He paused, and lowered his head. Then he took a large swallow of whisky, and mouthwashed it around his teeth. ‘That’s why it’s so hard to believe that she could have taken her own life.’
Lloyd suggested, ‘I guess she could have come to believe that death is a way of living forever. You know . . .”they shall grow not old, as we who are left grow old.”’
Wayne set down his empty glass. ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t make any kind of sense at all. Particularly the way she told you that she didn’t have any parents. I mean—she was going to marry you and not invite us?’
‘I don’t know, Mr Williams. I can’t figure it out.’
They sat in depressed silence for five or ten minutes, and then Lloyd asked, ‘You said that she was obsessed with religion. Do you happen to know what kind of religion? She wasn’t in with a cult or anything, was she? Like the Moonies, maybe? Or the Bhagwan?’
Wayne made a face. ‘I’m not sure. She started off at the Episcopalian church at San Clemente. She went to Bible meetings and church socials and all that kind of thing. Then about three months after they gave her a place with the San Diego Opera, she met this guy Otto—the guy I thought was you. She always talked about Otto like the sun shone out of his—well, like she thought a whole lot of him, you know? Otto had this group that was all into communicating with the world beyond, all that crap, if you’ll excuse my French.’
‘Oh, sure.’ Lloyd got up and poured both of them another large drink. ‘You don’t happen to know the name of this group? Where they hang out? What they’re into?’
Wayne shook his head. ‘All Celia ever talked about was how much she enjoyed the group, the group was brilliant, and Otto was brilliant, she thought Otto was wonderful. God, practically.’
‘You never met Otto?’
‘We only came down to see the opera once. Personally I can take it or leave it, opera. I don’t know where Celia got her interest from. Especially that goddamned Wagner. After she met Otto, it was Wagner this and Wagner that, and when she came home weekends she played this real loud heavy stuff with screaming women. I used to take the dog for a walk. That Wagner music, Jesus. It sounded like somebody dropping an A-bomb on an afternoon session of weight-watchers.’
Wayne paused, cleared his throat, and then continued, ‘Barbershop, that’s more my style. “In The Good Old Summertime”.’ There were tears in his eyes.
Lloyd sank back into the sofa and toyed with his glass. Wayne puffed at his cigar and blew smoke-rings up to the ceiling. He was quite drunk now, which was probably just as well. The full impact of his daughter’s death wouldn’t hit him until he woke up tomorrow morning with a cement-truck hangover.
Twenty minutes later, Wayne’s eyes drooped and he dozed off. Lloyd gave him a moment or two to fall more heavily asleep. Then he walked softly across and removed the half-burned cigar from Wayne’s lifeless fingers.
He went through to the kitchen, picked up the telephone and dialled Sylvia Cuddy’s number. While he waited for Sylvia to answer, he switched on the portable television next to the spice-rack, and watched a Wrigley’s Doublemint commercial with the sound turned down to gnat-in-a-jam-jar level.
Sylvia answered. There was opera in the background, Verdi, played at devastating volume.
‘Sylvia? This is Lloyd.’
‘Oh, Lloyd! I’ve been waiting for your call! I was just about to go out.’
‘Don’t let me keep you.’
‘Oh, not at all. Wait, just let me turn this down. I can’t hear myself think. Leonard Katzmann’s taking me to Mario’s for dinner, as if I haven’t had enough opera for one day. Or enough of Leonard, come to that. How are you, my dear? Was it terrible today?’
Terrible? How could he possibly put into words the sheer grisly horror of those gaping Lon Chaney nostrils, those stretched-back lips, that incinerated hair? That beautiful face that had been turned into a grinning blackened voodoo death-mask?
‘Well,’ he said, trying to sound matter-of-fact, ‘it was pretty difficult, to be honest with you. It was just about the worst thing I’ve ever had to do in the whole of my life.’
‘Lloyd, my love, I’m so sorry. You don’t know how badly everybody feels for you.’
‘Thanks, Sylvia. Listen . . . I’ll talk to you tomorrow about the funeral and all that kind of thing. The medical examiner hasn’t released her body to the morticians yet. Apparently it’s a rule that they always have to carry out an autopsy after a suicide.’
