Rhode Island Red (16 page)

“Get that gun the fuck out of my face,” Walter came back, blustering, weak.

Sweet only laughed at him. “You got a hot minute to tell me everything,” he said. “Don't bother to deny nothing. Don't give me excuses, alibis, nothing. Just tell me what I want to know. Starting with you and Charlie Conlin.”

Walter swallowed hard, trying not to come apart, trying to mask the trapped rat quality in his eyes.

Thwack!

Even I felt that backhanded slap across Walt's face. But he took the blow standing up. Then, for the first time since this crazy encounter began, Walter looked at me.

My stomach flipped.

Get a grip, baby girl
, said Ernestine.
Here it comes
.

“He had the seat next to me at the Garden,” Walter began slowly. “We both had season tickets for the Knicks. We got to talking. I couldn't believe it when Charlie told me he was a cop. He seemed like real people. We liked each other a lot. Started having a drink, shooting the shit after the games. Sometimes I would meet him after work. We used to shoot pool once in a while—pick up—I mean, when I wasn't living with Nanette, he and me met some women at some of the places he liked to go hear music. We were … I don't know … friends.”

“Right,” Leman said. “Y'all went out chasing pussy together. Did a little coke together. Shit like that. Real cool. Charlie always thought he was Mister New York Cool. Mister Dangerous. He was going to buy those season tickets even if he couldn't pay the rent. Okay. Go on.”

“We had been buddies for a year before he told me about this thing that was going to set us up for life. Charlie had heard these rumors. Unbelievable stories. But he sure as hell believed them. There was this saxophone—they called it Rhode Island Red—and it was worth a million dollars. Maybe even more.”

I burst into laughter. Walter must have gone crazy! There was no saxophone on earth worth a million dollars.

“Real funny, ain't it?” Sweet said, not laughing. “You just shut up and keep listening to your friend here. You didn't think it was so funny, did you, Walter?”

“No.”

“Keep talking, Walter. Tell us how Charlie filled up your head with dreams of gold.”

Gold? What gold?

“He said he had it worked out,” Walter went on. “He said people had been looking for this sax for decades, but now he had a line on it. This old man—some jackleg trumpet player—actually knew where he could lay his hands on this treasure. The guy's name was Tuttle but they called him Wild Bill. Wild Bill was tight with Charlie's old lady, a blind girl that he stayed with sometimes. She didn't even know that he was a cop. She only knew him as a musician, Sig, his undercover name.

“Anyway, the two of them, the girl and Wild Bill, would get high together, play on the street together, sometimes she would give him a place to crash, stuff like that. And one day Wild Bill told her about the sax. She never really believed it existed. Tuttle was nothing but an old alkie, used to be a junkie. She figured it was some kind of pipe dream—something he made up.

“She mentioned it to Charlie eventually. She wasn't copping out on Tuttle or anything, she just told him, more like a joke than anything else. Charlie put it all together. He knew then that the rumors weren't crazy, that the million dollar sax was for real.

“Yeah, he was planning on taking this Wild Bill off—beating him out of this so-called gold mine. But, like Charlie said, what was a guy like Turtle going to do with something that valuable anyway? He'd never be able to fence it. He was bound to fuck up. Chances are somebody would have either conned him out of it or killed him for it. So Charlie cut himself in.

“He told Wild Bill how it was going to be: he'd give him sixty grand and Wild Bill would turn the sax over to him and be out of the deal forever.

“Wild Bill accepted.”

“Yeah,” Leman echoed. “I bet he did. But where was Charlie gonna lay his hands on sixty thousand dollars? Simple. He lifted the buy money from the operation we were doing.”

“That's right,” said Walter.

“Goddamn straight, it is,” said Leman. “Then the dominos started falling. Tell us, Walt.”

“First, Charlie learned that some washed up mob punk, an ex con out of Rhode Island, was after the sax. He was a white dude who had been in the joint with Turtle. Charlie figured, if this guy knew about it, how many others knew?

“Next thing that happened, Charlie got wind that Internal Affairs was about to eat his ass up. They suspected he stole that buy money.”

