Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

by Sara Gran

  "Might as well go get a cup of coffee and relax," the man behind the counter said. "It's gonna be a while."

  I went to the coffee shop. The power was out there too. I got a glass of water. I did not relax. When the power went back on I went back to the copy shop.

  Finally I scanned the prints from Vic Willing's house. After a few twists and turns I managed to run it through the local cop's database.

  Unknown Man was very, very known to the police: Andray Fairview, unfortunate owner of a misspelled name, a short adult record, and a long juvenile one—s upposedly sealed but easy enough to access if you're Claire DeWitt, world's greatest private eye. Current resident of Orleans Parish Prison, being held on possession charges, trial date forthcoming. He'd been arrested yesterday afternoon—just my luck.

  I printed out everything I could find on Andray Fairview, the long, sad public record of his life. Andray Fairview, this is going down on your permanent record. I skimmed the papers as they printed. Andray's mother was the county and his father was the state. Lots of arrests, most of them for possession with intent to sell, some for theft, a few for assault, plenty for carrying a concealed weapon. Almost no school record, and what there was was pitiful. Two murder charges, both dropped. I figured I'd rectify that soon enough.

  As I was jogging the pages into a rectangle and sticking them into a folder I saw a picture of Andray Fairview and dropped the papers.

  It was the boy who'd peed on my truck. Suicide Boy.

  "There are no coincidences," Silette wrote. "Only mysteries that haven't been solved, clues that haven't been placed. Most are blind to the language of the bird overheard, the leaf in our path, the phonographic record stuck in a groove, the unknown caller on the phone. They don't see the omens. They don't know how to read the signs.

  "To them life is like a book with blank pages. But to the detective, it is an illuminated manuscript of mysteries."

  9

  DÉTECTION WAS LONG out of print now and hard to find at any price. I bought copies whenever I came across them in thrift shops or used bookstores that didn't know what they had. I'd packed one with me for the trip to New Orleans. I was superstitious about going anywhere without it, even though I knew most of it by heart now.

  Détection was maddening. The book is notoriously difficult—sometimes nonsensical, always contradictory, repeating the bad news and never repeating the good, never telling you what you want to hear, always just out of reach.

  That was how I knew it was true.

  The copy Tracy found in my parents' house was the first U.S. version, a cheap yellow paperback with a picture of Silette on the cover, scowling in a black suit. The publisher, strangely, had decided to market it as part of a crime series. A real look in the EXCITING world of France's top criminologist! Nothing could be further from the truth. Not unless by "EXCITING" you meant "exciting to finally glean a shadow of meaning after years of study." That kind of exciting.

  Once you've read Silette there's no going back, people say. Something in you is changed, and you won't be your old self ever again. No matter how you may want to forget what you've read, you never can.

  Once you know the truth, there are no second chances. No do-overs, no changing your mind, no turning back. The door shuts behind you, and locks.

  Over the next few months after finding the book in the dumbwaiter, Kelly and Tracy and I took turns with Détection, passing it around until we nearly had it memorized. We read the little yellow paperback until the spine cracked and the brittle brown pages crumbled in the corners and the covers fell off the book.

  We understood almost none of it. That didn't stop us from loving it.

  Détection was a door to another world; a world where, even if we didn't understand things, we were sure they could be understood. A world where people paid attention, where they listened, where they looked for clues. A world where mysteries could be solved. Or so we thought.

  By the time we realized we were wrong, that we had misunderstood everything, it was too late. Silette had already branded us. For better or worse, we were not the same girls anymore.

  10

  AFTER A FEW wrong turns I made it to the College of New Orleans in Broadmoor. It had been badly flooded. I remembered where the criminology department was, but when I got there it was closed, and not looking too good. I peered in through a window and saw dim sunlight streaming in: the roof was missing.

  A handwritten sign taped to the door said FOR CRIMINOLOGY, LIT, AND OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY CLASSES GO TO DOUBLEWIDE HALL. An arrow pointed straight ahead.

