“I got something you can find,” Lenny quipped. “It’s in my pocket.”
Everyone laughed again.
Chloe gave us a look that would have made anyone squirm.
Anyone except Tracy.
“Reena said,” she began. “Reena asked us to find you.”
Chloe made a face like she’d tasted something bad.
“That bitch,” she said. “I just, you know.” For a split second she looked like she might cry, but it passed as quickly as it came. “Fuck her. Asshole. Working all the time. Fucking priss. Fucking little Miss Perfect.”
“She was worried,” Tracy said, regaining her voice. “Worried about you.”
“Yeah, well, as you can see,” Chloe said bitterly, “I don’t need any rescuing. So, you know, unless you want to get a drink and hang out . . .”
Everyone laughed again.
“Are you really detectives?” one of the other men said. “You really solve mysteries?”
I tried to say
Yes, yes, we do.
But I opened my mouth and nothing came out.
“Nice seeing you,” Chloe said, sobering up, her voice like an icicle. She waved a hand at us. “Bye-bye, girls.”
Blood ran down her arm from an earlier cut. A smear of blood was on her hip.
“You can come with us,” I said with all the effort I could find. “If you want. We can take you home, right now.”
My voice sounded small and tinny, even to me. Everyone laughed again.
“Go screw yourself,” Chloe said. She looked away, at the wall. “Just go fuck yourselves.”
Tracy opened her mouth and closed it again.
No one looked at us, and everyone went back to their private conversations, their drugs, their personal dramas. Chloe closed her eyes and put a hand over them, as if she was scared of seeing us again when she opened them.
Tracy and I looked at each other. Neither of us had anything to say.
“Just go to hell,” Chloe murmured.
“They’re already here,” CC said.
San Francisco
B
IX WOKE ME UP
at two the next day. I looked at the comic book. The Cynthia Silverton story in here was entirely different—it was the one where Cynthia’s crazy aunt Eleanor comes to visit and her girl-servant gets murdered. Bix had a pot of green tea on a little tray. That was a thoughtful way for a man to kick you out in the morning. We sat in the living room and drank tea. The girl was gone.
“I have shit to do,” he said. “Sorry.”
“Thanks for the tea.”
“You’re welcome. Got any plans for the day?”
“Not really,” I said. “I gotta be back in Oakland tonight for a show.”
“Who you seeing?” Bix asked.
“This guy who I think might have murdered someone,” I said. “This guy I knew. I used to go out with him. That’s who he murdered.”
“Oh,” Bix said, wrinkling his brow. “Sorry.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”
I sipped my tea and waited for the pity to sink in. It did.
“If you want,” Bix said. “You could read some more comics. I mean, I don’t know about all day, but a few hours.”
“Really?” I asked. “Are you sure?”
“Sure,” Bix said, relenting. “Why not?”
When all this was over I’d give Bix Manipulation Resistance 101. For now, I stuck around and read the comics.
I read for a few hours. Reading the Cynthia Silverton digests was like falling into a black hole of memories.
At six I took Bix out to an early dinner at his favorite restaurant, a vegan soul food place in downtown Oakland. We talked about the girl he was dating.
“If you like her that much,” I said, “just do what it takes to keep her, okay?”
“Well, it’s not that easy,” he said.
“It is,” I said. “It really is.”
Bix frowned. I excused myself and went to the bathroom and did a long line of coke off the top of the toilet.
Would it really have been that easy? Was anything ever that easy? It seemed so now. Now that everyone I loved was gone, it seemed like it would have been so easy to keep them.
Someone banged on the door. I ignored them.
“Claire? Uh, Claire? Are you okay?”
Because he wasn’t ready. Because better things were waiting for him. Because I thought if I set him free, he would fly off to some better nest, where someone better than me would love him, where someone better than me would stay with him.
Someone banged on the door again and I didn’t answer and then it was the police and they were breaking the door down. I paid my bill and was escorted out with a stern warning and a brief lecture. Bix was gone.
Because we’d all been handed heaven on a silver platter, and instead we’d kicked it away and asked for hell.
