The Infinite Blacktop Page 3

  I hadn’t known how rare Cynthia Silverton was until last year. Kelly had called me. I’d never thought much about the comics, which had been such a big part of our childhoods that they were invisible. I didn’t notice them unless they weren’t there.

  But on the internet, Cynthia Silverton didn’t exist. There was one short entry in an online directory of printed comics—

  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.

  I found one complete set of the books. They were in the collection of a book dealer in Oakland. He didn’t want to sell them. Book dealers are funny like that. Drug dealers are much happier to part with their wares. But he did let me look at them.

  Each issue had a Cynthia Silverton Comic, or more than one. A True-Life Mystery Not Quite Solved. A story from Case File of Cynthia Silverton. And one advertisement—

  BE A DETECTIVE!

  Money! Excitement! Women and men admire detectives. Everyone looks up to someone with knowledge and education. Our home-study course offers the chance to earn your detective’s badge from the comfort of your own home.

  There was an address in Las Vegas, Nevada, if the reader wished to reply. I’d looked the magazine over and over. There was no publication information. No colophon or copyright page. No other advertisements. Just that ad.

  “But now,” Kelly had said, when I’d last spoken to her, our semi-annual call where we hissed clues and accusations at each other, “when you think about it, don’t the Silverton books seem strange to you? Doesn’t it seem like they were written just for us? Like they weren’t normal comics at all? And didn’t you ever think about how weird it all was?”

  But somehow, I hadn’t. I was the best detective in the world, and I hadn’t noticed the greatest mystery of all: the odd and twisted trajectory of my own life.

  “I mean,” Kelly went on, “who the fuck are we? Did you ever think about that? Who the fuck are we?”

  Driving through Oakland, wondering who had tried to kill me, I remembered something.

  Five days ago, after stealing one of the books from Bix, I’d answered the ad. The ad in the Cynthia Silverton comic book.

  BE A DETECTIVE!

  Money! Excitement! Women and men admire detectives. Everyone looks up to someone with knowledge and education. Our home-study course offers the chance to earn your detective’s badge from the comfort of your own home.

  I’d written:

  To Whom It May Concern:

  I am already a professional detective, but I would like to improve my skills. Do you offer a continuing education course? Or may I enroll in the standard home-study course despite my age and experience? Please reply at this address.

  Sincerely,

  Claire DeWitt

  I mailed it to the address in the ad.

  I didn’t know exactly what I was trying to do when I sent the letter. Maybe get answers. Maybe prove to someone that I was paying attention.

  And I remembered something else: the Lincoln that had tried to kill me had Nevada plates.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE MYSTERY OF THE CBSIS

  * * *

  Los Angeles, 1999

  I met Constance Darling, at the time the best detective in the world, on July 18, 1994. It was in Los Angeles. I was drifting around the country, working for other PIs and solving cases as they came to me. I didn’t want a steady job and I didn’t want a steady life and I didn’t want to love anyone.

  When Tracy disappeared I wasn’t a child anymore, but I was nothing close to an adult. Kelly and I spent two years looking for her; we never found a single clue. Had I been an adult, maybe I would have seen that that was a clue itself: that absence could be as meaningful as presence; that silence could be louder than a scream. Two years into the search I gave up and left Brooklyn. At the time I told myself I was saving my life.

  LA was where I ended up. Where something ended, at least. When I got there I didn’t know that things were ending; I thought I was passing through, like I’d passed through Portland, like I’d passed through Chicago, through Nashville, through Miami, through a dozen other cities.

  I slept in a motel on Sunset on good days and in Griffith Park on less good nights. Worked a few small cases and did some research for a detective named Sean Risling on the side. Sean was writing a book on orchid poisons. Still is. I planned to drive down to San Diego whenever I was done with LA—which would be when the money dried up or I got kicked out—and from there maybe Tijuana and from there maybe Texas or maybe across Mexico and from there to I didn’t know where for I didn’t know what reason.

