Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

by Sara Gran

  "Why not?" Leon said. "She's got nothing left down here."

  "She sure doesn't," Marsha said. "Less than nothing. You know, she never even came to see the house. Where the house used to be. Said she'd rather remember it as it was."

  "I don't blame her," Leon said. They were silent for a minute. Then Leon said, "I heard about Brad."

  Marsha didn't say anything.

  "I'm so sorry," Leon said.

  "I miss him every day," Marsha said. "I think about him all the time. All the time. Every day."

  No one said anything.

  It was the first time I'd heard anyone talk about the storm since I'd first met with Leon. People talked a lot about the response to the storm and the effects of the storm and the future the storm would bring. But they didn't talk much about the incident itself.

  Finally I had Jack Murray's box out and open. But there was almost nothing in it. A few items of filthy clothing. A copy of Aunt Sally's Policy Players Book, a book that decoded dream images into lottery numbers. A chip from the casino downtown for two dollars. Mardi Gras beads.

  And a postcard. It was from the Spot of Mystery in California. On the front was a picture of the house itself, a benign-looking cabin in the redwoods.

  "Shit," I said.

  "What?" Leon said.

  "Fuck," I said. "I said that out loud?"

  Marsha and Leon nodded and looked concerned.

  "What is it?" Marsha asked. "Is it a clue?"

  "Yes, it is," I said. "A very valuable clue. Very valuable indeed. Lucky we came here in person. I wouldn't have wanted to miss this important clue"

  "Ooh," Marsha said. "That's kind of exciting."

  "It always is," I said smugly.

  Leon smiled politely and looked rigid and unhappy.

  I turned over the postcard. It was addressed to Jack, at this address. The postmark was January 1, a few days before I'd come to New Orleans. Next to the address someone had written a message in black ballpoint ink:

  The Case of the Green Parrot.

  28

  MY FAMILY HAD not been popular in our Brooklyn neighborhood. We were poor, white, and strange, with no good excuse for it. We lived in a neighborhood of African Americans and Puerto Ricans and Dominicans and Haitians and Jamaicans, some of whom strived to be working class, most of whom had given up. The fact that Mother and Father openly loathed people of color didn't help.

  The house had been in my father's family for generations. There had been a few people in line before my father for the ancestral mansion, but he could whine and wheedle his way into anything. Besides, no one much wanted it; it had been vacant for years, and the garage had become a bathroom, the garden shed a shooting gallery. The houses on either side had long ago been turned into rooming houses. The east and north had been taken over by row after row of ugly brick projects. From what I understood, Mother and Dad lusted after the house for years before they finally managed to get their hands on it. I always suspected it was the house that kept them together. Neither would let the other have it.

  My parents were both beautiful, both intelligent, and as far as I could tell both entirely incompetent. My father chased the squatters off with a shotgun but did little else to improve the property. The hot water was sporadic and even the cold water wasn't entirely reliable. In the bedrooms the heat was just enough to keep a red-blooded mammal alive, and there was none on whole floors and wings. The back staircase was so rotted, it couldn't be used. The front stairs were made precarious by the original runners, slick with age, which no one bothered to replace.

  Settled in their little patch of hell, my parents surrounded themselves with dethroned royalty and snake-oil peddlers, mail-order Ph.D.s and ouija board readers—in other words, their people.

  "Shut up and listen, darling," Mother would snap if I wasn't attentive enough to one of her houseguests. "This is your education." In her Austrian accent education came out as a long slur, something obscene.

  There was the raw-vinegar-and-oil proponent; the psychic who promised that any day now their fortune would arrive; the astrologer who convinced Mother she was Isis reincarnate; the third cousin who was a count, a fitting counterpart for my mother the marquise.

  Oh, yes, we were royalty, or so my mother insisted—although she also insisted raw vinegar was a wholesome food for children. Even if she wasn't technically quite as close to the queen of Hapsburg as she imagined, she was another kind of royalty: beautiful and almost famous. My parents knew Andy Warhol and the owners of Studio 54; they knew counts and duchesses and movie stars. My mother drove a sports car around town and tossed the tickets in the boot; my father collected rare books that he got on credit based on his family name. Before they got the house they lived at the Chelsea Hotel and ran up a legendary bill at El Quixote, which they never paid.

