Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (15 page)

I waited for him to answer.

“I don't know,” he finally murmured.

“You
don't know
,” I repeated. I suppose you could say I was a little annoyed. “Well, I learned this from the
clues
, Leon. I learned this from your tics and tweaks. I learned this because you began shaking your right foot when you talked about your sisters. You do that when you aren't being honest with yourself. I learned that by being there, in person. This is what detectives do, Leon. If that's not what you wanted, maybe you should hire some rent-a-cop non-union hack from New Jersey with a mail-order badge and a magnifying glass from a Cracker Jack box and a—”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

“Now,” I said, “why don't you come with me and see what I do? Because obviously you don't trust me. And I want you to trust me, Leon,” I lied. “It's
important
to me that you trust me.”

I didn't care if Leon trusted me. But I did want him to keep paying me.

“Okay,” he finally said. “I'll come with you. Not because I
don't trust you”—now we were both lying—“but just because I'm curious. But the thing is,” he said, “my car is dead.”

“Dead?” I said.

“Well, no,” he said. “Hopefully not dead. But it kind of, like, broke. And the place I usually go to is closed. It never reopened. And my friend told me about this other guy, but he's in Metairie and I can't get there. So I found this place on St. Charles, but they're only open till one, and—”

I offered to pick him up. He accepted. Leon was on his porch waiting for me when I got there. I parked the car anyway. I got out and went to him.

“Can I use your bathroom?” I asked Leon.

He frowned. “The house is already locked up,” he said apologetically. “And it'll just take a minute to get back uptown. Literally.”

“Please?” I said. “I really can't wait. Literally.”

From the outside Leon's house was an unremarkable shotgun on France Street. With a sigh he let me in and told me where the bathroom was. Inside the house I gasped and practically lost my balance.

Leon's house was
gorgeous
.

Leon collected Mardi Gras memorabilia from the golden age. Each room was lined with period glass cases that held lithographed invitations to balls, necklaces of glass beads, crowns of costume jewelry, aprons from skull & bones gangs, queen's sashes, and more of the same. Even without the Mardi Gras stuff the house was beautiful. The walls were painted a deep, rich red. The furniture was from the same era as the house, mid-1800s, but everything was pleasantly worn and just slightly out of place, just enough so you knew you didn't have to walk on eggshells.

Quickly, I took in what I could. In the second parlor I found a desk, and I rifled though credit card statements, electric bills, and other papers. Nothing told me anything. In a little bowl on the desk was a stack of cards—business cards, shopping cards, charge cards.

I looked at my watch. I'd been there three minutes. I figured
I had seven, absolute maximum, before he noticed I was gone too long.

I jogged back to the last room, which Leon used as a bedroom.

My God.

Leon made his bed.

On his nightstand was a small pile of books:
Reading Indians and Writing Race
;
Mardi Gras in New Orleans
;
The Krewe of Comus: An Informal Oral History
; and
Cajun Mardi Gras Traditions
.

On the other nightstand was a pile of novels: Julie Smith, Poppy Z. Brite, James Lee Burke. There wasn't a novel anywhere else in the house: probably not Leon's. I looked in the drawer. One vibrator, one diaphragm, one packet of cough drops. Definitely not Leon's. So Leon had a girlfriend.

I looked at my watch. Eight minutes, all of them wasted. I'd learned a lot about Leon, but none of it would help me with Vic.

Leon was in the truck with the heat on full blast, frowning.

“Sorry,” I said. “Female trouble. So. Mardi Gras.”

At the mention of Mardi Gras, Leon smiled. His whole face came to life. It was as if someone had flipped a switch and turned him on, a real man replacing the cardboard cutout that had been holding his place.

“Oh, yeah,” he said enthusiastically. “I've been collecting Mardi Gras stuff since I was a kid. I been to pretty much every parade—well, pretty much every parade since I was born. Except 1989. I was in the hospital—man, that sucked. I missed the whole season that year. I'm in three krewes now; Krewe De Vieux, Zulu, and—oh, I'm not supposed to say I'm in that one, but one of the big ones.”

