Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

by Sara Gran

  Chloe’s room revealed disappointingly few other clues. The razorblade, the shooting schedule, and a few more books. Tracy found them under a pile of dirty clothes in the closet.

  They were cheap paperbacks. They had racks of them at the newsstand on Myrtle Avenue. Miss Mary’s Punishment. The Story of a Slave Girl. A Bad Girl Gets What She Deserves.

  We knew about things like that, of course. Men had all kinds of desires, and if you let them, they would take that desire and put it squarely on your back, making it yours to carry. They would hand it all right over to you, this giant mess you could never hope to contain or control. It would take you over, if you let it. And I knew their desire was not always in a straight line, that sometimes it could fold back on itself, eat itself alive. It wasn’t enough for them to want some of you; they needed you to want some of them, to care enough to hurt them, or let them hurt you.

  But Chloe? Chloe wanting something like that for herself?

  Again I had the feeling that I was lost in the woods. No signs pointed the way. No exit in sight, and it was too late to turn back now. All we could do was follow the clues, and keep going.

  By ten o’clock that night we’d been to four bars: International, Mars Bar, the Blue & Gold, and Holiday. We’d asked everyone we knew and a few people we didn’t; lots of people knew Chloe, but no one knew where she was now. It wasn’t until Blanche’s, a dive-y bar on Avenue A, that we found anything close to useful.

  We was Tracy and I. Kelly was with Jonah. His band was playing in Hoboken.

  “Me and Chloe used to be close,” Elizabeth said. Elizabeth was a junior at Hunter High School. As we talked she played a Playboy pinball game. She was remarkably good at pinball. “I used to stay at her place all the time. She was a really good friend. From when we were thirteen to, like, less than a year ago. Like nine months.”

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  Elizabeth scowled and slammed the ball around, hitting Bunnies’ breasts, stomach, thighs.

  “She turned on me one day, is what happened,” Elizabeth said bitterly, looking at the game. “One day we were hanging out at her house and she just lit into me. Sounded like my fucking dad.”

  “So you had a fight?” I asked.

  Elizabeth slammed a ball into a playmate’s blond head, still on the same quarter. “No. Not even. The weird thing was, we’d been getting along great. When we first became friends, she could be a little bitchy sometimes, but, you know, I could too. And then it was like . . . it was like we got past that, and we were really close. I was staying at her house for the weekend, with her and her mom, and we had all this fun—we watched movies, ordered Chinese food, just being stupid. And then on Sunday night, after this great weekend, she started getting more and more annoyed with me. Like, I did the dishes, and I was doing the dishes wrong. And the stupid VCR got unplugged, and when I tried to put it back together I was doing that wrong. And then—I don’t even remember what set it off. Shit!”

  A silver ball bounced off a Bunny and fell down through the flippers, ending the game.

  “You get a match?” I asked. A matching number on a pinball machine could get you a free game.

  “That was the match,” Elizabeth said. She turned to face us. “It was something ridiculously stupid. She asked if she could borrow this dress, this really cute vintage dress I have—you know the polka-dot one?”

  Tracy and I nodded. We did know that dress.

  “So I said no, because I wanted to wear it. And she just lost it. She started screaming at me that I was selfish, that I didn’t care about her, that I was a bitch—totally crazy stuff.”

  “What’d her mom do?” Tracy asked.

  “She was gone by then,” Elizabeth explained. “She went on a date with this guy. We were supposed to go out together and then this guy called and she totally blew us off and went out with the guy. He was, like, twenty-five. Anyway. I never talked to Chloe again. She can fuck herself for all I care. Never apologized or anything.”

  “What do you think happened?” I asked.

  “I have no idea,” Elizabeth said. “She can fucking die for all I care. I hope she does die, actually, because she’s a fucking cunt. How long has she been missing for?”

  “Only a few days,” Tracy said. “But we have reason to suspect foul play.”

  “Good,” Elizabeth said. “I hope she disappears forever. I hope she fucking dies. Actually, I hope she’s raped first, has an abortion with a rusty coat hanger, and then dies.”

