Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway (20 page)

“Ace!” CC called. “Do you want to kick these little bitches out or do I get to do it?”

“Try, you fucking piece of—” Tracy began, but Ace was already on his way to us. Firmly, without unnecessary violence, he put a hand on each of us and pushed us toward the door.

“Believe me,” he whispered. “Just leave. I’ll call her roommate if I see Chloe, okay?” He had dark stubble and smelled like a man.

“And if I catch you hanging out front waiting for him,” Ace whispered as he pushed us out the door, “I’ll kick your little asses myself.”

W
E ADMITTED DEFEAT
and took the M back to the Lower East Side. We started at a bar on the corner of First and First. Tracy had a plan and it was a good one. We knew the bartender a little, a guy named Greg who used to drink and play in punk bands and now just drank. He was young—not yet twenty-five—but his life seemed laid out for him, a highway he would speed down to bad relationships and street life and an early death.

Tracy and I got shots of tequila from Greg and bought one for him.

“Oh my God,” Tracy said, as we’d arranged. “I saw Vanishing Center at International Bar last night. Just, like, hanging out drinking. I kept trying to get CC’s attention, but he barely noticed me.”

“Ew,” I said, according to script. “He’s gross! You like him?”

“I think he’s cute!” Tracy protested. “You know him, don’t you, Greg?”

“Yeah,” Greg said, a little proud of his association.

“Can I have another shot?” she asked. “Where does he live?”

An hour later we were slightly drunk and knew a lot more about CC. He’d been evicted from his apartment two weeks ago. Which was a squat. I didn’t know you could be evicted from a squat. Soon we were at the squat, talking to a guy with a tall mohawk, wearing red plaid pants and a leather jacket and no shirt. It was on Seventh between C and D. The guy with the mohawk smelled like he had never taken a bath and was kind of cute anyway. Or maybe because of it. The building was an old tenement, not in substantially worse shape than some of the other tenements in the neighborhood, except there didn’t seem to be any doors, anywhere, and the walls were covered in graffiti.

“I mean, Jesus,” Mohawk Guy said. His chest under the jacket was white and smooth. “You can imagine what it takes to get kicked out of here.”

“Yeah,” Tracy said. “What
did
it take?”

We were sitting on dirty sofas in a kind of living room in a kind of apartment. When we knocked on the door a beautiful, filthy girl a year or two older than us let us in. When we said we were asking about CC, she rolled her eyes and called for the man with the mohawk. She called him Boss Man.

“The first thing was, he shit on the floor,” the Mohawk Guy said. “I mean, we don’t have many rules here, but that’s one I’m okay with. I mean, the toilets are backed up a lot, but, you know, shit in the trash can or something. Jesus.”

“I know,” Tracy said. “Jesus.”

Tracy had the amazing ability to drag anyone into conversation, to make anyone feel as if she was on their side and in complete sympathy with their experience. Like she too had experienced the shitting on the floor versus using the trash can dilemma.

“And then,” Mohawk said, “there was the whole thing with the razorblade.” His hands were big and the ends of his fingers were square. His hands looked older than his chest.

“Right,” Tracy said. “What exactly happened with that?”

“All I’m saying,” Mohawk Guy said, “is blood is
not
cool. I mean, you don’t know who’s got what around here, you know? You want to play with knives, fine. Not on people’s beds, man.”

“Wow,” Tracy said.

“Wow,” I agreed.

“I know,” Mohawk Guy said.

“So you have no idea where he is now?” I asked.

“Sorry,” Mohawk guy said. “I mean, I seen him around from time to time, but I pretty much try to avoid him. He’s bad news. Hey. So my band is playing at Hell on Sunday. If you guys aren’t doing anything.”

We knew Hell. It was an S&M club on the west side where punk bands played on the off nights.

“That’s so cool,” Tracy said, and I couldn’t tell if she was still in character or really thought it was cool.

We took a flyer for his show and thanked him for his time and left. We walked back up to Sophie’s and got a beer.

“So,” Tracy said. “We’re back to nothing.”

“Basically,” I said.

“Fundamentally,” Tracy said. “Essentially.”

“Nothing.”

“Less than nothing.”

“Nothing with nothing subtracted.”

“I gotta pee.”