  I walked around the building. Behind it was a series of trailers, some connected to each other, some independent. When I got closer I saw a banner hung across the front of the first one: DOUBLEWIDE HALL.

  I opened the door to Doublewide Hall. The whole trailer shook when I shut the door behind me. Inside were a few desks piled with banker's boxes and one desk with a blond girl at it. A little sign taped to the girl's desk said RECEPTION.

  "Hi," the blond girl said, fakely friendly. She was alert and cute and about twenty-one. That wasn't her fault. For all I knew there was a heart of pure evil behind that cheerful blond façade. "Can I help you?"

  "Yes," I said. "Is Mick Pendell around? I was in the neighborhood and thought—"

  "Do you have an appointment?" the blonde asked.

  "No," I said. "You can just tell him Claire DeWitt is here to see him."

  The blonde made a sad face. "I'm sorry. I really can't put anyone through without an appointment."

  "You don't have to put me through," I said. "You don't have to put me through anything. Just call him."

  "I'm sorry. He really can't see anyone without an appoint—"

  "Can you just tell him I'm here?"

  "I wish I—"

  "Can you just tell him?"

  "I really—"

  "Tell him."

  "I—"

  "Tell him."

  "We—"

  "Tell him. Tell him. Please. Just tell him."

  "Okay" she finally said. She didn't try to hide her hatred. I didn't blame her. She picked up the phone and dialed. She muttered a long apology and then hissed "Claire DeWitt" as if it were a curse. That's the usual pronunciation. The person on the other end muttered something back. She thanked him and smiled and hung up.

  "He says he'd love to see you," she said brightly. "With an appointment. How's—"

  "I don't think so," I said. "I don't think that's going to work."

  I reached into my purse and found a notepad and a pen. "How about if I leave Mr. Pendell a note. Would you please pass that along to him?"

  "Absolutely," she said. "I would love to."

  You're dead, I wrote on the paper.

  I folded it in half and gave it to the girl. She took the paper with a frozen smile and kept her eyes on her computer screen, unblinking, until I left.

  On my way back downtown my phone rang.

  "Claire?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Claire, it's Mike. Mike Yablonsky. How you been?"

  "Hungry," I said. "Thin. Starving. Since you haven't paid me the five hundred you owe me, I got nothing to eat, Mike. I'm starving here."

  "I'm sure," he said. "And I'm sure it looks good on you, Claire. Listen, I got your e-mail. About Vic Willing. Who hired you for that one?"

  "The nephew," I said. "The guy disappeared in the storm. You knew him?"

  Mike was a cop when I lived here. Now he was a PI. He had Constance to thank for that. He wasn't an educated guy but he was smart, and he had the knack. I trusted him. As much as I trusted anyone, at least.

  "Yeah," Mike said. "He hired me a few times. And I saw him around, you know, court, those PBA fundraisers, shit like that."

  I was way uptown on Claiborne. In front of me on the street was a big white cherry picker, the kind of truck with a big hydraulic arm that could lift someone up twenty or thirty feet in the air to fix a phone pole or wash a window. The truck pulled over by a nexus of power lines o
n the next corner. I pulled over across the street. I could drive and talk on the phone at the same time. But I wouldn't do either well.

  "And?" I said.

  "And," Mike said. "I don't know."

  "You don't know what?"

  Two men in white jumpsuits got out of the cherry picker truck, looked up at the pole where the power lines met, and conferred. I looked around. The power seemed to be working fine here.

  "I don't know," Mike said. "I mean, I'm not saying he was a bad guy."

  "Of course not," I said. I figured that was exactly what he was saying. "But?"

  "I mean, he was a good guy," Mike said defensively. "Always good to me, at least."

  "But?" I said.

  The men got back into the truck. One hopped into the cherry picker part. The other got behind the controls.

