Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

by Sara Gran

  “Claire.”

  I looked around. It was Fabian, a boy I knew who went to Bronx Science. He was kind of sort of homeless—he had a home but didn’t like it very much—and so he spent most of his time hanging out down here in the park.

  “Fabian,” Tracy said, after hellos. “You know Vanishing Center, right?”

  “Kind of,” Fabian said.

  “Are they here yet?” Tracy asked.

  “Yeah,” Fabian said. “They’re in their van down on Avenue B.”

  Tracy and I looked at each other and smiled. Tracy looked at Fabian and suddenly she was pretty.

  “Fabian,” she said in her pretty voice. “I am such a big fan. I’m kind of, like, obsessed. Could you pleeeease show us their van?”

  The van, a nondescript white Dodge, was parked on Avenue B across the street from the park. Fabian pointed it out while we were still on Seventh Street.

  “I think the guys might be in there now,” Fabian said.

  Tracy broke into a run first, and I followed. I don’t know how we knew, but we knew.

  Chloe was in that van. We couldn’t see her or smell her or feel her. Those senses are overrated.

  I knew because I felt her in our bones. Because she was my victim, and I was her detective. And when fate ties two people together, those ties aren’t given up lightly, if ever.

  We heard the motor start as soon as we turned the corner onto Avenue B. By the time we’d crossed the street the van was moving. There was no way we were going to catch it, but I kept running anyway. I wanted to see.

  CC was driving. In the passenger seat was Chloe.

  It was less than a second. Her eyes caught mine and a look passed her face—fear, loss, confusion.

  CC reached over and pulled her away from the window.

  The van turned a corner and was gone. Gone.

  Tracy was across the street. I jogged over to meet her.

  “I saw her.”

  “I know. Me too.”

  Fabian came to meet us.

  “What just happened?” Fabian said, confused.

  Tracy rolled her eyes at me. Then she smiled and became pretty again.

  “Oh my God!” she said. “CC! I can’t believe I missed him! Where does he usually go after a show? I mean, does he just hang out, or—”

  “I don’t know,” Fabian said. “But sometimes he likes to go to Hell.”

  41

  San Francisco

  WEDNESDAY AT FOUR I met Josh and the girl, Paul’s girl, at a coffee shop in Oakland. The girl and Josh were there when I arrived. It wasn’t the girl from the Swiss Music Hall—the girl in the white dress. It was a woman I knew. Her name was Sheila and she lived in Berkeley. She owned a bar on San Pablo Avenue where bands played, including, I bet, Paul’s band. I was sober and bright-eyed after three cups of tea and a real breakfast. I was turning over a new leaf, flying right and solving the case. Starting right now.

  Sheila turned to Josh and rolled her eyes and said, “You didn’t tell me it was Claire!”

  “I didn’t know you knew her!” Josh said.

  “Like the one fucking detective I’ve ever met,” Sheila said. “And you couldn’t have mentioned that?”

  “If you knew a detective,” Josh said, “you could have mentioned that, you know?”

  I sat down. “It coulda been worse,” I said. “Believe it or not, there’s people worse than me.”

  “It isn’t that,” Sheila said. “I’m just so embarrassed. I thought this would be, like, anonymous.”

  “I won’t tell anyone,” I said. “Not unless it’s gonna make or break the case. In which case I will. Okay?”

  “You won’t tell his wife?” Sheila asked. She looked regretful. Like she knew she’d done something wrong.

  “No,” I said. “Not unless I absolutely have to, and I’m sure we’re all in agreement that solving Paul’s murder is more important that sparing you an awkward moment. So come on. Spill.”

  Sheila gave up the drama and spilled.

  “God, I’m so embarrassed,” she said again. “I met him at the bar. I knew Paul was married. I didn’t know Lydia but I knew who she was. We flirted, but, you know, it was totally innocent. Well, it started innocent. He left and it was fine. But then, total coincidence, I ran into him a few days later. At Moe’s. The bookstore.”

  “What was he getting?” I asked.

  She frowned, trying to remember.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Does it matter?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Everything matters. It’s not such a hard question.”