I drank my beer while Tracy went to the bathroom. When she came back she was holding a piece of paper in her hands and smiling.

“What?” I said.

She showed me the piece of paper. It was a flyer.

“It was on the floor,” she said.

THE DELINQUENTS * THE MURDER VICTIMS
JUNKIE WHORE * VANISHING CENTER
TOMPKINS SQUARE PARK FRIDAY
. . .

It was Friday. The show was tonight.

“Look,” she said. “We found CC.”

I smiled. “Wow,” I said. “We really are the greatest detectives in the world, aren’t we?”

San Francisco

T
HAT NIGHT I WENT
to the Fan Club with Tabitha. She met me at my place and I drove us to Oakland. Tabitha was wearing a long dress from the seventies that was dirty around the hem from the city streets. Supposedly she was a writer, but really she watched movies and did drugs all day. She’d written a few books that were required reading in college courses—a book on film noir, a book on detective fiction—and the royalties kept her afloat. It seemed like she kept getting advances for new books but never wrote one. Maybe it was just one advance for one book that she’d stretched out for years.

The Fan Club was just outside of downtown Oakland, in a neighborhood where the police wouldn’t mind an after-hours club too much. It was a typical gambling joint: dark, bad music—in this case bad hip-hop and R&B—and full of people who work nights: prostitutes, waiters and waitresses, bartenders, strippers, shift workers, filmmakers. There was a bar and gambling tables—poker, roulette, and craps—and that was about it.

The ladies’ room was like an addict’s fantasy of a ladies’ room. Stalls with toilets that had actual tanks, with solid white tops, which you likely could have snorted clean to good effect. The sinks were freestanding types, but along another wall a kind of shelf at shoulder height provided the perfect venue for even more cocaine, which two ladies were taking of advantage of as we entered.

The two women, one white and one black, were past thirty and my guess was they were working girls on a date, their man or men busy in the main room. Or, more likely, in the men’s room. Whoever they were, they had high heels and a lot of makeup and leather jackets and hair that had taken hours and a lot of money. The black woman had a gold cap over her front tooth with a five-pointed star cut out.

Tabitha wasn’t shy.

“Where’d you get that?” she asked right away. She was asking about the coke, not the tooth. “Do you think you could introduce us? Is that Albert’s? Is he here?”

There was a reason I’d invited Tabitha. The white girl held out a rolled-up twenty to her.

“Go on,” she said. “You can get the next one.”

Tabitha smiled and helped herself to a long, deep snort. She passed the ersatz straw to the black girl, who held it out to me. I took a fair enough serving.

“Oh my God,” Tabitha said. “This is really, really good.”

“You know Albert?” one woman said.

Tabitha nodded. “But this isn’t his,” she said. “This is way better.”

“I’ll introduce you,” the other women said. Sisters under the skin. “You know Julio?”

“In San Mateo?” Tabitha said. “He’s still around?”

They talked cocaine for a while—common acquaintances, after-hours clubs, quality and cuts. Then Tabitha brought the conversation around to our mission.

“We’re actually here because we’re detectives,” Tabitha said. I bristled a little at the
we.
“Not cops. Private eyes. My friend here is investigating a murder case.”

The women’s eyes widened.

“Like
Forty-Eight Hours Mystery
?” the white woman said.

“Exactly like that,” I said, and tried to sound serious and sane like someone on
Forty-Eight Hours Mystery.

“Or that other one,” the black woman said. “
The
First Forty-Eight.
”

I nodded and tried again to look like someone on a TV show who wasn’t the villain. Or the victim. Or the disturbed witness who you believed only because she didn’t seem competent enough to come up with a lie.

“You really a detective?” the black girl said.

“For real,” I said. “That’s what I do.”

“Isn’t taking drugs on a case, like, invalidating?” the white girl said. “Won’t that be, like, inadmissible and shit?”

“Well, psychologically, maybe,” I said. “It could complicate things. But legally, I can kind of do whatever I want. I don’t work for the courts or anything.”

“Wow,” the white girl said. “So, you’re investigating a murder?”

“I sure am,” I said. “Actually, we have reason to believe the victim was here . . .”
The victim, the victim
, I told myself,
no one I know, just a victim.
I paused for dramatic effect “. . . with the murderer.”

The girls each shook a little and almost jumped. Then they both giggled.

