Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway (22 page)

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.”

“What’s a long—longue—” I tried to ask.

“
Longueur
,” Eric said again, with a slight French accent. “It’s like the long boring part in a story no one wants to read.”

He looked at me.

“Didn’t you and Paul used to . . .”

I nodded. “Yeah. A long time ago.”

“You know, if you and him had stayed together, none of this—” He stopped himself and looked at me, shamefaced.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to say that. I’m so sorry.”

“No,” I said. “No, of course. No worries. Can I use your bathroom?”

He pointed the way. In the bathroom was a framed poster of Bela Lugosi as Dracula. I turned on the faucet and then took a bag of cocaine from my purse and used my house key to do one bump, and then another. I looked in Eric’s medicine cabinet and hit gold: a nearly full script of thirty Percocets. Eric Von Springer, née Horowitz, thank God for your oral surgery. Thank the angels for your bad teeth and diseased gums. I couldn’t remember how many milligrams were good, so I started with one pill and then on second thought took another, and then stuck the rest of the bottle in my purse.

I felt my head buzz and I lay down on the cool white tile floor. It smelled like pine. I wondered how anyone’s bathroom floor could be so clean. Maybe they cleaned it. My mind raced.

Eric wouldn’t kill anyone over a woman. He liked Lydia, but he liked a lot of us. I couldn’t imagine that any single one was irreplaceable to him.

Eric knocked on the door. “Claire? Um, sorry. Are you okay in there?”

I thought about how much cocaine it would take to overdose. I thought about the last time I ate, which may have been the day before sometime. The white tile was cold and the whiteness made me want more drugs. I wondered if I could get some without sitting up, and I thought yes, probably. I reached for my purse and with a little shifting of my shoulders, it worked.

“Claire? Claire, are you in there?”

I sniffed one bump more and after it rushed through my sinuses my heart fluttered in my chest, skipping a beat or two. It felt good. It felt exciting. Like it could change me. Improve me.

If I’d stayed with Paul, maybe he would have died anyway. Maybe I would have killed him. But slowly, and a little bit at a time, and we’d both still be around to watch me do it.

Eventually Eric broke into the bathroom and kicked me out and then I spent the rest of that day and most of the night driving around the city. With each day that passed something ugly was growing in me. I watched it grow. I fed it cocaine. I loved it and held on to it, kept it alive. Something had died, but maybe what had replaced it would be better. Maybe this was how people lived, normal people who weren’t me.

Samsa¯ra
was one name for the wheel of life and death, the stupidity we wander through, lost, until we find enlightenment and get to join with the divine. All the shit that hurts so much. The big things like death and loss and pain and also just the everyday grind of eating and sleeping and wanting and wanting and wanting—that was samsa¯ra. You were supposed to want to get out of it. You were supposed to look for the exit, the golden ticket that could take you to the chocolate factory. Escape from New York. This way to the egress.

I took a corner too sharp. I pulled over to take a break and do another bump. After I felt it hit my sinuses, icy and shaking, I remembered that I’d already done too much, and decided not to do anymore. I felt my membranes burn and a little trickle of hot blood drip from my nose.

Some people took the bodhisattva vow. The vow that, even if enlightened, they would continue to incarnate wherever they were needed the most—earth, hell, purgatory, wherever. Constance had taken the vow. People acted like bodhisattvas were all so fucking selfless, but I figured half of them just liked it better here. Heaven for climate, hell for company.

I remembered I’d forgotten to eat again.

I figured half the bodhisattvas liked it better here and the other half were scared to leave, so they pretended to care about the rest of us. They didn’t give a shit. They were just scared to go. Just as scared as everyone else of giving up their worst self. The self they knew the best.

Which I figured was pretty much what had happened with Lydia and Paul.

T
HE PERSON I IMAGINED
as Lucy—the person I’d seen in the video—was probably very close to who Lucy used to be. I imagined a woman who smiled often. A woman who would dance by herself to a song no one else loved.

That was before Paul died.

Now, even the way she sat on a high stool behind a cash register was angry—one leg swinging over the other, shoulders pulling in to surround her heart. She was behind the counter in her friend’s vintage clothing store, surrounded by piles of beaded sweaters and spangly purses.

I drank a kombucha that I hoped would settle my stomach. After a few hours of tossing and turning the night before, I’d gotten up and made myself eat some toast for breakfast. Then I did some more coke and threw up.

“Lydia was completely fucking cheating on him,” she said, leg kicking the counter in front of her. “Some guy she shared a rehearsal space with. Or maybe their bands rehearsed in the same place. Something like that.”

The room spun a little, and for a very fast second I wondered if we were on a boat. The room settled and it passed.

“So Paul knew?” I asked.

“Paul totally knew,” she said. “And that guy was
not
the first.”

“Who was the first?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But it had been going on for a while.”

“What was it like,” I asked. “I mean. Their relationship. Was there something particular, some one problem, or—”

“You know what it was?” Lucy said, pointing at nothing, angry. “They would rather be miserable. I swear to God. You know, it was, honestly, it was kind of fucking sickening after a while. Breaking up, getting back together. Treating each other like that.”

“Like what?” I asked.

Lucy gave me a mistrustful look and I wondered if she might be a little crazy. I knew I was not entirely lucid myself.

“You know,” she said, “couples who just drag each other down like that. Down and down and down.”

That was a pretty good description of talking to Lucy. She was a black hole, pulling everything and everyone in with her as she collapsed.

“Supposedly they had this big love,” she said. “Gigantic. Like the song. Supposedly they were this perfect fucking couple. Well, nothing is so perfect. Not like
that.
”

“No,” I said. “It’s not. Did Paul—I mean, other than you, I mean—”

“You mean did he sleep with other girls?” bitter, angry Lucy finished for me. “I have no idea. Not while we were seeing each other. He broke it off just a few weeks before he died. Wanted to try to work things out with
her.
That
worked out great.”

I looked around the room. Maybe I saw a mouse run behind a rack of dresses and maybe I didn’t.

“I hate this job,” she said all of a sudden. “My song is on all these fucking charts and somehow I still have a day job. I never thought I’d be doing this again. My old label sold half as many records and I made twice as much money. Biggest mistake of my life.”

“Is there something you would hate less?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I just want to be done with this shit.” Her eyes were bright, not in a good way, and I wondered again if she was a little crazy. “This whole never-quite-making-a-living shit. This whole touring nine months of the year and then coming back to this shit two months later. It used to be worth it. Now everyone keeps telling us to put our shit out ourselves and sell it on the Internet. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to do any of it.”

She hugged herself.

“When you’re young it all seems, you know, so cool. Touring and dressing up and makeup and sleeping with whoever you want. And now I’m thirty-four and, you know, I’m broke, and someone I really, really cared about is dead, and I fucking hate my band, and someone I cared about, someone I thought I had a future with—”

She stopped talking and blinked, as if she’d just realized that she’d been saying those words out loud. She shook her head and shrugged, ending a conversation with herself.

I asked her if she wanted to grab a drink. I didn’t like her but Paul had cared about her.

She shook her head.

“I gotta watch the store. Besides,” she said. “I’ve been drinking too much already. As you won’t be surprised to hear.” She laughed.

“Any friend of Paul’s,” I said. “You know. If you ever want to talk or anything. Or just get a drink or whatever.”