Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

by Sara Gran

  "And I'm still the first crazy white lady you think of," I finished for him. "That is practically fucking moving, Mick. Really. It's almost touching."

  Mick sat up.

  "Listen," he said. "Claire. Andray Fairview did not kill Vic Willing."

  "How do you know?" I asked.

  "I know him," Mick insisted. "He did not kill Vic Willing."

  He sounded anxious. He hoped he was telling the truth, but he was far from sure.

  It doesn't matter what people want to hear. It doesn't matter if people like you. It doesn't matter if the whole world thinks you're crazy. It doesn't matter whose heart you break. What matters is the truth.

  I lay back on the bed and looked at the ceiling. Mick lay next to me and tried to catch my eye. We lay next to each other and passed the joint back and forth. A carriage trotted down Frenchman Street. Two drunks argued as they walked past the hotel, slurred words indecipherable.

  "Are you going to tell the cops?" Mick asked after a while.

  "No," I said. "I won't do anything until I'm sure he did it. Even then, I'll probably leave it up to the client."

  "He's a good kid," Mick said. "If you get to know him, you'll like him."

  "I don't like anyone," I said. "Especially kids. And especially good ones."

  "He's different," Mick said.

  "No one's different," I said. "Except worse. That kind of different."

  He rolled over onto his side and looked at me. He was starting to wrinkle around his temples, lines spreading out through his tattoo. But he still looked good. I didn't say anything.

  "You know me," Mick said finally. "Give him a chance, okay?"

  I sat up on the bed and pretended to be interested in my fingernails and didn't say anything.

  I didn't know when Mick and I had stopped being friends. We'd both been apprenticed to Constance, him before me. We were never rivals; we were more like brother and sister.

  But Constance took a whole world with her when she died. In the world she left behind, we were just two people who used to know each other. To her we were two other people, a better Claire and a better Mick. For all practical purposes they'd died along with Constance. As far as I knew no one missed them.

  No one except me.

  "Okay," I said. "I'll look into it. I'm not making any promises. But I'll look into it a little more."

  "Shit," Mick said, sitting up. "Thank you, Claire. I mean it. Thanks." But he wasn't smiling. He just looked a little less miserable.

  "But" I said. "You're helping. And you are not doing the fun stuff."

  Mick nodded. He knew what I was talking about. Financial records, case files, evidence—if we found any—all of it would have to be sifted through. It was boring work, and he was good at it.

  "Fine," I said. "Now tell me what you know about Vic Willing."

  Mick shrugged. "People said he was a good guy. I met him a few times. Never worked on a case he prosecuted, but you get to know people. He was one of these guys, you know, a real New Orleans character. Talked a lot, had a loud voice, went to Galatoire's and places like that. Wore seersucker suits. Sort of super-confident in that way that rich people are, sometimes. Very white-guy alpha male. Charming. You know the type."

  I shrugged. I didn't know if I knew the type.

  We talked about Vic some more. Mick didn't have anything interesting to say. Then we went over Andray's alibi, slim as it was. I asked Mick about the people Andray had spent the week of the storm with, or said he did.

  "Huh," Mick said, frowning. "Huh. Trey's gone, not dead, I don't think, but I don't know where. Peanut is no longer with us, unfortunately: definitely dead. Terrell ... well, he's around, but I'm not sure—he's not really such a hot alibi. He's kind of, you know, in the life. Lali, she might be okay."

  He told me where to find Lali. Turn right at the abandoned gas station. Left at the fallen-down house. Watch yourself on the next corner; it's hot these days.

  "I heard you were in the hospital," Mick said. "You okay?"

  "Yeah," I said. "No. I don't know why everyone thinks that. I went to a spa for a while. That's all."

  I asked Mick if he knew why Andray would have a copy of Détection.

  "Andray?" Mick said. "Détection? The Silette book?"

  "Yeah," I said. "The Silette book."

  Mick wasn't into Détection. He took what Constance had to offer but wasn't interested in what was behind it. To him it was just a crazy book, one of many crazy books Constance and I had passed back and forth. Mick thought books were just books.