“And that's where I come in,” Sweet said, his voice raw. “I didn't know nothing about nothing before IA got in on it. Didn't have to be a genius to realize they were going to fall on me too. I was Charlie's partner, so they figured I was in on it too. If he was dirty then I was dirty. Sure, the nigger in the duo would have to be in on the corruption.

“Finally they were convinced that I was innocent. Next thing I know, the Department's telling me I have to join forces with those idiots in order to find out what the fuck happened to my partner. That's when I started hearing about this stupid saxophone and the bodies it was racking up.

“It must have been touch and go for old Charlie. He was racing the clock near the end. He was hot as hell. A mob guy sniffing around; IA on his tail; dealing with a loose cannon like this old alkie, Tuttle. Isn't that right, Walt?”

“Yes. Wild Bill had told him he'd have the sax in forty-eight hours. Charlie needed a place to stay. He couldn't risk going back to the blind girl's place. And he couldn't stay at my apartment uptown because we didn't want anybody to connect the two of us. He told me to sit tight till he got in touch.”

“Right, right,” Leman said, a nasty, self-satisfied smile on his lips. “So, of course, that's when you decided to ‘involve' your lady friend here.”

Walter's eyes flicked over at me and then away. Smart move. Because surely the look I was giving him would have put
his
eyes out.

“That's the way it was, honeychile,” Leman said. “Walter sicced Charlie on you.”

“I didn't, Nan,” Walter said, head down. “I mean, I did, but—”

“Yes, it appears that you did, Walt,” I said.

Sweet's grin was ever-widening as he began to speculate. “Charlie picked you up on the street. The two of you were laying up in here having a good old time—”

“Fuck you, Sweet,” I said. And I meant it in a way I've never meant that obscenity before in my life. I made a silent vow never to use that phrase again.

He went on, untroubled by my outburst. “—except something totally unexpected happened that night. That night, a little geek named Diego murdered Charlie. And not because of this fantasy saxophone of gold. Oh no. Because of a skinny, blind skank named Inge that he was hung up on. That greaseball kid was probably trying to break in here. Charlie could have heard him and thought it was you at the door, Walter. He opened up, took an ice pick in the throat, staggered back in here and died. Now, ain't that a bitch?”

He paused and wiped his forehead with his free hand.

“Charlie was a pretty good cop,” Leman said. “A pretty good crook too. He hid the sixty grand in here before he went to sleep.” He looked over at Walter then. “And maybe he hid something else—ain't that right, Walt? Maybe he lied to you and already had the sax. Maybe he stashed that in here too.”

“He did no such thing!” I shouted. “How could he have hidden something like that?”

Sweet looked pityingly at me. “Did it ever occur to you while you were running around like black Kojak trying to solve this case that Charlie had put you out that night?”

“Put me out?”

“Drugged you, bitch. The two of you drank a lot, didn't you? The coroner said he had wine in his stomach. Maybe he doped you so he could have all the time he needed to prowl around here. The next day you found the cash in your sax, but not the other sax—not Rhode Island Red.

“So Charlie is dead now, right? What's Mr. Walter's next move, huh?” He caught Walter's eyes but Walter said nothing. “I'll tell you. Mr. Walter figures the money belongs to him now—in fact, everything belongs to him now, whatever he's man enough to find—the sixty thousand, the sax, whatever. So tell us, Walter, what you did about it.”

“I don't know what you mean,” Walter said quietly.

“Oh really? Wasn't your first step to go to Inge? Makes you kinda nervous to hear her name, doesn't it? Well, we can stop referring to her as Charlie's girl—the blind girl, Walter. Her name was Inge Carlson. Weren't you determined to shake the information you needed out of her? Scare her. Beat it out of her if you had to?”

Walter did that thing again—he swallowed, hard.

Oh no, I thought. No, no, no. Oh no. But I wasn't just thinking it. I was moaning aloud.

“She tried to tell you she didn't know anything about it, didn't she, Walter?” Leman said, sounding almost kind. “No matter what you did to her, she kept swearing she didn't know where the sax was. But you wouldn't believe her.”

Walter was shaking his head.

