Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (2 page)

“So,” I said. “What do you think happened?”

“I don't know,” Leon said. “I mean, the storm—there were some people you just never saw again. It wasn't like a war, where someone comes and knocks on the door and tells you that your loved one is deceased or whatever. There was no organization or anything like that. People just disappeared.”

We looked at each other.

“How tall was he?” I asked.

“Tall?” Leon said. “Tall? About six feet?” That's what people say when they don't know how tall a man is. For a woman the answer is five-five. In any case, he was probably close to that, and the water was nowhere near that high in the Quarter. If he'd drowned, he would have had to try pretty hard to do it.

“Is it possible he went to help?” I asked. “Went out on one of the rescue boats?”

“Well, sure,” Leon said. “It's
possible
. I guess he could have drowned someplace else. I guess he could have gone
toward
the water, trying to help, but you know, I don't think so. Vic wasn't exactly that type. Not that he was a bad guy,” Leon qualified. “I mean, he was nice and everything. But swimming around helping people, getting dirty—I don't really see him doing that. He wore these buckskin shoes in the summer and if someone stepped on them, you know, he wasn't happy. So, no, I don't see that. Anyway. He could have been out somewhere, looking for food or whatever, just walking, and he could have been drowned that way. You hear about these walls of water—it's hard to know exactly what happened where. But it's unlikely. So, you know. That's pretty much all I can say.”

We looked at each other for a minute. I shivered. The air was forty degrees and gray, hovering next to snow. This being the South, it was unlikely it would ever quite get there.

“Tell me about your uncle,” I said.

“He was a lawyer,” Leon said. “You know that.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know that. What was he like as a person?”

“Huh,” Leon said, as if thinking about it for the first time.
“Well. You know. He seemed nice. We weren't really close. We used to all get together over the years for Thanksgiving and Christmas, birthdays, funerals, whatever. After my mom passed on, I was Vic's only family here in town, so I tried to check in with him every once in a while. Probably not as often as I should have. But he was busy. Work kept him real busy and he had this big social life—he went to balls and that kind of thing, all that rich-person stuff. He was in a lot of clubs, a lot of Mardi Gras stuff. Hmm. He'd lived in New Orleans all his life. I think you know all this.”

“Where's the rest of the family?” I asked.

“Well. My parents are gone. They're gone for a long time now. Vic was my mother's brother. My sisters, one is in New York and one is in L.A. They're great. On my father's side there's still a lot of people here in the city, but that's another family. They saw Vic at holidays and stuff like that, but they weren't close. And Vic, he never had kids. He dated, you know, but nothing ever developed. I don't think he wanted it to develop. I think he liked living alone.”

“So as far as
that
family goes, your mother's family, it was just the two of you?”

Leon nodded. “Here in the city, yes. Just us two. It was just my mother and Vic. They had some cousins, but they were older and they're all gone now.”

“Did you love your uncle?” I asked.

“Well,” Leon said, frowning. “He was my uncle.”

“'Cause you know,” I said. “This kind of investigation is going to be a lot of money and a lot of time and you might not like what you find out. So if you didn't love him, you might want to rethink this while you can. It's a big thing, and there's no going back.”

Leon paused for a minute before he answered. I finished my jambalaya. The waiter came and took my bowl and spoon and napkin just as slowly and carefully as he had given them to me.

“Vic left me everything,” Leon finally said. “He didn't have to do that. He had this property—little pieces of land all over the city. He'd inherited it all from his father. I knew there'd been
some money there but I didn't know there was that much. It probably would have gone to me no matter what. There was no one else. But Vic, he went to a lawyer and made a will. He made sure I got everything and knew where it was and all that.” He paused again and frowned. “I thought I would be okay. Until I started cleaning out the apartment.
His
apartment. And then I realized it wasn't right. It wasn't right to leave him like this. I guess I feel like I owe him. Like maybe I owe it to him to find out what happened. Personally—well, he's my uncle. It's not like I
didn't
love him. It's not that I
don't
like him or anything like that. I just. Well. You know.”

“I know,” I said.