  “Well, okay, then,” I said. “Thanks for the help.”

  “No problem,” Elizabeth said, still scowling. “And hey,” she called out behind me as we turned to leave. “If you need help—I mean, I fucking hate Chloe. But you guys—well, let me know what happens. Let me know if you solve your case or whatever.”

  “What do you think?” Tracy asked when we were outside on the cold street.

  “No idea,” I said.

  But we looked at each other, and we did kind of have an idea. We just didn’t have the words for it.

  If you hate yourself enough, you’ll start to hate anyone who reminds you of you. And if you stick with it, you’ll come to hate anyone who doesn’t see how just awful you are.

  As we both knew all too well.

  We’d had a few drinks but after Elizabeth we didn’t feel like having fun, or whatever it was we did. We were quiet and without talking walked to the subway and started the long ride home.

  I felt like at any minute I could float away, or shatter apart. There would be nothing left. I may or may not have been real. I might have died. Maybe I had died and no one had noticed or remembered to tell me.

  On the subway we dozed, my head on Tracy’s shoulder.

  “Trace,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “If I was dead, would you tell me?”

  She reached up and put her hand on my head, stroking my hair.

  “You bet I would,” she said.

  “Would you miss me?” I asked.

  “You bet I would,” she said. “For the rest of my life. I couldn’t live without you, bitch.”

  21

  San Francisco

  PAUL’S HOUSE WAS a row house from the early 1900s, not technically a Victorian but dressed up like one all the same. I’d had Claude research the house, and what he didn’t tell me in his report I could guess from the scars on the walls. Over the years it had been cut open and ripped apart again and again—first built as a single-family home, then made into apartments, probably during the Depression, then divided into rooms when it was a boarding house in the seventies and eighties, each probably holding a hot plate and a depressed, lonely man. Or woman. As the neighborhood started to gentrify in the nineties, the apartments became bigger again. Than a gay couple bought it and restored it to single-family stature just before Paul bought it, turned the bottom floor into a studio, turned the parlor into another studio for Lydia, and lived in the rest of the house.

  A few days after I spoke with Lydia, a set of keys in a white envelope arrived through my mail slot. I noticed they weren’t Paul’s or Lydia’s—they were a new set from a hardware store. That evening I drove over to the Mission and let myself into the house where Paul died.

  The police had come and gone. I’d snuck in a few times while they were investigating but they’d shooed me away when they found me. Of course, technically it was Lydia’s house and I could go in anytime she said it was all right. But the police didn’t want me there, and I was trying to play nice, hoping to stay in the loop in the unlikely event that they actually found something. Now their investigation was dying down and I could have it all to myself.

  When I got to the door I noticed the lock looked good. If someone had picked it they had done a nice job—no scratches, dents, or dings. The key Lydia’d given me fit nearly perfectly in the lock, with the usual scratchiness of a new key. The door was intact; the windows around it clearly hadn’t been broken recently.

  So how did Paul’s killer
get in the house?

  Inside was quiet and dark. The cops had covered it and Lydia’s friends had been in and out, getting stuff and helping her with papers and money. But it felt still. The things had been moved since Paul died, but the energy remained untouched.

  The entrance opened up onto a kind of hall/foyer with a parlor on one side and a living room on the other. Dusk cast long shadows across the floor. I flicked on the lights and saw I was stepping on a pile of mail. I picked it up and put it on another pile of mail on a table near the door.

  It was almost exactly as it had been the night he died. Lydia’s coat was still hanging over the banister where she’d tossed it that night. Everywhere in the house were records, CDs, small musical instruments like maracas and reindeer bells, books about music: Ethnomusicology of Northern Peru; Vintage Guitar Price Guide 2007; Narcocorridas: A History; Protest and Harmony in French Folk Music. The house was clean but not neat. Vintage furniture, framed music posters, thrift store paintings of cats and dogs: it looked like two much younger people lived here.

