Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead Read online

  Their customers were relatively diverse, many of them white, many black, a few Latino, a good number in big pickups with four wheels across the rear like mine, almost all with Texas plates. I didn't know if that meant they were from Texas, here to capitalize on the rebuilding, or if they were locals who bought cars while they were evacuated in Houston, or if people registered their cars in Texas because of Louisiana's sky-high insurance rates. I figured you could get pretty much all the basics here; cocaine in various forms, heroin, maybe meth, possibly pot, although that could be a separate, indoor industry.

  The dealers were not diverse. They were all young men between thirteen and twenty-five, all black, and all wearing white T-shirts or white undershirts and huge jeans that hung down to display fancy boxer shorts, sometimes two pairs. Some wore parkas or large hooded sweatshirts to protect from the cold. Most had gold caps on some or all of their teeth. Most had their hair done in twists or braids of one kind or another that ranged from four to six inches long, although a minority wore neat, longer dreadlocks. They were as similar as Wall Street brokers in gray flannel suits or white-coated doctors in a hospital or Marines in uniform—and like those other people in uniform, their sameness subdued something in them, made them forget a piece of themselves. Something that should have been in their eyes wasn't there.

  I drove up toward the lake, through Broadmoor and Mid-City to Lakeview. The streets got quieter until the quiet was a roar, eerie and deafening. Here the buildings had a ring around them where the water peaked and sat for a few days before receding. With each block the yellowish-brown water line was higher and higher. It went from the stairs to above the porch to the windows to above the windows, and then there was nothing for it leave a mark on except the trees.

  The damage didn't end. It seemed like it should be over, and then on the next block it was worse: buildings missing walls, houses pushed by the force of the water into other houses, cars on top of cars, blocks of houses half collapsed, boats on sidewalks, parking lots of cars covered with the chalky white dust the dirty water left. It had been more than a year since the storm. But on some blocks it was as if nothing had happened since then; literally nothing, not even a breeze or a rainfall or a bird or even a breath.

  I drove back down Carrolton. Near the highway I found a flooded, abandoned strip mall. I pulled into the parking lot, and it was hard to imagine that it was ever much less dreary than it was now, with its dollar store and discount beauty supply store and fast food chicken joint and payday loan office and check casher. At each corner of the parking lot was the concrete base of what used to be a streetlight, probably broken long before the storm.

  Since I'd been in New Orleans I'd noticed that nearly every car I saw was like mine: a big, shiny new oversize pickup or four-by-four in white or silver, the offspring of drowned cars and FEMA checks and hysteria. But each car or truck had at least one scar: a crushed fender, smashed head- or taillight, a deeply dented side panel or hood or door. People still drove like they were in an emergency: weaving in and out of lanes, driving fast, stopping faster, still trying to outrun the storm. My unblemished truck stuck out like a sore thumb.

  If there was anyone within half a mile, I hadn't seen them. I checked my seat belt and tightened it up a bit. Then I started up the truck and drove around the parking lot in figure eights and then in circles, building up a tiny bit of speed with each turn, staying under thirty miles an hour so I wouldn't set off the air-bags. I made one more loop and didn't turn and drove right into the base of the streetlight in the corner of the parking lot. Instead of bracing myself I softened every part of my body, and when the truck hit the concrete it was like riding a wave as it broke. I heard a satisfying crush of steel and glass.

  The car set off an alarm to let everyone know it had hurt itself. I turned it off and got out of the car to see the damage. A chunk of concrete had crumbled off the lamppost base, leaving the dead wiring poking out like bones and veins. On the car there was a dent as big as a deer in the front fender, surrounded by a constellation of little mini-dents and bumps and scrapes.

  Now I looked normal. Or as much as I ever would.

  I drove back down to a gas station on Magazine Street and Washington for some water and snacks for my hotel room. I parked outside the lot on Washington. When I got out with my water and nuts and Chick-o-Sticks, two boys were leaning on the driver's side door of my truck. The boys were about eighteen, wearing the standard uniform of oversize jeans and black hooded zip-front sweatshirts. One had his sleeves pushed up and I saw tattoos on his forearms and hands, number-letter combinations that I knew stood for neighborhoods and gangs and housing projects but looked as random as the markings on the houses: 3MP, 7WB.

