Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway Read online

  “Anything what,” I said. “What’d you notice?”

  He wrinkled his brow. He didn’t know what to say.

  “Anything,” I said. “What was the first thing that came to mind when you saw—”

  I felt dizzy, and put my hand on the squad car to steady myself.

  I am a detective, I told myself. I am a detective on a very important case. Just like I always wanted.

  Ramirez wrinkled his already wrinkled brow again. “I thought, Someone sure hated this guy,” he said. He rushed to add, “I mean, I don’t know if that’s true. But that was what I thought.”

  “Thanks,” I said. He shrugged and turned away, as if I’d insulted him. Huong met his eyes and they each made a little face.

  I didn’t care if they thought I was crazy. I would solve the case. I would find out who killed Paul. And they would still think I was crazy and I still wouldn’t care.

  I looked up at the police and the lights and Lydia and for a minute I wondered if this was real.

  Huong and Ramirez started to walk away.

  “Wait,” I said. “Wait.”

  They turned around.

  “He had a gun,” I said. “If he was surprised Paul was home, why would he have a gun?”

  “Or she,” Huong said.

  I nodded. Girls didn’t pull a whole lot of B&Es, but it was possible.

  “All that equipment,” I said. “Guitars, amplifiers. Some of it’s worth a lot. Hundreds, maybe thousands.”

  Huong shrugged and walked away. She knew what I was thinking: a robbery, but not random; a robbery by someone who knew what their gear was worth and knew one or the other of them might be home. But that should make it an easy crime to solve: Paul and Lydia had probably never jotted down their serial numbers, but it didn’t matter—vintage musical instruments like the ones they played had a lot of quirks and dings and stains and were easy to identify. Lydia would know one of her or Paul’s guitars anywhere. Plus, Lydia and Paul were both fairly successful and were photographed often enough that their gear was well documented, at least the most-used items. As long as we kept on top of the pawnshops and music stores and websites where people sold guitars, we should find out who killed Paul within a month or two.

  Not that it would matter much to Lydia.

  I went over and sat by her. She’d finally started to cry, quietly, tears pouring out of her eyes and a steady choking noise coming from her throat. After a while Ramirez came over. I looked up. Lydia didn’t. She was gone, sailing the oceans of grief. Drowning, more likely.

  “Think she can give a statement now?” he asked.

  “Can it wait?” I asked. “Tomorrow afternoon?”

  He nodded. We made a date for four o’clock tomorrow at the Mission station on Valencia Street.

  I left Lydia and took my car and found a twenty-four-hour coffee shop and came back with two big trays of coffee and a plate of snacks for the cops and the crime scene guys. Cops and their ilk work hard, if futilely, and anything you can do to make your case more attractive helps.

  Of course, some of them knew me already. A little coffee and a buttermilk muffin wouldn’t solve that.

  It didn’t matter anyway. I wasn’t counting on the cops to solve the case. I was counting on solving the case myself. If they would help me by sharing whatever information they had, that would be good, but it wasn’t necessary. I would solve it just fine alone. I would find out who killed Paul and then—

  Before I could stop myself my mind said, And then Paul can come back.

  As the sun rose the police and investigators started packing up and going home. When the last few were nearly done and I was sure they wouldn’t need us anymore, I put my arm around Lydia and helped her stand and led her to my car. I put her in the passenger seat and buckled her in and shut the door. I took us to my place, where I got her out of the car and up the stairs and into bed. In bed I gave her an Ativan I’d been saving for a special occasion. Soon the choking sound subsided and she fell asleep. I watched her. In her sleep her hands clenched and unclenched, grabbing at the sheets. Her face was stuck in the shape of crying even though no sounds came out. She’d never be the same. She was already a different girl, a girl with a different face.

  I lay on the sofa and didn’t sleep. In Lydia’s jacket I found a pack of cigarettes and smoked a few. I thought about nothing. There was a big white hole where normal thoughts usually were. Soon enough my mind hooked onto the missing guitars and the locked door and the hole filled up with clues and suspects and all the detective stuff and I could pretend it was just another case.

