Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

by Sara Gran

  It was a poker chip.

  Paul didn’t gamble. I took him with me to Reno once. For a case I had to pick up a suitcase full of cash from a doctor in Reno who dealt in tranq prescriptions and homemade liver tonics and deliver it to a woman in Needles, Arizona—a long story, but that was the only way the Case of the Dove with Broken Wings was ever going to be resolved. Since I had to stay in Reno overnight I figured I might as well have some fun doing it. I played a little craps and an hour or two of baccarat, but Paul didn’t play anything, not even slots. He said he didn’t know how and besides, he was having fun just watching.

  After a while I realized the real reason he wasn’t playing. He wasn’t worried about losing. He was scared that he would win. Paul was embarrassed enough about being rich. The last thing he wanted was more money.

  I put the chip in a little plastic bag and put it in my purse. I was done for the night. I’d already been here for two hours and I was fairly certain I’d gotten what I’d come for. I stood up, dusted myself off, used the bathroom, washed up, got my coat, and reached in the pocket for my keys—

  Keys. That reminded me. I went and looked at the front door. You didn’t need keys to let yourself out, but you did need them to lock the door behind you.

  I stopped and lay down on the sofa and tried to puzzle it out. Whoever killed Paul didn’t have to take his keys. But it seemed like he had anyway.

  Paul let himself in. Maybe the killer came in with him. Maybe the killer knocked. Or maybe the killer was already there.

  Somehow the killer got in.

  He—or she—killed Paul and left, locking the door behind him. Or her.

  Why would he lock the door behind him? I mean, you kill a man, take his things, and split. Are you worried someone else will steal more? That your awesome crime scene will be spoiled?

  Something knocked around in my brain. It almost came to the surface but then fell away, dissolving back into the currents of grocery lists and half-read books and misconceptions, the sad little graveyard where thoughts go to die.

  I reached in my pocket for more coke and came up with the empty plastic bag. I licked it clean.

  You figure this: The neighbor hears the gunshot, fucks around for a minute or two, calls the cops, throws on a robe, goes over to check Paul’s place, finds that it’s locked, and so the neighbor waits for the cops. This all takes three to seven minutes. Plenty of time for someone to kill Paul, lock the door behind them, and disappear.

  Then why didn’t it sit right with me?

  I got out my phone and called Officer Ramirez.

  “Hi,” I said. “It’s Claire DeWitt.”

  “Seriously?” he said. “Today?”

  “Nah,” I said. “Just kidding. Someone you actually like is on hold. But while I’ve got you: Paul Casablancas. Are you absolutely sure the door was locked?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I was first on the scene, as far as I know. It was locked.”

  “Could the killer have been in the house? Not were they. But would it even be possible?”

  He thought about it for a second. “No,” he said. “Well, yes. Possible? Sure. They couldn’t have gone out through the front door, ’cause we had a guy there while I looked inside, just for that reason. But could he have, say, snuck out through a back window, closed it behind him, and somehow broken into or, you know, scaled another house to get out from the yards and back on the streets, all without a dozen cops noticing—sure, that’s possible. It’s within the realm of human possibility, I guess. We searched the backyards, but if he’d done it fast enough, before that—yeah. It’s possible. Extremely fucking unlikely, though.”

  “Extremely unlikely,” I repeated.

  “More than unlikely,” Ramirez said, “but I don’t know the word for that.”

  “Me either,” I said. “I’m gonna have to look that up.”

  “Well, I don’t think that happened,” he said. “I think we would have seen or heard or vibed or otherwise been aware of the perp.”

  “Could he have hid in the house?” I asked. “It’s a big place.”

  “Could?” he said. “Sure. Could he, you know, had a false panel and been hiding in the wall? Sure. Coulda been living in there for years. But did the officers do a thorough and reasonable search of the house? Yeah. You bet. Saw it myself. I don’t think he was there.”

  He stopped and took a sip of something. Probably coffee.

  “Or she,” he said.

  “Or she,” I repeated.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I said.”

  “Right.”

