Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway (8 page)

Still, though. Chloe? A cutter?

“The truth holds no prisoners,” Silette wrote. “It takes no hostages. And if you don’t want to meet with the same terrible fate, better not to approach at all. Stay on the other side of town, outside of the woods, and do not enter, not at any cost.”

I looked at the floor and shivered. A feeling came over me, a black feeling like I’d fallen into a pool of dirty water. Like I’d stepped into the woods and didn’t know my way back.

Tracy lay back on the bed and looked at Joe Strummer. I lay next to her. The sun came in at its sideways December angle.

“It’s like he was watching her,” Tracy said.

“But was he helping?” I asked. “Or was he, I don’t know, judging? Like, looking down on her?”

“Good question,” Tracy said.

We looked at Joe.

“Helping,” Tracy said, gazing at the poster, falling under Strummer’s spell. “I think he would definitely help.”

On our way out we saw a photo-booth picture of Chloe and Reena that Chloe had stuck in her mirror. There were four pictures on the strip: two of both of them, one of Reena alone, and one of Chloe.

Tracy took the strip and ripped the picture of Chloe off and stuck the rest back in the mirror.

“Let’s go,” she said.

That night I had a dream about Chloe. We were near the edge of a woods, on the border of a dark clearing lit by thin moonlight. I’d never seen a woods before, not bigger than Central or Prospect Parks’, but in my mind it was clear and vivid. Enormous trees rose up hundreds of feet into the air, thick dark red bark wrapped around them. Green piney needles covered the forest floor, and new shoots clustered around the base of the trees. In the clearing, little yellow flowers shot up around giant clovers.

Chloe and I sat next to each other on big mossy rocks at the edge of the clearing. We were dressed as we would be for a typical day in the city: boots, vintage dresses, leather jackets. We were talking softly, trading secrets and whispers.

Then, suddenly, Chloe was naked. Her ribs and hips stuck out painfully through her skin. Her face was turned to the ground. When she looked up, her face started to turn black—or rather, little holes of blackness appeared where her face fell apart. One bit at a time her face collapsed into itself, leaving a black emptiness in its place.

I woke up talking, twisting and turning in bed, not sure if I was trying to get closer to Chloe or run away.

San Francisco

N
INETEEN DAYS AFTER
Paul died, I got a phone call from an EMT in New Orleans. When you answer the phone at three in the morning and someone says “Is this Miss Clara DeMitt?” you know it isn’t good news.

“Yes,” I said. “This is, I mean, I am. Claire. Clara. Clara DeMitt.”

“I have some bad news, Miss DeMitt. Bad news, but he’s going to be okay.”

Andray
, I thought.
Andray’s been shot.

Instead the EMT guy said: “Clara, Mick Pendell has had an incident.”

“Incident?” I said. “Did someone shoot him?”

“Overdose,” the EMT said. “We think it was intentional. He’s in Touro.”

I felt a strange lump in my throat when I realized that sometime, no matter how long ago, Mick—or anyone—had put me down as his emergency contact.

I hadn’t seen Mick since the Case of the Green Parrot in New Orleans. Mick had worked for Constance, like I did. Before he met her Mick was on his way to a life of domestic terrorism, prison, and bad tattoos. He started riots in the Pacific Northwest and chained himself to redwoods in California. He helped people escape from jail and firebombed politicians’ houses. But there’s a series of fine lines between fighting for a cause and just fighting. He stole from the rich and gave to the poor—first among them himself—until he tried to rob Constance. Constance was one of the rich—the Darlings had reserves to keep them flush for generations.

Constance helped Mick see that there are never any sides. Only things we understand and things we have chosen to pretend we don’t understand. Only those we admit we love and those we pretend we don’t recognize.

Mick was a detective. He knew it while Constance was around to tell him, and forgot after she died.

After I hung up with the EMT, I called the hospital. I was transferred around a few times until I reached a nurse on Mick’s floor.

“He’s stable,” she said. “They pumped out his stomach.”

“What’d he take?”

“No report yet but I’d guess a bunch of stuff. He on any meds?”

I nodded and then I remembered she couldn’t see me and I said, “Yeah.” I wasn’t certain but suspected that he was taking a big mess of prescriptions: antidepressants, antianxiety drugs, sleeping pills. He hadn’t weathered the storm well.

