The Infinite Blacktop

by Sara Gran

  “Who were you?” I asked, out of curiosity.

  Carl crunched up his face when he thought about it. “Someone who didn’t . . . Someone who DID things. Someone like the people in detective novels. Men who do things without obsessing, without fussing over every little detail. Without second-guessing myself all the time.” He thought for another long moment. “All my life it seemed like, like I was trying. Like I was working. Like life was my job, and I was failing at it. But that day, with Merritt—it seemed so real. More real than anything else ever had. Like I was really alive. The way other people were.

  “But afterward—I could remember that it felt good, but I couldn’t feel it again. Like pain. Once, I broke my arm. It was so stupid, I don’t even want to tell you how. But then later, after it hurt—I mean, after it healed—it was like I was aware of the fact that it had been incredibly painful, but I couldn’t really ever feel it again. It was like that.

  “Anyway. I cut his tires and”—Carl made an ugly, dead, smile and tossed his hands in the air—“it all worked out perfectly. Merritt got in the car, he was drunk, blew out his tires in the canyon . . .”

  The odds of his shitty little plan working were about a million to one. You can spend a lifetime studying fate and change and trying to figure them out. And then someone like Carl goes and has the luckiest day in three thousand years.

  Or the unluckiest.

  “As soon as I heard he was dead,” Carl said, “I knew I’d made a . . . Jesus. Mistake isn’t the word. It was unforgivable. Unconscionable.

  “I won,” Carl said. “I won. And I lost the best friend I ever had. And I—a man who has devoted his life to art, to this only thing, to this—I killed the best artist I ever knew. Over something . . . something I’d made up. A fucking lie I’d invented to justify myself. To justify my jealousy. Ann? I hardly even knew Ann. She wasn’t even real.”

  But she was real. Maybe she was never really real to Carl, or even Merritt. But she was real.

  Neither of us said anything for a while. Carl started to cry. I sat next to him and held his crying, shaking hand as I called the police, and as we waited for the police to come Carl put his head in my lap and sobbed and I stroked his hair. When the police came he went without arguing.

  In that room with him, the solution rolling out before my eyes, for a short moment I’d felt the way he’d described—alive. Like I wasn’t rehearsing, like this was actual, real life, and my place in it was inevitable and secure. Like I belonged here as much as anyone else.

  And I knew that, also like Carl, with his broken arm, I wouldn’t be able to hold on to it after it was gone.

  In my mind’s eye the rest of my life poured out ahead of me: black tar on an endless road, dark and alone. It would be a long series of empty moments that took me down an infinite highway to nowhere in particular. Happiness would always be around the next corner—but never here, never now, never on this road.

  * * *

  In the days after I busted Carl I didn’t feel much of anything in particular. It wasn’t an interesting case and he wasn’t a particularly noteworthy adversary.

  There’s the mystery and then there’s the case, Silette wrote. This was no mystery. This was a case, and a dull one.

  And now it was closed. I had my four hundred hours. Or so I thought. I typed up all my time sheets and brought them to Adam. He was sitting at his desk, as usual, smoking cigarettes and shuffling papers around. I don’t remember ever seeing him do anything else.

  I sat in front of him and gave him my ledger. Adam smoked and looked at the pages. He wrinkled his brow a little and tapped out some addition and subtraction on his fingers as he looked the ledger over.

  “You’re short,” he said.

  For a quick moment I thought he meant my height. Then I realized he meant my hours.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I was very careful. I bought a calculator.”

  “I see that,” he said. “But you’re one hundred and eight minutes short.”

  He handed the papers back to me.

  “The case isn’t done,” he said. “You have one hundred and eight more minutes to go.”

  There was no arguing. Unless I wanted to argue with him for one hundred and eight minutes and make up the time that way.

  “OK,” I said. “But I think this case is done. Is there something else I can do for you? I don’t mind going over in hours. I can do a few days’ work on another case if you have anything. I don’t mind at all.”

  “I don’t think so,” Adam said. “This is the case. And you have nearly two hours left to go. So why don’t you go and do that, and then when you’re done, come back, and I’ll sign your paperwork.”

  “OK,” I said. “I’ll do that. Thank you, Adam.”

  He made his tight little non-smile and said nothing and I left.

  * * *

  So I had an hour and forty-eight minutes left. I didn’t know what to do for an hour and forty-eight minutes.

  Carl confessed to everything all over again pretty quick once the cops and the lawyers started in on him. He wasn’t a tough guy. Just a frightened and jealous man who’d made some terrible mistakes. I didn’t really care if he went to jail. I didn’t think he was gonna turn around and kill someone else all over again. But maybe he was better off now. Nothing to hide, no secrets. We should all be so lucky. Although being out of prison was pretty nice, too. Either way, I’d solved the case. Not my problem.

  A few days after he confessed, later in the day after Adam told me I was short, Carl was on the cover of the Los Angeles Times. For reasons that were opaque to me, he was being walked into the police station by Christopher Collins. Christopher Collins from the Richter Agency. Who hadn’t fucking solved the case then and hadn’t fucking solved the case now.

