Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway (11 page)

I let my mind clear and I looked at the blood, the blood that had once been red and blue and alive and was now dead and brown.

The cops can only do so much. Even if they mean well, even if they’re geniuses, they have fifty or so cases and limited overtime and wives and husbands and children and mortgages. That’s why you hire a private eye. Because if she’s smart, the private eye has none of those things.

I knew the cops had looked under the sofa and looked through the desk and in the corners and through the laundry hamper. But there were secrets to find.

First I went to the kitchen and looked through the refrigerator. Nothing was out of order—soymilk, rotten vegetables, half a chocolate bar, everything you’d expect. I checked the freezer: ice, frozen vegan burgers, miscellaneous uninteresting foodstuffs. I went through the kitchen cabinets, the dish rack, the dishwasher, the spice shelf.

Nothing. This was the fourth time I’d done this, maybe more. There was nothing the first time and nothing the last time and nothing this time.

From my bag I pulled a penlight and I got down on the floor and looked under the furniture. Nothing. I looked through the sofa. I’d looked through it before, but sofas were complicated creatures. They were like slot machines. Things would go in and in and in, but most of them would disappear. Only occasionally would anything come back out, and only for those with dedication and luck and a good understanding of how the machine worked.

I’d searched the sofa before. Now I
really
searched the sofa. First I took off all the cushions and pillows and piled them a few feet away. I looked at the sofa carcass, its tight crevices and narrow valleys. I went to my car, opened the trunk, and after some rummaging found my slim jim, the tool locksmiths use to open a locked car door, a very thin, long piece of metal about an inch wide. I took the tool and went back to the sofa. First I reached my hand into the crevices around the edges. Next I went through the same crevices, as slowly as I could, with the slim jim. The first thing I found was a corn chip. I picked it up and put it aside. Next I found a few quarters and then a nickel. I was toward the back when the tool hit something hard and solid.

I felt a current run up from the small, solid thing through the tool and into my hand and I knew: It was a clue.

A clue is a word in another language, and mysteries speak the language of dreams. Mysteries speak the alchemical language of the birds. There is no dictionary. Not even for me.

I gently extracted the locksmithing tool and set it aside. The tool was hard, and I couldn’t risk damage. Instead I stretched my arm out as far as it would go, painfully pulling my shoulder a little from the socket. I moved my hand as best I could in the tight fit, and after a few seconds I found it: something small, hard, round. Slowly, carefully, I pulled it from the sofa and up to the light.

It was a poker chip.

Paul didn’t gamble. I took him with me to Reno once. For a case I had to pick up a suitcase full of cash from a doctor in Reno who dealt in tranq prescriptions and homemade liver tonics and deliver it to a woman in Needles, Arizona—a long story, but that was the only way the Case of the Dove with Broken Wings was ever going to be resolved. Since I had to stay in Reno overnight I figured I might as well have some fun doing it. I played a little craps and an hour or two of baccarat, but Paul didn’t play anything, not even slots. He said he didn’t know how and besides, he was having fun just watching.

After a while I realized the real reason he wasn’t playing. He wasn’t worried about losing. He was scared that he would win. Paul was embarrassed enough about being rich. The last thing he wanted was more money.

I put the chip in a little plastic bag and put it in my purse. I was done for the night. I’d already been here for two hours and I was fairly certain I’d gotten what I’d come for. I stood up, dusted myself off, used the bathroom, washed up, got my coat, and reached in the pocket for my keys—

Keys. That reminded me. I went and looked at the front door. You didn’t need keys to let yourself out, but you did need them to lock the door behind you.

I stopped and lay down on the sofa and tried to puzzle it out. Whoever killed Paul didn’t
have
to take his keys. But it seemed like he had anyway.

Paul let himself in. Maybe the killer came in with him. Maybe the killer knocked. Or maybe the killer was already there.

Somehow the killer got in.

He—or she—killed Paul and left, locking the door behind him. Or her.

Why would he lock the door behind him? I mean, you kill a man, take his things, and split. Are you worried someone else will steal
more?
That your awesome crime scene will be spoiled?

