Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

by Sara Gran

  “Two?”

  “That’s all I know about,” she said.

  “And Lydia?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I wasn’t exactly supportive of the first,” she said. “So, I don’t think so, but she wouldn’t have told me. I don’t really go for that kind of thing. I mean, you want to have an open relationship, I’m all for it, but the lying and the sneaking—I’m not into that. I don’t think it’s right. Paul wasn’t perfect but he was a nice guy. So, there might have been others, I don’t know. She only told me about the first one.”

  “Who was that?”

  “This guy Eric. He puts on those horror movies at the Castro?”

  I nodded. I knew who he was.

  She shook her head, blond curls and red lips shaking.

  “The whole thing is so sad,” she said. “They could have made each other so happy. They could have had this great life. I mean, that big kind of love, that’s what everyone’s looking for, you know? But, I don’t know. It was like they took a wrong turn somewhere and they were just, like—I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as I’m making it sound.”

  “But what?” I asked.

  She frowned. “The thing about Lydia is . . . I mean, she’s like my best friend, and I love her. But it’s like—”

  She made a face.

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Like she has—had—this great husband, super-successful career, the house, everything. But somehow it was never enough. There’s something in her—the things that are supposed to satisfy you—they never satisfy Lydia. Not really. And after a while, you start to wonder if anything could ever really satisfy her at all.”

  36

  THAT AFTERNOON I WENT home and found Claude in my apartment. Which is not strange. He works there. He was sitting at the big wooden table frowning over a big fat book. Modern Poker Chip Collecting.

  He looked sad.

  “The poker chip,” I said.

  He looked sadder. I’d wanted to give him a little time to find it on his own, but that didn’t seem to be working.

  “I can’t,” he began. “I mean, I don’t—”

  “Okay,” I said. “You looked for a mark?”

  “I found a mark,” he said. “And I looked in the books. Ace Novelty in Tennessee.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “You’re doing great.”

  Claude wrinkled his brow. “No,” he said. “I’m not. Because that’s as far as I got.”

  “Well, Ace is one of the big boys,” I said. “Where do they distribute?”

  “Everywhere,” Claude said. “Plus, they sell direct online. So pretty much anyone in the world could have bought those chips.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “So what do we do?” Claude asked.

  I sighed.

  “We’re going to the poker chip man,” I said. “And you, pal, are coming with me.”

  Claude laughed nervously. “You say that like it’s a threat.”

  “It is,” I said.

  Claude looked anxious.

  “Lydia and Paul were cheating on each other,” I said.

  Claude wrinkled his forehead. He mostly kept his personal life to himself but I figured he didn’t have a vast body of experience in the sex/love/emotions realm of life.

  “So what does that mean for us?” he asked.

  “It means,” I said. I thought about it. “It means,” I finally said, “that a lot of people got hurt. And that we might have more suspects than we thought.”

  The poker chip man lived near the peak of Russian Hill, in a big apartment that from what I’d heard his grandfather had bought during the Depression. If the poker chip guy had any money, he fooled me.

  There was no point in making an appointment because he would break it. Instead we rang his doorbell at two o’clock on a Friday afternoon. In my wallet I had a few hundred dollars in cash and in my right hand I had a box. In the box was a pie.

  You never knew what the poker chip man would want. You could guess, but you never knew.

  “What do we do if he’s not here?” Claude asked.

  “We come back,” I told him. “Until he is.”

  There was no answer. I rang the bell again. And again and again. On the fifth buzz a male voice croaked through the intercom:

  “What.”

  “I have pie,” I said. “Coconut cream.”

  Claude looked at me. I shrugged. It may work or it may not.

  The buzzer let out a long ratchety buzz. We went in.

  “It’s you,” the poker chip man said when he opened the door. His face fell. “I thought—”

  “I have pie,” I reassured him again.

  He raised an eyebrow. We’d reached a deal.

  The poker chip man was somewhere between fifty and seventy years old, white, six feet tall or more. He was dressed in a tweed jacket worn at the seams and trousers and suede shoes and looked a little like Vincent Price. He was given to dramatic Price-ish facial expressions, which enhanced the resemblance. If you saw him walking down the street you might think he was a Berkeley English professor or you might think he was an alcoholic who used to be a professor. But he was neither. He wore a magnifying glass on a cord around his neck.

  The apartment was big: three bedrooms, dining room, living room, impossibly luxurious extra no-reason-at-all room, two big bathrooms, and an eat-in kitchen. Most of the space was filled with books. Books were stacked ceiling-high on the floor and every available surface. I’d been coming to see the poker chip man for ten years and the space between the stacks had grown smaller and smaller each year. Next year there would just be paths between the stacks. You always wonder how people and their apartments get like that, and it was interesting to see the process in action.

  The other occupant was poker chips. Most were in glass jars of every imaginable size and provenance—industrial-size pickles, peanut butter, brass polish, and more. Some were in steel coffee cans, some were in plastic or paper bags, and some were just loose. There were thousands.

  First, the man went for the pie. He sat down at a table in the kitchen, pushed aside jars of poker chips, and fished out a fork from the sink. Then he opened the box and looked at me, as if waiting for an answer.

