Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (17 page)

He looked at me and nodded, unsure. His friends stopped talking and looked at me.

“Do you know a young man, about your age, named Lawrence? His mother's Shaniqua, works at LaVanna downtown?”

Lawrence was the boy who Vic Willing had supposedly helped out of legal trouble, from the goodness of his heart. I'd tried calling the numbers his mother had given me, but they were all disconnected or clearly fake.

“Yeah,” one of the other boys said cautiously. He was taller and older and looked serious. “I know him.”

“You know where I can find him?” I asked.

The boys shut up and started to turn away from me.

“I'm not a cop,” I explained quickly. “I'm a private eye. Like on TV. Look.” From my wallet I took out my California PI license and showed it to the boys. “I'm investigating a case. Lawrence might be an important witness.”

The boys all laughed in astonishment.

“Like
Magnum, P.I
,” one said.

“Just like that,” I said. “But without the boss.”

“Get outta here,” the boy I'd first spoken to, the cute one, said. “You ain't no PI.”

“Am too,” I said. “I'll prove it to you.”

“Go on,” he said. The boys laughed again.

“Okay,” I said to the boy. “Tell me one thing about yourself.”

“Like what?” he said.

“Anything,” I said. “One thing.”

“Okay,” he said. His voice was husky and a little raw, as if he'd been shouting. “All right. Lemme think . . . Okay. When I was a little kid, my sister called me NeeNee. That was her nickname for me.”

The boys laughed and kept talking. I looked at the boy; his
height, his weight, his tattoos, the slightly overdeveloped muscle in his right forearm. I listened to his layers of accents as he talked to his friends. His shoes were worn, his pants big and denim but not very clean. I watched the way he carried himself, saw the curves of his emotions in his back, the set of his shoulders and his jaw, the slight overbite, the lines in his face, the tension in his belly. He blinked twenty percent more than he should have. Once I had all the information, I closed my eyes and let it all fall together into a whole.

In two minutes I had it.

“You were born in Atlanta, Georgia,” I began, opening my eyes. Slowly, the boys stopped talking and laughing and turned toward me. “You were born in 1992. You moved here when you were four, maybe five, with your mother. Your name is Nicholas, Nicholas something. You worked scooping ice cream last summer in the French Quarter before the storm came. Your mother left when you were eight. You lived with your aunt and uncle but you came back from Houston without them three—maybe four—months ago.”

Now all the boys were listening. “Your father is in Angola,” I said. “You miss your sister. You've been looking for her. You had a girlfriend but—well, I won't talk about that. You do better in school than you should. And you like airplanes. Someday,” I said, “you'll fly in one.”

The boys looked at Nicholas—the cute boy—for confirmation. Eyes wide, he nodded his head.

“The ice cream place,” he said, slowly. “It was Uptown. On Carrolton.”

“Holy shit,” one of the boys said.

“Fuck,” another said.

“How you do that?” another said. “I mean—what the fuck?”

“Told you,” I said. “I'm a private eye.”

“Now,” I said, “you guys can help me with something. Something for a
very important case
.”

From my purse I got my picture of Vic Willing.

“Any of you know this guy?”

I handed the picture to Nicholas. He said he didn't know him.
I watched his face as he looked at the picture. He was telling the truth. So was the next boy, and the next.

The tall boy with the serious face took the picture and, like the rest of them, shook his head.

“Uh-uh,” he said, his eyes darting a little to the left. “Never seen him.”

He was lying. He knew Vic Willing.

When we finished with the pictures the boys went back to their conversation. Nicholas, the cute boy, came and sat next to me.

“That was fucked up,” he said, pretending to laugh.

“Thank you,” I said.

“So,” he said, looking at the floor. “My sister. You know where she's at?”

I looked at him. He didn't look like a boy anymore. He looked like a little old man, with the burdens of an unfair life on his back.

“You been looking for her?” I asked.

He nodded. He looked bone-weary tired.

“Few years now,” he said.

“You didn't lose her in the storm?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“Foster care?” I guessed.

He nodded. “I ain't seen her in five years,” he said.

“I don't know where she is,” I said. “But I can tell you how to find her. But the thing is—people change. You know that, right?”

He nodded.

“She might not be the person you're thinking of. She might not even be someone you want to know. You understand that?”

He nodded again, his old-man face serious.

“Okay. You know that guy over there, Mr. Mick?” I asked, pointing at Mick.

“Yeah.”

“Well, you give him everything you know about her—her full name, her date of birth, her Social if you have it—and he'll find her for you. Shouldn't take him more than one, two days. But he
probably can't get to it until he's done with this thing he's helping me with, 'cause I'm keeping him pretty busy. You tell him I promised, okay? Tell him I promised.”

The boy nodded and thanked me. I didn't know if he would do it or not. I would've offered to help him myself, but Mick would do it faster—he knew the ins and outs of the system in Louisiana. Besides, why steal his chance to be a do-gooder?

The boy wandered off and I pretended to read a magazine for a while, all the while keeping my eyes on the tall boy who'd lied about not knowing Vic. After a while he got up to use the bathroom. I was waiting for him when he came out.

“Hi,” I said.

The boy jumped.

“What the fuck?” he said. “You waiting for me?”

“So you knew Vic,” I said.

His whole body tensed. You didn't have to be a detective to know something was wrong. He frowned.

“You seem like a nice lady,” he said. “But everyone around here know. You talk to the crazy lady about the DA, you dead.”

“Really,” I said. “Where'd you hear that from?”

The tall boy laughed and shook his head.

“Sorry,” he said. “I ain't fucking around with that.”

“Thanks anyway,” I said. He nodded.

I turned to walk away. Then I heard the boy inhale and I turned back. He had something else to say.

