Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (6 page)

There was a mystery here.

I put the fingerprinting kit down and carefully, gingerly testing each floor board before we put our weight on it, we crept around the room. The pigeons watched and cooed as we peeked under sheets draped over old furniture, carefully opened doors to closets full of chipped china and disintegrating linens. As far
as I could tell it was like the rest of my parents' house, full of old things and dust.

But it was Tracy who knew better. It was Tracy who had the courage to creep around the edges, avoiding the rotted middle of the floor. It was Tracy who found the old dumbwaiter at the far side of the room. Tracy who somehow opened the rusted latch, Tracy who pulled up the old rope, unused for decades. And Tracy who found the mystery.

A copy of Silette's
Détection
, sitting on the tray of the dumbwaiter, waiting for us.

Three years later Tracy disappeared. Kelly and I were the last people we knew of to see her, alive or dead. No one saw Tracy or heard from her again.

Wherever she went, whatever happened to her, she took our copy of
Détection
with her.

B
ACK IN MY HOTEL
I put on all the lights in the bathroom, the brightest spot in the place. Then I lay a cleanish pillowcase over a piece of wood I'd found on the street and put the wood over the sink, making a table. On the left side of the table I put a clean sample of Vic's fingerprints, nearly complete, from his house. Next to it, on the right, I put a random print I'd taken from the house. I looked at them both under my magnifying glass. It was a match. I changed the second print and looked again. Another match. Again—a match. Again—this time
not
a match. But I was pretty sure it was Vic's left hand—it was the same size and had the same low Whirl of Esteem. I made a note on it and put it aside. Another print—a match. Another—a match.

After fifteen prints I came across one that wasn't a match to either hand. It was big and probably male.
UNKNOWN MAN
, I labeled it.

I went through the rest of the prints. I found a few more, but most were smeared and degraded. Those people had, likely, visited Vic's house, but not for long and not lately. They'd touched the front door and that was about it. Unknown Man had been in the refrigerator. He'd been in all the kitchen cabinets. He'd been in the bathroom and the bedrooms. Unknown Man had
put his hand on the bookshelf. His index finger touched the spine of
Nana
.

Unknown Man had fed the birds.

There was a knock on my door. It was the clerk from the front desk.

When I'd checked in to my hotel on Frenchman Street I'd opened the door and stepped inside and tripped over the bed. From the bed I found a light switch and flicked it on. I was also in reaching distance of the TV, the closet door, the bathroom door, and the dresser.

I'd gone to see the clerk at the desk again. He was a young man, white, in his twenties, and looked like a college student or dropout. He wore a rag wool sweater and shorts and socks and sandals. I guessed, from the looks of him, that
Dude, he liked to party
.

“Hey,” I said. “Hi. My room's a little small.”

The clerk looked at me blankly.

“Your room?”

“Yeah. Yeah. My room. I checked in yesterday. Room—” I looked at my key. “108.”

The clerk shook his head slowly. He looked at me like he was worried about what might happen if he made me angry. “Uh, I don't know,
ma'am
. I think that room is taken.”

“Yeah,” I explained. “It is taken. It's taken by me. I was wondering if maybe you have a bigger room available?”

He looked at me long and hard and finally a spark of recognition lit in his eyes and spread through his face.

“Riiight,” he said, with a little smile. “I remember you. Room 108, right?”

“Right,” I said. I gave up on the room and moved on to my next query. “Do you like to party?”

I opened the door and let him in. He looked around. “Dude. This room is small.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Someone should do something about that. You got it?”

He handed me a large white envelope with the hotel's logo printed on the corner. I shut the door. I'd paid him up front. I sat on the bed and opened the envelope and smelled the weed. It was shake, probably Mexican, but not half bad. Although if there's any weed that's more than half bad, I haven't met it yet. I put it aside for later and went back to the fingerprints. The next step was scanning them to see who they belonged to.

There was a phone book in my room. It was from 2005.

I asked the clerk at the desk for a phone book. He gave me the same one.

I looked at him.

“That's it,” he said. “They haven't made a new one.”

We looked at each other.

“It might be kind of out of date,” he said.

In the phone book I found a list of copy places. I stuck the mystery prints in my purse and drove over to the closest spot, on Elysian Fields. I'd scan the prints into the computer, fake some credentials for myself, unlock some passwords, and compare the prints to the databases.

At the copy joint there was a note on the door.

Back in fifeteen minutes

I waited fifeteen minutes. I waited twenty-five. No one came back. I checked the phone book and went to the next place, up in the Central Business District. The young man behind the counter didn't know what a scanner was, although if I wanted to come back when the manager was available, which might be later or tomorrow or never ever ever, perhaps she would be able to advise me. The third place was closed. There was a big bright sign in the window that said
OPEN
, but they were closed. The fourth place from the phone book was falling down and moldy, with piles of trash in front, obviously unopened since the storm and unlikely to scan anything anytime soon. I went back to the first place, which was now open. But their power was off.

“Might as well go get a cup of coffee and relax,” the man behind the counter said. “It's gonna be a while.”

I went to the coffee shop. The power was out there too. I got a glass of water. I did not relax. When the power went back on I went back to the copy shop.

Finally I scanned the prints from Vic Willing's house. After a few twists and turns I managed to run it through the local cop's database.

Unknown Man was very, very known to the police: Andray Fairview, unfortunate owner of a misspelled name, a short adult record, and a long juvenile one—supposedly sealed but easy enough to access if you're Claire DeWitt, world's greatest private eye. Current resident of Orleans Parish Prison, being held on possession charges, trial date forthcoming. He'd been arrested yesterday afternoon—just my luck.