  All I’d ever wanted was to grow up and leave Brooklyn and be a detective. And here I was, in a maybe-literally-lousy, maybe-literally-flea-infested motel, overlooking the night prostitutes of Sunset Boulevard, weedless, limited in intoxication to a little pint of something I’d bought at one of LA’s endless liquor stores, with no one to love and no one to love me, with nothing to live for and nowhere in particular to do it.

  And then one day Sean Risling called me and said Constance Darling was in town, and needed help for a few days with the HappyBurger Murder Case. Was I free?

  The only thing I had in life was freedom—that and a couple of hundred bucks and my own skin and bones and my car. All I wanted was the opposite of that—something I’d never seen and didn’t even know the words for, and wouldn’t know who to ask for even if I did know what it was.

  I’d known who Constance Darling was since I was a girl, starstruck by Jacques Silette and his first, and best, protégé, Constance.

  Jacques Silette, the French genius and visionary detective, wrote one brilliant, maddening book: Détection. Brilliant, that was, according to me and maybe a few dozen others around the world (although a few dozen was probably hopeful, even then). Détection was not a book that told you to change or asked you to change. It changed you. You could call it a book, and that was certainly what it looked like: a little yellow paperback, part of an educational series that included a book called The Life of the Bee and another called, demandingly, Understand Physics! But no other book could do what Détection did. It was a spell; a virus; somehow Silette knew just the right proportion of ink to pulp; letters to space; black to white; to effect permanent change. And by the time you realized that you had been changed, it was too late: your defenses were already proven to be worthless; your resolve had revealed itself an embarrassment. You were someone else now.

  Other books would give you ideas and words and things to defend and argue. Détection gave just one thing—the truth—and in its short 123 pages (US reprint edition, 1959) offered us 123 different doors to the same place: each door locked, each ready to be picked open if you worked hard enough.

  “Your assumptions,” Silette wrote, “are your worst enemies. Throw away your clever thoughts. Let the rest of the world drown in lies. Rest on the life raft of truth.”

  A whole new life of misery and truth could be yours for a mere couple of bucks and a few ounces of paper—if you finished the book, that is. Most people gave up after one line or one page or sometimes even one word. More than once I’d seen someone open the book, get through a page or two, and literally throw it across their desk or into the trash or back to the idiot who’d given it to them, the idiot who’d thought maybe they were ready for the only thing worth having—real life.

  And what was this truth that would rebuild your bones, rewire your veins?

  “The detective who thinks she’s found the truth is as wrong as the detective who never managed to look for it at all,” Silette wrote. “The truth can never be limited and therefore never found. This is what makes it the only thing worth finding.”

  If that wasn’t clear enough, turn to page sixty-eight:

  “For the detective whose eyes have truly been opened,” Silette wrote, “the solution to every mystery is never more than a breath away.”


  I first read those lines at fourteen. Kelly and Tracy and I were already exploring vices and solving mysteries across New York City. But when we didn’t have the money or the time to get away we sometimes still spent afternoons exploring the vast DeWitt house, which had plenty of mysteries and vice of its own.

  We found the book in my attic. As Silette said, detectives aren’t made, they’re born; a detective only needs to somehow be shown his true nature. Tracy, a born detective if there ever was one, was the first to find the book, the first to crack it open, the first to read. The world was oddly silent when she picked it up; later we compared notes and realized each one of us had been struck by something different at that exact moment: Kelly by the dust swirling in the sunlight; me by the pigeons cooing from the eaves, amplifying how otherwise oddly quiet the room was; Tracy, by the dusty smell of the book.

  “The mystery that can be solved,” Tracy read, “is not the eternal mystery.”

  When I heard those words I felt something turn, shiver, and fall down. I couldn’t tell if it was inside me or next to me. I was frightened. Later I would learn that feeling was the beginning of the end of lies. Nothing would ever taste the same; nothing would ever smell the same.