We looked at each other. His long, serious face looked tired. Tired of fighting, tired of keeping secrets, tired, probably, of living in a world where if you say the wrong thing to the wrong person, you die.

“If you wanna find Lawrence,” he said. “He hangs out at this park up in the Irish Channel. Third and Annunciation, around there. Little guy, big dreads. If he ain't there, you just go on back another day.” He looked at me. “He there. You find him. You find him easy.”

He hoped that whatever he wouldn't tell me about Vic, Lawrence would.

C
ONGO SQUARE WAS
a small cobblestone-paved plaza on the edge of Louis Armstrong Park, preserved as the spot where African and Haitian and Indian slaves in the eighteenth century, allowed slightly more freedom in New Orleans than elsewhere in the South, came to play music, dance, and worship. The square was widely regarded as the birthplace of American music, the spot that held the key to understanding what would later become jazz and then become rhythm and blues, rock-and-roll, and everything that followed.

It was preserved, but not protected. A regular crew of alcoholics and addicts had claimed it and held it tight. Anyone else who stepped in that corner of the park did so at their own risk. The police never came around. Neither did the Salvation Army or the National Guard.

There were a few benches scattered around the perimeter. Three were empty and two had men sleeping on them. Toward Rampart Street there was a picnic table, anchored in place. Five men sat at the table. Each was over fifty and poor, probably homeless, wearing clothes that hadn't been washed this year. They were the same type of man you could see in any city in America, in a little park or square just off downtown, halfway to skid row. I think they started making them after the Civil War; fighters who'd lost their wars and lost their fight. Even when their side won, they lost.

One of them was Jack Murray. Under layers of dirt and spilled liquor and despair, the men were barely distinguishable from one another, but I recognized him from the day on Constance's porch. I was sure he wouldn't remember me.

Jack Murray, PI, began life as a good upper-middle-class boy from Uptown. Like Vic Willing, he'd graduated from Tulane and started off full of ambition. Jack Murray wanted to be the best PI alive, and he was on his way there. He solved the murder in the Blue Room in less than ten minutes when he was just twenty-six. At thirty, he solved the murder in the wax museum, open since 1957. At thirty-five Jack Murray got James “Slim” McNeil exonerated for the Abita Springs slayings and sent the real guilty party—McNeil's own brother!—straight to the pen. Murray was the detective to beat back in 1979. Made the cover of
Detective's Quarterly
no less than five times. He was ready to take over the world—or at least his little corner of it.

But at forty, Jack Murray discovered Jacques Silette. And everything changed.

I'd read interviews with him from that time. He seemed genuinely shaken by what he'd learned. From
International Detection
, 1988:

Interviewer: So how has your discovery of Silette changed your approach to solving crimes?

Murray: (Long pause.) I think that now I'm more interested in seeing how my mysteries solve me.

Soon Jack was turning down all the best cases that came his way. He passed up the Case of the Baghdad Bandit and its fifty-thou commission. He didn't even try to find out who shot the police chief's mistress. And he totally ignored the Murder on Rue Royal, despite a personal plea from the editor of the
Times Picayune
to get involved in the case.

Instead, it seemed like he was accepting the worst offers he could get, all of them pro bono. He devoted months to solving the murder of a homeless man by the railroad tracks in Metairie.
He found a serial killer who'd been preying on the working girls of New Orleans for years. But no one cared about homeless men or working girls—no one except the victims themselves. Murray wasn't making any money, and after a year or so of this he got kicked out of his house. He started drinking more. Everyone tried to help him; friends, other detectives, family. But he said he wasn't the one who needed help.

After he'd been on the street for a few years, a determined writer tracked him down to interview him for the
Journal of Silettian Studies
. The journal lasted for exactly two issues due to complete lack of interest from the world at large.

Interviewer: What does it mean to you to be a Silettian detective?

Murray: (Pause.) It means I was blind, and now I can see.

Interviewer: And the drinking?

Murray: Well. Some people need glasses to see, you know.

After that, Murray wouldn't answer any more questions.

I'd heard of him when I worked for Constance, although not from her. The older guys never mentioned his name; it was us young PIs, full of gossip, who were fascinated by him. The brilliant detective reduced to a bum and a drunk. I'd thought he was more legend than reality. I didn't know how complicated life could be until one day he showed up on Constance's doorstep and rang the bell.

I saw him at the door, held up one finger in a
wait
gesture, and went to find Constance in her office.

“Constance,” I began. “I think you—”

But she was already up and coming toward the door. When she opened it the big man smiled broadly, as gray and soiled as his old coat and hat, and they fell into each other's arms. They both laughed as the man waltzed her around the porch.

I stood and watched until a ringing phone pulled me away. There was always something going on at the big house on Prytania Street. The day before it had been Constance's meditation
teacher, Dorje, in his saffron robes, making mushroom tea in the kitchen. The day before that we'd interviewed a German shepherd. Life was never dull with Constance.

I went back to work and didn't see Constance for a few days. When I saw her again I asked about the man at the door.

“Jack Murray,” she said. “If you see him again, Claire, please let him in, or give him money if he needs it, will you?”

“Of course,” I said. I was burning with questions, but I didn't know if I should ask them.

“Jack's path is a strange one,” Constance said, seeing the questions on my face. “But he is where he's supposed to be. We needn't worry about him. And if he needs help, he knows he can always come here.”

She looked at my face and saw that I was still confused.

“Sometimes you have to accept things that you can't understand, Claire,” she said.

I frowned. So did Constance.

“Well, I suppose you don't have to
accept
them,” Constance clarified. “But they exist all the same.”

Jack disappeared back into the twilight world of shelters and hotels, park benches and bus stops, liquor stores and rooming houses. I never saw Jack after that. I doubt Constance did either.

Six months later, she was dead.