"Cray, David - Little Girl Blue" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cray David)

ya know, and two daughters."

Foley extended his legs until they reached the fire wall. He raised
his eyes slightly and smiled. "What I think it's about," he explained,
"for me, anyway, is innocence. That's why I don't do the tour. I
mean, a pro is a pro, right? No matter how young she is." He went
back into his briefcase, plucked a second photograph. "You ever see
this one?"

Carpenter stared down at a photo of Peter Foley kneeling beside a young
girl, perhaps ten years old. The girl's dark hair was braided on
either side. Her lips were full, and spread in a wide grin; her eyes
were clear and brown. "I don't know from girls," he said. "From
girls, you got the wrong guy."

"I'd give anything to get her back. You ever see her, let me know."

"In life," Carpenter shot back, "you gotta take what you can get, then
move on."

Foley was pleased to note the cynical tone, pleased again when
Carpenter took a fat cigar from the glove compartment and lit it up.
"There's somebody I want you to meet," Foley declared. "Later on, when
you're more comfortable."

Carpenter put the car in gear, checked the rear-view mirror. "I gotta
go," he said. "I promised to take the kids to the movies."

THREE

THE ICY wind cut Robert Reid to the bone. It cut through his down
parka, through his tweed jacket, through the wool turtleneck and the
long-sleeved silk undershirt he wore next to his skin. It numbed his
cheekbones and the ridge of bone above his eyes; it curled his toes,
shrank his penis, and left him wondering why he'd come to Central Park
when he could have remained in his nice warm bed. He was a columnist
after all, and not a reporter; he could pick and choose his stories.

Five years before, in quick succession, Robert Reid had lost his two
great loves, Mary-Margaret, his wife of thirty-seven years, and single
malt scotch. He'd lost them both and had overnight become a diabetic
old man nursing a cirrhotic liver, a bad heart, and a prostate the size
of a beach ball. He, Robert Reid, who'd once dived from a west-side
pier in the dead of winter, searching the polluted waters for a
.45-caliber automatic rumored to have been tossed there by a killer.

Resigning himself, Reid hunched his shoulders and adjusted his scarf to
cover the back of his neck. He'd been to the crime scene and glimpsed
the small defenseless form lying in the dirt. The story would play, he
was sure of it, a morality tale in there someplace no matter how she