. Have to change and take another.”
“Makes a long day, for them and you, I imagine.”
“They’re getting a good education. They’re going to be somebody.”
“You had some rough times in the past.”
Bebe tightened her lips, looked away from Eve and back to her laundry. “Past is past.”
“The DeSalvos still have some money, some influence in certain circles.” Eve glanced around the tiny kitchen. “Your brothers could help you out, you and your boys.”
This time Bebe showed her teeth. “My brothers aren’t getting near my boys. I haven’t said word one to Frank or Vinny in years, or them to me.”
“Why is that?”
“That’s my business. They’re my brothers, aren’t they? It’s not a crime if I don’t want anything to do with my own brothers.”
“Why does Anthony DeSalvo’s only daughter hook up as an LC?”
“As a way to stick it to him, you want to know so bad. Ended up sticking it to myself, didn’t I?”
A lock of graying hair fell over her brow as Bebe yanked out a boy’s sports jersey to fold. “He wanted me to marry who he wanted me to marry, live the way he wanted me to live. Like my mother, looking the other way. Always looking the other way, no matter what was right in her face. So I did what I did, and he didn’t have a daughter anymore.” She shrugged, but the jerkiness of the movement transmitted lingering pain to Eve. “Then they killed him. And I didn’t have a father.”
“You did some time, lost your license.”
“You think I got shit around here, with my boys in the house? You think I’m on the shit?” Bebe shoved at the laundry basket, threw her arms wide. “Go ahead, look around. You don’t need a warrant. Look the hell around.”
Eve studied the flushed face, the bitter eyes. “You know how you strike me, Bebe? You strike me as nervous as you are pissed off. And I don’t think it’s because you’re on anything.”
“You cops, always looking to screw with somebody. Except when it matters. What good did you do when they killed my Luca? Where were you when they killed my Luca?”
“Not in the Bronx,” Eve said evenly. “Who killed him?”
“The fucking Santinis. Who else? Fucking DeSalvos mess with them, they mess with us. Even if Luca and me, we weren’t the us.” She gripped the basket now, as if to steady herself. And her knuckles went as white as the plastic. “We had a decent place, a decent life. He was a decent man. We had kids, we had a business. A nice family restaurant, nothing fancy, nothing important. Except to us. We worked so damn hard.”
Bebe’s fingers tightened on, twisted a pint-sized pair of jockies before she tossed them back in the basket. “Luca, he knew where I came from, what I’d done. It didn’t matter. The past’s past, that’s what he always said. You’ve got to make the now and think about tomorrow. So that’s what we did. And we built a decent life and worked hard at it. Then they killed him. They killed a good man for no good reason. Killed him and torched our place because he wouldn’t pay them protection. Beat him to death.”
She stopped to press her fingers against her eyes. “What did you cops do about that? Nothing. The past isn’t the past with your kind. Luca got killed because he married a DeSalvo, and that’s that.”
She began to fold clothes again, but her movements were no longer efficient, and the folds no longer neat. “Now my boys don’t have their father, don’t have the decent place to grow up. This is the best I could do, the best of the worst. I don’t own a restaurant, I work in one. I rent out a room and a bath upstairs so I can pay the goddamn rent, and so somebody’s here to watch over my kids when I have to work nights. This is the life I’ve got now. My boys are going to have better.”
“Ava Anders offered you a way to give your boys a better life.”
“They earned their scholarships.”
“There was a lot of competition for those scholarships,” Eve said. “A lot of kids qualified, just like yours. But yours got them. Full freight, too.”
“Don’t you say they didn?
?t earn what they got.” She lashed toward Eve like a whip. “If you say that to me, you’re going to get out of this house. You get your damn warrant, but you’ll get out of my house.”
“She offered a lot,” Eve continued. “Little vacations, drinks by the pool. Did she single you out, Bebe?”
