by Sara Gran
“Oh yes, well. She was feeling down. Like I said, I shouldn’t let one day ruin all my good memories of her. I just don’t want to think she was so unhappy when she died.”
“But what was she so unhappy about?” I pressed.
“Well, not SO unhappy,” Linda said. “At least, I don’t think so. She was just—it was just a moment, and I’m sure it would’ve passed. But people were jealous. They were mean. She lost a lot of friends.”
“Anyone stand out?” I asked.
“No—yes. A few. This stupid cunt named Marcy Evergreen,” Linda said. “They used to be close and then when Ann became such a big deal Marcy wasn’t nice. You know, people are strange. Or maybe not. But their reactions aren’t always what you expect. And then there was the logo.”
“Logo?” I asked.
Now Linda sighed. “This company. Something to do with computers. Or advertising. T-shirts. I don’t know. But they took one of her hives, one of her drawings, and basically changed it around a little and stole it for their logo. She talked to a bunch of lawyers, and I don’t think she got anywhere. But her heart was broken. Her work was very important to her. She did NOT want it used to sell things.
“People work all their life to get recognized,” Linda said. “What they don’t realize is that once they get recognized, they’re not themselves anymore. Not in public. Not to anyone else. They’re someone else. And that’s what people recognize. That’s who everyone falls in love with. That’s who they want. People like Ann are constantly changing. But the world wants just that one incarnation of them, over and over again.”
We didn’t say anything for a moment. Two hummingbirds fought a few feet from us. I thought about how much I wanted to enjoy the sunshine and the hummingbirds and the flowers. Enjoying life as it unfolded was always hard. Since Constance died it seemed physically impossible. It was all just a long, infinite, blacktop of things you’d regret not enjoying later.
CHAPTER 9
THE CASE OF THE INFINITE BLACKTOP
* * *
Las Vegas, 2011
Las Vegas was eighty-five degrees and as dry as the desert it was but inside Nero’s Inferno the air was cool and dark and almost damp, more like a cave than a royal domain. I didn’t know if the rumors about extra oxygen in the air at casinos were true, but I did perk up a bit after waiting on line for the desk clerk for five minutes, and by the time I was at the top of the line, I had energy and vitality to spare—although the planned-to-excite gambling sounds and the bright colors and the uppers and the coffee and the CIA pills I’d bought from Keith were likely also contributing to the busy, busy buzz.
At the desk I told the clerk, a white girl about twenty-something with black hair and a pretty face with pink, rounded lips, that I wanted to see Jonathan Markson in security.
“I’m sorry,” the girl said. “This desk is for reservations only. We have an information desk—”
“But you have a phone right there,” I said, pointing at her fancy multi-line phone. “So you could call him on that.”
She frowned. “We’re only supposed to use that phone for checking people in.”
“Sometimes life hands us lemons,” I said, “and then we make lemonade. And phone calls.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“That’s OK,” I said. “Call Jonathan Markson’s office, tell him Claire DeWitt is here, and he’ll know.”
She gritted her teeth and called the central operator who put her through to security who put her through to Markson’s office.
“Right,” the girl said. “OK. I’ll tell her.”
She hung up and looked at me.
“Mr. Markson is busy at the moment but asked me to relay that—”
“Right,” I said. I wrote my new phone number on a scrap of paper. “You can call him back and tell him I’ll see him in about ten minutes. And I’m expecting a package here for Kitty McCain. Please call me right away when it comes.”
“Sure,” she said, sweetly, as if she was talking to a crazy person. I wanted to say We’ll see who’s crazy, but I wasn’t sure that was a bet I would win. Maybe in ten minutes she’d find me out on the floor and say Well, we’ve now proven it’s you.
Maybe that would be the story of my life. Look who was crazy after all.
I walked through the casino floor and found the roulette tables, and then found the security cameras—one or more over each table. I sat at a roulette table, next to a small gaggle of middle-aged convention men, making sure I was in full view of the camera.
