Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

by Sara Gran

  In the rearview mirror I saw the driver of the car who'd been following us. At the oldest, he was fourteen. He looked pissed off. But the shooter didn't look upset at all.

  No one could be that bad of a shot. He had been less than ten feet away from Andray and his friends.

  He was no killer. But he was trying.

  When we crossed the border into the Garden District, Andray took his foot off the gas and let the car roll to a stop. I leaned across the other boy and shifted the gear to Park. On the still, empty street, we looked at each other.

  We laughed. Almost being killed does strange things to you.

  I took the gun I was holding, carefully wiped it down with my T-shirt, and handed it back to Andray's friend.

  "Fuck," he said.

  I nodded in agreement.

  We all laughed again.

  From far away we heard sirens.

  "Shit," Dreadlock Boy said. "Fuck fuck fuck."

  Warrants, I figured. I switched places with Andray and drove the truck over to Magazine Street. I knew the cops in New Orleans, and if they responded to the shooting at all, it would be a quick drive around the neighborhood. They were unlikely to stop a white woman for—well, for anything really, but especially not in connection with a gang shooting in Central City. I asked Dreadlock Boy where I could drop him. He and Andray looked at each other. Deadlock Boy looked scared. Only then did I understand that Dreadlock Boy had been the target all along.

  I'm not the world's greatest private dick for nothing.

  First we drove to an empty block in the Irish Channel, where, after a quick stop at a hardware store for a wrench, me and Andray and Dreadlock Boy—who as it turned out was the infamous Terrell—switched the plate off my truck for one we nicked off an old man's Buick. Terrell, a smart boy, removed the side-view mirror from another truck like mine and switched those too. He also, with my permission, picked out a broken two-by-four from a pile of garbage and smashed in the other bumper. No one would think it was the same truck now. Now that he wasn't trying to be frightening, Terrell's good nature shone, and he grinned as he smashed up my truck.

  "Should I do the other side?" he asked politely after he'd crushed the right side. "Or just leave it?"

  We decided to just leave it.

  The alterations to the car would clear us with the cops. As for the shooters, I didn't know. In most cities I wouldn't have worried about it much—we white ladies are pretty safe if we stick to our own neighborhoods, the beneficiaries of generations of racism whether we want it or not. No one is eager for the problems that come with shooting someone who might make the TV news. But in New Orleans, I was pretty sure that even a white lady getting murdered didn't merit much attention from the cops. A few days ago a white woman had been killed in By-water, shot in her home while she held her baby daughter in her arms. The rest of the country was in an uproar. In New Orleans it was just another murder.

  After we had the truck in order, I drove to a motel on Airline Highway in Metairie. The strip was lined with them, back from when this was the main artery into the city, before Highway 10 came along and ruined everything. Now they were shabby and lonely, some renovated into hooker hotels, some still waiting for things to pick back up, which would surely happen any day now.

  Inside the hotel a caved-in ceiling took over half the lobby, leaving off a small mountain of plaster cordoned off with yellow caution tape.

  PARDON OUR APPEARANCE WHILE WE RENOVATE! a sign said.

  With a fake ID I booked a room for myself and my son under the name Sylvia Welsch, and gave the key to Terrell.

  He looked at me suspiciously.

  "Just take it before I change my mind," I said.

  He smiled and thanked me. He and Andray exchanged a complicated handshake and some ghetto language I didn't understand. We left.

  An hour later the sun was down and Andray and I were sitting in my truck in an empty parking lot for an abandoned fruit wholesaler, just outside the Quarter by the railroad tracks. It was quiet and smelled like gasoline. We each leaned back in our seat, drained. I put the radio on, low, to WWOZ. We passed a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor and a blunt back and forth, not saying anything. The forty was Andray's and the weed was mine, although it was at Andray's insistence that we rolled it in a cigar wrapper. We old white ladies like our plain old E-Z Widers.

  "You a good shot," Andray said, grudgingly, after a while.

