Read Online Rhode Island Red by Charlotte Carter - Free Book Online Page B

musician. And that graceless seeing eye dog of hers—Bruno.
    I forced myself to read on. The young woman and her dog, the article said, were both dead when police arrived on the scene. She has been identified as Inge Carlson. No witnesses had, as yet, come forward. Police said the motive for the killings was not known, but of course they had not ruled out the possibility that the girl and her canine companion had walked in on a robbery in progress.
    I stared dumbly at the photo of that silly dog. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to look at Inge’s face again. I wondered if her sightless eyes shone any brighter in death, but I was too scared to look, too sickened.
    In my dumbass attempts to do right, I’d managed to cut a pretty wide swath through the endless possibilities of wrong. Sig, the undercover cop I’d taken in off the street, was dead because I’d made him sleep in the other room.
    As for Walter, we’d been through the best and the worst together. I gladly took his money when I needed it, and his time, and his sex, and even, once in a while, his advice. In his own weird way, he loved me, I think. But I was fucking around on him, just as he’d said. Even if I was genuinely in love with the eccentric and gallant Henry Valokus—and I was—I was still cuckolding old Walt.
    And now this, the latest grotesquerie. There was no doubt in my mind that the blind girl and her dog were dead because of that twenty thousand dollars I’d given her—her inheritance from Sig. I thought I was doing the right thing, the compassionate thing, the correct thing. Following the gospel according to Ernestine.
    â€œFuck!” I kept repeating through the tears I fought to keep in my throat.
    There was a phone in the back of the coffee shop. I fumbled through my wallet and found Leman Sweet’s card.
    I left my name and the number of the coffee shop pay-phone on his voice mail. “It’s urgent,” I added. Then I took a seat near the phone and waited.
    It took about twenty minutes for him to call back.
    â€œWhat can I do for you?” he began, grudgingly civil. I guess I was still riding for free on his feelings for Aubrey.
    â€œI just read the paper,” I said. “Do you have anything to do with that blind girl thing? The one who was murdered?”
    Sweet didn’t answer for a minute.
    â€œWhat’s that to you?” he finally said.
    â€œDo you?”
    â€œYou figure it out, college girl. You saw me with the fucking guitar. I explained the undercover gig to you, with the street musicians. She was a street musician. I was supposed to be a street musician. What do you think?”
    â€œThe paper didn’t say anything about the musician angle.”
    â€œPaper didn’t say a lot of things. How dumb are you?”
    Actually, I could have answered that one. But I refrained. This was no time for self pity.
    â€œHello?”
    â€œI’m still here,” I said.
    â€œWhat’s this all about, college? Do you know something about that chick?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œWhat have you done, girl?”
    â€œI gave her twenty thousand dollars—the money that was missing from Charlie Conlin’s socks.”
    â€œFuck.”
    â€œYeah, I know.”
    â€œAre you saying you been in that apartment where she was killed?”
    â€œYeah. That’s what I’m saying.”
    â€œWhere are you?” he boomed into the receiver.
    I’d used up every bit of the goodwill Aubrey had built for me with Leman Sweet. He was back to hating me. But I’d made up my mind that if he so much as breathed on me this time I was going to pick up a bottle and kill him with it.
    I was waiting on the street when he pulled up to the coffee shop in his standard issue, plain clothes car. He reached over and opened the passenger door, barely looking at me.
    â€œSince you like to meddle with police business so much, I’m taking you to the