Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway (2 page)

That night I dreamed about Lydia for the first time. I was standing on the roof of my apartment building, surrounded by black, inky water. White stars glittered in the black sky above.

I watched Lydia drown.

“Help!” she screamed. Black muck was streaked on her face and matted her hair. “Help me!”

But I didn’t help. Instead I lit a cigarette and watched her drown. Then I put on a pair of thick black-rimmed glasses and watched her drown more closely.

“The client already knows the solution to his mystery,” Jacques Silette wrote. “But he doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t hire a detective to solve his mystery. He hires a detective to prove that his mystery can’t be solved.

“This applies equally, of course, to the detective herself.”

Two or three days later Lydia got my number from Eli and called me. We talked for a while about Eli and other people we knew in common and then got around to the real reason she’d called.

“So, are you sure you don’t mind?” she asked. “About me and Paul? Because we both really like you and—”

“No,” I said. “Of course I don’t mind. Me and Paul weren’t—”

“Oh, I know,” Lydia said. “I would never—I mean, if you’d still been—”

“No,” I said. “Really. So are you guys still—”

“Oh my God,” Lydia said. “I’ve seen him like every day. It’s been great.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said.

“Do you really think so?” Lydia said. “Do you really think it’s wonderful?”

Did I really think it was wonderful?
Wonderful
was probably an exaggeration. I thought it was fine. Maybe even good. I couldn’t say the last time I thought anything was exactly
wonderful.
That implied more joy than I may ever have felt. But that was what she wanted to hear.

“Yes,” I told her. “Of course. I think it’s
wonderful.
”

Lydia and Paul started a new band together, Bluebird. After a year or so Bluebird broke up and they each started their own bands again; Paul started a Rom-ish, Klezmer-ish outfit called Philemon and Lydia started a bluesy, roots-y, Harry Smith–inspired punk band called the Anthologies. I saw each band once or twice. They were good. Better than good. I saw Paul and Lydia together at an Anthologies show and they seemed happy, smiling and supportive and generally kind of joyous. And when they got married, one year later, they sent me a sterling silver magnifying glass from Tiffany’s, a kind of bridesmaid’s gift even though I wasn’t a bridesmaid.
Thank you
, the card with the glass said. I wasn’t sure if they were thanking me for introducing them or for stepping aside so gracefully.

I was invited to the wedding but I was in L.A. on the Case of the Omens of No Tomorrow. It was a good magnifying glass and I used it often until two years later when, stuck in Mexico City with no passport and no ID and little cash, I pawned it to pay a coyote named Francisco to smuggle me across the border.

Nothing lasts forever. Everything changes.

Maybe Lydia and Paul’s story wasn’t a series of words that had already been printed in ink. Maybe it was a novel they would write themselves. Maybe it could even have a happy ending.

Or maybe it would be just another crime story where someone kills somebody else and nobody pays and it’s never really over. “Mysteries never end,” Constance Darling, Silette’s student, told me once. “And I always thought maybe none of them really get solved, either. We only pretend we understand when we can’t bear it anymore. We close the file and close the case, but that doesn’t mean we’ve found the truth, Claire. It only means that we’ve given up on this mystery and decided to look for the truth someplace else.”

January 18, 2011

I’
D SPENT THE NIGHT
in Oakland, in the redwood forests in the hills high above the city, talking with the Red Detective. He said he smelled change coming. For him, for me, for all of us. He pulled tarot cards, and no matter how many times we shuffled we got Death.

“I’m not sayin’ it’s anything more than a change,” the Red Detective said. “I’m just sayin’ it’s gonna be one hell of a shakeup.”

At two or three I drove back to my place in San Francisco and took off my clothes and crawled into bed in a T-shirt and underwear, twigs and leaves still in my hair.

At five o’clock the phone rang. I didn’t plan on answering it, but my hands picked it up all the same.

“Claire?”

The voice on the other end was brusque and female and I didn’t recognize it.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Hey. It’s Detective Huong from the SFPD.”

I knew Madeline Huong. She was all right, as far as cops went. At least she tried. That was more than you could say about most people these days.

“What’s up?” I asked. My mind was blank, still not quite awake.