  “House of Pies,” I said. “Albany.”

  The man looked back at the pie. He took a bite, chewed slowly, and apparently deemed it worthy.

  Then he ate the pie. The entire thing. Claude watched him eat, fascinated and horrified. The poker chip man didn’t seem to mind. It took about half an hour, maybe less. I checked my email on my phone and then sat on the floor in one of the pathways and flipped through back issues of Poker Chip Fancier magazine. I was reading the obituary of a man who’d designed chips for the Sahara and Caesar’s (Geoffrey van Der Crook, born in Indianapolis, survived by a daughter who would not carry on his legacy but instead had foolishly become an orthopedic surgeon) when I heard Claude speak.

  “Uh, Claire,” he said. “Claire, I think he . . .”

  I looked up. The poker chip man was done with his pie and he held out his hand. I came over to the table. Claude and I sat and watched him.

  “Give it to him,” I told Claude.

  Claude dug the chip out of his pocket and put it in the poker chip man’s hand. The man looked at it for a moment or two, then wrapped his hand around it and closed his eyes. Then he opened them and started studying it with his magnifying glass. Then he smelled the poker chip. He smelled it again and then lightly sniffed a few more times.

  “Menthol,” he said, a little condescension in his voice, as if it were obvious. “No sun fading,” he went on. “Never seen the light of day. See this?” he pointed to something I couldn’t see. “A dent from a fingernail. People do it when they get anxious. But this dent is deep.”

  “So either a very healthy person, or—”

  He cut me off. Maybe we were vamping a little for Claude. “A fake nail,” he said. “Which is about a thousa
nd times more likely.”

  “I know that,” I snapped.

  Suddenly the man licked the poker chip. He made a face: Not half bad. I held out my hand and he handed it over and I did the same.

  “Nice,” I said. “Cocaine,” I explained to Claude. “And cocoa butter.”

  “And,” the man said. “A little bit of Florida Water.”

  African American people were about 70 percent more likely to smoke menthol cigarettes than any other race. White people use cocaine more than any other race, but the cocoa butter and Florida Water are used almost exclusively by African Americans and Latinos. And Oakland had the highest African American population in the Bay area, more than double San Francisco’s.

  “So, Oakland?” I guessed.

  The man raised an eyebrow: Maybe. He looked more carefully.

  “You’re sure it’s Bay Area?” the man asked.

  “Not sure of anything,” I said. “But that’s what I’m hoping.”

  He nodded and closed his eyes again. His lips moved, quietly, while his eyes spun under their lids. He murmured softly, syllabic sounds that sounded like a language but weren’t: gore gore, scorp, pista, pista. His murmurs became louder and more like words: No, no, no. Yes, yes, yes. Finally, after five or six minutes, he spoke:

  “The Fan Club,” he said, eyes still closed, face still in visionary rapture. For a split second, he was beautiful. “Downtown Oakland. March 5, 2010. Blackjack.”

  He opened his eyes and looked up at the ceiling, beauty gone.

  “A losing bet,” he said. His eyes rolled down and he looked right at Claude. “Never bet on seventeen.”

  “No,” Claude said quickly, frightened. “I won’t.”

  I stood up. Claude looked from the man to me and back again, confused. I went over and took the chip out of his hand and replaced it with a hundred-dollar bill.

  “Always a pleasure,” I said.

  The man didn’t say anything. His face went back to its normal dour look, and I knew he was wishing he’d saved some pie.

  “Next time,” I said, “I’ll bring two.”

  He looked at me and nodded. We had a deal.

  37

  Brooklyn

  IF WE’D HAD A CAR, it would have taken seven or eight minutes to get from our neighborhood to Broadway and Kent. Walking, it would have taken thirty to forty minutes. On the subway it took forty-five minutes. We stood up and went to the door, watching the train inch into the station.

  “It’s like they’re pushing it,” Tracy said. “Like there’s some guy back there pushing the train into the station.”

  “Except he fell asleep,” I said. “And now his infant daughter is pushing it.”

  “But then she died,” Tracy said. “And now it’s her ghost.”

  “But she’s not pushing,” I said. “She blowing. She’s blowing a gentle, delightful breeze onto the back of the train.”

  Finally the train stopped with a loud, metallic thump.

  We still had a fifteen-minute walk. By the time we found what we were looking for, we were frozen and miserable.

  “I fucking hate winter,” Tracy said.

  “Me too,” I said. “And I fucking hate this city.”

  “Me too. I want to move to California.”

  “I want to move to Florida.”

  “Las Vegas.”

  “Arizona. Is that warm?”

  “I think so. I think it’s like the desert.”

  Finally we got there, a big industrial building that took up a city block. The door was unlocked and we entered into a dark, empty lobby. Through another door we heard a sound; guitars, or something like them. The door was a big sliding number and to open it you pulled a counterweight on a chain. We both pulled together and slowly the door creaked open.

  On the other side was a giant empty space. It was dimly lit and you couldn’t see where it ended or exactly where the ceiling was. The only area you could clearly make out was a circle near the center, where a makeshift stage had been set up and a half-dozen or so people milled about, lit by an industrial light overhead.

