Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway (3 page)

I didn’t say anything. Claude started to fidget and cough. Then he started to cry, little trickles of tears squeezing their way out of his eyes at first, stingy and cheap, then big sobs as something died inside him. Maybe it was his hope of being someone else. His hope of being a normal person with a nice life and a pretty girl and a good job. All that was over now, or would be soon. Good riddance to it.

We sat in my office for an hour or so and Claude cried and he was hired.

I never saw him cry again.

Jacques Silette’s
Détection
, the book that found Claude in the sterile Stanford library, was a book that had ruined many lives, as it had ruined Claude’s. And mine. For three years I’d lived in New Orleans and studied with Silette’s student, Constance Darling. Constance spent the better part of the fifties and sixties in France with Silette, learning everything he had to teach as they became friends and then lovers. He’d been a renowned detective, the best in Europe. But after he published
Détection
, he was written off as a crackpot. Almost no one understood the book, or admitted they did. Instead they pretended that he, Silette, was the crazy one while they, the other detectives of midcentury Europe and America, with their abysmal solve rates and idiotic pseudoscientific methods, were the clever ones. Silette had anticipated this, and from what I’d heard wasn’t especially hurt by the reaction. I can’t believe it didn’t sting at least a little, though, when even his closest friends in the world of detectives stopped taking his calls. But over the years he developed a new set of friends and fans—few and far between, but devoted.

Jacques Silette was the best detective the world had ever seen. So I thought. His methods were unusual, but I and a few others were loyal to them. I’d never met Silette—he’d died in 1980, when I was still a child, heartbroken after his daughter, Belle, was kidnapped and never seen again. A few years later his wife, Marie, died from heartbreak. His genius was no defense against pain. It never is. His role as the best detective in the world did not protect him from also playing the role of the heartbroken, beaten-down sap left behind.

Constance was Silette’s favorite and best student—also his lover, friend, and companion. Constance was one branch of the Silettian tree, and I was her fruit, but there were other branches too—other detectives who had studied with Silette and imagined a claim on his legacy. There was Hans Jacobson, who gave up detection for finance. Hans made fortune after fortune, and joyfully threw it all away on women, boats, art, and drugs. Now he lived under a bridge in Amsterdam. I’d met him and I was pretty sure he was the happiest man I’d ever met. Jeanette Foster became a good, if dull, detective specializing in corporate espionage. She’d died just last year in Perth. And there was Jay Gleason, who went on to develop a scam correspondence school in Las Vegas that advertised in the back of
Soldier of Fortune
and
Men’s World
and
True Detective:
BE A DETECTIVE OR JUST LOOK LIKE ONE
or something like that.

Jay was one of Silette’s last students. He moved to France in 1975, just fifteen years old, to study with Silette. It was two years after Silette’s daughter Belle had disappeared, since everything good had drained from his life. Supposedly, Jay showed up on Silette’s doorstep one day. Without even a hello, messy blond hair in his pretty face, in dirty bell bottoms and a rock-and-roll T-shirt, Jay launched into his solution to the one-hundred-year-old Case of the Murdered Madam, a famous unsolved case in Paris that had done in better detectives than Jay. He was sure he was right and sure he would impress the old man. It was the ex-husband, Jay was certain. When he was done, Silette laughed, the first time he’d laughed since the last time he’d seen his daughter. Something in Jay—his earnestness, his intelligence, his faith in Silette—amused the older man.

“You’re wrong,” Silette said to the young American, having of course solved the case many years ago himself. “You did some good work. But you missed the most important clue of all.”

“What was it?” Jay asked.

“Close your eyes,” Silette said.

Jay did as he was told.

“What do you see?” Silette said.

Jay hesitated. He didn’t know what the right answer was. More than anything, he had wanted to impress the old man.

“Blackness,” Jay said. “I mean, nothing. I—”

“Shhh,” Silette said. He put a hand on Jay’s back to calm him. “Keep your eyes closed. What do you see? Not what do you want to see. Not what do you think I want you to see. Me or anyone else. Not that. Use your eyes. What do you see?”

