Rhode Island Red

by Charlotte Carter

  Walter didn’t.

  No, I didn’t tell him. I didn’t have to. He noticed.

  He had just come out of the shower that morning. I was making coffee. By the time he was dressed for work, Walter had turned sullen. He took a seat across from me in the kitchen, ignoring the plate in front of him.

  “Just so you don’t think you’re getting away with something, Nan, I know you’re fucking around.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Skeevy bitch.”

  “Cut it out, Walter.”

  “Cut what out? You’re dogging around and you know it.”

  “Walter, you sound like a tired housewife. I’m not your goddamn property. You never slept with anybody else while we were together?”

  Things took the predictable elevator up from there, ending with his wordless, self-righteous departure for the office. He didn’t slam the front door. Matter of fact, he didn’t even bother to close it.

  I sat alone for a while, feeling tired and torn—and guilty—until I decided I’d better hit the streets and make some money.

  It was hard to shake the bad mood. After an hour of playing I repaired to a busy coffee place on Thirty-fourth Street. The jelly donuts were tops, and I needed a shot of sugar, bad. The guy sitting next to me finished his chocolate croissant (I had tried one once—too oily) and walked out. I picked up the Daily News he’d left behind and started flipping through it.

  Page three was where I stopped flipping.

  BRAVE POOCH DIES DEFENDING BLIND MISTRESS

  One of the grainy photos accompanying the story showed a hulking, lifeless animal lying on its side. “Seeing eye dog and mistress both stabbed to death” was the caption. Next to that was a picture of a young woman three-quarters covered by an EMS blanket.

  “Fuck,” I said aloud.

  It was Inge—Mrs. Sig, the 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.

  “Fuck!” 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.

  “What can I do for you?” he began, grudgingly civil. I guess I was still riding for free on his feelings for Aubrey.

  “I 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.

  “What’s that to you?” he finally said.

  “Do you?”

  “You 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?”

  “The paper didn’t say anything about the musician angle.”

  “Paper 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.

  “Hello?”

  “I’m still here,” I said.

  “What’s this all about, college? Do you know something about that chick?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What have you done, girl?”

  “I gave her twenty thousand dollars—the money that was missing from Charlie Conlin’s socks.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Are you saying you been in that apartment where she was killed?”

  “Yeah. That’s what I’m saying.”

  “Where 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.

  “Since you like to meddle with police business so much, I’m taking you to the scene of the crime,” he said when I’d slammed the door closed.

  I had deliberately placed the sax case between us on the front seat. I kept my eyes fixed on the busy streets, on the people walking free, living, happy—not trapped like me, not hurtling toward some dark unknown, like me.

  “Start talking,” Sweet commanded.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “How did you know Inge Carlson?”

  “I didn’t know her. I found her.”

  “How?”

  “I asked around the street. Sig—I mean Conlin—had told me about her.”

  “And where did you get the bright idea to give away twenty grand of New York City Police money to a blind whore?”

  “I didn’t know it was your money, Mr. Sweet. I figured Conlin got it from someplace pretty bad, that he’d done whatever he had to do to get it, but it was his. If she was his lady, then some of it should go to her. Any kind of a man would want that.”

  Sweet’s mouth pulled back unattractively from his big teeth. “I wonder,” he said, “if you learned your line of bullshit in school or whether you’re just a born liar.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  “Yeah, sure. And that blind girl ain’t dead.”

  One good thing had happened: Sweet’s power over me—his ability to terrify me—was dwindling rapidly. His contempt and scorn were fast becoming a bore.

  “Okay,” I said quietly. “I’m the world’s biggest liar. Let’s move on to something else. Why are you taking me to her apartment?”

  “I want you to show me exactly what happened when you gave that money away.”

  “Nothing ‘happened.’ I just gave it to her.”

  “There’s a potential witness been turned up too. I want him to take a look at you. A good look.”

  “Just in case I gave her the money and then came back and stole it from her—and then killed her—right?”

  “You irritate the shit outta me, you know that?”

  “I’d gathered.”

  “We gonna see how smart you are later, when I take your ass to the station … little miss genius.”

  I sat back and sighed heavily, wondering whether Leman had washed out of junior college somewhere.