  The parlor was Lydia’s studio, where she kept her instruments, practiced, and recorded ideas. I went in and glanced around. It felt like nothing. Lydia hadn’t played much in the months before Paul died and, obviously, since. She said she’d lost inspiration. I wasn’t sure what that meant. In the studio there was a light layer of dust over everything. Her guitars were locked in a safe that was bolted to the wall; she’d grown up in a rough neighborhood and no one was taking what was hers. A door in the hall led to the staircase to Paul’s studio downstairs. The padlock had been open when the police got here the night Paul died; Detective Huong had arranged for a locksmith to come and lock up the rest—she didn’t want Lydia to lose what was left to regular thieves.

  Huong was okay. For a cop.

  Lydia said the thief could have picked the padlock or Paul could have left it open—it wasn’t a great lock and Paul wasn’t careful about using it. She’d tried to tell him, she’d told me bitterly over the phone. As if it would have mattered. I tried to tell him about that fucking lock. That that fucking lock was no good.

  The keys Lydia gave me included one for the padlock. I opened it and went down to the studio. It was full of musical detritus: castanets, guitar cords, a harmonica, a laptop computer, an old-fashioned reel-to-reel recording device. The brand names spelled a melancholy poem: Vox, Harmony, Voice of Music.

  Paul had owned eighteen guitars. Ten had been out in stands when the crime occurred; five had been stolen and five had been left behind. The other eight guitars were in a locked closet; those hadn’t been touched. No time in a smash-and-grab.

  Five guitars stolen and five left behind. The obvious reasons the thief didn’t take them all were time and attention—not enough of the first and wanting to avoid the second. But the obvious was not always true.

  Five stolen: an acoustic Favilla, a Gibson J-2000, a Lucite Dan Armstrong, a Les Paul, and a Telecaster. Five left behind: a Teisco Del Ray, a plastic Maccaferri, a Japanese-made little western number with cowboys painted on the front, a two-toned green Gretch Anniversary model, and a Guild acoustic.

  Why those five taken? Why those five left behind?

  You’d think someone who knew guitars would have taken the good stuff and left the crap, financially speaking. Or a random thief would have just grabbed five, maybe recognized the big names like Gibson or Fender but otherwise just taken his chances.

  But what was actually stolen was somewhere in between.

  The guitars were worth between about two hundred bucks and two grand. I figured the thief had guessed what was worth the most and he’d been wrong. I’d got a list of what was taken and what was left from Lydia and I’d had a few different guitar dealers look the list over. The values were not obvious. Most people would have expected the Les Paul to be gold, but it was a fake, worth only a few hundred bucks. The stolen Favilla didn’t look so special but it clocked in at about six hundred. Of course, our thief, who was likely also our murderer, would get much less than that. But he’d get something. The stolen Korean-made Telecaster was only worth two or three hundred, but the Teisco he’d left behind was worth close to a grand, and the Maccaferri, which looked like a worthless plastic toy, would bring in at least six hundred bucks. The Gretsch, which was beautiful but not famous, was worth close to two grand.

  Maybe the thief had just grabbed five guitars at random. Maybe he was someone who thought he knew guitars but wasn’t as knowledgeable as he thought. Going by that I could put half the men in San Francisco in a lineup, along with a quarter of the women. Or maybe the thief knew something I didn’t.

  You couldn’t exactly call it a clue, but it was something.

  Upstairs were two bedrooms and a bathroom. I went to the bathroom and looked through the medicine cabinets. Lydia had left a bottle of Vicodin, twelve strong pills left. I put the bottle in my purse.

  One bedroom they used as intended, the other held clothes, shoes, and occasionally guests. Both Lydia and Paul were sharp dressers, and they had tons of clothes. Scattered around were more CDs, more books, guitar picks and pick guards and pick-ups. On top of one dresser in the first bedroom were three coffee cups and two books. One cup was vintage, from Tahoe; in it was a twenty, two singles, and a few dollars in change. In another, a souvenir cup from Las Vegas from the same era, was a paperclip, two guitar picks, a cheap sandalwood mala, and a roach from a joint.

