The Infinite Blacktop Read online

  I knew Cynthia from her monthly adventures in the Cynthia Silverton Mystery Digest, a periodical that ran comics, short stories about Cynthia, and real mysteries you could solve at home. I picked them up in the bookmobile that lurked around our neighborhood in lieu of an actual library. Cynthia was the best detective in her oddly crime-ridden hometown of Rapid Falls. Her parents killed in a mysterious automobile crash, Cynthia lived with her loving pagan housekeeper Mrs. McShane and was an A student at Rapid Falls Community College, where she was studying criminology under the wise tutelage of Professor Gold. Cynthia’s life in wealthy and bright suburban America was as alien to me as the lives of the Yanomami of Brazil.

  But I knew Cynthia was a detective. And somehow I knew that I was, too.

  “Behind every woman’s broken heart,” said Professor Gold, when Cynthia had her moment of despair on the Case of the Scorpion’s Tale, “is someone with a sledgehammer.”

  Of course Cynthia solved the case. Cynthia always solved the case.

  After I recognized the ring, and knew Tracy had likewise been initiated into the mysteries of Rapid Falls, we were bound. Friends forever. She introduced me to her other friend, Kelly, already an initiate. Cynthia Silverton pulled us together like magnets.

  We lived in a neighborhood no one exactly moved to: it was a place you ended up, and then tried to escape. Tracy was Irish on her father’s side and undefined Brooklyn-European on her mother’s. She didn’t remember her mother, who died when she was two. Tracy’s father was a decent man and a bad alcoholic. They lived in the vast housing projects across the street from our house. He’d rarely left New York. When he worked, he worked on the docks near where we’d found the girl with black hair. When he didn’t work, he drank. When her father did well, he made decent money and didn’t mind spending it on her: Dr. Martens boots, a new vintage dress, books. When he was drunk, Tracy came over to my house or Kelly’s to eat.

  Kelly lived with her mother in a tenement-type apartment around the corner. Like us, Kelly’s mother had wanted to escape. But she got pregnant young and got trapped in the apartment she grew up in, never able to scrape together the money to leave and give up rent control, never able to accept it as her real home. She never forgave Kelly for trapping her.

  Our house was a giant and crumbling half a city block from 1850-something that somehow had survived both Robert Moses and the erosion of polite capitalism all around. It was an inheritance. Everything was inherited; work was a dirty word to the DeWitts. There was an old Brooklyn line of the DeWitts, naval officers or whalers or maybe slave traders—the stories changed depending on who was telling them, how much the storyteller had had to drink, and what they wanted out of the listener. Although visiting DeWitts—my father’s family—were rare. Most of the DeWitts were regular, normal, rich people who didn’t want anything to do with us. But occasionally one of my father’s brothers or a poor cousin would come by with one of his ever-rotating spouses and always-surly children, all much older than me. Everyone would get drunk. At least two people would end up fighting, sometimes physically, over a slice of arcana from the past, usually involving money: of course Cousin Philip was legally entitled to one thirty-second of the Gold Coast estate, but everyone knew, they fucking knew, don’t pretend you didn’t know, that Uncle Hammond had meant it to go to Josephina’s kids, and just hadn’t rewritten the will in time. Josephina’s kids loved the beach like their own mother’s milk, and it was a fucking sin to rip them apart from it, a fucking sin.

  My parents had snatched the house through some complicated, shady legal twists I never understood. My European mother, from a different city, every time I asked, was skilled at the art of theft without violence. The lawyer who’d helped them steal it still called every once in a while asking to get paid. My mother laughed at him. My father pretended not to be interested in things like money and status and houses; he collected books and drank and charmed younger women and at night, alone in his library, raged against anyone who had more than him. Which was almost everyone.

  But half the house was rotting away, anyway, and Brooklyn had changed since the older DeWitts had settled here. Our neighborhood was majority black and minority Puerto Rican and Dominican. Otherwise there was one Chinese American family in the projects, one Pakistani family down the street, Tracy, Kelly, and me. Everyone in my family was racist, which made the house easier for my parents to steal—my parents being just as racist, but more desperate.