  The taller boy had short hair and a beautiful face with big, sad, liquid brown eyes. The shorter boy had neat dreadlocks just past his shoulders, and dark skin. His face would have been gentle and friendly if he'd let it. But he was trying hard to make it mean, although he couldn't quite pull it off. Under his sweatshirt the boy with dreadlocks had on a white T-shirt with a photo of another teenage boy on it, hands thrown up in the mudras of neighborhood codes and gang symbols. The picture was framed in a printed frame made of thousand-dollar bills. KWAME "PEANUT" SINCLAIR, it said. 1990–2006. LOVE U 4-EVER.

  "Excuse me," I said. "My truck."

  The boy with dreadlocks smiled like the cat who'd swallowed the canary, and stepped away. He tried to look mean but he just looked goofy. A funny, goofy kid with a nine-millimeter under his billowy white shirt.

  The taller one didn't step away. He stayed where he was and looked at me and didn't smile.

  I stood and looked at him. He was about my size and much, much stronger. Under his baggy clothes I could see the outline of a young, strong body. But if he could generate the energy to throw a punch, I'd be shocked. He looked like he was sleepwalking.

  I figured he was looking for someone to take his life. I didn't want it.

  Me and the boy looked at each other.

  "You oughta thank him," Dreadlock Boy said, eyes bright, with an accent so thick I could barely understand him.

  Suicide Boy and I looked at each other. The gray sky hung low above us.

  "Yeah?" I asked. "Why's that?"

  "He guardin' your truck for you," Dreadlock Boy said.

  Suicide Boy looked at me. End it, his eyes said. Do it. Now.

  I didn't say anything. I knew that look.

  "It's true," Dreadlock Boy insisted. "He put a blessing on it for you. Now it's like, consecreted."

  I figured he meant consecr Ated, but consecr Eted was pretty good too. A secretion that consecrates. I looked at my truck. There was a puddle under the front tire. The tire was wet. I figured Suicide Boy had peed on it. Consecreted it was.

  Dreadlock Boy smiled. Suicide Boy didn't. He kept looking at me, hoping today might be the day he'd be put out of his misery.

  It wasn't. Not as far as I was concerned.

  "Hey," Dreadlock Boy said. "What those tattoos mean?" I have a dozen or so tattoos, but he could see only two: T on my left wrist and K on my right.

  "I don't remember," I said. "I was drunk."

  I walked around the truck to the passenger side and unlocked the car and got in. While I did, Suicide Boy finally pushed himself off the driver's side door and stepped away. I climbed into the driver's seat and started the truck and pulled out without looking at the two boys again, letting the small event die a natural death.

  In my rearview mirror I saw the boys standing on the street. Dreadlock Boy was laughing. Suicide Boy wasn't.

  As I drove back downtown I called a crime reporter I knew at the Times Picayune to see if he knew anything about Vic Willing.

  "Hey!" I said. "Jimmy! It's Claire DeWitt."

  He laughed. "Oh my God. Seriously, who is this?"

  "Claire," I said. "Jimmy, it's Claire. I'm in the city."

  "No, seriously," he said. "Come on. Who is this?"

  "Really," I insisted, wondering if I was rig
ht. "It's me. DeWitt."

  "Oh my God," he said. "For real? Seriously. You're actually calling me? On the phone? This is actually Claire DeWitt?"

  "Yes," I said, less sure than ever that I was, in fact, Claire DeWitt. "It's me. Listen, I know we didn't quite—"

  "Oh my God," he said again. "This is rich. This is truly fucking rich. Claire DeWitt. Oh my fucking God."

  "Yeah, so I was thinking, I could really use your—"

  "Oh, no. No. Absolutely not. I don't even know why I'm talking to you. No. I'm sorry, but no. I really shouldn't even be talking to you. You know that, don't you? In fact, I'm not talking to you. Goodbye."

  He hung up.

  It went better than I expected.

  6

  MY HOTEL WAS guaranteed to come with free wireless. FREE WI-FI, their website said. When I reserved my room, I double-checked.

