Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (3 page)

Of 161 murders in New Orleans in the past year, only one murderer had been successfully prosecuted and convicted. Talk about unlucky—160 of your pals go free and you go to Angola.

“No, I never ask, ‘Why me?'” Silette said in his last interview, after his daughter, Belle, had disappeared. “Because every day of my life before, I had asked, ‘Why not me?' Now it all makes perfect sense that I should be as miserable as everybody else.”

I got everything back in the file and put away in a dresser drawer. From my suitcase I took a little muslin pouch that had five I Ching coins inside. I threw the coins on the bed. Constance Darling, my teacher, taught me the five-coin method long ago.

Hexagram 25. I looked it up in the old, tattered paperback she'd given me, one of five books I'd packed for the trip: the five-coin
I Ching Manual
; Silette's
Détection
;
Poison Orchids of Siberia: A Visionary Interpretation
; a book on the witchcraft practices of Northern Mexico; and a paperback novel to read on the plane.

Hexagram 25: Snake on the mountain. The snake swallows his own tail and is never satiated. When the queen weeps, the rice weeps with her. A good man feeds rice to the snake, and at last he is full. A home without rice is a home without joy.

I picked up the phone and called Leon.

“I'd like to see where Vic lived,” I said. “Can we do that tomorrow?”

“Well, no,” Leon said. “I'm helping this guy I know gut his house in Mid-City. But we could do it the next day. Sure. Great.”

“Great,” I said.

“Great,” Leon said. “And hey. Listen. Could we make a time limit for phone calls? Maybe, you know, ten or eleven?”

I looked at the clock. It was 1:11
A.M
.

“Sorry,” I said. “But no. I don't think that will work.”

When I got off the phone with Leon I called Frank from Ninth Ward Construction. I dialed the number from the card I'd found in Napoleon House.

We can do it! I can help!

Maybe we can. Maybe he could.

The number was disconnected.

From my purse I dug out a magnifying glass and looked more closely at the photo of Vic I'd taped to the file. In plain sight his tie had little green dots on it. Under the magnifying glass I
saw it was an animal of some kind. I got a stronger magnifying glass.

The dots were little green parrots, hundreds of them.
Case #113
, I wrote across the top of the file.
The Case of the Green Parrot
.

“T
HERE ARE NO
innocent victims,” wrote Jacques Silette. “The victim selects his role as carefully and unconsciously as the policeman, the detective, the client, or the villain. Each chooses his role and then forgets this, sometimes for many lifetimes, until one comes along who can remind him. This time you may be the villain or the victim. The next time your roles may switch.

“It is only a role. Try to remember.”

Silette wrote one book,
Détection
, in 1959. Jacques Silette was a genius. So I thought. So a few thousand others around the world thought too. Most people thought he was a liar or an idiot or a fraud or had never heard of him at all. I could forgive the people who'd never heard of him. I wasn't sure about the rest.

Silette's own history was murky. He wasn't especially secretive, just bored by things he already knew. He spent nearly all of his life in Paris. He was born sometime between 1900 and 1910 and became a detective sometime between 1930 and 1940. What is known is that by 1945 he'd solved the famous robbery of the Banque Française and recovered the rarer-than-rare first edition of Vidocq's memoir that had been missing since 1929. We American dicks have it easy, with dozens of murders a day to choose from. The French have to settle for book heists and bank robberies.

I'd moved to New Orleans in 1994 to work for Constance Darling, the detective. She was a former student of Silette's; student, friend, collaborator, lover. I left New Orleans when she was murdered nearly three years later. Constance had spent the late fifties and early sixties in Paris with Silette and then, for reasons I didn't know, abruptly broke it off and moved back to New Orleans. When she left, Silette took up with another student, this one even younger than Constance. For a genius, he was pretty happy, or so it seemed. But his happiness wouldn't last. It never does.

“Happiness is the temporary result of denying the knowledge one already has,” Silette wrote. “Once one knows what one knows—once one knows the solution to his mysteries—happiness is besides the point. But in rare cases, something much better can bloom.”

