Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (26 page)

My eyelids felt heavy and I felt myself drifting away.

“You my sister, girl,” Andray said, smiling. “We on the same team. And I'm-a see you again for sure.”

We were standing next to each other on the street in Central City. No one else was around, and I heard the water curl through the streets. It rose up around us, wrapping us tight but leaving us dry. Birds flew overhead: parrots, pigeons, doves, starlings, blue jays, all singing together, flying in a whirlwind above us. Andray leaned toward me and whispered in my ear, his breath hot on my skin.

“Your girl, she up there waiting for you. She want me to tell you. She ain't never forget you. She know she in your heart, every minute. Like a little bird in there, beating her wings. She waiting for you up there. She saving you a seat right by her side. She say you getting closer. She say the time is almost here. She say soon, girl. Soon.

“And your girl, she say the whole world stranger than you ever gonna believe. And she say she laugh so hard, sometimes, at the things she see you do, she almost fall off her throne and fall back down to earth.”

I gasped and opened my eyes. I was lying in a filthy lot in Central City. Hovering above me was a man of indeterminate age and features, kicking me lightly. Andray was gone. I didn't know when he'd left.

I sat up. The old man shuffled back a little and mumbled something, his breath forming clouds in front of his mouth.

“Better luck next time, pal,” I croaked, my throat dry and painful. “Not dead yet.”

The man left. I lay still for maybe a minute or two, or maybe I fell back asleep for a while. Eventually I got up and checked
for damage. I didn't think I had a concussion, and if I did, the last place I wanted to be was a New Orleans emergency room. I checked my purse and pockets, and everything important and lethal seemed to be in place. I looked at my phone. It was three in the morning. I'd been out for hours.

From my purse I took out a compact mirror and looked at the bump on my head. It was a little mountain, all right, but the skin was barely broken. I wiped up the small smear of blood that was there and stood up.

I saw more Lite-Brite lights. I sat back down.

I did this a few times before I was stable enough to keep standing. Then I walked. I made it as far as the steps of a church on Dryades. I sat on the steps and tried to stay awake. I was feeling a little punch drunk. The cold air helped a little.

“Hey, miss,” I heard behind me. “Miss.” I turned around. A man was behind me. Not one man, I saw after a moment. Men. A bunch of them were huddled up in sleeping bags and newspapers and rags by the door of the church, about five feet from where I was sitting, trying to sleep and stay warm.

“Hey, miss, 'scuse me.” One of the men scootched forward and sat near me. He was skinny and short and old.

“Yeah?” I said.

“You got a smoke?” he said. “I don't mean to bother you. But you got a smoke? All I want is a cigarette.”

I shook my head. “Uh-uh,” I said. “Sorry. I don't have one.”

He looked at me like he didn't believe me.

“Really,” I said.

He mumbled something under his breath.

“You want a dollar?” I said. I was worried about a rebellion of men on the church steps. “'Cause I really don't have a cigarette.”

He smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “That'd be nice. Thanks.”

I reached into my pocket and found a five-dollar bill and gave it to him.

“Thanks,” he said again. “Bless you.”

“You too,” I said.

I stood up and my head spun. I sat back down.

“Hey,” the man said. “How about you? You want a cigarette?”

“Sure,” I said. “I'd like that.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a half-smoked 100. I took it and he lit it for me with a matchbook.

When he lit the match, he saw the bump on my head.

“That don't look good,” he said, frowning.

“It don't feel good,” I said.

The cigarette tasted good. I sat and smoked it. The man pulled a pint bottle out from his overcoat and opened it up and handed it to me.

“Thank you,” I said. I took a long, burning sip and handed it back to him.

“You welcome,” he said. The man smiled. As I looked at him his coat kind of shook and then rattled. I thought I was seeing things, but then something crawled out from the coat and onto the man's shoulders.

It was a rat. A pretty, clean brown and white rat.

“Oh!” I said.

