Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway (23 page)

She looked at me. “Who are you?” she said. “Are you, like, some kind of a fucking shrink or something?”

“No,” I said. The room spun a little again. Maybe I saw a squirrel run across the room and maybe I didn’t. “I just—”

“I don’t give a shit if you were friends with Paul,” she said, getting louder. “You weren’t such good friends, anyway. He never mentioned you. He never said ‘My friend Claire this’ or ‘My friend Claire that.’ Why are you even here?”

“Because,” I said. “I need to know who killed Paul.”

“Who cares?” Lucy said, almost yelling now. “Jesus. You think that matters? It was a robbery. Who cares?”

“I do,” I said.

“What’s the fucking difference?” the woman yelled. I knew I knew her name, but I couldn’t bring it to mind. “Who fucking cares?” I didn’t remember what she was yelling about anymore. Everything was starting to go red and then black around the edges. “He’s not coming back. Nothing’s bringing him back. Who cares who shot him? You think you’re some kind of fucking detective? Like the countess did it in the drawing room with the poker? I got news for you, lady: No one cares, it doesn’t fucking matter, and in the end he’ll be just as dead.”

I left just before I fainted. The fresh, foggy air revived me. I took a few deep breaths. I was okay. I stumbled to a hamburger stand around the corner and got a hamburger and ate half and felt better.

If it was Lydia who was dead, I would have pegged Lucy in a heartbeat. But she’d seen Paul as her salvation. I couldn’t see her shooting him. And if she had, she’d spill something at the scene or leave her wallet or shoot herself. She was that kind of messy girl.

I checked my phone. There was an email from the lama.
Have u heard from Andray?
I hadn’t.

And there was an email from Sheila, the other woman Paul had dated.

I remembered the book.
A Little Book on the Human Shadow,
by Robert Bly.

Silette wrote: “The detective who pretends not to see the truth is committing something much worse than a mortal sin, which can only ruin her own soul—she is committing all of us to lifetimes of pain. The truth is not just something we bring to light to amuse ourselves; the truth is the
axis mundi
, the dead center of the earth. When it is out of place nothing is right; everyone is in the wrong place; no light can penetrate. Happiness evades us and we spread pain and misery wherever we go. The detective above all others has an obligation to recognize the truth and stand by it; the detective above all, the detective above all.”

Brooklyn

T
HE NEXT DAY
for no particular reason we took the train to the end of the line to Coney Island. The train was elevated and outdoors, and you could see Coney Island miles before you reached it, see the new Cyclone and the old cyclone and the long-closed parachute drop. Under a sheet of snow they looked mysterious and lonely, like the statues at Easter Island or the pyramids in Egypt.

At Stillwell Avenue the train shuddered and shook to a halt and we got off. Our first stop was the bar built into the cavernous mouth of the train station. It was dark and filthy. At the bar two old white men, the last of a dying breed, drank whiskey and beer. They didn’t laugh. They didn’t talk. Tracy and I each got a shot of tequila.

After shots we walked across the street to Nathan’s. It was empty except for a group of girls from the projects and a few boys loitering around them, standing at one of the aluminum tables. Tracy and I kept our eyes straight ahead.

“White bitch.”

“Go back to Manhattan.”

We got hot dogs and fries to go and ate them on the frigid boardwalk, looking out at the gray and dirty ocean, shivering.

“Is this real?” Tracy said. She frowned. “Would you tell me?” she said. “Would you tell me if it wasn’t?”

I nodded. “I would,” I said. “I promise.”

But after that we went to the big bar on the boardwalk and got more tequila shots and beer, and I went to the bathroom and I looked in the mirror and looked and looked but I didn’t see a thing I recognized. Who was that girl? Was she real?

If she was real, why didn’t she have anything to say? Why didn’t she do something?

I hated her. I took out my lipstick and crossed out her face in the mirror, scribbling over it until she was covered in red, until she didn’t exist anymore. Someone banged on the door.

“Fuck off,” I yelled.

On the train back a man looked at Tracy. Men looked at Tracy all the time. Men looked at all of us all the time. We were trying to talk about the case but he was distracting her. He was young, in his twenties, handsome, and wore a suit and tie. Lord only knew what he was doing in Brooklyn.

