by Sara Gran
“All I wanted,” the lady said, “was to make her see how she had hurt me.”
Later, I would learn that was all most people wanted: to make everyone see how they’d been hurt. Eventually I would see that I was one of those people—that huge swaths of my life had been a message with no receiver, a dramatic story in a language no one spoke but me. We were screaming. No one was listening.
We were in a coffee shop in Washington Heights. The three of us and the lady. Tracy leaned across the table toward her.
“She sees that now,” Tracy said. Tracy took the woman’s hand. “She gets that. Everyone knows that you were hurt. Everyone knows that you were angry. So now you need to give her back her home, and do something else.”
The woman nodded and signed the papers and started to cry.
After she signed the house back over to her sister she said, “What do I do now? What do I do now that it’s all over? Am I supposed to start life all over again?”
At the time I thought I was young and foolish for not knowing how to answer her question. We were fifteen years old. We didn’t know what you do once you’ve proven your point in life. As teenagers we were holding out hope that adults had this shit figured out; that there was more to humanity than proving a point and baring your wounds and leaving a trail of blood and bone and knocked-out teeth and broken hearts behind you.
“Yes,” Tracy said to the woman in the coffee shop with a strange, strong, confidence. “You’re supposed to start life all over again.”
CHAPTER 18
THE CASE OF THE INFINITE BLACKTOP
* * *
Las Vegas, 2011
Howie drove.
I sat in the back like a child as Howie and Mattie sat up front and talked as we drove through the black Nevada night in Howie’s 2005 Ford. A few minutes ago we’d turned off the highway and onto a long well-paved pitch-black local road. We were going to see a man named Worth. Worthington Able, known in the trade as “Worth,” was a retired print-shop employee widely admired for his skill, knowledge, and love of the black arts. He started his career, Howie explained, in the famous, long-gone, Printer’s House out on Sahara Avenue.
“Printer’s House did all the top-tier casinos,” Howie explained. “Did the keno slips for nearly everyone, menus, everything for the Sands—”
“Back when it was really the Sands,” Mattie said, an inside Vegas joke that she and Howie both chuckled at.
“When they closed, Worth went to work for QuikShop—they were a more basic kind of a place. More, you know, like the name would indicate. Then when Pakshee started up his shop, Worth was one of his first hires. Worth worked at that shop from the day it opened to the day it closed.”
We were long past the eastern city limits and now we turned off the freeway onto a smaller road that seemed to cut straight into the desert. Howie’s headlights sliced white through the black air, skittering across the road like a snake. In a few minutes we turned off that road to an even smaller one and then pulled up near a small house on a compound-type property, not that different from Keith’s, where I’d bought my pills and my gun: a few busted trailers; three or more broken cars; a couple of sheds; raised garden beds; date and orange trees out back.
Apparently Howie knew Worth well enough to know that Worth wouldn’t be asleep and wouldn’t mind us dropping by to say hello at ten o’clock on a weekday evening. And Howie was right. Worth was an African American man close to seventy, wearing blue jeans and a faded button-down shirt and puffy black shoes for old men that made his feet look like big dark marshmallows.
Worth seemed unsurprised to see us and let us in to the main house, which was a double-wide mobile home made immobile and set on a foundation. Inside, the house was neat and plain, and we all sat in the living room area on old, clean sofas and chairs. Introductions were made all around; excitement hung in the air; apple juice was served on a tray; Mattie introduced me and explained what I was looking for; and then Worth began with a proud smile.
“I did indeed have the pleasure of working for Songbird Press,” Worth said. “I’m very proud of that. Pakshee and I got along very well. He was a very eccentric man. Liked to come in at all hours. Liked to set type himself. Have YOU ever set type, young lady?”
“I have not,” I said.
