names of those four boys?” said Ghislaine, “Patrice, Louis Jean—what were the other two?”
“Hervé and Honoré.”
“Did you see the look on Philippe’s face? He must have thought the police already know everything about this case! Seriously, how did you get their last names?”
“It wasn’t all that hard,” said Nestor. “I have a friend on the School Police. We used to be in the Marine Patrol together. I noticed that really shook your brother up.”
“Well… what about Philippe’s involvement?”
“He’s scared,” said Nestor. “He didn’t want to say a word about the whole thing. My guess is he’s afraid of the kid involved, this Dubois. My friend told me he’s a bad kid, got a juvenile record this long. That’s why I wanted to let them all know they’ve got something much worse than this kid to worry about.”
“Let them all know?” said Ghislaine.
“Well, you know yourself that the first thing your brother’s gonna do is get hold of those four boys and tell them the cops are talking about them, and not just cops from the School Police, either, and that one of them recanted. Each boy will say that it wasn’t him, of course, but they’ll… you know… they’ll start wondering who the traitor is. If I’m right, everybody will start mistrusting everybody else, and they’ll be thinking, ‘Hey, is that what could happen to me if I lie to protect Dubois? It’s gonna be worse than what Dubois could do to me.’ I also think it’ll help if they start talking about this teacher, Estevez, and what’s gonna happen to him. They can’t all be lacking in affect! I can tell Philippe’s not that way.”
“I know he’s not,” said Ghislaine. She paused… composed… deep in thought… then exploded with “He lacks something worse, Nestor! He lacks courage! He’s a baby! He fawns over—worthless delinquents like Dubois! He fears them more than death itself—and therefore he’s drawn to their gross toughness and wants them to like him!… I’m sure they laugh at him the moment he’s gone, but he grovels before their every opinion. Does he worry about being arrested for perjury? Does he worry about the horrible things that could happen to him in jail? Does he know how guilty he will feel if he helps put Mr. Estevez in jail? Yes!—he knows all of that. But none of that is anything compared to his fear of the tough guys, this Dubois and all the rest of them. He idolizes them for being tougher and more violent than he is! And right now he’s trembling at the thought of the unspeakable horrors of what they will do to him if he betrays them. It’s worse than unspeakable—it’s unimaginable! In his mind it’s the ultimate horror!…! He’s just a poor little baby, Nestor, a poor little boy!”
Her lips began compressing and turning down at the corners… her chin trembled upward until it looked like a wriggling fig… her eyes began leaking…
::::::Yes? No? Perfectly okay if I put my arm around her to console her—right? Right… to console her.:::::: So he did.
They were standing side by side as his arm went across her back. Her head was down, but then she tilted it upward until she was looking him right in the face from no more than six inches away. Nestor turned the arm he had around her from a now-now-buck-up gesture to a genuine squeeze. That brought her face even closer to his. Her expression was a primordial plea for help.
“Don’t worry. If I have to take care of this Dubois, I’ll do that, too,” Nestor said in a hushed voice but quite grandly.
Her eyes still fixed upon his face, Ghislaine spoke a single word barely above a whisper: “Nestor…” Her lips parted slightly.
The lips hypnotized him. ::::::Cut it out, Nestor! This is a police investigation, for God’s sake! But she’s giving me an open invitation! More than anything else, she needs comfort and protection. Right?… right. It’s just a way of restoring her composure. Right?… right!:::::: He brought his lips so close to hers that now she had only one eye, in the center of her forehead, practically on top of her nose—
Sound of a key in the lock on the front door, barely eight feet from where they stood. Whoops! Their heads snapped apart. Nestor’s incriminating arm retracted from her side back to—slap!—his.
The door opened. A tall, slender man, a fifty-year-old Philippe, he looked like… stood before them… startled and embarrassed… Nestor felt the same way, startled and