“So if Chloe is with CC—” she began, but broke off. She bent the Cynthia Silverton digest she was holding back and forth in her hand.

“Jesus,” she said. “What is that guy’s problem?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “So. We know CC likes—”

But Tracy wasn’t listening to me. She was staring at the man. The train was quiet, other than the squeak and roar of the metal wheels against the track. A few people were reading. A few people were staring at nothing. At the end of the car two boys were writing on the rear window. BDC—Brooklyn Danger Crew. I didn’t recognize them but I recognized their tags.

Tracy looked at the man. At first he smiled at her. She didn’t smile. Then he looked straight ahead. Tracy still looked at him. Then he started to squirm a little.

Suddenly Tracy spoke.

“What the fuck are you looking at?”

The man tried to ignore her.

“What!” she screamed. “
These?
” She grabbed her breasts.

The man turned red and looked down, around, straight ahead, anywhere except at Tracy.

“What do you want?” she screamed. “Is this what you want?”

As we pulled into the next station she threw her book at the man. He swerved and ducked but the book caught him anyway, just above the eye. He picked it up and threw it back at her. It hit me painlessly on top of my head. A small smudge of blood rose where a sharp corner had hit him. The man looked hurt and confused, like a wild animal who’d been shot by an automatic weapon he couldn’t see or understand.

The doors opened and the man ran off the train.

Tracy’s face was red and damp. Her lungs heaved up and down. I thought she was going to cry. Instead she turned to me and said, “I should have killed him.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Really.”

“He should be dead.”

“Absolutely,” I agreed. “He should be dead now. He’s lucky it was you instead of someone else.”

She nodded. “He was lucky,” she said. “Because he should have died.”

That night we decided to go to Hell. We were supposed to meet Kelly at my house at eight, but she showed up at nine with a bruise across her left cheek and a foul mood. Kelly’s father had left when her mother, Lorraine, got pregnant and according to Lorraine this was Kelly’s fault, and she never let her forget it. Now she was convinced Kelly would make the same mistake and ruin her own life as Kelly had ruined Lorraine’s. They had always fought. But Kelly’s new boyfriend set off something deep and ugly in Lorraine. Lorraine was thin but strong. I imagined she’d cornered Kelly somewhere in their dingy little two-bedroom railroad apartment. Kelly couldn’t win a fight with her mother but she was nimble and young and could escape easily. Which was probably exactly why Lorraine hated her.

She would stay with me until things cooled down with Lorraine, which they would in a few days. Lenore, who didn’t seem to have a maternal bone in her body for me, was strangely gentle with Kelly. Lenore’s own father had hit her, and for all her faults she never laid a hand on me. Eventually Lorraine would track Kelly down and deliver an apology, backhanded like her slaps:
You know I’m sorry, but
...
I shouldn’t have hit you so hard, but
...

My room was almost as big as Tracy’s apartment, if twenty degrees colder, so we got ready to go out there. Tracy took little nips from a pint of vodka as we got dressed. I didn’t know what had happened in the two hours since I’d seen her, but she’d gotten into a bad mood. Or maybe a sad one: she wasn’t bitchy, like her usual bad moods, so much as quiet. I kept catching her staring off into space, like she was somewhere else. When we were doing makeup Kelly went to the bathroom and got cornered by Lenore—“Baby, your momma did that to you? Jesus, what happened?”

Tracy stared at herself in the mirror. I was pretty sure she wasn’t seeing anything, though.

“Hey,” I said.

She pulled herself back in from wherever she’d been. For a split second it seemed like she’d actually left her body. Like she was really gone. I shivered.

“What’s up?” I said. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said, quick and defensive. “I’m fine.”

“Did something happen?” I asked. “Like with your dad or something?”

She picked up a lipstick and slowly rubbed it on her lips.

“Yeah,” she said. “Someone wouldn’t mind their own fucking business, and I had to smack them.”

I felt my stomach drop and my shoulders tense. When Tracy wanted to be mean, she was a genius at it. Fights with her were little bloodbaths that ended quick and left permanent scars.

Our eyes met in the mirror and she had that mean look, when you couldn’t tell if she was going to be funny or cruel.

