Hymn Read online

  ‘Waldo,’ he called. ‘Come on out here.’

  Waldo stepped out on to the balcony, tugging his cummerbund straight. ‘You want something, Mr Denman?’

  Lloyd nodded. ‘Yes, I do. I want you to drop everything for just a couple of minutes and come out here and take a look at the cove.’

  Waldo kept his eyes on Lloyd; obviously tense, obviously thinking anxiously about everything he had to do. Check the menus, update the wine-lists, call for two replacement waitresses because Angie and Kay had both phoned in sick. Sick, my ass, excuse my Lithuanian, surfing more like.

  Lloyd tried to encourage him, ‘Relax, look around. What do you think of the cove this evening?’

  Waldo glanced at it quickly. ‘This evening, it’s a nice cove.’

  ‘Is that all? Just nice?’

  Waldo contrived to look around some more. ‘This evening, it’s a heck of a nice cove.’

  Llody laughed and clamped his arm around Waldo’s shoulders. ‘You know what your trouble is, Waldo?’

  ‘What?’ asked Waldo, uneasily. ‘What’s my trouble?’

  ‘You never stop to think how lucky you are.’

  Waldo plainly didn’t understand what Lloyd was trying to say to him. He shrugged, twisted the napkin that he always used for polishing fingerprints from knives and forks. ‘I do what I can, Mr Denman. You know that.’

  ‘Sure, Waldo, I know that. But just close your eyes and take a breath of this good Pacific air and let your muscles loose. You may have had your troubles with Tusha, but you’ve got yourself two beautiful children, and your own apartment and a car that actually runs, and a whole lot of people who like you.’

  ‘Well, that’s nice, Mr Denman. Thank you very much.’

  ‘Waldo . . .’ Lloyd began, squeezing Waldo’s arm. But he knew that it was no use pushing Waldo any further. He would simply embarrass him.

  Waldo went to the rail and looked out over the sea. Now that the sun was setting, La Jolla and all its jostling restaurants and souvenir shops and colour-washed apartment buildings were thickly coated in a glutinous shellac of amber light. The gulls continued to wheel and scream, and Waldo lifted his double chin and watched them.

  ‘My family used to live in Palanga, you know, on the Baltic,’ he said. ‘It seems very far from here now, very long ago. My grandfather used to take me for walks along the shore. It’s funny, don’t you think, Mr Denman? I can see him as clear now as I did then. He always used to wear a long grey wool coat, and an old-fashioned black felt hat.’

  ‘That’s not so funny,’ smiled Lloyd. ‘I can almost see him myself.’

  Waldo slowly shook his head. ‘Grandfather used to say to me that when we die, our souls become seagulls. They fly, they swoop. That is why seagulls always sound so sad. They are always looking for the people they left behind.’

  Lloyd said, ‘That’s a cute little story.’

  Waldo wiped his eyes with his fingers. ‘I used to believe it. I think I still believe it. Maybe in the Baltic my grandfather still flies and swoops along the shoreline, looking for that boy that he once used to take for walks.’

  He shrugged, and then he said, ‘I’d better get back in now. There’s a whole lot to do.’

  As he went in, however, Lloyd saw two men in budget-priced suits push their way in through the restaurant’s oak-panelled front door, and stand uncertainly among the pot-plants. They certainly didn’t look like the Fish Depot’s usual type of customer, but then they didn’t look like health inspectors, either. One of them was cavernous-cheeked and unshaven, with glittering eyes. The other was podgy and rumpled, with a surprised-looking face, and an uncontrollable quiff of fraying brown hair. Jackie Gleason meets James Belushi.

  The unshaven one came up to Waldo and spoke to him. Waldo nodded, then shook his head. He said something else, and then he turned and pointed toward the balcony. The two men weaved their way between the tables with their hands in their pockets, and emerged out on the balcony.

  ‘Mr Lloyd Denman?’ the unshaven one asked him, with a slight catch in his throat.

  ‘That’s right. How can I help you?’

  The man produced a gold badge. ‘I’m Sergeant David Houk, sir, San Diego Police Department. This is Detective Ned Gable.’

