The Infinite Blacktop Read online

  “Did I ever tell you,” Sean said, “about Chicago?”

  “Chicago?” I said. I was a little drunk.

  Sean raised his eyebrows a little, glad he hadn’t told me about Chicago before so he could tell me now.

  “Oh yeah,” Sean said. “I never told you this?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “So I’m in Chicago,” Sean began. “I’m on a case for this investment firm. I used to do financial stuff. This was before you knew me. Long time ago. Whitley Cross. That was the client. Whitley Cross. A private bank. Horrible people. They’ve got me in Palmer House. I hated all of it, the finance people, the work, the math, everything—so I’m in the bar all the time. Amazing bar. They’ve got these olives stuffed with blue cheese in the martinis. They’re like a meal. And of course the drinks.

  “So I’m sitting at a table in the bar in Palmer House, going through this mountain of spreadsheets. Forensic accounting. It’s incredibly boring. I’m drinking too much. I wish I was dead. And then someone sits at my table and I look up and it’s Jay. Jay Gleason. He smiles and we shake hands.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You knew Jay?”

  Somehow I’d never realized this before. I’d met Jay once. I hadn’t known it was him at the time.

  “Kind of,” Sean said. “I never met Silette, you know that, but we used to write sometimes. One time I was in France, I was hoping to meet him. We had a lunch scheduled in Paris, but he sent Jay to let me know he couldn’t make it. We didn’t talk much—I was waiting in this little café near the museum, Jay came by, introduced himself, sat down, explained that Silette wouldn’t be making it, asked if I was getting around Paris OK, did I need anything. Just normal stuff. He bought me lunch and he left. I’d heard he was this vicious guy. He told me where to get my suit cleaned. Told me where to go for oysters.

  “So here I am in Chicago, and Jay sits right down at my table. We shake hands, exchange small talk. He’s very sketchy about why he’s in town. I don’t push it. This is 1989, maybe. 1988. I have no idea what he’s been up to. I know the rumors.

  “So I tell him about the work I’m doing. I guess it’s obvious that I hate it. Not just that I hate the work, but that my life is just miserable at this point. I’m making a ton of money, I’m staying in the Palmer House, I’m at the top of my field, and I’m hating every day of it. My wife had left me like a year before. I hardly even noticed.

  “So we sit, we have a few drinks, he’s got nothing to do so we go to dinner. There’s a steakhouse downstairs. Very civilized. We have a nice dinner, I try to pay, Jay won’t let me. Pulls a roll of cash out of his pocket, a couple of thousand bucks, easy. In 1980-something. We talk about people we know, detectives, trade news. And then toward the end of dinner Jay says to me, ‘Why are you doing this?’

  “I don’t even know what he means at first. Why am I doing what? He looks around and makes this gesture with his hands. This gesture.”

  Sean tried to replicate it. It was kind of like a shrug, but with wide, expansive hands.

  “This gesture,” Sean went on. “This gesture, I can’t do it right, but it was like—everything. Like this whole fucking life. Why are you doing this?

  “We were both standing next to the table. And Jay looks at me and he does that gesture again, that thing with his hands, and he says, ‘This is over for you, Sean. Starting right now. This is all over for you. You need money?’ He takes that big fat roll of cash out of his pocket and holds it out to me. I didn’t need money; I wouldn’t take it. We shake hands; he leaves.

  “That night, I have this crazy dream. I dream that I’m in the woods, and there’s flowers all around me. They’re incredibly beautiful, and they smell amazing. I never smelled anything like that in a dream before. Like roses just past their prime. Sweet, but almost too sweet. Somehow I knew not to touch them. I knew if I touched them, I would die. Not right away, not soon, but over the long run. These flowers would kill me. They were poison.

  “The next morning I wake up and I have like five messages from Whitley Cross. I was fired. I never knew what happened. Never knew if Jay made it happen somehow or if it was all just a coincidence.