But then she cracked up laughing.

“Everything’s cool,” she said. “I was just thinking about how I’m never going to meet a guy I would even consider having sex with. I mean, it’s just impossible. I don’t think there’s a single boy in New York City who isn’t disgusting, crazy, or even more disgusting.”

“Oh come on,” I said. “There’s CC.”

“Ewww!”

Now we both laughed. But our eyes met and suddenly we weren’t laughing and we were both thinking the same thing.
Chloe did it.

Did she? Really?

Again I felt like I was in a dark woods.

Or that Chloe was in the woods—lost, confused, terrified. And the only way to find her was to follow her there.

Kelly didn’t come with us to the club. Just before we went out she called Jonah and they got into a fight.

“We have to
go
,” Tracy said into Kelly’s free ear. “We’re on a
case
.”

“Leave her alone,” Lenore said from the door. I hadn’t known she was listening. She was standing in the doorway holding a long, skinny cigarette. “She can stay here. You girls go do your little detective thing.”

Kelly mouthed a thank-you to my mother as if Lenore was the friend and Tracy and I were the interrogating, fun-ruining adults. She turned her back on us and went back to her call.

We left without her.

San Francisco

T
HAT NIGHT I DROVE
around the city in my little Mercedes. My car felt like a cocoon. I didn’t know what I was looking for. When it got late enough I dropped by the Fan Club. The black girl I’d met wasn’t there, but it was easy enough to buy a bag off someone else, for not as good of a price. I bought it from a tall skinny man with sunglasses on. “I should at least get a kiss,” he said, after pretending he was giving me a bargain. I kissed him but afterward I felt exactly the same, not even ashamed, which made it worthless.

At dawn I ended up in the Oakland hills. The Red Detective looked at me and said, “How’s your missing girl coming along?”

“There is no missing girl,” I said for the hundredth time. “It’s murder.”

“You let me know when you find that missing girl,” he said. “And have fun with the lama tomorrow.”

“The lama?” I said.

He nodded. I checked my phone. There was an email from the lama:
Come down and visit tomorrow if u can. It’s been 2 long. Kids r putting on a play u will like.

When I got home it was the next morning. I fell into a fitful, cocaine-troubled sleep and dreamed about Paul again. It was a story from one of the Cynthia Silverton books, the Case of the Suspicious Sideshow Performer. In the story Cynthia wrestled with Herman, the suspicious and swarthy tattooed man, for the knife that would prove he’d cut the trapeze artist’s safety net after all. But in my dream it was me, and I was wrestling with Paul.

I won the fight, faking him out with a kick to the ribs from the left while I ducked and grabbed the knife from the right. Just like Cynthia always won, just like I always won. Just like all us detectives always win, at least the small wars. We wouldn’t be detectives if we didn’t.

But in my dream I took the knife and handed it back to Paul. I didn’t want it. I didn’t want to fight and I didn’t want to win. He had that smile he got when I did something that made him happy, that smile that made me feel like all things were possible, like previously locked doors had been thrown open wide—which was often at first and then less often and then never.

Once, when we hadn’t been dating long, I’d met him at a Mexican restaurant on Twenty-Fourth Street. I was forty-five minutes late. A case. Always a case. When I came in Paul looked so happy to see me, with such an astonished smile. And I said
What’s up?
And he kissed me and said
I thought you weren’t coming. I thought I wouldn’t see you again.

In my dream he reached out to take the knife, unsure, happy, proud, smiling that same astonished smile.

Go on
, I said.
I trust you.

Which I’d never said to him, or anyone, in my life.

T
HE NEXT DAY I DROVE
down to Santa Cruz. Highway 880 shifted into the slow, winding mountains of Highway 17 and fog began to roll in off the water. I got off in Scott’s Valley and headed up the mountain. That morning I slept late and didn’t do any drugs. But then I got stuck on the highway and started to feel like I might fall asleep or faint or otherwise check out, so I did the tiniest bump. And then one or two more.

The fog was thicker here and it looked like it would rain, but it wouldn’t. By the time I reached the top of the mountain the sky was clear and blue, and when you tried to remember the fog it seemed like you were making it up.