The Infinite Blacktop

by Sara Gran

  I’d kind of wanted to sleep with Detective Hernandez. It seemed like a possible opportunity for something, although I didn’t know what that opportunity was. It was what someone would do in a detective novel. But after he told me about what happened in Beverly Hills that day anything like that seemed out of the question, and sex seemed like cotton candy—something for kids having fun when they don’t know any better, not something for adults to seriously consider.

  * * *

  I went back to all the slides and photographs and catalogs I had of Ann’s work. Her work changed over the years. People don’t stay the same. They might grow or they might shrink, but all things changed.

  I looked at Ann’s early work. Probably not the first art she’d made but the first anyone thought was good enough to make a fuss over. The sculptures and paintings she made were fascinating and intricate but the overall impression was muddy, confusing. As she went on, everything got bigger, stranger, more precise.

  I looked at the last piece. Linda Hill had said she wasn’t making as much art, or at least not showing it as much, in the months before she died. The last big-deal piece she’d done had been sold at a charity auction 252 days before she died.

  It was nothing like anything she’d ever done before. It was a piece of rough silver metal, raw and scratched, with graffiti written all over it. The graffiti was in English letters but didn’t seem to be any words that I knew. Maybe it was a piece of a car left over from an accident. Maybe a third or a quarter of a bumper.

  The graffiti didn’t make sense to me and I took the letters and wrote them out and rearranged them and put in breaks between words in different places, until finally it fell into place before my eyes, opening like a flower—

  Fuck

  Off.

  I looked at the catalog where I’d found the piece.

  It had sold at auction for $350,000.

  She’d never shown a piece in public again.

  * * *

  I looked for what wasn’t there.

  I tried to track down Ann’s car but it was a dead end. As far as Detective Hernandez knew it was destroyed after the accident.

  I went back to Marcus Mikkelson, the mechanic who’d looked at Merritt’s car. I went over the whole scenario with him. The scenario of Ann. She’d been driving at night on Franklin Avenue and hit another car. There were more details in the police report, which I showed Marcus.

  There’s a certain feeling you get as a detective when you know you’ve found your person—your paper guy, your footprint lady, your cat fancier. I knew with Marcus I’d found my car-accident guy.

  But ironically, just six months later, Marcus died in a car accident himself. He had a heart attack on the 210 heading out to Pasadena. He steered into the guardrail just in time to avoid killing anyone other than himself, and left no mysteries behind.

  As I told him about Ann, Marcus listened carefully and asked thoughtful questions, most of which I couldn’t answer.

  “Is it possible?” he said when I was done. “Yes, it’s possible. One thing you learn in this business pretty fast is that anything’s possible. But look at it like this: this is a one-in-maybe-five-million shot.” He meant Ann’s car hitting the other car at that exact angle, killing Ann but hurting no one else. “Now, have five million things happened, making it possible that this is one of them? Are there five million things? Of course. There’s far more than five million things out there. Would I keep digging? Absolutely.”

  I thanked him, and kept digging.

  * * *

  The person driving the other car in Ann’s accident had been an actress named Barbara Resin. Barbara’s address was not far from my hotel, which I figured told you everything you needed to know about where her acting career and her life had gone since the accident.

  Except I was entirely wrong. The building wasn’t far from my hotel, but the neighborhood was entirely different; Larchmont was like the nice parts of New York City, bustling with well-off people and well-off babies and their equally well-off dogs. Barbara lived in a small, pleasant little Tudor off Larchmont Avenue, with a lawn out front and a couple of rose bushes around the house and two good cars in the driveway.

  She did not invite me inside.

  “I don’t understand who you are,” she said after I ran down my shtick—detective, settling the issue for the family, just following up on some formalities to eliminate any misconceptions. Barbara was blond and attractive and looked much younger than her fortyish years—not the way people look after surgery but the way people look when they’re happy and well-rested and have some money.

  I started again. “I’m a private detective—”

  “No, I HEARD you,” she said. “But you didn’t tell me what you actually wanted.”

  She was also not dumb.

  “Did you know Ann?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” she said. “It was a completely random accident.”

  “But I know that it wasn’t,” I said. “And I know that for years now, you’ve been carrying this with you. And I know that every day, you say to yourself, Don’t think about it. Forget about it. But you can’t. And it comes to you at the strangest times. When the kids are playing. When you’re making love with your husband. You made a huge mistake,” I said. “And now is your chance to set it straight.”

  “Get the fuck off my property,” she said.

  She shut the door.

  * * *

  Ann had no children, no siblings, and no living parents when she died. Her estate went to a cousin who lived in Ventura. I called the cousin. I asked if I could exhume Ann’s grave.

  “Why?” she asked. “Why would anyone want to do that?”

  Something made me bite my tongue. I made up a lie about a suspect, blood alcohol levels, accident patterns. It took a long five minutes of lying, but finally she agreed. She didn’t really care. She barely knew her cousin, and her material remains were not all that interesting to her. Then the coroner had to sign off. I begged and pleaded with Hernandez to ask the coroner and finally he did and the coroner said yes. I knew he’d say yes to a cop and no to a PI. I probably would too.

