To Be Sung Underwater

by Tom McNeal

  Part Three

  1

  Upon opening her eyes in her storage room, Judith felt heavy, dull, disoriented. It was late afternoon; she’d fallen asleep, and what awakened her was the ringtone, the Debussy one. “Hello,” she said, but it came out too loud. She was trying to sound wide awake. It was the middle of the afternoon, a workday. What if it was Lucy Meynke, or Hooper or Pottle?

  “Edie?” A man’s flat voice.

  “Who?”

  “Edie Winks.”

  Of course. Clair de Lune. The Edie Winks phone.

  “Oh,” Judith said. “I couldn’t hear you. It’s not the best connection.”

  “It’s Gilbert Smith.”

  Judith didn’t speak. Who was Gilbert Smith?

  “Gilbert J. Smith. You hired me to—”

  “Oh, right.”

  “I have the information you requested.”

  He has the information I requested. “Okay,” she said.

  “I thought we might meet to discuss it.”

  “Okay.”

  The detective suggested the next morning, at the Hamburger Hamlet on Hollywood Boulevard, say ten-thirty?

  Which meant slipping away from work again or going in late again, both bad options. “I’m at work then,” she said. “How about first thing tomorrow—sevenish? Or tomorrow night after six?”

  Gilbert J. Smith said that wasn’t possible tomorrow, but he could do either of those times on Friday if she liked.

  This was Monday. Friday seemed like sometime next year.

  “What do you do?” Gilbert J. Smith said softly, innocuously, but Judith ignored the question. “It’s all right,” she said. “I can work it out for tomorrow.”

  After hanging up, she sat on the side of the bed. It was late, almost 4:30. When had she fallen asleep? And how had she slept so long? She pulled her own phone from her purse, turned it on, checked missed calls. Lucy Meynke had called five times. Mick Hooper twice. Leo Pottle once. There was only one message, and it was from Lucy: “Bad news—Pottle took the next show from us. Do I sound hysterical? Because I feel hysterical. Where are you?

  What excuse had she given? A migraine specialist? A battery of tests? She couldn’t remember. She called Lucy and said, “I had to take an Imitrex, but I’m better now. I’ll be right there.”

  She returned to the studio—one of the other editors, passing in the corridor, averted her gaze—and found Lucy alone there, turning from the monitor at the sudden admission of outside light. “Oh,” she said. “Thank God you’re here.” They stayed until after midnight, grindingly, painstakingly working their way through the cuts. When they’d gotten six minutes of film behind them, they felt good enough to go home. As they approached their cars in the empty parking lot, Judith said, “How about we work late tomorrow night, too?” She opened the Audi with the remote and added, “I’ve got an appointment at ten-thirty tomorrow morning, so I won’t be in until eleven-thirty or so, but we can go gangbusters after that.”

  Lucy, at her car, turned as if in surprise, but Judith slipped at once into the Audi and turned the ignition key.

  The next morning, she turned up a narrow ramp to the second and top floor of an old auto-service garage adjacent to Hollywood Boulevard. The garage was wood-framed, with glassed walls that from Judith’s parking space gave onto Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where tourists already milled. The Hamburger Hamlet stood just across the street. It was 10:20. Judith was early. Gilbert J. Smith had said he’d sit toward the back of the restaurant and would be the one with a green loose-leaf notebook. He had asked what she would be wearing. “Black and white,” she’d said, and that’s what she showed up in: black ballet shoes, black pipestem pants, white boater top, and diamond stud earrings—no-nonsense Judith clothes.

  She still harbored an image of Gilbert J. Smith as Harry Dean Stanton, but the man waving her over to his table was enormous, well past routine obesity, and his crew cut gave his large head an odd flatiron aspect. His polo shirt, pants, belt, and shoes were all black. (He looked, she would decide later, like someone who’d been a lineman for his high school football team, then done a stint in the Marines before turning to a life of eating, sleuthing, and listening to Johnny Cash.)