I parked my car in front of a dirty little club on the border of Oakland’s downtown and Chinatown. I dug the little bag out of my purse and used a credit card (Discover; name of Juanita Velasquez; enrolled in Delta Skymiles and Comfort Rewards; no criminal rec-ord) to scoop out a little more coke. It smelled awful, like nail polish remover. I wondered how anything could taste that bad. Cow tranquilizer. Canine antibiotics. Baby monkey cough suppressant.
Scorpio Rising weren’t very good. The opening act was atrocious, which made Scorpio Rising much better than they might have been. That still didn’t say much. A kind of rehashed punk deal. Maybe it was supposed to be ironic in some way I didn’t get. It was likely there was a lot I didn’t get, both in general and especially that night.
But despite not being good, they were good. The crowd loved them. People were having fun. They were beautiful young men, and as the night went on they took off their jackets and then their shirts. The singer sprayed beer out from his mouth to the crowd. The drummer threw his sticks at the audience. Everyone was so young, it seemed amazing they were allowed out of the house by themselves. But when I was their age I’d already been on my own for years.
The first guitar player and singer were better looking than the others, and well aware of it. I didn’t see Lydia going for that type. Too slutty, too unsubtle. The drummer pounded away, angry and methodical. He didn’t smile. No. The bass player never stopped smiling—he was a little younger than the others, and stuck out his tongue at the audience a few times. He couldn’t stop laughing. Also no.
That left the other guitar player. He was likely just under thirty. He played a black imitation Les Paul. He had that thing girls liked in guitar players—concentration, absorption, dedication. I didn’t know if women liked it because it implied the man could pay that same attention to her, or because it meant the man was capable of ignoring her so completely that she could believe the worst about herself.
The guitar player was good-looking enough, and sexy, but no heartthrob. He looked dirty. He had dark hair that he’d slicked back but kept falling in his face. He wore a wifebeater shirt that showed off homemade tattoos: streets or jail. Or maybe kids paid five hundred bucks an hour for tattoos like that now. But from the way he held himself I guessed streets. I noticed he kept his back to the wall, and his shoulders and brow stayed tense.
Toward the end of the set the singer introduced the band. They’d all adopted the last name Scorpio. Cute.
“ . . . And on rhythm guitar—”
The drummer tapped out a drumroll.
“—Rob Scorpio.”
Getting backstage was not a big production. You just walked over and went backstage. I was the oldest person in the club by a hundred years. The band was drinking beer, hyper and high from the stage, comparing notes on the show, laughing excitedly.
Everyone except for Rob Scorpio.
I saw a door against the back wall.
DO NOT OPEN. ALARM WILL SOUND
.
I walked past the band, unnoticed, and pushed the door. Silence. Outside was Rob Scorpio, smoking a cigarette. He wasn’t smiling.
“Do you have another one?” I asked. “I left mine in the car because you can’t smoke anywhere here. But here we are and I think you can smoke.”
He nodded and held out his pack. Natural Native No-Additives Only-Gives-You-Good-Cancer Lites. I took one and he lit me up.
“Thanks.” I leaned against the wall a few feet away. “Hey, are you Rob?”
He raised a slow, sad eyebrow at me. His desire to be someone he was not was painfully clear. That and something more—something so heavy on him, he couldn’t lift his eyes to meet mine.
The guitar player in the drawing room with the gun.
My heart raced and adrenaline cleared my head, sobering me up.
“I think you know my friend,” I said. “Lydia. Lydia Nunez?”
He looked a little to the left of my eyes.
“No,” he said.
“I think you do,” I said. “I think—”
“I don’t,” he said. He looked at me and threw his bottle on the street, vaguely in my direction. It didn’t break but instead landed with an unsatisfying
thunk.
Then he turned and went back inside.
I picked up the bottle. The singer came out to start loading gear into their van. He looked at me.
“There’s a sip left!” I said. I took my beer bottle and went back to my car.
In my car I drank the last sip of beer and put the bottle in my purse and did a little coke, feeling sleep crushing in, and checked my phone and waited.
When Rob and the drummer came out an hour or two later I would follow them back to wherever Rob Scorpio lived. My plan failed. I started up too close behind them and they saw me. The singer, who was driving, slammed on the breaks and two Scorpios came out of the van, one holding a bat. I threw the car into reverse and sped away. Apparently bats were the weapon of choice in Oakland.
