Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

by Sara Gran

  Mike frowned. “I thought you guys were, like, a thing.”

  “We were friends,” I said.

  “I heard you were in charge of the investigation,” Mike said. “We don’t have a copy. I’ll see if I can order it for you.”

  “Well, I’m in charge of my investigation,” I said. “Not anyone else’s. Yeah. Let’s see if you can order it.”

  “Isn’t that like some breach of ethics?” he said. “Like a doctor operating on himself? It isn’t shipping for a few more days.”

  “Well, maybe,” I said, thinking of the times when I’d given myself a few quick-and-dirty stitches on bad days. “But I’m doing it anyway. And I thought it came out last week.”

  “You knew Lydia, too, didn’t you? Shame,” he said again. “I knew them too. Both of them.” He typed in a few more words. “Publication delayed. But we’ll get it as soon as anyone does. I can hold a copy for you.”

  “I didn’t know you knew them,” I said.

  “Haven’t seen her in years. She’s not exactly a book person. But we were both in bands, you know, back then. You probably heard of us. The Percolators.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. “Wow. That was you?” I’d never heard of them. “And that was when Lydia was in the . . .”

  “The Tearjerkers,” he said. “Her first band. Or her second. But, you know, that was the band that got kind of big. Kind of. We opened for them a few times at the Ritz. Back then Lydia didn’t look at guys like me. And I’m sure she still doesn’t.”

  “What kind of guys did she look at?” I asked.

  “Well, back when I knew her—in the eighties and nineties—she fucked rock stars. And rich guys.”

  Men always said that about girls like Lydia, as if they had the right to fuck them, and the girl had wrongly allowed someone else in.

  “Really?” I said. “Like who?”

  Mike shrugged. “I didn’t know any of them. You know who knew her well, who’s still around?” he said. “Delia Shute. That woman who makes those fancy Barbie dolls? She had a big show at MOMA last year?”

  I nodded. I’d heard the name.

  “She’d know. Didn’t Lydia give you her name?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “She did.”

  When I left the bookstore I drove up to San Rafael in Marin County. I parked in a parking lot off Fourth Street and walked around town a little. In a bookstore a woman was reading tarot cards. In front of an Indian restaurant a waiter yelled at someone on the other end of his cell phone.

  In the guitar store, Jon, the owner, was stringing up a mahogany Favilla behind the counter.

  “Hey,” he said. “Claire. Sorry I didn’t call you back. I was actually just about to. You didn’t need to come all the way here.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. I looked at the guitar. “You know one of Paul’s stolen guitars was a Favilla, right?”

  “Wait,” he said. “I thought that’s why you called.”

  “No,” I said. “I called just because I did. Why did you think I called?”

  “I could have just explained,” he said. “It’s the tiniest thing. You didn’t have to come here.”

  “I’m old fashioned like that,” I said. “No worries.”

  “It was totally not worth the trip. Do you have my email?”

  “I like to talk to people in person,” I said. “Let synchronicity get involved. See what fate has to say. Keeps things lively.”

  “Right,” he said, eyebrows raised as a shorthand way of saying I think you’re an idiot. I was used to it. “Well, this is Paul’s guitar. But he sold it to me like a year ago. I didn’t realize because I’d totally forgotten about it—it was kind of trash and basically needed a whole lot of work, so I’d put it in the back and totally spaced it. He traded it along with a Tele copy for a Mayqueen. I never would have bought it, but we did a trade, and, you know, it was Paul. But I knew there was something off about that list, so I checked my records. I’d totally forgotten. Sorry it took me so long.”

  I’d sent him the list of missing guitars as soon as I had it. Jon and Paul, like most of their friends, constantly bought, sold, and traded instruments with each other. It was almost a communal collection, with guitars, effects, and amplifiers floating around from one to another, going out with the tide on eBay and coming back in at night, sometimes years later. It was entirely understandable that Lydia would have made a mistake on the list—after all, she was part of the ever-rotating ownership. Or used to be.

