Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway (13 page)

F
IFTY DAYS AFTER
Paul died I drove across the Bay Bridge to Oakland. I passed the spot where Paul had left his car and thought I might feel something and I didn’t. Or so I told myself. Traffic on the highway was bad and I got off at the wrong exit and ended up stuck in traffic in downtown Oakland. It was like downtown Brooklyn—a lot of beautiful old buildings, built for the respectable middle-class shopper, now filled with “New York style” clothing stores and shops that sold gold teeth and fish-and-chips restaurants and, now, medical marijuana joints. A few old holdouts like I. Magnin somehow held on by their nails.

Homeless people congregated under an awning at Broadway and Thirteenth, trying to stay dry as it started to rain. A few blocks farther a man in a wheelchair weaved in and out of traffic, asking for change, his wheels slippery on the wet pavement. He knocked on my window. I didn’t want to open it.

He kept knocking. The light changed but I didn’t go—I wasn’t sure how close the man was, if the wheels of his chair intersected with the wheels of my battered Mercedes. He was annoying, but I didn’t want to kill him.

“Bitch!” he spat. “Bitch. In your fancy car. You give me some money.”

I looked around. From the sidewalk two cops watched. They didn’t do anything and they didn’t look like they would anytime soon.

The man banged on my window.

“Bitch!”

People behind me honked.

“Bitch! You give me some money, bitch.”

I leaned on the horn. The man didn’t seem to notice and didn’t move.

“Fuckin’ bitch in a Mercedes. You gonna give me something.”

Behind me more horns honked. Finally the cops stepped toward us.

The man wheeled himself away, screaming in the rain.

I wound my way through downtown, made a few more wrong turns, and finally righted myself going up the mountain. Sick of my car, I stopped at the first park entrance I found, parked, and entered the woods by a hiking trail.

The rain stopped. In a half mile I veered off and followed a deer path up a hill. Mushrooms bloomed on either side of the trail. I didn’t see another person until in ten or fifteen minutes I heard a woman’s voice, singing lightly in Spanish. After a few more minutes I came across a group of ten or twelve people in a clearing, about half of them indigenous people from somewhere in the southern part of the Americas—my guess was Peru, although I wouldn’t have bet on it. Most of them were lying around not really doing anything, but two of them, a tiny indigenous woman and a tall white woman, were standing.

The indigenous woman sang. The white woman said, “As the medicine starts to take effect, you might start to see things. These things might seem real, or they might not. But try to remember what you see. No two people will see the same things. These are private communications to you from the spirit of the vine.”

I climbed higher up the mountain. Near the top I veered off to another trail, this one fainter. In half an hour or so the trail took me around the mountain to the other side. No one was around; no one I could see, at least.

Finding landmarks in the woods wasn’t easy for me. I’d lived most of my life in cities, and most trees looked alike to my untrained eye. But after a few wrong turns I found the spot I was looking for, a ring of redwoods around a giant stump, blackened and hardened by fire. When a redwood dies five or ten more grow in a circle around the remains of the mother. It’s how they reproduce. This grove had been hit by fire, maybe back in the Oakland fires in the eighties, maybe a hundred years ago. A few trees in the circle had holes burned in their bases, caves big enough for a small person to curl up in. But they were still strong.

Sitting on a big rock nearby was the Red Detective.

“Look at you,” he said. “You got so many lies on you, you ain’t even know the truth no more.”

I shrugged and sat next to him.

“You wanna read cards?” he asked. “Or you just wanna sit?”

“I think I just wanna sit,” I said.

“Too bad,” he said. “I wanna read cards.”

From his pocket he pulled out his dirty old Rider-Waite tarot deck and shuffled and pulled a card. The Moon.

“Told you so,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said.

The Red Detective was not ever actually a detective, not in the way most people think of it. He never had any clients or solved cases. Instead he’d spent most of his life on the other side, committing crimes and getting caught for it. He had a heavy southern accent that showed his parents’ origins in Louisiana—a southern accent is common in Oakland, where it seems half the population can trace their roots to Louisiana or Alabama. By the time he was thirty-three, they say, and I don’t know if they’re right, he’d spent more than half his life in jail. He was out for three months when they got him for murder, first degree. It was a life sentence, no questions asked, if he lost the trial.