  “I just realized I’ve been here before,” Tracy said. “It looked different. It was a Thursday night. There was like a club in here. Chloe took me. A band was playing. There was a bar over there—”

  She pointed to the far rear wall.

  “And these girls who were like go-go dancers over there—” She pointed to the left. I could almost see the night she described; I’d been to a dozen like it.

  “Who was playing?” I asked.

  “CC and those guys. Vanishing Center.”

  “Chloe wanted to see them on her day off?” I asked.

  Tracy bent her head to one side. “At the time it seemed like it was just a party where they happened to be playing.”

  We walked toward the stage.

  “That’s them,” Tracy said.

  As we got closer I saw she was right. It was Vanishing Center. Behind them was a canvas banner with their logo: a coffin with the words TIME’S UP inside.

  No one noticed us as we walked up to them. Vanishing Center was setting up on stage, without CC.

  It looked like a fight might break out. Stiv Black, the bass player, was arguing with Johnny Needle, the guitar player, about setting up the stage.

  “Listen, shithead, I told you a million times, I don’t want any cords along the front of the stage.”

  “So fucking move them.”

  “You put them there, you move them, dickhead.”

  First we went up to Ace Apocalypse.

  “Hey,” I said. “We’re—”

  “Hey, no chicks,” Ace said, looking at the band. “I fucking told you. And they’re like twelve.”

  “We’re not with them,” Tracy said. “We’re looking for Chloe. She works for you. Have you seen her?”

  “Holy shit,” he said. He looked at us for the first time. “Chloe?”

  “Chloe,” Tracy said. “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Thursday,” Ace said. He frowned. “Last Thursday. Who are you?”

  “Friends of hers,” I said. “We’re looking for her. No one’s seen her since Thursday night.”

  “Me either,” he said. “Shit. I hope she’s okay. She was fucking up lately, but she was fantastic. Best assistant I ever had.”

  “Fucking up how?” I asked.

  “How lately?” Tracy said.

  “Past few weeks,” Ace said. The band kept arguing on stage behind him. “Maybe months. Usual bullshit. It’s like every assistant gets the same instruction manual. Showing up late. Showing up too hungover to do anything. Once, she fell asleep on set. Or nodded out or whatever—I don’t know what she does.”

  Ace didn’t know anything else. We walked to the stage, where the band was still arguing.

  “Hey,” Tracy said to Stiv Black. “I need to ask you something.”

  He ignored her and went back to arguing about the cords.

  “I told you a million times, I don’t need to be falling on my fucking face during a show.”

  “I need to ask you something,” Tracy tried again. “Uh, hey—”

  “You don’t?” Johnny said. They all notoriously fell off the stage at least once in each show.

  They both cracked up.

  “Hey!” Tracy said. “I need to ask you a question.”

  Both men stopped and looked at the tiny girl in front of the stage.

  Before she lost their attention she got out a picture of Chloe and held it out toward them. “I’m looking for this girl. I need to know if you’ve seen her.”

  “What are you?” Stiv said. “Some kind of a fucking detective?”

  The two men laughed. From behind I heard Ace laugh along with them.

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’re some kind of fucking detectives.”

  “Oh, detectives,” I heard behind me.

  Tracy and I both turned around.

  CC had come in sometime while we were arguing. He stood behind us. He wore a fray
ed, stained green velvet suit with no shirt and combat boots held together with silver and black duct tape.

  Tracy took her picture of Chloe and held it out to CC.

  “We need to know when you last saw this girl,” she said. “You know her. She works with Ace sometimes. Her name is Chloe.”

  CC ignored us. He stepped around us and pulled himself onto the stage.

  Tracy showed the picture to Johnny and Stiv. They crouched down to look. They smelled dirty, like a bar in the morning.

  “Yeah,” Stiv said. “I’ve seen that girl. But not, like, today.”

  “When?” I asked. “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “I don’t know,” Stiv said. “She’s just some girl. It’s not like I was keeping track. You see her, Johnny?”

  Johnny shrugged. Then he blinked, and looked away. “I know I seen her before. But that’s all I know.”

  “No one’s seen her for like four days,” I said. “There could be foul play.”

  CC took off his green jacket and tossed it on the floor. A musky smell came off him with the jacket. I took the picture from Tracy.

  “Hey,” I said to CC. “All I’m asking you to do is look at a picture.”

  “I don’t want to look at your stupid fucking picture, little girl,” he said. From somewhere else in the building I heard another band start; angry drums, screeching guitar. “Go away. You’re annoying.”

  Stiv plugged in his bass and checked his tuning. The guitar player did the same.

  “All I’m asking you—” I said to CC.

  But he cut me off. He reached into his back pocket and I saw a quick flash of silver. Like a magic trick, he suddenly had a razorblade in his hand.

  “I don’t care,” he said. “You can ask and ask and ask and I will never answer.”

  I felt something turn over in my stomach and suddenly I felt a kind of panicky, fearful desire. A feeling like something had been lost forever, like I’d forgotten about something living that needed me, and I was flooded with shame and regret and sickness and I knew.