Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (7 page)

Mike was a cop when I lived here. Now he was a PI. He had Constance to thank for that. He wasn't an educated guy but he was smart, and he had the knack. I trusted him. As much as I trusted anyone, at least.

“Yeah,” Mike said. “He hired me a few times. And I saw him around, you know, court, those PBA fundraisers, shit like that.”

I was way uptown on Claiborne. In front of me on the street was a big white cherry picker, the kind of truck with a big hydraulic arm that could lift someone up twenty or thirty feet in the air to fix a phone pole or wash a window. The truck pulled over by a nexus of power lines on the next corner. I pulled over across the street. I could drive and talk on the phone at the same time. But I wouldn't do either well.

“And?” I said.

“And,” Mike said. “I don't know.”

“You don't know what?”

Two men in white jumpsuits got out of the cherry picker truck, looked up at the pole where the power lines met, and conferred. I looked around. The power seemed to be working fine here.

“I don't know,” Mike said. “I mean, I'm not saying he was a bad guy.”

“Of course not,” I said. I figured that was exactly what he was saying. “But?”

“I mean, he was a good guy,” Mike said defensively. “Always good to me, at least.”

“But?” I said.

The men got back into the truck. One hopped into the cherry picker part. The other got behind the controls.

“But something about him,” Mike said. “Nothing he said. Nothing he did, either. But it was like—like sometimes a cloud would pass over him.”

“A cloud?” I said.

“A black cloud,” Mike said. “There was something going on there.”

“Like what?” I said.

“Like I got no fucking idea,” Mike said.

That was all he had to say about Vic. He invited me to come out and have dinner with the family in Metairie. I said I would if time allowed. I wouldn't.

A black cloud. I'd felt it in Vic's bedroom, just for a second.

I watched the men in the cherry picker for a few more minutes. I couldn't figure out what they were doing.

I left.

“The detective thinks he is investigating a murder or a missing girl,” Silette wrote. “But truly he is investigating something else altogether, something he cannot grasp hold of directly. Satisfaction will be rare. Uncertainty will be your natural state. Sureness will always elude you. The detective will always circle around what he wants, never seeing it whole.

“We do not go on despite this. We go on because of it.”

T
HAT NIGHT I LAY
in bed and read more about Andray Fairview. He'd been arrested yesterday afternoon, rousted with five other boys for loitering. It must have been just an hour or two after he'd peed on my truck. A search revealed—surprise!—one nine-millimeter semiautomatic handgun, one small bag of what appeared to be crack cocaine, one large bag of what appeared to be marijuana, both pending further testing, and unnamed drug paraphernalia. No cash was mentioned, which would hurt the case but, I was willing to bet, had enriched the cops. My guess was that this was more like a uniformed mugging than a real arrest. Andray would be out in a few days at the longest.

Andray was eighteen, African American, and a native New Orleanean. Father unknown, mother missing since leaving Andray at a hospital three years after giving him a misspelled name and a crack addiction at birth. Andray had officially aged out of foster care six months ago but hadn't actually had a foster placement for six years. Instead he'd been assigned to the St. Joseph's Service Center Home in St. Roch—which had closed in 2002. No one noticed that he had no placement after that. He had a record longer than my hotel room, but I didn't see anything more interesting than I'd seen at first glance: more possession, more assault. It didn't take much to rack up those charges, especially if you were black and poor and male. I guessed I'd done a lot more
assaulting and carrying and narcotic using and distributing than Andray, but my jacket was less than half as long. Then again, I'd rarely used a nine-millimeter or an AK-47 in my assaulting, like Andray had.

He'd been arrested for murder twice. Both arrests ended in a release after sixty days. That was the usual down here. The locals called it a sixty-day homicide or a misdemeanor murder or a 701—701 being the code that said the cops had sixty days to charge the suspect or let him go. Sixty days was a long time to put a murder charge together. Sixty days was a long time to put the Constitution on hold. But not long enough for this town. More than ninety percent of people arrested for murder in New Orleans were released in sixty days.

