C is for Corpse (9 page)

The road twisted, two lanes of blacktop angling back and forth up the side of the mountain. I down-shifted
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 afterward?”

“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?”

“She's up and around. I guess Derek's going over to see her later on. . . .” He paused. We were reaching the crest of the hill and a muscle near his left eye had started to jump.

“Are you going to be all right with this?” I asked.

He was staring intently at the side of the road. “Just up here. Slow down and pull over if you can.”

I checked my rearview mirror. There were three cars behind me, but the road was narrowing from three lanes to two. I eased over to the right and found a gravel shoulder where I could park. The bridge, with its low concrete guardrails, was about ten yards ahead. Bobby sat there, staring to his right.

Where the road descends from the summit, the
whole valley opens out, hills sweeping back as far as the eye can see to a range of lavender mountains pasted against the rim of the sky. The August heat shimmered in silence. The land seemed vast and primitive, looking as it must have looked for thousands of years. In the distance, live oaks dotted the landscape, as shaggy and dark and hunched as buffalo. There'd been no rain for months and the vista seemed chalky and pale, the color washed out.

Closer to us, the roadside dropped away into the treacherous canyon that had nearly marked Bobby's death nine months ago. A length of metal railing had been replaced, but where the bridge began, there was still a chunk of concrete missing.

“The other car started ramming us from behind just as we came over the rim of the hill,” he said. I thought he meant to continue, so I waited.

He walked forward a few feet, gravel crunching under his shoes. He was clearly uneasy as he peered down the rocky slope. I looked back over my shoulder at the few cars passing. No one paid the slightest attention to us.

I studied the scene, picking out one of the scarred boulders I'd seen in the photograph, and farther down, the raw, jagged stump where a scrub oak had been snapped off at the base. I knew the Santa Teresa police had swept the area clean of debris from the accident, so there was no need to whip out a magnifying glass or creep around picking fibers from the underbrush.

Bobby turned to me. “Have you ever been close to death?”

“Yes.”

“I remember thinking, ‘This is it. I'm gone.' I disconnected. I felt like a plant ripped up by the roots. Airborne.” He stopped. “And then I was cold and everything hurt and people were talking to me and I couldn't understand a word they said. That was in the hospital and two weeks had passed. I've wondered since then if that's how newborn babies feel. Bewildered like that and disoriented. Helpless. It was such a struggle to stay in touch with the world. Sending down new roots. I knew I could choose. I was barely attached, barely tethered, and I could feel how easy it'd be just to let go like a balloon and sail away.”

“But you hung on.”

“Hey, my mother willed it. Every time I opened my eyes, I saw her face. And when I closed my eyes, I heard her voice. She'd say, ‘We're going to make it, Bobby. We're going to do this, you and I.' ”

He was silent again. I thought, Jesus, what must it be like to have a mother who could love you that way? My parents had died when I was five, in a freak car accident. We'd been on a Sunday outing, driving up to Lompoc, when a huge boulder tumbled down the mountain and smashed through the windshield. My father had died instantly and we'd crashed. I'd been in the backseat, thrust down against the floorboards on impact, wedged in by the crushed frame. My mother had lingered, moaning and crying, sinking into a silence finally that I sensed was ominous and forever. It had taken them hours to extract me from the wreckage, trapped there with the dead whom I loved who
had left me for all time. After that, I was raised by a no-nonsense aunt who had done her best, who had loved me deeply, but with a matter-of-factness that had failed to nourish some part of me.

Bobby had been infused with a love of such magnitude that it had brought him back from the grave. It was odd, when he was so broken, that I experienced an envy that made tears well up in my eyes. I felt a laugh burble and he turned a puzzled glance on me.

I took out a Kleenex and blew my nose. “I just realized how much I envy you,” I said.

He smiled ruefully. “That's a first.”

We got back in the car. There'd been no blinding recall, no sudden recollection of forgotten facts, but I'd seen the miry pit into which he had been flung and I'd felt the bond between us strengthened.

“Have you been up here since the accident?”

“No. I never had the nerve and no one ever suggested it. Made me sweat.”

I started the car. “How about a beer?”

“How about a bourbon on the rocks?”

We went to the Stage Coach Tavern, just off the main road, and talked for the rest of the afternoon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I dropped him off at his house at five, he hesitated as he got out of the car, pausing as he'd done before with his hand on the door, peering back in at me.

“Know what I like about you?” he said.

“What,” I said.

“When I'm with you, I don't feel self-conscious or like I'm crippled or ugly. I don't know how you do that, but it's nice.”

I looked at him for a moment, feeling oddly self-conscious myself. “I'll tell you. You remind me of a birthday present somebody's sent through the mail. The paper's torn and the box is damaged, but there's still something terrific in there. I enjoy your company.”

A half-smile formed and disappeared. He glanced over at the house and then back to me. He had something else on his mind, but he seemed embarrassed to admit to it.

“What,” I coaxed.

He tilted his head and the look in his eyes was one I knew. “If I were O.K . . .. if I'd been whole, would you
have thought about having a relationship with me? I mean, boy-girl type?”

“You want the truth?”

“Only if it's flattering.”

I laughed. “The truth is if I'd run into you before the accident, I'd have been intimidated. You're too good-looking, too rich, and too young. So I gotta say no. If you were ‘whole,' as you put it, I probably wouldn't have known you at all. You're really not my type, you know?”

