"Grafton, Sue - C is for Corpse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grafton Sue)

"Spoiled," I said.

"Take any advantage you can," he replied sheepishly.

"You want to drive?"

He shook his head. "Lets drop my car off at the house and take yours."

I parked in the visitor's lot at St. Terry's and waited in the car while he went in to see Kitty. I imagined she'd be back on her feet by now, still pissed off, and raising hell on the ward. Not anything I wanted to face. I hope to talk to her again in a couple of days, but I preferred to give her time to settle down. I flipped on the car radio, tapping on the steering wheel in time to the music. Two nurses passed through the parking lot in white uniforms, white shoes and hose, with dark blue capes that looked like something left over from World War I. In due course, Bobby emerged from the building and hobbled across the parking lot, his expression preoccupied. He got into the car. I flipped the radio off and started the engine, backing out of the slot.

"Everything okay?"

"Yeah, sure."

He was quiet as I headed across town and turned left onto the secondary road that cuts along the back side of Santa Teresa at the base of the foothills. The sky was a flat blue and cloudless, looking like semigloss paint that had been applied with a roller. It was hot, and the hills were brown and dry, laid out like a pile of kindling. The long grasses near the road had bleached out to a pale gold, and once in a while, I caught sight of lizards perched up on big rocks, looking as gray and still as twigs.

The road twisted, two lanes of blacktop angling back and forth up the side of the mountain. I downshifted twice and my little VW still complained of the climb.

"I thought I remembered something," Bobby said after a while. "But I can't seem to pin it down. That's why I had to see Kitty."

"What kind of thing?"

"I had an address book. One of those small leather-bound types about the size of a playing card. Cheap. Red. I gave it to someone for safekeeping and now I have no idea who." He paused, shaking his head with puzzlement.

"You don't remember why it was important?"

"No. I remember feeling anxious about it, thinking I better not have it in my possession because it was dangerous to me, so I passed it on. At the time-and I remember this part clearly-I figured I could retrieve it later." He shrugged, snorting derisively. "So much for that."

"Was this before the accident or afterwards?"

"Don't know. I just remember giving it to someone."

"Wouldn't it be dangerous to whoever you gave it to?"

"I don't think so. God." He slid down on his spine so he could rest his head on the back of the seat. He peered through the windshield, following the line of gray hills up to the left where the pass cuts through at the crest. "I hate this feeling. I hate knowing I once knew something and having no access to it. It's just an image with nothing attached to it. There aren't any memory cues so I have no way to place it in time. It's like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle with a whole hunk knocked off on the floor."

"But how does it work when you forget like that? Is there any retrieving the information or is it just gone?"

"Oh, sometimes it'll come back, but usually it's blank . . . like a hole in the bottom of a box. Whatever used to be there has spilled out along the way."

"What made you think of it in the first place?"

"I don't know. I was looking through a desk drawer and came across the red leather memo pad that was part of the same set. Suddenly, I got this flash." He fell silent. I glanced over at him and realized how tense he was. He was massaging his bad hand, milking the fingers as if they were long rubber teats.

"Kitty didn't know anything about it?"

He shook his head.

"How's she doing?"