After that the story gets dim. In Oakland they say he knew how to work roots and that he “fixed” the judge, who threw the trial out on a technicality. In Berkeley, of course, they say that’s racist. They say he used his intellect to find a technical loophole the judge and all the lawyers had overlooked, that his brilliant mind, honed from years of jailhouse lawyering, outlawyered the law. In San Francisco they say it was a woman, that the Red Detective was a pimp and one of his women worked on the judge until he gave in and found a reason to throw the case out.

The Silettians have another story. The Silettians say that in prison, the Red Detective read
Détection.
And although the book makes sense to almost no one else, it made sense to him. And using what he learned in that book, combined with his army of prison and street acquaintances, he found the real killer—because he had not, after all, committed the murder he had been charged with, although surely he had committed others.

But Silettians don’t worry about justice. That’s for courts and judges. Silettians worry about one thing only, and that’s the truth.

In any case, the Red Detective was now free. Of course, he wasn’t the Red Detective back then. He was, maybe, just Red. Free, but, the story goes, with nothing—no friends, no family, no money, no place to stay. First he stayed on the streets of downtown Oakland for a while, moving in and out of shelters, following the clues to learn what the streets had to teach him. Slowly, a few blocks at a time, he started moving up the mountain.

I’d met him on the Case of the Washboard Killer. I’d heard about him for years but had not exactly believed he was real. Back then he was not quite up the mountain and into the woods. He was still in downtown Oakland, huddling under awnings to stay dry. He pointed out to me the clue I’d so stupidly missed: the killer had dirt under his fingernails long after he claimed to have left the park. Sometimes we are so blind. He didn’t talk to most people and wouldn’t have talked to me at all except he knew who I was; he and Constance had exchanged letters when he was locked up. I set the Red Detective up in a little place in Berkeley for a while, but he didn’t dig it at all. That was when he started to see that the woods were the place for him. He never thanked me, but he never forgot me either, and if I needed a pair of fresh eyes on a case he was always around.

“This missing girl case,” he said. “That’s why you come up here all in a funk.”

“It’s not a missing girl case,” I said. “It’s a murder case.”

“Every case is a missing girl case,” he said. “There’s no murder case, robbery case, missing girl case. Every case is every case.”

I nodded.

“I see that,” I said. “I do. There’s a lot going here. Definitely robbery. Definitely murder. But I don’t see a missing girl case.”

“You find that girl,” he said, “you solve your case.”

“Thanks,” I said. “That’s extremely un-fucking-helpful.”

He laughed.

“Good luck,” he said, still laughing a little. “Good luck with that missing girl.”

T
HE NEXT DAY
I turned the poker chip from Paul’s house over to Claude. The chip was for fifty dollars. It didn’t have a casino name on it. I asked him to look into it.

“Right,” Claude said. “Of course.” Then he blinked. “No. I don’t really understand what I’m supposed to do with that. Sorry.”

“Start with where it came from,” I said. Then I realized Claude didn’t know how to do that. “The first thing to look for is a maker’s mark of some kind. So go over the thing with a magnifying glass. There’s a few reference books on poker chips for collectors. They’ll have them at the big library at Civic Center. So go there next. And if that doesn’t pan out, I know a guy.”

“A guy?” Claude said.

“A guy,” I said. “But he’s the last resort.” The poker chip man could be unpleasant, and besides, I figured Claude could use the practice. Claude was excellent at library research, but he was still working on putting all that research together into a narrative that was not only possible but true. They aren’t teaching that in school these days.

“Okay,” Claude said. He sounded relieved to have some clear instruction at last. “I’m on it. Oh, and I got that address you wanted. It’s in your email.”

“Just tell me,” I said.

“I don’t remember,” he said.

“You do,” I said.

“I’ll get it wrong.”

“You won’t.”

He sighed, and gave me the address in Concord.