  Inge’s place looked alm
ost the same. Almost. Except now it had that low-level, greasy glare a room takes on when something awful has happened there. Like my place the night Charlie Conlin was killed. And, like my home that night, her place had become utterly unprivate. Strange people—cops—coming and going at will. Poking at things, being careless with their cigarettes, talking too loud.

  A policewoman looked over at Sweet. “Ready?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Send him in.”

  She hurried off. A slight young man no more than twenty with dark hair walked in a minute later. Eyes downcast, he stood next to the half-opened door, reluctant to enter the room. He might have been Latino, or Hawaiian, or Filipino. I couldn’t get a clear look at his face. The boy’s hair was cut very short and on one side of his scalp a pair of initials were incised. His big shirt and ballooning, low riding jeans completed the pathetic picture of a kid lamely trying to carry off the b-boy thing. Somebody should break it to him, I thought, that the happening look is now running to button down shirts and Hush Puppies.

  “Hey!”

  Leman Sweet’s ogre-like baritone snapped the kid to attention. He looked at Sweet and seemed to shiver.

  “Your name’s Diego, right?” Sweet demanded.

  He nodded.

  “Take a look at her.” He meant me. “Take a good look.”

  Diego stared at me, uncomprehending. I looked back into his dark, frightened eyes.

  “You ever see her before?”

  “No.”

  I didn’t bother to glance Sweet’s way. I merely took a seat at the kitchen table while he began to question the boy who, he said, was born in the Dominican Republic.

  “You told the officer you heard something going on in here the day the blind girl was murdered.”

  “They killed her dog, too, didn’t they?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I liked that dog. She used to let him come in the shop sometime. Sometime I give him a bone to—”

  Sweet cut him off. “What did you hear that day?”

  “Music.”

  “What kind of music?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? It was her playing the sax, wasn’t it?”

  “No,” he said defiantly. “Not that. I’m not talking about that. This was a man’s voice, singing. Like he was here singing to her. It could have been a tape, I guess.”

  “Ain’t nothing in here to play a tape on, man.”

  “Well, maybe the radio. But I don’t think so. It didn’t sound Like that.”

  “What did it sound like?”

  “I told you, I don’t know! It coulda been that country stuff.”

  “Country—you mean that C&W shit—like red neck, white socks, and Blue Ribbon Beer?”

  Diego didn’t get it.

  “Why don’t you just tell me what you heard,” Sweet said.

  “He said his eyes was red from the road.”

  “Come again?”

  “His eyes are red in the song. He said something about the road and eyes lined red. It didn’t sound like any music I heard before—more Like just talking. Except his voice was loud. And he kept saying it over. ‘road … eyes … lined … red … road … eyes … lined … red.’ It wasn’t like the way people talk, man. It was like a song.”

  “Shit, you telling me somebody was in here singing a stupidass truckers’ lullaby to that woman before they offed her?”

  Again, Diego seemed to be having trouble following the thread of Leman’s questions. I wondered if it had occurred to Sweet, as it just had to me, that Diego was a little stoned. Great. Just the complicating factor we needed.

  Sweet kept at it with the boy, but it was no good. The kid had not seen who was “singing” to Inge. Finally he was allowed to return to his work downstairs in the flower market.

  Not me. Sweet was as good as his word. He dragged me to the station house, where I was questioned and deposed and warned and ’buked and scorned, whatever that means.

  By the time Sweet released me, I was so tired I wasn’t sure if I could stand on my feet and walk home. I got as far as the corner of the block where the station house was located before I broke down. I lay the sax in its case against the side of a building and cried for about ten minutes. Nobody bothered me.

  Then I dried my eyes, walked over to the payphone, and called Henry. My words came out in a torrent of fear and sorrow. I was telling the story this way and that, all out of order—Inge and the dog and Wild Bill and Sig and Kurt Weill and yellow roses and Leman Sweet.

  He listened patiently and then, rather than trying to parse it out there, told me to wait at the phone booth, that he was coming to pick me up.

  No, I said, No. I had to get out of there. I couldn’t stand the thought of running into Leman Sweet again. I just wanted to get home.

  Good idea, said Henry, almost as if he were speaking to a mental patient. And I couldn’t blame him, really. I must’ve been hysterical. Go home directly, Nanette, he instructed. I’ll meet you there—All right, darling?

  My place is quite a switch from Henry’s high-rise love nest. From the landing, I watched him as he climbed the stairs, each step bringing his mournful, befuddled little face into sharper focus.