  Regardless of their literal bloodline, my parents were both from old, rich families, my mother's from Austria and my father's from right here in the United States. Mother despised that Father's money came from actual work—his grandfather had done something with steel—and never let him forget it.

  "I never should have married an American!" she would scream when they fought. "Look, you can see the dirt on his hands. He has calluses!" Except with her accent it came out as calOOSES. "He has calOOSES! He has calOOSES!"

  "Look at the princess!" Father would reply. "Look at the princess! Madam isn't happy with the help today, is she?"

  "She is not! She is not!"

  But Mother's insults were entirely unfounded—my father never worked a day in his life. The family fortunes in both cases were many times divided now, and while their combined income from their relative shares of the family pie would have been more than enough for us to live comfortably, it was never enough for them. They had no interest in getting by or getting jobs. They wanted to be rich again, and they were sure they could find the back door in. A dividend payment that could have fed us for a year turned into one bag of groceries, a payment to Dr. Bradley, "Chakraologist," a rabbit fur stole for Mother, and an investment in a scheme to import essential oils from Bavaria that, shockingly, never seemed to get off the ground. As far as I could tell, money and glamour were the only things that mattered to them. And what they didn't have in the first they made up for with the second. Neither would leave the house without at least an hour of primping. They refused to miss a good party and didn't pretend to care about the PTA or the bills or any of the dull matter of everyday life.

  When we moved in, the house was full of the detritus and debris of DeWitts past, but most valuables had long ago been removed and sold: art, silver, china, all of the better fixtures. A whole panel of stained glass had been sold from the front parlor, replaced with plywood. Chandeliers, doorknobs, mantels—all sacrificed to DeWitts' greed. What was left were the common-edition books, the scrapbooks, the trunks of old clothes, boxes and boxes of chipped dishes. Like a crackhead who picks up pieces of white lint and tries to smoke them, my mother would comb through the attic and closets when she needed cash. Sometimes she surprised us, turning up a silver fork or a set of pearl buttons.

  Big houses are full of mysteries, lives lived on top of each other year after year, leaving only their clues behind. As a child I pored over every inch of the crumbling mansion. Who was Great-Aunt Eve, and why was her copy of Das Kapital missing the first three pages? Why was there a switch on the first floor that turned on a light on the third? Who thought to build a hallway connecting the master bedroom with the maid's room, and who sealed it off years later? Why was Mother crying? Why was Father screaming? Why was enough never enough?

  And the biggest mystery of all: Why was everyone so unhappy?

  I investigated these mysteries alone until I met Kelly and Tracy. After that, we were a team, and we investigated together.

  On the first day of fourth grade I sat next to Tracy in school. I'd vaguely noticed her before, along with the other white girl, Kelly, she hung out with. Neither made much of an impact. I sat next to her because
there was an empty seat there and I was fairly certain she wouldn't hit me. I was never seriously injured, but slaps and hair-pullings were common currency in my neighborhood, more annoying than actually frightening or painful.

  Then I spotted Tracy's Official Cynthia Silverton Girl Detective Decoder Ring. She wore it on the ring finger of her left hand, as if she were married.

  "You got it," I whispered.

  I'd seen the ring advertised in the back of the latest Cynthia Silverton Mystery Digest. Teen detective and junior college student Cynthia Silverton knew her Aunt Agnes hadn't stolen the Bangkok Emerald. But then who had?

  Without the ring, I would never know.

  Tracy looked up at me and smiled. The room seemed to go quiet as she held out the hand with the ring, showing it off like a new bride.

  "I got it," she whispered. We looked at the ring in awe. Now, I was sure, we would understand everything. All secrets would be split open and laid bare; all mysteries would be solved.

  "So who did it?" I asked. "Who stole the emerald?"

  Tracy looked at me and bit her lip, thinking. She looked around; unable to guarantee our privacy, she instead wrote the guilty party's name on a carefully guarded scrap of paper. She handed it to me when the teacher wasn't looking.

