Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

by Sara Gran

  Now all the boys were listening. "Your father is in Angola," I said. "You miss your sister. You've been looking for her. You had a girlfriend but—well, I won't talk about that. You do better in school than you should. And you like airplanes. Someday," I said, "you'll fly in one."

  The boys looked at Nicholas—the cute boy—for confirmation. Eyes wide, he nodded his head.

  "The ice cream place," he said, slowly. "It was Uptown. On Carrolton."

  "Holy shit," one of the boys said.

  "Fuck," another said.

  "How you do that?" another said. "I mean—what the fuck?"

  "Told you," I said. "I'm a private eye."

  "Now," I said, "you guys can help me with something. Something for a very important case"

  From my purse I got my picture of Vic Willing.

  "Any of you know this guy?"

  I handed the picture to Nicholas. He said he didn't know him. I watched his face as he looked at the picture. He was telling the truth. So was the next boy, and the next.

  The tall boy with the serious face took the picture and, like the rest of them, shook his head.

  "Uh-uh," he said, his eyes darting a little to the left. "Never seen him."

  He was lying. He knew Vic Willing.

  When we finished with the pictures the boys went back to their conversation. Nicholas, the cute boy, came and sat next to me.

  "That was fucked up," he said, pretending to laugh.

  "Thank you," I said.

  "So," he said, looking at the floor. "My sister. You know where she's at?"

  I looked at him. He didn't look like a boy anymore. He looked like a little old man, with the burdens of an unfair life on his back.

  "You been looking for her?" I asked.

  He nodded. He looked bone-weary tired.

  "Few years now," he said.

  "You didn't lose her in the storm?" I asked.

  He shook his head.

  "Foster care?" I guessed.

  He nodded. "I ain't seen her in five years," he said.

  "I don't know where she is," I said. "But I can tell you how to find her. But the thing is—people change. You know that, right?"

  He nodded.

  "She might not be the person you're thinking of. She might not even be someone you want to know. You understand that?"

  He nodded again, his old-man face serious.

  "Okay. You know that guy over there, Mr. Mick?" I asked, pointing at Mick.

  "Yeah."

  "Well, you give him everything you know about her—her full name, her date of birth, her Social if you have it—and he'll find her for you. Shouldn't take him more than one, two days. But he probably can't get to it until he's done with this thing he's helping me with, 'cause I'm keeping him pretty busy. You tell him I promised, okay? Tell him I promised."

  The boy nodded and thanked me. I didn't know if he would do it or not. I would've offered to help him myself, but Mick would do it faster—he knew the ins and outs of the system in Louisiana. Besides, why steal his chance to be a do-gooder?

  The boy wandered off and I pretended to read a magazine for a while, all the while keeping my eyes on the tall boy who'd lied about not knowing Vic. After a while he got up to use the bathroom. I was waiting for him when he came out.

  "Hi," I said.

  The boy jumped.

  "What the fuck?" he said. "You waiting for me?"

  "So you knew Vic," I said.

  His whole body tensed. You didn't have to be a detective to know something was wrong. He frowned.

  "You seem like a nice lady," he said. "But everyone around here know. You talk to the crazy lady about the DA, you dead."

  "Really," I said. "Where'd you hear that from?"

  The tall boy laughed and shook his head.

  "Sorry," he said. "I ain't fucking around with that."

  "Thanks anyway," I said. He nodded.

  I turned to walk away. Then I heard the boy inhale and I turned back. He had something else to say.

  We looked at each other. His long, serious face looked tired. Tired of fighting, tired of keeping secrets, tired, probably, of living in a world where if you say the wrong thing to the wrong person, you die.

  "If you wanna find Lawrence," he said. "He hangs out at this park up in the Irish Channel. Third and Annunciation, around there. Little guy, big dreads. If he ain't there, you just go on back another day." He looked at me. "He there. You find him. You find him easy."

  He hoped that whatever he wouldn't tell me about Vic, Lawrence would.

  30

  CONGO SQUARE WAS a small cobblestone-paved plaza on the edge of Louis Armstrong Park, preserved as the spot where African and Haitian and Indian slaves in the eighteenth century, allowed slightly more freedom in New Orleans than elsewhere in the South, came to play music, dance, and worship. The square was widely regarded as the birthplace of American music, the spot that held the key to understanding what would later become jazz and then become rhythm and blues, rock-and-roll, and everything that followed.

  It was preserved, but not protected. A regular crew of alcoholics and addicts had claimed it and held it tight. Anyone else who stepped in that corner of the park did so at their own risk. The police never came around. Neither did the Salvation Army or the National Guard.

  There were a few benches scattered around the perimeter. Three were empty and two had men sleeping on them. Toward Rampart Street there was a picnic table, anchored in place. Five men sat at the table. Each was over fifty and poor, probably homeless, wearing clothes that hadn't been washed this year. They were the same type of man you could see in any city in America, in a little park or square just off downtown, halfway to skid row. I think they started making them after the Civil War; fighters who'd lost their wars and lost their fight. Even when their side won, they lost.

