Free Diagnosis Murder 7 - The Double LIfe by Lee Goldberg Page B

said. "I still have no idea who or what I'm looking for. But at the same time, I feel this nagging itch in the back of my mind, like there's something I'm missing." 
    "Two years."
    Mark shook his head. "No, it's not that. It's something right in front of my face that I'm not seeing."
    She gave him a look. "Maybe it's me."
    "It's the case," he said.
    "How can you be sure?" she said. "How do you know it's not some memory trying to claw its way back to the surface?"
    "Because this feeling is something I've felt before on other cases."
    "It's something you remember feeling before. It's a memory as much as it is a feeling. It may be a whole bunch of memories rising from the murk."
    "That would be nice," Mark said.
    "Yes, it would," Emily said. "Where to now?"
    "You could drop me off at the hospital and I could pick up my car."
    "Why would I want to do that?"
    "So you wouldn't have to chauffeur me around," Mark said. "I'm feeling fine. My eyesight is good. It's safe for me to drive."
    "Trying to get rid of me?" she said lightly.
    "I just thought you might be anxious to get back to your work."
    "I want to be with you. I want to help you solve this case and then recover your memory so we can continue our lives together," she said. "Nothing is more important than that to me.
    Mark nodded. "Okay. In that case, we're going to West LA."
    "What's there?"
    "Grover Dawson's place. So far I've been working from the present and going backwards. Let's start from the past and go forward. Probably the first thing I did was visit the scene of the crime to see what I could learn."
    "Makes sense," Emily said.
    "It's about time something did," he said.

C HAPTER N INE
     
    Grover Dawson's apartment was just a few blocks away from the Tropic Sands, where Mark had lived with his first wife and their infant son forty years ago. The Tropic Sands was a typical example of the space-age modernism that had swept Southern California in the late fifties and early sixties.
    The buildings of the era were essentially stucco boxes, bland on three sides but with eye-catching street facades meant to grab a motorist's attention. The Tropic Sands had two palm trees out front and the name of the apartment house written in flowing plywood script over a strip of lava rock and punctuated by a starburst lamp.
    The architecture seemed to say that these weren't just places to live—they were a trip to paradise or a rocket to tomorrow. The bright colors and sweeping rooflines were meant to distract tenants from the fact that they were actually living in cheaply made, cramped, assembly-line boxes that wouldn't be standing when the future they promised finally arrived.
    The apartments were built around and over the car, the carports literally incorporating the automobile as part of the exterior design. That worked well when cars all looked like rocket ships and ocean liners. The rapid decline and neglect of the buildings came about the same time that cars started looking like the shabby boxes they were parked under.
    Only a few years ago, the Tropic Sands and remaining buildings like it had become decaying slum apartments destined for demolition, to be replaced by the block-long condominium monoliths that were reshaping West LA.
    But then a miracle happened. Young, successful professionals embraced the exuberant optimism that the buildings represented, restoring the vintage properties to their gaudy grandeur.
    Now the Tropic Sands looked even better than it had in Mark's day, so much so that it seemed like a figment of his imagination, a fading memory gussied up by sentiment and wishful thinking.
    He wondered if Emily drove by the building on purpose as a way to jog his memory. Then again, perhaps he'd never told her about this place and she was merely taking surface streets to avoid the congestion on Santa Monica Boulevard.
    Either way, Mark was glad he'd seen the building. It may not have helped him remember Emily, but it gave him another tether between the past and the