“I don’t know,” I said. “Might as well go to school.”
And that was the Case of the End of the World.
San Francisco
T
HE NEXT DAY
I woke up late into the dark evening, with the sad, confused feeling sleeping through the day always brings. Claude was gone. I made some tea and then some more tea and then said fuck it and made some coffee.
The Case of the End of the World. Neither Chloe nor Tracy ever told me what Tracy dreamed, or what she told Chloe.
I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask one more time.
It’s easy to find someone who’s making no particular effort to hide. Chloe Roman had a Facebook page, from which I found out she wrote poetry and she lived in Los Angeles. From there it was just an hour or so, most of it spent on hold, to find out that she had no landline but had a cell phone, billing address in Los Angeles county.
I recognized her voice right away.
“It’s Claire,” I said. “Claire DeWitt. From Brooklyn.”
“Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God. Claire. Hi. Wow. How are you?”
“I’m good,” I lied. “How are you?”
We talked for a few minutes. I told her I was a private eye living in San Francisco. She knew that already; she’d searched me out online a few times. She told me she was a writer now. She wrote movies and TV shows for money and poetry for fun and was working on a memoir about growing up in New York City with her famous, negligent parents.
“I’ve been looking,” she said. “I’ve been looking online. I read all about you and I found a little about Kelly. But I couldn’t find anything about Tracy. Is it true they never found anything?
Nothing?
”
“That’s actually why I’m calling,” I said. “I don’t know if you remember. That night, that night when Tracy came and got you. I was wondering—she had a dream. Did she tell you about it? About the dream?”
“Dream?” Chloe said. “You mean your dream?”
I felt my head spin.
“My dream?” I said. “No, what happened was—” I stopped myself. “Chloe. What did happen that night?”
“Well,” Chloe said, “you guys had come the night before and, you know—Jesus, I’m so sorry. I wasn’t very nice.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I haven’t always been so nice myself.”
“And then the next night, you guys came back. You and Tracy.”
“And what did we do?” I asked.
“Well, you came over to me,” Chloe said. “I’ll never forget. You came over—”
“You mean, ‘you’
me?
Or ‘you’ both of us?”
“
You
you,” Chloe said. “Singular. You, Claire. Tracy waited by the door. You, Claire, came over and sat on that couch next to me. And you put your hand on my knee, and your hand was so warm. And I was, like, trying to get away—you know, I couldn’t stand the thought that anyone cared about me that much—it just made me sick. Sick, like I could die. You know.”
I felt the room spin around me and I lay down on the floor. I put my cheek against the cold floor and tried to ground myself to earth, but I felt like I was floating away. I did know. Sick like I could die.
“I tried to get away but you wouldn’t let me,” Chloe went on. “And you started to tell me about this dream you’d had.”
“What did I say?” I asked Chloe.
“Well,” she said, “you told me you had this dream. And I was all, you know, why would I give a shit? But you wouldn’t stop, you started telling me about this dream. This dream about a peacock. Well, you said ‘peacock,’ but I think you really meant peahen, because it was a girl. But anyway, that this peacock wanted to find God. Because God was so pissed off at people and he’d turned the lights off. So it was like the dark ages, you know? Like how some people call this the Kali Yuga? Like that. Everyone was fighting and killing each other and it was just generally like hell. Like shit. You know, like things are.
“So this peacock, she decides she’s going to get the lights turned back on. And, you know, she was this vain, stupid bird, or so everyone thought. I mean, she was a peacock. Everyone was, like, laughing at her and throwing things at her. You know, she was the patron saint of whores. She was a girl. But no one else could fly that high. No one else even tried.”
I rummaged through my purse and found a Percocet. I put it in my mouth and chewed it and swallowed. I remembered whispering in Chloe’s ear, my voice still so young, but I knew what I was saying was true. I was entirely certain that I was alive, and that I belonged on this earth: “People thought she was just a stupid girl. Just this stupid, slutty girl no one cared about and nobody loved.”
I heard Chloe make a sound and I wondered if she was crying. My hands were shaking and I took out another pill, but then put it back.