“It’s very challenging work,” Worth said. He talked to me like an affectionate, indulgent, zoo tour guide. “Very precise. Very detail oriented. Not many people enjoy it. Pakshee, he sure did. Loved it. Had a whole collection—a flatbed Vandercrook, a Holt & Brewer platen, a Galloway binding press. Only the best. I think you would say it was his passion. Maintained them all himself. You know, usually in these places—well, they call printing the black arts for a reason. Messy work. Dirty work. But Pakshee kept his machines clean enough to eat off.
“Like I said, we got along very well, me and Pakshee. Same interests. This was not long after my first wife died. I was not eager to go home at night. We’d stay up and talk printing or clean up or tinker with the machines or whatnot. He always had some special thing—some new ink or new type he wanted to try.
“Now, very quickly, Pakshee was doing all the best jobs. He did the menus for all the best restaurants. Business cards for everybody in town. Just the best. Boy, did we have a waiting list. It became like how they say a status symbol. You get your shoes from Gucci or whatever, you get your suits from Italy, and you get your papers all made by Pakshee.
“And then it all just . . .” Worth made a little spinning gesture with his right hand. “Went up in smoke.
“The first fire was November 19, 1986. Could not figure out how it started. The insurance was horrible. Just horrible. Didn’t want to pay a bit. But somehow we got it up and running again and then, March 1987, there was another fire. Same scenario. Middle of the night, no one could find the cause. And now the insurance was really horrible. They thought Pakshee was pulling one over on them. Nothing could’ve been further from the truth.
“February fourteenth was the last fire. 1988. And that time Pakshee said no, we’re not calling the fire department again. He gave up. He called me, I came over, and we parked across the street and watched it burn. At the end of the night he turned to me, shook my hand, and left. After that night I never saw Pakshee again, and as far as I know, no one else did, either.”
I showed him the Cynthia Silverton comic. Worth took the pages out of my hand and looked at them carefully. Something shifted on his face as he looked at the pages. He looked intent and focused and twenty years younger. For a brief moment I wondered if white moths had gathered around his face and I started to say something and then I realized it was my eyes playing tricks on me. Probably. Maybe it was the moths being tricky. I was trying to parse it all out when—
“Of course I remember this,” Worth said, looking up with a wide smile. “I printed it myself.”
I looked at him. I realized my mouth was open. I shut it before a moth could fly in.
“Oh yes,” he said. “I remember this very well. Best colors we ever did. Just now when I was saying about how Pakshee and I would come in at night and tinker around? Well, more than one night, this was what we were tinkering with. Cynthia Silverton, teen detective. Tiny print run. Yes ma’am, we did every issue,” he said. “Even the lost one.”
The white moths gathered around his face, kaleidoscoped around the room, nestled in the corners—
“The lost one?” I said. “The lost one? Did you say the last one? The LAST one or—”
“The LOST one,” Worth said. “The one that never got sent out. The lost issue of the Cynthia Silverton Mystery Digest. Number 201. In fact, if you don’t mind digging a little, I can show it to you.”
The moths cried and I felt my eyes start to roll back but I shook myself back awake. I felt a shiver as somewhere in my body a deal was struck and my heart and mind and lungs agreed to keep going a little while longer.
We’re almost there, I told my organs, as if I were talking to a child. We’re almost d
one.
The moths spun into a kaleidoscope Busby Berkeley fireworks dance to celebrate.
Worth did show me. With bright flashlights, the four of us walked out to one of the trailers behind the house. After some futzing with the lock Worth opened it and shone his flashlight inside. It was filled with what I guessed was printing machinery and cardboard boxes full of paper. Worth stepped into the trailer with a big sigh. It was small, not the kind of trailer people would voluntarily live in. More the type you would haul things in. The boxes were half-full and mismatched and messy but standing up OK.
“Now, these here,” Worth said, looking at one pile of boxes, “I got all kinds of good stuff here. Howie, Mattie, sometime we’ll go through it all together. That’ll be a fun time. But for now I think this young lady would like to see the one thing.”
