Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

by Sara Gran

“What was the trouble with the car?” I asked.

  “Alternator,” he said. “Guy probably either called highway patrol or hitched a ride. Got no records. He was long gone when I got there.”

  “How did the car feel?” I asked. “When you went inside to check it out. How did it feel?”

  “Feel?” he said. “What do you mean, feel? Like, did it feel like leather?”

  “No,” I said. “How did it feel?”

  He frowned. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “I’m not following. I didn’t really feel it.”

  “What I mean is,” I said, “what did it feel like?”

  “I didn’t, like, put my hands on it with any intent,” he said. “I just got in and got out.”

  “When you were in the car,” I said. “What did it feel like?”

  “Like a car,” he said, sarcasm creeping in. “It felt like a car.”

  I looked at him. I looked at him until I saw the shadows underneath his eyes, shadows he’d been trying to hide with his sarcasm and his cheap defenses.

  “Look,” I said. “I’m the only person you can tell this to. You can pass it on over to me and get rid of it, once and for all. Me and no one else. And if you don’t, if you choose to hold on to it and pretend it doesn’t exist, you will be stuck with this for the rest of your life.”

  He looked at me. “You’re crazy,” he said. “I think you should go. I think you should go now.”

  “What did it feel like?” I asked again. “This is your last chance. Your last chance to get rid of it. Forever. For the rest of your life.”

  Craig Robbins made a face and sighed and looked around and scowled and then finally said: “It felt . . . dark. Like a very dark place. It felt like a place where you could get lost. Where people could forget about you and . . .”

  Craig Robbins started to cry, angry tears forcing their way out.

  “It felt,” he choked out, “like being lost in the woods.”

  26

  IN CONCORD I GOT pupusas and plantains in a Salvadoran restaurant and then drove back home. Back at my place I lit a joint and watched Law and Order. During the third episode the phone rang. I let the machine get it.

  It was Kelly again.

  (Mumble mumble) are you there? I know you’re there. Pick up. Pick up. Pick up.

  I did.

  “Hey,” she said when I picked up, as if we spoke every day. “Do you remember the bookmobile?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Of course.”

  “The Cynthia Silverton books?” Kelly said. “Or comics or whatever you call them?”

  “Yeah,” I said again. It stung a little that she asked, for some reason. That it didn’t go without saying. That maybe our life together had been as ephemeral as all that.

  “Go look online,” she said. “Look for Cynthia Silverton. Then call me back.”

  She hung up.

  I made a cup of green tea and thought about what a bitch Kelly was. How she’d always been a bitch.

  Then I did what she said.

  At first I thought I’d spelled it wrong. I tried it a few different ways and realized I’d been right the first time.

  There was one short entry in an online directory of printed comics, which was stolen and republished thirty-eight times:

  Cynthia Silverton: limited run comic privately printed in Las Vegas, Nevada, 1978–1989. The adventures of Cynthia Silverton, teen detective and junior college student. Extremely rare, but of limited value.

  And one blog post, above a photo of the comics themselves:

  Complete set of the Cynthia Silverton Mystery Digest. Or so I think. There’s little information to be had on these obscure 70s/80s mystery comics. No reference in Grafton or Heinz. Teen detective Cynthia Silverton of Rapid Falls solves mysteries, fights her nemesis, Hal Overton, and attends junior college, where she studies criminology. Bizarre and wonderful.

  In a few minutes online I had the blogger’s phone number and address, and when I was done I didn’t call Kelly back. I got in my car and drove over to Oakland to meet Bix Cohen, blogger.

  Bix Cohen lived in a big apartment in the high-crime part of Oakland, where heroin addicts roamed free and glass windows were there for breaking. It was dull and drizzling when I got there. He lived in a big industrial building surrounded by abandoned lots, empty except for random pieces of furniture and broken glass and the other strange things that accumulated in urban blank spots—weeds, dirty pieces of clothing, used condoms, fast food wrappers, unidentifiable pieces of plastic and leather.

  On his block were three other cars, two of which looked old: an ’85 Merc and a ’91 Olds. The hood on the Merc was popped. I figured the third, a little ’98 Honda, was Bix Cohen’s. I pulled up in front of his house and took out my phone and called him.

  “So you’re who?” he said again after a few minutes.

  “Claire DeWitt,” I repeated. “I’m a private eye. And I think you can help me with a very important case.”

  “Wow,” he said. “You’re sure you have the right guy? I’m not really important.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short, Bix,” I said. “You could be the key to the whole thing.”

  “Well, okay,” he said hesitantly. He wasn’t buying it. Most people wouldn’t know the truth if it bit them in the ass and paid for the privilege. I could hardly blame them. “So you wanted to meet sometime?”

  “Sometime like now,” I said. “Like right now.”

  Bix came downstairs and he didn’t trust me at all. Smart man. He was early-thirties-ish. He wore glasses and a black T-shirt and jeans. I guessed he worked in a bookstore and I guessed close: he was a book dealer. He stood at the doorway without the door fully open, as if that would prevent me from coming in.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “No one else has them?”