  “But you know, after that dream I never took another financial job again. And a few days later, I started working on the Encyclopedia of Poisonous Orchids. And since then—”

  Sean made another kind of gesture now—another shrug, another gesture with his hands. But this one said All of this. I got all of this.

  I knew another story about Jay, too. The semi-annual Détection newsletter was published for eleven issues by a man named Lamar Livingston. Lamar was a criminology professor at UCLA. Most criminologists were sad and scarred people. Lamar was tall and excitable and optimistic. He never really understood Silette and never really understood Silettians; the newsletter was more of a gesture—a gesture of friendliness toward his fellow criminologists; of reconciliation toward rival schools of criminology; of his belief that all mysteries can be solved. He also ran a newsletter for forensic etymologists. He also did it, as he did everything, for the pure joy of doing things.

  In issue 11, Summer 1991, Lamar had the idea to publish a directory of known Silettians, and their contact information. He meant well. He included Constance, of course, Sean, Janet Perth (a dull but serviceable Silettian detective in Australia), and Hans Jacobson.

  And Jay. Somehow, I don’t know through who, Lamar got an address for Jay Gleason in Las Vegas and, not knowing any better, published it.

  The next day Lamar woke up to a bloody knife stuck into the door of his house in Westwood, and a note suggesting he refrain from publishing people’s addresses in the future.

  Lamar never published the Silettian newsletter again.

  * * *

  Some people said Jay was with Silette when he died. Some people said he’d absconded with the best of the Silette family silverware long before that. Some said Jay’s rich family had cut him off altogether. Some said Jay had inherited a fortune.

  The only concrete thing I knew about him was that he’d once lived in Las Vegas. I knew this because I’d seen him there.

  After Sean Risling introduced me to Constance in Los Angeles, after she let me think I’d helped her solve the HappyBurger Murder Case, before she invited me to come back to New Orleans with her, we took a trip to Las Vegas.

  It was, maybe, the best day of my life. The case was closed and I wasn’t sure I’d ever hear from Constance again.

  Instead, she asked me to drive her to Las Vegas the next day. I could hardly sleep that night, and we left early the next morning. She directed me to a big, luxurious, ugly estate on the edges of the city. She went inside and came out a few minutes later, not alone. With her were two men. One of them had Constance by the arm. I never knew what their dispute was about. But I could tell it wasn’t going anywhere good.

  She’d asked me to wait in the car. Instead I pointed a gun at the two men. I already would have died for her. They let her go.

  It was only a few minutes later, when I saw her damp face in the cool car, that I realized she’d been scared for her life.

  And it was only years later, when I came across his picture in a pile of photos on Constance’s desk, that I realized one of the men in the house in Las Vegas had been Jay Gleason.

  White man. White-blond hair. Narrow face.

  I never knew what they fought about, and I, and everyone else, lost track of Jay after that day. He’d dropped out of sight. There were rumors that he had had to disappear after running a real-estate con on the wrong men. That he’d hooked up with a man selling fake gemstones out of Phoenix, Arizona. That he’d had an affair with a Baptist politician and had blackmailed him for a small fortune. And a long-standing rumor that Jay Gleason ran a scam correspondence school for private investigation out of Las Vegas.

  Like the PI school advertised in the Cynthia Silverton comic books.

  The ad I’d answered five days before someone tried to kill me.

  * * *
r />   The plan, as I’d told Daisy, was to put her up in one of the low-rent, likely unpleasant, but safe-enough hotels in far west Berkeley, using the ID and credit card I’d stolen. We were on our way there when the radio spoke up. I’d had it on low volume this whole time and it had been steadily letting out a stream of robberies, homicides, static, and other things that weren’t about me.

  Now it was about me. Someone had spotted the Lincoln. The cop on the radio was reporting in to his superior that the Lincoln had been seen near the Ashby BART station. Even better, he had a Nevada plate number—RBH444.

  “Sorry,” I said to Daisy. “We’re going there now.”

  She raised an eyebrow at me.

  I popped another pill.

  “Let me see your phone for a sec?” I said to Daisy.

  She gave me her phone.

  I threw it out the window.