“You know what it says in the Bible,” Leon said with resignation. “
Look out for thine uncle as you would thineself
. Or whatever.”

“I don't think that's in the Bible,” I said. “But it's a nice thought.”

Leon shrugged.

“Oh, and there's one more thing,” he said. “A kind of important thing. Even though I don't really think it's true.”

“What's that?” I asked.

“There's someone who says he saw him.”

“
Saw
him?” I asked.

“This crazy guy,” Leon said. “Jackson. I mean, I don't think that's his real name, but that's what people call him. And I don't think he's that crazy, either, but he's, you know, a street person. He hangs out in Jackson Square. Homeless guy. Used to be a musician, I think. I don't really know. Anyway, I saw him when I came back in town and we stopped to talk for a few minutes. And he said he had seen Vic. He knew that Vic was my uncle. Jackson said he saw Vic down near the Convention Center. On Thursday.”

“Thursday,” I said. “
After
the big flood?”

“So he says,” Leon said doubtfully. “He said they stopped and talked and Vic gave him a few dollars.”

“Thursday,” I said. “So that would mean he was still alive after the worst of the flood. No wall of water or anything like that.”

“Well, yes, that's what it would mean,” Leon said. He shrugged. “I don't know. Jackson's a nice guy but, you know. I'm not sure he has a firm grasp on the day of the week.”

We sat quietly for a minute.

“Can I ask you a question?” Leon said.

“Yes,” I said. “Ask.”

“How old are you?”

“Forty-two,” I said. I was thirty-five. But no one trusts a woman under forty. I'd started being forty when I was twenty-nine.

“Wow,” Leon said. “Sorry. Just, you know. You look really young. Wow. Do you do something, or—?”

“Water,” I said. “I drink a lot of water. Eat a lot of fresh fruit. And I do a lot of yoga.” I'd never done yoga. I rarely drank water. “It really helps with the collagen.”

“And I heard you were in the hospital, maybe,” Leon said hesitantly. “That there was some issue regarding—”

“Oh, no,” I said. “
That
. No. Not a hospital. It's crazy how rumors spread. That was like a retreat I did. Like an ashram?” I'd never been to an ashram. I'd had something like a nervous breakdown and had ended up in the hospital. “Now can I ask you something?”

“Okay,” Leon said agreeably. “Sure.”

“Why me?” I asked. “'Cause you know I'm one of the most expensive detectives in the world. And with travel expenses and everything. And the rumors.”

Leon frowned and sighed. “Well, I asked around, and people said you were the best.”

“That's true,” I said. “I am.”

“So what do we do now?” Leon asked. “I don't really know how this is supposed to work. Do you need to talk to his friends or anything like that?”

“No,” I said. “Not yet.”

“Do you want to talk to the police?” Leon asked. “I mean, they did try, so—”

“No,” I said.

“Do you want a list of suspects? 'Cause you know, as a lawyer, he made a lot of enemies, so I figured—”

“No thanks,” I said. “No. I'm not that kind of detective.”

“So. What are you going to do?”

“I'm going to wait,” I said. “I'm going to wait, and see what happens.”

Leon frowned.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh.”

When the waiter brought the bill he dropped it on the floor next to the table, and when he picked it up a rumpled, dirty little piece of paper was stuck to the fake leather wallet. It was a business card. I picked it up. On the card was a poorly drawn picture of a bird flying over rooftops.

NINTH WARD CONSTRUCTION
, it said.
WE CAN DO IT
!

Underneath was an address in the Lower Ninth Ward and a phone number. It wasn't constructing anything now.

I turned it over. A name was written in ballpoint pen on the back. Underneath was a message:
Frank. Call me I can help!

I put the card carefully in my wallet and put it in my purse.

The first clue.

I
N MY ROOM
that night I looked over the file I'd started on Vic Willing. On the inside front cover of the file I'd taped a picture of Vic I'd printed out from the Bar Association website. Vic was fifty-six, male, white, formerly blond, now silver-haired, five-ten—which was taller in New Orleans than in, say, San Francisco or New York—fit enough, good-looking enough, blue-eyed, and wearing an expensive tie. I suspected that he always wore expensive ties.