  The guitars. The lock. The keys. The gun. The musician in the drawing room with the gun. The duchess in the kitchen with the guitar. I let my mind fill with the case. It was only a case. Only another case. Another sentence of words to rearrange.

  Maybe that was all there was to life. One long case, only you kept switching roles. Detective, witness, client, suspect. Then one day I’d be the victim instead of the detective or the client and it would all be over. Then I’d finally have a fucking day off.

  5

  AT NOON I GOT UP and called the cops; they didn’t know anything new. I got out a phone book and started calling music stores and pawnshops. I didn’t know exactly what had been stolen, but I gave a general description to each store—vintage, high-end, unusual gear, heavily used—and let them know there was a reward much bigger than what they could make on a few guitars or amps. Next I posted some messages on Internet forums and blogs for collectors, dealers, and repair people. A lot of these people knew Paul and Lydia, or knew who they were and knew what gear they played; they would be on our side. Some people were already talking about it.

  While Lydia slept I made her a big shake with protein powder and espresso and chocolate and maca root and astragalus and ground wolfberries. Death and solid food don’t mix. At two I woke her up for our appointment at the police station at four. She didn’t say anything. She drank a little of her shake and started to cry again.

  I got her to the police station by four thirty. It was like moving a corpse that could walk a little.

  It would help the police to know everything she remembered about that night. I waited outside—the cops don’t let PIs sit in on things like this. I took Lydia’s phone while she talked to them and called the most dialed number in it. It was her friend Carolyn. I’d met her once or twice. I explained everything to her and she said she would come to the station. I asked her to start telling people about Paul. I also asked if she knew how to arrange a funeral.

  “Yeah,” she said bitterly. “I sure do.”

  When Carolyn got there the police were still in with Lydia. Carolyn had big curly blond hair and wore a thick layer of makeup and a black dress and a black vintage coat with a white fur collar. She looked angry. I gave her the short version of what had happened.

  “Fucking scum,” she said. “They should hang them up by their fucking balls and let them rot.”

  That wasn’t exactly how I saw it. But I couldn’t say her view had no validity. I waited until the interview was over and I saw Lydia leave the interview room. Carolyn seemed competent enough and ready to take charge, so I let her.

  I drove back home and parked my car in the garage on Stockton where I rented a space by the year. When I shut the door behind me I remembered—Paul’s car. The victim’s car, I corrected myself. Where was it? I made a list on the back of an envelope from a parking ticket: car, house keys, guitars, neighbor.

  The gun, the neighbor. Keys, amplifiers. A murderer. A victim.

  And the rest of us poor suckers they left behind.

  Back at home it was dark and raining. Everything seemed sharp and the lighting in my apartment seemed wrong. It was a big loft with ill-defined areas serving as bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, closet. Mostly it was a big space with lots of vintage furniture and too many books and clothes and papers scattered around and a collection of strange things on the walls, like thrift store paintings and old mug shots and a vision
chart in Hindustani. Things I thought were beautiful. It was all arranged to do something to me, soothe some kind of raw edges, but it wasn’t working today. In the medicine cabinet I found half a bottle of very soporific cough syrup I’d brought back from Mexico a few years ago: I swallowed a quarter of it and went to bed and slept like a dead woman, without dreams, and I didn’t wake up until almost noon the next day.

  Later I pieced together the whole story. Earlier that evening, at approximately six p.m., the victim had packed his car, a 1972 Ford Bronco, with two guitars, an amp, and a small suitcase, and headed toward Los Angeles. He had a small show booked at USC the next night. He’d planned to leave earlier and didn’t; the victim was often late. Lydia hung around the house and went out at about ten p.m. to the Make-Out Room, a club on Twenty-Fourth Street, to see a band called Silent Film. At about midnight a neighbor heard what he thought was a shot and called the police. The police came. The body was found. Lydia came home and saw the scene. Everyone figured Paul’s car had broken down somewhere and somehow he’d gotten a ride back home, but no one knew the exact sequence of events yet. But it made the most sense and I figured it was true. The police figured he’d surprised the thief, who had shot Paul to avoid getting caught.