  He shook his head. "I can't even begin to imagine," he said. "I'm not even sure how well Andray can read. I mean, he can get by, but that's a hard book."

  I sat up and told Mick to leave. He asked if he could take me to lunch the next day and I said yes. Then he left.

  I remembered what he used to smell like, woodsy and sweaty. I rolled over on the bed to the spot where he'd been.

  He didn't smell like that anymore. Now he smelled like pot and plaster dust and smoke and mold. Like sadness. Like New Orleans.

  15

  A FEW MONTHS AGO, after a hard case, I'd gone on a fast to purify myself from its ill effects. I stopped eating. I stopped sleeping. I did not stop using drugs. A week went by, then two, then a month. After fourteen days I could see the codes in grocery receipts and billboards. After thirty days I could read clues in the wind, see signs in the clouds. But on the thirty-second day I collapsed a few blocks from my apartment in Chinatown. The ER doctor in the Chinese Hospital sat on the side of my bed and looked at my chart. He made notes in Chinese. I'm not Chinese and he didn't know I could read what he wrote. Affectless. Listless.

  "Dr. Chang says you're his patient," he said. The doctor was young and looked pretty listless himself. But Chang's name gets you special treatment around here, and he pretended to be interested in me.

  I nodded. I was studying the patterns of the fabric of the sheets. There were fractals in the warp, quadratic equations in the weave.

  "Chang says you're a detective," he said. "You solve mysteries."

  I nodded. I moved my gaze to the water in the plastic cup by my bed. When I moved the water shook, rippling the quantum particles in all directions of time. I had known of this before but had never seen it with my own eyes. I could see all kinds of things now I couldn't see before; things I'd only read about, things I'd dreamed of.

  "If you want to kill yourself," the doctor said wearily, "this is, like, the least efficient way possible to do it. And it's going to be really, really unpleasant. Because we will make you eat. We will make you sleep. And you really don't want a feeding tube down your throat."

  "What do they put in those things, anyway?" I asked, suddenly curious. "Is it, like, ground-up food? Ensure? Glucose? Do you put vitamins in, because—"

  "Yeah. It's a solution," the doctor said.

  "A solution," I repeated. Every mystery has a solution. Maybe that was the solution to this one.

  The doctor kept talking but I stopped listening. Some amount of time passed, or appeared to. The doctor wasn't there anymore. My own doctor, Nick Chang, came in. Dr. Chang is trained in Traditional Chinese medicine, in Chi Gong, yogic flying, ayurveda, and the teachings of Edgar Cayce. Among other things.

  I thought he would understand.

  "I can see everything," I told him. "I'm not sick. I'm fasting."

  "Fasting you plan ahead of time," Nick said. "You just stopped eating."

  "I'm spontaneous," I said. "You know that."

  "You have three choices, Claire," he said, trying to catch my eye. "Check in to hospital. Get put into hospital. Or come with me."

  I watched as a fly darted by, beating his little wings at exactly 108 beats per second. I read his thoughts, concerned only with bringing home food for his beloved. Flies! How I had misjudged them!

  I looked at Nick, at his breath pouring in and out of his nose, his heart pumping, lungs rising and falling. I saw through his skin as his blood cells reproduced and
died and reproduced again.

  "My car's outside," he said.

  He knew I wanted his car, a snazzy green Karmann Ghia.

  "Can I drive?" I asked.

  "No," Nick said. "Absolutely not."

  I didn't say anything. Time moved, backwards or forward. I wasn't sure.

  "This isn't like the other time," I said. "It's nothing like that."

  Nick didn't say anything.

  Nick drove. We headed north and I didn't notice where we were going until we were halfway across the Golden Gate Bridge. Marin passed by in a green blur. We started seeing the signs near Santa Rosa. SPOT OF MYSTERY, the signs said. One had a photograph of two men, twins, standing in a room. One man's head touched the ceiling while his twin was two feet shy. HOW CAN IT BE? the sign queried.