  I skimmed the copy—murder, confession, blah blah—until I got to the last paragraph.

  “The case was solved by an agent of the Richter Agency, Christopher Collins, who specializes in cold cases. ‘I was hired for this case over eight years ago,’ Collins said, ‘but the case isn’t solved until it’s solved.

  “ ‘Richter never rests.’ ”

  CHAPTER 14

  THE CLUE OF THE CHARNEL HOUSE

  * * *

  Brooklyn, 1985

  Tracy had been quiet all day. It was the aftermath of the Case of the Gilded China, and I could tell the case had hit her hard. Late that night, when the air was cold and calm under its own silence, we sat on the steps of a row house across from the projects where she lived. Our breath was cold in the night air, white against the black sky.

  “So yesterday,” Tracy said. “I mean last night. At the hospital. I was talking to the man—the witness.”

  Tracy paused and didn’t say anything.

  “What’d he say?” I asked.

  “Well, that once—before all this happened—he was at the end of his rope. That’s how he put it. Like there was an actual rope, and there he was, at the end. Under that rope—you know, it was just nothingness, I guess. Just blackness. Anyway, he had a rope, and he was at the end of it. And he didn’t know what to do anymore. He said he couldn’t keep living and he couldn’t die. He was frozen. So he went and he lived in, like, in some rooming-house-type place. He had a room in this place and for a year, he didn’t leave his room. Every night he would stand at the window and try to will himself to jump, and every night he couldn’t do it. Every night, he didn’t have the courage to jump.

  “And then, one night when he was looking down, doing his usual thing, his little chat with death—that was what he called it, his nightly little chat with death—he said he realized something. He realized that you can try as hard as you want to escape who you are, but eventually, you realize there is no escape. There’s nowhere to run, and nothing to run to. Nothing ever really changes. The state of life on earth is exactly what it is, and the only chance of a happy life is accepting that. Accepting life as it is. And knowing that there is no escape. And that’s the only f
reedom he’s ever been able to find.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I put my arms around her and told her I loved her and told her we’d feel better tomorrow. We never felt better tomorrow. But I said it because I didn’t know what else to say. Accepting life as it was, without rage, seemed maybe possible for some enlightened other people, in another place, with a better reality. Not for me. Not for us.

  Less than a year later, Tracy would disappear, taking with her all of our best tomorrows.

  A year and a half later, Kelly and I analyzed every memory, dissected every clue she had left behind. I reminded Kelly about the man in the rooming house.

  We were in Kelly’s apartment, sitting on her bedroom floor. Kelly frowned. She didn’t say anything for a while—she was already starting to speak less, frown more. She went digging in her boxes of papers, clues, and notes; she dug until she found what she was looking for—a scrawled hieroglyphic note on the back of a paper menu from the Kiev Diner: Open all Nite. We Serve Pierogi.

  “No, no, no,” Kelly said. “She told me a completely different story. A completely different version. It was a woman, not a man. And she didn’t live in some kind of halfway house—”

  “Rooming house—”

  “She lived in the Plaza Hotel. Like in the book. She said—”

  Kelly read the woman’s words off the back of the menu, where Kelly had written them eighteen months before:

  “ ‘After the fire, I was staying in the Plaza, across from the park. At first I pretended I was looking for a real place. A place to live. Then I stopped pretending I wanted to live. I couldn’t pretend anymore, and I just stayed there. I had a suite. I wanted to die, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  “ ‘I spent a lot of time looking out the window. I tried to miss life. I wanted to want to live. Or to have the courage to die already. But I just couldn’t do either. I didn’t want to live and I didn’t want to die.

  “ ‘I told myself I was hibernating. Healing. But winter passed, and then the spring, and then, soon enough, it was winter again, and I was still in the Plaza. I still didn’t want to leave. When I felt restless I would get dressed and roam around the halls, take the elevators up and down. Sometimes I’d go to other floors and walk around there. Mostly it was the same, but some floors were different.

  “ ‘Then one night I was sitting by the window—I had a kind of window seat I would sit in—I was sitting in my seat and the moon rose up, there was a big white moon and I realized: history isn’t real. It isn’t real. Maybe it happened once, but it wasn’t happening now. That who I was yesterday was not at all important to who I could be today. That every day the world was born again. I could walk out of that hotel and change my name, change everything about myself, and never look back unless the mood struck me to do so.

  “ ‘Escape is possible.

  “ ‘So I escaped. And that’s the only freedom I’ve ever been able to find. To give up the past, and create a new life. To start again.’ ”

  I looked at Kelly. She didn’t look at me.

  “But they’re complete opposites,” I said. “They can’t both be true.”

  Kelly turned and looked out the window, thinking.

  I didn’t know what to say, and we never talked about it again.

  CHAPTER 15

  THE MYSTERY OF THE CBSIS

  * * *

  Los Angeles, 1999

  I wasn’t above lying to Adam, but it wasn’t worth the risk. Back in my hotel room I looked for something to do for 108 minutes. I flipped through the paperwork again. Looked at a catalog of Carl’s paintings. Put a bunch of slides back in my slide projector and looked at them. Somehow I ended up looking at Merritt’s last paintings, the ones that everyone thought ruined his career, the paintings that were too big and made you too uncomfortable.