But nothing better bloomed for Silette. On a trip to the United States in 1973, Silette returned to his hotel room in New York City after giving a lecture to find his young wife, Marie, only twenty-four years old, drugged unconscious. Their daughter, Belle, was gone. Only two years old, Belle was Silette's only child, and he adored her. A few years later Marie, who had never been entirely stable, died from what the doctors called “unknown causes”: grief.

No one ever saw Belle again. Silette never solved his own greatest mystery. He never found the smallest clue, not the hint of a solution. The great detective went on, but not for long. By 1980 he too was dead, his heart broken, chipped away from every direction—daughter gone, wife gone, work practically forgotten by the few who had ever remembered to begin with.

Constance told me all this late at night over coffee at her kitchen table in New Orleans, in her big house in the Garden District. Constance wasn't much for emotional displays, but she had tears in her eyes as she told me about losing the people she'd loved. Silette had enemies, she told me. Criminals he'd put away, rival detectives, philosophers and psychoanalysts who resented his theories.

“When a person disappears,” Silette wrote in
Détection
, “the
detective must look at what she took with her when she left—not only the material items, but what is gone without her; what she carries with her to the underworld; what words will go unspoken; what no longer exists if she is made to disappear.”

Twenty-odd years after he wrote
Détection
, in his last interview, Silette was asked his own question: What had disappeared when his daughter vanished?

“My happiness,” he answered. Silette never spoke publicly again.

O
N MY SECOND
day in New Orleans I still needed to get a car. I'd planned to do it the day before, but I'd missed my flight from San Francisco to New Orleans and had had to book a later one. I'd gotten to the airport with plenty of time, but I got pulled aside and searched by the TSA folks and asked some questions. Never take a case involving people who can put you on the no-fly list.

“The detective will never be thanked for revealing the truth,” Silette wrote. “He will be despised, doubted, abhorred, spat upon. There will be no parades, no flowers, no medals for him. His only reward will be the awful, unbearable truth itself. If that is not enough, he is in the wrong line of work, and must rethink his calling altogether.”

In a car rental place by the Convention Center I tried to rent a car. I ended up renting a truck. A big white pickup truck with four wheels across the back, in case I needed to veer off-road and up a mountain to run over some wild game, maybe, or dip into a valley to scout out a source of fire. I'm sure it happens all the time in Gretna.

“This our most popular model,” the woman at the counter recited in a monotone Louisiana accent. “Everybody want the truck.”

“But
I
don't want a truck,” I said to the woman. “I want a car.”

“We outta cars,” she said, not looking at me. “We only got the truck. You want it?”

At home in San Francisco I drove a two-door Mercedes coupe from 1978. It would fit on the back of the truck with room to spare.

“No,” I said. “But I'll take it.”

In my big fat truck I put on WWOZ and drove in a spiral through the city. The damage started about fifteen blocks away from the “sliver by the river,” as people now called the high ground by the Mississippi. That was the oldest part of the city, and the part most likely to be visited by tourists. The sliver was like New Orleans always was. An average tourist visiting the city wouldn't notice much difference. I saw a few collapsed porches, the occasional missing roof, a few abandoned cars turned into garbage dumps. Some of it was storm damage and some of it, no doubt, was just damage.

Past the high and dry sliver was an intermediate zone, the areas where the water only visited, leaving quickly and never coming too high. Services were obviously spotty: most street lights were dark and trash was piled high. Some houses were crumbling down toward death, some were on their way up toward rehab. Signs with letters missing told the story: lots of
OTELS
and
HOT BO LED CRA FISH
and
AWN SH PS
. In the intermediate zone I started to see the marks spray-painted on houses: circles with X's through them, numbers and letters in the hollows of the X. Some of the spray paintings were obvious—
1 dead, 2 cats, 3 live
—but some were mysterious, cryptic:
1×3. TC5
.

Maybe they'd borrowed the letters from the signs; maybe if someone put them back in, all could be repaired.

