Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (13 page)

“What you don't understand,” Constance hissed at me, “is not all spirits are
good
.”

Constance didn't have a problem with my using drugs. It was Constance who taught me how to use
Calea zacatechichi
for prophetic dreams and iboga to break bad habits. She'd taken ayauasca twice and was one of the first twelve people to smoke DMT.

But she said the best way was to forge your own path to the truth, not swallow someone else's.

The mushroom came on right about when the parade broke up. Constance went to a friend's house and I wandered around the Quarter looking for Mick, who I finally found sitting on a curb on Decatur.

I thought if I could design the most perfect place in the world it would be exactly this. I had never even let myself dream that someplace like this might exist. It felt like I had been given the key to the secret garden, been initiated into the biggest secret. I was in love with New Orleans.

“You look so beautiful,” Mick said when he saw me. “Like an angel.”

“What the fuck did you take?” I asked him.

One year later, Constance would be dead, and her ashes would be in that box.

I wasn't there to see it. I left New Orleans less than a week after she died.

There are some things you can never forgive.

“Miss Claire,” I heard. “Yo, Miss Claire.”

I opened my eyes. Andray was looking at me.

“I think you fell asleep,” Andray said.

“I think you're right,” I said. “You'd be a hell of a private dick.”

Andray laughed. I was tired and hungry. All the adrenaline from our little shootout was gone, leaving me with low blood sugar and a headache. I asked Andray where I could drop him off.

“Anywhere's fine,” he said.

“Well, where?” I asked.

“Where you picked me up would be okay,” he said.

“Where you almost got
shot
?” I said. “There?”

Andray looked at me as if we weren't speaking the same language. “Miss Claire,” he said slowly, using the polite term a young person in New Orleans uses for an elder, “they wasn't aiming at
me
.”

I drove him back to the hotel on Airline Highway, then drove myself home, picking up a po'boy on the way. I fell asleep with the po'boy on the dresser, watching me accusingly.

T
HAT NIGHT I DREAMED
about Constance. We were in a rowboat with her old friend Jack Murray. They passed a bottle of brandy back and forth. I thought I was on the boat with them, but they ignored me and I wasn't sure if I was there or not. Constance wore her favorite Chanel suit, her white hair in a neat bun on her head. Jack wore an old suit and overcoat that weren't much more than rags. They laughed and whispered to each other; I couldn't hear what they said.

“Now listen,” Constance said sharply, turning to me suddenly. “Jack has something important to tell you.”

A subway rattled overhead. I looked up; it was the double-R subway from New York. On the side of the train was a mural of a girl with a spray paint can in her hand, writing her name on the train.
Girldetective
, she wrote.

“You're not listening,” Constance said. “He's telling you what you need to know.”

I looked at Jack. He opened his mouth to speak, but instead of sound birds came out of his mouth, hundreds of them; starlings, grackles, crows, pigeons.

“The clues are all around you,” Constance said sharply. “All you have to do is open your eyes, Claire, and see.”

A
FTER COFFEE THE
next morning I called Mick. I didn't tell him about my escapade with his little friend the night before. Mick probably thought he was at church, or maybe rehabbing houses in Lakeview.

“I need you to do something for me,” I said.

“Research?” Mick asked. “Go through files?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe later.”

“Interview suspects?” he asked. “Track down witnesses?”

“No,” I said. “Probably. But not now. First, I need you to find Jack Murray.”

“Oh, Claire,” Mick said, his voice thick with disappointment. “I don't know where he is. I wouldn't know where to begin.”

“You'd have a better chance than I would,” I said. “I don't even live here.”

“Jesus,” Mick said. “What am I, your fucking secretary?”

“You want to keep your little friend out of jail?” I asked.

Mick didn't say anything. We both knew the answer was yes.

“Then you're my fucking secretary,” I said. “And while you're on it, yes, you can get started looking through Vic's work records—the cases he prosecuted, what he won, what he lost, all that. Got it?”