  I set the slide projector on automatic and in its dim light I looked through Merritt’s file again. His paintings had grown on me since I started the case. I would have liked to have one of them, if I had money or a house to put it in. I put aside a slide of my favorite of Merritt’s paintings. It was called Pacific Ocean #12. It was dark and frightening and there was something in it that I knew but couldn’t put into words, and had never known I knew before. I figured I’d take it to a photo lab and get a print made for myself before I returned it to Adam.

  Merritt himself had grown on me, too. I was a little in love with him. I put all the papers back in Adam’s thin file. I wondered where the file would go when I was done with it. I took out the letter from Merritt—the sweet, drawn-on, three-line note Merritt had sent to a friend in New York and that was returned as undeliverable.

  I opened the letter and read it again:

  You are my friend.

  I love you.

  I miss you.

  I’d asked Adam about the letter. As far as he knew it had been in Merritt’s last mail delivery. Merritt likely didn’t see it before he died. No one knew who Jacob Heartwell was. He wasn’t in any of the files, at least. It had been on my list of potentially interesting avenues of investigation, but Carl had confessed before I’d gotten around to doing any real investigation.

  Who was Jacob Heartwell? If Merritt loved him so much, why didn’t he know where he lived? What did love mean to Merritt? To anyone?

  Merritt had drawn all over the outside of the envelope. I put it aside. I would ask Adam if I could get it back to the friend Merritt had sent it to, if I could find him. Jacob Heartwell.

  I put the letter back in the envelope and put it on the top of the file and there it was, on the back of the envelope. Under and above and mixed in with shapes and curves and lines Merritt had sketched.

  A bee. A honeybee drawn with black ink. Its wings were spread wide, as if in flight or about to take off.

  My hands shook as I picked up the envelope and looked at the bee. I turned off the slide projector and turned on the lights and looked at the bee again. I went into the bathroom, where the light was brighter, and looked at the bee again. It was finely drawn and from a different pen than the rest of the drawings on the envelope.

  The clock ticked. A hundred and eight minutes had passed.

  I didn’t care.

  I’d spent weeks now with Merritt and Ann’s work.

  Merritt hadn’t drawn that bee. Ann had.

  And according to the postmark on the envelope, which was from 1994, she’d done it the year after she died in 1993.

  Or, I realized, as I rewrote history in my head, the year everyone thought she had died.

  * * *

  At first I thought there was no way to date the envelope. There weren’t any radical innovations in postal technology in the two years between Ann’s death and Merritt’s. No fundamental changes to the nature of the envelope.

  I looked at the envelope and looked at it and looked at it some more. It was a security envelope, business size and business type, no maker’s mark anywhere.

  But security envelope meant a pattern and patterns could be traced. I picked it up, carefully, and looked at the pattern inside. A web of green wavy lines in a repeating pattern of about a half a square inch, set against itself at conflicting angles.

  * * *

  “I don’t understand,” the man on the other end of the phone said. “We’re not an archiving company. We’re a paper company. We make paper.”

  “I understand that,” I said. I was sitting up in bed in my hotel room. I’d gotten up at eight, had two big Thai coffees and a churro for breakfast, and gone to the Hollywood library. Merritt’s envelope had been plain, with no plastic window. Fortunately, paper manufacturers didn’t come and go frequently. It was a good solid business where the main players mostly stood still for fifty or more years at a time. From the phone books in the library, I made a list of envelope manufacturers in the American Southwest. Of course the envelopes could have been sent from anywhere, but everyone likes to save on shipping costs and you had to start somewhere. I got my list together and then I went back to m
y hotel room and started making calls.

  Now it was 2:00 p.m. My hands were shaking and my temples were throbbing. I’d planned to keep going until I had an answer, but now I realized that wasn’t going to work. After this call I would break for lunch. The idea of another Thai lunch alone was not appealing, which was another reason I hadn’t stopped.

  “I completely understand what you do,” I said. “I am actually a detective. A private eye. And I am on a very important case concerning a murder that happened in 1995.”

  “Huh,” the man said. The last person had hung up on me. The one before him had called me crazy, and then hung up on me. This one sounded just interested enough to keep listening. “A detective?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m trying to solve a very important mystery, and I think you could help.”

  The man took a deep breath in and out.

  “Is this one of those TV shows?” he said. “Where they’re gonna come out with cameras and start laughing at me?”

  “No sir,” I said. The man was in Bakersfield, which was a few hours away driving and a few galaxies away in every other way.

  Another deep breath in and out.

  “So what was the question?” he said.

  I explained again what I needed: if he might have sold this envelope and if so, when—the only defining characteristic distinguishing it from other envelopes being the security pattern on the inside. A crosshatched repeating pattern of green wavy lines.

  The man didn’t say anything for a minute.

  “Are you there?” I said.

  “I am,” the man said. “I just. I mean.”

  “I know,” I said, gritting my teeth against the reality of the fifty more phone calls I would need to make that day. “It’s an unusual request, and—”