  The Spot of Mystery was one of those places where a house mysteriously slid down a hill and violated all the known laws of physics with its irregular floors and uneven walls and balls rolling uphill—which the tour guide would assure you are absolutely, definitely not optical illusions. Also featured were a small flock of pygmy goats, two hot springs, several large redwoods, and a gift shop. Behind all this were cabins for rent. The place was run by a retired PI from San Francisco named Jake. I'd heard about it for years. I'd never been there before. I'd never needed it before.

  "Claire's going to take care of the goats," Nick told Jake when we arrived. Jake nodded. A young man who may or may not have been Nick's son showed me around and set me up in a cabin. Taking care of the goats was hard work. The main thing was making sure they didn't get too fat. There was a vending machine for goat pellets, and they'd learned to look hungry. The fat goats had to be segregated in a separate pen where visitors couldn't feed them.

  That night, after hours of shoveling goat shit, I slept again. A few days later, after more shoveling, fence mending, and goat-scolding, I started eating.

  Nick came to see me once or twice a week, adjusting the herbs he brought in for me to take, working on filling in the holes in my aura, discussing my treatment with the late Dr. Cayce. At the end of the third week I told him about it.

  "It was a girl," I said. I was sitting up in bed, looking out the window. "A case. A missing woman. A missing girl. I found her in the bay. She was—"

  I didn't finish my sentence.

  "You see bodies all the time," he said.

  "She was like me," I said. "She looked just like me."

  "So?" Nick said.

  "She didn't look like me," I said. "She looked like someone I knew."

  "The girl who disappeared?" he said. "Your friend?"

  I nodded.

  "But it wasn't her," he said. "That was a long time ago."

  "I know that," I said. "I know that now."

  "You want to join her," Nick said.

  That wasn't exactly it. But close.

  At night everyone at the Spot of Mystery gathered in the main house, behind the cabins, for dinner. I heard people talking about plans, schemes. I kept my nose clean and my head down. People pretended they didn't know who I was. Everyone knew who I was. Somehow word of my trip to the hospital had spread far and wide. Every PI in the country now knew Claire DeWitt was crazy. But most of them had already known that.

  I concentrated on the goats. They were good company. They overlooked most of my personality defects and failures, my withdrawal of food from the fatties, and my inability to speak goat. It was strong medicine. After four weeks I couldn't see the signs in the clouds anymore, but I was fattened up myself and well rested and fairly grounded in this reality. In another few weeks I was ready to go back to work. That was when Leon called. I was ready to say no. I wasn't interested in going to New Orleans. I hadn't been there since Constance died.

  "Take it," Nick said on his last visit. He held his hand lightly on my wrist, taking my pulses. "Take the job. You have to tie up loose ends sometime."

  "I don't have any loose ends," I said. "Not with that place."

  "You're lying," he said.

  "I'm not," I said.

  "You don't know you are," he said. "But you are."

  I trust Nick.

  I took the case.

  16

  NO ONE IS INNOCENT," Silette wrote. "The only question is, how will you bear your portion of guilt?"

  Mick called me the next morning. Andray was out of OPP already. I figured in cops' salaries and guards' salaries and buildings and transportation and sundries it cost about ten grand to keep Andray Fairview off the streets for three days. Mick explained that the NOPD had no drug lab. It had been ruined in the storm. Because of a backlog that pre-dated the storm by years, it would take months to test the drugs from recent arrests elsewhere. It was easier just to release anyone with less than, say, an entire truckload of cocaine.

  Over a sushi lunch Mick tried to sell me on Andray's pious innocence again. Mick was the worst type of guilty; the type who wanted to help. My guess was that just about now he was discovering what a depressing, useless job it was. Especially in New Orleans, where most people's idea of help was a bigger gun.

  It turned out his criminal justice program wasn't Mick's first encounter with Andray Fairview. Mick already knew him from a drop-in center for youth where Mick also volunteered.