“I got it,” Mick grumbled. “Jesus. Do you always have to make everything so fucking complicated?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do.”

I hung up the phone.

“Simplicity,” Silette wrote. “Is the refuge of fools.”

After breakfast, still slightly hungover, I walked back to Vic's house. I stood in his doorway and looked around as if I were starting my day.

This part of the quarter was almost too quiet. The loudest sounds on Vic's block were horse-drawn carriages and the calliope from the riverboat. No one was around. Across the street someone opened the door to a little cottage. A black cat came out and plopped down on the porch. The door shut behind him.

I closed my eyes. I knew the Quarter well enough to see a map of it in my mind's eye. The closest grocery was LaVanna's, on Royal. That was where Vic would go when he needed milk or toilet paper or cigarettes. I opened my eyes and walked over there. It was a bustling, busy little place, cram-packed full of junk food and beer and New Orleans tidbits like boudin at the meat counter and Hubig's pies in with the Twinkies. At the counter was an old white woman in a blue housedress, thick glasses on her face, a heavy wood crucifix around her neck. I showed her Vic's picture and asked if she knew him.

“Vic?” she said. “I knew him for years, poor kid. Why you wanna know? You a reporter?”

She had the fast-disappearing Yat accent, equal parts Brooklyn and Boston, and sharing the same origins. It used to be common in New Orleans; now it had moved out to Chalmette and up to the North Shore.

I explained who I was and why I was asking.

“Why ‘poor kid'?” I asked.

“I thought he drowned,” she said. “That's why I said that. What you told me about him disappearing, I didn't know that. I didn't know.”

“What was he like?”

“Vic? He was a hell of a guy.” She smiled. “A sweetheart. Knew him all of his life. His momma, she came from down here,
and she used to bring him down to see everyone. Always with a smile, something nice to say, something funny. Like a light, like a light in the room. Last time I see him he says ‘Miss Mary, Miss Mary,' he says, ‘when are you gonna . . .'”

But she stopped talking and started to cry.

“Vic,” she said, counting on her fingers as she cried. “Artie. Micky. Shawn, from over in the projects—Jesus, he was just a kid. Angie. Nate. Ferdie. Jesus Christ.” She shook her head. “I'm sorry. Jesus.” She sniffed and stopped crying. “Anyway, you wanna know about Vic, you come back and ask Shaniqua. She'll tell you.”

“Shaniqua?” I asked.

“Colored girl, works nights,” the woman said. “Very nice, been working for me for years, never any trouble. I know her whole family, I know the kids since they were born. Good kids. Vic, he helped 'em out of a jam a, what, a year or two back.” She shook her head. “How the police treat the coloreds around here, it's a crime. They got rights, you know. Not Vic, he didn't go for that. He helped Shaniqua and her kids, wouldn't take no money or nothing.”

“She's here every night?” I asked.

“Most,” the woman said. “She'll be here tonight around six, you wanna come back. She'll tell you.”

“I'll be back,” I said. “I'll be back around six.”

The woman shook her head.

“The coloreds,” she said sadly. “They got the mayor, the DA, everybody. It's all black now. But still. They ain't never seem to catch a break.”

“T
HE FIRST THING
you need to know about being a detective,” Constance explained when she was interviewing me to be her assistant, “is that no one will ever like you again. You will turn over their stones and solve their crimes and reveal their secrets and they will hate you for it. If you're stupid enough to marry, your husband will never trust you. Your friends will never relax around you. Your family will shut you out. The police, of course, will loathe you. Your clients will never forgive you for telling them the truth. Everyone pretends they want their mysteries solved but no one does.” She leaned toward me. I smelled her violet perfume, her expensive face powder. “No one except us.”

I felt a thrill up my spine; her words, of course, were straight from Silette's
Détection
. Had she been there when he wrote them? Had she helped them take shape?

“That's okay,” I said. “No one likes me anyway.”

She peered at me. “Do you have family?”

“Yes,” I said. “But I haven't seen them in years.”

