Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

by Sara Gran

  “So there’s, like, twenty bands that rehearse there. And she doesn’t date girls, right?” he said, hesitant. We were in my apartment, sitting on the big sofas and drinking a pot of white peony tea I’d made us.

  “Pretty sure not,” I said.

  “And I figure, she likes a certain type of guy, right?”

  “Excellent,” I said.

  “So I eliminated about half of them based on gender and looks and musical taste. I mean, I don’t think she’d date someone in, like, something hippie-ish, right?”

  “Aces,” I said. I was proud of Claude, deducing away while I drove around at night doing nothing.

  “I also eliminated hip-hop, jazz fusion, a yoga thing, and this band that was just kind of screaming. Sound good?”

  “Sounds perfect,” I said.

  “So we’re left with three bands with potential mates for Lydia. The first is a kind of punk band called Scorpio Rising, young for her but in the realm of potentiality, I think. The second is a—”

  “Stop,” I said. “Stop right there.”

  He looked a question at me, insecurity on his face.

  “You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. “It’s the opposite. You’ve done everything right. But now you’re presenting me with three, when I think, in your heart, there’s one.”

  He made a face like he didn’t know what I was talking about.

  “One,” I said. “You have three. But you know it’s one. Our life depends on this, Claude. The ship is sinking and you are picking a lifeboat. There is a gun pointed at your head and one chamber is loaded.”

  He frowned.

  “Just tell me,” I said. “I won’t be mad if you’re wrong. But I will be mad if you lie.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Really.” But then he got a look on his face I’d never seen before and he said: “Scorpio Rising.”

  “Are you sure?” I said. “Remember, the gun is pointed at us. One bullet. You got it right?”

  He looked at me and I saw something in him change.

  “I’m sure,” he said. “It’s the Scorpio Rising.”

  I knew he was right. In the middle of the night last night, in the hotel in Santa Cruz, I’d gotten up to go to the bathroom. When I came back I saw something I hadn’t noticed before: a scorpion tattoo curled into the lower back of the girl I’d just slept with.

  Claude and I looked at Scorpio Rising’s Facebook page. They were attractive and unoriginal, young men with good looks and marketable anger. They were playing in Oakland tomorrow night. I would be there.

  Eighty-eight days after Paul died I did what I’d been doing almost every night lately: driving around the city, stopping for a drink a few times, finishing up yesterday’s coke, and buying more from a guy I knew in the Mission. Adam. He folded his drugs up in pages from National Geographic. “The Condor’s Last Flight.” “Man’s Search for Gold.” “The Magic Muds of Iberia.” Adam was a million years old and lived in a dingy little place on Valencia that he’d had since time began. He sold me an eight ball for a good price—he remembered me from the Case of the Liminal Landlord, which was why he could live in that apartment forever. Some people remember but most don’t. Most people will tell you every day that you are wrong. Most people will look at you as if every case is your first. Most people will forget that you know. That sometimes, not always, you know what’s real.

  Even you, yourself, will at times forget this. Until the truth is so painful to bury in your chest that it escapes and spills onto the floor, bloody and red, and you have nothing left to hide.

  Tracy called, I remembered, driving up the Embarcadero. It was ten. No, midnight. Two. Three. I floated past the Ferry Building, skimmed under the bridge, turned around, and went back toward Chinatown and didn’t remember why.

  No, not Tracy. Kelly. I checked my voice mail.

  Mumble mumble call me about this Cynthia Silverton thing mumble mumble.

  I drove out to Oakland and rang Bix’s doorbell. He didn’t answer. I rang again and then a few more times. He came to the door with a baseball bat, like a suburban dad whose daughter had come home with a Hell’s Angel.

  He didn’t drop the bat when he saw me. Just sighed.

  “Come on,” I said. “Just let me look.”

  “It’s three o’clock,” he said.

  “It’s not like you were doing anything,” I said. “Come on. I’ll pay you.”

  I opened my wallet. It was empty.