  “Are you all right?” he said, arms out.

  I opened my mouth to answer, but nothing much came out. “Oh,” was all I could say, “Oh, O’Rooney.” I had taken to calling him by the nonsensical name that singer Slim Gaillard had invented for Charlie Parker during an impromptu recording session.

  “Come inside, love. Let me see you.”

  He sat me down at the kitchen table while he made a pot of tea for me. I drank it slowly, gradually calming down, and finally was able to relate the story coherently.

  “Henry,” I said mournfully, “what am I going to do? I got her killed. I got her killed, Henry.”

  “But you did not, Nan. How could you know what would happen? You were only trying to give help to a blind girl. She said she couldn’t even pay her rent.”

  “I know, but, Christ! It’s so awful. I’m like a wrecking crew, Rooney. Everything I touch seems to crumble and die. Maybe you better beat it back to that loft you once had on the rue Dauphine. I don’t think my tentacles can reach as far as Paris.”

  “I pay no attention when you say such things, Nanette.”

  In each pocket of Henry’s overcoat was a brown paper bag. The bags contained identical bottles of cheap Chilean wine which he had picked up, no doubt, at the benighted little liquor store up the block.

  He poured me a glass and undid the buttons of my blouse as I drank. “Go and change your things now,” he said. “I will make something to eat.”

  I don’t know what kind of mouldering condiments Henry found in the fridge or the cabinets, but with their help he made me some fantastic scrambled eggs. I ate like a wolf. We found some stale Fig Newtons in the cabinet and I devoured those too, along with half a quart of milk.

  “You were hungry, yes?” he said, smiling. “The way you were when you came in from school and your mother gave you those … those biscuits.”

  “Yes!” In my mind I saw, clear as a bell, the image of Mom in her pristine apron. “Milk Lunch Biscuits. She thought they were a treat. But I hated them. My mother never did understand about food.”

  “Mine did, of course. You are lucky you did not have her as a mother. You would have been a very fat little child indeed.”

  “But you weren’t. You were skinny. And a mama’s boy. And everything was fried in olive oil.”

  “You remember everything I tell you about my childhood, and I remember all about yours,” Henry remarked. “Our lives could not have been more different. And yet, I feel as if I lived there alongside you in Elmhurst. And as if you swam with me and ate the same sweet things as me in my grandmother’s kitchen.”

  “Me too,” I said. “I guess we’ve touched souls, Henry. That’s what all the poems are about.”

  “I want to see some of your poetry.”
>
  I rolled my eyes. “Oh, God. Maybe another night, sweetie.”

  “You used to write them in school. When you were so unhappy. When you were daydreaming.”

  “I could have used a friend like you in school.”

  He smiled slyly. “Do not be so sure. The only way I could have known you then is if I were your teacher. I might have kept you long, long after school—touching souls with you. And then what would your parents think?”

  We both laughed.

  “Do you know what I am thinking of now?” he asked mischievously as we cleared the dishes.

  “What?”

  “That strange hotel near the Opera, off the boulevard Haussmann, where I had the flu.”

  “Yes. The hotel du Nil. Where all the maids were from Barbados.”

  “I stayed there when I was very young. And so did you. And we both thought that nil meant zero, when it really meant the Nile River. What do you think that means, Nanette, that we both made the same mistake?”

  “I don’t know. But did your mom also tell you when you were little that you were a very smart child, but sometimes you were a fool too?”

  “Maybe. I suspect not. In fact, I don’t think anyone has ever told me I was very smart.”

  I took the dish towel from him and kissed his hands. “That’s all right, Rooney. You’re smart enough for me.”

  “At any rate,” he added, “I never stayed in that hotel again—or anywhere in the ninth. I found it much more romantic to live in the sixth, or in Montmartre. Before the long walk back to my room, I would drink a brandy every night at the Café Maroc because it was where all the performers went. And the shady characters.”

  “Did you get yourself seduced by any female tightrope walkers?”

  “Never.”

  “Lady saxophonists?”

  “No. You are my first. Take your things off, please,” Henry requested humbly.

  I had never been made love to more sweetly than that night. Nor will I ever be again, most likely.

  We undressed in the living room and lay in each other’s arms on the floor. No more talking for a long while. I was desolate, lost, when it was finished, until he covered me once more with his body and placed his hands on my face and kissed me until I was happy again.

  The city had grown dark, black.