“You're a Zulu?” I asked.

Leon smiled again. He was like a different person now, a real person with things he liked and didn't like and even something similar to a personality. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “There's white guys in there. We do the makeup, the skirts, everything. No one cares. It's the best club I'm in. We got a clubhouse down on—”

He stopped. I knew why: the famous clubhouse was still closed, drowned in eight feet of water.

“Anyway,” Leon went on, skipping over the flood like a record skipping a groove. “It's still the best krewe there is. Those guys
really
know how to party. There was this guy—John—he was an Indian too, and he was in about a hundred other clubs and masked Indian too. I mean he was just”—Leon took a deep breath, so great was John the Zulu—“just
the best
. He got me into it. He used to say everyone had a mask on anyway, so, you know, who cares. Anyway, it
is
the best krewe. It was John who really helped me get into Mardi Gras. Saved me, really.”

“Saved you how?” I asked.

Leon wrinkled his brow. “Well, not
saved
. It's not like I was—well, not
saved
, no. But I was, I don't know. Kind of just floating. Just not really doing anything and drinking too much and kind of, kind of drowning, if you know what I mean. Just kind of drowning in place.”

“I think I do,” I said.

“And then when I joined the Zulus it was like . . .” Leon looked down and frowned. “Like John came and got me. You know? That feeling like someone really sees you? Really sees you for the first time?”

“I do,” I said. “I really do.”

Leon looked at the floor and we drove the rest of the way uptown in silence.

T
HE LAST KNOWN
address for Jack Murray was a rooming house on Jackson Avenue near St. Charles. The house was a mansion, or had been. The porch was gone, its concrete pilings left to hold up nothing. A few traces of beauty still held on: a carved door, the crumbling haint blue porch roof. On the corner, a clot of thuggish boys hung out, trying to look murderous under the low gray sky. They gave Leon and me the long, slow fish-eye as we got out of the truck. I smiled at them.

“Hi,” I said, and waved.

They ignored me.

We climbed the makeshift wooden steps to the door. I tried the mammoth door, original to the house. It was unlocked.

Leon looked at me hesitatingly. I raised my eyebrows. He frowned. I shook my head. Finally he nodded and followed me inside. Leon was the type you have to bully once in a while if you want to get anywhere.

Inside the house told the same sad story, clinging to a few bits of past beauty like a woman showing off her “best features.” I'd grown up in a house like this, a mansion my parents had inherited in a neighborhood where no one like my parents—rich and lazy—had lived in nearly a hundred years. Scraps of plaster trim hung on to the hallway walls under chipped paint. An
original chandelier, covered in dust, hung precariously over the stairs. In a dusty sitting room a marble mantel proclaimed noble birth, a temporary dip in circumstances, a misunderstanding at the bank that would be settled any day now. It was a story I knew by heart, an old litany of excuses and apologies, born rich but somehow not quite staying there, poor but not poor enough to do something about it.

The manager came down the stairs under the swaying chandelier. To my surprise she was a white middle-aged woman with long white hair, barefoot, in jeans and a T-shirt.

“Sweetie!” she cried when she saw Leon.

“Marsha!” he said. They embraced.

This was fucking perfect.

“I'm so glad to see you!” the woman cried. “I been thinking of you.”

“Me too,” said Leon. “I heard about you from—”

“Me too,” Marsha said. “But it's still good to see you. How'd you make out?”

“Eh,” Leon said. “How about you?”

“Eh,” she said. They smiled sadly at each other.

“Hi,” I said.

“Oh,” Leon said. “This is Claire. I don't know if you heard about my uncle?”

“Your uncle?” she said. Leon told her the whole story and why we were there.

“Ah,” Marsha said. “Well, come on in, for Christ's sake. Have some tea.”

We sat on thrift-shop chairs in the dusty parlor and drank green tea. I explained to Marsha what we wanted.