  She nodded assent: not such a hard question. “What’d you get?” I asked.

  “I was buying a cookbook and a photography book. Chez Panisse and Man Ray.”

  “Did you sleep together?” I asked.

  “Oh, no,” she said defensively. “Not for a while. We ended up walking around Berkeley a little bit after the bookstore. He was this totally charming guy. So interesting, and he seemed so interested in me, what I did and what I thought about things. I don’t know. Then I ran into him again, but it wasn’t by accident—he came by the bar a few days later. His wife was on tour. He made it sound like things were pretty shitty. And we were getting along so great. Not that that makes it okay,” she added quickly. Defensively.

  I looked at her. “You know, it’s not the end of the fucking world. People do it all the time.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Well, I don’t. And it’s just. Him and his wife, they didn’t have that much time together. If I’d known.” She stopped and frowned. “It’s just hard to talk about. I mean, I liked him. A lot. He totally—well, I don’t think he meant to hurt me. But he did.”

  I wondered what Paul saw in her. She was a pretty girl, but nothing about her seemed so interesting to me. She couldn’t hold a candle to Lydia, that was for sure. I was about 99.9 percent sure she’d never killed a mouse, let alone a human. She wasn’t on my list of suspects.

  “Did he like you?” I asked.

  Josh cringed a little but Sheila answered honestly: “No, not really. At first he seemed to, but after we saw each other a few times he lost interest.”

  I figured Sheila seemed nice. Easy. Uncomplicated. That could be attractive. And I figured Paul got bored with her real fast.

  “Tell me something about Paul,” I said.

  “There was something dark in him,” she said. “I don’t think any girl would have changed that. I guess I thought I could make him happy. Didn’t take long to see I was wrong about that. I don’t think any girl could do that. I think there was something inside him that no girl was ever gonna touch, not me or Lydia or anyone else.”

  She cocked her head to the side, thought for a minute, and then corrected herself.

  “I guess if he met a girl like him,” she said. “A girl as weird and dark as he was. I guess if he ever met a girl like that, it could have worked.”

  42

  THAT NIGHT THE SALINGERS were playing at the Hemlock Tavern. I went by myself to see them. Less than a dozen people came. They played old country songs, Hank Williams and the Carter family. When the singer sang it was like something in her had been split open. Like she was singing from a part of her most people didn’t even know they had. Like she’d found a direct pipeline to her soul. About four people stood up front watching the band. One couple tried to swing dance but it wasn’t the right music for that and they couldn’t get a rhythm going. In the back some college kids yelled at each other, laughing. No one listened. She didn’t stop singing.

  After their set I headed to the stage, where they were breaking down and putting away their equipment. Girl, boy, girl, boy—I decided girl, and went up to Nita, the guitar player.

  “Hi,” I said. Then I realized something and I said, “I think we’ve met before.”

  “Oh my God,” she said, recognizing me too. “You’re that girl.”

  “That girl?” I said.

  “That girl,” she said. “That girl that Paul was in love wit
h.”

  I excused myself and went to the bathroom and did two fat lines of cocaine off the top of the toilet. I looked through my bag for something more and found a Tylenol 3 I’d taken from the guy I slept with in Oakland and took two.

  I waited at the bar for Nita as she finished loading up her equipment into someone’s van. She was about my age but looked hardened, leathery. At the bar she got a Red Stripe and I joined her.

  “That time in Chinatown,” she said. I remembered. It had been a while since I’d seen Paul. We hadn’t spoken since I’d gone to Peru. I walked by the vegan restaurant one night and heard someone call my name. It was Paul, having tea with Nita. I went in and sat down and had tea and a slice of carrot cake with them.

  “When you left, Paul said that he’d been crazy about you. That you were like the one who got away.”

  I shrugged. Exes always looked attractive late at night.

  “I was surprised when he married Lydia,” she said. “Really surprised. I always thought he would, I don’t know. That you guys . . .”

  Her voice stumbled off as she realized she was saying something stupid. I asked her about the blonde in the white dress.