Back at home I carefully took Rob Scorpio’s beer bottle out of my bag and set it up on my desk. Then I took out the Cynthia Silverton comic I’d borrowed from Bix. I fully planned on returning it. Someday. From a drawer I got out a fingerprinting kit.
I went to my file cabinet and took out Lydia’s fingerprints. I didn’t take fingerprints of everyone I met, but if it seemed like I would know them a while I asked for a set. Some people didn’t like it, but then you had to wonder what they were hiding.
Lydia’s heart center was scarred, a little line right in the middle of her thumb. Her Whorl of Love was overdeveloped, unsurprisingly. But her Arc of Compassion was strong. That did surprise me.
Carefully, slowly. I used a sheet of sticky paper to lift Rob Scorpio’s fingerprints off the beer bottle. I printed them onto a card and labeled them with his name and the date.
Poor kid. Everywhere you looked, broken lines, scarred swirls. No fully-shaped Destiny Whorl. Nothing of his own. But if he wanted to he could turn it around. Prominent Wheel of Forte.
I had the prints I’d collected from the house. Most were useless but a few were solid enough for comparison.
I looked at the piles of prints. Matching them up was supposed to be meditative. Part of the process. It seemed like a big fucking drag.
I emailed the prints with instructions to Claude. Then I called Andray.
“Hey,” I said. “I was just wondering if you’re okay. And, you know, Mick. Just wondering if you’d seen him or whatever. I don’t know if he’s in therapy or anything like that. I don’t know. I think I mentioned this before, but my caseload here is nuts. It’s, like, really crazy. If you ever wanted a job or anything.”
I rubbed my nose and a smear of blood came away.
I got off the phone and then somehow I was at the Shanghai Low. I went into the office with the bartender, Sam.
“Is this that stuff cut with the cow tranquilizer?”
He took a long, shivering snort. He wasn’t shy. When the bar closed we went to a closed Chinese restaurant across the street, which the restaurant workers made into an informal after-hours bar at night. A cook Sam knew from Imperial Palace bought us a round and then we bought him one. Paul took me here once. He’d lived in San Francisco longer than me and knew secret spots, privileged corners.
The sun came up but no one saw it through the fog until the morning guys came in to get the restaurant ready for the day and kicked the night shift out. In front of the restaurant Sam tried to kiss me.
“Are you kidding?” I said. The inside of my mouth tasted like dirty cardboard and my teeth felt like sandpaper.
When I got home it was noon. Claude was in my place. I was grinding my teeth and my eyes were wide but I was ready for bed.
“Hey,” he said, used to a range of states of disarray in his employer. “I checked all those prints.”
“And?” I asked.
“And this guy,” Claude said. “He was in the house.”
“Where?” My teeth were trying to wear each other down, grinding each other into oblivion.
Claude looked at me. “The refrigerator,” he said.
“Fuck,” I said again. The refrigerator was an intimate place in a house. A casual visitor rarely touched it. I realized I hadn’t blinked in about nine hours. I blinked, feeling my lids drag against dry corneas, and took off my jacket and my shoes.
“He was there,” I told Claude. “We need to find him.”
“He could have been there anytime,” Claude said as I walked into the bedroom. I took off my jeans and sat in bed, pulling the blankets around me.
“He was there,” I said.
“How do you know?” Claude asked.
“Because we trust one thing,” I said, wondering if a small black cat was running around the apartment or if I was seeing things. “And only one thing, ever, and never forget this okay? There’s only one thing that you can trust. You know what it is, right? Tell me you know what it is. Tell me you get it. Because if not, I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
“The clues,” Claude said. “We trust the clues.”
“Yes,” I said. Worlds were born and spun and crashed before my eyes. “Yes. Yes.”
“And you,” Claude said. “I trust you.”
“No,” I said. “Don’t. Never trust me, or anyone else. We’re all assholes. Especially me. Only the clues.”
And again I remembered:
Remember. The Case of the End of the World.
Brooklyn
I
SLEPT UNTIL NOON
the next day. My parents were out. I made coffee and smoked a cigarette and called Tracy.
“We forgot about school,” I said.