  Duane Edwards, she had written. The butlar did it.

  I sucked in my breath, unable to quite believe it.

  The butler? Really?

  I stared out the window and let my mind wander. Life could not be predicted, I was already starting to see. No one could be trusted.

  Five years later, Kelly and Tracy and I weren't friends anymore. We were sisters. Or so we thought. It was about then, when we were fourteen, that we gave each other the tattoos with a needle dipped in ink from a Bic pen and had our picture taken in front of the bar on First Avenue. I had a T and a K, Trace had a C and a K, and Kel had a T and a C. We would be friends forever, we swore. Sisters till the end.

  But forever never lasts as long as you think it will. Two years later Tracy disappeared. Soon after that, Kelly stopped speaking to me, and I'd spoken to her a dozen or less times since.

  Life could not be predicted, I saw. And no one could be trusted.

  29

  I SPENT THE REST of the day in the coffee shop, reading what I could find about Vic Willing online. It wasn't much. A little bit here and there about cases he tried, the usual litany of murders, assaults, and drug sales. Just thinking about trying to track down the cases and their actors gave me a headache—record keeping had long been a lost art in New Orleans, and since the storm most records were, literally, lost. Occasionally Vic popped up in the society columns. Mr. Willing accompanies Mrs. Branford Stepman to a fundraiser for our troops. Prosecutor Vic Willing enjoys a laugh with Ms. Stephanie Ludwig at the book release party for That Was New Orleans.

  My phone rang. It was Mick.

  "You busy?" he said.

  "Very," I said. "But what's up?"

  "I'm over by Coops," he said. He sounded cold. Cold and alone. "You want to maybe get something to eat? Maybe some dinner?"

  I said I would. I walked to Coops. Mick was already there, eating something fried, with a side dish of something else fried.

  "How are you not a thousand pounds?" I asked.

  "How are you?" he asked. "You've been inhaling food since you got here."

  "It's illegal where I live," I explained. "If you get fat in San Francisco, they kick you out."

  I got rabbit jambalaya. Just when I was about to bite into it, Mick's phone rang. He checked the number.

  He answered it. It was the drop-in center where he volunteered. I heard a thin, high, worried voice on the other end, but I couldn't make out the words.

  "No," Mick said vehemently. "Don't call an ambulance, don't call the cops. Don't call anyone ... No ... I'll be there in, like, a minute."

  He stood up and put on his jacket.

  "I'm almost there. Just wait."

  He hung up.

  "Do you mind?" he said. "They've got a little situation there—if this girl gets locked up it's gonna be bad news."

  "I don't mind," I said. I left two twenties on the table and put on my coat. "What happened?"

  "This girl," Mick said. "Her name's Diamond. Sweet kid. Her mom got sent upstate today. They weren't living together, but still. She was all she had. So sometimes she, Diamond, stays in this abandoned house in the Upper Ninth. A bunch of girls stay there. They all turn tricks. A while back some trick followed them home, so now they've got a gun. Which would be fine, except I'm worried Diamond—the girl—might use it on herself. Apparently she's totally freaking out. No one knows what to do with her."

  The drop-in center was a big depressing room on Canal Street near Claiborne. It used to be a grocery store, and the linoleum floor still bore marks where the refrigerators and coolers had been. A puddle of dirty water sat in one corner where a pipe leaked. Cheap plastic institutional chairs and tables were scattered around, handed down too many times. A buffet table offered coffee, colored sugar water, and doughnuts. A bin in the corner held old clothes and shoes. Two girls sifted through it, laughing and inspecting the clothes as if they were shopping in a mall.

  The kids in the center had divided themselves into affiliation groups: white punks, black thugs, white thugs, trannies and queer boys, a group of girls of different races who were obviously streetwalkers. Some of the kids in the center had children with them themselves, toddlers or babies. When Mick and I walked in, about half the kids waved at him and a few came running over.

  One young girl, one of the streetwalkers, was holding back tears. When Mick reached out a hand to her, she burst out crying. Everyone looked at her.

