Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (18 page)

There was a seat at the next picnic table over, and I went and sat near the men. They smelled strong even in the fresh cold air. This was a mean crowd, I saw that. But I had never let anyone get the better of me yet, and I didn't plan on letting that happen now.

They ignored me, passing around a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor.

“A girl could die of thirst around here,” I said with a little smile.

They ignored me. They kept ignoring me.

They ignored me until I left.

That afternoon I drove by the park on Annunciation and Third. A group of boys hung around, trying to look important and busy. But I didn't see any little guys with big dreads, no one who met Lawrence's description. I went to a sandwich shop on Magazine and First and got a shrimp po'boy and a root beer and then went back. Still no Lawrence.

On Jackson, between Magazine and Constance, I saw the cherry picker again, illegally parked by a fire hydrant. No one was in it.

Clean me
, someone had written in the dust on the rear window.

Kill me
, someone else had written underneath.

I'd been on the case for two weeks. I had clues, I had leads, I had questions. What I didn't have were answers.

“Only a fool looks for answers,” Silette wrote. “The wise detective seeks only questions.”

Silette didn't have a client paying him by the day and watching the clock. He had book royalties and a trust fund from his father, who'd made a fortune in textiles.

T
HAT NIGHT I
went to dinner at a restaurant on the corner of Frenchman and Chartres that served Creole food and had just reopened a few weeks ago. Like a lot of restaurants, they didn't quite have it together yet. The food came out in Wonderland-type portions: an iced tea was served in a little juice glass and a pile of fried okra was bigger than my head.

I'd just paid the bill and stepped outside into the cool, wet air when I felt it.

First the pressure dropped. Then it was like someone flipped a switch and the world turned to slow motion, its energies made almost visible. I felt fear rise up from my root and into my belly, where acid rushed to meet it.

Someone was going to die.

I looked around. I saw someone else hear it before I heard it. I glanced at the face of a woman across the street, and I saw in slow motion as her mouth opened and she started to let out a scream. Then—it seemed like an hour later but it had been less than a second—I heard the rat-a-tat-tat of gunshot from an automatic weapon. I looked around and saw the panic spread across the street, saw as one person and then another opened their mouths and then dropped down or ran or stood and screamed.

I heard the shots. But I didn't see the shooter.

I jumped down behind a newspaper box and stayed down, covering my head and my heart in a ball. I heard screaming, saw feet running in every direction. The plate glass behind me shattered as one shot and then another hit the window. That was the last shot.

I opened my eyes and unwound myself. All was quiet. I stood up. Everyone was gone or hugging the pavement. Everyone except me. I ran to the corner just in time to see a black Hummer with no plates drive away, a long brown arm pulling an AK-47 in through the window.

There was a tattoo, in fancy script, across the back of his hand. I didn't have time to read it.

I looked around. Next to the service entrance to the restaurant on Chartres a boy slumped against a wall, half lying, half sitting. His eyes were rolled open and his mouth was frozen in an O of terror. I thought he'd been shot.

Then his eyes rolled down. He smiled.

We looked at each other. In the wall behind him was a spray of bullet holes.

His face glowed. We started to laugh.

“Fuck,” he said.

“Man,” I said. “Wow. You all right?”

He nodded and laughed.

“I guess,” he said. “I ain't dead yet.”

He stood up and we both looked him over for bullet holes. There were none. People came out of hiding one at a time, coming over to look at the holes in the wall behind him.

I didn't know if the bullets were meant for me. Maybe. Maybe not. I'd been asking questions, and it wasn't impossible.

The boy who hadn't been shot grinned and did a little dance.

In New Orleans, it's hard to tell where your murder case ends and everyone else's begins.