  “Oh,” she said. “That’s Lucy. She’s a friend of Pete’s girlfriend. I know Paul thought she was attractive. You could tell. But cheating on Lydia—you think so?”

  “I don’t know,” I lied. I didn’t see any reason to burst her bubble. “It’s more just that she might know something.”

  “I knew him pretty well,” Nita said. “I don’t think anything happened.” She took a big inhale and let the air out slowly. “I don’t know. He was different this past year. He seemed depressed.” She frowned. “He was smarter than most people know,” she said. “Musicians, you know, people don’t expect much. But he read all the time, he knew all this weird shit. But he wanted to play, you know? Not read books all day. And for a long time, he did it. But then . . .”

  “But then what?” I asked.

  Nita shrugged. “I don’t know. Life caught up with him, I guess. He was fighting with Lydia a lot. I think he knew things were falling apart.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said again. “It’s easy to blame her. She always wanted more from him, you know. That kind of girlfriend. The kind who gets offended so fucking easily.”

  From the look on her face I figured Nita’d had a lot of those girlfriends.

  “But Paul wasn’t perfect either,” she went on. “He loved her, and he even liked her a lot, but he never really—he never seemed crazy about her. I mean, I think he was devoted to her, and really wanted to work things out. But something wasn’t there. That extra something. Like when he saw her walk into the room—like when he saw her he was happy, you know, but it was never like wow. It was never that way men look when they still really love their wives. That thing in their eyes.

  “And his career was going okay, but, you know, the usual bullshit. I mean, he was at that state where he was too busy to do everything he wanted but not big enough for a good manager or assistant or anything like that. He seemed, I don’t know. Just getting older, I guess. Like all of us. I mean, that’s the thing about this life. Playing music. You put all your eggs in one basket, you really devote yourself to something, and that basket—I mean, you don’t even have to drop it. It just gets old. It gets worn out. I’m kinda seeing now that no one ends up with a lot of eggs.” She made a bitter little laugh. “You sit up at night and you count people who would do you favors if you needed the money bad enough, but things don’t really work like that anymore. It’s all big corporations, and no one’s paying you to sit in on a session ’cause you’re an old friend, you know? You end up hoping someone had their first kiss to a song you wrote or took acid for the first time at one of your shows and then when they strike it, you know, strike it rich or even middle-class, they’ll invite you to come play at their fucking town fair. Their corporate retreats. That’s what I’m doing next week.” She drank some more beer and frowned. “Dental technology conference in Encino. There’s your egg. There’s what’s left of your basket.”

  Silette, bitter and old, wrote in a letter to Jay Gleason: “The detective won’t know what he’s capable of until he encounters a mystery that pierces his own heart. However, I tell you, it isn’t worth it to know. I’d rather be the sorry fucking detective that I was before, and have my daughter back.”

  43

  I FOUND LUCY, THE girl in the white dress, on Facebook by befriending Pete from the Salingers and then his girlfriend, Kim, and through her, Lucy. I did this as Wanda DeVille, a tattoo artist in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Slight adjustments were made to Wanda’s details as needed. She was one of about ten online ghosts I’d invented and maintained. Wanda had 4,289 friends, and she’d been on Facebook nearly since it began.

  Lucy was thirty-two. She played bass in a band that was kind of successful. They were on a major label and their albums sold some copies. On YouTube I found a video.

  There she was. The girl in the white dress. But now she was wearing a blue dress and playing bass on top of a hill. I looked at the tattoos on her arms. Bluebirds—no, blue jays. Birds who screeched and scared away other birds. Surrounding each blue jay was a wreath of roses, thorns and all.

  There was a contact form on her website. In the subject line I wrote: Paul Casablancas. I told her I was a PI investigating his death and would like to meet. Anyone who liked blue jays and thorns wasn’t all bad.

  She wrote back in seven minutes.

  Hey, she wrote. I would LOVE to talk to you.

  She gave me the address for a vintage clothing store on Hayes Street and said she’d be working there every day this week if I wanted to come by.

  I did.