“That's Boo,” the man said. He reached a hand up to pet the rat.

“Hey, Boo,” I said. I reached out to pet him, but Boo shrank away.

“Sorry,” I said.

“That's okay,” the man said. “He just shy.”

We passed the bottle for a while, not a good idea if you might have a concussion, but a good idea if you're depressed and lonely and it's four o'clock in the morning in the most godforsaken place in the USA and you are very, very thirsty.

We drank for a while and then we smoked more half-cigarettes. Then he pulled out one of the long brown joints and we smoked that.

We talked about the storm. The man told me he'd hidden in a spot he knew, a spot he would not reveal, but from which he could watch all the madness of the city without being seen by any authority.

“You leave people to their own, woulda been fine,” the man
said. “Once the cops and the Guard come in, start telling everyone what to do, that's when it gets all fucked up.”

“I have great faith,” I said, “in people's ability to fuck things up without the cops.”

The man laughed.

Me and Boo had been eyeing each other the whole time. Now, finally, he leaned in closer to me. I reached out my hand and let him sniff it. His sharp little nose took in everything. He made a face like something smelled foul. That means something coming from a rat.

“I know,” I said. “It's been a hard night.”

The rat looked at me and leaned toward me, moving his whiskers up and down as he weighed what I'd said. I held my hand still. Finally he sat back down on the man's shoulder. The man smiled.

“That means he like you,” the man said. “He don't like everyone. That means you can pet him.”

With one finger I petted his soft, clean little head. “Hey, Boo,” I said. “You're a good boy.”

“He is that,” the man said proudly. “He a real good boy.”

I scratched the top of his head. He seemed to like it.

Boo's owner turned to the men behind him. “Hey, Jack,” he said. “Look at this. Check it out.”

A big lumbering shadow came toward us. Between the play of lights and my head injury and my general intoxication, it looked like a shadow cast by a backlit giant. The shadow came into focus as a man in a big overcoat.

“Boo don't like just anyone,” the shadow said. I thought the voice was familiar, but I couldn't . . .

“He sure don't,” Boo's owner said.

The shadow got closer and I felt its eyes on me.

My head spun. I looked back at the shadow, but now it wasn't a shadow anymore.

It was Jack Murray.

“Come on, DeWitt,” the shadow said. “You and me, we going for a walk.”

I followed Jack, walking silently behind him. He wore the same tired overcoat from Congo Square, over an old suit that might have started off as any color but was gray now. He took us to the Moon Walk, the pathway by the river. We took up a few benches, and his strong unwashed smell was enough to guarantee our privacy. I was far from sober but I managed to get out a few questions, and I was just sober enough to remember his answers the next day. I remembered his face wobbling in the dark, spinning—or so it seemed to me—lit only by our cigarettes, or maybe they were joints, or maybe freebase, or maybe wet, the same long brown cigarettes soaked in poison I'd been smoking. Or maybe I should just say we each held something small and burning but I don't know what. I forgot my questions, but I remembered Jack's answers.

“I knew Vic from way back,” Jack Murray said. “We went to nursery school together, me and him. All the way up through Tulane. Two good little boys from Uptown, me and Vic.” He laughed. “Yes. I do know what happened to him. But you got to find out for yourself, DeWitt.

“You got all the clues you need. You just got to put them together. You trying to think with your head. But you got to remember what the man said. There ain't no coincidences. Believe nothing. Question everything. Follow the clues. Especially the first one.”

And later, after we'd smoked too much of whatever we were smoking and had drunk twice as much as was wise:

“Now, me, I'm happy with my lot,” Jack said. His face was calm above the light of his cigarette, his eyes clear and intent. “I solved my mysteries,” Jack continued. “I found my answers, and that's between me and God. Me and God and no one else. I know it looks like I got nothing, but I got everything. I got my peace and that's all I ever wanted. You, DeWitt, I don't envy you. You still got a long way to go. I feel for you, 'cause you're gonna go to hell and back before you solve your mysteries. You already halfway there, but that ain't nothing.”

