Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway (32 page)

They took me in and brought me to bed in a cot next to the lama’s room. The lama called a doctor he knew who came over and said I was basically fine, just wasted and bruised and malnourished and dying. But easily curable.

“Just keep her off drugs and feed her,” the doctor said. The lama told me later he said it like it was the easiest thing in the world. Like I hadn’t been trying to do that all my life.

I slept in the cot for a few days. When I woke up everything ached from the accident. I felt exhausted. I didn’t really want to be saved again. The lama was sitting next to my bed with a pot of green tea with herbs mixed in.

I drank some tea. He asked if I could eat a little something and I said no. I stared at the wall.

“We don’t go through these trials just for the hell of it, you know,” the lama said. “We go through them for wisdom. For purification. So we don’t make the same mistakes next time.”

I didn’t want a next time. I didn’t want to learn any more fucking lessons. I wanted to be with Tracy again. With Constance. With Paul. With people who loved me. I wanted to start over with them, to be someone else. Let someone else figure out who bludg-eoned the professor in the library with a candlestick. I didn’t give a shit. I wanted out.

I curled up in a ball and pulled the blankets over my head.

“Go fuck yourself,” I said.

“You know, I’ve seen you try so hard to end it,” the lama said. “So many times. And I feel like it’s kind of bullshit.”

“Thanks,” I said. “And you can take your fucking pearls of wisdom and shove them—”

“No,” he said. “Honestly, Claire. I’ve never seen anything like it. You know there are people who would give anything to be you.”

It was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. If anyone wanted to be me they could have it.

“I mean, you so clearly have something to do,” he said. “Most people, they try to kill themselves and, you know, it just happens. Most people, they kind of float through life with no direction and no signs and never even know why they’re here. I don’t think you really get that. You, you’re fucking indestructible. Look at you. You’re covered in scars, you’ve ruined yourself with drugs, and you’ve put yourself in more danger than anyone I’ve ever known. Or heard of. Did it ever even cross your mind”—he sounded pissed off at me now—“that things happen for a reason? That you’re here because people need you?”

“Your fucking platitudes—”

“Without Constance,” he went on, ignoring me, “we’d both be dead by now. No question. And somewhere there’s someone at least who wouldn’t have made it without you. I know it. I mean, you’re not giving me much evidence here of being a useful person, but I trust her. Apparently you’re being kept around for
something.
I mean, it could have been you. When she was killed, when your friend was killed, that guy—I mean it
should
have been you, a thousand times over, and it never is. I wish I were that fucking important. I wish the world gave that much of a shit about me. I really do.”

I didn’t answer. He made a pissed-off noise at my awfulness and left, shutting the door sharply behind him.

The next morning I started eating again. The day after that I got out of bed and walked around the grounds a little. The next afternoon I helped some of the kids with a gazebo they were building.

After a few days I ran into Jenny in the kitchen. She was making tea and she ignored me.

“Hey,” I said. “Thanks. For letting me stay. I know—I mean, I’m sure you didn’t want . . .”

She looked at me.

“You fall down,” she said. “We all fall down. You going to get back up?”

“I think so,” I said after a minute.

“I think so too,” she said. “I think some people, we always get back up. Always.”

That night the lama came into my room, where I was reading a Donald Goines novel
for the second time. The monastery was a nice place but their library sucked. I made a note to buy them some books when I got back to City Lights.

“So,” the lama said. “You haven’t heard from Andray, have you?”

“No,” I said. Of course, I wouldn’t know if I had—I’d lost my phone the night of the crash, and also hadn’t checked my email since then.

The lama looked worried. I’d never seen him look worried before. He sat down on my bed. I felt like we were kids at summer camp, sharing secrets. I’d never been to camp but it looked like this on TV.

“Trey called me,” he said. “First a few weeks ago and then again last night. Andray took off with some girl he met in Kansas City. They were supposed to meet up in Las Vegas but Andray didn’t show. Hasn’t answered his phone, hasn’t called Terrell either.”