“I'm sorry you came all this way,” she said when I was done. “I could have told you over the phone. Jack Murray doesn't live here anymore. After the storm he started drinking again and, you know. It wasn't that he got behind on his rent, although he
was
. But a lot of the guys here are in recovery and, God, I couldn't risk it. It could be like dominoes.” She laughed and flipped her hands over in time, like dominoes falling. “I was going to ask him
to leave, but I didn't have to. He just up and left. That was it. I heard from one of the guys that he's staying in Congo Square now,” she said. “I hope he isn't. But that's what I heard.”

“Did he leave anything behind?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said suspiciously. “How'd you know that?”

“People always leave something behind,” I said. “You think I could see?”

Marsha looked at Leon. He shrugged.

“It wasn't much,” she said, wavering. “But it was everything he had.”

“He left it behind,” I said. “He hasn't come back for it. Legally, that makes it garbage.”

“I guess,” she said. The idea seemed to make her sad. “Come on.”

Leon and I followed Marsha to a closet under the main staircase. It was full of sloppily stacked mismatched boxes. She struggled to pull a box out from the middle. Leon and I both jumped in to help. Somehow they ended up talking and I ended up un-stacking and restacking the boxes.

“I don't know why I keep it all,” Marsha said. “Some of this shit is twenty years old. But, you know. There's no one else.”

While they were talking and I was stacking, a man, another tenant, came over to us. He was Creole, probably handsome once, probably happy once, probably healthy and strong. Now he was old and none of those things.

He looked down at the floor, about to speak.

“It's okay,” Marsha said before he had a chance. “Next week.”

He nodded. He looked like he was going to cry.

“Thank you,” he said.

Marsha nodded and smiled, as if it wasn't worth thanking anyone over. The man turned and walked away.

“You talk to Mark Dylan?” Marsha said to Leon. “I haven't—”

“Oh, yeah,” Leon said. “He's in Dallas. He's doing okay. Dyin' to come home, though.”

They both laughed. “Talk to Jesse?” Leon said.

“Not for a while,” Marsha said. “I got an e-mail from her. A group thing. She's staying in New York, I guess. Her kids are there, she's got grandkids.”

“Why not?” Leon said. “She's got nothing left down here.”

“She sure doesn't,” Marsha said. “Less than nothing. You know, she never even came to see the house. Where the house used to be. Said she'd rather remember it as it was.”

“I don't blame her,” Leon said. They were silent for a minute. Then Leon said, “I heard about Brad.”

Marsha didn't say anything.

“I'm so sorry,” Leon said.

“I miss him every day,” Marsha said. “I think about him all the time. All the time. Every day.”

No one said anything.

It was the first time I'd heard anyone talk about the storm since I'd first met with Leon. People talked a lot about the response to the storm and the effects of the storm and the future the storm would bring. But they didn't talk much about the incident itself.

Finally I had Jack Murray's box out and open. But there was almost nothing in it. A few items of filthy clothing. A copy of
Aunt Sally's Policy Players Book
, a book that decoded dream images into lottery numbers. A chip from the casino downtown for two dollars. Mardi Gras beads.

And a postcard. It was from the Spot of Mystery in California. On the front was a picture of the house itself, a benign-looking cabin in the redwoods.

“Shit,” I said.

“What?” Leon said.

“Fuck,” I said. “I said that out loud?”

Marsha and Leon nodded and looked concerned.

“What is it?” Marsha asked. “Is it a clue?”

“Yes, it is,” I said. “A very valuable clue.
Very valuable indeed
. Lucky we came here
in person
. I wouldn't have wanted to miss this
important clue
.”

“Ooh,” Marsha said. “That's kind of exciting.”

“It always is,” I said smugly.

Leon smiled politely and looked rigid and unhappy.

I turned over the postcard. It was addressed to Jack, at this address. The postmark was January 1, a few days before I'd come to New Orleans. Next to the address someone had written a message in black ballpoint ink:

The Case of the Green Parrot
.

M
Y FAMILY HAD
not been popular in our Brooklyn neighborhood. We were poor, white, and strange, with no good excuse for it. We lived in a neighborhood of African Americans and Puerto Ricans and Dominicans and Haitians and Jamaicans, some of whom strived to be working class, most of whom had given up. The fact that Mother and Father openly loathed people of color didn't help.