  It was where Paul emptied his pockets. Nearly every man has a spot like this one. Everything here was Paul’s, used to be Paul’s, had been touched by him.

  I put the thought aside and looked at the last cup, from the Spot of Mystery in Santa Rosa. In it was a little collection of business cards. I flipped through them: A Vietnamese restaurant in Alameda. A guitar store in San Rafael. A stamped card one-tenth of the way toward a free smoothie in Oakland.

  Nothing jumped out at me. Nothing spoke to me. I put the cards in my pocket. The bed was unmade, sheets wrinkled and tossed. I imagined Paul sprawled across it, asleep, sun streaming in on his last morning, blissfully unaware of what the night would bring.

  I left the bedroom and started to walk down to the kitchen and then, suddenly spooked by being in a dead man’s house, I ran. I ran into the kitchen and looked out the window to remind myself there was still another world out there. But the overgrown backyard didn’t convince me. In my pocket I found the very last of my cocaine. I used a butter knife to scrape out what was left, snorted it, and then licked my finger and ran it through the bag and then over my teeth. I stood for a minute letting my chemicals acclimate themselves, and then went back to work.

  I went back to the living room. The body had been found here. Someone had tossed a carpet over the bloodstain on the wood floor. I pushed it aside.

  I sat in a chair and looked at Paul’s blood.

  No, I corrected myself. The victim’s blood. Paul was gone. There was no Paul and maybe never had been. Only the victim, a victim, the role he was apparently born to fill. All his life he probably thought he was something else, something so much more interesting: friend, husband, lover, musician. But in the end he was a victim.

  I let my mind clear and I looked at the blood, the blood that had once been red and blue and alive and was now dead and brown.

  The cops can only do so much. Even if they mean well, even if they’re geniuses, they have fifty or so cases and limited overtime and wives and husbands and children and mortgages. That’s why you hire a private eye. Because if she’s smart, the private eye has none of those things.

  I knew the cops had looked under the sofa and looked through the desk and in the corners and through the laundry hamper. But there were secrets to find.

  First I went to the kitchen and looked through the refrigerator. Nothing was out of order—soymilk, rotten vegetables, half a chocolate bar, everything you’d expect. I checked the freezer: ice, frozen vegan burgers, miscellaneous uninteresting foodstuffs. I went through the kitchen cabinets, the dish rack, the dishwasher
, the spice shelf.

  Nothing. This was the fourth time I’d done this, maybe more. There was nothing the first time and nothing the last time and nothing this time.

  From my bag I pulled a penlight and I got down on the floor and looked under the furniture. Nothing. I looked through the sofa. I’d looked through it before, but sofas were complicated creatures. They were like slot machines. Things would go in and in and in, but most of them would disappear. Only occasionally would anything come back out, and only for those with dedication and luck and a good understanding of how the machine worked.

  I’d searched the sofa before. Now I really searched the sofa. First I took off all the cushions and pillows and piled them a few feet away. I looked at the sofa carcass, its tight crevices and narrow valleys. I went to my car, opened the trunk, and after some rummaging found my slim jim, the tool locksmiths use to open a locked car door, a very thin, long piece of metal about an inch wide. I took the tool and went back to the sofa. First I reached my hand into the crevices around the edges. Next I went through the same crevices, as slowly as I could, with the slim jim. The first thing I found was a corn chip. I picked it up and put it aside. Next I found a few quarters and then a nickel. I was toward the back when the tool hit something hard and solid.

  I felt a current run up from the small, solid thing through the tool and into my hand and I knew: It was a clue.

  A clue is a word in another language, and mysteries speak the language of dreams. Mysteries speak the alchemical language of the birds. There is no dictionary. Not even for me.

  I gently extracted the locksmithing tool and set it aside. The tool was hard, and I couldn’t risk damage. Instead I stretched my arm out as far as it would go, painfully pulling my shoulder a little from the socket. I moved my hand as best I could in the tight fit, and after a few seconds I found it: something small, hard, round. Slowly, carefully, I pulled it from the sofa and up to the light.