  ‘This doesn’t concern unpaid parking tickets, does it?’ asked Lloyd, mock-defensively. ‘There’s a whole bunch still in my glovebox. You know how it is. Busy, busy, busy.’

  ‘Well, no, sir. We just wanted to ask you a couple of questions, sir.’

  Lloyd could sense their disquiet. ‘What is it?’ he demanded. ‘What’s happened?’

  Sergeant Houk cleared his throat, and then he said, ‘There’s been an accident, Mr Denman, on Rosecrans Avenue, downtown.’

  ‘An accident? What kind of an accident?’

  ‘Woman got fatally burned, sir. Right in front of McDonald’s restaurant.’

  ‘Well, that’s terrible.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Lloyd waited. He didn’t know what else to say. ‘So, a woman got burned. What does that have to do with me?’

  ‘Do you know Ms Celia Williams, sir?’ asked Detective Gable.

  Lloyd was baffled. ‘Sure I know Ms Celia Williams. She’s my fiancée. But she’s in San Francisco right now, giving a course of music lectures.’

  ‘She’s in San Francisco?’ asked Houk, glancing at Gable with unconcealed surprise.

  ‘Sure. She left at the weekend. I don’t expect her back until Saturday afternoon. She called me last night . . . I don’t know—it must have been twelve, half after twelve.’

  Sergeant Houk massaged his bony, unshaven jowls. ‘Mr Denman . . . I don’t know how to start saying this, sir. But as far as we can tell, Ms Celia Williams was the woman who burned to death in front of McDonald’s today.’

  Lloyd stared at him, and then laughed. The idea that Celia had been outside McDonald’s today, only six or seven miles away from La Jolla on Rosecrans Avenue, was so patently absurd that he wasn’t even upset. ‘Sergeant, that’s impossible. That’s totally impossible. Celia’s in San Francisco. She was giving a lecture this afternoon at the Performing Arts Center.’

  ‘Did you speak to her today?’ asked Detective Gable, sniffing, and wiping his nose with the back of his hand.

  ‘No, not yet. She usually calls me around midnight, when the restaurant’s emptying out.’

  ‘And you’re expecting her to call tonight?’

  ‘Of course I’m expecting her to call tonight. She’s my fiancée. We’re going to be married come September.’

  Sergeant Houk reached into the pocket of his creased Sears suit and produced a transparent plastic envelope. He held it up, so that Lloyd could see what was in it. A white credit card wallet, badly charred at one end, and a gold charm bracelet.

  ‘Mr Denman, do you recognize either of these two items?’

  Lloyd stared at him. ‘She’s in San Francisco. If you doubt my word, you can try calling her. She’s staying at the Miyako. Listen—do you want the number?’

  A small spasm of panic. The wallet’s clasp was curved and gold, in the shape of the Chinese symbol for yin and yang; just like the clasp of Celia’s wallet. And although he hadn’t looked closely at the charms, the charm bracelet looked startlingly like the one that he had given Celia when she had first moved in . . . and to which he had added a new charm each month. A treble clef, for the day she had graduated as a doctor of music; a house, for the day they had moved into 4884 North Torrey; a heart, for the day he had proposed to her.

  ‘Mr Denman,’ Sergeant Houk told him, with heartbreaking professional gentleness, ‘do you want to sit down and take a look at these things? The wallet contains a social security card and credit cards belonging to Celia Jane Williams, as well as business cards from this restaurant, and two photographs of a man who I now recognize to be you.’


  Lloyd looked mechanically around, and then dragged over a rattan chair, and sat down. Sergeant Houk handed him the wallet, and then the charm bracelet. Detective Gable coughed uncomfortably, and sniffed.

  This can’t be real, thought Lloyd. Something’s slipped, something’s gone haywire. This is not me, this is somebody else. Or maybe I’m still asleep, and this is nothing but a dream. But I can feel the wind. I can hear the gulls crying. And there’s Waldo, staring at me pale-faced through the tinted glass window, and Waldo wouldn’t stare at me like that, so apprehensive and so sorrowful, if this weren’t real.

  He opened the wallet. He stared inside. The embossed label said F. David, Del Mar. He knew it was hers. He had been with her at the Flower Hill Shopping Center when she had bought it. He didn’t have to look at the credit cards, but he did. Sears, Exxon, American Express. Don’t leave home without it.