  “Next time,” I said. “I’ll pay you next time.”

  He stood at ease and let the bat droop down to the floor.

  “This is not the best time,” he said.

  “If we wait for the best time,” I explained, “things rarely get done.”

  “I have a friend over,” he said.

  “You could sell me the comics,” I said. “Or even just lend them to me. Then I’d never come over again.”

  He sighed again.

  “I know,” I said. “You’d miss me.”

  “No,” he said. “I really wouldn’t.”

  He sighed a third time. Three’s a charm.

  “Come in,” he said. “You’re going to have to read in the bedroom. I need some privacy.”

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t like the bedroom?” I asked as we climbed the stairs.

  “We’re not there yet,” he said.

  He let us into his place. A pretty girl in a yellow dress was sitting on the sofa. She wore black cat-eye glasses and tennis shoes. She looked at me like I was Bix’s mom.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m Aunt Claire.”

  She gave me a confused smile and a little half-wave. “Hey,” she said.

  Bix set me up in his bedroom with the books. I lay on his bed, which he’d made carefully, hoping to get lucky with the girl in the yellow dress, and picked a book at random. Book number 13. I remembered this one. I skipped the comic and went right to the Cynthia Silverton Mystery. Alongside the story was an ad for a PI School in Nevada. Hey, kids, how would you like to make a living as a REAL detective?

  I thought I’d like that very much.

  “How do we solve mysteries?” Cynthia said to Professor Gold. “If all that science is for squares—well, how do we get people to confess? How can we solve mysteries?”

  I heard music coming from the other room, something classical. As I read I could practically see it play out in my head: Professor Gold, smug with his pipe and his wisdom, Cynthia in her robin’s-egg blue summer dress, sitting in Cynthia’s spotless midcentury living room in Falling Rapids. A fire burned in the fireplace. A cool early-summer evening.

  “Good question!” the professor said with a sly smile. “This is where a professional detective can really distinguish herself, Cynthia. You know what it means to make an offering, right? A sacrifice that we make for others?”

  “You mean like how on my altar I offer incense and water to the tertons who’ve come before us?” Cynthia asked, sipping her illegally obtained martini.

  Professor Gold stood up and headed toward the fireplace. He knocked his pipe against the stone, letting out the ashes.

  “Exactly,” he said. “But there’s other kinds of offerings too. Not just incense or water. When you give of yourself, when you—but no, Cynthia. I’ll let you put it together!”

  Cynthia smiled an anxious smile. Was she up for the challenge?

  “Well . . .” Cynthia began, hesitating. “I could. I mean.” She frowned. This was tougher than it seemed! “I could offer them money,” she mused. “But they can steal that whenever they want. I could offer them myself, but, as you know, I’m saving myself for Dick! Boy, Professor Gold, I give up!”

  The professor smiled at Cynthia, his favorite student. He reached into the pocket of his blazer and pulled out a little pocketknife, handle made of deer antler. He opened the knife and cut open his chest. He started under his neck and cut down, not at the center but on his left, until his flesh hung open down to the bottom of his ribs. Then, pushing aside the bones, he reac
hed in and took out his heart. Holding his heart in both hands, he held it out to Cynthia. Blood dripped onto the carpet.

  Cynthia laughed and squealed with delight. “I get it now!” she said. “Oh, thank you, Professor Gold, I get it now—I really do!”

  49

  Brooklyn

  HELL WAS ON THE FAR West Side in the twenties. The block was a busy hooker stroll. The streetwalkers in Brooklyn wore dated blue jeans and parkas and looked like homeless women, which many of them were. The fancy hookers in Manhattan looked like hookers in movies, with big hair and makeup and high heels and short shorts. Some just wore lingerie, teddies and merry widows and garter belts, stomping their feet to stay warm.

  The cab let out us out across the street. In the car next to us I saw a man and a woman doing something rhythmic and urgent, something neither of them seemed to be enjoying.