  “Fuck,” Daisy said.

  I figured we could beat the cops to the Ashby BART station. I was wrong. We were a half block away on MLK when I saw the flashing lights. We drove up slowly, as if we were rubberneckers.

  I saw a bunch of cops.

  I didn’t see the Lincoln.

  I drove around for a while and looked for the Lincoln. No luck, if it was ever there at all. I didn’t understand all the talk on the radio, most of it in arcane bureaucratic cop slang, but it sounded like they’d lost the car. I took Daisy to a hotel on San Pablo. I asked if they took cash. The man behind the bulletproof glass said no. No one took cash anymore. Where did people turn tricks? Where did they cheat on their spouses? Binge on drugs? All the darkest parts of life required cash. Saving those mysteries for another day, I paid for four days with one of Letitia Parnell’s stolen credit cards and registered in her name. The man at the counter didn’t blink at her ID. Apparently the dark side was now run on stolen credit and fake IDs.

  I walked Daisy to her room and checked it out. No one had followed us here and, without her phone, there was no way on earth anyone could follow her.

  “So what do I do,” Daisy said, “just hang out for the rest of my life?”

  “For a few days,” I said. “Just hang out for say three days. Four days. And then one way or another, it’ll all be done.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “One of us’ll be dead.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Probably. Hopefully not you and not me.”

  “That’d be a good ending,” she said, trying not to sound scared.

  I looked at her, looked at her for real, and she looked at me.

  “It’s not gonna be you,” I said. “Let’s just make that deal right now.”

  She shivered, and then nodded.

  I gave her a handful of cash for when the stolen card was cancelled and we said goodbye.

  I was going back to the car when Claude called. When he first starting working for me I made him buy three disposable phones and keep them charged, on, and ready, just for occasions like this. So far we’d used two of them. Although those other occasions were not all that much like this. One was a time when I wanted to order some painkillers on the internet and was paranoid about being traced. Another was when I wanted to pretend to give my number to a guy I’d spent the night with in Seattle and couldn’t think of a fake one fast enough.

  “What’s going on?” Claude said. “Are you OK?”

  “For the moment,” I said. I was about to pull out to San Pablo and start toward Nevada when all the exhaustion and blood loss hit me like a drug and my head spun.

  “Whoa,” I said. “Wow.”

  The world outside the car tilted one way and then careened the other—

  “Claire, what’s going on?” asked Claude. “Where are you? I’ll come get you.”

  The last thing I needed or wanted was to get Claude involved. I didn’t want to make this more complicated than it was. And I didn’t want Claude to get hurt.

  For a quick moment a horrible idea passed through my mind—that I had already ruined Claude’s life, which had been safe and steady before I hired him. And maybe now I would get him killed. I pushed it away.

  “Listen,” I said. “You have to do exactly as I tell you, all right?”

  “Yeah, OK,” he said. He knew me and knew my voice and knew when I was serious.

  “OK. Grab your laptop, leave your phone, and leave your house, right now.”

  I heard him rustling around for his laptop and snatching it up. Claude lived near College Avenue in Berkeley, near the campus and not far from downtown Berkeley. It was always busy around there, even at night.

  “Now walk downtown. Stay on the busy streets. Find something open twenty-four hours—a restaurant or coffee shop or whatever. OK?”

  “I’m putting on my shoes,” he said. “Laptop, wallet, keys. All right, I’m out the door, locking the door, leaving—”

  “Wait,” I said. I felt my head spin again and everything started to go black around the edges. I shook myself and spun back around to real life.

  “I need you to find out who owns a Nevada Lincoln with the plate number RBH444,” I told Claude.

  “What’s going on?”

  It sounded like his words were coming from a million miles away and it seemed like reality was curling up at the edges.

  “Just go somewhere safe,” I said. “Just promise me you’ll be safe.”