  Ramirez said okay and goodbye in a way that sounded like go fuck yourself and got off the phone.

  22

  I DROVE BACK TO MY apartment, where I took a shower and got dressed and read the new issue of Detective’s Quarterly. Alex Whittier was on the cover. Professor of criminology at Northwestern. There was a transcript of his latest talk: the scientific method of solving et cetera. Or something like that.

  A few hours later I got back in my car and drove to Japantown, where I met an old friend, Bret, at Fukyu in the mall for a late dinner. He’d already ordered for us. He knew what I liked. That was Bret’s hobby: he knew what women liked. Bret was in his fifties and the richest person I knew. I didn’t need money, but if I did, I knew I could always ask him. That counted for something; you couldn’t say that about every rich person. He was born rich and he loved money, so he just kept getting richer.

  After dinner we walked around the mall. Bret was born in Italy and had lived all over the world. He stopped at a little sweet shop and ran in to talk to the woman inside in Japanese. When he came out, he had a little box, and a look of triumph on his face.

  “This is the thing!” he said with a big smile, and I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I smiled too. He explained that it was a special little pastry he hadn’t had since he lived in Kyoto. Happiness is contagious, and Bret seemed impossibly, always, happy.

  Later, though, in his house, as the sun came up, I couldn’t sleep and his happiness had worn away, fought off by my natural immunity. “Happiness,” Silette wrote, “is the temporary result of denying the knowledge one already has.” Far be it from me to deny the clever and glamorous truth for a stupid thing like happiness. The truth that was so fucking important, the truth that we were all supposed to give up our lives for, give up our happiness for. This truth we detectives, we Silettians, were supposed to love so much. To think some other girl, some poor sweet sap who didn’t know any better, might actually be enjoying herself right now.

  I sat in a silk-covered window seat and looked down to the city below. Bret slept a happy sleep in his giant bed. In a drawer next to him I found a big fat bag of coke. I did a small fingernail’s worth, then stuck the bag in my purse. He knew what he was getting himself into when he invited me over. Bret’s San Francisco house was at the top of Pacific Heights and you could see the entire world from his bedroom. I opened the window and leaned out. The fog was damp and the streetlamps glowed. I took his special pastry from the bedside table where he’d left it, half eaten, and dropped it out the window and watched it fall slowly in the pink dawn to the black street below and then, in pieces and layers, tumble down the hill toward the bottom. A fat, smart crow swooped down, landed next to it, and started picking up the pieces for breakfast. After that I got dressed and walked back to the garage where my car was parked. The bill was fifty-two fifty and the cashier expected me to argue but I didn’t.

  After I got my car, I didn’t drive home. Instead I drove around the city, watching the sun break neighborhood by neighborhood, sniffing little scoops from the big bag of cocaine. At six or seven I went home and took one of Lydia’s Vicodin. I crawled into bed and fell asleep watching Craig Kennedy, Criminologist. Craig always solved his case in thirty minutes. Every week the same sets, dressed up a little differently, and most of the same actors, in different clothes, played out different stories on the screen. Which maybe wasn’t so different from e
very mystery. Just shorter.

  After a restless sleep I got up the next day and made green tea and watched more TV. I talked on the phone to Claude and Tabitha. Later I sat on my floor and shuffled the business cards I’d taken from Paul’s dresser. I shuffled some more and then I pulled one.

  The guitar store.

  I went to the file for the Case of the Kali Yuga and looked at the list of missing guitars. Five of them. The language of guitars sounded like a pornographic story translated from another language: whammy bars, f-holes, double-cutaway, fretwear, tailpiece, binding, belt-buckle rash, wall hanger, case queen.

  I called Jon, the guy from the guitar store, and left a message. I told him I wanted to talk to him. I didn’t tell him I didn’t know what I wanted to talk about.

  I didn’t know why I didn’t tell Lydia about the poker chip.

  I only knew that I didn’t.

  23

  Brooklyn

  I WOKE UP THE NEXT DAY thirsty and hungover. I stumbled into the cavernous kitchen, designed for full service, and put on a pot of coffee. My blanket was wrapped around my shoulders. The heat was either broken or we hadn’t paid the bill. I turned the oven on.