  But for some reason I felt a sick flutter in my chest and a horrible rush of déjà vu that made me want to cry for something I had forgotten, something I couldn’t remember but I knew had broken all of our hearts . . .

  It was a clue. The Clue of the Missing Guitar.

  Suddenly I felt like I was going to cry, and I missed Paul like hell.

  “Do you have a bathroom?” I asked Jon. He pointed me behind the counter. In the bathroom I pulled an almost new bag of cocaine from my pocket. I’d bought it from Tabitha the night before. I did a quick bump on each side and went back to Jon.

  “So five guitars were stolen,” I said, working it out. “There were five empty stands. And one was not the Favilla.”

  “Right,” John said.

  “Any ideas what it might have been?” I asked.

  Jon shrugged. “Could have been anything. I looked through some old receipts and nothing jumped out at me. Whatever it was, I don’t think he got it here.”

  “A missing guitar,” I said. “We have a missing guitar.”

  “Yeah, that’s about it,” Jon said. “Sorry you came all this way. I mean. Well.”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Just sorry you came all the way up.”

  “You were going to say something,” I said.

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “Right. I’m actually not sure if you knew you were,” I explained. “I think it was just going to come out, after ‘I mean’—”

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” Jon said. “Are you making sense?”

  “There’s something you’re not telling me,” I said.

  “There’s lots of things I’m not telling you,” Jon said, a bit snarky. “I mean, do you want to know what I had for lunch?”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  “I don’t think so,” he said, and turned back to his guitar. Paul’s guitar.

  “When you want to tell me,” I said, “call me. Okay?”

  Jon looked up. “What I had for lunch?”

  “No,” I said. “Whatever you wanted to tell me about Paul.”

  “Uh, okay,” he said, looking away, like you do when you talk to crazy people.

  “Promise,” I said. “Promise me you’ll call when you have something to say.”

  “Right,” Jon said. “Absolutely. I promise. I kind of have to, uh. You know.”

  I was pretty sure he meant he had to go talk to less crazy people now, and so I left. I walked to the corner. Then I stopped, turned around, and went back to the store. Jon pretended to smile when I came in.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to tell me something?” I said.

  “No,” he said. “Nothing to tell. Really.”

  “You have my number,” I said. “You know you can call me. Anytime. Do you have my email?”

  He promised he did and turned back to his Favilla. He ignored me. He ignored me until I left.

  30

  I DROVE BACK HOME. In my apartment I did another bump and called Bix Cohen to see when I could come look at the Cynthia Silverton books again. He wasn’t in. I wasn’t tired. I flipped through some books Claude got me on miniature horses. Nothing on suicide rates. That didn’t mean it didn’t happen.

  I looked at the list of Paul’s guitars. Five empty guitar stands. Five missing guitars.

  One of them was not the Favilla.

  Then what was it?

  I called Claude and explained to him what I needed. He would go through Paul’s collect
ion, his receipts, photographs—whatever he had to do to identify the missing guitar. He added it to his list of chores.

  After midnight my phone rang. I was watching Iggy Pop videos on YouTube and trying to research miniature horse suicides. I knew who it was even though I didn’t recognize the number.

  “Okay,” Jon said. “Okay. The last time I saw Paul was a little strange, to be honest. I think I saw something I wasn’t supposed to.”

  I felt a prickle on the back of my neck and I halfway didn’t want to ask but I asked anyway: “What’d you see?”

  “Well, it was in San Mateo,” he said. “This Korean restaurant. Tofu House. I know it sounds vegetarian but it isn’t—they just have a lot of tofu. Anyway, I stopped there before the airport and I saw Paul there, with a girl. A woman.”

  “Which one?” I asked. The prickling feeling spread to my upper back, in between my shoulder blades.

  “Which Tofu House?” Jon asked. “I think there’s only one in San Mateo.”

  “Never mind,” I said. “With her? Or with her?”

  “With her,” Jon said, “I think.” And somehow I knew what he thought was true.

  Maybe two people in love were like two trains, racing toward each other. With a whole town of saps in the middle, not hearing the whistle blow.