But a 701 was no cakewalk for the guy they arrested, either. A homicide suspect in New Orleans was more likely to be murdered himself than tried in court. The cops might as well have painted a target on the kids they held, guilty or not, for sixty days before they put them back out on the street. Any contact with the cops was grounds for the death penalty, and the judges and juries on the street didn't need sixty days to make a case stick.

People kill each other everywhere. The difference was that in New Orleans, no one tried to stop them. The cops blamed the DA and the DA blamed the cops. The schools blamed the parents and the parents blamed the schools. White people blamed black people and black people blamed white people. In the meantime, everyone went on killing each other.

I put the official records aside and looked at the fingerprints again. Like most criminals, Andray had a strong Robber's Swirl and a short Temper Curve. I wasn't surprised he was in jail. Vic had an overdeveloped Line of Denial and a small scar where his Conscience Whorl should have been. Typical lawyer. But both men had a strong and well-defined Heart Center in their thumbs. I didn't expect that.

Constance taught me the esoteric art of reading fingerprints long ago. There were only a few people left who really knew how to do it, and none here in the States. Some were in Europe,
most were in India. When Constance died I had to continue my study from books and intuition.

“Never be afraid to learn from the ether,” Constance told me. “That's where knowledge lives before someone hunts it, kills it, and mounts it in a book.”

I figured I had it solved. Andray Fairview broke in to Vic's house, found him at home, took some food, and took Vic too. Andray probably planned to take Vic to an ATM for a withdrawal. When he found out they were all down, he killed Vic and ditched him in the floodwaters. It wasn't a perfect crime, but it was a damn good one. Given that teenagers are rarely criminal masterminds, I figured the case would be over in a few days. The case of Vic Willing was as good as closed.

Or so I thought until I fell asleep that night.

I
WALKED DOWN
a long street that used to be in a city. Now it was deserted, covered with white ash and dried gray mud. Brown plants died along the side of the road. Ruins of cars and houses sat still and broken on either side of the street. The air smelled sweet and sickening, like organic decay.

I saw something at the end of the street—a house or a truck or a large animal. When I got there I saw it was a tank, the old-fashioned kind with a long barrel.

Out from the top popped Vic Willing.

Mardi Gras beads hung from the tank's barrel.
Send to Tom Benson
, someone had written along one side.
George Bush's Lunch Box
was written on the other.

On Vic's shoulder was a green parrot, the kind I'd seen in front of his apartment.

“It's the end of the road,” Vic said. His voice was different from what I'd imagined: grainier, better, more southern.

“Yeah,” I said. “I see that.”

“There used to be a city here,” he said.

“That was a long time ago,” I said carefully, weighing my words in my hands.

He nodded.

“She told me to tell you,” Vic said. “Remind you.”

“Remind me what?”

“There are no maps here,” he said.

“Then how do I find my way?” I asked.

Vic smiled at me. “Follow the clues,” he said. “You already missed one. Here.”

He tossed something at me. It somersaulted through the slow, thick air to my hand. I caught it. It was a copy of
Détection
. The book fell open to page 108. I couldn't read the text.

“She told me to tell you,” Vic said. “Believe nothing. Question everything.”

“What?” I said. “Who?”

But Vic just turned his tank around and drove off, chug-a-chug, down the street.

“She told me to tell you,” I heard him call from the tank. “Follow the clues. Believe nothing. Question everything. That's the only direction you need.”

When I woke up I rushed to my copy of
Détection
and opened it to 108.

“You cannot follow another's footsteps to the truth,” Silette wrote. “A hand can point a way. But the hand is not the teaching. The finger that points the way is not the way. The mystery is a pathless land, and each detective must cut her own trail through a cruel territory.

“Believe nothing. Question everything. Follow only the clues.”

I knew the case of Vic Willing wasn't over yet.

