The Infinite Blacktop Read online

  A few days later I left New Orleans and drove west. A few months and a few hard cases later I landed in San Francisco.

  “Happiness is for idiots,” Silette wrote. “But if we try, something much better than happiness is possible.”

  I’d lived by that rule for all my life. This was where it’d gotten me, a year after Constance’s death: to a hotel room in San Francisco’s Chinatown that I sometimes shared with a stray cat named Flea. Flea came with the room, along with a TV that got in three channels and a view of an alley below and the sound from a never-ending, heartbreaking erhu on the street outside.

  I’d thought I knew what it was to be alone.

  Before Constance died, I didn’t have a fucking clue.

  I was exactly where I’d started, but I had a little more money in the bank. I cared about as much for money as Constance had. If anyone missed me when I left New Orleans—or Brooklyn or anywhere else—they were doing a good job of making a fucking mystery out of it.

  I was starting to think Silette was wrong. It wasn’t happiness, and it wasn’t better.

  * * *

  In the year since Constance had died I’d tried settling down in a couple of different cities—Portland, Detroit—and none of them stuck. I liked San Francisco. I’d been there for a few months and come to think I wanted to stay. I didn’t know I would stay for fifteen years. But I knew it was just as good as anywhere else and had plenty of work to keep me in hotel rooms and cat food for as long as I wanted.

  No one seemed to be particularly happy about this. San Francisco didn’t throw open her arms and welcome me to her bosom. No place ever had. But the only unhappy residents whose opinions I had to care about were the police.

  On my first case in San Francisco—the Case of the Emerald Peacock—I ran into trouble. The case was easy enough, barely a mystery at all, and a nice way to make five grand. After solving it, I was on my way back to my hotel room with a bottle of malt liquor in a paper bag when I saw two cops in front of the door to the hotel.

  They didn’t move to let me pass. They were both young and in uniform. A matched set: boy and girl.

  “You Claire DeWitt?” the woman cop said.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  The woman slugged me in the gut, hard.

  I fell down to the ground, head spinning. She kicked me.

  “San Francisco doesn’t need another PI,” the woman said. “Go fuck yourself.”

  “And do it someplace else,” the man said.

  I crawled over to the gutter and vomited. The cops laughed.

  Turned out those two weren’t the only cops who were excited to meet the new PI in town.

  “Listen,” Officer Heather Fong said a few days later. Fong was a brand-new patrol cop in Hunters Point. We weren’t friends, and we never would be, but I’d done her a good favor on one of her own cases, and lied to the right people about it when her job was at stake. She owed me. Back then that was the best I hoped for: being owed. I’d called her after the warm welcome to ask what the big fucking problem was.

  Turned out the problem was, as it so often was, me.

  “Pretty much everyone on the force has it out for you,” Fong said. “Like they pretty much all hate you.”

  I’d kind of suspected that already, but it was always interesting to see these things spelled right out. These things being other people’s dislike and sometimes hatred of you.

  “I mean,” Heather said, “they really, really don’t—”

  “I get it,” I said.

  “I heard some of the guys say that if they catch you doing anything like a PI again they’re turning you in to the Bureau.”

  “Fuck,” I said. “They would do that?”

  “Not usually,” Fong said. “But for you? Yeah, I think so. I think they would.”

  The Bureau, aka the CBSIS, properly known as the California Bureau of Security and Investigative Services, was the division of the California state government in charge of PI licenses, along with regulating security guards, locksmiths, and other occultists. Each American state had its own rules for operating as a PI; in some a PI card was easy to get as a candy bar and barely needed; in liberal, regulated California, we had the CBSIS. And if the CBSIS caught you stepping out without a license, you could consider yourself done: maybe fines, maybe jail, and zero chance of ever practicing again in the state. You so much as think of a mystery without a license in California and you’re skating on thin ice.

