An Equal Opportunity Death Read Online Free PDF

murder; I would be dead.
    When the sky finally lightened to the dim gray of dawn, I was relieved. Even the iciness of the house was preferable to staying in bed. By six-thirty I was up, dressed, and on my way to Thompson’s to get my paper.
    Since I was early, I went to the café for breakfast. It was nearly empty. On clear mornings it was filled with laborers from the sewer project. They had been working on that sewer so long that they were regulars there. They jammed into the booths, shouting, laughing, calling for more coffee, playing the juke box. Anyone else lucky enough to get a seat on one of those mornings found it impossible to talk or read. So most people avoided the café before eight. Now, in the rainy season, with the sewer work suspended, the café was empty and quiet. I was glad to be able to sit alone in a back booth and read the paper.
    The newspaper coverage of Frank’s murder filled two columns on the front page and several on page six, but it told me nothing new. And, thank God, it didn’t mention names. So, although everyone in town would know I was at Frank’s Place yesterday, it was still possible that my boss might not.
    Taking no chances on that, I got to the Henderson substation early and by ten after eight I had put in a sick card for the previous day, picked up the day’s route book, and signed out the most reliable truck in the yard. I was out of the office before most people had come in.
    The rain was heavier than it had been the day before. The river was higher and the water was thick with debris.
    It was good to have a truck that wouldn’t break down, one with new tires and an engine that could pull it out of the mud. I would be “dragging the truck” today—walking house to house for a couple hundred yards, then coming back to move the truck along so I would have it for parts of the route where there were long driveways and distances between houses.
    The route was assigned. The pages of the route book were in order, one page per customer, up one side of the street and down the other. But few readers followed that plan. There were always ways the route could be altered to suit one’s personal idiosyncracies. Some readers started at the west end of their routes and worked east each day, moving away from the ocean, as if every hundred yards would diminish the cold dampness of the Pacific. Some read commercial accounts first, residences last. Some did the flatlands in the morning in hopes that by afternoon, when they had to climb those endless wooden stairs, the rain would have stopped. I did the stairs first, before I was fully awake and aware of my aching thighs, and saved the flats till later, when just the thought of another step was debilitating.
    This route was divided into two sections. The first part, including South Bank Road and Frank’s Place, I had done Monday. The remainder of the route was set up to start with a group of cottages on the ocean side of town. The Fortimiglios’ was among them. If I did the hillside first, I could work down to their meter well before noon.
    I parked the truck halfway up the hill and checked through the route book. Each page had spaces to list the customer’s usage for twenty-four months, so I could see how much electricity they used this time last year. If their present usage was dramatically higher, like Frank’s, it raised questions. If it was considerably lower, the questions became suspicions. Before starting out, I glanced through the upcoming twenty or so pages for houses on this block, checking the comments section on each page. There were a number of places noted “dog OK,” a few merely “dog,” and only one “dog/w” (watch out). Although the location of the meter was mentioned on each page, I found it faster to follow the service drop from the main line to the weatherhead above the actual meter.
    I walked quickly on the streets and carefully down unpaved, muddy driveways to meters on the sides of houses. The houses were