  "I told you," I said. "I'm a private eye." The truth was, it'd been an easy shot. I'd always liked guns, and I was a pretty good shot even before I met Constance. But it was Constance who taught me to shoot with my eyes closed. It was Constance who taught me how to persuade a bullet that you and it were on the same side. It was Constance who told me that the bullet wants to hit its target. You only had to encourage it. We'd find an empty lot somewhere and practice. No one ever stopped us. Back then, in my first months with Constance, I thought New Orleans was paradise.

  Andray looked at me. "Shit," he said. "I didn't believe you."

  "I don't blame you," I said. "People lie."

  He nodded. "How you get a job like that?" he asked.

  "Well," I said. "You have to go to school and study hard. You need really good grades. And then you have to go to college. Meet the right people, all that."

  "Oh," Andray said. He leaned back in his seat a little.

  I laughed. "I'm kidding," I said. "I'm totally kidding. I didn't do any of that shit."

  Andray laughed a little, unsure. "For real?"

  "Yeah, for real," I said. "All that stuff is bullshit. I don't know. You just do it."

  He looked at me. "You didn't go to college and that?"

  "Uh, no," I said. "I left home when I was seventeen. I didn't even finish high school. Got a cigarette?"

  Andray took out a pack of Newport Lights and held the pack out to me. I took one and so did he, and he lit us each up, letting the blunt smolder on the screw-top to the forty.

  "Where you from?" he asked, still not sure about me.

  "I'm from Brooklyn," I told him.

  Andray almost smiled. "Brooklyn" he said. "You from Brooklyn?"

  "Yep."

  "It was like here?" he asked.

  "Well, no," I said. "At its worst, it was never like here. But close. You know: despair, poverty, murder. My high school was the first in the country to have metal detectors. And a nursery. But less murder. Less guns."

  "Brooklyn," Andray said, nodding approval. The knowledge seemed to relax him a little. "That's no joke."

  "Well, it is now," I said. "It's all rich people now."

  "That's what this city gonna be like soon," Andray said, nodding. "They don't want no black people here no more. White people want it all for themselves."

  I didn't say anything. I didn't know any white people who wanted New Orleans all to themselves. The sad part was that no one seemed to want it at all.

  "You ever go back there?" he asked. "Home?"

  "Brooklyn?" I said. "Rarely."

  "You don't like it now?" Andray asked.

  "No," I said. "I don't like it at all."

  We sat for a minute. I could tell Andray wanted to ask me something. I sat quietly while he worked up the courage to do it.

  "You was there?" he asked finally, looking down at the bottle of beer in his hands. "In New York? When, you know?"

  "Yes," I said. "I lived in California already. But I was in New York."

  "You were there there?" he asked.

  "Nearby," I said. "I was in Chinatown. I was working on a case."

  "That's near?" he asked.

  "Yeah," I said. "And then I went down to the site."

  "Shit," Andray said. We sat silently for a minute.

  "There was a lot of bodies?" he finally asked.

  "No," I said. "Ashes. A lot of ashes."

  We were quiet for another minute. Then Andray asked, "Were you scared?"

  Everyone always asks that. I don't know why.

  "Yeah," I said. "It was scary.
It was a long time before we knew it was over. It seemed like it would keep on happening. Like it was a war. Like it was gonna be a war. And I couldn't get out of the city for a while. There were no flights. I had to rent a car and—well, it's a long story."

  "Oh," he said.

  Then after another minute he said, "You ever seen a dead body?"

  "Yeah," I said. "Lots of times."

  Andray wrinkled his brow, deepening the creases on his forehead.

  "Ever anyone," he asked, "like—like someone you knew?"

  I nodded. I thought he wanted to say something but neither of us knew what it was.

  After a while he said, "Water's different. Everyone was like, you know. Still there."

  "Yeah," I said. I remembered the girl in the bay. She'd drowned trying to go home. Trying to swim. She froze instead. It's an ugly way to die.

  "You saw people you knew?" I asked.

  He nodded.

  "You still see it?" I asked.

  He nodded again. "Not all the time, anymore. But yeah. Sometimes."