  "But something about him," Mike said. "Nothing he said. Nothing he did, either. But it was like—like sometimes a cloud would pass over him."

  "A cloud?" I said.

  "A black cloud," Mike said. "There was something going on there."

  "Like what?" I said.

  "Like I got no fucking idea," Mike said.

  That was all he had to say about Vic. He invited me to come out and have dinner with the family in Metairie. I said I would if time allowed. I wouldn't.

  A black cloud. I'd felt it in Vic's bedroom, just for a second.

  I watched the men in the cherry picker for a few more minutes. I couldn't figure out what they were doing.

  I left.

  "The detective thinks he is investigating a murder or a missing girl," Silette wrote. "But truly he is investigating something else altogether, something he cannot grasp hold of directly. Satisfaction will be rare. Uncertainty will be your natural state. Sureness will always elude you. The detective will always circle around what he wants, never seeing it whole.

  "We do not go on despite this. We go on because of it."

  11

  THAT NIGHT I LAY in bed and read more about Andray Fairview. He'd been arrested yesterday afternoon, rousted with five other boys for loitering. It must have been just an hour or two after he'd peed on my truck. A search revealed—surprise!—one nine-millimeter semiautomatic handgun, one small bag of what appeared to be crack cocaine, one large bag of what appeared to be marijuana, both pending further testing, and unnamed drug paraphernalia. No cash was mentioned, which would hurt the case but, I was willing to bet, had enriched the cops. My guess was that this was more like a uniformed mugging than a real arrest. Andray would be out in a few days at the longest.

  Andray was eighteen, African American, and a native New Orleanean. Father unknown, mother missing since leaving Andray at a hospital three years after giving him a misspelled name and a crack addiction at birth. Andray had officially aged out of foster care six months ago but hadn't actually had a foster placement for six years. Instead he'd been assigned to the St. Joseph's Service Center Home in St. Roch—which had closed in 2002. No one noticed that he had no placement after that. He had a record longer than my hotel room, but I didn't see anything more interesting than I'd seen at first glance: more possession, more assault. It didn't take much to rack up those charges, especially if you were black and poor and male. I guessed I'd done a lot more assaulting and carrying and narcotic using and distributing than Andray, but my jacket was less than half as long. Then again, I'd rarely used a nine-millimeter or an AK-47 in my assaulting, like Andray had.

  He'd been arrested for murder twice. Both arrests ended in a release after sixty days. That was the usual down here. The locals called it a sixty-day homicide or a misdemeanor murder or a 701—701 being the code that said the cops had sixty days to charge the suspect or let him go. Sixty days was a long time to put a murder charge together. Sixty days was a long time to put the Constitution on hold. But not long enough for this town. More than ninety percent of people arrested for murder in New Orleans were released in sixty days.

  But a 701 was no cakewalk for the guy they arrested, either. A homicide suspect in New Orleans was more likely to be murdered himself than tried in court. The cops might as well have painted a target on the kids they held, guilty or not, for sixty days before they put them back out on the street. Any contact with the cops was grounds for the death penalty, and the judges and juries on the street didn't need sixty days to make a case stick.

  People kill each other everywhere. The difference was that in New Orleans, no one tried to stop them. The cops blamed the DA and the DA blamed the cops. The schools blamed the parents and the parents blamed the schools. White people blamed black people and black people blamed white people. In the meantime, everyone went on killing each other.

  I put the official records aside and looked at the fingerprints again. Like most criminals, Andray had a strong Robber's Swirl and a short Temper Curve. I wasn't surprised he was in jail. Vic had an overdeveloped Line of Denial and a small scar where his Conscience Whorl should have been. Typical lawyer. But both men had a strong and well-defined Heart Center in their thumbs. I didn't expect that.

  Constance taught me the esoteric art of reading fingerprints long ago. There were only a few people left who really knew how to do it, and none here in the States. Some were in Europe, most were in India. When Constance died I had to continue my study from books and intuition.