  "Basically," Mick said, picking at a seaweed salad, "I only go to make myself feel better. Like I'm doing something. Almost every one of these kids has major post-traumatic stress disorder. They're like vets, basically. They're like people who went through a war. It's not just the storm. That's far from the worst thing that's happened to most of them."

  He stopped and looked at his seaweed for a minute, as if he were wondering how it got there and what it was.

  "Anyway," he went on, still looking suspiciously at the salad, "I knew Andray from there. He used to come by sometimes and take a shower, get something to eat, get some clean clothes. He's been on his own for a long time. As long as I've been going there, which is five years. These kids—well. The schools are a mess, the city's a mess, their families are gone. Anyway, Andray's different. He's a good kid. He's smart. Really smart. He used to sell dope and I can see him doing that again, you know, falling backwards a little, but killing someone—I don't think so. I really don't think so."

  "I'm sure," I said. "I'm sure he's a saint"

  Mick looked up. "Claire, I'm telling you..."

  I took a sip of tea.

  "You're telling me a lot of things," I said. "You're telling me that you're depressed. You're telling me that you're drowning in guilt. But you haven't told me anything so far that proves Andray Fairview didn't kill Vic Willing. His prints were in Vic's house, he's killed before—"

  "You don't know that," Mick said, weakly trying to fake liberal outrage.

  "You don't want to know it," I said. "But you know it just fine. He was in a gang since he was eleven. What do you think he's done?"

  Mick looked at me like he was going to hit me. Then he leaned back into his chair and closed his eyes. I expected him to come back with a witty rejoinder but instead he stayed there, his head against the wall and his eyes closed.

  "How about you?" I finally asked, looking at my sushi. The colors were so bright that it looked artificial; pink salmon, red tuna, green wasabi. "How'd you make out?"

  Mick shook his head.

  "That good, huh?" I said.

  He shook his head and squeezed the top of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, as if his sinuses ached. For the first time I noticed he wasn't wearing his wedding ring. "I lived in Mid-City, Claire," Mick said. "I lost everything."

  "Oh," I said. "What about—"

  "She left," Mick said. "She moved back to Detroit." He opened his eyes and looked at me. "Less crime."

  "You're kidding," I said.

  He shook his head. "Not kidding."

  He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the wall.

  Some people, I saw, had drowned right away. And some people were drowning in slow motion, drowning a little bit at a time, and wo
uld be drowning for years. And some people, like Mick, had always been drowning. They just hadn't known what to call it until now.

  17

  I STARTED THE CASE of Vic Willing again.

  Under a gray sky in Jackson Square there were three people reading tarot cards and palms, two people handing out leaflets about how to get to heaven or hell, and about five men who met the description Leon had given me of Jackson. This was the man he said had seen Vic Willing the Thursday after the storm. Skinny guy, old, black, missing some teeth, gray and black woolly hair. Usually wore an overcoat and usually carried around one big bag of cans and another big bag of his stuff.

  I looked at the potential Jacksons. Two looked mean. One looked crazy. One got up and walked away fast when he caught me looking at him. I didn't see Vic or Leon having a relationship with any of those men. That left one who could be Jackson.

  I walked over to him and he smiled and held out a battered paper cup.

  "Got any change today?" he asked with a thick southern accent.

  "Sure," I said. I put a five in his cup. He thanked me.

  "Are you Jackson?" I asked.

  He said he was. I introduced myself and asked if I could sit down with him for a minute. He said yes. I sat down and explained to him who I was and what I wanted from him—an account of when he last saw Vic Willing. He told me more or less what Leon had told me:

  "It was Thursday," Jackson said. "Down by the Convention Center. The National Guard, they rounded everyone up and brought them over there. They didn't know any better. I mean..." He paused for a second. "You'd think after they realized, they would have stopped." He shook his head. "Anyway. The police was rounding everyone up and bringing them there. I was hanging out outside and I see Vic. He didn't know no one else there, I think—I mean, it was a lot of people like me. Not a lot of people like him. So I think he was happy to see me."