Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (33 page)

The man looked like a different man now. He smiled. He wasn't so ugly.

“Babies,” he said indulgently. “Naughty babies, be quiet. No one can know you're here.”

He reached into his pocket and took out a handful of sunflower seeds and fed them to the two on his shoulders.

“Silly birds,” he said.

One flew over and landed on my shoulder. I laughed. The man laughed too, and we smiled at each other.

The bird's feet scratched and tickled my shoulder. He gently pushed his beak into my hair.

“Erk,” he said into my ear. “ERK.”

“I never knew who I was before,” the man said. But now he was Vic Willing.

“Erk! Erk!”

“You'll see, Claire,” he said, smiling, in his mellifluous southern voice, “when you open your eyes.”

“Erk!”

“The blood just washes off.” He looked down at his hands, clean and white.

“It's like,” he said, and I got the idea that he was telling me something very important, “it's not like it never happened at all,” he said, the birds preening his white hair. “That wouldn't mean anything. It's like it all happened, every last bit of it. But somehow, you can go on anyway. Somehow, you can know every last bit of it and still go on.”

Vic looked happy but I was overcome by a sour feeling. Jealousy.

I looked down, and my own hands were covered in blood.

“Your time is coming,” Vic said. “Ain't no one forgotten about you, girl. But you got to be patient. Maybe the most patient of them all. But at the end, I promise you, is something glorious.”

When I woke up, I knew the Case of the Green Parrot was closed.

And I knew that, like Jack Murray, I would go to hell and back before I solved the rest of my mysteries.

A
FTER SOME COFFEE
I drove out to the Industrial Canal and dropped in the gun I'd bought and the weapons I'd taken from Andray. Back in my room I put together a little package explaining who'd done it and why with a bill for my services and put it in an express mail envelope for Leon.

When I was packed and ready to go I sat on the bed and made a call to Washington, D.C.

I'd missed my flight into New Orleans because of a case I solved that involved a Homeland Security officer and a girl who wasn't his wife.

But I wasn't going to miss my flight out. I had a favor I'd been saving for a rainy day, and today it was pouring. I wanted to get out of here and back home to California as soon as possible.

“I'm sorry,” the man who answered the phone said brightly. “The senator really can't talk to anyone without an appointment.”

I hadn't talked to the senator in three years, not since I'd solved a mystery no one else could fix for her. She didn't want to owe me. But she owed me all the same.

“Could you tell her?” I asked. “You could just tell her I'm on the phone.”

“I'm sorry, I—”

“You could try,” I said. “Because she'll want to talk to me. Just write it down. Write it down on a little slip of paper and—”

“The senator really can't—”

“She can.”

“She won't—”

“She will,” I said.

Less than a minute later the senator picked up the phone.

“Sorry about that, Claire,” she said. “He's an aide—he didn't know.”

“It's okay,” I said. “But listen. I could use a favor.”

“Name it,” she said, all business.

I told her about the trouble I'd been having flying.

“So I was hoping you could help me out with that,” I said. “I was hoping I could just get on the airplane from now on, you know, like a normal person.”

“Of course,” she said. “Absolutely. It's done.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Thanks a lot. I really appreciate that. But the thing is, I've got a flight tonight. A flight home from New Orleans. Louis Armstrong Airport. And I really, really don't want to miss this flight.”

The senator had come to me when no one else would help her, when there was no one else she could trust. It's funny how people forget those times. You'd think I was the one who put her daughter in that opium den.

She paused for a second too long before she answered. But it was the right answer. “Of course,” she said. “I'll take care of it. I'll call the airport myself. I'll do it as soon as we're off the phone.”

We thanked each other again and I hung up.

I picked up my suitcase. I felt like my bones had been replaced by lead, my blood by oil.

That's the thing about being a private eye. The job will bleed you dry. No one ever says, Hey, maybe the PI needs a break. Hey, let's buy the PI a drink. No thank-you cards, no flowers, no singing telegrams, and half the time you don't even get paid.

A
FEW DAYS BEFORE
Constance died we stayed up late one night talking in her parlor, each of us on one of her long velvet sofas. Of course, I didn't know she was going to die soon. But I knew change was coming. I felt it in my blood, I saw it when I slept. That night she was in a rare mood. Usually she taught by example and metaphor, dream and command, but tonight we drank wine and talked and she answered a few of my questions directly. Her white hair was piled on her head and she wore black silk pajamas from Hong Kong. She smelled like violets always, and sometimes like a special shampoo she used from Paris, and the old-fashioned makeup she bought on Canal Street.

Not many good things had happened to me before I met Constance. But after I met her I knew how to recognize the good parts of life and stay with them for a minute or two before they flew away, joining the dead wherever the dead go. This was one of the good moments: her hair, her smell, her house, Mick sleeping in the spare room, all of us a family.

I loved New Orleans. I thought I was finally home. I loved the city so much, it hurt sometimes.

“The truth is a funny thing,” Constance said. “Just when you think you've got a hold on it, it slips away.”

“Then why do it?” I asked. “Why bother to solve mysteries? Don't they ever end?”

Constance laughed. “Oh, no,” she said. “No. Mysteries never end. And I always thought maybe none of them really get solved, either. We only pretend we understand when we can't bear it anymore. We close the file and close the case, but that doesn't mean we've found the truth, Claire.”

“Then what does it mean?” I asked.

“It only means that we've given up on this mystery,” Constance explained. “And decided to look for the truth someplace else.” She yawned. “That's enough for now, dear. You go on and get some sleep. I'll see you in the morning.”