  That part I wasn’t so sure about.

  6

  AT TWENTY-THREE I WAS LIVING in Los Angeles, if you can call it living. I had nothing else to do. A detective I knew named Sean Risling had me working on an encyclopedia of poisonous orchids he was putting together. I sampled and researched and wrote. At night I bought little twenty-dollar bindles of cocaine and sometimes cheaper bags of heroin wrapped in pages of Cat Fancy magazine on Sunset Boulevard. I slept in a series of hotel rooms in Hollywood. When Constance Darling, the famous detective from New Orleans, came to town on the HappyBurger Murder Case and needed an assistant, Sean introduced us. Risling said little and knew much.

  Constance was famous—famous to other detectives, at least. Years ago, when we were finished being children, my friend Tracy found a copy of Jacques Silette’s little yellow book Détection in my parent’s musty, bitter house in Brooklyn. After that we were ruined: being detectives was all that mattered to us. Especially Tracy, who became the best detective of us all—and when she vanished a few years later became a mystery herself, leaving only a Tracy-shaped hole behind, a paper doll cut out from the page.

  To me, Silette and his students were rock stars, celebrities. I was always surprised when no one else seemed to have heard of them.

  Wasn’t solving mysteries important? Didn’t the truth matter? Of course, Silette had foreseen this. He knew the truth always was, and always would be, the most unpopular point of view. “If there is anything that can unify us,” he wrote to Constance during the Paris uprising, already old and bitter, “it is our love of deceit and lies, and our abhorrence of the truth.”

  Constance was pleased enough with me when the HappyBurger case was done, but I hardly let myself hope she would take me on as a permanent assistant. Or as close to permanent as we get; she died three years later, shot in New Orleans for the few hundred bucks she had in her Chanel bag, a bag that was now mine.

  Constance had set me up in a room at the Chateau Marmont down the hall from her own. I didn’t know what she was doing now that we were done with the case. I figured I’d hang around the Marmont until she kicked me out. I had no place to go, anyway. I’d let my cheap Hollywood Boulevard hotel room go when she hired me, and when we were done I’d sleep in the bus station or maybe in Griffin Park, up by the observatory. When Sean paid me I’d get another hotel room or a room in a share.

  But the next morning Constance called me to her room.

  “DeWitt,” she said. She was sitting at a table drinking a cup of coffee with chicory, a woody smell I didn’t recognize at the time but would later. She peered at me, head tilted like a little bird. Constance was already old. She was born old, with her Chanel suits and spectator pumps and white hair in a topknot.

  “DeWitt, are you free for another job tomorrow?”

  “Sure,” I said, heart thumping.

  “Do you drive?” she asked.

  “Legally?”

  Constance flicked her hand in the air. The law was for people who needed instructions, she would later tell me. The same people who needed to be told not to put a baby in the dryer or a dog in the microwave.

  “We’re going to Las Vegas,” she said. “Or close to it. Do you know the way?”

  “I’ll get a map,” I said. “Give me the address and I’ll plan it tonight.”

  She nodded and tossed me the keys to her car. For the trip she’d rented a Jaguar identical to the one she drove in New Orleans, as she would in every city we visited.

  That night I plotted out our trip on a few maps. I asked the concierge at the hotel for recommended stops along the way, and I marked the least filthy gas stations and the best date shakes. When I was done I took the Jaguar and drove around Los Angeles, up Sunset Boulevard into the hills and out toward the ocean.

  It had been eight years since Tracy had disappeared from a subway platform in New York City. We were going to grow up to be great detectives together, Tracy and Kelly and I. We were detectives already, just not great ones. But we were pretty good for kids.