“Some of it hit him,” she said, “but he’ll be okay. Just, you know, got to deal with whatever made him do this.”

She sounded sympathetic, but tired. I asked if I could speak to him. She said he was sleeping.

“He got family?”

Mick had no one and he had nothing. He taught criminology and ran a drop-in center for homeless children. He used to just volunteer there. Then they lost their funding and the director moved on and Mick couldn’t stand to let it go so he didn’t. His biggest donor was Anonymous and if he’d known who Anonymous was he might not have taken her money.

Mick—my Mick, Constance’s Mick—was not going to die or come close to dying alone. I booked a flight for New Orleans the next evening. Something fluttered in my chest, some feeling of life, of direction, of being needed and busy and a part of the human race.

A few hours later, before I started packing, Andray called. It was the only time he’d called me since New Orleans. It might have been the only time he’d called me ever.

“Mick was in the hospital,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I heard.”

“Oh,” he said. “You knew.”

He sounded disappointed.

“Thanks,” I said. “You seen him?”

“While he was still there,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I said. “He’s out already?”

“Yeah. Let him out this morning.”

“Where is he?” I asked. “Is he okay?”

“Home,” Andray said.

We didn’t say anything for a minute. I didn’t know how Andray was going to stay alive another year. He had been shot once since I’d been gone, his fourth bullet diving neatly into the top of his right shoulder and through the other side. No one in New Orleans had called me when it happened. I’d found out from the lama.

I knew I wouldn’t have made it without Constance. Andray had me and Mick. Put us together and we weren’t a quarter of her. As evidenced by the fact that both Mick and Andray were very close to dead.

“You been okay?” I asked Andray.

He made a noncommittal sound:
Uh-huh
or
I-’ont-know.

“You see Terrell?” I asked.

“Yeah. Few times,” he said.

“He doing okay?”

“Not really.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But. You know. The only way out is through. That’s what they say.”

Andray didn’t say anything.

I thought about Andray and Terrell all the time. I didn’t know if I’d made their lives better or worse when I came to New Orleans on the Case of the Green Parrot. At least I knew that before me, they’d had each other. Now Terrell was locked up and Andray was floating through life alone.

I wanted to say
I will do anything I can to get you out of this.
I wanted to say
I will pull you out of this black tar pit of death and sorrow and drag you to the shore.
The way someone had dragged me out of that black pit.

When you love something so much, the thought of doing it but not doing it well hurts almost more than never trying. Almost. You wouldn’t know until you tried it that failing is actually better.

“Well,” Andray said. “Just lettin’ you know.”

He hung up. I rummaged around my coffee table, through unpaid bills and unread magazines and cups of undrunk tea until I found what I was looking for: a little bag of cocaine Tabitha had left here a few nights ago. I opened one of the magazines, the
New Journal of Criminology
, ripped out a stiff subscription card, and used it to scoop out a bump of cocaine and snort it.

I called Mick. He answered, groggy.

“Hello?”

“It’s me,” I said.

“Me? Ellie?”

He was still high off whatever he’d used to try to end his life. Ellie was his ex-wife, the wife who’d left after the storm.

“Claire,” I said. “Claire DeWitt.”

“Oh, hey, Claire,” he said, disappointment audible. “I’m sick.”

“I know,” I said. “The hospital called. They told me.”

He didn’t say anything.

“What the fuck?” I said. Suddenly I felt insulted, as though he had tried to leave this mortal coil only because I was in it. “Seriously?”

He sighed and didn’t say anything.

“You want to come out here for a while?” I said. “I could—”

He sighed again and didn’t say anything. He sighed like I’d said the dumbest thing in the world, like I understood nothing and never would.

“I have a ticket booked for tomorrow,” I said. “I figured I’d come and see if—”

“This isn’t a good time for a visit,” he said. “Listen, Claire. I don’t feel. I. I mean.”

“Okay,” I said. “Can I call you later?”

“Sure,” he said. But I knew he wouldn’t talk to me later, either.

“You sure you’re okay?” I said. “I mean, I could come and—”

“Yeah,” Mick said, clearly not fine and clearly not wanting to talk to me. “I’m fine. I’m totally fine. We’ll talk soon, okay?”

He sounded like he was talking to a bill collector. We hung up. I called Andray back. His voice mail picked up.