  “Gilbert Smith?” she said, not that she needed to. The green notebook lay on the table before him, next to a neatly folded Times sports page. He’d pushed himself up to greet her, and he now breathed heavily through his mouth, as if the mere act of being upright were physically exhausting. “And you must be Edith Winks?” he said.

  They both sat down. When he turned to catch the notice of the waitress, Judith scanned the restaurant (crowded, casual), then looked out through the window at the uneasy mix of dazed tourists and stony locals. “I haven’t been on Hollywood Boulevard for years.”

  “I’m not often here myself,” the detective said. “It’s just that I had work nearby today.” Now that he was seated, his eyes, deeply set in his fleshy face, were fixed on her as if from a duck blind.

  A waitress appeared, a white woman, midthirties, hardened and bored. In the old days, this restaurant had hired only black men and women, a practice of which Judith approved, though she’d sometimes wondered how she would’ve felt had she been Vietnamese, say, or Guatemalan. In any case, the policy was gone, litigated to smithereens was Judith’s bet. “Herbal tea,” she said.

  The waitress gave her a That’s it? look and walked away without writing anything down. Her hawking a loogie into the hot tea was not out of the question.

  Gilbert J. Smith said, “Winks is an interesting name. Is it English in origin?”

  So. He was on to her. Which for some reason irritated her. “I think it derives from forty winks,” she said, and the detective reacted with such a quick set of staccato laughs that Judith was aware of his flabby breasts jiggling beneath his tentlike polo shirt. Then he said genially, “Forty winks as in you dreamed it up?”

  She could feel her skin pinkening. “My check’s good, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  The detective’s face seemed to relax then, as if they’d now had some meeting of the minds. “I know that,” he said, and this was his Harry Dean Stanton voice, the one she liked. “And you’d be surprised how little I worry about. I don’t have a spouse, or kids, or a big bank account, and that’s where you see the bulk of your real worrying.” He seemed actually to be thinking about this. “I keep tropical fish, but you couldn’t say I worry about them.”

  The sullen waitress brought Judith a small pot of hot water and a saucer containing two tea bags, Earl Grey and Orange Pekoe. The hot water wasn’t hot at all, but it at least looked unadulterated. Besides, the mere process of slipping the tea bag from its jacket and dipping it into the tepid water was calming. She said, “So you seemed to be saying on the phone that you’d found my old friends.”

  Gilbert J. Smith opened the green notebook and flipped through a number of pages before clicking open the binder and slipping a single page free of the metal rings. He tipped the page toward him and began to summarize what he read. “Patrick Guest,” he said. “Living in eastern Brazil. Has been for the past twelve years. Cattle operation, plus soybeans. Now developing a portion of property into a gated community of oceanview building lots with a website targeting rich Americanos.”

  Judith stared at him and said, “You’re kidding.”

  Behind the heavy lids, Gilbert Smith’s eyes rose. “The truth is, I used to do a little kidding, but I gave it up. It’s not compatible with this line of work.” He returned his attention to the page. “Mr. Guest is married to a Brazilian, the former Maria Madalena Abreu Silva, who has borne him four girls. All ems: Margarita, Monica, Miryam, and Mariana.” He stopped then, turned the page facedown, and, as a little intermission, tore open a pink packet of sugar substitute and stirred it into his coffee.

  Judith found the news she’d just received deeply pleasing. She liked thinking of Patrick Guest on a green ranch overlooking a foreign ocean, liked thinking of him spendin
g his evenings with his Brazilian wife and daughters with names beginning with m. She imagined white cotton dresses and a white plaster house with dark heavy beams.

  Gilbert J. Smith set down his coffee. “Now with William Blunt and Deena Schmidt,” he said as he again scanned his sheet of paper, “we get a little lucky. They turn out to be a twofer. Seems they both live in Grand Lake, Nebraska.” The sheet of paper dipped an inch and his hunter’s eyes locked on to her. “In fact, they live at the same address.”

  “What?” Judith said, and wished she hadn’t.