  "Yeah," I said. "I got things like that."

  "Someone you saw?" he asked.

  "Yeah," I said. "No. I never saw her. But I see her all the time."

  Andray nodded and we were quiet for a while. We killed the blunt. He took a long, thin paper-rolled joint out of his pocket and lit it and took a drag. It smelled strange and chemical-y. It was the same thing Lali and the boy who shot the tree had been smoking.

  "What is that?" I asked.

  Andray laughed.

  "You ain't know this?" I shook my head. "Called wet. It's like a joint—see, they mix up weed and tobacco, sprinkle in a little dust—you know what that is? Angel dust?"

  "Yeah," I said.

  He nodded. "Okay. So you roll it up and then you dip it in embalming stuff, the stuff they use at funeral parlors."

  "Embalming stuff?" I said incredulously.

  Andray laughed and nodded. "Yeah." He smoked a little more, and his eyes glistened. "It's good shit." He handed the cigarette to me.

  I looked at it. Smoking embalming fluid wasn't exactly on my list of things to do in New Orleans. I was tired and the day could fairly be called over. Going home and going to bed would be a perfectly reasonable thing to do—perfectly reasonable, and no one could blame me at all.

  But the detective's job is not to be perfectly reasonable. The detective's job is to follow the clues wherever they lead. And right now, they were leading toward the strange burning cigarette in Andray's hand.

  I took it and smoked a little. Under the pot and tobacco it tasted like cheap cocaine, or nail polish remover. Nothing happened.

  The White Hawks came on the radio, an Indian gang that had made some good recordings on and off since the seventies. Andray muttered along with the song, sung in the mysterious-to-me language of the Black Indians.

  "You understand that?" I asked Andray when the song was over. "You know what that means?"

  "Kind of," he said. His lips formed a tiny little smile. "My uncle, he was in the White Hawks."

  "Shit," I said. "Is that him singing?"

  He shrugged. "Maybe. He died a long time ago—2004, he died. I used to stay with him, sometimes."

  "Where'd he live?" I asked. We handed the joint back and forth.

  "Annunciation Street," Andray said. "He was real nice. And his girlfriend, Aqualia, she real nice. She a real good cook too. I used to stay with him a lot. He worked at Hubig's. You know, the pie place?" I nodded. Hubig's Pies were a packaged, chemical-y, turnover-type snack sold nearly everywhere in New Orleans.

  "He was coming home one night," Andray said, his voice shaking a little. "And he was ... he was ... you know."

  He rolled the window down and spit out it. I didn't say anything.

  After a minute or two Andray turned back toward me.

  "He used to tell me this thing from the Bible," Andray said. "'Let the dead take care of their own,' he used to say. 'Let the dead go their own way.'"

  "It's 'Let the dead bury the dead,'" I said. "It's in the Bible."

  Andray wrinkled his brow.

  "My uncle, he used to say there was two Bibles," he said. "Or one, but it been split in half. He said half's in the book, on paper. But the other half is inside people. You born with it, but it's up to you to find out. You gotta learn to see it for yourself. That's the only way."

  "Smart man," I said.

  "He was," Andray said, nodding. "He was that. He knew what was gonna happen too. He always say, 'No revenge. Whatever happens, let it die with me,' he said. 'Let the dead take care their own. They got their own things to do now. Indians don't settle fights with knives and guns. They settle fights with costumes and songs.' When he died I wanted to, you know. But I knew what he wanted, so." He shrugged. His hands were tied.

  We passed the joint back and forth. The moon hung low in the sky; with each inhale from the joint it seemed to get lower and bigger, until it was right on top of the car. We looked at it.

  "You see that?" Andray asked. He smiled.

  "Yeah," I said.

  We passed the joint and watched the moon as it descended, shining its white light on us like a gift. When it was close enough it covered us entirely, blotting out everything else but its yellow-white body.

  "You see that?" I asked.

  "Yeah," Andray said. "That's some fucked-up shit right there."

  I didn't know if we were talking about the same fucked-up shit. I felt my eyes close.