“Hey,” I said. “It’s Claire. So I just talked to Mick and he doesn’t sound so good. I was thinking maybe you could go see him? See if he’s okay? I think they let him out of the hospital too early and I also think, you know. I don’t know how safe he is.”

Andray didn’t call me back and neither did Mick.

I canceled my ticket and didn’t go to New Orleans. Instead I did the rest of the coke and cleaned my apartment, meaning I moved stacks of unpaid bills and unopened mail from one table to another. I put unfiled papers closer to the file cabinets and put all my scraps of paper with very important notes on them (
Nate
DIDN'T HAVE THE LEMONADE
.
Fingerprints don’t match, 1952–58. Sylvia DeVille, DOB 12/2/71, not in system, likely not an abortion.
) in a pile on the kitchen counter. I put the dishes in the sink. When the apartment was cleaner it felt empty and alone, like a tomb I might not escape from, and I got dressed and went out as quickly as I could. It was after midnight. I went to a bar in North Beach and ordered a beer and then a scotch and then another beer, and when a man I’d never met before asked if he could buy me another drink I said yes. He asked me what I did.

“I’m a private detective,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said with a little smile, thinking he knew, “and I’m a cowboy.”

A
ND THEN THERE WAS
the Case of the Missing Miniature Horses. I took the case twenty-five days after Paul died. A man named Ellwood James had a ranch near Point Reyes, north of San Francisco, in Marin County. Ellwood James was the cousin-in-law of the district attorney of San Francisco, and he raised miniature horses. It was a surprise to see just how miniature the horses were. The tallest was three and half feet, on all fours. The horses looked a little sad and ashamed that they weren’t going to grow anymore. They reminded me of the kids from
Flowers in the Attic
, never growing after being locked in an attic a few years too long.

Ellwood James thought that someone was stealing his horses.

“I started off with one fifty,” he said. He sounded like a real rancher, as if he were talking about heads of cattle. “Births, deaths, what have you, six months in I got ninety-nine. Someone is stealing my horses.”

My theory was that the little fellows were running away to try to get some big boy genes back in the mix, or maybe committing suicide. I made a mental note to research equine suicides.

He took me around the ranch. Your basic low-security operation. I explained to him that if he wanted to stop the thefts, he needed to put up some higher fences, some lights, and maybe some razor wire. If he wanted to find out who, if anyone, was stealing the little guys, he’d be better leaving things as they were and investing in some surveillance.

Ellwood also bred peacocks.

“Peafowl,” he corrected me, using the gender-neutral term. “Peacock’s a male, peahen’s the female.”

He looked up; I followed his eyes to see a ring of vultures closing in.

“Goddamn it,” he said. We followed the vultures and walked across the pasture, tiny horses in all colors roaming and grazing. Dandelions and little purple flowers I couldn’t name dotted the green grass. The sky was so blue it almost hurt to look at it.

When we’d reached a hundred feet or so we saw what the vultures were so eager for. A dead peacock. Maybe a peahen.

“Goddamn it,” Ellwood said again. “Damn things were supposed to live to twenty.”

“Maybe she
was
twenty,” I said.

Ellwood nodded. Neither of us knew how to date peafowl, that was for sure.

A vulture swooped down and landed ten or fifteen feet from us.

“Might as well let her have it,” Ellwood said, and we walked back across the pasture.

“Not much of a job for a private eye,” I said.

“I want to know who’s doing this,” Ellwood said. “A man has his honor. His pride.”

I wasn’t sure where honor and pride fit into shrinking horses. When we got close to the barn one of the little guys, all black with a glossy coat, came toward me. I crouched down and we looked at each other. He looked sad and wise.

“I see your point,” I said to Ellwood. “But what I charge’ll cost more than you’re losing.”

“Money is not an issue,” Ellwood James said.

Magic words.

I took the case.

From Ellwood James’s place I drove back to the 101 and up to Sonoma County and got off near Santa Rosa and drove out to the Spot of Mystery. The Spot of Mystery was one of those places where a very mysterious house slid down a very mysterious hill and now defied every known law of physics, if you squinted just right. Other highlights included a gift shop, a petting zoo of fainting goats, hot springs, and some extremely tall redwoods with names like Old Buddy and Faithful Susan.