  31

  THE NEXT DAY I drove over to the Haight and went into Amoeba Music. In the discount vinyl section I found a forty-five by the Percolators. They had nothing in the bins by the Tearjerkers.

  “Yeah, they’re pretty collectable,” the kid at the counter told me. “Oh, snap, check it out. We do have one.” He turned and looked behind him, where the expensive, rare records were displayed against the wall, safe from grubby and thieving hands.

  After looking for a minute he found another forty-five. I held out my hand.

  “Uh, it’s one fifty,” the clerk said, hesitant. “One hundred and fifty.”

  “I’ll be careful,” I said. He handed me the record. The cover was a series of cutouts, like a ransom note, except in addition to letters there were parts of a woman’s body. Cut to the Bone, the record was called. On the B-side was “Never Going Home.” It looked like it had been put together in someone’s basement.

  “That was before they got big,” the clerk said, which I’d guessed. I bought both records.

  Back at home I listened to the Percolators first. I was surprised that they were good. After that I put on the Tearjerkers. They were even better.

  I tried to single out Lydia’s guitar and listen to just that, but I couldn’t. I looked at the forty-five sleeve while the song played again. Cut to the bone.

  Recorded at Skylight Studios, Oakland. Mixed and engineered by Kristie Sparkle. Lydia Nunez: Guitar; Nancy Garcia: Bass; Elia Grande: Drums. Special thanks to Delia Shute.

  I googled Nancy Garcia. She was dead. Cancer, family, too young, et cetera. Elia Grande lived on a commune in Minnesota. She, maybe, would get an email. Kristie Sparkle was an herbalist living in Marin.

  Delia Shute was not easy to track down. It was easy to find her work. She took pictures of Barbie-type dolls who reenacted great scenes from history. She didn’t have a listed phone number. Her gallery didn’t agree to pass on a message and they didn’t fall for my brilliant ploy of calling with a medical emergency for Delia’s cousin in Greenland who—

  “We have no way to get in touch with her,” the owner told me, firm and barely polite. “We are absolutely unable to pass on any message at all, under any circumstances. I’m very sorry, but there’s nothing we can do to help. Nothing at all.”

  It’s easy to find businesses who don’t care very much about their customers. Delia Shute’s bank was pretty good and her insurance company was surprisingly cautious, but her cell-phone provider just didn’t give a shit. There’s a certain tone of voice that registers as “official” to young people because they’ve heard it in the movies. They’ll fall for it like Sinatra for Ava Gardner. I have a warrant. National security. Reference number (redacted). After barking a few commands and clichés, I got her address and phone number.

  On a foggy afternoon I rang Delia Shute’s buzzer. Her block in SoMa was quiet during the day. There was a bar on the corner called the Manhole that was probably loud on the weekends.

  Delia opened the door and looked at me. She was about forty and thin and heavily tattooed, in multiple layers—one whole sleeve seemed to be a coverup of some kind, although I couldn’t tell what was underneath without being obviously nosy. It was cold, and she wore black yoga pants under a red vintage housecoat with a nautical pattern of ropes and anchors on it.

  “I thought you were the UPS guy,” she said. She looked a little confused, as if she couldn’t exactly grasp how I wasn’t him.

  “I’m not,” I said. “My name is Claire DeWitt. I’m a private eye.”

  Everyone loves a mystery. She lifted an eyebrow.

  “I’m investigating the death of Paul Casablancas,” I said. No matter how many times I said it, it never seemed completely real. I didn’t want it to. “I heard that you used to know Lydia Nunez.”

  She nodded. “I did.”

  We walked up three flights of wide slate stairs and she let me into her loft. She had nearly the entire floor of a big old industrial building. I figured she’d bought it when she was young, for a steal, and she had. She was working on her dolls when I got there, this time building a scene from the Russian Revolution. I had to admit, the dolls were pretty stunning.

  She showed me the Russian Revolution dolls and a scene from Luna Park, in Brooklyn, she was just starting. We talked Coney Island history for a while—Hottentots, housing projects, elephants, tattoos.