  Then it took an undertaker and funeral director and five grand. I didn’t have five grand. I found out that people bill you for this kind of thing. They billed me.

  Three weeks later the body was exhumed, taken to a medical examiner, and inspected.

  The body in Ann’s casket wasn’t Ann. It was Kate Duvall, a woman with fifteen prior arrests for solicitation and DUI and public intoxication. Her teeth, uniquely flawless, gave her away.

  Probably alcohol poisoning, the examiner said. It was hard to tell this long after death, but that was what it looked like and it sounded good to me.

  I laid everything out for Detective Hernandez. Ann hadn’t been killed that night, and someone else had been buried in her grave. Carl had murdered Merritt over nothing.

  We met in Nate ’n Al’s again. This time he admitted I had a case. Ann was possibly still alive.

  “Nice job, DeWitt,” he said, with grudging grudgingness.

  “And?” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “What do you want me to do?” he said. “Track her down? You really think she killed that girl?”

  “No,” I said. “But she faked her own death.”

  “That’s not really a crime,” Hernandez said. “I mean, fraud. But.”

  Which I knew. But still.

  “Isn’t there something you can do?” I asked.

  “Sure,” Hernandez said. “There’s a lot I could do. But would any of it be, you know, a good use of taxpayers’ time and money? No. It’s a mystery how the woman, Kate, got in the coffin. Probably found her somewhere, or bought her from a hospital. People do all kinds of fucked-up shit. There’s lots of ways to get bodies. You wouldn’t believe it. Experiments, black magic, switcheroos like this. It’s a whole black market. Anyway. I got eleven murder books on my desk. Fresh. This isn’t a priority. It isn’t my job to hunt down e
very little aspect of the truth,” Hernandez said. “Maybe that’s your job. I don’t know. I just try to solve murders. Looks like she wanted to disappear,” Hernandez said. “Maybe she had a good reason. Why not let her?”

  * * *

  I didn’t know if she had a good reason, or what a good reason would be. It seemed like if she was in trouble, she had resources for help. Carl hadn’t seemed like a threat. If women disappeared over men like Carl there would be none of us left. And I was sure Merritt must have been in on it—I figured she was escaping with his help, not from him.

  So why would a successful and rich and beautiful woman want to abandon her life? A woman who was marketable, profitable, and attractive to just about everyone she met? A woman with the eyes of Los Angeles and New York on her back? A woman men wanted to sleep with, men wanted to marry, a woman men wanted to solve and to fix? A woman other women envied, and wanted to be, and would imitate, and followed?

  The more I thought about it, the more I came up with a better question.

  Why wouldn’t she?

  * * *

  Kate, the woman in Ann’s coffin, had a daughter who lived in Venice. We walked down the boardwalk together and I told her about her mother. The daughter’s name was Leanne. She was a bartender at a bar on the boardwalk. She fed a bunch of stray cats who lived behind the bar. She was thirty-seven and sun-wrinkled.

  “Believe it or not,” she said, “I really loved my mother.”

  “I believe it,” I said.

  “You know,” she said, “this guy I study with. He says at any given moment we’re all just doing the best we can. I don’t know if that’s true about everyone, but it’s true about my mother. She did the best she could. She was an alcoholic and a prostitute. That was the best she could do. She worked very, very hard to be where she was. She could have been a lot worse.”

  I asked her to tell me something wonderful about her mother.

  “My mother loved to dance,” she said. “When she was younger, and she had boyfriends, she would make them take her out. When she was older, and no one wanted to be around her, she would put on her records—she lived in this little room down on Sixth Street—and dance around by herself, until they would bang on the door and make her turn the music off. Now I do that. I put music on and dance alone in my room. It’s . . . joyous. As long as you can move, it’s a joy no one can take away from you.”

  We sat on a bench on the boardwalk and Leanne cried harder and longer than I’d ever heard anyone cry in my life.

  * * *

  I went through the files again—mine, Adam’s, Richter’s. I stayed in my hotel for two days. I ate nuts and yogurt and beef jerky from the gas station on the corner. I read through every interview, all my notes, everything I’d seen or thought or heard.

  I found nothing.

  At the end of the second day I got dressed, got in my car, and drove around. I drove up Hollywood Boulevard and down to Santa Monica Boulevard. No one had a sign up: Drugs here. Good facsimile of companionship.

  But you know. You can tell.

  I parked on a side street and went into a bar off Hollywood Boulevard where a lot of people my age looked to be coming and going. Inside it wasn’t hard to find a hook-up. The bartender sold me a bottle of beer and then pointed toward a girl in the back by the jukebox. I took my beer and went over and put a few songs on the jukebox. The girl was with a boy and two other girls. I caught her eye.

  “Hey,” I said. “The bartender sent me over?”

  She nodded toward the bathroom. I nodded and went in the bathroom and waited for her. She came in in a minute. She had bleached-white hair and wore a short black dress with a white collar and thick black thigh-high stockings and a ring of black makeup around her eyes.

  “What’d you want?” she said suspiciously.

  “Coke?” I said.