  The CBSIS was a shadowy organization, entirely autonomous, with no relation to any other governmental body. Their membership roster was strictly private, supposedly for the members’ own safety. Their decisions were indecipherable, and there was never any appeal. There was a rumor they had it out for Silettians. Lilly Hodgkins, Eli Singer, and Wally Christopher, all decent detectives with Silettian leanings, were all denied licenses. I’d heard that they’d had Hodgkins defend her PI exam for over forty-eight hours under hot lights in an airless room. I’d heard they wouldn’t even let Eli take the test. I’d heard that Wally had taken the test every year for nine years straight before he finally gave up and moved to Florida. Later I would find out these stories were varying degrees of true.

  “So get a PI license,” Heather said. “Seriously.”

  Getting a PI license in California required six thousand hours of work under the supervision of a licensed private eye—there were other ways you could do it but none I was likely to accomplish in this lifetime. I’d done far more PI work than that in my life, but most of it without any official type of supervision. In Louisiana, it took only forty hours of coursework to become a certified PI, but I wasn’t sure Constance had ever bothered. She’d had a framed business-looking certificate hanging on the wall of her room but if you looked closely enough it was a certificate from a witch school in Mississippi.

  Via phone and fax I got Mick Pendell, Constance’s other employee in New Orleans, who was licensed and bonded, to sign off on as many hours as he’d actually witnessed, which came out to 4,351. Sean Risling, who’d introduced me to Constance and hired me for odd jobs over the years, signed off on another 1,252. Of course, there was no thought of anyone fudging the hours or cutting me a break. Even Mick, tattooed anarchist, leader of the someday-soon-to-be-revolution, who didn’t live in California and was scared of very little in life, knew enough to be scared of the CBSIS.

  I got their statements witnessed and notarized, according to procedure. But I still needed four hundred hours. Four hundred hours of supervised PI work. I’d been a working PI since I was twelve, and an amateur since I was nine. But I needed their fucking four hundred hours.

  No one in San Francisco would take me. I asked every licensed PI in the city. I called a man I found in the phone book who specialized in Missing Treasure and Lost Fortunes. The Lost Fortunes man said no. He’d heard about me. “I don’t need the trouble!” he yelled, having already explained that he’d left his hearing aid at an Ethiopian restaurant. “I am very close to retiring and I don’t need the trouble! But God bless, DeWitt.”

  Finally Hans Jacobson, the Dutch Silettian scholar—and investor, wine merchant, and art dealer—heard about my situation and made some calls.

  I never knew who told him. Just that one day I picked up the phone in my fleabag hotel and it was Hans. It took a few minutes to figure out who it was.

  “Claire,” he said in his heavy Dutch accent. “You’ve got a work!”

  “Sorry?” I said. “What?” Like half of Europe, he thought he spoke English better than he did.

  “A work!” he said. “I made some talks and I found you the work. For the license.”

  An involuntary sigh of relief escaped me.

  “Adam Dubinsky in the Angel City,” Hans said. “He’s expecting you, you know, some of these times now. You call him, you work it out.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I’d never met Hans. I only knew who he was from Constance. Unless they were feuding, which was often enough, the few Silettians left kept in touch,
at least a little. Christmas cards and congratulatory notes after big cases. When possible, we helped each other. Over the years the little community would fall apart; personal insults and ideological differences and a lack of interest and death would pull us apart. But back then, in the glory days of the semi-annual Détection newsletter and semi-regular Silettian conferences where a bountiful dozen or even twenty fans might show up, we Silettians kept an eye on each other. Almost like a family.

  “Hey, thanks,” I said. I sounded about eight years old. “Really. Thank you.”

  “Eh,” he said, like it was nothing. “For Constance. Let me know. I will be happiness to see your progressings.”

  * * *

  I didn’t have much to tie up in San Francisco. I knew a lot of people, but that didn’t mean they cared about me, or that I cared about them. Other than Nick Chang—my doctor who wasn’t a friend yet, but would be in years to come—I had had no friends, no obligations, no houseplants. The cat was an acquaintance. The guy who managed the hotel, Billy, said he’d feed her while I was gone. I lingered for a few days to prove a point and then I packed some clothes and some books and a decent .45 and a silly little pocket-size .22 and drove down to Los Angeles in the 1982 Mercedes I’d accepted as payment for revealing the Clue of the Broken Glass, a case that ended with nothing but misery and death. And one very good car.