  When I woke up, I was surprised to see Andray had changed his clothes. He was now in full Indian regalia: Vegas showgirl meets Buffalo Bill. He had on a big feathered headdress and an outrageous suit embroidered with beads and sequins, all bright green. He was smoking another brown cigarette and watching me calmly. When he crossed his legs his sequins rattled and shook. He exhaled an ocean of smoke.

  From outside I heard drums and tambourines and brass. I looked out the window just in time to see the St. Anne parade pass by—the Societé de Sainte Anne, as Constance used to call it.

  My eyes focused in to see two women standing on the corner, watching the parade go by. Both women were in costume, the older one as Marie Antoinette and the younger one as generic French royalty.

  I shivered in the cold.

  "Stand still," Constance snapped.

  "I can hardly fucking breathe," I complained. "And I'm freezing."

  Constance shook her head. "Hush," she said.

  "Is it always this cold on Mardi Gras?" I asked, kicking the ground. "Because—"

  Constance grabbed my arm and turned me around to face her.

  "Do you know what the St. Anne parade is really for?"

  "For?" I said. "I dunno. The parades aren't for anything, are they?"

  Constance rolled her eyes. "Most aren't," she explained. "But this one is. When the captain arrives you will see that he's holding a box. Almost no one else will see this, by the way, because almost no one else has your eyes, Claire. But he will have a box. And in that box are ashes. Someday I'll be there, in that box."

  I shivered again. Sometimes I would get this strange idea that Constance was going to kill me. I'd known her for two years by then, and she was extraordinarily good to me. But I couldn't believe it. Not until after she was gone was I really sure that she had nothing up her sleeve. I didn't know there were people like that: people who don't keep track of what they give, people who don't ask for payback.

  "The procession goes to the Mississippi," Constance told me. "When they get there, he'll scatter the ashes into the river."

  "Who is it?" I asked. "I mean, who was—"

  "Society members," Constance said. "Friends, family. Me, someday, and I hope you too."

  She smiled at me but it was a funny kind of a smile, melancholy and secretive. Constance had always wanted me to take a more active part in New Orleans. She wanted me to love it like she did. And for a while, I did.

  Finally the parade came, singing and dancing. One woman was a devil, another a b
aby doll, men dressed as women and women as men, cowboys and Indians and priests and nuns and cops and people with nothing on at all. I followed Constance's lead as she bowed deeply to the first man in the parade, and I noticed the wooden box he held in his hands.

  We joined the parade in the second line, in between a group of kazoo players and an old brass band from Tremé. Someone handed me a mushroom. I figured it was probably the good kind and I ate it.

  "What you don't understand," Constance hissed at me, "is not all spirits are good"

  Constance didn't have a problem with my using drugs. It was Constance who taught me how to use Calea zacatechichi for prophetic dreams and iboga to break bad habits. She'd taken ayauasca twice and was one of the first twelve people to smoke DMT.

  But she said the best way was to forge your own path to the truth, not swallow someone else's.

  The mushroom came on right about when the parade broke up. Constance went to a friend's house and I wandered around the Quarter looking for Mick, who I finally found sitting on a curb on Decatur.

  I thought if I could design the most perfect place in the world it would be exactly this. I had never even let myself dream that someplace like this might exist. It felt like I had been given the key to the secret garden, been initiated into the biggest secret. I was in love with New Orleans.

  "You look so beautiful," Mick said when he saw me. "Like an angel."

  "What the fuck did you take?" I asked him.

  One year later, Constance would be dead, and her ashes would be in that box.

  I wasn't there to see it. I left New Orleans less than a week after she died.

  There are some things you can never forgive.

  "Miss Claire," I heard. "Yo, Miss Claire."

  I opened my eyes. Andray was looking at me.

  "I think you fell asleep," Andray said.

  "I think you're right," I said. "You'd be a hell of a private dick."

  Andray laughed. I was tired and hungry. All the adrenaline from our little shootout was gone, leaving me with low blood sugar and a headache. I asked Andray where I could drop him off.