“I’ve got bad news,” she said. “I’m sorry to have to tell you. There’s been a murder.”

“Who?” I said. But then suddenly black flashed before my eyes and I knew.

“Paul Casablancas,” we said at the same time.

“What?” she said. “What did you say?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Well, anyway, I’m sorry,” Huong said again. “I saw your number in the wife’s phone and I figured you’d. You know. Not everyone . . .”

She meant that I was accustomed to death, that I would know what to do and who to call and I wouldn’t faint or cry.

She was right.

“Claire? Claire?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m here.”

“If you could come down to the scene. We’re at his house. The wife, she could use someone.”

“Lydia,” I said. “Her name is Lydia. And yeah, I’ll be there soon.”

I hung up with Huong and called Claude. He’d been my assistant since I came back from the Case of the Green Parrot in New Orleans. I didn’t need an assistant because my workload was so big. I needed an assistant because so much of it was boring. Looking up credit card statements, making phone calls, going to city hall to check the bill of sale on a house, following up on miniature horse feed distributors—I was tired of it.

Claude was the latest in a string of assistants I’d hired and then fired over the years. Or would have fired, if they hadn’t quit first. Claude was a good worker, smart, loyal, and with an encyclopedic knowledge of Medieval economics, which came in handier than you might think.

On the night Paul died Claude picked up his phone on the fifth ring. He’d been sleeping.

“There’s been a murder,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, unsure. “Is this how we do this now?” Usually we didn’t get involved in a case until a bunch of other people had already had their hand in it and screwed up. No one called a private detective, especially not me, until every rational option had been explored and dismissed. Like an exorcist or a feng shui consultant. I’d never called Claude in the middle of the night to start a new case before.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think I just wanted to say that.”

I didn’t tell him the person who’d been murdered was Paul. That it was someone I knew.

“Do you want me to go somewhere?” Claude said. “Wait, I think I’m supposed to say, ‘Meet you at the scene,’ or ‘I’ll be there in five,’ and then hang up. I don’t think I can be there in five. But I could be there in like an hour.”

I didn’t say anything.

Paul was dead. Words didn’t seem strong enough to hold that fact. Paul, who’d once made me an origami swan. Paul, who knew every Burmese restaurant in the Bay Area, who spent every Sunday at flea markets, buying speakers and tube testers and ohm meters.

I imagined the big flea market in Alameda, the tube testers sitting there, untouched, unbought, alone.

“No suspects,” I said. “No known motive.”

“Okay,” Claude said. “So, uh. Can I do something to help? Or?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Claire,” Claude said. “Are you okay?”

“Of course,” I said. “Listen, can you start a new file?”

“Sure,” he said. “What are we calling it?”

“The Case of . . .”

I closed my eyes and saw something against my eyelids—a bird fluttering, fireworks exploding, a ghost. According to one school of thought we were in the Kali Yuga, a long stretch of time that might be as short as a hundred thousand years or as long as a million, depending on who you asked. In other yugas we have been, and will be, better-looking and kinder and taller and we won’t kill each other all the time. The sky will be clear and the sun will shine. But in the Kali Yuga every virtue is engulfed in sin. All the good books are gone. Everyone marries the wrong person and no one is content with what they’ve got. The wise sell secrets and sadhus live in palaces. There’s a demon named Kali; he loves slaughterhouses and gold. He likes to gamble and he likes to fuck things up.

In this yuga, we never know anything until it’s too late, and the people we love are the last people to tell us the truth. We’re blind, stumbling toward what’s real without eyes to see or ears to hear. Someday, in another yuga, we’ll wake up and see what we have done and we’ll cry a river of tears for our own stupid selves.

“Claire?” Claude said. “Claire, are you okay?”

“Of course,” I said. “I’m fine. And it’s the Case of the Kali Yuga.”

When Claude walked into my apartment for the first time he looked like he had never had a good day in his life. He wore a jacket and shirt and clean blue jeans and real shoes, not sneakers. That told you something positive right there. He was thin and handsome—my guess was one parent with ancestors in Japan and another with history in Africa, with a few different coasts of Europe thrown in, and later I found out I was right.