  It didn’t seem as strange to me as it should have that Tracy had the Cynthia Silverton Decoder Ring on her finger that day in fourth grade. I didn’t know then that only a few hundred copies of the comics had been printed, that even fewer had been distributed, and that in thirtyish years I would be able to find just one surviving copy. Back then I only knew that Cynthia, my best friend, had introduced me to everything good in life: mysteries, solutions, and two people who loved me enough not only to miss me when I was gone, but to come and find me and bring me back.

  * * *

  I didn’t know how they found me. Later Tracy would tell me she’d been sleeping, and she’d had a dream about me. Tracy told me about her dream as she and Kelly washed the blood and the dirt off me in Tracy’s bathtub. I couldn’t stop crying.

  “I had to find you,” Tracy said. “In the dream. Someone was waiting for you in front of this house. It was pink. The house. I couldn’t really see the woman but I knew she was waiting for you. She needed you. I knew I had to help you or you wouldn’t get there. To the street with the pink houses. She pointed toward the park. I woke up, and we found you.”

  Nine years later, I would be on the street with pink houses. But Tracy was gone by then, and Kelly didn’t want to talk to me.

  “I want to die,” I said in the bathtub.

  “We’re all going to die,” Kelly said, always the practical one. “But not today.”

  “None of us are going to die,” Tracy said, less practical, putting Band-Aids on my wrists. “Because we’re going to save each other. We’re going to save ourselves.”

  And in a way, we did. Tracy saved me. Kelly saved me. Every time I fell down, they picked me up. Every time I cut myself, they bandaged me up.

  And then, when they needed me, I left, and let them fall down alone.

  Just over a year after the night when she washed my cuts and bandaged my hesitation marks, Tracy vanished. The police looked and I looked and Kelly looked. Prior to this case—the only case that mattered—we had an unblemished and unbroken 100 percent solve rate.

  But we never solved the case of how Tracy disappeared one night from the Brooklyn Bridge subway station. No one found a single clue. Not one witness. Not one rumor, one eyewitness, one fingerprint.

  Tracy had us—until it wasn’t convenient for me to have her anymore. Until I decided that seeing the world and becoming a great detective and fulfilling what I imagined to be some kind of clever little destiny were more important to me than the people who, against all reason, loved me.

  I left Brooklyn and I never, ever looked back.

  Kelly stopped speaking to me, except for a phone call every year or two to run some clue by me, a fingerprint or a subway token or a can of spray paint.

  I became the best detective in the world, just like I’d dreamed of. I met kings and I met magicians. I solved people’s mysteries and I dug up their secrets. I walked into people’s lives and I ripped them open and gave them the one and only thing they needed to build a life up again. I met people who had everything on earth except the one thing they wanted the least but needed the most—the truth.

  I solved every mystery I came across.

  Except my own.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE CASE OF THE INFINITE BLACKTOP

  * * *

  Oakland, 2011

  A man named Eric banged on the bathroom door.

  “It’s Eric,” Eric said over and over, “Jen, just come out and talk to me. I think that’s reasonable. I think that’s fair. Just listen to me. Come on.�
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  I looked in the mirror with one eye. There were maybe half a dozen small cuts on my face, and a larger one under my left eye that could probably do with a few stitches, but I’d live without them.

  I looked at the rest of my body. Along my left hip was a giant bruise, which was probably connected to the pain, which I’d narrowed down to the left thigh. Bruised femur maybe, injured hamstring maybe. There was a big scrape along the front of the right thigh and knee that had left my jeans stained with blood, but that I hadn’t even felt—the other, louder, pain had drowned it out. Other than that all the damage seemed internal or at least invisible—I felt cracked ribs, and my left eye still seared, although less so after washing it out. I figured a light scratch on my cornea.