  She nodded and introduced me to a guy at the bar who took me into a back room in the bar and sold me an eight ball. In the back room the guy cracked open a bottle of whiskey and we shared it. He tried to kiss me. He did not succeed. His eyes were bright and a little frightening. After the transaction the girl went back to her friends and she asked if I wanted to sit with them and I said OK. We introduced ourselves. I instantly forgot their names.

  They asked what I was doing and I said visiting LA. I said I was looking for a friend. Finally I got the white-haired girl’s name. It was Danny. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she kept saying. Later I found out she thought everyone hated her. She was in love with one of the boys and he didn’t seem to realize it. Later, as life wore on, I would realize that most people think everyone hates them. The truth is worse; for most people, no one is thinking of them at all.

  After that we went to another bar and then back to an apartment in Venice. I didn’t know whose apartment it was; there was a hole in one wall and you could see the veins of the building through the hole. Maybe it was a squat; it was dirty and smelled like stale drugs and ashtrays and everything in it was someone else’s garbage.

  At the apartment were about a dozen people. A bunch of them were in a hardcore band together. They’d played earlier that night in Long Beach and now they were excited and manic and high.

  Fuck mysteries. Fuck clues and suspects and victims. Fuck being the best detective in the world. I was done with hope and done with goals and aims and doing and becoming. I was done with it all. Let someone else solve the mysteries. Let someone else pick up the pieces. Let someone else try to make it all fit together.

  Maybe I would just do drugs full-time now. Maybe I would marry some man, or be someone’s girlfriend. Maybe I would get some kind of a real job or maybe I would give up on jobs and just be a poor person.

  But fuck this life. This life was nothing but pain and useless pain at that. Joy might be useless but at least it was joy. Supposedly. So I’d heard.

  One of the boys from the band was the kind of boy who never sits entirely still. The kind who’s always doing something with his hands and always knocking things over. He offered me speed and I accepted. We talked for a while about his band and a few hours later we were in the back seat of his Ford by the beach doing something that was supposed to be impactful, I guessed, but was exactly like everything else.

  I thought about the last time I was in Los Angeles. It was when I met Constance for the first time. It was as if a character from a movie had stepped off the screen and into my life, like a dream suddenly made real.

  It seemed like my life could start. It seemed like everything before had all just been the price I would pay for this.

  In the back seat of the Ford I thought I would like to find that hopeful girl from six years ago. I would like to take her, and hold her hopeful little face in my hands, and I would like to break that face until I felt her bones snap in my hands. Until I opened her veins and made her bleed, and she knew enough to never smile again. I would go back to that hopeful girl and beat sense and logic and pain into her until she understood, finally understood, that hope was a scorpion, and that if you poked at it, you would be stung.

  When we were done we went back to the apartment in Venice. The best drugs were gone and the party was fading. Suddenly exhausted, I curled up on a dirty, damp sofa and started to fall asleep.

  I was in New Orleans, back in Constance’s house, like I had been a thousand times. Like I’d been every day for a number of days. Stacks of books on every surface and dust on the plaster trim.

  But it wasn’t like those other days. Nothing looked out of place but something felt horrible and wrong. It was dead silent and the air was tense, like a murder about to happen. I smelled something foul and organic and I looked around and thick filthy black mud was seeping in through the floor, through Constance’s good cypress floor, the last real cypress on the block . . .

  And then just as I was falling off the high cliff of life into the low and sticky tar of sleep I jerked myself awake with a recoil. I shook off the dream about cypress floors and I thought about honey.


  Honey and bees. Bees and beehives.

  People change, but they only change so much. Especially when they changed intentionally and willfully and with a reason; you’d think they would understand that in order to change a thing you have to see the thing you were changing—in this case, themselves. You had to at least try. But they never did. People, in my experience, never really saw themselves at all—at best they saw a distorted, reversed, mirror image. And, if nothing else, the messy and fucked-up little pieces that you didn’t even know you had would give you away in the end.

  I sat up, shook myself the rest of the way awake, and started looking for my stuff. Everyone else was sleeping. I found my things, used the bathroom, and left. Outside the sun seared my eyes and I blinked and squinted. I’d left my car back in Hollywood somewhere. I went through my pockets and found $19.45.

  I started walking and soon there was the boardwalk and there was the ocean. I spent four dollars on a pair of sunglasses and two dollars on two cups of coffee, which I drank as quickly as I could, and then got another. I found a bus that took me as far as La Cienega and Sunset. I got off there and got more coffee and walked the five miles back to my hotel.

  Back in my room I took off my clothes and took a long shower. Then I dried off, got dressed again, and went back to my files.

  I started again.

  I looked at Ann’s Beehives, projected through the dark against the white door to my bathroom. Some of them looked like real beehives and some, obviously, were some kind of metaphor.

  I went back to all of her catalogs. In the last one she had a long artist’s statement about the work. I didn’t understand all of it. I wasn’t sure I really understood any of it. It was a full page of fine-type text. Some of it was about paint and pigments that came from flowers and insects. A lot of it was about bees and matriarchy and the history of beekeeping. There was a long list of citations at the end.