  Gilbert J. Smith was slowly nodding to himself. “That’s right. They were married”—his eyes drifted down the page—“on June 25, 1978.”

  One year to the day after she’d married Malcolm.

  “Well, good for them,” Judith said, trying to recover. “That’s the most astonishing news.”

  Gilbert J. Smith regarded her blandly, then returned his gaze to the page. “He was a general contractor, built single-family houses primarily, but is now retired. She works in a doctor’s office. Two sons, one in high school, one in the navy. House in Grand Lake free and clear. Same with a metes-and-bounds property in Rufus Sage, Nebraska. No criminal records, no judgments against them.”

  The detective read a little more to himself but evidently found nothing worth repeating. He slipped the sheet of paper into a folder. “The telephone number for Mr. and Mrs. Blunt is here, but under the circumstances, I took the liberty of not contacting Mr. Blunt to give him your contact information.” He smiled. “I can still do that if you like.”

  Judith shook her head.

  The detective slid the folder across the table. “You’ll see that all I have for your vaquero is an address. And of course the website for the housing development.”

  Judith opened the folder to glance at the page—it was all neatly typed, and was followed by several pages of photographs. One was of a hundred or so Brahma bulls clustered sedately against the most brilliantly blue sky. Some of Patrick Guest’s cattle, she supposed. She looked again at Gilbert J. Smith.

  He said, “Satisfied, Mrs. Winks?”

  She glanced down at her wedding ring—and wished she hadn’t—then again raised her eyes to the detective. “I am,” she said. “It all seems quite complete. What do I owe you?”

  He shook his large head and gave a dismissive wave. “All covered by your check. No extras on this one.”

  As she stood to leave, Gilbert J. Smith handed Judith his business card. “In case you need anything further,” he said, and out on the sidewalk, waiting for the stoplight, she casually dropped the card into a nearby trash can. Across the street, the crowd at Grauman’s had thickened. A Darth Vader impersonator posed for a picture with two small boys. Another impersonator held his red furry Elmo head under his red furry arm and drank from a plastic water bottle. A low-slung car passed by with four low-slung Hispanic boys staring sullenly from various windows.

  Deena had married Willy. Willy had married Deena.

  It seemed like the biggest surprise in the world and yet, when she thought about it, not much of a surprise at all. All of Deena’s prying questions when Judith and Willy had been together, all of the looks she’d thrown Willy’s way. And the way Deena’s letters suddenly stopped after Judith had broken off with Willy.

  But it was good, she told herself. It was good, better than any other scenario she might’ve imagined. Willy hadn’t just recovered, he’d recovered quickly. Now she could call and talk to Deena and find out how they both were, she and Willy, and their two sons.

  Judith and Lucy stayed late that night and started early the next morning, but the work resisted, seconds of film grudgingly growing to one minute, then two, then three. By early evening they were too tired to think properly, and after declining Lucy’s invitation for a quick bite at Tom Bergin’s, Judith went to her storage unit, opened the folder given her by Gilbert J. Smith, and checked the time. Six forty-five. Seven forty-five in western Nebraska. Several times she gathered in three staggered breaths of air and slowly released them. She practiced saying hello, out loud, in a normal voice. Finally she tapped out the telephone number of Willy and Deena Blunt on her keypad, hit the send button, and then, upon hearing almost at once the brusque hello of a woman who must certainly be Deena, she hung up without a word.

  The next night, when she reached a taped message in Deena’s voice asking the caller to please leave a message, Judith hung up on that, too. But four or five days later someone who sounded quite a lot like Willy answered on the first ring. When Judith didn’t speak, he repeated his hello.

  “Willy?” she said.

  “Warren.”

  “Warren?”

  “Willy’s son.”

  “Oh. Could I speak to Willy?”

  “Not here.”

  “When would be a good time for me to reach him?”

  “You mean at this number?”

  “Yes.”

  “Never. He’s never at this number.”

  “What number should I try, then?”

  Away from the phone, Warren yelled, “I don’t know! You come get it if it matters so much to you!” Then, back into the phone, he said, “When we want him to call us, we leave a message at this number.”