“Look,” I said, reaching into my bag. “I’ve actually got a picture of him—”

I took out a picture of Paul that I had found online. He and Lydia holding hands on the street in Los Angeles, circumstances unknown. They looked happy. They looked like two people in love who could possibly stay that way forever. I’d picked it because he was smiling, and you could see his face clearly. He looked like the Paul I knew. Had known.

“Oh,” the black woman said. “Oh, oh, oh. I know her. I mean, I seen her. Poor little thing—she got killed?”

I felt something turn in me, something shift gears. Tabitha noticed and looked at me sideways.

“No,” I said. “Him. The guy.”

“Well, I seen
her
,” the black woman said. “Bought some yay off me, her and her skinny little boyfriend. Cute, but not like that guy.” She pointed a long nail at my phone. “Not a man like him. A boy.”

I felt a shiver up my spine. I didn’t know what it meant. But I knew it didn’t mean anything good.

The white woman shrugged and went back to her cocaine, Tabitha along with her. The black woman looked at me long and hard and I realized she was the smartest person I’d met that day.

“You really a detective?” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Really.”

She looked at me again. “My brother’s up in Quentin. Also murder. Couldn’t find no one else to blame it on so they put it on him.”

“He didn’t do it?” I asked.

The woman gave me a long, tight look. “My brother a fucked-up kid. He did a lot of shit. But not that. I know it for a fact. I know where he was, what he was doing, all that.”

I took out a pen and wrote my phone number on a napkin and gave it to her.

“Call me,” I said. “Maybe I can help.”

The woman looked at me.

“Yeah, okay,” she said, wary but wanting to hope. “I just might do that.”

The conversation drifted. Tabitha was having a good time with the girls; I wandered away and came back a few times. I talked to a few other people: no one else knew Lydia or Paul. The end of the night rolled around, our last chance to go home before the cold stare of daylight.

I said goodbye to the girls. The white girl gave me a kiss. The black girl didn’t.

We looked at each other.

“You ain’t lying about my brother, are you?” she said. “You gonna help us?”

From my purse I got out a little magnifying glass. Then I took the woman’s hand and looked at it under the glass. Her skin was a little rough and hot and damp.

I used the magnifying glass to read her fingerprints. Her Curl of Sin was strong and pronounced. Her Moon of Pride was deeply grooved. She’d been born under a bad sign, I saw that right away. Nothing but bad luck for her. But her Line of Insight was also strong, and her Gypsy’s Swirl was exceptionally placed.

If she said her brother was innocent, I believed her.

“No,” I said. “I’m not lying. Call me in a few weeks, get everything you have together, and we’ll talk. If I can’t help I’ll find someone who can. I know some lawyers.”

She held back a smile that was too good to be true. I had five hundred bucks in my purse and I took out two and gave it to her for an eighth of an ounce of cocaine.

“Gimme three and I’ll give you a quarter,” she said.

I took out another hundred and handed it to her. She smiled when she handed me the bag.

“That’s some good shit, girl,” she said.

When we left the club I drove us back to the city and dropped Tabitha off and went home. I took a few more stolen sleeping pills and lay in bed until I fell asleep, my mind still chattering and raw.

When I woke up the next day my jaw felt like I’d been chewing on a lamppost all night. I spent the day watching
Monk
reruns, angry at my hangover, angry at myself, angry at the world. My thoughts tasted bitter and sounded like a cheap drum machine.

That night I called Claude and told him what I’d found out. The poker chip had led us to a club that had led us to a boyfriend. Lydia had a boyfriend.

I didn’t blame her for not telling me. I’m sure it didn’t seem like there was much point, now.

“Okay,” Claude said. “So how do I find him?”

“You just do,” I said. “To begin with, we know they met at some point. So look at the places Lydia was likely to meet men. Start there.”

Claude frowned. “Where do women meet men?” he said, as if it were a mysterious question.

“Wherever they see each other,” I said.

Brooklyn

B
Y NINE O’CLOCK
in Tompkins Square Park it was clear things would come to a bad end. To start, the show was illegal; they’d gotten no permits or permission from the city to use the small band shell in the park. The police came up on stage to boos and hisses and screams. After a few minutes of talk with the musicians the cops agreed to let the show go on as long as they were done by midnight. The audience cheered.