After a few more blocks I saw the first apartment complexes without walls, furnished rooms exposed, like a dollhouse. Here was a bedroom, there a kitchen, here someone's living room frozen in time. Mixed in were block after block of little wood shotguns, every fourth or fifth house collapsed in a pile of rubble, houses tilted this way or that, ready to give up and tumble down at any minute. Whole blocks of housing projects stood boarded up and empty, some because of the flood, some closed for years.

People were few and far between. I saw some cleaning their houses or walking toward the functioning strips of the city. I saw more sitting on porches, doing what people do when they're overwhelmed. Just trying to think of where to begin was enough to make you sit back down and not get up. But the main occupants of the intermediate zone were drug dealers and their customers. The boys coming in and out of abandoned shotguns and cottages openly carried weapons in their waistbands, barely concealed under oversize jeans and big sweatshirts and thin, billowy white T-shirts. There was no secret to what they were doing.

Their customers were relatively diverse, many of them white, many black, a few Latino, a good number in big pickups with four wheels across the rear like mine, almost all with Texas plates. I didn't know if that meant they were from Texas, here to capitalize on the rebuilding, or if they were locals who bought cars while they were evacuated in Houston, or if people registered their cars in Texas because of Louisiana's sky-high insurance rates. I figured you could get pretty much all the basics here; cocaine in various forms, heroin, maybe meth, possibly pot, although that could be a separate, indoor industry.

The dealers were not diverse. They were all young men between thirteen and twenty-five, all black, and all wearing white T-shirts or white undershirts and huge jeans that hung down to display fancy boxer shorts, sometimes two pairs. Some wore parkas or large hooded sweatshirts to protect from the cold. Most had gold caps on some or all of their teeth. Most had their hair done in twists or braids of one kind or another that ranged from four to six inches long, although a minority wore neat, longer dreadlocks. They were as similar as Wall Street brokers in gray flannel suits or white-coated doctors in a hospital or Marines in uniform—and like those other people in uniform, their sameness subdued something in them, made them forget a piece of themselves. Something that should have been in their eyes wasn't there.

I drove up toward the lake, through Broadmoor and Mid-City to Lakeview. The streets got quieter until the quiet was a roar, eerie and deafening. Here the buildings had a ring around them
where the water peaked and sat for a few days before receding. With each block the yellowish-brown water line was higher and higher. It went from the stairs to above the porch to the windows to above the windows, and then there was nothing for it leave a mark on except the trees.

The damage didn't end. It seemed like it should be over, and then on the next block it was worse: buildings missing walls, houses pushed by the force of the water into other houses, cars on top of cars, blocks of houses half collapsed, boats on sidewalks, parking lots of cars covered with the chalky white dust the dirty water left. It had been more than a year since the storm. But on some blocks it was as if nothing had happened since then; literally nothing, not even a breeze or a rainfall or a bird or even a breath.

I drove back down Carrolton. Near the highway I found a flooded, abandoned strip mall. I pulled into the parking lot, and it was hard to imagine that it was ever much less dreary than it was now, with its dollar store and discount beauty supply store and fast food chicken joint and payday loan office and check casher. At each corner of the parking lot was the concrete base of what used to be a streetlight, probably broken long before the storm.

Since I'd been in New Orleans I'd noticed that nearly every car I saw was like mine: a big, shiny new oversize pickup or four-by-four in white or silver, the offspring of drowned cars and FEMA checks and hysteria. But each car or truck had at least one scar: a crushed fender, smashed head- or taillight, a deeply dented side panel or hood or door. People still drove like they were in an emergency: weaving in and out of lanes, driving fast, stopping faster, still trying to outrun the storm. My unblemished truck stuck out like a sore thumb.

If there was anyone within half a mile, I hadn't seen them. I checked my seat belt and tightened it up a bit. Then I started up the truck and drove around the parking lot in figure eights and then in circles, building up a tiny bit of speed with each turn, staying under thirty miles an hour so I wouldn't set off the air-bags. I made one more loop and didn't turn and drove right
into the base of the streetlight in the corner of the parking lot. Instead of bracing myself I softened every part of my body, and when the truck hit the concrete it was like riding a wave as it broke. I heard a satisfying crush of steel and glass.