‘Take your time, Lloyd. I’ll call around tomorrow, if you like.’
‘Sure, I’d like that. There’s just one thing I wanted to ask you.’
‘Anything. Go ahead.’
‘Well . . . do you happen to know anybody at the opera called Otto?’
There was a pause. ‘Otto? Not that I know of. Do you happen to know his second name?’
‘Otto, that’s all I’ve got. Maybe he’s not exactly a member of the opera company, but just knows some of the people there. He’s involved with some kind of religious study group.’
‘I can’t say that I’ve ever heard of any Otto. But I’ll ask around, if you like. Maybe Don knows him.’
She hesitated, and then she said, ‘Is it something you want for yourself? I know a marvellous priest you could talk to, Father Bernard.’
‘No, no, it’s just . . . just somebody that Celia happened to mention. I guessed I ought to tell him what happened.’
‘Oh, sure. Well, I’ll ask. You don’t know anything else about him?’
‘Just that Celia thought he was something between Jesus Christ and Robert Redford.’
‘Did she? Well, knowing how critical Celia was, he sounds like just the kind of man I’d like to get my hands on. I’ll ask around, okay? Goodnight, Lloyd, and take care of yourself.’
Lloyd recradled the receiver. As he did so, the seven o’clock news came on to the television. Immediately, he saw the unsteady hand-held image of a blackened, burned-out bus, out in the desert. The same bus that Sergeant Houk had been sent to investigate. Lloyd pressed the remote-control, and caught the reporter in mid-sentence.
‘. . . this afternoon by two Highway Patrol officers on a routine journey through the Anza Borrego State Park . . .’
Lloyd watched as the TV news cameras circled around the skeletal wreck of the bus.
‘. . . only known witness was a blind Indian boy who claims to have heard voices in the vicinity of the bus immediately prior to its burning, but . . .’
The camera pulled back to show three ambulances parked on the edge of the highway, and a row of body bags lying on the ground. The reporter said, ‘Only two of the victims have so far been positively identified. One was Mr Ronald Korshaw, a carpet salesman from Escondido. The other was Ms Marianna Gomes, a scenic designer for the San Diego Opera Company . . .’
Lloyd stared at the television with a tight feeling of fright and elation. So there’s no connection between the deaths of all of these people in a burned-out bus in the Anza Borrego State Park and Celia’s suicide on Rosecrans Avenue, is there, Sergeant Houk? But what do you think are the odds that two girls from the San Diego Opera Company should burn themselves to death on successive days? A zillion to one?
Lloyd had once met Marianna Gomes. He remembered a vivacious, dark-skinned girl in a flouncy red blouse. Red lips, black eyes, hips that swayed to a silent salsa. Hardly the suicidal type—any more than Celia had been.
He recalled Celia talking to him about Marianna, too. ‘She’s so bright and so talented, and she has the craziest sense of humour.’ Several times, when Celia had returned home late, she had told him that she and Marianna had been ‘working on something’ together, and that they had ‘lost track of time’.
Was this what they had both been working on? Their mutual suicide by fire?
Lloyd swallowed the rest of his drink. His mind was clamorous with images, po
ssibilities, snatches of remembered conversation.
‘Marianna and I have been working on this idea together . . . I guess we just got carried away . . .’
He could picture her now, in her sheepskin jacket, turning around as she closed the front door.
‘We were talking about what you could do if you had all the time in the world.’
When had she said that? He could distinctly remember her saying it: ‘. . . all the time in the world’.
Maybe both Celia and Marianna had been attending religious discussions with this mysterious Otto character? Maybe they had been working out their self-immolation with him? Because—think about it—how had Celia managed to get to Rosecrans Avenue with that yellow petrol can, if she hadn’t had somebody to take her there? She hadn’t been seen on the bus, no taxi-driver had reported taking her, and there were no vehicles in the area that were unaccounted for.