  Ecclesiastes 1:2–5: “ ‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’ says the Teacher. ‘Utterly meaningless!’ What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.”

  I’d been reading Bible verses for months, trying to find the Clue of the Phoenix Strangler. He’d put together bits and pieces from psalms and proverbs and made his own book with its own numbers, pages of which he’d left at his crime scenes. The Book of Paradise Valley. The Gospel of Biltmore. Now he was in jail waiting for his trial and the women of Phoenix were safe—at least from him—and I was banned from entering the city of Phoenix until the turn of the millennium.

  Daniel 4:28: “All this happened to King Nebuchadnezzar.”

  * * *

  Adam’s office was on Wilshire Boulevard in a neighborhood called Miracle Mile. I didn’t know what was miraculous about it, or exactly where the mile was. It seemed to me like a middling neighborhood of offices and stores on Wilshire and small houses on the side streets. The boulevards and the side streets were entirely out of proportion to each other, as if two different neighborhoods were duking out the rights to the scale of Los Angeles. Adam’s office was in a small commercial building—neutral ground, maybe, in the war of scale—in between a business called SKJ Imports and another called Allied Natural Products. There was no receptionist at his office; instead the frosted glass door opened up into a kind of waiting area with a few leather chairs separated by a wall and a door from an inner office. Everything was gray and all the lights were fluorescent. Fifteen minutes after we were supposed to meet Adam opened the door and gestured that I should come in. In the office was a desk and a couple of chairs and three filing cabinets and a painting of a horse. It seemed like a particular horse; maybe a horse Adam knew. His desk was messy with pens and books and a seemingly infinite number of papers—typed, printed, scrawled-on, and blank.

  Adam was a short man and his eyes were large and brown. He smoked Pall Malls, one after the other, like it was his religion. He had a long face that was perpetually sad and wise. You couldn’t imagine his face ever being younger than forty, or ever having a heart that wasn’t broken—but I wasn’t sure anymore if anyone had a heart that hadn’t been broken. Maybe everyone else just did a better job of hiding it than Adam.

  He had no idea who I was.

  “So you say you had some trouble with the police in San Francisco?”

  “Um, well, yeah,” I said. “I think Hans Jacobson called you? I’m a detective? Claire DeWitt? And—”

  “Wait,” Adam said. “Oh yes, yes.” But then he frowned and said, “Hans said I’d do what, exactly?”

  “Hours,” I said. I looked around the office. Stacks of files looked like they hadn’t been touched in years. A window was open to an alley where two pigeons cooed.

  Sometimes since Constance died I wondered if people could see me. If maybe there was some kind of filter around me that made it impossible for people to know I was there if I wasn’t holding a gun to their neck.

  I didn’t think that would accomplish anything here.

  Adam looked at me. “What?” he said.

  “Hours,” I said again. “I need hours. For my license.”

  Adam’s face lit up. “Oh, right! Constance Darling! Constance’s girl! You need the hours. Well—”

  I sat on the other side of Adam’s desk and he smoked his Pall Malls and shuffled some papers on his desk until he found what he was looking for. It was a thin manila file folder and he handed it to me.

  “The Merritt Underwood Case,” he said. I took the file and opened it. Not much. “Unsolved. That should keep you busy for four hundred hours.”

  “OK,” I said.

  I waited for him to say something more about the case. He didn’t.

  He turned back to his fascinating eddy of papers and starting sifting through.

  “So it’s all here?” I asked. “All here in the file?”

  “Yes,” he said evenly, glancing up. “All there in the file.”

  “OK,” I said again. “So I’ll just dive in? And check in with you in a few days?”

  “That sounds good,” he said. “Let’s do that.”