M
OST PEOPLE ASSUME
Constance was killed working on an important, dangerous case. She wasn't. Constance was having dinner with a friend at a restaurant in the French Quarter when she was killed. Two boys came in with AK-47s and killed everyone in the place. Eight patrons, three staff members, and one off-duty cop who was supposed to be guarding the place. He did his best. His gun was in his hand when they found him—a .22-caliber revolver. It was a toy compared to what the two boys had. I've never seen anyone say no to an automatic weapon. The boys who shot her didn't have to kill her to get her money. They killed her anyway.

Constance was worth millions. I'd seen her give a thousand dollars to a beggar. She bought her maid a house. She sent her cook's kids to Harvard. She would have given those boys anything they'd asked for, even without a gun. But they didn't ask. They just shot her.

A lot of people thought there was more to it. Conspiracies. Webs. Plans. Connections. Constance had never stopped working on the disappearance of Belle, Silette's daughter. Some detectives thought she must have found something: clues, stories, suspects. Silette had other followers too, and not all of them agreed with the way Constance kept the torch. Not everyone thought she was the rightful heir to the throne.

Those people didn't know what life is like in the city of the dead. They didn't know how easy it is to die.

Mick spent years studying Constance's murder. He studied each detail, followed every clue. Other detectives helped. Kevin McShane came out of retirement to work the case with Mick. The Red Detective came down from the hills of Oakland to whisper theories in my ear. The Oracle of Broad Street volunteered her services for free. Every detective in the world wanted to crack the case.

But in the end, there was no case. No mystery. Just a plain fucking murder. There was nothing more to it than two poor kids who wanted money and didn't know or care who they were killing to get it.

The big conspiracy that killed Constance wasn't the Federal Reserve or the Octopus or the Anti-Silettians. It was the biggest, oldest conspiracy in the world—the conspiracy that produced kids like the two who shot her for pocket change. It was the conspiracy that began when the first man looked at his neighbor and said, “Hey, I think I'd like
that
cave.”

Constance was always trying to get me to see something better in people, something that would lead us up a little higher. I didn't see it.

“This world was supposed to be paradise,” she told me once, biting into an apple at her big kitchen table. “If people would wake up, it still could be.”

“I don't know what it was supposed to be,” I said, “but it's pretty fucking close to hell. Listen to that.”

A siren wailed past the house, the fifth one that night. There was some kind of battle on the streets Uptown: four murders in three days.

Constance smiled. “When you get to hell, Claire, believe me, you'll know it. It's
much
hotter than this, for example. And dark—they don't have light bulbs there yet, or so I'm told.”

Constance was shot through the head, right at her third eye. And with her gone, I became the best detective in the world.

D
ISGUISE IS ONE
of the arts of detection, and like most of our arts, it has fallen on hard times. Your average hack detective today thinks putting on a suit from the Goodwill and getting a haircut qualifies as a disguise. It does not. Neither does slapping on a little makeup or a wig, although, certainly, costuming is a good skill to have, and one you'll need. But disguise is far more than a new outfit and a change of facial hair. For a worthwhile disguise the detective must not only
appear
to be someone else, she must
believe
herself to be someone else. She must let her ego dissolve into the ether and must reach out into the collective unconscious and pull up a new person, fully formed, to borrow for as long as she needs her. She must let herself be possessed, if you will, by this new person, regardless of how unpleasant she may find her new persona to be. But this isn't the biggest challenge. The challenge for the detective who needs a disguise isn't taking on the new personality—it is letting her old personality go. To let go of the self is the highest calling of the self, something that few achieve. And something that every self, whether she knows it or not, aspires to.

In the afternoon I went back to Congo Square. This time I went as Elmyra Catalone, African-Italian American recovering crack addict from Memphis, Tennessee, raised Baptist, now occasionally Pentecostal, occasional sex worker, victim of sexual abuse at the hands of a cousin, mother of four children, one
dead, one in foster care, one in Angola, one living in the town of Celebration, Florida, with a wife and two children. Elmyra is off the crack cocaine but she likes her liquor and has a schnapps now and then to be sociable.