I printed out everything I could find on Andray Fairview, the long, sad public record of his life. Andray Fairview, this is going down on your permanent record. I skimmed the papers as they printed. Andray's mother was the county and his father was the state. Lots of arrests, most of them for possession with intent to sell, some for theft, a few for assault, plenty for carrying a concealed weapon. Almost no school record, and what there was was pitiful. Two murder charges, both dropped. I figured I'd rectify that soon enough.

As I was jogging the pages into a rectangle and sticking them into a folder I saw a picture of Andray Fairview and dropped the papers.

It was the boy who'd peed on my truck. Suicide Boy.

“There are no coincidences,” Silette wrote. “Only mysteries that haven't been solved, clues that haven't been placed. Most are blind to the language of the bird overheard, the leaf in our path, the phonographic record stuck in a groove, the unknown caller on the phone. They don't see the omens. They don't know how to read the signs.

“To them life is like a book with blank pages. But to the detective, it is an illuminated manuscript of mysteries.”

D
ÉTECTION
WAS LONG
out of print now and hard to find at any price. I bought copies whenever I came across them in thrift shops or used bookstores that didn't know what they had. I'd packed one with me for the trip to New Orleans. I was superstitious about going anywhere without it, even though I knew most of it by heart now.

Détection
was maddening. The book is notoriously difficult—sometimes nonsensical, always contradictory, repeating the bad news and never repeating the good, never telling you what you want to hear, always just out of reach.

That was how I knew it was true.

The copy Tracy found in my parents' house was the first U.S. version, a cheap yellow paperback with a picture of Silette on the cover, scowling in a black suit. The publisher, strangely, had decided to market it as part of a crime series.
A real look in the EXCITING world of France's top criminologist!
Nothing could be further from the truth. Not unless by “EXCITING” you meant “exciting to finally glean a shadow of meaning after years of study.” That kind of exciting.

Once you've read Silette there's no going back, people say. Something in you is changed, and you won't be your old self ever again. No matter how you may want to forget what you've read, you never can.

Once you know the truth, there are no second chances. No
do-overs, no changing your mind, no turning back. The door shuts behind you, and locks.

Over the next few months after finding the book in the dumbwaiter, Kelly and Tracy and I took turns with
Détection
, passing it around until we nearly had it memorized. We read the little yellow paperback until the spine cracked and the brittle brown pages crumbled in the corners and the covers fell off the book.

We understood almost none of it. That didn't stop us from loving it.

Détection
was a door to another world; a world where, even if we didn't understand things, we were sure they could be understood. A world where people paid attention, where they listened, where they looked for clues. A world where mysteries could be solved. Or so we thought.

By the time we realized we were wrong, that we had misunderstood everything, it was too late. Silette had already branded us. For better or worse, we were not the same girls anymore.

A
FTER A FEW
wrong turns I made it to the College of New Orleans in Broadmoor. It had been badly flooded. I remembered where the criminology department was, but when I got there it was closed, and not looking too good. I peered in through a window and saw dim sunlight streaming in: the roof was missing.

A handwritten sign taped to the door said
FOR CRIMINOLOGY, LIT, AND OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY CLASSES GO TO DOUBLEWIDE HALL
. An arrow pointed straight ahead.

I walked around the building. Behind it was a series of trailers, some connected to each other, some independent. When I got closer I saw a banner hung across the front of the first one:
DOUBLEWIDE HALL
.

I opened the door to Doublewide Hall. The whole trailer shook when I shut the door behind me. Inside were a few desks piled with banker's boxes and one desk with a blond girl at it. A little sign taped to the girl's desk said
RECEPTION
.

“Hi,” the blond girl said, fakely friendly. She was alert and cute and about twenty-one. That wasn't her fault. For all I knew there was a heart of pure evil behind that cheerful blond façade. “Can I help you?”

“Yes,” I said. “Is Mick Pendell around? I was in the neighborhood and thought—”

“Do you have an appointment?” the blonde asked.

“No,” I said. “You can just tell him Claire DeWitt is here to see him.”

The blonde made a sad face. “I'm sorry. I really can't put anyone through without an appointment.”

“You don't have to put me through,” I said. “You don't have to put me through anything. Just call him.”

“I'm sorry. He really can't see anyone without an appoint—”

“Can you just tell him I'm here?”

“I wish I—”

“Can you just tell him?”

“I really—”

“Tell him.”

“I—”

“Tell him.”

“We—”

“Tell him. Tell him. Please. Just tell him.”

“
Okay
,” she finally said. She didn't try to hide her hatred. I didn't blame her. She picked up the phone and dialed. She muttered a long apology and then hissed “
Claire DeWitt
” as if it were a curse. That's the usual pronunciation. The person on the other end muttered something back. She thanked him and smiled and hung up.

“He says he'd love to see you,” she said brightly. “
With an appointment
. How's—”

“I don't think so,” I said. “I don't think that's going to work.”

I reached into my purse and found a notepad and a pen. “How about if I leave Mr. Pendell a note. Would you please pass that along to him?”

“Absolutely,” she said. “I would love to.”

You're dead
, I wrote on the paper.

I folded it in half and gave it to the girl. She took the paper with a frozen smile and kept her eyes on her computer screen, unblinking, until I left.

On my way back downtown my phone rang.

“Claire?”

“Yeah?”

“Claire, it's Mike. Mike Yablonsky. How you been?”

“Hungry,” I said. “Thin. Starving. Since you haven't paid me the five hundred you owe me, I got nothing to eat, Mike. I'm starving here.”

“I'm sure,” he said. “And I'm sure it looks good on you, Claire. Listen, I got your e-mail. About Vic Willing. Who hired you for that one?”

“The nephew,” I said. “The guy disappeared in the storm. You knew him?”