Also in his file I had his last three credit card statements, banking records for six months, e-mails from his easy-to-hack e-mail account, and medical records. Vic had high blood pressure and high cholesterol, common enough, especially here. Elevated PSA levels could have meant something, but his prostate health hardly mattered now.

As for his shopping, well, his ties
were
expensive, a hundred bucks a pop. So were his hats, his suits, his shoes—even his underwear was silk. He went to expensive restaurants and hotel bars a few nights a week, probably to meet with other lawyers. His e-mails were just as predictable, concerning work, meetings, and occasional social events with friends. He wasn't married and never had been. The society columns occasionally showed him at fundraisers, where he went with friends or friends' wives or other lawyers. I figured he was gay.

A few days ago I'd sent out e-mails to detectives I knew and
lawyers I knew and people I knew from New Orleans. It turned out plenty of people I knew knew Vic Willing, had met him or spoken to him or knew someone who had. Their answers were in the file.

A prince, most people said. A really good guy.
Really
good. Generous. Always had time for you, at least a little, considering how valuable his time was. There was the time he bailed his adversary, the defense lawyer Hal Sherman, out of OPP, the notorious Orleans Parish Prison. There was the pro bono consulting work he did on the Shimmel case, on his own time, and there was the job he'd gotten for Harry Terrebone when he got out of rehab and no one else would touch him. He even volunteered, when time allowed, mentoring the young men of New Orleans and encouraging them to abandon their murderous ways. Stay in school, kids. Don't use drugs. Murder is bad. Et cetera.

He was my go-to guy at the DA's office
, one retired NOPD cop wrote in an e-mail.
The only one you could deal with. You know what
they're
like. But Vic was different. You could really talk to him
. The cops and the DAs in New Orleans had a long-running feud. It was like the Hatfields and the McCoys. Except when the bullets went flying, it was everyone else who got shot.

Rumors of bribes and corruption hounded the DA's office. Those kinds of accusations were commonplace in any law enforcement bureau—after all, even the most honest agents of the law made mistakes, and people who really did commit crimes didn't like to admit it. And all departments had their bad apples. But in New Orleans most of the apples were bad and most of the accusations were true. Bribery and corruption were everyday business here.

But none of the accusations tainted Vic Willing.
An honest lawyer
, another detective I knew wrote.
If there is such a thing
.

If I were a cop I'd look at Leon for offing Vic. But I was no cop. Leon could probably kill someone if circumstances called for it—most people could. But I didn't see Leon having the organizational talents he would have needed to pull this off.

Vic's banking records were long but dull. A lot of deposits and a lot of withdrawals. He made a semi-decent income
at the district attorney's office, but his fancy ties were financed by inheritances. His father, Tolliver Willing, had invested well in real estate and left all of his holdings to his only son, Vic. Leon's mother, Vivian—Vic's sister—had married a musician and was largely cut out of the family fortunes for her bad judgment. Wisely, Vic hadn't sold any of the properties he'd inherited, and was still collecting rent on five residential buildings in the Garden District and the French Quarter when he died. Now they were all Leon's. They were all high and dry and their value had doubled in the past few years. Real estate values had been rising quickly before the storm, and even faster since, now that there was so little real estate left.

I looked at Vic's cases, or what I'd been able to find in the past few days. I'd make a more detailed review later if I needed to. Vic was a prosecutor. Like most New Orleans prosecutors, he won plenty of small cases and lost almost all the big ones. It was nearly impossible to get witnesses to testify in cases of big drug deals or murder because the witnesses knew that, conviction or no, they'd be killed for testifying. No major drug dealer acted alone. Even if the accused was sentenced and locked up—unlikely—one of his compatriots would settle the score. Further, the police department was renowned around the world for its incompetence and its inability to work with other agencies, as was the DA's office. Between the two of them big cases just didn't work. New Orleans' labyrinthine legal system, based on the Napoleonic Code, didn't help matters. Put it all together and New Orleans had both the highest murder rate and one of the lowest conviction rates in the country.