Elmyra came to the park shyly at first, looking for a friend from Tallahassee she'd heard might be around here. She didn't see the friend but it looked like a place she could have a drink without causing too much trouble. If there was one thing Elmyra had had enough of in her life, it was trouble. From her plastic bag she took out a little bottle of peppermint schnapps and had a swig and found a bench to sit on. Trying to stay warm, Elmyra drank her schnapps and waited for her friend.

The men at the picnic table were not kind to Elmyra.

“Lookie here, there that same white bitch in dirty clothes.”

“She put some kinda shit on her face thinking we won't see.”

“Bitch.”

“White bitch.”

Jack Murray was silent.

I had a slug of schnapps and threw my wig in the trash and left. On my way to the truck on North Rampart I saw Leon coming out of a record store. I thought I could avoid him but he spotted me when I opened the door to the massive truck with its ear-blasting remote.

“Claire?” he said. “Is that you?”

We made small talk. He asked how the case was going. I lied and said it was going swell.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “Is everything okay?”

“Of course,” I said. “Thanks for asking.”

Leon acted strange and confused. When I got back to my hotel I remembered that I was still in Elmyra's clothes—some of which I had bought at a thrift shop and some of which I found in the garbage—and that I had splashed myself with some schnapps before going to the park, for effect. And that I was actually kind of drunk when I saw him. And that I smelled like crack from the pipe they'd been passing around in Congo Square.

This day wasn't working out as I'd hoped.

T
HE HARDEST THING
about buying a gun in Louisiana was that there were so many options I hardly knew where to begin. I heard shots at least once a day. Half the men in the city wore clothes so big, they could carry an arsenal under them. Out of the sliver by the river, spent casings and shells crunched underfoot on the sidewalk like crack vials or fall leaves. The suburbs west of the city were lined with pawnshops that advertised
$99 SPECIAL ON 9 MILLIMETER
and
HANDGUN SALE
and
SPECIAL ON UZIS
.

But I decided a pawnshop was too risky. It wouldn't be as helpful to have a
registered
gun; besides, I wasn't sure if I would pass the criminal background check. I'd only brought paperwork for two other names with me, and I didn't want to waste them.

Instead I drove around Central City. As always, there was a small group of young men on every third or fourth corner. It was like looking at a long strip of fast food restaurants and convenience stores at a highway exit. They all looked equally good, or bad. It wouldn't be a complicated transaction, but a lot could go wrong—I could get robbed, the police could show up, or the kids could refuse to deal with me.

From a pocket in my purse I pulled out two dice. One was lapis, one was jade. They had been Constance's. I held the dice in my hand for a minute and let them warm up. Then I tossed them on the passenger seat.

I got seven. I made a left on the next block and a right on Seventh Street. After two blocks I saw a group of kids, slightly larger than the other groups, maybe eight or ten young men on the steps of a cottage, laughing. They were laughing at something the kid on the top step had said. The kid on top stood above them, not smiling even though he'd just made the others laugh.

As I got closer I saw that the kid on the top step was Andray Fairview.

I pulled up beside them. Two kids who stayed down on the street put their hands on their waistbands and looked at me. I rolled down my window and leaned over.

“Hey, Andray,” I said. “Remember me?”

As the other boys looked on, amused, he came toward the truck and leaned toward the window.

“What's up, Miss Claire?” he said. His face wasn't that different than it had been in OPP: vacant and depressed, devoid of qi. Again, it was clear that he'd shut his doors tight and had no inclination to let me in. It was like the night we'd gotten high together had never happened. I didn't blame him.

“Come on,” I said. “Get in the car. You can do me a favor and get on my good side.”

Without arguing he got in the passenger side of the truck and shut the door behind him.

“What's up?” he said again, looking straight ahead.

I thought about giving him some kind of I'm-not-the-enemy-here speech, but that wasn't exactly true. I liked Andray, but I kind of
was
the enemy. I wasn't at all sure he didn't kill Vic Willing.