  San Francisco was a city a little in love with itself, and sometimes its inflated self-esteem rubbed off on its citizens. Eric Von Springer, née Eric Horowitz, was famous, at least in San Francisco, for being handsome and wearing vintage suits and having a waxed mustache and smoking little Indian bidis and doing interesting things. Once a year he put on a show of vintage horror movies at the Castro. He produced a music festival at Adventure Park in Berkeley every summer. He had a small company that released DVDs of silent films.

  I met Eric at his place in Albany, north of Berkeley, a little Deco bungalow filled with monster toys and film canisters and movie posters. He smoked a bidi and wore a hat I couldn’t quite classify and a trim gray suit. I’d told him I was looking into Paul’s murder. We’d met before a few times but briefly: once after a movie at the Red Vic and then again at a party in Noe Valley and then some other night, some other time.

  “So you were friends with Paul, right?” Eric asked. We sat in his living room. “I used to go out with his friend Lindsey. You know Lindsey, right?” he said. “From the Trunk Murderesses?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Aren’t you friends with Ray Broderick, too?”

  “Oh, yeah. He’s in Sweden now. You know Cooper, right?”

  “Cooper Daily?”

  “Cooper Jones? That guy who does the book fair.”

  “Oh yeah, right,” I said. “He always has good stuff. I got these cool vintage criminology books from him last year.”

  We looked at each other for a minute.

  “And you know Lydia Nunez,” I said.

  He tried to look innocent. I gave him a give-it-a-rest look. He groaned and shook his head.

  “Jesus,” he said. “Does everyone know?”

  “Nah,” I said. “I’m a detective. I know lots of stuff other people don’t know.”

  “Jesus,” he said again. He lit another bidi. “Well, I guess there’s no point in lying about it now. What do you want to know?”

  “The basics,” I said. “You can start from the beginning.”

  He let out a big heavy sigh. “Okay. So, Lydia and me, we’ve known each other, like, forever. And, you know, I’ve pretty much had a thing for her the entire time. Something about her—I swear, I have had a thing for
this woman since, like, the nineties. You know, she’s smart, beautiful, the whole package. But I was with someone, then she was with someone, and I never thought she was that into me anyway. We flirted, but that was kind of her thing, and I think that was as far as it went with her. But I liked her. A lot. I mean, I gladly would have ended many relationships to be with her.”

  Eric seemed like a man who liked women.

  “Anyway,” he said, bringing himself back to the timeline. “So, I have all these feelings, and Lydia gets married. Which is okay because probably nothing was going to happen anyway, right? So, I resign myself to this, this married thing, and it’s cool. Then one night, we were showing Cemetery Man at this place in Oakland, and she’s there with her friend Carolyn. So we watch the movie, the projector keeps breaking down, whatever. Afterward, I go to talk to her, and Lydia is, you know . . . I don’t know if she was exactly flirting, but there’s something there. So we go to this bar in downtown Oakland, this dive I know. And, shit.” He sighed. “I am really not into breaking people’s marriage vows.” He sighed again. “And believe me, I got what I deserved.”

  He lit another bidi and shook his head, looking at something invisible in between him and the wall. He blew smoke at the invisible thing.

  “So it didn’t last?” I asked.

  He shook his head slowly. “It did not last,” he said to the wall. “We got together that night, and the next morning—” He twisted his mouth to the side and paused for a long time. “I woke up and she was on the phone with Paul. Screaming. Fighting. I mean, you know. I don’t think it’s like she had no feelings for me. I think she—I don’t know. Fuck it.”

  I didn’t have to be a detective to tell he still thought about it. A lot.

  “So what was her deal?” I asked. “What was she doing?”

  He shrugged. There was a bitter little frown on his face. “I don’t know. Maybe I do. I mean, look, I’ve been with a lot of women. I think I kind of get women.” I thought he kind of got women too. “And Lydia, until we slept together, I didn’t get that she—she’s one of those women who thrives on the attention, you know? On being chased. I think she loves those scenarios where some guy, some guy like me, will go to the fucking end of the earth to get her. But she’s not that interested in the next part of the story. The happily ever after. That’s like the longueur in the story to her.”