Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway (6 page)

“Nick gonna be a while?” I asked.

“A bit,” she said. “He’s in with Henry.”

That was the kid.

“Do me a favor,” I said.

“Yeah?” she said.

“Gimme that can of oil under the register.”

Mei smiled and found the can of oil and gave it to me. The door squeaked like hell, and I bet so did the big paper cutter they used to wrap up their packets of herbs. I tested it and I was right. God forbid a Chang get his hands dirty. I was like their Schneider. I oiled the paper cutter and then got up on a chair to get the door hinges. They needed a whole new entryway with better security, but that wouldn’t happen unless I did it for them. I figured some Saturday I could re-hang the door, at least.

Mei went to the back and called out to the senior Chang in Chinese, “Claire’s here, she fixed your door. Come say thank you.”

The old man came out smiling. He shuffled his feet and walked about one step per hour. He was older than old. I’d never seen anyone smile as much as him.

“Claire DeWitt,” he said in Chinese. “Always a pleasure. I had a dream about Constance last night.”

“What’d she say?” I asked. My heart strained a little: I was hoping for a secret message, a little affection, maybe the solution to the Case of the Kali Yuga.

“Poppies!” he said. “I’m helping Mei treat a woman with tuberculosis. Constance said to try poppies.”

He laughed some more, but then he stopped and looked at me. Really looked, the way only a Chinese doctor does.

“What happened?” he said. He wasn’t smiling now.

I looked away. “Someone died,” I said. “But I’m fine.”

He shook his head and gave me that look you get from people who feel sorry for you.

Nick came out with his little boy next to him.

“Hey,” I said to Nick. “Hey, kid.”

Nick smiled. “Say hi to Claire,” he said to the boy. But the boy was shy and squirmed, turning his head toward his dad. Everyone laughed.

Mei volunteered to drive the kid home and Nick took me into his exam room. I sat up on an exam table and he started taking my pulses.

“Who died?” he asked.

“This guy,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Nick got it and dropped the topic.

“Your liver is still overheated,” he said. “Are you taking your herbs?”

“No,” I said. “They taste bad. And they make me feel weird.”

“Right,” he said. “Because you hate feeling weird. Look up.”

I rolled my eyes up and he looked at them. When he was done he looked at my tongue.

“What’s up?” he said. “Your lungs are overheated and toxic. Your liver is bad as always. And your heart is weak.”

“Nothing’s up,” I said. “I’ll start taking the herbs.”

He looked at me again. “You really don’t want to talk about it?” he said.

“There’s nothing to talk about,” I said. “This guy died. It’s a new case.”

Nick raised an eyebrow.

“When you want to talk about it,” he said, “I’m around.”

He wrote me a new prescription for herbs, which a different intern filled at the counter, leaves and twigs and seashells I was supposed to boil in a tea. If I were smart I would have married Nick. We had a little thing after Carrie. Would have given up detective work and been an herbalist. But if I were smart I would have done a lot differently.

The world didn’t hire me to be smart and happy. It hired me to be a detective, and solve mysteries.

P
AUL NEVER SAT STILL
; he was always drumming his fingers or nodding his head or standing up or sitting down. But it wasn’t anxiety, just a little too much energy for the boundaries of his own skin. Paul seemed to be at peace with himself, to have reached some type of truce with his demons, in a way that I figured was rare and hard-earned. He’d put down roots here and now; made a commitment to inhabit this body, this life, demons and all.

The third or fourth time we went out we met for coffee in this place on Valencia.

“They take their coffee way too seriously here,” Paul said, and it was true. You had to read a lot before you could order a coffee. He took our too-serious coffee from the counter and grabbed us a table. I went out to take a call—always a call, always a case—and when I came back in I felt his eyes on me as I walked through the crowded coffee place to our table, felt them in a way that made me feel like someone else. Someone better.

“I could watch that all day,” he said when I sat down, and he said it like he meant it. And then he said “Hey,” and he leaned over and kissed me—not for the first time, but it still felt like something. Like something I didn’t remember having felt before, or at least for a long time. Like a door had been opened that had been shut so long ago that I forgot it was there, and whatever was behind that door was brighter and less burdened than what I’d become.