  Hell was dark. The music was loud and it smelled like stale liq-uor and spunk. Along the wall people tied each other up and hit each other. I tried not to look. We wandered around. In another room people rode other people like horses or ponies. One woman rode a man in a black patent outfit, a shiny little black horse. We lingered and watched for a minute. If we hadn’t been on a case it might have been funny.

  It didn’t bother me until we got to the room with the needles. The room with blood.

  The music throbbed. I felt something on me, something on my arm, my hair. Before I could turn around I heard Tracy say, “Get your fucking hands off her. Don’t you touch her.”

  “Sorry,” I heard a rough male voice say. Everything started to go black around the edges.

  The man was gone and I was sitting on a chair. Someone pushed a glass of cool water against my lips.

  “Drink this,” Tracy said. “You’ll feel better.”

  I drank it and I did feel better. I saw Tracy in front of me. We were in the ladies’ room, sitting in front of the mirrors. Everything became clear again. Under the throb of the music I heard moaning. I turned around. Two sets of high heels shifted in one of the stalls.

  “What happened?” I asked. “Did we find her?”

  Tracy shook her head. “There must be another room,” she said. “A VIP room, something like that.”

  A woman washing her hands—why bother?—at the sinks overheard us. She turned around. She wore a patent-leather corset that left her huge breasts uncovered, matching shorts, and high patent boots. She was in her forties and her hair was long and dark. Something was strange about her, and it took me a minute to place it: she was sober.

  “I don’t know who you’re looking for,” she said. “But there is a private room. Lenny’s office. He’s the owner. It’s like a party room—he only lets his friends in, people he knows, and they can do things there they can’t do here. Does that help?”

  She smiled a sunny smile. I couldn’t quite look at her, at her impossibly old breasts, at the gold rings through her nipples, at her bright smile. But Tracy looked right at her eyes and said, “Thank you so much. That’s a huge help. We’re looking for a friend of ours, actually—maybe you know her.”

  Tracy pulled out her picture of Chloe and showed it to the woman. The woman looked and shook her head.

  “I don’t,” she said. “But she sure looks like Lenny’s type. I’d try his office.”

  The woman gave us directions to the office: behind the bar, up the stairs, door at the end of the hall. But before we left the bathroom she stopped and looked at us and said, “Most people here are pretty nice. If they weren’t, I’d take you to the doorman and get you kicked out. But Lenny—I see that you’re not normal kids. I see that. But he can be tricky, okay? I like to party pretty hard. But he’s not someone I party with. Not anymore. You hear me?”

  We looked at each other and nodded. We heard her. What we’d seen so far had not exactly cheered us.

  “Okay,” she said as she left. “Play safe, kids.”

  We found Lenny’s office exactly where the woman said it would be, at the top of the stairs and down a dark corridor. When we reached the door I felt a chill. I looked at Tracy and I knew she felt it too.

  Chloe was behind that door. I knew it. I felt the cord that bound us, detective and missing girl, hum with tension. There was no turning back, no undoing the cord or untying the knot. For lifetimes, I knew, Chloe and I were bound, whether I found her this time, or the last time, or the next time. She would always be the missing girl and I would always be the detective. And I would be missing and she, the detective, would find me. We were bound together, but we had choices; we could live in heaven together or in hell. Either way we’d be stuck with each other, and the ripples from our choices would change every last word ever said.

  Which was why I was scared to open the door.

  Tracy reached past me and grabbed the door and pulled it open, like ripping off a bandage.

  No one noticed us at first. It was a dingy, dark little bar office like the office of any bar in the world. Like there was one back room and in every bar was a door that somehow opened up to it. At a battered desk sat a man I figured was Lenny, the owner, in sunglasses. In the middle of the room were two women doing—well, I wasn’t exactly sure what they were doing. But one, skinny and pale, was on her hands and knees on the dirty floor. Above her was another woman, standing on her knees, using some kind of—what was she doing?