Lloyd picked up the phone again, and redialled Sylvia’s number, but Sylvia must have left for her dinner at Mario’s. He went back into the living-room, collecting the Wild Turkey bottle from the table. He hadn’t bothered to refill the decanter. Wayne was still dozing, his head thrown back and his mouth open, purring deep like a cat.
Lloyd opened his desk-drawer, and lifted out a thick yellow legal pad. Writing in firm italics, in dark purple ink, he set down the title CELIA JANE WILLIAMS and then underneath he wrote June 15, the day of her death.
He had no real evidence; nothing to go on but speculation and fear. But he was sure now that Celia’s decision to set herself alight hadn’t been done spontaneously or rashly, nor had she done it in a moment of irrationality. She had planned it, maybe for weeks, maybe for months.
Whether Otto and his religious study group had anything to do with it, he didn’t yet know. But he was determined to find out.
OTTO, he wrote on his pad, and then filled in the two Os with two eyes and a smile. Have a nice day.
He hadn’t been brought up as a fighter, not in the physical sense, anyway. His father had always said that it was crazy people who demanded an eye for an eye. Survival was more dignified than trying to do to others what they had done unto you. But now Lloyd found himself consumed with a feeling of revenge that was like nothing he had ever experienced in his life. It was almost like being on fire himself. He couldn’t sit still, he could scarcely breathe. He was going to find out who had taken Celia away from him, no matter how long it took, no matter how much it cost, and he would get even.
Seven
La Jolla was masked in a pearl-grey Pacific fog the following morning, as Lloyd drove down to Denman’s Original Fish Depot. Waldo’s light-blue Cutlass Supreme was already parked outside, and behind the Victorian-style frontage, with its parlour palms and its art nouveau window-frames, Lloyd could see the lights inside the main restaurant. He unlocked the door and went straight in.
‘Waldo?’
Waldo was sitting at one of the dining-tables, writing menus. Outside the window, La Jolla Cove was invisible, as if the world ended just beyond the balcony.
‘Mr Denman, how are you? You didn’t have to come in to the restaurant yet. Everything is fine. Everything is running smooth.’
He stood up, and they embraced each other, a little awkwardly because of Waldo’s intervening pot-belly and his insistence on proper protocol. Lloyd would never be ‘Lloyd’ to Waldo, not even if they were still running the Fish Depot together when they were nonagenarians. Waldo’s first law of industrial relations was that if a man gave you a job, then you respected that man. If you couldn’t respect him, you should find another job.
‘You went to the mortuary?’ asked Waldo, gently. ‘You saw her?’
Lloyd nodded. ‘Yes. I’ve met her parents, too.’
Waldo frowned at him. ‘Didn’t you say she didn’t have no parents?’
‘Well, yes, that’s what she said, but it turns out she does. They came down from San Celemente last night and stayed over. I saw them off about a half an hour ago. They’re very broken up about it.’
‘Everybody is broke up, Mr Denman. Everybody is broke up real bad.’
Lloyd went through to the kitchens. A huge copper saucepan of fish stock was simmering on the hob. He lifted the lid and sniffed it. ‘Smells good. Louis is going to be giving Marcel Perrin a run for his money one of these days. Did he manage to buy any bluefish?’
‘He’s gone down to the dock to fetch some now. He wanted more abalone too.’
Lloyd looked around, and then he said, ‘I’m going to need some time off, Waldo. I want you to take charge of things for a while.’
‘Sure, Mr Denman. You can count on me. How long do you think you’re going to need?’
‘I don’t know, it could be a couple of days, it could be a week. There’s a problem I have to take care of. I’ll try to keep in touch, but if you get into any kind of trouble you can always call my lawyer, Dan Tabares. He’s in the phonebook, Tabares Oldenkamp Tabares.’
Waldo watched Lloyd uneasily. ‘You want to tell me what’s wrong, Mr Denman? Maybe there’s something I can do.’
Lloyd squeezed Waldo’s hard, podgy arm. ‘Not this time, amigo. This is one that I have to sort out on my own. I’ll pay you two hundred dollars a week more, okay? And you’ll have full authority to sign cheques.’