  Now Tracy was gone and Kelly was becoming someone ugly. She was so devastated by our inability to find Tracy that I was pretty sure she’d never left New York City at all, scared of overlooking a single clue, missing the phone call that would explain everything. She hated me for leaving. She hated me for being here while Tracy, so much wiser and kinder and prettier, was gone. I agreed. But there was nothing I could do about it.

  On the end of the Sunset Strip I pulled over to a pay phone and put in a handful of change. First I called Tracy. She’d disappeared in 1987. No one knew if she was alive or dead. Kelly had fixed her old phone number so it was never given away, never changed. I called it. No one answered.

  I’m here, I said aloud, or maybe thought. I’d spent so much time alone, I couldn’t tell the difference sometimes. I’m here, just where we were supposed to be.

  But Tracy didn’t answer, because Tracy wasn’t there.

  Next I called Kelly. She picked up the phone and didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything either. I knew she knew it was me and I knew she knew exactly where I was and who I was working for, the great Constance Darling. How could she not know? Wouldn’t the angels be singing? Wouldn’t Silette’s hand come down from heaven and mark us, all over again, with the mark of Cain, the stain of the detective, the scar of initiation, as he had when we’d read his book? Wasn’t it the most obvious thing in the world that something had actually happened, that my course, finally, was changed?

  Genius, we were learning, was only skin deep. Brilliance is as brilliance does. Our ability to solve mysteries was not particularly helpful in actual living.

  We didn’t say anything. The silence on the phone sounded like Brooklyn. After a minute Kelly hung up and I had a sour taste in my mouth and I remembered that even the best things would never be good again.

  I drove back to the hotel and used a sewing needle and the ink from a ballpoint pen to give myself a tattoo of a four-leaf clover on the top of my left foot, where it hurt the most. Maybe someday someone would ask me about it, and I would get to tell them about today. This day when everything changed. And then everything would change again, because someone cared enough to ask.

  The next day we started late. Constance was always a night person and liked her morning routine of coffee and poached eggs and meditation. She was quiet on the drive and almost seemed anxious, the tiniest cracks showing in her cool veneer. I asked a few times if she wanted to stop and she didn’t, my carefully plotted breaks just spots on the map.

  We didn’t go into the city proper but circled around it, starting at the cheaper suburbs and moving up to streets with mansions and gates.

  “Here it is,” she said. “This is the house.”

  A curved driveway
led to a high fence surrounding a property lush with palms and hedges and desert flowers. Behind the plants I saw glimpses of a white mansion that looked like it’d been spun out of cardboard and cotton candy, brand new, and dropped in Las Vegas. I heard rustling in the plants—animals or maybe other humans were moving around, hiding.

  “Wait here,” she said. “I may be a while.”

  I waited outside the gate and watched Constance ring the buzzer, say a few words, and get buzzed in. She disappeared into the hedges. I waited. Even with the air full blast, the sun was hot and I felt a little queasy.

  Nine minutes later I saw a man in blue jeans and a black shirt and cowboy boots pulling her away from the house.

  I tried to catch Constance’s eye but she didn’t see me. Constance looked like she always did—too intelligent and a little bit bored.

  But when she tried to take her arm back from the man in the black shirt, he twisted, hard, and didn’t let go.

  I watched for another minute. They argued. Constance didn’t look scared. They exchanged a few more words and it didn’t look too heated, but when she tried to pull away again the man in the black shirt held on tight.

  I got out of the car and left the motor running and the door open. No one saw me. I went up to the gate and pulled a cheap little Saturday night special from the back of my waistband and pointed it at the man’s heart.

  Constance and the man were about fifteen feet away. I’d bought the gun when I’d first come to L.A. I liked to travel armed back then. It was the only way I knew to speed up time, to bend reality to my will. Constance taught me more effective and less painful ways to make thoughts real.

  I knocked on the gate with the gun.

  “Hey,” I said.

  Constance and the man turned to look at me.

  “Who are you?” the man said.