I put ten bucks on zero black. While everyone’s eyes were on the wheel I swiped half the chips from the conventioneer next to me off the table and into my hand, where I paused for a second before sticking them in my packet. I lost my bet. I went to another table and repeated the whole thing. Spanish tourists drinking whiskey and cracking jokes about the ass of the young woman at the next table over. I wasn’t sure what was so remarkable about her ass but I owed her a cut of the four hundred–odd bucks’ worth of chips I pocketed from the men from Spain.
It was at the third table, with the girl with the remarkable ass, that I placed a handful of chips on red to win and a man in a suit came over to me and gently took my arm.
“Mr. Markson says he apologizes for the delay,” the man in the suit said, “and will be happy to see you now.”
The man led me around a few corners to a service elevator, which we took up to the tenth floor.
Jonathan Markson’s office was giant and done up Nero-style with antiques that may or may not have been real and a giant mahogany desk that wanted to pass itself off as something from Versailles. A wide window behind him looked across the city. There was about thirty feet of floor between the window and the door, as a crow might fly. Or a hawk.
Markson stood up from behind his fancy desk, gentleman-like, when the man in the suit brought me in. Markson was also in a suit, and an expensive one, with shoes that probably cost more than cars I’d owned. He held out a big hand for me to shake. It felt like shaking hands with a gorilla. A gorilla who hated me and wished I’d get the fuck out of his city, but was too much of a gentleman to say it. That kind of gorilla.
“Claire DeWitt,” he said, with fake enthusiasm. “How wonderful to see you.”
I gave the man in the suit the chips I’d earned. Markson thanked the man in the suit and he left.
“Wow,” I said when the man was gone. I sat in a fancy gilt chair across from Markson’s desk. He looked more smug than angry. I wasn’t sure what that meant.
“What a surprise,” I went on. “That you’re here. In your office. ’Cause I wouldn’t have expected that, considering how fucking busy you were like twenty-nine minutes ago when I tried to get you on the phone.”
“And I apologize,” Markson said, “for the misunderstanding. What can I help you with?”
“A room would be nice,” I said. “Under the name Kitty McCain. And I’m expecting an important package later today or tomorrow. Very important. Can you please make sure I get a call as soon as it comes into the mail room?”
“Of course,” Markson said with a look on his face like maybe I was joking.
“And I could use some cash,” I said. “A loan. Or a gift would work.”
Now Markson definitely seemed to think I was joking. He almost smiled, and even looked a little arrogant. I crossed my legs and leaned back in the expensive chair.
“You are in the fucking business of cash,” I said. “You are literally sitting on top of the biggest fucking ATM on planet earth. And considering our past—”
What I implied, but did not say, was considering our past where I helped you break up a gambling ring that had bilked you of close to four million, considering that I of my own free will have kept their means of doing so secret for eleven years—
“I would think five fucking grand and a room,” I went on, now with my own arrogant little look, well fucking earned as far as I was concerned, “would not be a very big
deal.”
Markson thought for a minute, frowned, realized that I was right and he was wrong, and then opened his desk drawer and took out a stack of hundreds as high as my forearm. He counted out fifty one-hundred-dollar bills and handed them to me.
“A gift,” he said, through a tight and unhappy jaw. “And your room will be ready in ten minutes.”
I’d never known if I could trust Markson. I didn’t know any better now. But it was in his interest to avoid trouble, which, in this case, meant giving me what was needed to mollify me until I left.
Outside his door, a bellhop was waiting to show me to my room. The room was a suite, and the suite was giant and full of ridiculous things—hot tub, whirlpool, chili-lime peanuts, serrano-maple-sugar popcorn, the LA Times, the New York Times, USA Today, ashtrays that could break a skull, oceans of tiny bottles of alcohol, and a coffee maker with infinite combinations of coffee, tea, cocoa, and yerba maté.