‘Mr Denman, it wasn’t for the extra money that I offered to help.’
‘Of course you didn’t. But you’re going to have extra responsibilities now, and extra responsibilities means extra pay. Okay?’
‘Well, okay, Mr Denman, if that’s what you want.’
Lloyd went through to his office. He collected his Filofax, his spare set of keys, and the cassette from his answering-machine. Then he went across to the small table where he kept his business cheque books. Somebody had crowded the top of it with about a dozen of the old salt-and-pepper pots they used to use, before Lloyd had bought a complete new service from Villeroy & Boche. He unlocked the desk, and eased the lid up only a quarter of an inch so that he could retrieve a cheque book without dislodging any of the salt-and-pepper pots.
He had managed to tweak one cheque book between two fingers when the salt-and-pepper pots suddenly slid, and scattered all over the floor.
‘God damn it,’ he cursed.
‘Everything okay, Mr Denman?’ asked Waldo, peering around the door.
‘Oh, sure, fine—I just . . .’
He looked down at the scattered salt-and-pepper pots and they suddenly reminded him of something. Celia’s scrimshaw, scattered across the carpet. And why had the scrimshaw scattered like that? Not because somebody had swept it all off the top of the piano with their arm. If somebody had done that, the scrimshaw would have been sprayed over a much wider area. No—it had all slid off the piano-top together, in the same tumbled cluster as these salt-and-pepper pots. Because somebody had done what he had just done with this desk. Lifted the lid, to retrieve something that was inside.
He gave Waldo a last quick list of instructions, and then he left the Original Fish Depot and stepped quickly out into the cool, moist fog. He wanted to go home and see what it was that his late-night visitor had been looking for.
The house seemed even quieter and emptier during the day than it did at night. He carried all his office papers inside, and left them on the kitchen counter. Then he went into the living-room and across to the piano.
He listened. Nothing but the sound of insects in the yard, and the whispering of lawn-sprinklers. Nothing but the measured dripping of a bathroom tap.
It was like a life, dripping away, drip, drip, drip, down the drain.
Carefully, he took all of the pieces of scrimshaw off the piano-lid, and laid them out on the cushions of one of the sofas. He was conscious as he did so that the photograph of Celia was watching him from the open bedroom door. Come, my Celia, let us prove . . . while we can, the sports of love.
The telephone rang and made his skin tingle with shock. He took off the last two pieces of scrimshaw, and went to answer it.
‘Lloyd? It’s Sylvia.’
‘Oh hi, Sylvia. I guess you heard about Marianna.’
‘Wasn’t that terrible? I was devastated. And the day after Celia, too.’
‘She was a really terrific girl.’
Sylvia said, ‘I came back from Mario’s and saw it on the late-night news. I was just devastated. You don’t think there’s any connection, do you?’
‘That’s what I asked the police, but they really didn’t know. I think there’s a pretty strong chance that there is a connection. It seems like far too much of a coincidence, two girls from the same opera company burning to death two days apart.’
‘I don’t know, Lloyd. It’s not as if Marianna killed herself on her own. You know, not as if she was following Celia’s example. She had twelve other people with her, and none of them had anything to do with the San Diego Opera.’
‘Well, I guess the police will come up with something,’ Lloyd told her, guardedly.
‘I guess so,’ Sylvia agreed. ‘It’s such a terrible waste of life.’
‘I really have to go now,’ Lloyd told her, eyeing the bare white lid of the piano. ‘Did you say you were coming around today?’
‘For sure . . . that’s if you still want me to.’
‘Why don’t we go out for drinks? I could use somebody to talk to. I’ll pick you up at six-thirty.’
‘I’d like that.’
Lloyd put down the phone and returned to the piano. Gently, he eased up the lid, and peered into the shadowy interior. Pianos always smelled the same inside, of wax and resin and felt dampers, almost like church. He lifted the lid right up, and propped it open.
At first glance, there didn’t appear to be anything inside it. The trouble was, he didn’t know what he was supposed to be looking for. A key, maybe? A wad of dollar-bills? A message? A chamois-leather bag, crammed with diamonds?
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