“Do you have any friends?” she asked.

“I used to,” I said. “They—one disappeared. The other hates me.”

Constance smiled.

“Good,” she said. “That's perfect.”

I'd met Constance in Los Angeles in 1994. A detective named Sean Risling had set up an introduction, knowing I needed work and Constance needed help. She was in L.A. on the famous HappyBurger murder case. Of course I knew who she was: the famous detective, the student of Silette, the eccentric from New Orleans, admired by some, reviled by more. Silette and his followers have never been the most popular detectives. No matter how many cases we solved or how quickly we solved them, respect was always hard to come by. It was like an episode of
Quincy
, stretched out over fifty years. All the better, Constance explained later, when we were friends. High expectations from others can cripple you.

I didn't expect her to like me. I didn't let myself hope. I called her on the phone as per Sean's instructions. She picked the time to meet and the place, a small, dark restarant in Little Tokyo.

“How will I know you?” I asked.

“I'll know
you
,” she said.

I thought she was nuts. That was the first thing I liked about her.

Since I'd left Brooklyn I'd been traveling around the country, taking it in a little bit at a time. A year in Chicago. Six months in Miami. Two years in Portland. I went from place to place, earning money when it was easy and acquiring it by other means when it wasn't. Sometimes I solved crimes, helping out other detectives when they needed it, going undercover where they couldn't. I was getting a reputation as a good detective but impossible to deal with. I had a temper. I had no patience.

I'd shot four people. I'd killed two. None were in self-defense.

I sat in the restaurant in Little Tokyo and read Bhukerjee's
Deadly and Medicinal Orchids of South America
. A side project I was working on for Sean. He'd been working on the world's definitive encyclopedia of flower poisons. And still was, as far as I knew.

Constance came in and sat at my table, barely glancing at the rest of the restaurant. She knew me, all right.

“Bhukerjee,” she said, looking at the book. “Not bad.”

“Who do you like?” I asked.

“For orchids?” she said. “Or poisons?”

“Both,” I answered.

She thought for a minute. “Ivan Vesulka,” she said. “He's a little sketchy on details. But I don't think you can beat him for theory.”

I reached into my purse and pulled out my own worn, creased copy of Vesulka's
Poison Orchids of Siberia: A Visionary Interpretation
.

We smiled at each other. I was hired.

I didn't try to impress her. I figured that wouldn't work. I just did my work and kept my mouth shut, watching her out of the corner of my eye when I could, taking in her fur, her spectator pumps, her Chanel suit, her big custom bag, the white hair in a knot on top of her head, the rocks on her fingers and around her neck.

Mostly in those first few days I ran errands for her. Bring this book to the Tibet Center, pick up dinner from the Korean barbecue joint, run to the herbalist for some new tea, find a Spiritual Church in Los Angeles and light a candle for Black Hawk. I tried to do a good job and keep my head down and my nose clean. After a few weeks she started giving me more substantial tasks: read this book on iridology and write up a report, go talk to this person about the history of poker chips. At the end of four weeks I sat in as she interviewed Vishnu Desai, the murderer—although, of course, we didn't know that at the time. Constance asked him a hundred questions or more in the room she'd taken to interview witnesses and suspects, two floors under her own room at the Chateau Marmont.

Desai didn't fold. He was good. At the end she turned to me.

“Anything you'd like to add, Claire?”

I figured she was cutting me a break. She'd missed the most important question of all. There was no way it had escaped her gaze, as sharp as an eagle's.

“Mr. Desai,” I began gently. “You say your wife, Sarafina, ran
out at eleven o'clock for a bite from the HappyBurger down the block.”

“Yes,” Vishnu said politely, wearily. “She was hungry. There was nothing in the house. HappyBurger was the only place around; she was going there to get a bite when—”

His voice broke, unable to form the words for what happened next.

“Mr. Desai,” I said. “Sarafina was a Sikh, am I right? She was a follower of Yogi Bhajan, wasn't she?”