  One of them was Jack Murray. Under layers of dirt and spilled liquor and despair, the men were barely distinguishable from one another, but I recognized him from the day on Constance's porch. I was sure he wouldn't remember me.

  Jack Murray, PI, began life as a good upper-middle-class boy from Uptown. Like Vic Willing, he'd graduated from Tulane and started off full of ambition. Jack Murray wanted to be the best PI alive, and he was on his way there. He solved the murder in the Blue Room in less than ten minutes when he was just twenty-six. At thirty, he solved the murder in the wax museum, open since 1957. At thirty-five Jack Murray got James "Slim" McNeil exonerated for the Abita Springs slayings and sent the real guilty party—McNeil's own brother!—straight to the pen. Murray was the detective to beat back in 1979. Made the cover of Detective's Quarterly no less than five times. He was ready to take over the world—or at least his little corner of it.

  But at forty, Jack Murray discovered Jacques Silette. And everything changed.

  I'd read interviews with him from that time. He seemed genuinely shaken by what he'd learned. From International Detection, 1988:

  Interviewer: So how has your discovery of Silette changed your approach to solving crimes?

  Murray: (Long pause.) I think that now I'm more interested in seeing how my mysteries solve me.

  Soon Jack was turning down all the best cases that came his way. He passed up the Case of the Baghdad Bandit and its fifty-thou commission. He didn't even try to find out who shot the police chief's mistress. And he totally ignored the Murder on Rue Royal, despite a personal plea from the editor of the Times Picayune to get involved in the case.

  Instead, it seemed like he was accepting the worst offers he could get, all of them pro bono. He devoted months to solving the murder of a homeless man by the railroad tracks in Metairie. He found a serial killer who'd been preying on the working girls of New Orleans for years. But no one cared about homeless men or working girls—no one except the victims themselves. Murray wasn't making any money, and after a year or so of this he got kicked out of his house. He started drinking more. Everyone tried to help him; friends, other detectives, family. But he said he wasn't th
e one who needed help.

  After he'd been on the street for a few years, a determined writer tracked him down to interview him for the Journal of Silettian Studies. The journal lasted for exactly two issues due to complete lack of interest from the world at large.

  Interviewer: What does it mean to you to be a Silettian detective?

  Murray: (Pause.) It means I was blind, and now I can see.

  Interviewer: And the drinking?

  Murray: Well. Some people need glasses to see, you know.

  After that, Murray wouldn't answer any more questions.

  I'd heard of him when I worked for Constance, although not from her. The older guys never mentioned his name; it was us young PIs, full of gossip, who were fascinated by him. The brilliant detective reduced to a bum and a drunk. I'd thought he was more legend than reality. I didn't know how complicated life could be until one day he showed up on Constance's doorstep and rang the bell.

  I saw him at the door, held up one finger in a wait gesture, and went to find Constance in her office.

  "Constance," I began. "I think you—"

  But she was already up and coming toward the door. When she opened it the big man smiled broadly, as gray and soiled as his old coat and hat, and they fell into each other's arms. They both laughed as the man waltzed her around the porch.

  I stood and watched until a ringing phone pulled me away. There was always something going on at the big house on Prytania Street. The day before it had been Constance's meditation teacher, Dorje, in his saffron robes, making mushroom tea in the kitchen. The day before that we'd interviewed a German shepherd. Life was never dull with Constance.

  I went back to work and didn't see Constance for a few days. When I saw her again I asked about the man at the door.

  "Jack Murray," she said. "If you see him again, Claire, please let him in, or give him money if he needs it, will you?"

  "Of course," I said. I was burning with questions, but I didn't know if I should ask them.

  "Jack's path is a strange one," Constance said, seeing the questions on my face. "But he is where he's supposed to be. We needn't worry about him. And if he needs help, he knows he can always come here."

  She looked at my face and saw that I was still confused.

  "Sometimes you have to accept things that you can't understand, Claire," she said.

  I frowned. So did Constance.

  "Well, I suppose you don't have to accept them," Constance clarified. "But they exist all the same."

  Jack disappeared back into the twilight world of shelters and hotels, park benches and bus stops, liquor stores and rooming houses. I never saw Jack after that. I doubt Constance did either.

  Six months later, she was dead.

  There was a seat at the next picnic table over, and I went and sat near the men. They smelled strong even in the fresh cold air. This was a mean crowd, I saw that. But I had never let anyone get the better of me yet, and I didn't plan on letting that happen now.

  They ignored me, passing around a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor.

  "A girl could die of thirst around here," I said with a little smile.

  They ignored me. They kept ignoring me.

  They ignored me until I left.

  ***

  That afternoon I drove by the park on Annunciation and Third. A group of boys hung around, trying to look important and busy. But I didn't see any little guys with big dreads, no one who met Lawrence's description. I went to a sandwich shop on Magazine and First and got a shrimp po'boy and a root beer and then went back. Still no Lawrence.

  On Jackson, between Magazine and Constance, I saw the cherry picker again, illegally parked by a fire hydrant. No one was in it.

  Clean me, someone had written in the dust on the rear window.

  Kill me, someone else had written underneath.