I gave the bellhop five bucks and then I went down to the mall in the basement of Nero’s and spent some of my five grand on three new pairs of underwear, three new T-shirts, a pair of boots, two pairs of jeans, and a black satin jacket that cost more than the rest of the clothes combined. In a convenience store, still in the mall, I bought antibiotic cream, eye drops, hair product, and a blank notebook. The shops were bright and loud under a fake blue sky painted on the ceiling. I also bought a laptop for three hundred dollars and a few burner phones.
I brought my new clothes and goods up to my room and ordered a French dip sandwich with a salad and fries from room service. I took off the clothes I was wearing, which were filthy and specked with blood, and put them in the garbage can in the bathroom. I swallowed another pill from Keith and took a long shower. When I got out of the shower I put hair product and antibiotic cream on the appropriate zones.
I looked at myself in the full-length mirror in the bathroom. My face was red and angry but luckily red faces weren’t rare, and that alone would not make me interesting.
My bigger cuts were healing up rough. Across my ribs and down my left hip and thigh was a great wild mess of blue and black and green and purple.
I looked like shit. But with clothes on, I didn’t look like an accident victim, at least. I just looked haggard. That gave me a half step ahead of anyone who was looking for an accident victim.
I got dressed. Room service had come while I was in the shower. I looked in the mini-bar and wanted a real drink but didn’t think I could stomach it and settled for a Heineken.
I ate the sandwich and a dozen or so of the french fries and a few bites of the salad. I felt improved afterward. I wasn’t actually planning on sleeping but after lunch my eyes started to close and I was finding them near impossible to open, despite my strongest efforts and my multiple pills, until my phone rang. And rang.
I woke up. It was Claude, of course. No one else had this number.
“You found out about the comics?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Claude said. He sounded distraught. I woke up the rest of the way and stood up and popped another two pills with the last of the Heineken.
Every bone in my body shrieked. We are tired, my bones said. Why won’t you let us rest?
I bit my lip, hard, to talk back to my bones.
The good news was that Claude had the scans and was on his way home to send them to me now. The bad news was that, otherwise, he hadn’t accomplished much.
As Claude talked I saw something tiny dart around the room, near the closet, out of the corner of my eye.
The little darting thing rushed toward me, a tiny white blur.
“Bix is trying but he doesn’t, you know . . .”
“Know what he’s doing?” I suggested.
“Exactly,” Claude said. “I don’t think I do, either.”
“OK,” I said. “We know they were printed in Las Vegas, in 1970-something to 1980-something, by a printer that may or may not still exist, right?”
“I think?” Claude said warily.
“Actually, that is a YES,” I said. “So what kind of printing was it? Most likely, full-color offset. How many were printed? Well, given the lack of copies on the internet we can guess not many, so we can look for a short-run press, which is probably all there is in Las Vegas, anyway, printer-wise. The big printers are in cheaper places. So, first, check with the short-run full-color offset printers that exist now that also existed in, let’s say, 1979 through 1989. And they will know, and be able to tell you, about the ones that no longer exist.”
Claude agreed that this was a good plan and agreed to execute it.
The little darting thing stopped about a foot in front of me.
I bent down to see it.
It was a mouse. A tiny white mouse.
I also told Claude to rent me a new car under a different name from a fancy place that would deliver and would do it now.
“Oh,” he said. “And one more thing.”
“Yeah, Columbo?” I said.
“The lama wants to talk to you. He texted me twice.”
“OK,” I said.
Like in the movies, I hung up without saying goodbye.
I was interested in pursuing a conversation with this rodent but instead I called the lama back. I’d been working on a case with the lama when I’d started my day, twenty-four hours ago in Oakland. It seemed like a lifetime ago.
When I first met the lama his name was Chuck. He used to stay up all night to surf the first waves of the morning and sleep during the day. In between he would get high and pick fights and get kicked out of punk shows for being a dick. He was another of Constance’s charity cases. He’d thought he was a detective. Constance knew better.