  “You making something?”

  I turned around. My mother was there, looking as hungover as I felt.

  “Just warming up,” I said.

  “Yah,” she said. “Make Mommy a cup of coffee, will you?”

  “It’s already on,” I said.

  She looked relieved. We both sat at the big wood table. My mother, Lenore, was still a shockingly, unearthly beautiful woman. Her blond hair was in a dated flip and she had on smudges of last night’s makeup, but it didn’t matter. She had high cheekbones and perfect tight skin you could bounce a quarter off of. Her blue eyes shone. Her Austrian accent had been finely tuned in boarding schools all across Europe, as one after the other kicked her out. Men would stop cars in the middle of the highway for her. Men would give up fortunes for my mother. Men had done those things, and more, as she liked to remind us.

  But then she fell in love with my father. And, according to her, that was when her life started its slow, long spiral down.

  Over the mantel was a clean patch, outlined in gray dust, where a Warhol silkscreen of my mother used to hang before she sold it a few years before. We looked at the empty spot.

  “Ach,” my mother said. “The car.”

  My mother had a little yellow Karmann Ghia. At least twice a year it was towed—reading street signs and feeding meters was exactly the kind of drudgery Lenore had no time for. The drudgery of getting the car back from the impound lot at the Navy Yard would be someone else’s problem.

  One morning a few months later an Italian man would show up at the house and scream at Lenore for an hour in Italian, while she screamed back. Then the man would drive away with the car, which I would never see again.

  She went to the window. She’d parked in front of a fire hydrant a few yards down from the house. We had our own driveway, but it had been blocked by an abandoned car for a few weeks.

  No one had noticed yet, not the car in our driveway or the Karmann Ghia parked in front of the hydrant. Traffic enforcement wasn’t exactly patrolling our neighborhood regularly. The street was gray, with old black snow hardened in little piles here and there, trash scattered around it.

  “Baby,” Lenore said. “Could you?”

  She looked ready to cry.

  “Sure,” I said. “After some coffee, okay?”

  She nodded. She looked at me, a long look, like she was really taking me in.

  “What?” I said, annoyed.

  “You okay, right?” she said. “Everything okay?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Of course everything’s okay.”

  She stood up and came toward me—I thought she might hug me and I stiffened, but instead she only put her hand on my head.

  “Yah,” she said. “You always okay.”

  Her voice sounded bitter, like I had done something wrong. Her hand tightened on the top of my head, as though she were a hawk and I were a mouse she’d found. For a minute I thought I might fall off my chair.

  Lenore squeezed my head. I felt her fingernails dig in.

  Finally she dropped me.

  “Gimme some money,” I said after a minute. “I’ll get the boys down the block to move the car already.”

  That night Tracy and I took the subway downtown to follow up on our last, best clue—the movie Chloe was supposed to see before she vanished. We took the G to the F to the East Village. New York City wasn’t all that big for us—Brooklyn, parts of Queens, and Manhattan below Fourteenth Street.

  It was less than ten miles from our house to Second Avenue: on the subway it took sixty-seven minutes to get downtown. I read the Cynthia Silverton Mystery Digest, checked out from the bookmobile that morning. Tracy had read it already. She picked up a copy of the New York Post that someone left on the bench.

  “Fucking Koch,” she said. “Switch with me.”

  “No,” I said.

  Every month brought exactly one good thing, more regular than a period: a new Cynthia Silverton Mystery Digest. We didn’t have much of a library in our corner of Brooklyn—a pale-brick storefront that was perpetually closed for renovations—but we did have a bookmobile: a shining airstream-type trailer some do-gooder stocked with comic books, romance novels, detective stories, a few Sweet Valley High paperbacks, and the Cynthia Silverton Mystery Digest. The Cynthia Silverton Mystery Digest was a five-by-seven magazine featuring the exploits of teen detective and junior college student Cynthia Silverton. Each issue featured a Cynthia Silverton story, a True Mystery Not Quite Solved, true-crime tales, and alluring advertising for home-study courses in private detection and fingerprinting and important detection tools. I already had the Cynthia Silverton Spy Camera, a tiny fourth-rate imitation Minox that fit in the palm of my hand, and the Cynthia Silverton fingerprinting kit, which had started us on the road to ruin.