  “No one,” I said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I would feel better meeting in a public place.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I understand that completely. But I would feel better seeing the books right now.”

  We looked at each other. I liked Bix. He had more spine than I’d imagined.

  I took out my wallet and started slowly taking out one-hundred-dollar bills.

  After one he didn’t budge. Two and he shifted in place a little, wobbling from one foot to the other. Three and he sighed deeply.

  “How’s the book business these days?” I asked.

  “Fine,” Bix said, staring at the money.

  I held out two hundred-dollar bills to him. They were nice and new from the bank. Little things mean a lot. No one’s giving you jack shit for a pile of crumpled fives and tens.

  “Two to let me see them,” I said. “All to buy them.”

  He took the two. “Okay,” he said. “Fine. Come on upstairs.”

  I followed him up the stairs.

  Bix made tea. The apartment was huge by Bay Area standards—over twelve hundred square feet, probably close to fifteen hundred—and full of books, magazines, and other things on paper. Bix also collected other strange things; a collection of glass eyeballs filled one shelf, old teapots in the shape of monkeys, cats, and other animals filled another. On a big wooden table were stacked the Cynthia Silverton books, one hundred and eight of them. I looked them over. They were the right books, all right. Just glancing at them brought a flood of memories. Passing them around classrooms with Tracy and Kelly. Having one stolen on the G train and fighting with the girl who took it. Lying in bed reading about Cynthia’s struggles with Hal Overton, her nemesis.

  “Where’d you find ’em?” I asked.

  Bix sat on an old red velveteen sofa in the living room and crossed his legs.

  “Honestly?” he said.

  “Nah,” I said. “Let’s have the bullshit talk first.”

  “I found them in the garbage.”

  “Honestly?” I said.

  “For real,” he said.

  “What do you want for them?” I asked.
>
  “Oh,” he said right away. “They’re not for sale.”

  That means expensive .

  “I’ll give you five hundred,” I said. “Right now. For all of them.”

  He made a face like he was about to break up with me. “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “A thousand.”

  He made the face again.

  “Two grand,” I said. “I can come back in an hour with it.”

  He made the same face.

  “You own this place, don’t you?” I said.

  He smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “I own the building. I bought it from the city in this homesteading deal for like five bucks.”

  “You know I’m a private eye,” I said. “We could barter. I can find out pretty much anything. About anyone.”

  He shrugged. “I feel pretty good about what I know,” he said. “Unless you can solve, like, you know, who Kasper Hauser was and who killed Kennedy, stuff like that.”

  “The crown prince of Bavaria,” I said. “And E. Howard Hunt.”

  “Wow,” he said. “Huh. But now, you know, there’s nothing to barter with.”

  “I could dig up dirt on you,” I said. “Blackmail is always a possibility.”

  “Yeah, well, hmm,” he said. “Good luck with that. I’m not famous or anything. I mean, I could be out there fucking dogs in the street and I don’t think anyone would really care.”

  “Except the dogs,” I said.

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “Of course. Good point. And you know, I would never fuck a dog. That would be, just. I mean, I like animals. Not like that. In a good way.”

  “I didn’t really think you would,” I said. “Good tea.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “It’s picked by monkeys in Thailand. Or so they say.”

  “Wow,” I said. “I guess it’s good that they have jobs.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “I guess. Although, not having a job is kind of nice too.”

  “I bet,” I said.

  We looked at each other.

  “You can read them here,” he said.

  “You sure?” I said.

  “Sure,” he said. “Only not now. I have a date.”

  “I could stay when you go out,” I suggested.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “If you don’t leave, I’ll call the police. All I have to do is press the button.” His phone was in his hand, 911 already dialed in. Bix was a smart cookie.

  “Okay,” I said. “Tomorrow?”

  “Another day,” he said.

  “Tomorrow’s another day,” I said. “Hopefully a better one.”

  “Another day,” he said. “I think we need to leave it at that.”

  “Can I ask you something?” he said as he walked me downstairs to lock the door behind me. “Is India Palace good for a date?”

  “Do you want to get laid?” I said. “Or do you just want to talk?”

  “Are both an option?” he asked.

  “You’ll be fine with India Palace,” I said. “Let’s see how you do tonight and we’ll talk about the next step.”

  “Cool,” he said. “Thanks.”

  “Tomorrow?” I said.

  But Bix wasn’t stupid. “Another day,” he said, and shut the door behind me.

  27

  THAT NIGHT I DREAMED ABOUT PAUL. I dreamed about the first night we’d spent together, only in my dream we were on a boat, floating in a deep black sea, the two of us alone. When my clothes were off and he saw my scars and tattoos and bruises for the first time, he wanted to ask about each one. But I didn’t want to talk about how I’d been shot and marked and cut. His body was smooth and unmarked except for a few bad teenager tattoos and one neat, barely visible surgical scar, the kind rich people have, where an appendix used to be. He put a hand on my foot, over the four-leaf clover I’d put there myself long ago in Los Angeles. It was faded but still there, just barely.

  “I bet there’s a good story behind this one,” he said, smi- ling.