“Is that a ‘no,' Walt?” Sweet asked. “You mean no, you wouldn't believe her or no, that's not the way it happened?”

“No,” he answered at last, “I didn't believe her. Because while I was searching her place I found a lot of cash. I mean, a lot. I figured she was in on the whole scheme and was cutting me out. She and this Wild Bill were going to cut me out completely. I was nothing to them.”

“You were in a real corner, weren't you? You were desperate. You killed her, didn't you, Walt?”

I had been praying not to hear the question almost as hard as I was praying not to hear the answer.

“I was pushing her around,” Walter said, his voice so quiet and thick now that both Leman Sweet and I were straining to hear him. “I was pushing her around and looking all over the place for that sax, or for more money. I had just opened a drawer in the kitchen. I looked up and she had a … a pistol in her hand. She could hear me moving around and she had it aimed right at my chest.

“How do you think it made me feel? Beating on a blind girl. I had crossed a line and I knew I was never going back. Just like Charlie had. But was I supposed to let her shoot me to death? I had come too far for that—too far and too close. I picked up that blade and killed her before I even knew it. That dog of hers was going nuts. I couldn't …” He broke off into sobs.

“A touching story, bro,” Leman said. “Most touching. Did you cry like that when you caught up with Wild Bill and near 'bout killed him too?” He didn't bother to wait for an answer. “He told you Charlie had the sax already, is that it? That Charlie had beaten him to it and didn't even pay him that sixty thousand. You figured then that Charlie had doublecrossed you. And then you realized, after all the places you had been looking for it, Charlie had hidden it right here in your girl's place. Meanwhile, Wild Bill obligingly drops dead of natural causes. Looks like you finally got a few breaks, man.”

Yes. All Walter needed was a way to get me out of the picture long enough to take the place apart.

“So, asshole, you finally hit paydirt,” Sweet said to Walter. “You found it while Miss Bald America here was away from home today. We've been tailing the two of you for a long time now. Watching your comings and goings. If you'd made it out of here before the lady of the house returned, it would look as though she just had a routine robbery. But tell us, what would you have done if she'd walked in on you tearing this place up? Would you have blown her away too?”

I was curious about that too.

“You heard the man, sweetheart,” I said to Walter. “Would you?”

He would not look at me. There was grief on his face. Not just shame. Grief.

And even I was ashamed of having asked that question.

Leman Sweet reached around into his back pocket, no doubt going after the cuffs he kept there.

In the half second it took him to do so, Walter made a move.

“Put that fucking gun down,” I heard Sweet command. That's when I started screaming.

I'm sure they could hear me screaming on the Champs-Elysées, but Walter didn't seem to.

He turned and ran toward the fire escape, heedless of Leman's shouts.

Walter was at the kitchen window now, where two figures had suddenly sprung up outside. The sight of them was almost enough to halt my screaming. They were the two from the white van, the man and woman who had kidnapped me, the ones who had held a gun to my head, the ones who had told me about Henry.

Only this time they wore badges around their necks. And their dark weapons, pressed so close to the window, were trained on Walter's forehead and heart.

I saw Walter's arm go up.

“No!” Sweet ordered uselessly, already diving for the floor, taking me down with him.

The windowpane shook and exploded.

All around me the guns spluttered and boomed like amateur fireworks on the beach.

I saw my Limoges café au lait bowl do a freaky dance and finally leap to its end off the corner of the drainboard.

And then it was over.

But I was still screaming.

“I hope you're not going to waste no time mourning this motherfucker,” Sweet said with a jerk of his head in the direction of the blood-wet body on the floor.

The body. The body. That was no goddamn “body”. That was Walter M. Moore. We had made love hundreds of times. Gone swimming in the country. Walked home from the movies. Argued about nothing.

I was sitting at the kitchen table and the detective was perched on the arm of a nearby chair. Someone had placed a glass of water in my hands.

Not stopping to think, not missing a beat, I was on Sweet, teeth bared, crazed. Trying to gouge his eyes with my nails, spitting incoherent curses.

It was the male cop from the white van who pulled me off. Had he flung me or did I slip? I don't know, but I landed on the floor, practically in Walter's arms.