  He went back to his papers.

  “And I’ll keep track of my hours?” I said. “Should I make some kind of a chart or something?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Something, you know, workman-like. Something official.”

  “OK,” I said. “Well, I guess I’ll start.”

  “Good,” he said. “That sounds good.”

  “OK,” I said again. “Thank you. Thanks for doing this. I really do appreciate it. I’m really happy to be in LA.”

  “Great,” he said. “And it’s Los Angeles.”

  “Sorry?” I said.

  “It isn’t LA,” Adam said, looking up again with a little disapproval. “It’s Los Angeles.”

  “OK,” I said. “Thanks.”

  He made a tight-lipped smile and I left.

  He didn’t look up again.

  * * *

  The first time I came to Los Angeles, in the early nineties, in the days before I met Constance Darling, the detectives’ bar in Los Angeles had been the Velvet Turtle down in Chinatown. Back then every city had a detectives’ bar, where PIs would meet and trade hope and bullshit and company when they passed through town. The Turtle had black leather booths and dark wood fixtures and good drinks. The men—they were all men then, the few female detectives shut out of the club, except for those of us who found secret doors in when no men were looking—back then in the early nineties the men talked about the heyday of the sixties and fifties, when the Spot, the detectives’ bar of their era, was elbow-to-elbow with PIs in sharp suits with sharper wisecracks at the ready, trading information, starting feuds, breaking each other’s hearts.

  By the 1970s, the Spot in Bunker Hill was long demolished and forgotten, and you’d be lucky to find a dozen detectives at the Turtle on a Saturday night. Now, in 1999, you’d be lucky to find a half dozen in a month. All the traditions were dying out and there was just enough tradition left to make you ache for it. The few detectives left—those good enough to survive the coming decimation by search engines and public databases—would come to see each other more as petty rivals than as grand and worthy enemies. Or even, God forbid, friends.

  Not that it mattered much to us Silettians, anyway. No one else wanted us around. Among ourselves, most of the Silettians were on a scale from dislike to loathe, and electronic communication didn’t help us much. Now we could loathe and ignore ea
ch other on computerized bulletin boards and listservs instead of in person.

  That night I thought about driving by the Turtle to see who was around but figured it would be more depressing than useful. Being around people I sort-of kind-of knew but didn’t want to know better was, debatably, more lonely than being alone. The only person in Los Angeles I could convince myself cared about me was Sean Risling, the detective who had introduced me to Constance, but he was hunting down flowers in Siberia.

  Instead I found a cheap hotel in Hollywood and bought some weed from a guy on Sunset. The guy I bought weed from had long blond hair and a sunburned face, and he was hanging out in front of the Rainbow. I didn’t know how I knew he had weed. I just knew.

  “Got any plans for the night?” he asked, after he took my money and gave me my drugs.

  “Yeah,” I said. “These are my plans,” and we looked around at the wasteland of Sunset Boulevard, rising up and down toward the vast nothingness of the ocean, at the long road to nowhere, at the street that just went and went until there was nowhere left to go, and then I changed my mind and said, “Actually, I have no plans. I have nothing to do, and I have no plans.”

  “Yeah,” the guy said, laughing a little. “Sounds good to me.”

  It did not sound good to me. But I kept that to myself, went back to my hotel room, shut the door, and smoked my weed alone.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE CASE OF THE INFINITE BLACKTOP

  * * *

  Oakland, 2011

  Getting into the hospital was not hard. No one was looking for me. Apparently the lady cop I’d stolen the radio from had taken my advice and kept it to herself.

  I went into the ER. The waiting room was the usual backlog of misery, thirty or forty people who’d moved from fear and pain to frustration and pain to the deadness of giving up and pain. First I found the vending machines—they always have vending machines—where I bought some peanut butter crackers and a bottle of water. Then I went to the swinging door to the ER and pushed and stepped through. I was almost in when a security guard, an African American man with gray hair who weighed about 125 and looked like an alcoholic going through withdrawal, stopped me.