It was just one kiss and a minute later we were back to our coffee.

“You’re smiling,” he said. He said it a little shyly, and I looked at my coffee and wondered if we were both blushing a little. And I thought but didn’t say
Because you make me smile
.

But then I felt tense, and the moment turned yellow and eerie, like the moment when the clouds have gathered and the light turns before it starts to storm. Like in a movie when you see a couple looking so happy and alive, but you knew when you bought your ticket: This wasn’t a story about love. This was a story about murder.

L
YDIA HAD PAUL BURIED
in a private ceremony, for family only. She said she couldn’t handle a big crowd, which made sense. She had the funeral at a cemetery up in Sonoma County, near the Bohemian Highway where Paul owned a house and spent much of his childhood. He’d been gone a week. At the same time as the private funeral there was a public memorial service in Delores Park. His murder had been big news in the neighborhood. He’d been well liked. Since his death secrets had come out: he’d given a substantial piece of money to the local arts group that put on the Day of the Dead parade; he’d given more cash to an outreach program for kids to bring them into the strong Mexican American culture of the Mission. Paul was very public with his appreciation of the Mexican/Missionion/San Franciscan culture of the neighborhood. He never wanted to change it, never wanted a Starbucks or a Pinkberries to replace the taquerias and botanicas.

I don’t know who organized it. Maybe no one did; maybe it just happened. Later I couldn’t remember how I’d heard of it, or how I knew to go to Delores Park that day.

A hundred people were already there, milling about. More people were building a kind of ersatz altar around a big old live oak, hanging pictures, CDs, records, and even instruments from the tree. Someone hung a bunch of small Mexican sugar skulls, someone else hung up ticket stubs from dozens of his shows. A lot of musicians were there, of course, and soon enough people started playing. Everyone knew “Danny Boy” and “Auld Lang Syne” and “When the Saints Go Marching In” and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.”

People started crying and a few broke down completely. I saw Paul’s bass player, Phil, sobbing. Maryanne, his drummer, stood alone in the crowd near the altar with her hands on her hips, shaking her head and looking furious. Someone tried to hug her and she shrugged him off.

Anthony Gides, a music critic who had been a big fan of Paul’s, brought the music to a close and stood near the tree and started to talk. He talked about Paul’s music; about his mentorship of other bands, his study of Roma guitar, his passion for Haitian drums and Cuban claves. About how empty the music world would be without him. About—

But then the band started playing again, suddenly doing “Brother, Can You Can Spare a Dime.” The crowd, now several hundred, cheered. Nancy O’Brien, a keyboardist who played with Paul sometimes, came over and hugged me. She looked exhausted and we didn’t say anything. Josh Rule, another guitar player Paul was friends with, also came over and hugged me.

“You know he was fucking crazy about you,” Josh said.

I shrugged. Now that he was gone I guessed it seemed like he’d been crazy about everyone. Death erased complications.

“I want to go,” Josh said. “This feels weird.”

“Me too,” I said. We left the park and started walking down the hill. The crowd was hundreds strong by now. Soon someone would do something stupid and someone else would call the cops and it would all be in the papers tomorrow.

“This is completely fucked up,” Josh said. “I can’t believe neither of us were invited to the funeral.”

I told him it didn’t bother me. Family was family.

“
Family?
” he said. “
We
were his fucking family.
We
were.”

I didn’t argue. I drove Josh back to his place in Albany, north of Berkeley. When we got to his house he asked if I wanted to come in for a drink and I said yes. Everyone wants to have sex after a funeral. The sex was okay and we ordered pretty good Nepalese food afterward and then fell asleep watching
Naked City
on TV. I left as quickly as I could the next day, leaving Josh naked and asleep and alone.

Josh was a sweet, quiet sleeper, a man who would make someone a good husband one day. But as I got dressed and hooked my bra behind me in the hushed bedroom I felt the cold winter sun in my eyes and a shiver up my spine and a thick spill of shame in my solar plexus and I knew: This case was going to be complicated.