I helped the kids finish the gazebo, and helped them start a new yurt. After ten days the lama drove me into town, where I rented a car and drove back to my place in the city. There was a stack of mail in the slot. I had a few hundred emails. A lot of client inquiries. A few looked promising. A woman whose son was being accused of a murder she knew he didn’t commit. A man who wanted to find some missing paintings, stolen from his family in 1942. Sounded kind of fun. But everything still felt heavy and dull, dirty and old.

Nothing from Andray.

I called Claude. The lama had called him, so he knew I was alive at least.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You were really cool and I treated you like shit.”

“I didn’t see,” Claude said. “The whole time we were working on the case, I didn’t get it, what was going on with you.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “No reason you should have.”

“Yeah, well,” he said. “I am trying to be a detective.”

We both laughed.

“Do you still want to work for me?” I asked. “It’s cool if you don’t. I’ll give you a recommendation, your last few weeks’ pay, whatever.”

Claude paused for a second. “Do you still want me to?” he said.

“Of course,” I said. “You’re the best.”

“Then I do,” he said firmly. “Working for you is the best thing that ever happened to me, Claire. I’d be lost without you.”

I stopped and didn’t say anything for a minute. Then I got him started working on the murder case I’d picked up at the Fan Club. The woman had sent me a few emails with all the information she had about her brother’s case. I believed her that he was innocent. Maybe we could save him. Or at least get him out of jail.

S
OMEHOW ME AND DELIA
became friends. I told her all about Lydia in her big loft in SoMa.

We sipped hot tea and looked out her giant windows at the gray foggy street outside. Delia seemed sad. I knew she missed Paul, missed Lydia, missed everything and everyone, like I did.

“Hey,” I said. “Want to see something cool?”

We drove for nearly two hours and by the time we got to the Double J Ranch it was night. Before we turned up the drive I made a few adjustments to the security system. No one would know we’d been here at all.

I cut the lights and turned up the drive and stopped at the gate. I opened up and let us in. Most of the little horses were sleeping, except a few who snacked on grass and dew. We got out of the car and looked at them.

“Oh, Claire,” Delia said. “They’re beautiful.”

“I know,” I said. “I kind of love them.”

The little black guy was sleeping when we got there. But after he heard my voice he woke up, shook himself awake, and stood up and came toward me.

“Oh, Claire,” she said again. “He likes you so much.”

I scratched the little guy just where he liked, on the hard top of his head, and Delia fed him some carrots she’d brought from her fridge.

Then we opened the gate and we let them out. We let them out the back door, not the one that led to the highway, but the one that led to the Bohemian Club’s woods. To Paul’s woods.

It turned out a neighbor was poisoning them. He was putting tiny amounts of poison in very small apples and tossing them over the fence. No one knew why. Did he hate all horses? Did he especially hate tiny horses? Mysteries never end. A guy from the Spot of Mystery saw one of the horses wandering off to the woods to die. He was a smart man, an ex-detective from Houston, Texas, who’d gotten into trouble with liquor and bad women. But he was still smart, and when he saw the horse lie down he took a hair sample from the dying little thing. Jake paid to get it tested and they came up with arsenic. Now the neighbor was facing charges and the horses were safe and the man from Houston was becoming a detective again. I gave him a good chunk of the fee I’d gotten for the case and he’d gotten his own place in Santa Rosa and had been dry for two months.

Delia and I opened the gate, but no one left. We stood there with the gate open and some of the horses came and sniffed at it and eyeballed it, but no one left.

Except the little black guy. He came to the door and stepped halfway through and looked at me. Then he went all the way through and stopped and looked at me again.

“You’re welcome,” I said. “But you know it’s gonna be rough out there? No one’s gonna feed you or comb your hair. You’re gonna be on your own. You’ll tell the other animals where you’re from and no one will believe you. They’re gonna think you’re a fucking lunatic. You know that, right?”

Delia crouched down and looked into his eyes.

“He knows,” she said. “He’d rather be real.”

He ran. He galloped away like a fucking stallion. We locked up the gate behind us and left.

And that was the Case of the Missing Miniature Horses.

That night I drove to Oakland in my rented car and sat around the fire with the Red Detective.