  "Oh, Mr. Mick," she said. "Mr. Mick."

  Mick put his hand on the girl's shoulder and pulled her in to his chest. She collapsed against him and sobbed. The other kids stepped away to give them space. I guessed that was Diamond.

  Mick led the girl to an empty table. I wandered over to the buffet and got a cup of coffee. The kids in the center sounded just like kids everywhere—loud, laughing, nearly hysterical. But they weren't like kids everywhere. They were kids like Mick had been once, kids for whom no adult on earth could muster up enough love or money or responsibility to care for. Abandoned children had long been a problem in New Orleans. Since the storm it was an epidemic. Thousands of parents stayed where they landed, sending their kids back to New Orleans with a promise of We'll send for you when we can.

  Mick had already been on his own for years when he met Constance in his early twenties. She'd found him holding up a convenience store where she was buying an Evian. Mick had tried to rob Constance. But she saw something else in him, and after a long conversation he bought her her Evian and Constance turned him into a private eye. Or, according to Silette, revealed him as such.

  I took my coffee and sat near a group of boys who looked like Andray—young, black, poor, so full of life that it took everything they had to suppress it and look cool. I tried to eavesdrop, but their accents were so thick that I could make out only every third or fourth word, and it was always nigga. After a while one boy and then another noticed me listening. It was obvious that I made them uncomfortable—there was no explanation for my presence there or my interest in them.

  But I knew I was there for a reason. There are no coincidences. Just opportunities you've been too dumb to take, doors you've been too blind to step through.

  "Excuse me," I said to the boy sitting closest to me. He was small and not much more than thirteen or fourteen. His face was round and adorable. "Can I ask you a question?"

  He looked at me and nodded, unsure. His friends stopped talking and looked at me.

  "Do you know a young man, about your age, named Lawrence? His mother's Shaniqua, works at LaVanna downtown?"

  Lawrence was the boy who Vic Willing had supposedly helped out of legal trouble, from the goodness of his heart. I'd tried calling the numbers his mother had given me, but they were all disconnected or
clearly fake.

  "Yeah," one of the other boys said cautiously. He was taller and older and looked serious. "I know him."

  "You know where I can find him?" I asked.

  The boys shut up and started to turn away from me.

  "I'm not a cop," I explained quickly. "I'm a private eye. Like on TV. Look." From my wallet I took out my California PI license and showed it to the boys. "I'm investigating a case. Lawrence might be an important witness."

  The boys all laughed in astonishment.

  "Like Magnum, P.I," one said.

  "Just like that," I said. "But without the boss."

  "Get outta here," the boy I'd first spoken to, the cute one, said. "You ain't no PI."

  "Am too," I said. "I'll prove it to you."

  "Go on," he said. The boys laughed again.

  "Okay," I said to the boy. "Tell me one thing about yourself."

  "Like what?" he said.

  "Anything," I said. "One thing."

  "Okay," he said. His voice was husky and a little raw, as if he'd been shouting. "All right. Lemme think ... Okay. When I was a little kid, my sister called me NeeNee. That was her nickname for me."

  The boys laughed and kept talking. I looked at the boy; his height, his weight, his tattoos, the slightly overdeveloped muscle in his right forearm. I listened to his layers of accents as he talked to his friends. His shoes were worn, his pants big and denim but not very clean. I watched the way he carried himself, saw the curves of his emotions in his back, the set of his shoulders and his jaw, the slight overbite, the lines in his face, the tension in his belly. He blinked twenty percent more than he should have. Once I had all the information, I closed my eyes and let it all fall together into a whole.

  In two minutes I had it.

  "You were born in Atlanta, Georgia," I began, opening my eyes. Slowly, the boys stopped talking and laughing and turned toward me. "You were born in 1992. You moved here when you were four, maybe five, with your mother. Your name is Nicholas, Nicholas something. You worked scooping ice cream last summer in the French Quarter before the storm came. Your mother left when you were eight. You lived with your aunt and uncle but you came back from Houston without them three—maybe four—months ago."