Something knocked around in my brain. It almost came to the surface but then fell away, dissolving back into the currents of grocery lists and half-read books and misconceptions, the sad little graveyard where thoughts go to die.

I reached in my pocket for more coke and came up with the empty plastic bag. I licked it clean.

You figure this: The neighbor hears the gunshot, fucks around for a minute or two, calls the cops, throws on a robe, goes over to check Paul’s place, finds that it’s locked, and so the neighbor waits for the cops. This all takes three to seven minutes. Plenty of time for someone to kill Paul, lock the door behind them, and disappear.

Then why didn’t it sit right with me?

I got out my phone and called Officer Ramirez.

“Hi,” I said. “It’s Claire DeWitt.”

“Seriously?” he said. “Today?”

“Nah,” I said. “Just kidding. Someone you actually like is on hold. But while I’ve got you: Paul Casablancas. Are you absolutely sure the door was locked?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I was first on the scene, as far as I know. It was locked.”

“Could the killer have been in the house? Not
were
they. But would it even be possible?”

He thought about it for a second. “No,” he said. “Well, yes. Possible? Sure. They couldn’t have gone out through the front door, ’cause we had a guy there while I looked inside, just for that reason. But could he have, say, snuck out through a back window, closed it behind him, and somehow broken into or, you know, scaled another house to get out from the yards and back on the streets, all without a dozen cops noticing—sure, that’s possible. It’s within the realm of human possibility, I guess. We searched the backyards, but if he’d done it fast enough, before that—yeah. It’s possible. Extremely fucking unlikely, though.”

“Extremely unlikely,” I repeated.

“More than unlikely,” Ramirez said, “but I don’t know the word for that.”

“Me either,” I said. “I’m gonna have to look that up.”

“Well, I don’t think that happened,” he said. “I think we would have seen or heard or vibed or otherwise been aware of the perp.”

“Could he have hid in the house?” I asked. “It’s a big place.”

“Could?” he said. “Sure. Could he, you know, had a false panel and been hiding in the wall? Sure. Coulda been living in there for years. But did the officers do a thorough and reasonable search of the house? Yeah. You bet. Saw it myself. I don’t think he was there.”

He stopped and took a sip of something. Probably coffee.

“Or she,” he said.

“Or she,” I repeated.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I said.”

“Right.”

Ramirez said
okay
and
goodbye
in a way that sounded like
go fuck yourself
and got off the phone.

I
DROVE BACK TO MY
apartment, where I took a shower and got dressed and read the new issue of
Detective’s Quarterly
. Alex Whittier was on the cover. Professor of criminology at Northwestern. There was a transcript of his latest talk: the scientific method of solving et cetera. Or something like that.

A few hours later I got back in my car and drove to Japantown, where I met an old friend, Bret, at Fukyu in the mall for a late dinner. He’d already ordered for us. He knew what I liked. That was Bret’s hobby: he knew what women liked. Bret was in his fifties and the richest person I knew. I didn’t need money, but if I did, I knew I could always ask him. That counted for something; you couldn’t say that about every rich person. He was born rich and he loved money, so he just kept getting richer.

After dinner we walked around the mall. Bret was born in Italy and had lived all over the world. He stopped at a little sweet shop and ran in to talk to the woman inside in Japanese. When he came out, he had a little box, and a look of triumph on his face.

“This is the thing!” he said with a big smile, and I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I smiled too. He explained that it was a special little pastry he hadn’t had since he lived in Kyoto. Happiness is contagious, and Bret seemed impossibly, always, happy.

Later, though, in his house, as the sun came up, I couldn’t sleep and his happiness had worn away, fought off by my natural immunity. “Happiness,” Silette wrote, “is the temporary result of denying the knowledge one already has.” Far be it from me to deny the clever and glamorous truth for a stupid thing like happiness. The truth that was so fucking important, the truth that we were all supposed to give up our lives for, give up our happiness for. This truth we detectives, we Silettians, were supposed to love so much. To think some other girl, some poor sweet sap who didn’t know any better, might actually be enjoying herself right now.