  And then the edges of everything crumbled away, and it all fell down to black.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE MYSTERY OF THE CBSIS

  * * *

  Los Angeles, 1999

  I counted my meeting with Adam Dubinsky as half an hour. Three hundred and ninety-nine and a half hours to go for my fucking license. Three hundred and ninety-nine and a half hours to go before I could legally do the only thing I was good at; the thing I’d been doing all my life.

  I was staying in a motel on an unpleasant strip on Hollywood Boulevard. It wasn’t so different from my room in San Francisco. Instead of Chinatown, it was in Thai Town. No cat. Spending time around people who didn’t share my language was my best bet, apparently. My room was thirty-nine dollars a night in San Francisco and thirty-six in Los Angeles, and the room in Los Angeles tried to be nice in a way that made it even uglier; in addition to the worn bed and the aging armchair and the sad little writing table there were new, unfortunate, striped drapes. A Thai family—parents, grandparents, three kids—ran the desk. None of them had the slightest interest in me or made any pretense of friendliness. Thank God for small favors.

  I didn’t really know why I never had any money. I would ask for, and get, a lot for a case. I’d been working since I was a kid. No one came to me unless they were desperate and well prepared to pay, whether they could afford it or not. I didn’t have an office and I didn’t advertise so people generally found me the way people found a drug dealer or a bootleg movie: ask around; look for people who knew; try to read the signs. By the time a client found me they were usually willing to pay and usually I made sure they did. But I only took the cases I wanted to take and I didn’t like to think about money before or after I spent it and I never bothered to collect for expenses or keep track of tax deductions or pay taxes or deal with any of it. So maybe I did know why I never had any money. Those were pretty much the reasons. Also I’d do things like give a couple of hundred bucks to a cop I knew in New Orleans who was out of work or give even more to a lady I met in an Ecuadorean restaurant who was trying to get a dog shelter off the ground. I didn’t do those things to be nice so much as for the cocaine-like rush of good feelings and self-aggrandizement that they brought. I didn’t try to kid myself otherwise. And now, of course, I wasn’t getting paid at all.

  Back in my room I opened the file Adam Dubinsky had given me. First I skimmed it and then I went back to the beginning and carefully read every page. Four years ago, in 1995, a man named Merritt Underwood died. Maybe he was murdered or maybe he just had bad luck. Or good luck. The case was never solved. Underwood was an artist and made some money but hadn’t acquired a lot of wealth: he’d wo
rked and sold less and less over the years, and spent more time drinking and picking fights with people.

  On July 8, 1995, his car was found at the bottom of a valley in Topanga Canyon. He was forty-four when he died. At first it was assumed to be an accident, but his parents, both doctors in Pasadena, both now dead, were never convinced, and suspected murder. I didn’t know why they suspected it. They’d paid Adam Dubinsky to try to solve the mystery of who, if anyone, killed Merritt. Adam Dubinsky was still working on it when they died; first the father, from a heart attack, and then eight months later the mother, causes unknown. With no living client, and no one paying him, Adam had put the case aside in favor of mysteries that would affect the living.

  The police had turned up nothing. The highlights from their report were in Adam’s file. Merritt was a life-long inhabitant of Los Angeles and his whole world was here in the city. Everyone loved Merritt—until he got drunk, did something stupid, and then they didn’t love him anymore. Then they put him outside like a dog that chewed up a pair of cheap shoes: annoying, and doubtless a nuisance, but no one seemed to really hate him, and most seemed to find him cute, and they always let him back in the house.

  Along with the report was a set of slides of photographs of his paintings. There were also a few photographs of Merritt himself.

  He was a man you might call “burly.” I couldn’t tell how tall he was from the photos but he was tall enough and pleasantly wide. He didn’t mind taking up space. He wasn’t particularly handsome. There was nothing wrong with his face, all the flesh was assembled well enough, but not especially or particularly well. He was unshaven for a day or two and his hair looked like he’d probably cut it himself.

  But there was something about the way he curled his lips. Some kind of light in his eyes. It was like he didn’t know how to hide.

  The last photo was a candid shot. It was at a party; there was a crowd of unfocused faces behind him. He was looking at the camera and lighting a cigarette.