  ‘Where were these found?’ he managed to say, his lips woolly and numb.

  ‘They were found on the body of a white Caucasian female aged about twenty-nine, in the parking lot outside McDonald’s Restaurant, Rosecrans Avenue, at 11.30 a.m. this morning,’ said Houk.

  ‘She was blonde,’ added Gable, trying to be helpful, trying hard to be sympathetic. ‘She was pretty, by all accounts, with blue eyes. She wore a red chequered shirt and blue 501s.’

  Lloyd didn’t look up, but rubbed his thumb across the white leather wallet again and again, as if he were expecting a secret message to appear. ‘Red chequered shirt?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s right, sir. Red chequered shirt and 501s.’

  ‘Outside McDonald’s on Rosecrans?’

  ‘That’s correct, sir.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Lloyd, and he didn’t. He was so sure that Celia was in San Francisco that he was prepared to call her now, at the Performing Arts Center, even though he knew she was right in the middle of a lecture on reading operatic scores. Just to call her and say, ‘You’re there, aren’t you, in San Francisco?’ And to hear her say, ‘yes! of course I am!’

  ‘And what did you say? Fatally burned? Dead?’

  Sergeant Houk sucked in his cheeks even more cavernously. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Denman, but it sure looks like it. I mean, there’s still a possibility it isn’t Ms Williams. Somebody could’ve stole your fiancée’s wallet. But I wouldn’t count on it.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Lloyd protested. ‘She flew out of here Sunday afternoon! I put her on the flight myself! She was giving five lectures on Wagner and operatic technique, and then she was coming directly back home! There’s no conceivable reason why she should have come back to San Diego before Saturday, none at all. And I can’t believe she wouldn’t have called me.’

  ‘Well, there must have been some motive,’ Sergeant Houk said, gently. ‘The only trouble is, we don’t yet know what it was.’

  Detective Gable said. ‘She wasn’t under any kind of strain, was she? Worried about this lecture tour, anything like that? Some people crack up without any warning whatsoever, just crack up, and the next thing you know they’ve left their family and their friends behind and they’re riding lettuce-trains all over the country.’

  Lloyd slowly shook his head. Lettuce-trains? He couldn’t make any sense of what they were telling him. It was totally unbelievable that Celia was dead. On Sunday morning they had lain side by side in bed together with fresh coffee and the Sunday paper and the sun striping the sheets. She had leaned on her elbow, one hand thrust into her tangled blonde hair, and said to him, ‘We’re going to have babies, aren’t we?’

  He had finished reading Calvin & Hobbes and then leaned forward and kissed her forehead. ‘Sure we’re going to have babies. A boy like me and a girl like you.’

  She had smiled a distant smile. ‘One will do.’

  ‘Just one? I want a dynasty!’

  ‘One’s enough. If you have a baby, you know, you live for ever.’

  But she hadn’t had a baby, hadn’t even had the chance to have a baby. Now she was dead, impossibly and unimaginably dead. No life everlasting, nothing.

  The tears dripped down Lloyd’s cheeks and he didn’t even know that he was crying.

  ‘When did this happen?’ he asked, trying to remember if he had experienced any unusual feelings during the day. Any feeling of coldness, any sudden sense of loss. But lunchtime had been chaotically busy, and for most of the afternoon he had been writing up his accounts. He couldn’t recall anything but frantic hard work and wondering how to keep laundry costs down. Ah Kim’s had just put up their prices two cents a napkin.

  Houk said, ‘It seems like she poured petrol over herself. Kind of a ritual suicide. One of the cooks from McDonald’s managed to reach her with a fire-extinguisher, but it was too late.’

  ‘She killed herself?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Denman, it sure looks that way.’

  ‘I don’t even know what she was doing there,’ Lloyd protested. ‘I mean—what in God’s name was she doing there? She wasn’t depressed, she wasn’t upset.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Denman, we really don’t know. We don’t even know how she got there. There were no private vehicles anywhere in the vicinity left unaccounted for, and nobody saw a woman riding a bus with a petrol can.’