T
HE WAITING ROOM
off Orleans Parish Prison, famously known as OPP, smelled like fear and disinfectant. Most of the other people in the waiting room were mothers and lawyers. Across the room from me was the boy with dreadlocks who'd been with Andray when he'd peed on my truck. He didn't recognize me. He flipped through the pages of a
telenovela
someone had left in the waiting room. In the corner of the room two other boys, both white, leaned forward in their chairs, elbows on their knees. They wore big but short pants with long white socks and white undershirts and baseball hats on sideways. They scowled and tried to look frightening. They succeeded in looking a little frightening.

After waiting an hour and watching other people come and go, I went up to the guard.

“I think you forgot me,” I said. I gave him my name.

“I ain't forget you,” he said defensively. “You ain't on the list.”

“I put my name on the list when I got here,” I said.

“It ain't here now,” the guard said.

We put my name back on the list. I had to start all over again. It would be at least half an hour before I was called. I went outside for some air.

The two white boys were sitting on the steps, smoking. They looked at me. I looked at them. One was brunette, average build.
The other was a redhead and rail-thin. Both had tattoos on their arms like the other boys I'd seen—numbers, letters, codes, memorials. The redhead also had a rosary tattooed around his neck.

There are no coincidences. Only clues you've been too blind to see, doors you haven't found the key to open.

“For the detective whose eyes have truly been opened,” Silette wrote, “the solution to every mystery is never more than inches away.”

I went over to the boys and sat next to them, inches away.

“Hi,” I said. “I'm Claire DeWitt. I'm a private eye from Brooklyn, New York.”

They sat up and looked at me. No matter how far downhill it goes into yuppiedom, Brooklyn always impresses people. Between that and the PI business I had a good introduction to anyone under the age of forty who'd ever owned a hip-hop album.

“I'm here working on a case,” I said. “A
very important
case.”

The boys nodded, and tried to look dependable and upright.

“And what I need to know,” I said, “is if either of you has ever seen this man.”

I took out my picture of Vic Willing and showed it to them.

They looked at the picture. When they did, something happened to the redhead. It was like a door shut across his face and locked tight. He didn't blink. He didn't wrinkle his forehead or move his eyes or any of the other normal things someone would do looking at a photograph. Instead he locked up, like a car that'd run out of oil.

The brunette boy looked at the photo and shook his head.

“Uh-uh,” he said. “Sorry.” He was telling the truth.

The redhead shook his head. “Sorry,” he muttered.

He was lying. I looked at him. He started to look nervous. His foot tapped. Suddenly he stood up.

“Fuck this shit,” he said angrily to the other boy, throwing his cigarette on the ground. The brunette looked confused. “This is
bullshit
,” said the redhead. “Waiting here all fucking day to see that nigga. He ain't even
come
visit me when I was in Charity, not once.
Fuck
this.”

He turned and walked away without looking at me. The brunette boy, confused, trailed behind him.

The truth may have been inches away. But I still wasn't close enough to grasp it.

I went back inside and read a book I'd brought with me on Mexican witchcraft. When my name was called I went through two metal detectors, both of which missed every piece of metal I had on me, and ended up in a square room that had the same smell and more lawyers and less mothers. A guard pointed to a round table near the middle, where Andray Fairview sat waiting for me where a guard had left him.

I sat in the plastic chair across from him. He didn't look up.

“Hi,” I said. He looked up, saw me, and looked back down. I didn't know if he recognized me or not. I doubted it.

His eyes were big and pale brown, the whites streaked with red and pink. Under the neckline of a thin T-shirt a gunshot scar blossomed on his chest. His eyes were fixed down on the linoleum floor, and his breathing was long and shallow. He sat slumped in his chair as if it took all of his energy to stay sitting up.

“I'm Claire DeWitt,” I said. “I'm a private investigator.”

That usually gets a good response. Everyone loves a mystery. But Andray just looked up and lifted his eyebrows and then let them fall back down, gradually, to his occipital ridge. If he recognized me, he gave no sign of it.