The Infinite Blacktop Read online

  “Hey,” he said. “You check in with them?”

  He nodded to the check-in counter.

  “Yes!” I said, trying to sound like I’d been dealing with the ER all night. I’d done it enough times that my muscle memory jumped in and took over. I held up my peanut butter crackers. “My mother’s in there! I just went to get her a snack!”

  He waved me on. I knew no one else would stop me in the busy beehive of the ER. Patients were treated in little mini-rooms while doctors and nurses buzzed around, trying to figure out who to sting next. I stopped a nurse.

  “Hey,” I said, sounding as breathless and tired as I was. “I’m looking for my aunt. Daisy Ramirez?”

  “In there.” She pointed to a mini-room down the hall.

  I went to Daisy Ramirez’s room and opened the door. The wound on her head—a five-inch gash across her forehead and into her scalp—had been stitched up and I figured she was waiting for test results.

  “You—” she began, but for the second time that night I put my finger to my lips and mouthed the sound shhh. I shut the folding papery door behind me.

  “The cops were looking for you,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. “But so is the person who hit me with the car. The thing is, they might be looking for you, too.”

  Daisy wasn’t stupid, and I could tell the thought had crossed her mind. “Fuck,” she said. My radio crackled with news of a shooting.

  “You a cop?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “You got somewhere to go? People who can protect you?”

  “I can protect myself,” she said.

  “Not in here, you can’t. Get your stuff. Let’s go.”

  Daisy looked at me.

  “And I trust you why?” she said.

  “Because,” I said. “You’ve been in the hospital for three hours and you’re still alone. So I’m guessing there’s no one else you particularly trust more. Come on.”

  Leaving the hospital was as easy as getting in. The ER doesn’t force its services on the unwilling. Daisy was OK other than cuts, bruises, and maybe a mild concussion, or so the doctor who’d seen her for ten minutes had said. She was waiting for tests. She would live without them, for now.

  We went back to the parking lot where, just to be on the safe side, we stole another car.

  “You gotta be kidding,” Daisy said when I picked the lock on a Nissan from the early 2000s.

  “There’s worse things,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she snorted. “I could be you.”

  “True enough,” I said. “Thank your lucky fucking stars you’re not.”

  I got the Nissan started and got out of the hospital lot and was on my way to the highway. I asked if she remembered the license plate on the Lincoln.

  “I told the cop,” she said. “I saw the last three digits—444. That’s my lucky number, four. But that’s it. I didn’t catch the first part.”

  “How’d you get hurt?” I asked.

  “After he hit you, I was scared. I got in my car, but he backed up into me. I hit my head on the windshield.”

  “What else did you see?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “That’s not true,” I said. “Take a few deep breaths. Close your eyes. When did you first notice the car?”

  She did what I asked and in a minute she said: “When it turned the corner. Because of the car, you know. I like old cars.”

  “Who was driving?” I asked.

  “Some guy,” she said.

  “Some guy who looked like what?”

  Daisy thought for a minute. “White guy. White hair. Like blond, not old. But really light blond. I couldn’t really see any, like, detail or anything.”

  “Tell me something else about him,” I said.

  Daisy made a face. “I just said. I just told you. I couldn’t really see.”

  “If you could see his hair color, you could see something else,” I said. “His shape. Tell me about his shape.”

  “Narrow,” Daisy said. “I mean, it might have been a shadow. I don’t know what I was seeing, exactly. But that’s what he looked like to me. Thin. Narrow.”

  * * *

  In 1955, Jacques Silette had all of Paris—maybe all of the world—at his fingertips. He was the most renowned private investigator of the twentieth century. In the Case of the Melancholy Bibliophile, he’d solved the unsolvable. Using the Clue of the Forbidden Banknote, he’d proven the unprovable. Le Monde published no less than three full-length features on his dazzling exploits and modern tools.

  He gave regular talks at L’École de Criminologie.

  He fucked his willing students and clients with abandon and glee.

  He was one of the highest-paid detectives in the world.

  He was, by most accounts, a happy man.

  And then everything changed.

  Exactly how Silette got off the straight and narrow road of mediocrity and began to look for the truth is not known now and maybe never was, even to him. Was the path already there? Did Silette discover it, or only define it? How did he come to find himself in uncharted territory, and end up on the long, lost highway toward truth?

  “There are no facts,” Silette wrote, “only pebbles that may or may not be part of this path toward the truth.”

  The closest we have to a travelogue of how Silette found that road is an account by a man named Louis Fournier. Fournier was Silette’s peer and acquaintance and maybe almost, not exactly, a friend. They knew each other from L’École de Criminologie. Fournier was a professor specializing in poisons and chemicals, but not without poetry in his soul; in 1974 he published a small and beautiful illustrated book of aphorisms inspired by his favorite venoms: “The rattlesnake might bite / but its rattle will sing you to sleep.”

  Which is maybe better in French.