No one knows what Jay saw. But, so the story goes, Jay saw something—something that made him shake and cry and, finally, eyes still closed, collapse on Silette’s doorstep, ruined. Ruined and saved, the two sides of the Silettian coin.

“It was the son,” Jay finally choked out. “It was the son. Oh, God. He killed his own mother. It was the son.”

Silette smiled. That was the answer. Silette invited Jay in and let him stay.

Jay was from a wealthy northeastern family with branches in Newport and Long Island’s gold coast, along the groves of the Hudson River and in rich wooded corners of the Mid-Atlantic. He could have been anything he wanted, or, like most of his family, nothing. There’s no shame in being idly rich—not among the other idle rich, at least. But Jay wanted to be a detective. And now he was peddling official PI certificates suitable for framing.

Some took this, these mixed outcomes, as proof that Silettian detection was a sham. There were only a few of us Silettians and we did get more than our share of negative attention. Our enemies said it was because we were strange and unreliable, theatrical in our methods, dramatic in our solutions.

I said it was because we solved so many fucking cases. And usually by the time a Silettian got his hands on a case, ten other detectives had already failed. Most cases never even got to a Silettian unless the client was desperate enough, the way a person with cancer goes to an herbal clinic in Tijuana when the doctors tell her she’s got no chance.

“The detective’s only responsibility,” Jacques Silette said in an interview for
Le trimestrielle des détectives
in 1960, “is not to his client or to the public, but only to the awful, monstrous truth.”

I knew someone who went to one of those clinics in Tijuana. Brain cancer. Stage four. Before she crossed the border the doctors told her she had six months, maybe nine. Maybe less.

When she came back they put her in one of those full-body scanners and took lots of blood and ran test after test after test.

Not one cell of cancer remained.

L
YDIA WAS SITTING
on the steps of their house—Paul’s house—on Florida Street in the Mission. She wasn’t crying. She was still in shock. Police cars surrounded her in a half-circle, sending their long white lights into the shadows. Before Lydia saw me I noticed Officer Lou Ramirez and Detective Huong drinking coffee by one of the cars. I went over to them.

“What happened?” I asked.

“B and E,” Huong said, unmoved. “As far as we can tell. Probably thought no one was home, panicked when there was.”

“How’d they get through the door?” I asked.

“Either picked the lock or found a key. Or maybe they forgot to lock it. Wife says a bunch of stuff’s missing—TV, VCR, musical instruments. Had a lot of valuable things, sounds like.”

“They were both musicians,” I said.

“That where she was?” Ramirez asked. “The wife? Playing music?”

“I can find out,” I said. A thousand cops had probably already asked Lydia that question tonight. But they didn’t talk to each other. That wasn’t how they worked. “What happened?”

Huong answered, “Neighbor heard a shot. Waited a minute, went out to look, didn’t see anything, called the police anyway. Ramirez got here first. Rang the doorbell, no one answered, broke through the lock, went in and found . . . the deceased.”

“What else?” I asked Ramirez.

“What else
what?
” Ramirez asked.

Ramirez didn’t like me much, but he owed me. The Murder at the Kabuki. That and a whole lot more, but that was the one where we agreed on the debt. But I knew Ramirez and Huong hadn’t called me to do me any favors. They wanted a buffer between them and Lydia’s raw pain. I didn’t blame them. When the ugliest parts were over they’d want me gone and out of the case. We weren’t friends.

“
Anything
what,” I said. “What’d you notice?”

He wrinkled his brow. He didn’t know what to say.

“Anything,” I said. “What was the first thing that came to mind when you saw—”

I felt dizzy, and put my hand on the squad car to steady myself.

I am a detective
, I told myself.
I am a detective on a very important case. Just like I always wanted.

Ramirez wrinkled his already wrinkled brow again. “I thought,
Someone sure hated this guy
,” he said. He rushed to add, “I mean, I don’t know if that’s true. But that was what I thought.”

“Thanks,” I said. He shrugged and turned away, as if I’d insulted him. Huong met his eyes and they each made a little face.

I didn’t care if they thought I was crazy. I would solve the case. I would find out who killed Paul. And they would still think I was crazy and I still wouldn’t care.