Worth didn’t object when I offered to shuffle the boxes around and poke inside as he stage-directed me. As I searched he told me about the lost Cynthia Silverton digest.
“There’s five of them,” he said. “I’m going to give you one, because I can tell it’s important to you, and in thirty years, no one else has come to look for it.”
It didn’t look so from the outside, but the boxes were well organized inside: finely printed restaurant menus from 1985 to 1990, proclaiming chops and aspics and other things people didn’t eat anymore; business cards; invitations to Jerry Jablowski’s retirement party and Annie and Richard’s wedding; brochures for the Crystal Palace Spa and the Aladdin’s new keno; heavy-bond stationery for casino executives and many, many casino lawyers—all of which I would have loved to read and sort through and study if I wasn’t scared of being murdered.
As I looked, Worth explained about the lost issue.
“I told you there were five copies of the lost issue. But that isn’t entirely accurate. There were no copies of the lost issue, because Pakshee’s whole operation burned down before we ever got to print it. That was the last fire. But we’d printed up the proofs, and that’s what I have here. The proofs.”
As I moved the boxes I felt the life drain out of me from exhaustion and knew I was very close to being done—with the night, with the mystery, with life. But at the same time I felt something reaching up to me from the boxes, some dark and bright force pulling me close, something that was feeding me and keeping me alive.
That thing was the truth.
I’d been moving boxes around for about an hour. I didn’t know what I was doing anymore or why I was doing it. I was starting to see things again, this time tiny white frogs jumping around in the dark boxes, multiplying by the moment. I knew they were too ludicrous to be real and I also knew from the shivering around the edges of my vision that more were coming, and soon—
Then I felt it. I knew as soon as my fingertips tapped against the box. The colors and light that were keeping me alive were coming from this box; in this box were all the secrets I was supposed to know and did not, all the words wise people knew and I’d forgotten.
I opened the box and there it was: Cynthia Silverton Mystery Digest number 201.
On the cover was the familiar image of blond Cynthia. She stood on Mount Happy, just outside of town, and looked down on the peaceful facade of Rapid Falls. A tear came from one eye. At the bottom of the hill, on the way up, was her nemesis, Hal Overton.
A sound came from my mouth that was something like a gasp.
“The Final Showdown!” the headline exclaimed.
I made another strange sound and the moths came back and they teamed up with the frogs and everything was white—
“Hey little lady—”
And Worth caught me from behind as I started to fall and gently sat me on the floor. Mattie and Worth and Howie made concerned sounds.
Mattie went to get me a glass of apple juice and Worth and Howie held my hands, like good mothers, until I was back in the right time and place.
“It’s just a lot,” I said, and everyone nodded in agreement.
“I know how you feel,” Worth said. “Sometimes the past comes up on us like a ghost. Sometimes life is like a haunted house. But there’s no way to leave. You just have to make your peace with the ghosts.”
Howie and Worth put together a big shopping bag for me with a complete set of the comics—it turned out Worth had them all, not just the lost issue. Howie drove me back to Nero’s. I dozed on the way there, adrenaline kicking in with white-hot panic every time I came close to actual sleep. At Nero’s Inferno Howie pulled up the big circular drive and stopped behind a line of cabs twenty or thirty feet from the front door. I thanked him profusely and offered him gas money, which he refused. I asked if I could make a donation to the church and he said yes, but that it wasn’t necessary. I gave him two hundred dollars and he seemed shocked, in a good way. I got out of the car and Howie drove off.
I thought about what Mattie had said. How good it felt to think of myself as kind, and how self-serving it was. Maybe it didn’t matter, as long as everyone had their Pampers. Or maybe, until we learned to do things for reasons other than imposing our own fucking pain on the world, there would never be enough diapers to go around.
A show had just ended and a crowd was coming out of Nero’s. Instead of fighting my way through them I stood and waited for them to clear.
