Read Online Impulse by Catherine Coulter - Free Book Online Page A

at Bainbridge followed by Yale, a wealthy entrepreneur in his own right. Odd that he had eyes very nearly the color of hers—pale blue—when she now realized that it was also the color of her real father’s eyes. Mrs. McGill had been wrong about DominickGiovanni being pure Italian. Those pale blue eyes had to have come from a more northern country.
    There was only one other similarity between the two men besides the color of their eyes. Dominick Giovanni and Charles Rutledge were nearly the same age. Only a year separated them, Dominick Giovanni being the older.
    “You’re very quiet, Rafaella.”
    She jumped at the unexpected sound of Charles’s voice. It was pitched low, just above a whisper, so as not to disturb her mother, which was absurd, since her mother was in a deep coma.
    I was just thinking about my father, who’s a criminal.
Rafaella wasn’t about to tell Charles of her discovery. It would be needlessly cruel. He loved her mother, and the knowledge of her mother’s journals, her seemingly endless obsession with Dominick Giovanni, would give him incalculable pain. No, Rafaella wouldn’t tell him a thing. “I was just thinking about things. I’m scared, Charles.”
    He simply nodded. He understood, too well. “I spoke to Al Holbein. He called yesterday to see how Margaret and you were doing. He told me about you breaking that Pithoe case in Boston. He said it was par for the course—you were bright as hell and tenacious as a pit bull—but a cop, Masterson is his name, is trying to take all the credit, which, Al says, isn’t working, but is also par for the course.”
    “Actually all the credit should go to a little old Italian lady named Mrs. Roselli.”
    Charles cocked a beautifully arched brow at her. “Tell me about it.”
    Rafaella smiled. “Al called me in and assigned me to the case. I didn’t want it. The press had sensationalized it, and it was particularly gruesome. And nobody really cared anymore, because the crazy who had done it—Freddy Pithoe, the son—had confessed right away. It just gave the media a chance to do another danceon Lizzie Borden again. But you know Al, he got me going, made me so mad I wanted to slug him. He didn’t say a word about any anonymous tip he’d gotten, and of course he’d gotten one—from Mrs. Roselli. When I asked her later why she hadn’t told the police what she’d told Al, she said that the snot-nosed kid they sent had no manners and treated her like a
strega stupida.
Why should she say anything to a snot-nosed kid with no manners who treated her like a stupid witch? I had no answer for that.
    “I then asked her why she’d told Al. She said that he’d done a series about ten years ago on the Italians in Boston and he’d mentioned her husband by name and written what a fine man he’d been. Guido Roselli had been a fireman killed in a runaway fire in the South End. She pulled out the yellowed clipping and read it to me.
    “She told me too that she didn’t really like Freddy. She thought he was weird. It was the boy, Joey, she cared about.”
    “Yet she cleared Freddy and showed the boy to be the guilty one. Interesting.”
    Rafaella nodded.
    “Why do you think Freddy Pithoe opened up to you? Was he another Mrs. Roselli?”
    Rafaella gave him a crooked smile. “He told me over and over, when I asked why he hadn’t told the police about X or about Y, that they’d just called him a
fucking liar
—excuse the language, Charles—and told him to shut up. I listened to him and didn’t comment until I realized he wasn’t telling me the truth; then I kept after him until both of us were hoarse.” She raised her eyes to the ceiling. “Thank you, God, for Mrs. Roselli.”
    “What will happen to the boy, Rafaella?”
    “Hopefully he’ll get into a decent foster home and have a very good shrink.”
    “And Freddy?”
    “I spoke to Al. He promised to find a job for Freddy on the paper. He’ll be all right. Freddy’s one of the walking