“Hey,” the lama said.
“Hey,” I said. I was going to ask if he knew this mouse but then I realized probably no.
“So Andray called,” the lama said. It was the case we’d been working on; a mutual friend, Andray Fairview, was missing. Apparently he’d been found.
“Yeah?” I said.
“He’s in Taos,” the lama said. “You missed him.”
“OK,” I said. “I’m kind of busy with other stuff now, anyway.”
I thought about telling him the whole story but the idea of it exhausted me. I looked at the mouse. His face was vague at first. I thought maybe I needed glasses. But the closer I got, the more his face became distinct and clear.
“Hey, I almost forgot,” the lama said. “I had a dream about you.”
“Yeah?” I said. “What was that?”
“You were in the desert,” the lama said. “And you were, like, some kind of goddess of fury out there. Like Medusa, snakes coming out of your head, the whole bit. Total rage.”
“Yeah?”
The mouse darted away again. I whipped my head around to look for it.
“Yeah,” the lama said. “It was like, a scary thing,” he went on. “But not a bad thing. It was something you needed to do. A lot of trapped energy being released.”
As the lama talked, the mouse came back. Slowly, with mouse-ish hesitation, it walked toward me and stopped about a foot away from me.
I bent down and then crawled down and then laid down on the floor on my stomach until I was eye to eye with the mouse. I saw that it was holding something in its tiny, uncanny, little mouse hands.
“The whole desert was shaking,” the lama said. “It was kind of amazing.”
The desert will shake, I thought. But for now the mouse leaned back on its rear paws and held its full little hands out to me.
In its hands was a book.
“Claire?”
“Yeah?”
I recognized the yellow cover, the cranky white man on the cover.
It was, of course, a copy of Jacques Silette’s Détection.
The mouse opened it to page forty-five.
“A mystery is like a termite: even if you don’t know it’s there, it creates holes in your foundation, leaving you off-kilter and unsupported, never understanding why your house is such a
frightening and confusing place to be.
“Sometimes the solution is to rebuild your house. Sometimes, it’s to set your house on fire.”
* * *
Jacques Silette never made it to Las Vegas, but right before he lost his daughter in New York City, he stopped in Atlantic City for the night and loved it. He wrote a long rhapsodic letter about it to his friend back at home, a butcher and amateur vintner named Acel Dumont.
“A monstrous rainbow beauty of electric neon. Dollars and coins fall from the sky in a starlit eternal night. A never-ending meteor shower of hope crushed and reborn, reborn and crushed, inhaled and exhaled. Every supposedly desirable nugget of capitalist material in Europe is here duplicated and made available to anyone with forty-nine cents: a good steak; a cigar; the illusion of a library with wallpapered books; fancy dress and what they call ‘fine brandy.’
“But here there is a shimmering illusion of a society that is, in its capacity for hope and optimism, far superior to anything the world has known before. The gambling is nothing. It is a lived metaphor for a real hope: the hope that maybe someday, maybe tomorrow, even after the dice fall, even after our mysteries are solved, we can be happy. Because now, we can only be happy in that moment when the dice are in the air, when everything is a mystery, when we can continue in petty ignorance.”
CHAPTER 10
THE MYSTERY OF THE CBSIS
* * *
Los Angeles, 1999
Before I left Linda Hill she gave me a banker’s box full of Ann Davidson on loan—slides, auction catalogs, magazine articles, prints, and photographs. Back in my hotel room that night I looked at photos of Ann’s work. Her sculptures were odd and busy. Most of them were containers with birds and bees and flowers inside. They started off as little cigar boxes of cardboard and paper and then became trunks and suitcases and finally they changed into big, welded, fantastical sculptures in her last years. Like Linda said, Ann liked beehives; she also liked vines, snakes, nautical ropes and knots, and endless repetitions of shapes in a specific swirling, curling, sinister, vine-like pattern.