  "Never be afraid to learn from the ether," Constance told me. "That's where knowledge lives before someone hunts it, kills it, and mounts it in a book."

  I figured I had it solved. Andray Fairview broke in to Vic's house, found him at home, took some food, and took Vic too. Andray probably planned to take Vic to an ATM for a withdrawal. When he found out they were all down, he killed Vic and ditched him in the floodwaters. It wasn't a perfect crime, but it was a damn good one. Given that teenagers are rarely criminal masterminds, I figured the case would be over in a few days. The case of Vic Willing was as good as closed.

  Or so I thought until I fell asleep that night.

  12

  I WALKED DOWN a long street that used to be in a city. Now it was deserted, covered with white ash and dried gray mud. Brown plants died along the side of the road. Ruins of cars and houses sat still and broken on either side of the street. The air smelled sweet and sickening, like organic decay.

  I saw something at the end of the street—a house or a truck or a large animal. When I got there I saw it was a tank, the old-fashioned kind with a long barrel.

  Out from the top popped Vic Willing.

  Mardi Gras beads hung from the tank's barrel. Send to Tom Benson, someone had written along one side. George Bush's Lunch Box was written on the other.

  On Vic's shoulder was a green parrot, the kind I'd seen in front of his apartment.

  "It's the end of the road," Vic said. His voice was different from what I'd imagined: grainier, better, more southern.

  "Yeah," I said. "I see that."

  "There used to be a city here," he said.

  "That was a long time ago," I said carefully, weighing my words in my hands.

  He nodded.

  "She told me to tell you," Vic said. "Remind you."

  "Remind me what?"

  "There are no maps here," he said.

  "Then how do I find my way?" I asked.

  Vic smiled at me. "Follow the clues," he said. "You already missed one. Here."

  He tossed something at me. It somersaulted through the slow, thick air to my hand. I caught it. It was a copy of Détection. The book fell open to [>]. I couldn't read the text.

  "She told me to tell you," Vic said. "Believe nothing. Question everything."

  "What?" I said. "Who?"

  But Vic just turned his tank around and drove off, chug-a-chug, down the street.

  "She told me to tell you," I heard him call from the tank. "Follow the clues. Believe nothing. Question everything. That's the only direction you need."

  When I woke up I rushed to my copy of Détection and opened it to 108.

  "You cannot follow another's foo
tsteps to the truth," Silette wrote. "A hand can point a way. But the hand is not the teaching. The finger that points the way is not the way. The mystery is a pathless land, and each detective must cut her own trail through a cruel territory.

  "Believe nothing. Question everything. Follow only the clues."

  I knew the case of Vic Willing wasn't over yet.

  13

  THE WAITING ROOM off Orleans Parish Prison, famously known as OPP, smelled like fear and disinfectant. Most of the other people in the waiting room were mothers and lawyers. Across the room from me was the boy with dreadlocks who'd been with Andray when he'd peed on my truck. He didn't recognize me. He flipped through the pages of a telenovela someone had left in the waiting room. In the corner of the room two other boys, both white, leaned forward in their chairs, elbows on their knees. They wore big but short pants with long white socks and white undershirts and baseball hats on sideways. They scowled and tried to look frightening. They succeeded in looking a little frightening.

  After waiting an hour and watching other people come and go, I went up to the guard.

  "I think you forgot me," I said. I gave him my name.

  "I ain't forget you," he said defensively. "You ain't on the list."

  "I put my name on the list when I got here," I said.

  "It ain't here now," the guard said.

  We put my name back on the list. I had to start all over again. It would be at least half an hour before I was called. I went outside for some air.

  The two white boys were sitting on the steps, smoking. They looked at me. I looked at them. One was brunette, average build. The other was a redhead and rail-thin. Both had tattoos on their arms like the other boys I'd seen—numbers, letters, codes, memorials. The redhead also had a rosary tattooed around his neck.