Read Charlie All Night for Free Online Page A

toward them. He
looked wonderful: big and
broad and solid and fun. But not permanent.
She could take him or leave him. Or take him and
leave him. No problem.

Charlie came back to the table and smiled at them. "Let's go. You can
tell me all about the station.
Leave nothing out, no matter how
disgusting. I'm braced for anything."

"Good," Allie said.
    *  *  *
They gave Charlie a quick tour of old Tuttle in the late-September
dusk. The town unfolded
before him like a set of sepia-toned postcards:
a white filigree bandstand in the park, a narrow Main
Street mercifully
free of aluminum storefronts, and a city hall that looked like a
glowering, gargoyled sandstone castle.

"Historic preservationists, bless them," Joe told him. "They fight
tooth and nail to keep old Tuttle
pure. Of course, over on the other side, new Tuttle is a symphony of
aluminum siding, but who
cares?"

"But even the preservationists can't save city hall," Allie said.

"They're going to tear down that building?" Charlie craned his neck to
look back at the ornate structure. He wasn't a historic-building nut,
but tearing down something that magnificently outrageous seemed a waste.

Joe shrugged. "I think they're just going to abandon it. Too hard to
heat or something. They've got a
new building all planned. There's a
model of it in the basement of the old building. It's awful." Joe
turned a corner and a few minutes later it was dark.

"What happened?"

"East Tuttle, better known as Eastown." Allie pointed out die window.
"See? Streetlights out, but
nobody fixes them. This is not a Good
Section of Town."

In defense of the city department, they try." Joe slowed to let a
weaving pedestrian cross. "The
vandalism around here is pretty
frequent."

"Not that frequent," Allie said. "These people get taken for a ride."

Charlie looked around at the peeling paint and broken steps and a
derelict corner grocery store, and
tried to make it fit with what he'd
seen of Tuttle before. "A lot of drugs down here?"

Allie shrugged. "Probably, but I hear the best place to score is right
by the old bandstand in the park."

Charlie started to laugh. "So much for Tuttle, the perfect small town."

Allie sighed. "It used to be sort of like that. A lot of mom-and-pop
businesses run by people who
called you by name. Most of them are gone
now, run out by the chains." She peered out the window
at another
corner store left standing empty. "You know, I don't think there are
any independent
groceries
left in the whole city."

"That's a shame." Charlie said absently. Tuttle was not a hotbed of
crime. What the hell could be
going on at a radio station in a town
like this to make a man like Bill Bonner lose his cool and his
father
send him in as an amateur detective?

Something here didn't make sense. And since his father and Bill were
involved, two men notorious
for getting their own way no matter what
the cost, Charlie was especially wary. They were up to something.

He sat silently while Joe drove and talked and eventually they came to
a slightly better part of town
full of old frame houses with big front
porches, and Charlie smiled in spite of himself. Tuttle was a
nice
little town, the kind of town he'd always liked when he'd driven
through one on his way to some
place else. He avoided stopping in any
town like this one on the grounds that if he really liked it, he'd
stay,
and then he'd take a permanent job. And if things went the way they
usually did, he'd get
promoted, and then he'd be in charge, and pretty
soon he'd be his father.

No town was worth that.

Then Joe turned again, and in a few minutes they were in a more modern
neighborhood, passing a mall.

"Tuttle has a mall?" Charlie asked, amazed.

"There's a lot more to Tuttle than meets the eye," Allie said, and
Charlie wondered exactly how much more there was, how much of it Allie
knew, and how long it would take him to get it out of her.
    *  *  *
It was late when they got back to the apartment. They'd picked up
Charlie's car at