  This month’s unsolved mystery was the Case of the Murdered Heiress. Lana Delfont was found murdered in her Park Avenue apartment. The door was locked from the inside. Who could have done it? And why didn’t the killer steal her famous diamonds, but instead carefully arrange them on her body?

  “The daughter did it,” Tracy said.

  “Yep,” I said. “The earrings.”

  “Exactly,” Tracy said. “No one but a daughter would put earrings on her mother like that.”

  “No one but a daughter would stab her mother that many times,” I said.

  Tracy nodded. She didn’t have a mother—hers had died in an accident when she was two—but she’d heard.

  Finally the train pulled into the station and we bundled up for the cold outside.

  That evening we went to Theatre 80. At the counter was a bored punk girl with pink hair and a leopard sweater. SUNSET BOULEVARD, the marquee exclaimed. THREE NIGHTS ONLY.

  “Hi,” I said to the girl through thick plastic. “Can you tell me what was playing here last Saturday night?”

  “Five dollars,” she said.

  “I’m not trying to buy a ticket,” I said. “I’m trying to ask you a question. Do you know what was playing here last Saturday night?”

  The girl pointed to my left. I turned. I didn’t see anything.

  “Can’t you just answer my question?” I said.

  The girl pointed again. Then she turned around.

  “Why are you such a cunt?” I asked.

  She shrugged.

  “Fuck you,” I said. “Cunt.”

  She turned back around and gave me the finger.

  “Fuck you, whore,” she said.

  “Look,” Tracy said. On the wall to my left was a poster for Belle du Jour. Underneath, a little card said Saturdays 8-10-12.

  “I never saw it,” Tracy said. “What’s it about?”

  We got a slice at Stromboli’s across the street and I told her about Belle du Jour and the fat man with the pet crickets and the gangster with
the gold teeth. After pizza we walked over to Sophie’s, the bar across the street from Reena and Chloe’s place. In Sophie’s we got dollar pints of beer. Someone put the Pogues on the jukebox. At the bar an old man muttered to himself, angry and suspicious.

  We walked over to the horseshoe bar, where by now Chloe’s ex, Ben, would be on his shift.

  Ben was just starting when we ordered our first round of drinks. As far as I could tell, Ben was perfect. He was twenty-one. He had short brown hair and wore Levi’s and a shirt with the sleeves rolled up to reveal perfect olive forearms, one tattooed with a broken heart and the words LOVE KILLS.

  We both knew who he was, but he didn’t remember us. He didn’t seem to care, either.

  “Yeah,” he said bitterly when we said we were looking for Chloe. “I have no fucking idea where she is, and if I did, you’re the last people I would tell.”

  “What?” I said. “Why?”

  “Who do you think we are?” Tracy said.

  “I know exactly who you are,” Ben said, and walked away to perform some imaginary bar task.

  Tracy and I looked at each other. Another mystery. We walked around the bar to where Ben was.

  “We’re detectives,” Tracy said. “Reena asked us to help find Chloe. She’s really worried about her.”

  Ben opened his mouth and then closed it, looking confused.

  “I’ve known Chloe for, like, a year,” I said. “We’ve met before. Like, a million times. That time at Gas Station when Vanishing Center—”

  “Oh,” Ben said. “Oh! Oh! Shit.” He shook his head. “I am so sorry. I didn’t recognize you at all. No, you, you’re—I am so sorry.”

  I said it was okay. He asked why we were looking for Chloe. I told him Reena had hired us. Chloe was missing. No one had seen her since last Thursday.

  “Fuck,” Ben said. “Reena did call me, but I figured. Well. You know.”

  “No,” Tracy said. “We don’t.”

  “You don’t know?” he said. “You don’t know about Chloe?”