I didn’t know what to do next other than read the Cynthia Silverton digests I had in a large, wrinkled Tropicana plastic shopping bag in my hands. I knew I couldn’t stay awake much longer. I’d gotten no shortage of leads or clues or ideas since I’d been hit by the Lincoln, but I’d barely begun to put them together.
What I did not have was the person who was trying to kill me, dead beneath my feet. That was when I would sleep again.
Or maybe I would go to my room, sleep for just an hour, and then get up and start again. Just two hours.
I leaned against the wall outside the casino and felt moths flutter around me. The wall was plaster and felt like cool water against my cheek. I looked down and saw white frogs jumping on the diamond-flaked ground, popping like touch-me-nots in spring, but not just all white now; the colors I’d felt before, in the trailer, now infused the little amphibians with light. They swam in the cool lake of the black earth, zipping through the black muddy water in bright skins, slicing through the cold—
And then with a sickening shiver in a deeply rooted piece of myself I had never known existed before I shook myself awake and my own voice whispered something without words into my inner ear.
The translation was: You are going to die.
I shuddered awake and looked around. The crowd had thinned slightly, but not by much. I’d dozed for less than a minute.
I didn’t see him. But I heard him in my same inner ear, heard him singing for me, calling out for my arteries, my liver. I heard him coming in on the breeze like a whistle or a hum.
There were people all around me. A million targets between his heart and mine.
No more Technicolor kaleidoscope variations and no more white moths; now everything around me was stop-motion slow and crystal clear. The air was dry and the wind was hot and thick and every wave of it brought more of him. Him, he, him—I couldn’t see him but I could feel him and he was close.
Jay Gleason. He was coming back to kill me.
I grabbed the .45 from my waistband and turned around. I didn’t know where to point it.
I heard people scream.
Two security men came running toward me, one from inside the casino, one from the parking lot.
Then I saw him.
It was a bullshit car. He’d ditched the Prius. Now he drove a blue Toyota from 2001.
Jay Gleason. He was coming to kill me.
He came around the endlessly long cul-de-sac of Nero’s Inferno from the same direction Howie had just left, and as he pulled up toward me, the driver’s-side window rolled down—
—and out curled a long white arm holding a simple black gun—
—and I aimed and I fired and then he did—
—and
I heard a BANG and the air around me rushed violently and I felt a horrible ripping across the top of my right shoulder that made me drop my gun just as I felt the kickback from my own shot recoil up my arm and the two met at my shoulder, white-hot.
Blood poured down my shirt and my right arm was limp. I felt pain in the abstract way you feel it when protected by shock. I spotted my gun a few feet away and crawled-ran over and grabbed it with my left hand. I pointed it at the Toyota and shot again, and then again and again. I hit the car every time but I didn’t know whether I’d hit the person inside until the Toyota lurched forward and hit one of the columns under Nero’s overhang, cracking the plaster column in two. The door opened and a man stumbled out. He was holding on to his gun, but barely. I’d hit him. More than once.
It was Jay Gleason.
I ran toward him in a crooked curve, making a semicircle across the twenty feet between us, hopefully making myself a harder target. But he could barely hold his gun, and he tried to lift it up and point it at me but didn’t have the strength. By the time I reached him, the front of his black shirt was soaked with blood.
I stepped closer and grabbed his useless gun out of his hands and smacked him across the face with it. He fell down to his knees.
Around us people screamed and cried.
I pushed my gun against his neck.
“Why?” I said.
He didn’t answer.
I wanted to shoot him. I knew what I should do was try to keep him alive, to seduce information out of him.
Instead I lifted up my gun and hit him in the face with it, hard. Blood came out of his nose and mouth and his eyes shut.
I bent down and whispered in his ear—
“Claire DeWitt always wins.”
He didn’t answer. I thought he was dead but no such luck. The security guards came and broke it all up just in time. For him.
Security guards surrounded us and it was a slice of a moment before six police cars came pouring into the cul-de-sac, officers racing out, guns drawn, ready for action.