  Anyway. From an account Fournier gave to Le Trimestriel des Détectives in 1969:

  Jacques was a man who knew how to enjoy life. When he wasn’t working, he was eating, drinking, or off with a girl. But—oh, I don’t know, maybe it was 1956 when that started to change. In the past, we would often go out for a drink or a meal. Now, never. It wasn’t very sudden and it wasn’t very gradual. I can tell you around holiday time in 1955, we went to some of the university parties—I remember very well because I was jealous of his ability to get along so well. I remember watching him across the room at a little party in Emile Jean-Baptiste’s house—he was another professor, the fingerprints man—and I saw all the smart people around Jacques and I felt quite jealous. I was very lonely at the time; my wife had left me, my family was gone. And Jacques seemed to attract this life, this life filled with pleasure and company, without even trying.

  Now the next year, Emile had a party again. I went with my new wife, Christiane, and we were very happy. And Jacques—he wasn’t there at all. He’d stopped going to parties.

  He’d stopped going to parties because he was home, alone, writing the book that would define his life and legacy: Détection.

  Détection was a book about solving mysteries.

  It was a book about crime.

  It was a book about everything.

  It was a book that seeped into your bones and changed you from the inside. It would pierce through the lifetime of armor you had built around your heart and show you how you had protected all the wrong things, hidden your best and, like a miser, given the world your worst. The fact that this was exactly what the world had asked of you could no longer be an excuse.

  Now, you had the bricks of truth, and your only responsibility was to build your road.

  “If life gave you answers outright,” Silette wrote, “they would be meaningless. Each detective must take her clues and solve her mysteries for herself. No one can solve your mystery for you; a book cannot tell you the way.”

  Everyone knows what happened next: Détection was published, not to acclaim and celebration, but to derision, hostility and laughter. Those are the sounds of people running from real
ity. The high heels clacking on the pavement, the doors shutting as they leave: those are the sounds people make when they encounter the truth.

  No one ever welcomes the truth. No one ever congratulates you for pointing it out and you will not be thanked.

  And like all true things, Détection would change you forever if you weren’t careful—if you didn’t hold it at arm’s length, reading with one eye on the page and the other on your friends, laughing a smug little laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. If you gave the book even a little bit of an honest shake, it would give you an entirely new life—and burn your old, better, safer life to the ground.

  Now Silette was no longer the well-loved man with profiles in the paper and crowds around him at parties. Instead, he was the man people made blind-item cracks about in the paper and whispered about at parties: Did you hear about Jacques and his crazy book? What happened to him? And, unspoken: How can I make sure it doesn’t happen to me?

  But Silette still solved cases. More than ever before. His record before Détection was good; after Détection, perfect.

  You’d think that would matter. It didn’t.

  Now, sixty-odd years later, the majority of people who’d heard of Jacques Silette knew him as a punch line, or maybe a cautionary tale. His followers were fewer and fewer every year. The first generation of intellectual offspring had mostly died off, and failed to reproduce. Jeanette Foster was already gone. Constance too. Hans Jacobson was facing old age without having converted a single detective to the Silettian path-of-no-path. Sean Risling, never particularly devout to begin with, only had biological offspring, not intellectual.

  And then there was Jay Gleason, Jacques Silette’s last student. And while the rest of us kept in touch somewhat over the years, emailing or calling or telegramming or messaging when we needed clues or money or confirmation—although less and less as the years crept on, and we each had less of those items to offer—Jay had never been part of our world, even as ill-defined and unsupported as that world was. He never connected with the other Silettians. Only with Silette himself.

  Jay, the legend went, showed up on Silette’s doorstep in Paris one day in 1970-something, young and beautiful and bright, overflowing with money and admiration and inspiration—all things in increasingly short supply for Silette, especially in his later years.

  Long after Constance had moved to New Orleans and Hans had gone on to Amsterdam, Jay Gleason was there. What did they talk about? What did Jay learn?

  By the time Jay came along, the world had largely passed Silette by, if it had ever paused for him at all. He’d gone from dull respect to a quick moment of notoriety to a long jag of ridicule and then been forgotten, like the Brownie camera or the IWW.

  In the sixties, Silette was, I like to imagine, content in his own little world, comfortable with the ridicule of outsiders and inferiors. After a long affair with Constance and numerous shorter affairs with other women, he married one of his students, Marie, and they had a daughter, Belle. They were happy. They loved each other. Marie was intelligent and complicated. Silette was growing old and his rough edges were softening. They both had money. They had an apartment in Paris and had inherited a country house from Marie’s family. There was an ancient little vineyard on the property: reportedly, before it all came crashing down, Silette was studying winemaking techniques. They weren’t accepted by Silette’s university colleagues or Marie’s staid family, but they had their own circle of friends to keep them busy: artists, occultists, those few students and other detectives who chose to understand.

  In 1971 their daughter Belle was born; both parents were delighted. You might imagine Jacques Silette to be a cold man, overly intellectual, judgmental of his child. By all accounts you would be wrong. Constance told me an offhand story one night about how, in his thank-you card for Belle’s first-birthday gift (Constance sent a Chanel rattle), Silette went on a rapturous rant about the joy of changing diapers, about the bliss and depth of seeing material existence come full circle and the rare opportunity to spend so much time handling the materia prima the alchemists had spun into gold.