I sat in a silk-covered window seat and looked down to the city below. Bret slept a happy sleep in his giant bed. In a drawer next to him I found a big fat bag of coke. I did a small fingernail’s worth, then stuck the bag in my purse. He knew what he was getting himself into when he invited me over. Bret’s San Francisco house was at the top of Pacific Heights and you could see the entire world from his bedroom. I opened the window and leaned out. The fog was damp and the streetlamps glowed. I took his special pastry from the bedside table where he’d left it, half eaten, and dropped it out the window and watched it fall slowly in the pink dawn to the black street below and then, in pieces and layers, tumble down the hill toward the bottom. A fat, smart crow swooped down, landed next to it, and started picking up the pieces for breakfast. After that I got dressed and walked back to the garage where my car was parked. The bill was fifty-two fifty and the cashier expected me to argue but I didn’t.

After I got my car, I didn’t drive home. Instead I drove around the city, watching the sun break neighborhood by neighborhood, sniffing little scoops from the big bag of cocaine. At six or seven I went home and took one of Lydia’s Vicodin. I crawled into bed and fell asleep watching
Craig Kennedy, Criminologist.
Craig always solved his case in thirty minutes. Every week the same sets, dressed up a little differently, and most of the same actors, in different clothes, played out different stories on the screen. Which maybe wasn’t so different from every mystery. Just shorter.

After a restless sleep I got up the next day and made green tea and watched more TV. I talked on the phone to Claude and Tabitha. Later I sat on my floor and shuffled the business cards I’d taken from Paul’s dresser. I shuffled some more and then I pulled one.

The guitar store.

I went to the file for the Case of the Kali Yuga and looked at the list of missing guitars. Five of them. The language of guitars sounded like a pornographic story translated from another language: whammy bars, f-holes, double-cutaway, fretwear, tailpiece, binding, belt-buckle rash, wall hanger, case queen.

I called Jon, the guy from the guitar store, and left a message. I told him I wanted to talk to him. I didn’t tell him I didn’t know what I wanted to talk about.

I didn’t know why I didn’t tell Lydia about the poker chip.

I only knew that I didn’t.

Brooklyn

I
WOKE UP THE NEXT DAY
thirsty and hungover. I stumbled into the cavernous kitchen, designed for full service, and put on a pot of coffee. My blanket was wrapped around my shoulders. The heat was either broken or we hadn’t paid the bill. I turned the oven on.

“You making something?”

I turned around. My mother was there, looking as hungover as I felt.

“Just warming up,” I said.

“Yah,” she said. “Make Mommy a cup of coffee, will you?”

“It’s already on,” I said.

She looked relieved. We both sat at the big wood table. My mother, Lenore, was still a shockingly, unearthly beautiful woman. Her blond hair was in a dated flip and she had on smudges of last night’s makeup, but it didn’t matter. She had high cheekbones and perfect tight skin you could bounce a quarter off of. Her blue eyes shone. Her Austrian accent had been finely tuned in boarding schools all across Europe, as one after the other kicked her out. Men would stop cars in the middle of the highway for her. Men would give up fortunes for my mother. Men had done those things, and more, as she liked to remind us.

But then she fell in love with my father. And, according to her, that was when her life started its slow, long spiral down.

Over the mantel was a clean patch, outlined in gray dust, where a Warhol silkscreen of my mother used to hang before she sold it a few years before. We looked at the empty spot.

“Ach,” my mother said. “The car.”

My mother had a little yellow Karmann Ghia. At least twice a year it was towed—reading street signs and feeding meters was exactly the kind of drudgery Lenore had no time for. The drudgery of getting the car back from the impound lot at the Navy Yard would be someone else’s problem.

One morning a few months later an Italian man would show up at the house and scream at Lenore for an hour in Italian, while she screamed back. Then the man would drive away with the car, which I would never see again.

She went to the window. She’d parked in front of a fire hydrant a few yards down from the house. We had our own driveway, but it had been blocked by an abandoned car for a few weeks.

No one had noticed yet, not the car in our driveway or the Karmann Ghia parked in front of the hydrant. Traffic enforcement wasn’t exactly patrolling our neighborhood regularly. The street was gray, with old black snow hardened in little piles here and there, trash scattered around it.