“Good night,” I said. I stood up and turned around. But then a strange feeling overcame me and I turned back around. Suddenly tears were streaming down my face.

“I . . .” I began.

“Yes?” Constance said. It was dark, and she couldn't see I was crying.

“I . . . Thank you,” I said. I realized I had never said it before. “For everything. Thank you.”

Constance looked at me and smiled.

“You're welcome, my dear,” she said. “You are very, very welcome.”

I nodded. Then I turned and started toward the door. I would never see her alive again.

“And yes,” Constance called out behind me. “I love you too, Claire.”

Thanks to Dan Conaway, Andrea Schulz, Angus Cargill, Megan Abbott, Mark Levine, Suzanne Gran, Warren Gran, Dawn Asher, and Bobby Urh for their time, generosity, help, and kindness to this book—and to me—over the years it took to write it.

1

San Francisco

I
MET PAUL WHEN
a friend of my friend Tabitha played at the Hotel Utah late one Thursday night. About twenty people were there to see the friend's friend's band. One of the about-twenty was Paul. I was at a table in the corner with Tabitha and her friend. Tabitha was tall and pole-thin with orange hair, and arms and legs covered with tattoos. Tabitha's friend was one of those guys who was too sweet to be real. Or desirable. He was a little younger than me and smiled like he meant it.

I saw Paul at the bar looking at me, and when he caught me looking he looked away. It happened a few more times, enough times that I was sure it wasn't my imagination. Things like that happened to me often enough, and it was not exactly noteworthy for a man to make eyes at me across a dark and dirty bar in San Francisco.

Except something about Paul, about his big dark eyes and his quick, shy, smile, a smile he tried to hide, made me take note.

At the end of the night I felt his eyes on me when Tabitha and I left the bar, and I wondered why he hadn't talked to me and I wondered if he'd planned that, too, to make me think about him, because with men you never can tell. At least I can't.

Two weeks later we went to the Hotel Utah again to see the same band and Paul was there again. I wouldn't have admitted that that was why I went, but it was. Paul was friends with the guitar player. Tabitha's friend played drums. Paul and I avoided each other, although I didn't notice it at the time. He went over to sit with the band while they were hanging out drinking before the show and I left to go to the bathroom. I came back and Paul left to get a drink. I'd been thinking he was a kind of cute, kind of smart-looking guy who maybe I would meet and maybe I would sleep with.

But that night I felt something in the pit of my stomach, more bats than butterflies, and right before I finally shook his hand I felt a wave of dread come over me, like we were being pulled into a black undertow we couldn't fight our way out of. Or didn't want to.

Jacques Silette, the great detective, would have said we knew. That we knew what was coming and made the choice to pursue it. “Karma,” he said once, “is not a sentence already printed. It is a series of words the author can arrange as she chooses.”

Love. Murder. A broken heart. The professor in the drawing room with the candlestick. The detective in the bar with the gun. The guitar player backstage with the pick.

Maybe it was true: Life was a series of words we'd been given to arrange as we pleased, only no one seemed to know how. A word game with no right solution, a crossword puzzle where we couldn't quite remember the name of that song. 1962, “I Wish That We Were _______.”

Finally we met.

“I'm Paul,” he said, extending a cool rough hand, callused from years of guitar. He had dark eyes and his smile was a little wry, as if we were both in on a private joke.

“I'm Claire,” I said, taking his hand.

“Are you also a musician?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I'm a private eye.”

“Wow,” he said. “That's so cool.”

“I know,” I said. “It is.”

We talked for a while. We'd both been traveling, had been traveling for years, and we traded war stories. Holiday Inns in Savannah, missed flights in Orlando, grazed by a bullet in Detroit—maybe being a musician and a PI weren't so different. Except at least some people liked musicians. Paul was smart. You could jump up a few levels in conversation right away, without warming up. He wore a brown suit with white chalk stripes, frayed at the collar and cuffs, and he held but didn't wear a dark brown, almost black hat that was close to a fedora but not exactly. In San Francisco men knew how to dress. No cargo shorts and white sneakers, no pastel polo shirts and misplaced socks hiding an otherwise good man.

Tabitha spent half the night in the bathroom doing some awful coke—it was cut with horse dewormer or cat tranquilizer or dog stimulant, depending on who you believed. It was going around town. I did a little and tasted the chemicals thick in my throat and passed on the rest.

Later Tabitha's friend went home with a different girl and I found out he wasn't really a friend. He was a guy she'd been sleeping with. The girl he went home with was younger than us and her eyes were bright and her hair was long and blond and unbleached and she smiled with white, unbroken teeth.

Tabitha was too drunk and had had too much of the horse-deworming cocaine and started to cry. I gave Paul my number for another day and took her home.

“I was so stupid,” she cried bitterly, stumbling down the street. “Someone that nice would never like me.”

I didn't know what to say because it was true. Tabitha was a lot of things, many of them good, but nice wasn't one of them. I took her home, helped her get upstairs, and left her on the sofa watching
Spellbound
, her favorite movie. “Liverwurst,” she muttered along with Ingrid Bergman.

When I got home Paul had already called. I called him back. It was two fifteen. We talked until the sun came up. He was one of those men who are shy in a crowd but not alone. He'd just come back from six months in Haiti, studying with
bokos
and their drummers. I didn't know much about music, not the technical parts, but we both understood what it was like to devote yourself to one thing above all else. Something you gave your life to, and never knew if you were right to do it or not. It wasn't something you could talk to many people about.