“Solved your case?” he said.

“Kind of,” I said. “She did it. The wife in the living room with the gun.”

“How’s it feel?” he asked.

“Like it’s still not done,” I said. “Like I’ve still got a case to solve.”

“Like a missing girl case?” he asked smugly.

“Maybe,” I said.

“Told you,” he said, and it was the first time I’d seen him smile, which he tried his hardest to conceal.

“What is left behind when a mystery is solved? Is there a nothingness, a vacuum, a hole?” Silette wrote. “Is it possible that some mysteries are better left unsolved, that we are sometimes better off with nothing than something?”

The next day I went to go solve my case. My missing girl case.

Lydia met me in an interview room, ugly and institutional. She was in her orange jumpsuit, handcuffed, dirty, and humiliated, just as she should have been. If we had been anywhere else I would have killed her with my bare hands.

She was already crying when I came in.

I told everyone that I went to Peru for the Case of the Golden Pearl and just lost touch with Paul, but that wasn’t what happened. What happened was that he asked me to call him.

“You never call me,” he said. “And then you do that thing where you leave.”

He didn’t say it as an accusation; he presented it as a fact. We were on the phone. It was late at night. That was when we had all our real talks, late at night on the phone.

It was true: I never called him, and I did this strange thing where I would leave, in the middle of the night after sex or the next morning or sometimes just while we were hanging out, having dinner or watching a movie or walking around the city.

It was always a case. But it was never a case. I left because every time we spoke we were getting closer. Because every time, something seemed to be revealed between us.
Oh I always
and
That’s my favorite too
and
I know just what you mean
and
I can’t believe you also
and the unspoken but always present
How have I not known you forever? How is it I was here without you, and now you are so close to being everything?
Something that seemed like it had been there all along.

“I’ll call you,” I said. “It’s, you know, it’s hard for me. But I’ll call you.”

“Because you know,” he said, and he said it without accusation, without anger, “I can’t keep doing this. This isn’t fair.”

He was also bruised, scarred by life. Who wasn’t? I had no monopoly on pain, I knew that.

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I’m just—”

“Don’t be sorry,” he said, and I thought I heard him smile. “Just call me sometimes, okay?”

I promised I would. And then a few days later I got on a plane to Peru without telling him and I never called him again.

I couldn’t imagine any circumstance, in any lifetime, where I would be able to tell Paul how I felt about him. That I loved him.

We didn’t speak for a while, when I got back. I heard he was dating someone else and I pretended I didn’t care and everyone believed me. I took a case finding out what had happened to a missing girl and it turned out she’d drowned in the bay. I stopped eating and stopped sleeping and ended up in the Chinese Hospital, Nick Chang by my side. Then I went to New Orleans on the Case of the Green Parrot and when I came back I ran into Paul and Nita in the vegan place in Chinatown and he told Nita he’d been in love with me.

We’d spoken occasionally after that, friends, and when we’d run into each other that night at the Shanghai Low I felt that undertow again, that thick black current pulling me back toward him. And I thought maybe, just maybe . . .

And then Lydia walked in.

Lydia sat in her prisoner’s chair in her prisoner’s outfit. I sat down in the chair across from her.

“I loved him so much,” she said, still crying. “I couldn’t stand it. It made me crazy, loving him so much. He always loved you more,” she said. “I knew. I pretended I didn’t but I did. I was his fucking substitute, his second-best. It should have been you together, not us. None of this would have happened if you’d just loved him back.”

“Is that why you killed him?” I asked. “Because you were jealous?”

“Of course not,” she said. “I didn’t mean—I never wanted to. It’s not like I planned it. You think I wanted this to happen?”

“I don’t know what you wanted,” I said.

“I thought—” she began. “I don’t know what I thought. I really don’t. But I guess in some way. With the gun. Like, I could make him love me. Like, I never knew—I never knew how to make anyone love me, and I knew no one ever did. I mean, I know why. I know that. But I thought, not consciously, I mean, of course I know you can’t force someone to love you. I just wanted him to love me so much and . . .”