Chili Con Carnage by Kylie Logan Page A

because the way she nodded, I knew she believed me from the start. “But then . . . well, it didn’t take me long to realize his mind was a million miles away. You know, he was with me, but he was thinking about someone else. The whole time we were together. Well, that pretty much made me see the light. As much as I wanted to, I knew I was never going to get anywhere with Roberto.”
    “Someone else?” Her dark eyes filled with tears. “Me?”
    I patted Karmen’s hand. “I don’t doubt it for a minute. So you see, you don’t have any reason to be jealous of me. And I didn’t have any reason to kill Roberto.”
    As if the effort of thinking was a slow and painful process, she blinked a few times. “Then why are you here?” she asked.
    “To find out who really did kill him,” I told her.
    At that moment, the bartender showed up with another glass of ice water and I figured it was time to get down to business. “Hey,” I accepted the water and gave him as much of a smile as I could manage with an ice bag on my throat. “Have you found a phone around here? Roberto told me he put his in my purse. You know, before the fight broke out the other night. But I don’t have it.”
    The big guy shook his head. “Nobody’s turned it in. Probably got smashed to smithereens. You know . . .” He poked his chin toward the front of the bar. “Like my window.”
    I thanked him and turned back to Karmen, who was still watching me with something very much like suspicion gleaming in her eyes. “Why do you care so much?” she asked.
    “About Roberto’s phone? I don’t. Not really. Except that he mentioned it to me when I saw him yesterday morning and I was wondering if there were any calls or any messages, you know, that would tell us something about what happened to him.”
    “Not about the phone.” She made a face. “About who killed Roberto. If you didn’t love him, why do you want to find out who did this to my Roberto?”
    “It’s my sister,” I said because really, it didn’t seem worth the effort to make up some hogwash when it was just simpler to tell the truth. “Well, actually, it’s my half sister, Sylvia. She’s the one they arrested for the murder.”
    Karmen nodded. “And you’re worried about her. You want to help her. You and your sister, you must love each other very much. Yes, I understand.”
    I didn’t. Not completely, anyway, but rather than get into it, I said, “I don’t think she did it. Not that Sylvia doesn’t have a dark side. She can be meaner than a rattlesnake, but she’s usually just mean to me. And as nasty and vindictive and terrible as she is—” I softened the statement with a smile; the cops were sure to talk to Karmen somewhere along the line and there was no use giving them any hearsay ammunition against Sylvia.
    “Well, Sylvia might not be perfect,” I said, “but I can’t imagine she’d ever actually kill anyone. And if she didn’t do it—”
    “You don’t want her to suffer. You’re a good sister.”
    “Half sister,” I corrected her. “And it’s not really that. It’s more like . . .” I thought about it while I took another drink of water. I’d asked myself the same question the whole time I trudged around Taos looking for El Rancho. Why did I want to help Sylvia, anyway? Had the tables been turned, I was pretty sure she wouldn’t be sitting in a dive bar trying to find out the truth so she could clear my name. In fact, I was pretty sure she’d show up at the local jail, camera in hand. Just so she could snap a picture and hang an eight by ten of me in an orange jumpsuit in a place of honor in the RV.
    “I think . . .” I wondered if Karmen would even understand, decided she wouldn’t, and continued on, anyway. “I think it’s because if Sylvia didn’t do it—and I’m pretty sure she didn’t—that means the person who really did do it is out there somewhere laughing his ass off because he got away with it. I guess it’s all about