It was dark when I parked my car on Hemlock Drive in Concord, a bland East Bay suburb. Number 404 Hemlock was a low-slung little suburban number with a patch of green lawn in front. I got out and rang the bell.

A man answered the door who looked pretty much like I expected. He was white and forty-ish and strong and wore blue jeans and a T-shirt.

“You Craig Robbins?” I asked.

“You are?” he said, wary.

“Claire DeWitt,” I said, flashing my ID. “PI.”

He looked at me blankly.

Craig Robbins worked for the city towing cars—cars that were stuck, cars that were abandoned, cars that died, and, in Paul’s case, cars whose owners died.

“I’m investigating Paul Casablancas’s murder,” I said. “You found his car.”

“I did?” he said.

“You did. Ford Bronco. Old one. You found it by the side of the Bay Bridge, four fifty a.m., forty-nine days ago.”

Craig wrinkled his brow. “I
did
,” he said, surprised.

“What was the trouble with the car?” I asked.

“Alternator,” he said. “Guy probably either called highway patrol or hitched a ride. Got no records. He was long gone when I got there.”

“How did the car feel?” I asked. “When you went inside to check it out. How did it feel?”

“Feel?” he said. “What do you mean, feel? Like, did it feel like leather?”

“No,” I said. “How did it feel?”

He frowned. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “I’m not following. I didn’t really feel it.”

“What I mean is,” I said, “what did it feel like?”

“I didn’t, like, put my hands on it with any intent,” he said. “I just got in and got out.”

“When you were in the car,” I said. “What did it feel like?”

“Like a car,” he said, sarcasm creeping in. “It felt like a car.”

I looked at him. I looked at him until I saw the shadows underneath his eyes, shadows he’d been trying to hide with his sarcasm and his cheap defenses.

“Look,” I said. “I’m the only person you can tell this to. You can pass it on over to me and get rid of it, once and for all. Me and no one else. And if you don’t, if you choose to hold on to it and pretend it doesn’t exist, you will be stuck with this for the rest of your life.”

He looked at me. “You’re crazy,” he said. “I think you should go. I think you should go now.”

“What did it feel like?” I asked again. “This is your last chance. Your last chance to get rid of it. Forever. For the rest of your life.”

Craig Robbins made a face and sighed and looked around and scowled and then finally said: “It felt . . . dark. Like a very dark place. It felt like a place where you could get lost. Where people could forget about you and . . .”

Craig Robbins started to cry, angry tears forcing their way out.

“It felt,” he choked out, “like being lost in the woods.”

I
N CONCORD I GOT
pupusas
and plantains in a Salvadoran restaurant and then drove back home. Back at my place I lit a joint and watched
Law and Order.
During the third episode the phone rang. I let the machine get it.

It was Kelly again.

(Mumble mumble) are you there? I know you’re there. Pick up. Pick up. Pick up.

I did.

“Hey,” she said when I picked up, as if we spoke every day. “Do you remember the bookmobile?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Of course.”

“The Cynthia Silverton books?” Kelly said. “Or comics or whatever you call them?”

“Yeah,” I said again. It stung a little that she asked, for some reason. That it didn’t go without saying. That maybe our life together had been as ephemeral as all that.

“Go look online,” she said. “Look for Cynthia Silverton. Then call me back.”

She hung up.

I made a cup of green tea and thought about what a bitch Kelly was. How she’d always been a bitch.

Then I did what she said.

At first I thought I’d spelled it wrong. I tried it a few different ways and realized I’d been right the first time.

There was one short entry in an online directory of printed comics, which was stolen and republished thirty-eight times:

Cynthia Silverton: limited run comic privately printed in Las Vegas, Nevada, 1978–1989. The adventures of Cynthia Silverton, teen detective and junior college student. Extremely rare, but of limited value.

And one blog post, above a photo of the comics themselves:

Complete set of the
Cynthia Silverton Mystery Digest.
Or so I think. There’s little information to be had on these obscure 70s/80s mystery comics. No reference in Grafton or Heinz. Teen detective Cynthia Silverton of Rapid Falls solves mysteries, fights her nemesis, Hal Overton, and attends junior college, where she studies criminology. Bizarre and wonderful.