I looked up at the police and the lights and Lydia and for a minute I wondered if this was real.

Huong and Ramirez started to walk away.

“Wait,” I said. “Wait.”

They turned around.

“He had a gun,” I said. “If he was surprised Paul was home, why would he have a gun?”

“Or she,” Huong said.

I nodded. Girls didn’t pull a whole lot of B&Es, but it was possible.

“All that equipment,” I said. “Guitars, amplifiers. Some of it’s worth a lot. Hundreds, maybe thousands.”

Huong shrugged and walked away. She knew what I was thinking: a robbery, but not random; a robbery by someone who knew what their gear was worth and knew one or the other of them might be home. But that should make it an easy crime to solve: Paul and Lydia had probably never jotted down their serial numbers, but it didn’t matter—vintage musical instruments like the ones they played had a lot of quirks and dings and stains and were easy to identify. Lydia would know one of her or Paul’s guitars anywhere. Plus, Lydia and Paul were both fairly successful and were photographed often enough that their gear was well documented, at least the most-used items. As long as we kept on top of the pawnshops and music stores and websites where people sold guitars, we should find out who killed Paul within a month or two.

Not that it would matter much to Lydia.

I went over and sat by her. She’d finally started to cry, quietly, tears pouring out of her eyes and a steady choking noise coming from her throat. After a while Ramirez came over. I looked up. Lydia didn’t. She was gone, sailing the oceans of grief. Drowning, more likely.

“Think she can give a statement now?” he asked.

“Can it wait?” I asked. “Tomorrow afternoon?”

He nodded. We made a date for four o’clock tomorrow at the Mission station on Valencia Street.

I left Lydia and took my car and found a twenty-four-hour coffee shop and came back with two big trays of coffee and a plate of snacks for the cops and the crime scene guys. Cops and their ilk work hard, if futilely, and anything you can do to make your case more attractive helps.

Of course, some of them knew me already. A little coffee and a buttermilk muffin wouldn’t solve that.

It didn’t matter anyway. I wasn’t counting on the cops to solve the case. I was counting on solving the case myself. If they would help me by sharing whatever information they had, that would be good, but it wasn’t necessary. I would solve it just fine alone. I would find out who killed Paul and then—

Before I could stop myself my mind said,
And then Paul can come back.

As the sun rose the police and investigators started packing up and going home. When the last few were nearly done and I was sure they wouldn’t need us anymore, I put my arm around Lydia and helped her stand and led her to my car. I put her in the passenger seat and buckled her in and shut the door. I took us to my place, where I got her out of the car and up the stairs and into bed. In bed I gave her an Ativan I’d been saving for a special occasion. Soon the choking sound subsided and she fell asleep. I watched her. In her sleep her hands clenched and unclenched, grabbing at the sheets. Her face was stuck in the shape of crying even though no sounds came out. She’d never be the same. She was already a different girl, a girl with a different face.

I lay on the sofa and didn’t sleep. In Lydia’s jacket I found a pack of cigarettes and smoked a few. I thought about nothing. There was a big white hole where normal thoughts usually were. Soon enough my mind hooked onto the missing guitars and the locked door and the hole filled up with clues and suspects and all the detective stuff and I could pretend it was just another case.

The guitars. The lock. The keys. The gun. The musician in the drawing room with the gun. The duchess in the kitchen with the guitar. I let my mind fill with the case. It was only a case. Only another case. Another sentence of words to rearrange.

Maybe that was all there was to life. One long case, only you kept switching roles. Detective, witness, client, suspect. Then one day I’d be the victim instead of the detective or the client and it would all be over. Then I’d finally have a fucking day off.

A
T NOON I GOT UP
and called the cops; they didn’t know anything new. I got out a phone book and started calling music stores and pawnshops. I didn’t know exactly what had been stolen, but I gave a general description to each store—vintage, high-end, unusual gear, heavily used—and let them know there was a reward much bigger than what they could make on a few guitars or amps. Next I posted some messages on Internet forums and blogs for collectors, dealers, and repair people. A lot of these people knew Paul and Lydia, or knew who they were and knew what gear they played; they would be on our side. Some people were already talking about it.