"The Hymn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

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 fiancee. 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 fiancee. 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 fiancee'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!'