  He read it out.

  She wrote it down.

  “Okay?” he said. Warren was ready for this phone call to be over.

  “Yes,” Judith said. “Thanks very much.”

  Before hanging up, Warren said, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” which made no sense whatsoever. Why shouldn’t she say he hadn’t warned her? Because he hadn’t. He hadn’t warned her about anything.

  Had he?

  No, he hadn’t.

  Judith called the number immediately, without thinking, and after three rings a voice said, “This is M. McKunkle. Please leave a message and I’ll either call you back or not.” A beep sounded and Judith hung up feeling quite stunned.

  M. McKunkle. Mumbles McKunkle. The stage name he’d chosen that day for a comedic sidekick. So it was Willy, all right, though it didn’t sound exactly like Willy, not anyhow the Willy she remembered, and would his using M. McKunkle just be some little private joke or some signal to her, Judith, should she ever call?

  She took her three short breaths in, one slow extended breath out. Several times she did this. Then she redialed, waited for the beep, and said, “This is Judith Toomey Whitman and I’m trying to reach Willy Blunt.” She gave her number, once, but slowly, so there would be no mistake, and hung up.

  It was late afternoon. She’d gone into the studio early, before six, with the idea of doing a marathon day, but by midmorning she’d felt the aura coming on, and though the Imitrex she’d taken preempted the migraine, it had made her feel sluggish and nauseated. “Go home,” Lucy had said to her, clearly preferring working alone to working with the Judith at hand. “Get better.” And so Judith had come here, the one place where she might feel better. She braced her back with pillows, stretched her legs over the honeymoon-cottage quilt, and tried to read. She couldn’t, of course. Her thoughts fled the page in all directions. That boy, Willy’s boy, with Willy’s inflections. Saying, We leave a message at this number if we ever need to talk to him. Why was that? And why was Willy never at home? Were they separated? Divorced? And why would Willy have a message like that? M. McKunkle. That was odd. But he couldn’t really say Mumbles McKunkle, could he? That would sound like… What? A rent-a-clown agency or something. Mumbles McKunkle. Every occasion. Mister Pottle-Wattles. Goosey-Lucy. Jemima Puddleduck.

  At the first chords of “Clair de Lune,” Judith nearly jumped.

  She stared at the slim ringing phone.

  On the third ring she flipped it open and said, “Hello?”

  “Edith Winks?” A woman’s voice.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Therese Aiken from Valley Oaks Bank. How are you?”

  Judith said she was fine.

  “Well, this is just a courtesy call to let you know your n
ame just showed up on the overdraft list. A check for four hundred dollars came through and you’re short. Not a lot, about fifty dollars. The overdraft’s covered, but there’ll be a fee unless you want to come in and make a deposit today.”

  “You call people to save them overdraft fees?”

  “It’s not required, but we try to as a courtesy.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?”

  “Yes. I mean, isn’t that why they put those niggling little fees in place? So they can make a pile by collecting them all over the land?”

  Therese Aiken, to Judith’s surprise, issued a soft laugh. She also seemed to lower her voice slightly. “I can’t comment on bank policy, but truthfully, the reason we call our customers is because our branch manager gets sick of people coming to her all p.o.’d about these ‘niggling little fees.’ ”

  Judith made a deposit at the bank (and ventured over to New Accounts to give a quick thank-you to Therese Aiken for the heads-up), then drove home. It was the first time in a week she’d been home before dark. It was also Wednesday, a fact of which she hadn’t been particularly aware until she opened the door and walked into the sweetish scent of meat loaf. Sonya’s note on the kitchen table said, Mr and Mrs W, 2 dinners in fridge, S. And so they were—two big plates covered with stretched Saran wrap, as if beamed there straight from Hutchinson, Kansas: meat loaf, baked potato, a mix of carrots and peas. By the time Judith took it steaming from the microwave, her mouth was actually watering. She grabbed a fork and began to eat standing up.