  I took in the rest of the room. A few scattered chairs. A desk and a beaten sofa. Maybe eight people all together, most of them chattering with that particular grating cocaine-induced pitch. On a small coffee table near the sofa were a few lines of coke cut for whoever wanted them.

  As my eyes adjusted to the light I saw that one of the men on the sofa was CC. He wore the same green velvet suit with no shirt. He sniffed and rubbed his nose and watched the two women in the middle of the room.

  I turned back to the two women and finally I realized what the woman on her knees was holding. It was a knife. She was cutting the woman on all fours beneath her. In the dark room I hadn’t seem the blood right away. She was writing a word on her back, right above her ass, with the knife. So far she’d gotten to BITC.

  Then I realized. The girl getting cut was Chloe.

  Chloe saw us and froze like a wild animal. After a minute she sat up and looked at us. Everyone followed her eyes. The woman with the knife stopped cutting. She was a brunette, thin but curvier than Chloe, and she looked like she was enjoying what she was doing. Chloe stood up, stumbling a few times on her way.

  Chloe was rail thin and her ribs poked out from under her top. Her hips protruded sharply around the tiny thong and garter belt she wore, both cheap and already a bit ratty.

  “You,” she said, accusingly, as if she’d half been expecting us. As if we’d already fought about all of this and she’d won. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  She laughed. It became clear she was bombed, maybe drunk or more likely on heroin.

  “You guys wanna get in?” Chloe waved Tracy over to the spot she had just abdicated in the middle of the room. “You wanna go next?”

  I stood still, frozen. A million thoughts ran through my head. But none was true; each was only an evasion, a distraction, my own reaction to what I was seeing.

  “We—” Tracy began. But her voice faltered.

  “We came—” I started.

  “To find you,” Tracy said, her voice thin and weak. “We were looking for you.”

  “Find me?” Chloe said. She laughed without smiling. She and CC looked at each other and they both laughed. Chloe wobbled a little on her feet, teetering on her heels. She half walked, half tripped onto the sofa. CC caught her and they laughed.

  “Find me?” she said again. “Right. I forgot. You guys have your little girl detective thing. That book or whatever.” She turned to CC. “They’re into some book,” she explained. “Some book about solving mysteries. They think they’re detectives or some shit like that.”

  “I got something you can find,” Lenny quipped. “It’s in my pocket.
”

  Everyone laughed again.

  Chloe gave us a look that would have made anyone squirm.

  Anyone except Tracy.

  “Reena said,” she began. “Reena asked us to find you.”

  Chloe made a face like she’d tasted something bad.

  “That bitch,” she said. “I just, you know.” For a split second she looked like she might cry, but it passed as quickly as it came. “Fuck her. Asshole. Working all the time. Fucking priss. Fucking little Miss Perfect.”

  “She was worried,” Tracy said, regaining her voice. “Worried about you.”

  “Yeah, well, as you can see,” Chloe said bitterly, “I don’t need any rescuing. So, you know, unless you want to get a drink and hang out . . .”

  Everyone laughed again.

  “Are you really detectives?” one of the other men said. “You really solve mysteries?”

  I tried to say Yes, yes, we do. But I opened my mouth and nothing came out.

  “Nice seeing you,” Chloe said, sobering up, her voice like an icicle. She waved a hand at us. “Bye-bye, girls.”

  Blood ran down her arm from an earlier cut. A smear of blood was on her hip.

  “You can come with us,” I said with all the effort I could find. “If you want. We can take you home, right now.”

  My voice sounded small and tinny, even to me. Everyone laughed again.

  “Go screw yourself,” Chloe said. She looked away, at the wall. “Just go fuck yourselves.”

  Tracy opened her mouth and closed it again.

  No one looked at us, and everyone went back to their private conversations, their drugs, their personal dramas. Chloe closed her eyes and put a hand over them, as if she was scared of seeing us again when she opened them.

  Tracy and I looked at each other. Neither of us had anything to say.