I was just sober enough to remember I'd never told him my name.

“Being a good detective, see, people think that makes it easy for us,” he explained. “But it makes it harder. Maybe some things come easy to you, but that just means you gotta do more. It means more's expected from you. It means you got a place, and that place needs you. It means there's a job for you. A job that only you can do. It means there's a book out there that only you can read. Constance knew that,” he said. “She knew the truth isn't always in a book. It isn't always in a file, or on a piece of paper somewhere. It can be buried like a treasure. It can be in the sky. It can be in the water. It can be in here.” He looked at his PCP-laced cigarette. “It can be inside you, in your own heart. You can leave little bits of it everywhere, once you know how. That way it's only for the people who have eyes to see. Ears to hear. You make it easy for people, you ain't doing 'em no favors. See, she understood. You can't do someone's job for them. You can't solve their mystery for them. Even after they gone, you can't solve it. It just go unsolved until they come around again. All you can do is hold it for 'em till they get back.

“She ain't teach you everything, not by a long shot. There's a lot you still got to learn, DeWitt. She still teaching you. But you gone and closed your eyes. You shut your ears. The whole world teaching you. The whole world your school. But you stopped listening, just 'cause you lost your favorite teacher.”

And later, he said:

“Now us detectives, our reward's in heaven. We ain't get much here on earth, but when we go upstairs, we gonna get ours. I been promised that, and I believe it. But a man like Vic, he don't know about that. He think he got to take his reward right here. So what was his reward?”

“I don't understand,” I said. “How do I find that out?”

“I already told you too much,” Jack said, scowling above the red light of whatever he was smoking. “And that's all I'm gonna tell you. That's all I
can
tell you. You got to find the rest out on your own. You got to find your own buried treasure, girl. Solve your own mysteries. I solved mine. I fucking been to hell and back, but I solved mine.”

I had a hard time staying awake. But I wasn't so drunk that
I didn't see the tattoo above his heart when he reached into his chest pocket, looking for a cigarette butt.

Constance
.

“I tell you one more thing,” Jack said, before he left me alone and disappeared. “If you hoping for a happy ending, DeWitt, you lookin' in the wrong city.”

I
WOKE UP ON
a park bench in Congo Square. I was panting. I heard a shrill squawk in my ear.

It was my phone. I picked it up and checked the display. It was Mick. It was one in the afternoon. I ignored it.

I stood up, dusted myself off, and found a taxi to take me back uptown to get my truck.

I'd lied to Andray. There was no way I was leaving New Orleans.

“Not one detective in a thousand will hear my words,” Silette wrote, “and of those, one in one hundred will understand. It is for them who I write.”

Detectives are superstitious, and over the years people started to read more into
Détection
. It was code for a secret plan. If you said it all at once, without stopping, you could crack any case. If you put every seventh or ninth or forty-fourth or one hundred and eighth word together you would get something that meant something else. It hadn't been written by one person, but by a secret cabal of detectives. It was a channeled message, and Silette didn't understand it any better than the rest of us.

People thought that because they didn't understand. They weren't the one in one hundred in one thousand.

Silette hadn't written for them. He had written for me.

I
WENT BACK
to my room and went back to sleep. When I woke up again it was dark. I went to a restaurant on Frenchman Street and ordered sunny-side-up eggs. But when they came, they didn't look like eggs at all. They looked like something terrible and inedible. They looked like punishment.

It's a great thing to be at rock bottom, I reminded myself. There's nowhere to go but up.

After breakfast—or maybe it was dinner—I called Mick. I didn't plan on telling him what had happened with Andray. On a different day it might have been fun to break his heart. Not today. I told him I'd fallen asleep early the night before and hadn't learned anything new.

Then I told him my truck had died. I asked if I could borrow his car, a dark gray sporty little Nissan from 1990-ish.

“Died?” he said.