  I never knew which DeWitt from the past had bought the book and, knowing my ancestors, tossed the book in the unused wing, unread, after the first bite that left marks. We were already good detectives. With Cynthia Silverton as our guide, Tracy had discovered the Clue of the Broken Light Bulb, which had cost a man his life. Kelly had closed the Case of the Blue Moth at Dawn, which had not ended well for anyone.

  But after we read Détection, it all changed. We did everything Silette said and, unlike anything else we’d ever encountered, unlike religion or money or love, it worked. We solved every case we found. But we still couldn’t seem to solve the biggest mystery we had: why no one cared about our cases, no one cared about our solutions, and no one else seemed to care about mysteries at all. Didn’t the truth matter? Wasn’t reality different from a lie? The answers from the world at large were no and no one cares.

  It wasn’t long after finding the book that I first saw a picture of the great and beautiful Constance Darling. It was in a book called Criminology through the Ages that I’d stolen from the NYU Law Library. The book was sliced into twelve chapters each named after the major criminological movements throughout time—Aristotelian, Vidocqian, Occult, etc.—and then a thirteenth chapter on Minor Traditions and Trends. One of the Minor Trends, in between the Anarchists and the Sufis, were the Silettians.

  “It would be unfair to call this so-called esoteric school of detection discredited,” the book spelled out for all of eternity, its own idiocy frozen in print, “because that would imply it had ever been credited at all.” Alongside the text was a photo of Jacques Silette and Constance Darling. The caption read: Flim-flam artists Jacques Silette and Constance Darling, Paris, 1963. Silette was already fifty-something. Constance was in her thirties. I didn’t know for sure, but I came to suspect over the years that the photo was from a department party in L’École de Criminologie in Paris, where Silette taught for much of his life.

  I was fourteen when I first saw that picture. Constance’s hair was already white in the photo; her eyes, already wise. She and Silette were talking to each other, two alone in a crowd, and their deep rapport was clear on the page—somehow, some secret essence of what they had together had, wordlessly, silently, been transposed from soul to life to photo to page to me, a confused child in Brooklyn. I knew, because the world let me know, that I was a stupid child, hateful and hated. But I knew that if it took the rest of my life, I would find out what could be so thrilling and fascinating, so worth the time of these exotic and rarefied humans.

  In the black-and-white photo, Silette was facing slightly toward the camera, Constance’s body facing a little away—but her head was turned back and looking just to the left of the camera, with a dry and slightly irritated look at the photographer—or someone next to them—as if to ask: What foolish thing are you up to now? Her white hair was tall and elegantly teased, and she wore a black Chanel suit with white trim and an ocean of white pearls, each one, I later would learn, hand-plucked from the China Seas just for her by an overeager admirer. Around them, in the background, other people in suits and hairdos did whatever dull mortals did around gods. Silette was on the short side, with a strong square face and short, neat white hair and black-framed glasses. Always in a suit. Always the smartest man in the room.

  The electric thrill of recognition and longing that rushed through me when I saw that photo stayed with me that day, and never left. I’d read everything I could find about Constance Darling and the tiny trail she’d blazed as Silette’s finest student. There wasn’t much to read: the occasional mention in Detective’s Quarterly, which I found archived at the St. Francis College library in downtown Brooklyn; a few references in the New Orleans Times-Picayune at the Brooklyn Public Library for cases she solved. In the main New York library on Forty-Second Street a bored librarian helped me find more in the periodical indexes, and it wasn’t long before I realized that Constance had accomplished what no detective on earth—other than Silette—had achieved: she had solved every fucking case put in front of her. And not only had she not cherry-picked the easy solutions and big paychecks, she had taken cases that ten other detectives had failed at before.

  A 100 percent solve rate was unheard of in mid-to-late-twentieth-century private detection. Constance should have been the most feted and admired detective in the world. Instead, each report, every time, treated her success as a fluky, inexplicable, coincidence: “Eccentric private investigator Constance Darling presided over . . .”; “Marginal sleuth solves cold case . . .”