  "You have wireless, right?" I'd asked.

  "Absolutely," the clerk assured me. "All of our rooms come equipped with free wireless Internet."

  The Internet service hadn't worked for more than three minutes at a time since I'd been there.

  "It's cocks" the clerk told me. At first I thought he was describing the men behind the broken wireless service. Later I find out he was talking about Cox, the Internet service provider. "They're really difficult to deal with. Cox. They just screw you."

  After a few false starts the next morning I found a coffee shop on Frenchman Street that had wireless—not through their own service, which was similarly screwed by Cox, but from the bicycle shop next door.

  "Cox loves them," the girl in the coffee shop told me bitterly as she made my espresso. "Cox always fixes their stuff first."

  I had plans to meet Leon at Vic's apartment at three. I got there at two-thirty and parked the truck across the street and watched. Vic's place was on lower Bourbon Street, near the edge of the Quarter, an old Spanish-style apartment complex from the early 1800s. The block was quiet; the noise and crowds and vomit of upper Bourbon, a few blocks away, didn't reach here. I'd forgotten that in New Orleans every block was its own world; block by block was how locals described their city, good and bad. This block was a quiet one, entirely residential on the face of it, although you could bet at least a few illegal enterprises lurked behind the Spanish exteriors. Even the clip-clop of the horse-drawn carriage tours sounded far away. The street was picked up and the sidewalks swept clean.

  I walked up and down the street and back to Vic's building. Through the gate I saw a courtyard dominated by a pool. Around the pool were a few metal tables with chairs, and bougainvillea and bamboo grew around the perimeter. On a sunny day it was probably nice. Today it was cold and empty. At three-twenty Leon showed up. I met him by the gate and he let us in. Vic's apartment was on the second floor.

  Houses are like people, only less annoying. To take them in you start with the big and work your way down to the small. First I walked through the apartment, looking, with Leon trailing behind. It was swank. Antique furniture, spotlessly clean aside from seventeen months' worth of dust, everything tasteful and neat and magazine-ready. Newish appliances in the kitchen and a hole where the refrigerator had been. Leon told me that's as far as he'd gotten in cleaning out the place. Thank God. Losing the refrigerator was bad enough.

  There was a bedroom, an office, a living room, a dining room, and the kitchen. The office was the only room that had any personality. The personality was "I work a lot." Neat stacks of papers were piled on the desk. I flipped through them. Money stuff and work stuff, none of it interesting.

  I walked through the whole place. Then I did it again, only more slowly, and then again, slower still. Nothing happened. In the kitchen were two sets of dishes, one for special occasions and one for every day. I asked Leon what happened to all the food.

  "Well, they made us throw out the fridge," he said. "And the rest of it..." He frowned. "I don't know. I guess he ate out a lot."

  "No soup?" I asked. "No crackers?" Everyone has a can of soup in the cabinets somewhere. Everyone has a can of something they thought they would want and then didn't want but won't throw away because it's perfectly good food.

  Leon shrugged.

  I went through the apartment again. In the bathroom cabinets I found a variety of prescription drugs dating back to 1995, including a pretty recent and nearly full bottle of Vicodin, which I stuck in my purse along with some penicillin and an almost-empty bottle of Valium. All three were prescribed by a DDS.

  "Nothing interesting in here," I told Leon, swallowing a Valium. He sat on the sofa and turned on the TV, ignoring me.

  It isn't enough to open drawers and look in closets and open the medicine chest. Everyone knows that you'll do that. Everyone knows that someday, someone will look in their medicine chest. Everyone knows that someday, someone will look in the locked desk drawer, the safe, the box under the bed. I'd look through all Vic's hiding spots, but I knew all I'd find there is what he thought was important. And people are usually wrong about what's important. If I wanted to find out what was really important I needed to look for the places he forgot about. What was so familiar that he didn't think to hide it? What slipped into the cracks of the house—in between the sofa cushions, behind the refrigerator? What had he left in the sink? What was next to the bed? Why these books? Out of millions of books in the world, why did Vic choose to keep these here in his office? The less books a person had, the less the books had to say. Not enough of a sample to observe patterns. One cookbook out of five books meant much less than twenty out of a hundred.