  “So you’re friends with Lydia,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I was also friends with Paul. I introduced them, actually.”

  “Fucking shame,” she said, shaking her head. “Paul fucking rocked. He was the best. Once he came and picked me up when my car broke down in El Cerrito. Hardly even knew him. I used to go out with this girl Beth, they were friends. Then, like, years later we did this art project together for SF-MOMA. He wrote the music and I did this performance thing. My part was awful but his was wonderful. Fucking great. I still have the music somewhere.”

  “He was a great guy,” I agreed.

  “So what do you think?” she said. “Got any suspects, or whatever you call them?”

  “No,” I said. “Pretty much none. That’s why I came to talk to you. Trying to dig into the past a little, just because, you know, there’s nothing.”

  “I thought it was a robbery,” she said. “You think it might have been personal? Like someone actually killed him on purpose?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “It sure looked like a robbery. But I’m just checking everything out.”

  “Well, Jesus Christ,” she said. “I bet you are. Fucking shame,” she said again.

  “So how did you know Lydia?” I asked.

  “We were kids together,” she said. “Teenagers. You know. Partied. Slept around a lot.”

  “What was she like back then?” I asked.

  “Beautiful,” Delia said. “Hot. You want some tea?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Green, if you have it.”

  She stood up and headed toward the far wall, which was an undelineated kitchen.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’m doing this Chinese herb thing. No black tea or coffee.”

  “Liver heat?” I guessed.

  She nodded. “You too?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Fucking liver,” she said. “It’s like the Chinese equivalent of, you know, take two aspirin and call me the morning. Except no one says that anymore.”

  “Right,” I said. “Except it’s like, avoid eating everything good, take six weeks’ worth of herbs that taste like shit, and then call me in the morning.”

  She laughed. “It’s like, give up everything you like, stop getting angry, and then call me next month.”

  The water boiled and she mad
e us each a cup of green tea with roasted barley. Cooling for the organs. We took our tea over to a table near the windows and sat down.

  “So,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Right. Well, you know, we were kids. We didn’t really have, like, families. I grew up in Emeryville, which is kind of a shithole. I guess now it’s a shithole with a big mall and Pixar. My parents were kind of in a cult. A new religious movement. Let’s put it like this: it was a cult in the common parlance.”

  “What kind of a cult? What did they believe?”

  “Nothing too awful,” she said. “It was like this pseudo-Buddhist thing. They meditated a lot, they were pretty spaced out. The kids pretty much roamed wild. They didn’t hit us or anything. They just meditated all the time. This guy Carl was the leader. He was from New Jersey.”

  I made a face.

  “I know, right?” she said. “I mean, who follows some guy from New Jersey? He wasn’t even in the CIA or anything. He wasn’t very charismatic. It’s not like you couldn’t escape his iron will or anything. He liked to eat Dover sole for dinner. That was the only time he got pissy—when he couldn’t get his fish for dinner. Like with almonds, how they make it with butter like that? And then everyone had to change their name, for, like, this numerological thing, and they had this whole thing about eating seeds. I actually still do that, I think they were kind of right about that. You know, it’s like everything in the plant is already there, right? Anyway. It was like the world’s most boring cult. So, yeah, Lydia. We were fifteen or sixteen when we started hanging out. Are you from here?”

  “Brooklyn,” I said.

  “So you know,” she said. “You were a bad girl.” You didn’t have to be a detective to guess that. “Fake IDs. Sneaking into shows. Shoplifting. Guys. Normal stuff. You know. We were poor. Well, not exactly poor. Broke.”

  “How did you guys meet?” I asked.

  “Around,” she said. “Going to bars and shows and stuff. She was from Hayward but her parents kicked her out and she was always bumming around—oh, I remember now, we actually met, like, specifically. She was staying with my friend Deena in the Castro. With Deena and her mom for a few months. So we started hanging out and then she stayed with me for a while. At the time it didn’t seem like a big deal—honestly, it seemed kind of glamorous, you know, being so young and on your own. Looking back it looks fucking horrifying. It looks like her parents were out of their minds. Which they were.”