  Worse were the passive headlines: “Missing heiress found . . .”; “Murderous doctor finally charged . . .”; “Long-dormant homicide cracked . . .” It was as if all those cases had just solved themselves.

  Later I would learn that Constance didn’t know, or care, what the larger world said or thought about her. I once heard her refer to the Washington Post as “the Babylon Daily News.” Not that she ever read it. Her own reputation—impeccable and iron clad—was known to anyone she wanted it to be known to.

  When Sean called to ask if I wanted to meet Constance, I had nothing and no one. Tracy was long gone, Kelly never forgave me for leaving Brooklyn and was maybe going crazy, my family didn’t miss me, and I sometimes wondered if I was real. I bought little bags of cocaine and heroin and snorted them or jumped in the cold ocean or got tattoos or got in fights or slept with strangers to see if I was real. I still wasn’t sure.

  Was I free?

  Yes. I was free.

  I met Constance two days later in a private room in a restaurant in Little Tokyo, where we drank rare green tea that tasted like grass and rain. After we chatted about books and poisons she asked me where I was from.

  “New York,” I said. “Brooklyn.”

  She looked at me with her sharp eyes. Her hair had already been white for years, and she wore it in a bun on top of her head like a dancer. Her face was all angles and edges, few soft spots. Constance had been at Silette’s first lectures. It was Constance who Silette had entrusted with his legacy—which she, in turn, would entrust to me.

  Constance was from an ancient New Orleans family, most of them now gone. When she was younger she’d traveled the world: for fun, for mysteries, for love. In 1978 she’d solved the Case of the Wilted Rose in Buenos Aires. In 1985 she’d uncovered the Clue of the Ancient Sin in Port-au-Prince. But by the time I met her she wasn’t young, was close to old, and liked to stay in New Orleans. In the back of her house she grew poisons and entheogens. She could be cruel. Usually it was for a good cause: the cause of the truth.

  “Brooklyn,” she said. “Were you one of those girl detectives?”

  “I-I was,” I stammered, shocked she’d heard of me.

  But then she nodded, and the way she nodded made me think the fact that
she’d heard of me before was not necessarily a good thing. But somehow, over the next few weeks, she let me help her solve the HappyBurger Murder Case. Six weeks later I moved to New Orleans to be her assistant and apprentice. One year later we stood together on Prytania Street, Times-Picayune flashbulbs popping as the police took away the killer in the Case of the Crimson Hibiscus. We were the best detectives in the world and no one could deny it. Even more than our cases, we had each other. I sometimes lived with her in her big Garden District house and sometimes in various apartments around New Orleans when I needed time alone or she needed my room for a visiting detective from Morocco or a shaman she’d flown in from Siberia to help on a case. With Constance, all things were possible; with her at my side, my teacher and guide, I could conquer any demon and slay any falsehood. Together, we would live our lives as a wonderful and crooked line that always took us to the only place worth going to: the truth.

  That night on Prytania Street I was sure I felt my life settle into new and better patterns. I knew I was done with the worst of life now. All of that pain, it seemed now, red and blue lights flashing across the scene, sliding into the back seat of Constance’s chauffeured Jaguar, had just been the prelude to this. And it seemed like a fair price, now that it was over. I could almost look back on the years before Constance with a kind of affection, now that they were so far away.

  Back at Constance’s house, her other assistant Mick was still awake, along with their friend Brother John, who’d come by to drop off some Solomon’s seal he’d been growing for her. Mick made tea and John passed around a bottle of homebrew and we stayed up late laughing and talking and being in love with ourselves, with each other, with the little slice of the world we’d carved out for ourselves, cut by cut.

  But out of all the things I learned from Constance, the most important was that happiness doesn’t last. In 1998, less than four years after I met her, Constance was shot and killed in a hold-up in the French Quarter. There was no conspiracy. No big mystery. Two kids needed money and so they shot her for her purse. If they’d asked, she would have given them whatever they needed. Instead they shot her, and then a few days later someone else shot them. No mystery. No justice.