  Lloyd dragged out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes. ‘God, what a waste. God, what a terrible waste. I can’t tell you how . . .’ he stopped, his throat was too tight, and his mouth didn’t seem to work. She had killed herself, burned herself to death, and she hadn’t even tried to tell him what was wrong. That was what hurt. She hadn’t even asked him for help.

  Sergent Houk waited for a long moment. Two of Lloyd’s waitresses had arrived, and Lloyd could see them anxiously talking to Waldo, and glancing out at the balcony now and again. He gave them a hesitant wave, but they probably didn’t understand what he was doing, or else they were too upset, because they didn’t wave back.

  Sergeant Houk glanced around at them, and then carefully took back the wallet and the charm bracelet. ‘You’ll have these back as soon as possible, Mr Denman. Meanwhile there’s one thing I’m going to have to ask you to do. It won’t be easy, but we do need somebody to come downtown to the mortuary tomorrow morning to identify Ms Williams’ remains.’

  Remains, thought Lloyd. What a forlorn, contradictory word. When your soul has left your body, nothing remains. Only memories, only a scattering of objects. Clothes, photographs, a voice that speaks over and over again on video-recordings, an endlessly repeated smile.

  ‘We’ll have to ask you a few more questions,’ Sergeant Houk told him. ‘We’re going to have to piece together everything that happened.’

  Lloyd nodded. ‘All right, I understand.’

  Detective Gable laid his hand consolingly on Lloyd’s shoulder. ‘You okay, sir? You want a ride home or anything?’

  ‘No . . . no thanks,’ Lloyd replied. ‘I have a restaurant to run.’

  The two policemen left him out on the balcony, and went to have a word with Waldo. Essentially, it was ‘keep an eye on him, he’s already in shock’. Then they left. Lloyd sat alone for a long time, unaware that the restaurant wasn’t filling up, that no customers were coming in. Waldo had put a hastily-chalked sign outside saying Closed: Family Bereavement and Suzie was calling up all the customers who had made reservations, cancelling them all apologetically, and offering them free Fish Depot cocktails the next time they came.

  Lloyd stood up, and leaned against the rail of the balcony. The ocean lay below him like molten solder, with a gradually wrinkling skin. The seagulls turned and cried. Lloyd wondered if one of them were already Celia, circling around La Jolla Cove, looking for him.

  Waldo came out and stood a little way behind him. ‘You all right, Mr Denman?’ he asked, at length. ‘You want a drink, maybe?’

  Lloyd shook his head. ‘No thanks.’

  ‘You want that I
should drive you home?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t feel real. I feel like I’m here, but at the same time I’m not here at all. Can you understand that?’

  Waldo came up and clasped Lloyd’s shoulder. ‘It’s a beautiful evening, Mr Denman. The cove is beautiful. Do you know what they say in Lithuania, when somebody dies on a day like this? They say that God loved them so much that he lit all the lamps of heaven to guide them on their way.’

  Three

  A little after eight o’clock, Lloyd drove himself back to North Torrey. He switched on the car radio but KFSD was playing ‘Un Bel Di Vedremo’ from Madame Butterfly and he couldn’t bear it; it had always been Celia’s favourite. He drove the rest of the way home with tears running down his cheeks.

  As he turned into the driveway, a lantern was alight on the front verandah, and the living-room lights were shining, but only because they had been tripped by automatic timers. There was nobody waiting for him, and now there never would be.

  He parked his white BMW in the driveway and killed the engine. He stayed behind the wheel for three or four minutes, trying to decide if he really wanted to go inside. She was dead, but all of her clothes would still be there, her towel would still be hanging in the bathroom. Her photograph would still be smiling at him from his night-table. Most painful of all, he would still be able to smell her. Red, by Giorgio of Beverly Hills.

  He had opened the BMW’s glovebox to find the remote-control for opening the front gates, and her sunglasses and her lipstick had been lying inside, just where she had last tossed them. He had opened the lipstick case. Cantata Red.

  The evening was growing shadowy. The air was thick and warm, and there was a strong smell of eucalyptus and pine. Up above him, it looked as if God had stirred boysenberry jelly into the sky, the way Lloyd’s mother used to stir boysenberry jelly into his milk when he was a kid. I prefer boysenberry to any ordinary jam, somebody sang in the back of his brain.