  I bent over and shook my hair. Blood rushed to my brain and I came close to fainting; everything went spotted and black, but I steadied myself and it passed. A little storm of glass and metal flakes came out of my hair and fell to the ground. I came up slowly.

  I checked my pockets. No wallet. A hundred and eighty bucks in cash, plus my Taser and my radio.

  No one had noticed me come in the bar. I waited for Eric to give up and then I opened the bathroom door and looked around, my eyes scanning for the right combination of race, age, and unattended purse.

  In about eight seconds I spotted her by the door, sitting with friends, purse dangling from the back of her chair. A white lady with strawberry blond hair from a bottle, about my age in tight jeans and white high-heeled ankle boots and a tank top that was printed with sports insignias. Her face was lightly pockmarked, as mine would likely be from now on, and she looked hard around the edges—but her eyes, under her layered strawberry blond hair, looked open and undefended. She was trying against all reason to have fun in this dive bar in the darkest corner of Oakland with a group of friends, and looked like she was succeeding—like she, and they, were having the kind of plain and joyful moment that refutes all theories and is so rare you could cry when you think about it—at least, rare enough for me.

  I am so sorry, I silently thought to the strawberry blonde. I am so sorry that I am me and you are you, and I am so sorry that this is how we will intersect.

  But being sorry had never stopped me before and wouldn’t now. I walked up to the bar and ordered a Coke. I kept my face down and in shadow and the bartender and I noticed each other as little as possible. It was too dark to see most of the cuts on my face, and it was a rough enough place that the ones that could be seen wouldn’t bother anyone. I grabbed a handful of napkins and walked toward the chair that held the strawberry blonde’s purse as if I were going to walk past. Her purse, like her shoes, was white leather and cheap and beautiful.

  When I reached the chair, almost to the door, I stumbled, and dropped the Coke so it spilled on the strawberry blonde’s feet, ruining her white boots.

  I immediately crouched down with the napkins and started cleaning it up before she realized what was going on.

  “Oh my God!” I said. “I am so sorry!”

  “What?” she looked down, confused, and figured it out. “Oh, it’s OK. Let me just—”

  “No, I’ve got it,” I said.

  She bent down to help.

  “I’ll get more napkins,” I said. “Just one sec—”

  While she was still looking down, I stood up and, behind her back, grabbed her purse off the back of her chair, and stepped outside, the cool night air bringing me back to life even as I gritted my teeth against the pain and limped away from the bar before anyone knew I was gone.

  I thought of her good night ruined, of the money she couldn’t afford to lose now lost, and I knew that someday, when all had ascended to the higher realms, I would be left alone to pay for the shit and the pain I’d caused.

  Until that day, I would win.

  Another few blocks away, I stopped and checked the police radio. It sounded like they’d gotten a good description of the Lincoln from the woman with the bleeding forehead and had at least two patrol cars out looking for it. I didn’t doubt the Lincoln could still be running. It was a motherfucker of a car.

  I looked through the purse I’d stolen. A phone with no password protection. A wallet with no cash but two credit cards and one ATM card and one driver’s license in the name of Letitia Parnell. I bet people called her Letty.

  Also a bottle of pills. The prescription label wasn’t in Letitia’s name. They’d been measured out for someone named Catherine Farmer. I didn’t recognize the name of the medication. Dexmethylphenidate. There was only one reason someone would steal a bottle of pills, so I guessed that Letitia Parnell had recognized the name.

  Uppers or downers?

  Dexmethylphenidate. I did some quick Latin translations in my head.

  Uppers.

  I popped two in my mouth, swallowed them without water, and went out to steal a car.

  * * *

  The first car I broke into was a late-model BMW and I couldn’t get it started for the life of me. I hadn’t stolen a car more than a couple of times in the past twenty years, and it showed. The second car I tried was an older Ford Taurus and I couldn’t even get in without breaking a window. The third was a 1995 Honda and I got it up and started in about twelve minutes. In the future I’d brush up on new automotive technology: for now I was happy to be in the Honda. I drove back toward the accident scene. It was mostly cleaned up, just a little pile of broken glass and plastic and the disturbing smell of burnt rubber left to mark the spot.