  “There’s a story,” I said, and I smiled back, but I didn’t tell him. I let him think what he wanted. It wasn’t really the kind of story you tell someone you like.

  In real life, when Paul asked about the clover, I got out of bed and lit a joint, and when my phone rang I answered it, happy for the distraction. It was a case. Always a case. When I came back to bed that conversation was done. Something else was done too, done and gone. Something I’d killed.

  In my dream I stayed in bed, on our boat, just the two of us, his hand on my foot, and I let the phone ring and we looked at the clover together and I said, When I put it there I dreamed of you. Of this night. I put it there for you. I handed him my heart, bloody and bruised.

  Go ahead, I said. Take it. It’s yours.

  28

  IT WAS SUNDAY AND that night I had my usual appointment with Claude for seven o’clock. He rang my buzzer at 7:14. There was no automatic entry in my building—I wouldn’t have lived there if there were—so I went down to let him in. He was sweaty and wearing a soccer outfit.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Game went late.”

  I looked at him. “You play soccer?”

  Claude gave me a tight smile. “Every Sunday,” he said. “Since I was a kid.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” Claude said. “Every week. I think I mentioned it before.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You sure?”

  Claude’s smile got wider and tighter and showed more teeth. He had really good teeth.

  “Well, anyway,” he said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t have time to eat, and I’m starving.”

  “Name your poison,” I said. “I’m buying.”

  Claude chose the Enlightened Mistress’s place. We talked about Paul. We had other cases going on but they weren’t very interesting. The Case of the Misunderstood Manager—the guy’d hired us to prove he didn’t steal twenty grand, which I was pretty sure he had stolen. But he was spending most of it hiring us to prove otherwise, so I didn’t feel too bad about it; apparently the universe decided to use him as a conduit for my money. And the Case of the Confused Academic—a college professor had hired me to find out if his wife was cheating, not work I ordinarily did, but he offered me a ridiculous amount of money and I took it. A mistake. I’d told him a dozen times his wife was not actually cheating, but he kept throwing more money at me to keep digging. He had an inheritance, but not one big enough for this particular habit. Soon I would cut him off—these situations can turn unwholesome fast. Maybe I’d have a talk with him and his wife, try to iron it all out. Maybe not. And the miniature horses.

  That left Paul.

  “I want us both working on this full-time,” I told Claude. “Forget about everything else. This is our case.”

  “Sure,” Claude said. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Good question,” I said.

  I got the lemon chicken. Claude got the beef and broccoli and wonton soup. He still had his little soccer outfit on.

  “So who do you play with?” I asked.

  Claude stopped with a wonton halfway to his mouth.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Soccer,” I asked. “Who do you play with?”

  “A bunch of guys from Berkeley,” he said. “Mostly international students. Not too many Americans are into it.”

  “How’d you get into it?” I asked.

  “My parents are from Europe,” he said. “My dad is Nigerian-French. My mother is Vietnamese-French by way of Oslo. They moved to Berkeley when I was a kid.”

  “Wow,” I said. “They should open a restaurant. I would eat there.”

  “Well, they’re both academics,” Claude said. “My mom does philosophy-literature stuff and my dad does, like, theoretical physics slash philosophy. They kind of let him write his own ticket in terms of a job description.”

  “I’d still go to the restaurant,” I said.

  Claude nodded. “I probably would too,” he said. “As long as someone else was cooking. M
y parents didn’t do, like, parent stuff.”

  “Mine either,” I said. “So are you, like, an American? Have I been fucking up your payroll this whole time?”

  “You ‘pay me’ off the books,” Claude said, making quote marks in the air. “As it were. And yeah, I’ve been a citizen since I was five.”

  We ate in silence for a few minutes.

  “Any siblings?” I asked. I was still hoping against hope for a Nigerian-Vietnamese-French-Oslosean restaurant to come from this family.

  Claude sighed. “No. No siblings. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Of course.”

  We finished our meal and I told Claude to keep going with the poker chip. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  As Silette wrote: “Information is what paupers trade in when they have nothing left to sell.”

  29

  THE NEXT DAY I WALKED across Chinatown to City Lights Books on Columbus. Mike was behind the counter. He was about forty-five, with long gray hair and tattoos up and down his arms, most of them names and logos of bands; the Misfits, the Cramps, the Clash. I’d met him about five years back on the Case of the Kleptomaniacal Occultist, and although we hadn’t planned to keep in touch, he worked in the closest bookstore to my house, so we had. Mike was sarcastic in a way that he thought hid his battered heart but that actually laid it bare.

  “Claire,” he said. He looked semi-amused whenever he saw me, as if my existence was a smirk-worthy joke. Which maybe it was.

  “Hey, Mike,” I said. “How’s life treating you?”

  “Not as well as some people,” he said. “Better than others.”

  “That’s a good attitude,” I said. “Do you have this new book called An Outback Full of Clues? The subtitle’s The Story of Australian Detection.”

  He looked up the book in his computer. “Shame about Paul Casablancas,” he said. “Didn’t you guys used to date?”

  “Briefly,” I said.