“What is your type?”

“I haven't figured that out yet.”

He looked at me for a minute with a quizzical smile forming.

“Would you just say what's on your mind?” I said.

“How can you turn it around and make me feel good that I'm deformed?”

“Oh God, you're not deformed. Now, quit that! I'll talk to you later.”

He smiled and slammed the car door, moving back then so I could make the turn-around and head out the far side of the driveway.

I drove back to my place. It was only 5:15. I still had time to get a run in, though I wondered at the wisdom of it. Bobby and I had spent the better part of the day drinking beer and bourbon and bad Chablis, gnawing barbecued spareribs and sourdough bread tough enough to tug your dentures out. I was really more in the mood for a nap than a run, but I thought the self-discipline would serve me right.

I changed into my running clothes and did three
miles while I went through the mental gymnastics of getting the case organized. It felt like iffy stuff and I wasn't quite sure where to start. I thought I better check with Dr. Fraker in the Pathology Department at St. Terry's first, maybe pop in and see Kitty at the same time, and then try the newspaper morgue and go through the tedious business of checking back through local news prior to the accident just to see what was going on at the time. Maybe some event then current would shed light on Bobby's claim that someone had tried to murder him.

I went over to Rosie's at seven for a glass of wine. I was feeling restless and I wondered if Bobby hadn't set something in motion somehow. It was nice having someone to pal around with, nice to while away an afternoon in good company, nice to have someone whose face I looked forward to seeing. I wasn't sure how to categorize our relationship. My affection for him wasn't maternal in any way. Sisterly, perhaps. He seemed like a good friend and I felt for him all the admiration one feels for a good friend. He was fun, and being with him was peaceful. I'd been alone for so long that a relationship of any kind seemed like seductive stuff.

I snagged a glass of wine at the bar and then I sat in the back booth and surveyed the place. For a Tuesday night, there was a lively crowd, which is to say, two guys arguing nasally at the bar, and an old couple from the neighborhood sharing a big plate of pancakes layered with ham. Rosie remained at the bar with a cigarette, smoke drifting up around her head in a halo of
nicotine and hair spray. She's in her sixties, Hungarian and bossy, a creature of muumuus and dyed auburn tresses, which she wears parted down the center and plastered into place with sprays that have sat on the grocery-store shelves since the beehive hairdo bumbled out of fashion in 1966. Rosie has a long nose, a short upper lip, eyes that she pencils into narrow, suspicious-looking slits. She's short, top-heavy, and opinionated. Also she pouts, which in a woman her age is ludicrous, but effective. Half the time, I don't like her much, but she never ceases to fascinate.

Her establishment has the same crude but cranky appeal. The bar extends along the left wall with a stuffed marlin arched above it that I suspect was never really alive. A big color TV sits on the far end of the bar, sound off, images dancing about like transmissions from another planet where life is vibrant and lunatic. The place always smells of beer, cigarette smoke, and cooking grease that should have been thrown out last week. There are six or seven tables in the center of the room surrounded by chrome-and-plastic chairs out of somebody's 1940s dinette set. The eight booths along the right wall have been fashioned out of plywood and stained the color of walnut, complete with tasteless suggestions carved in by ruffians who apparently had had a go at the ladies' room too. It's possible that Rosie doesn't read English well enough to divine the true meaning of these primitive slogans. It's also possible that they express her sentiments exactly. Hard to know with her.

I glanced over at her and discovered that she was sitting
ting bolt upright and very still, squinting narrowly at the front door. I followed her gaze. Henry had just come in with his new lady friend, Lila Sams. Rosie's antennae had apparently gone up automatically, like My Favorite Martian in drag. Henry found a table that seemed reasonably clean and pulled out a chair. Lila sat down and settled her big plastic bag on her lap like a small dog. She was wearing a bright cotton dress in a snazzy print, bold red poppies on a ground of blue, and her hair looked as if it had been poufed at the beauty parlor that very afternoon. Henry sat down, glancing back at the booth, where he knows I usually sit. I gave a little finger wave and he waved back. Lila's head swiveled in my direction and her smile took on a look of false delight.

Rosie, meanwhile, had set her evening paper aside and had left her stool, gliding through the bar like a shark. I could only surmise that she and Lila had met before. I looked on with interest. This might be almost as entertaining as
Godzilla Meets Bambi
, at my local cinema. From my vantage point, of course, the whole encounter took place in pantomime.

Rosie had her order pad out. She stood and stared at Henry, behaving as though he were alone, which is exactly how she treats me when I come in with a friend. Rosie doesn't speak to strangers. She doesn't make eye contact with anyone she hasn't known for some time. This is especially true when the “anyones” are women. Lila was all aflutter. Henry conferred with her and ordered for them both. Much discussion ensued. I gathered that Lila had made some request that didn't suit
Rosie's notion of gourmet Hungarian cuisine. Maybe Lila wanted the peppers left out or something roasted instead of fried. Lila looked like the sort of woman who'd have lots of dietary taboos. Rosie only had the one. You ate it the way she served it or you went somewhere else. Lila apparently couldn't believe that she couldn't be catered to. Shrill and quarrelsome noises arose, all Lila's. Rosie didn't say a word. It was her place. She could do anything she wanted to. The two men at the bar who'd been arguing about politics turned to watch the show. The couple eating the sonkás palacsinta paused simultaneously, forks in midair.