“But she did it,” Chloe said. “The peacock. She flew and she flew and she found him. She met God. And she told God how much she loved us, how we really weren’t so bad after all, about how, you know, we’d fucked up everything so bad, but we could do better. It might take a few lifetimes, it wouldn’t happen right then, but we could get better. She saw the best in us, even though we’d ruined everything. Even though we’d screwed up and ruined it all. And he was so impressed, he changed his mind. He turned the light back on. He didn’t think she was just some stupid girl. He thought she saved the whole world.”
One arm around Chloe, pulling her close, warmth growing where we touched, Chloe shivering, smelling salted, metallic blood from her cuts. I was wiping tears off my face.
“But when she came back down,” Chloe told me, telling me the story I had told her,“she wasn’t a peacock anymore. The sun had burned her feathers black, and blistered her crown red, and now she was a vulture, the wisest animal on earth, the animal who knows all the secrets.”
Whispering to Chloe, her squirming to get away.
“It’s okay,” I whispered in her ear, “you didn’t know. Soon we get to be vultures again. We don’t have to pretend we don’t know everything anymore. We just have to grow up a little first, that’s all.”
“Claire? Claire, are you there?”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m here. I just—I remembered it differently. That’s all.”
“Yeah,” Chloe said. “It was such a strange thing to say, but somehow it made sense. I mean, it made everything make sense. All of it. Like a poem.”
We didn’t say anything for a minute. My hands were shaking.
“Claire?” Chloe said again. “Are you there?”
“I’m here,” I said. I was too here. More here than I ever wanted to be. Chloe told me about her kids, her husband, her writing. Her life sounded pretty good.
“It’s all because of you guys,” she said. “All the good things that happened—they were all because of you and Tracy. Because you came and got me. Because you didn’t give up.”
“No,” I said. “They were because of you. Because
you
didn’t give up.”
“No,” she said. She started to cry. “I have two beautiful children, they’re like these little fucking miracles, they’re so normal and not crazy. Because of you. Because of what you said.”
I remembered now: waking up in the night, calling Tracy, still sick from the pills.
We have to get her out of there. I had this dream.
“And Tracy,” she said. “I never talked to her again. Not after the last time.”
“Well none of us—” I began and then I stopped myself. The Percocet kicked in. I felt as close to nothing as possible. But something stuck in my throat.
“The last time?” I asked Chloe. “When was the last time you talked to Tracy?”
“After I’d been in L.A. for a while,” she said. “She found me. She found my aunt’s number and called me.”
A chill crept up the back of my neck.
“When?”
“Maybe a year after I moved out here,” she said. “Maybe a little more.”
Tracy had disappeared on January 11, 1987. Chloe had gotten on the bus to Los Angeles January 14, 1986.
“So it’s true no one ever found out anything about Tracy?” Chloe asked. “Not even you?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s true. But I’m starting to have an idea.”
Chloe asked for details, but I didn’t want to tell her. It was just an idea.
But it was a pretty fucking good one.
We got off the phone with promises to get together and keep in touch. Maybe we would.
But for now, we hung up and I lay on the floor for a while.
Maybe out of everything I thought I knew, there was nothing I was more wrong about than my own life story.
When I got off the phone there was a message from Claude. I felt a little dizzy and weak. I drank a glass of orange juice and took a shower and did a line of coke before I called him back.
“Hey,” I said. “Hi. I mean, it’s me. What’s up?”
Claude paused. I felt a drop of blood trickle from my nose, and I wiped it away with my hand.
“Are you okay?” Claude asked.
“Of course,” I said. “I’m fine. What’s up?”
“I think I found the guitar,” he said. “I went through all of Paul’s money stuff and I found it. The missing guitar. It’s a Wandre. The one that was stolen. He bought it two years ago, and I’m pretty sure it was never sold or traded. It’s just gone. Does that help?”
“Yes,” I said, and told Claude I would call him back. In my mind I pushed aside Chloe and Tracy and Claude. Instead I did another bump of coke and opened my computer and read about Wandres. They were not common. Paul’s would get a nice piece of money if the thief sold it to the right person, but that right person would be hard to find. Almost no one knew what Wandres were. And people who did know were passionate about them, making the one stolen from Paul hard to sell. An ordinary thief would have passed it up. Only one kind of person would have taken it—someone who wanted to keep it and play it.