“H
EY. IT'S CLAIRE
.”

When I left Josh I swallowed two Valium I’d stolen from his bathroom and drove around the city. But even with the gentle numbing of the diazepam I felt something sick and painful where my chest met my belly. Back at home I took a Percocet out from my stash of painkillers I had squirreled away for actual pain and crushed it with the handle of a knife on a cutting board in the kitchen. I snorted half the Percocet and felt a little better, or at least like there might be a cure for the sickness. I called Andray.

“Just wondering if you were okay. If you were busy or working or, I don’t know. If you need anything. You know.”

I’d met Andray in New Orleans on the Case of the Green Parrot. Andray was a born detective, like Tracy and Constance. Unlike them he was alive, although just barely. He could be working for any detective in the world. Even the very best. Instead he was drowning in New Orleans, selling drugs and guns and getting high. He’d been shot at least once since I’d seen him last.

I’d had Constance, sober, wise, and in her own way loving and pure, to guide me to dry land. Andray had me, Claire DeWitt, who despite being the very best detective in the world was at this moment snorting a crushed painkiller off her kitchen counter.

I hung up. Andray didn’t call me back. The sickness, which had abated for a minute, came back. It didn’t feel like it was leaving anytime soon.

“All these fucking missing girls,” Silette, bitter and old, wrote to Constance, “and the one I can’t find is my own. If it were a detective novel it would be too utterly stupid to read.”

“As a wise man once told me,” Constance wrote back, “solutions are always possible, and the limits of the truth far exceed the limits of human understanding.”

“Enough with my fucking platitudes,” he wrote back. “Consider everything I said a lie, a mistake. I was wrong, and I regret every word of it. The only true thing is pain.”

I fell asleep watching
Murder, She Wrote
. No one knew about Jessica Fletcher’s past in England as George Cukor’s ne’er-do-well maid.

When I woke up Tracy was sitting on the edge of my bed. She was young again, fifteen, but had a knowing look on her face you don’t get before thirty or forty. She sat on the bed with ease, like a woman, not a child.

“The things you don’t know,” she said, “could fill the ocean.”

I looked over the side of the bed. My apartment had flooded sometime during the night. Black water trickled around the floor, the trickles connecting into an ocean.

The ocean rose.

“The things you don’t see,” she said, her Brooklyn accent sharp, “could light up the whole damn sky.”

I looked up. The sky above me was filled with stars, glittering gold and white. They swirled around to form new constellations: the Parrot, the Key, the Gun, the Ring. Then the stars rearranged themselves into a solid white wall.

We were on the subway, steel ceiling above us. The constellations were now graffiti: a knife, a can of spray paint, a pigeon.

On the walls of the subway were words. Thousands of them;
ocean
and
storm
and
boot
and
dagger
and
mission
and
Nevada.

Tracy sat across from me. We were on a double R subway from the mideighties. Next stop, Atlantic Avenue, transfer to the—

“And with the words you forgot,” she said, “you coulda solved the whole damn mystery already.”

From the pocket of her jacket she pulled out a paint pen and wrote more words on the wall.
Truth. Key. Bird. Ring.

“Which mystery?” I asked.

“All of ’em,” she said. “Remember. The Case of the End of the World.”

She snapped her fingers and I sat upright in my bed, awake.

Brooklyn
January 3, 1986

“D
ID SHE TAKE HER KEYS
?”

It was 1986. Chloe and Reena were Tracy’s friends. They were a few years older than us—Chloe was eighteen and Reena, nineteen. Reena worked at a vintage clothing store on Seventh Street. Chloe worked for a filmmaker named Ace Apocalypse. He paid her almost nothing, but she loved the job. She wanted to make movies herself someday, or so she said.

Chloe and Reena lived together on Fifth Street near Avenue A. Tracy had met them one night about a year before in Sophie’s, a bar down the block from their apartment—the bar where we now sat with warm beer in front of us. Chloe and Reena liked Tracy and treated her like a kid sister: Reena gave Tracy a discount in the store where she worked; Chloe invited her to clubs and gallery openings and performance art nights around Alphabet City and Brooklyn.