I interviewed him.

“You’re a student, right?”

“I’m getting my PhD,” Claude said. “Medieval history.”

“So let’s say we’re on a case,” I said. “I call at five in the morning to bounce some ideas around. Is that going to pose a problem for you?”

“Absolutely not,” Claude said, still not smiling. “I am an idea guy. Anytime. Always happy to bounce ideas around. Or, you know, do stuff. That’s also good. I can do stuff.”

He didn’t sound so sure about doing stuff.

“Why are you getting a PhD?” I asked him. “And why do you want this job?”

He sighed.

“I thought that was what I wanted,” he said. “I mean the PhD. Berkeley. I thought that was what I wanted since I was, like, fifteen. This is exactly it. And now I’m here, and—” He looked around the room and furrowed his brow. “I don’t think it’s what I want,” he said. “I mean, I’m not giving it up. Not yet. I’ve put too much work into it. And I’m in a really, really good place right now professionally. Academically. But I don’t think it’s what I want.” Claude threw his hands up in the air as if he were talking about someone else, someone crazy, a man he could not understand. “I think I want to be a detective,” he said.

“A detective,” I said. “Why?”

“I have no idea,” Claude said. “Sometimes I think it’s what I always wanted. It just seemed too . . . too—”

“Unprofitable?” I suggested.

“Yes,” he said. “But also—”

“Dangerous?” I said.

“Maybe,” he said. “But also just—”

He held out a hand to stop me when I opened my mouth.

“Just,” he went on, “unrealistic. I mean, everyone wants to do it, right? I figured the competition must be just, you know, astronomical. And me with no experience, not even insurance investigations or anything. But when I heard you were looking for someone, I figured I might as well try. I knew the odds were slim. And I know you’re probably interviewing people much more qualified than me. But, life is short. I figured—I mean—”

Claude frowned.

“In 2001,” he said, and all of a sudden I knew he was telling the truth, and he had never said it out loud before. “I was doing research in the library at Stanford. And somehow I ended up in the criminology department—I think I was looking for penal codes in fifteenth-century Russia. And this book, this little paperback. It was like—I know this sounds stupid. But it was like it fell off the shelf right by my feet. And I picked it up and opened it and I read this line: ‘Above all, the inner knowing of the detective trumps every piece of evidence, every clue, every rational assumption. If we do not put it first and foremost, always, there is no point in carrying on, in detection or in life.’”

The room was quiet. We were in my apartment in Chinatown. I had the top floor of a building on Ross Alley. Beneath me were three stories of light industry and immigrant housing, nearly all of it illegal. My place was big, close to fifteen hundred square feet, and served as both a home and an office. Or neither.

My best friend, Tracy, had found the same book in my parents’ house when we were younger than seemed possible now. The book that would save our lives and ruin them.

Even the noise of the street outside was hushed as Claude talked about the moment he became Claude. Only he didn’t know it then, and I could see he still didn’t know it now.

“I don’t know,” he said. He sounded sad and maybe a little angry. “I don’t even know what it means. It was like—like what everyone’s always told me? Like the things they tell you to do, you know? All of that. I don’t know how to say it. I mean, it’s like coming down here, to Chinatown, and you see the signs but they’re all in a different language, and it’s just like your life but it’s—like it’s out of register, or in another time. Another yuga. Like, all my life, you know, you walk out of the house every day and turn right. And then one day you realize, left was always there too, only you never saw it, and instead of ending up in Berkeley, you’re in Chinatown. Or China. Like that dream when you’re in the house you grew up in and there’s a secret room no one told you about, you know? And it was like everyone knew about it and no one told you. Like that. And all around you, still, no one sees it. It’s like they don’t even know it’s there. Or they know, but they’d just rather not know at all. Like they just, you know, like insects. Like a hive. Does that make sense? Does that make any sense at all?”

“Yes,” I said. “It does.”

“So I checked the book out of the library,” Claude continued, upset. “To be honest, I never gave it back. Which I guess is technically stealing, but. I mean, it hadn’t been checked out since 1974. And ever since then—I know this sounds crazy—I wanted to be a detective.”