Wandres had been built in Italy by Antony Pioli in the 1950s and ’60s. They were strange guitars—odd shapes, off colors, metal necks, electronic bits Pioli developed himself. I couldn’t pin down the exact story behind Pioli and his Wandres. One person said Pioli designed motorcycles and that was where he got his ideas. Another said he’d worked in an airplane factory, another that his father had been a luthier. None of that felt true. After a few hours online I found another story: In 1955, Antony Pioli was indeed the son of a luthier, a man who made boring, insipid guitars. Antony thought he’d rather do anything than work in his father’s shop, which smelled to him like defeat and despair. Then one night Antony, well into his thirties but still living like a boy, came down with a terrible fever. The doctor came. Antony’s fever was so high, the doctor packed him in ice and prayed. Antony screamed and shook and finally, close to dawn, his fever broke. And in a few days, when he was able to walk, he got up and made his first Wandre guitar, an amoeba-shaped heresy in brilliant reds and greens, saying the design had come to him in a dream the night he nearly died. No one thought it would play. No one believed it would work. They were wrong. He went on to build some of the best guitars the world had ever seen. Then, in 1970, just as suddenly as he’d begun, he stopped making guitars and never touched his workshop again. People said he’d fallen in love with the wrong woman. That his heart, once broken, turned bitter, and could never find the inspiration to build anything again. No one seemed to know what became of him after that.
I thought that story was true.
I asked Claude to send me the details of Paul’s guitar and he did. The model was a Doris, supposedly named for the woman he loved.
I called Claude back.
“This is it,” I said. “This is the clue.”
“
A
clue,” he asked, “or
the
clue?”
“
The
clue,” I said. “The only clue. Whoever killed Paul wanted that guitar. I can’t imagine it’s why they killed him. But they couldn’t resist it.”
“So you think it was one of her boyfriends?” he asked. “Or one of his girlfriends?”
“I think,” I said, “it was someone who loved somebody else very much.”
T
HAT NIGHT I DID
fat lines of cocaine off my kitchen counter and called Kelly.
“Hey,” she mumbled.
“Hey,” I said. “Remember Chloe Roman?”
“The Case of the End of the World,” Kelly said.
I told her what Chloe had said—that she heard from Tracy after the case, possibly after either Kelly or I had last seen her.
“Shit,” Kelly said. “Is she sure?”
“No,” I said. “She’s not.”
Kelly didn’t say anything.
“So what’s up with the comics?” I asked. “Why are they so rare?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But it’s weird. It looks like they hardly made any, and out of what they did make, only a few lasted.”
Kelly didn’t say anything for a while. But I knew she wasn’t done.
“I know at the time,” she finally said, “at the time we didn’t know what normal things were, so they seemed normal to us. But now, when you think about it, don’t they seem strange to you? Doesn’t it seem like they were written just for us? Like they weren’t normal comics at all?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I did think that.”
“And didn’t you ever think,” she said, with a little accusation in her voice, a little anger, “about how weird it all was? About finding
Détection
in your parents’ house, and the bookmobile, and the comics? About how it seemed like all these things came together, all these things conspired, to make us who we are? I mean, that’s a pretty big fucking coincidence.”
“Of course I’ve thought about it,” I said. But I hadn’t, not really. Fate hands us our cards and we play them.
“I mean,” she said, “who the fuck are we? Did you ever think about that? Who the fuck are we?”
Kelly was done, and she hung up. I felt a shiver in my bones and I knew she wasn’t wrong.
Who the fuck were we?
W
E DIDN’T KNOW WHICH
night Rob Scorpio rehearsed, or what time. Claude called the rehearsal studio and they told him Scorpio Rising had a standing date for Thursdays at eight thirty. But when we showed up at eight thirty on Thursday, the Rabid Elves were rehearsing. They said they’d switched with the Scorpio clan, giving them their Friday ten p.m. slot. The Rabid Elves were pretty good and I suggested they change their name, but the singer, a tall, heavily tattooed Latina woman named Marie, told me to go fuck myself. Agreed. Friday at ten we showed up to find Lucky Strike rehearsing, a surf band with white Strats and a Farfisa organ. They didn’t know anything about Scorpio Rising. They’d switched times with “these guys who played rainsticks.”