  I wasn’t worried about the cops. I knew the lady cop hadn’t talked, and the rest of the cops in Oakland had better things to worry about than an accident victim who didn’t want their help. They wouldn’t be looking for me.

  A few people were still hanging out around the accident. Or maybe they always hung out here. I drove up to two of them and parked the Honda. I got out and left it running. It had probably been two or three hours since the accident. They were certainly getting their money’s worth out of it.

  “Hey,” I said. They turned around and looked at me, they being two women somewhere between thirty and fifty, both African American. One woman wore worn-out athletic shorts, flip-flops, and a Raiders T-shirt. The other woman wore jeans and a matching Raiders T-shirt. They both smoked cigarettes. I figured them for a couple although I wasn’t sure and it didn’t matter.

  Neither of them said anything. They both looked confused. I figured they recognized me from the crash and I figured right.

  Finally the woman in jeans said, “Hey, are you OK? Weren’t you just—”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m OK, thanks. Did you see what happened to the other woman? The woman who was screaming?”

  “The ambulance took her,” the woman in jeans said.

  The woman in shorts hit her friend on the hip.

  “I don’t want to bother her,” I said. “I just want a statement for insurance. Do you know her name?”

  Now both women looked at me, each with her mouth in a straight line. They were bigger than me, and there were two of them. I could do something about one of those problems, and so I did: before they could figure it out and stop me I took the Taser from my back pocket and brought it up to the bare arm of the woman in shorts and pressed the obvious button. I heard a low electrical hum and the woman shook and shook and made a strange sound in her throat and fell down. All of this took two or three seconds. Before the woman in jeans could retaliate I quickly, and very painfully, raised my left leg and kicked her in the waistline, as high as I could reach. When my ankle hit her waist she fell down and I bit back a scream of pain. I felt bones in my leg I’d never felt before, and it didn’t feel good.

  She was down and doubled over in pain. I crouched down, feeling new and equally painful leg components howl and shriek as I did, both woken and numbed by the pills, and held the Taser up to her neck.

  “That would hurt a lot,” I said. “I really don’t want to do it. You seem like a nice person. All I want is her name. The name of the woman who went in the ambu
lance. And I promise, I’m going to protect her, not hurt her.”

  The woman kept her mouth shut, pulling her lips tight, until her fear got the better of her and she said, “Fuck,” and then she said, “Fuck,” again and then she said, “Daisy Ramirez. Her name is Daisy Ramirez.”

  * * *

  As I drove to the hospital the pills I’d taken started to effervesce up my spine; I felt like I was a dying phone and someone had plugged me in. Or maybe it was the shameful, but undeniable, adrenaline high that always came with violence.

  Claude was my latest assistant and seemed like he might stick, unlike dozens before. If he was still with me after the Case of the Kali Yuga, likely nothing would scare him off.

  I trusted him.

  I texted Claude: 911. Call me here use disposable.

  * * *

  I drove through dark Oakland and tried to remember the last few days.

  The Case of the Miniature Horses was closed. No one was murdering anyone over dwarf equines. The Case of the Kali Yuga was exactly the kind of case that people murdered each other over, but there was no one left to want me dead. The victim was dead and the murderer was locked up. The Clue of the Hawk’s Tears—no, that was last year. I was still confused. Had I hit my head in the accident? I didn’t think so. It was just shock.

  Think, Claire. Think. There was an accident—an accident before this one. I was in Santa Cruz with the lama. Nick Chang gave me a new prescription. I stole a book from Bix about—

  My thoughts stuttered a little. I stole a book? Why?

  Not a book. A comic.

  A Cynthia Silverton comic. I remembered the rough paper in my hand, slipping it into my jacket pocket. A loft in downtown Oakland. A book dealer I knew.