  But Vic was easy. There were two cases, fiction and non-, almost all hardcovers. I skimmed the bookshelves. Most of Dickens, all of Flaubert and Zola, all of Poe, and the complete Mark Twain, all in decent editions. I pulled a copy of Thérèse Raquin off the shelf. Its cloth cover stuck to Nana on one side and Germinal on the other. I cracked the book open and it creaked. Vic hadn't read any of them. A decorator or bookseller had stocked the shelves for him.

  In the nonfiction case Vic Willing had a manual for his computer, a manual for his car, and about a hundred books about New Orleans. These looked like someone had actually read them. They were roughly organized by topic: cookbooks, history, politics, architecture. At the end were about ten books on Mardi Gras Indians, also known as Black Indians or Indian gangs.

  The Indians were groups of people—mostly black, mostly men—in New Orleans who on Mardi Gras and Saint Joseph's Day and other mysterious occasions got together to play music and dance and chant in their own strange language. They were not Native Americans. Some Indians, like Bo Dollis, were such good musicians that they went professional. In America no one knew who they were, but in Europe and Asia—and in their own neighborhoods in New Orleans—they were stars. The Indians organized themselves into tribes with names like the Wild Magnolias and the White Hawks. Within the tribe were ceremonial, ritualized rankings and jobs and positions. The Spy Boy from each tribe would go ahead and arrange or avoid encounters with other tribes, the Witch Doctor was the spiritual leader of the tribe, and the Big Chief was, obviously, the Big Chief. On holidays they dressed up in costumes that were somewhat Indian but more Vegas: sequined, beaded, and feathered.

  I'd been fascinated by the Indians when I lived there, but never understood them. Constance had Indian friends, but she wouldn't introduce me.

  "They're touchy," she explained. "Complicated."

  I'd seen Indian practice, far away from the tourists and months away from Mardi Gras, just a group of men together in a dirty park in New Orleans, chanting and playing instruments. It was ten years ago. I'd just got the news that Constance had been killed, and I was driving around the city for no reason at all, taking in what I could before I left. Without her there was no reason to stay. I was near Shakespeare Park when I heard their drumming, and I circled into the park, hoping to catch a glimpse of them.

  The men huddled together, some with cowbells and blocks and tambourines, tapping out a beat as they sang. One man stood in the ce
nter, his eyes rolled up to heaven, whites shaking under the pink of his eyelids, calling out a chant.

  But then the men saw me watching and the practice broke up. The chanting died down, and the men each went in a different direction, and by the time I got out of my car it was as if no one had been there at all.

  Most of what the men chanted was in their own Indian language, but a few words were in English.

  Sister Constance,

  Sister Constance,

  You left us all too soon...

  Apparently Vic had been fascinated by the Indians too, or at least interested. I got a chair and looked on top of the bookshelf. Nothing. As long as I was up there I looked around the room. Nothing but dust.

  Under the sideboard was the safe. I craned my head and looked under the desk. There was the combination, scotch-taped to the underside: 8–18-85. I looked at the serial number on the safe. It was the date he bought it.

  Inside was another disappointment. A crappy .22 revolver that was practically frozen from rust and less than a grand in cash. I left it open for Leon.

  I settled down at Vic's desk. There were some papers on the desk, not filed yet, and I went through those first. Nothing interesting. I turned on the computer. It was nearly empty. Weather, TV schedule, more weather, and sites for three different Mardi Gras krewes. His e-mail was boring and work-related or boring and personal. He was invited to a lot of dinner parties. He didn't go to many.

  That was it for the office. I asked Leon if I could use the house keys for a minute. He looked confused but said yes.

  I took the keys and left the house and walked down to the corner. Then I stopped, turned, and walked back. Nice block, lots of cute houses, swanky apartment buildings like Vic's, gardens with bougainvillea and banana trees, lots of bright fresh paint. His building didn't have parking, so likely Vic would often have to park a block or more away. Every day Vic would walk down this block, see these gardens, and those cute houses, and then get to his house. His house stood up well by comparison. It was as nice as any in the neighborhood.