  I'd been on the case for two weeks. I had clues, I had leads, I had questions. What I didn't have were answers.

  "Only a fool looks for answers," Silette wrote. "The wise detective seeks only questions."

  Silette didn't have a client paying him by the day and watching the clock. He had book royalties and a trust fund from his father, who'd made a fortune in textiles.

  31

  THAT NIGHT I went to dinner at a restaurant on the corner of Frenchman and Chartres that served Creole food and had just reopened a few weeks ago. Like a lot of restaurants, they didn't quite have it together yet. The food came out in Wonderland-type portions: an iced tea was served in a little juice glass and a pile of fried okra was bigger than my head.

  I'd just paid the bill and stepped outside into the cool, wet air when I felt it.

  First the pressure dropped. Then it was like someone flipped a switch and the world turned to slow motion, its energies made almost visible. I felt fear rise up from my root and into my belly, where acid rushed to meet it.

  Someone was going to die.

  I looked around. I saw someone else hear it before I heard it. I glanced at the face of a woman across the street, and I saw in slow motion as her mouth opened and she started to let out a scream. Then—it seemed like an hour later but it had been less than a second—I heard the rat-a-tat-tat of gunshot from an automatic weapon. I looked around and saw the panic spread across the street, saw as one person and then another opened their mouths and then dropped down or ran or stood and screamed.

  I heard the shots. But I didn't see the shooter.

  I jumped down behind a newspaper box and stayed down, covering my head and my heart in a ball. I heard screaming, saw feet running in every direction. The plate glass behind me shattered as one shot and then another hit the window. That was the last shot.

  I opened my eyes and unwound myself. All was quiet. I stood up. Everyone was gone or hugging the pavement. Everyone except me. I ran to the corner just in time to see a black Hummer with no plates drive away, a long brown arm pulling an AK-47 in through the window.

  There was a tattoo, in fancy script, across the back of his hand. I didn't have time to read it.

  I looked around. Next to the service entrance to the restaurant on Chartres a boy slumped against a wall, half lying, half sitting. His eyes were rolled open and his mouth was frozen in an O of terror. I thought he'd been shot.

  Then his eyes rolled down. He smiled.

  We looked at each other. In the wall behind him was a spray of bullet holes.

  His face glowed. We started to laugh.

  "Fuck," he said.

  "Man," I said. "Wow. You all right?"

  He nodded and laughed.

  "I guess," he said. "I ain't dead yet."

  He stood up and we both looked him over for bullet holes. There were none. People came out of hiding one at a time, coming over to look at the holes in the wall behind him.

  I didn't know if the bullets were meant for me. Maybe. Maybe not. I'd been asking questions, and it wasn't impossible.

  The boy who hadn't been shot grinned and did a little dance.

  In New Orleans, it's hard to tell where your murder case ends and everyone else's begins.

  32

  MOST PEOPLE ASSUME Constance was killed working on an important, dangerous case. She wasn't. Constance was having dinner with a friend at a restaurant in the French Quarter when she was killed. Two boys came in with AK-47s and killed everyone in the place. Eight patrons, three staff members, and one off-duty cop who was supposed to be guarding the place. He did his best. His gun was in his hand when they found him—a .22-caliber revolver. It was a toy compared to what the two boys had. I've never seen anyone say no to an automatic weapon. The boys who shot her didn't have to kill her to get her money. They killed her anyway.

  Constance was worth millions. I'd seen her give a thousand dollars to a beggar. She bought her maid a house. She sent her cook's kids to Harvard. She would have given those boys anything they'd asked for, even without a gun. But they didn't ask. They just shot her.

  A lot of people thought there was more to it. Conspiracies. We
bs. Plans. Connections. Constance had never stopped working on the disappearance of Belle, Silette's daughter. Some detectives thought she must have found something: clues, stories, suspects. Silette had other followers too, and not all of them agreed with the way Constance kept the torch. Not everyone thought she was the rightful heir to the throne.

  Those people didn't know what life is like in the city of the dead. They didn't know how easy it is to die.

  Mick spent years studying Constance's murder. He studied each detail, followed every clue. Other detectives helped. Kevin McShane came out of retirement to work the case with Mick. The Red Detective came down from the hills of Oakland to whisper theories in my ear. The Oracle of Broad Street volunteered her services for free. Every detective in the world wanted to crack the case.

  But in the end, there was no case. No mystery. Just a plain fucking murder. There was nothing more to it than two poor kids who wanted money and didn't know or care who they were killing to get it.

  The big conspiracy that killed Constance wasn't the Federal Reserve or the Octopus or the Anti-Silettians. It was the biggest, oldest conspiracy in the world—the conspiracy that produced kids like the two who shot her for pocket change. It was the conspiracy that began when the first man looked at his neighbor and said, "Hey, I think I'd like that cave."

  Constance was always trying to get me to see something better in people, something that would lead us up a little higher. I didn't see it.

  "This world was supposed to be paradise," she told me once, biting into an apple at her big kitchen table. "If people would wake up, it still could be."

  "I don't know what it was supposed to be," I said, "but it's pretty fucking close to hell. Listen to that."