  In 1973 Jacques and Marie took their first trip to America. There was a case to solve, but they also took a long trip across the country seeing friends and introducing their daughter. They visited Constance in New Orleans, of course. In Akron, Ohio, they spent a day with a visionary locksmith Silette had corresponded with since the 1950s. Next they spent a few days in New England visiting Marie’s cousins at various universities: linguists; anthropologists; psychoanalysts. In Chicago, Silette gave a lecture to the Women’s Society for Philosophy, where he apparently confused and dismayed the crowd of three who attended, although the night maid, listening from the hallway, afterward had dinner with Silette and Marie in their hotel, and they became fast friends. In Kansas City, he and Marie visited with an elderly detective named Horace Washington who, though solitary by nature and not given to discussing it much, was one of the first people in America to read and understand Silette’s book.

  Finally they landed in New York City. Silette had another lecture scheduled, this one at a small private library near Gramercy Park. He’d been asked to speak to a group of detective novel enthusiasts about something like “the eternal meaning of mysteries.” He spent forty minutes talking about a rare kind of praying mantis that lived in a rose bush outside his house, and then another fifty minutes explaining the etymology of the word clue, yanking a thread out of a very expensive tapestry to illustrate. Most people left. A few fell asleep. Two became angry and tried to stop the lecture. One listened. That was enough for Silette.

  Marie was tired. She stayed home to rest with Belle.

  After the lecture Silette had dessert and cheese and coffee with the men in the book club. Most had left, but the two who stayed were by all accounts lively and appreciative. The desserts were excellent.

  After midnight, Silette returned to their hotel to find Marie drugged and unconscious. Belle was gone.

  There was a rumor, likely not true, that Silette—the man who solved the Case of the Bitten Apple without even getting out of his taxi, the man who found the Clue of the Watercolor Butterfly in forty-four minutes—strolled into the hotel, smiling and relaxed, took the elevator up to his room, walked in, saw Marie sleeping, and then looked for Belle. Only when he couldn’t find her did he realize something was horribly wrong. The most brilliant mind of the twentieth century and he walked right into his own tragedy like any other stupid fucking sap.

  There was another rumor, one I was more inclined to believe, that told the story differently. In this story, the men in the club had just put out dessert. Silette bit into a crisp sweet-bitter pignoli nut biscuit and said, “My life. Jesus Christ, my life,” and dropped the cookie and ran back to the hotel, but he was too late. Belle was gone. Apparently the light from one of the men’s cigarettes hit Silette’s eye in a certain way that allowed him to put together the previously unrecognized clues—the unlocked door to the hotel staircase, the fingerprint on the elevator button—and let him see that his life, as he knew it, was now over.

  The police came. Interpol came. The FBI. Every detective of any merit, real or imagined, wanted to solve the case, some to help one of their own, some to spite Silette.

  No one ever found one clue. Not one hint, one word, one thread.

  Ironically, the greatest detective the world ever knew never solved his own biggest mystery. Neither did anyone else. Belle was never found, dead or alive.

  Silette and Marie were broken people. After they got back to France they were rarely seen in public again. Marie died two years later from a broken heart. Silette never wrote again, and died in 1981. He still worked a few cases over those years. Of course he solved them all. But fewer every year. Mostly he stayed in Marie’s country house. He remained friendly with a few people he’d known in town—the butcher, his gardener, the man who owned the cigar store—but let most of his other relationships slide away.

  But in the last years of his
life, Silette made one new friend.

  Jay Gleason.

  Legend had it that Jay had shown up at Silette’s door one night, leonine and lithe with long golden hair and bell-bottoms, empty inside from a louche childhood in the mansions of Newport and Cannes, lusted after but never loved, burning with an internal fire for the truth that brought him to Silette’s door. The story was that he showed up, drunk on the thrill of mysteries, feverishly desperate to tell the great man his own little solution to the Case of the Murdered Madam. His solution was wrong. But for some reason—maybe loneliness—Silette invited Jay in, and let him stay. Maybe they were lovers. Maybe more like father and son. Either way, the two of them, by all accounts, formed their own little world, Jay alternately learning from the great man and protecting him from the sharp edges of life, which turn so much sharper as you age.

  Sean Risling once told me a story about Jay. This was in Los Angeles, maybe 2005. Sean was still working the encyclopedia of flower poisons he’d been working on since I’d met him. I helped him out when I could—stopping by an herbarium in London if convenient or introducing him to a woman I’d met who’d lived through an accidental meal of amaryllis belladonna (she described the hallucinations to Sean as “being punished by witches who’d been sent by my father”). We’d have dinner once a year if he was in San Francisco (usually Cliff House; Sean liked the view) or if I was in Los Angeles (Musso & Frank’s; we both liked the food).

  We were at Musso’s. I was in town for a funeral. We’d already eaten crab cakes and sand dabs and killed a bottle of wine. Now we were on to coffee and Diplomat Pudding. And somehow, as always on these nights, the topic came around to Silette.