Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (9 page)

“That was fast,” I said.

“I'm in this
group
,” Mick explained, as if he knew how ridiculous it was. “Southern Defense. We provide legal services to people who otherwise would get none. People like Andray.”

“You
volunteer
?” I said. “Mick, that's fucking
incredible
of you. You deserve a
fucking medal
. Don't for a minute think that I'm not impressed, because—”

“Believe it or not, Claire, I'm not trying to impress you,” he said bitterly. “I—”

“I choose not to believe it,” I said. “But what do you do? Don't they get public defenders?”

Mick lay back on the bed and smoked a little more weed. He sighed again. “Of course they get one
on paper
,” he began.

“Stop sighing,” I said. “It's annoying.”

He took another big inhale but this time stifled the sigh and exhaled silently. “Yeah. So they get a defender on paper, but there aren't really any here. So this group, Southern Defense, they're supposed to help by giving them defenders. But they don't have enough defenders either. They've got fourteen but they're all totally overextended. So they recruited people like me, criminologists—”

“Professors of criminology,” I corrected him. Mick used to be a PI but gave it up to teach and donate his time to nonprofits like this. I hadn't forgiven him for it yet, and I didn't plan on do
ing so anytime soon. Teaching was a waste. School was the worst possible place to learn anything, or so it seemed to me from my brief time there. If he really wanted to help people he ought to be out there solving mysteries.

“Whatever,” he said, muting another a sigh and rolling his eyes. “There's a bunch of us who are like the second string, who can't serve in court but can give advice and hook people up with resources or whatever. So I was working with Andray on this bullshit charge he's in there for now, and then today he mentions to me that a crazy white lady came to accuse him of murder. And, well—”

“And I'm still the first crazy white lady you think of,” I finished for him. “That is practically fucking
moving
, Mick. Really. It's almost touching.”

Mick sat up.

“Listen,” he said. “Claire. Andray Fairview did not kill Vic Willing.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I know him,” Mick insisted. “He did
not
kill Vic Willing.”

He sounded anxious. He hoped he was telling the truth, but he was far from sure.

It doesn't matter what people want to hear. It doesn't matter if people like you. It doesn't matter if the whole world thinks you're crazy. It doesn't matter whose heart you break. What matters is the truth.

I lay back on the bed and looked at the ceiling. Mick lay next to me and tried to catch my eye. We lay next to each other and passed the joint back and forth. A carriage trotted down Frenchman Street. Two drunks argued as they walked past the hotel, slurred words indecipherable.

“Are you going to tell the cops?” Mick asked after a while.

“No,” I said. “I won't do anything until I'm sure he did it. Even then, I'll probably leave it up to the client.”

“He's a good kid,” Mick said. “If you get to know him, you'll like him.”

“I don't like anyone,” I said. “Especially kids. And especially good ones.”

“He's different,” Mick said.

“No one's different,” I said. “Except worse. That kind of different.”

He rolled over onto his side and looked at me. He was starting to wrinkle around his temples, lines spreading out through his tattoo. But he still looked good. I didn't say anything.

“You know me,” Mick said finally. “Give him a chance, okay?”

I sat up on the bed and pretended to be interested in my fingernails and didn't say anything.

I didn't know when Mick and I had stopped being friends. We'd both been apprenticed to Constance, him before me. We were never rivals; we were more like brother and sister.

But Constance took a whole world with her when she died. In the world she left behind, we were just two people who used to know each other. To her we were two other people, a better Claire and a better Mick. For all practical purposes they'd died along with Constance. As far as I knew no one missed them.

No one except me.

“Okay,” I said. “I'll look into it. I'm not making any promises. But I'll look into it a little more.”

“Shit,” Mick said, sitting up. “Thank you, Claire. I mean it. Thanks.” But he wasn't smiling. He just looked a little less miserable.

“
But
,” I said. “You're helping. And you are
not
doing the fun stuff.”

Mick nodded. He knew what I was talking about. Financial records, case files, evidence—if we found any—all of it would have to be sifted through. It was boring work, and he was good at it.

“Fine,” I said. “Now tell me what you know about Vic Willing.”

Mick shrugged. “People said he was a good guy. I met him a few times. Never worked on a case he prosecuted, but you get to know people. He was one of these
guys
, you know, a real New Orleans character. Talked a lot, had a loud voice, went to Galatoire's and places like that. Wore seersucker suits. Sort of su
per-confident in that way that rich people are, sometimes. Very white-guy alpha male. Charming. You know the type.”

I shrugged. I didn't know if I knew the type.

We talked about Vic some more. Mick didn't have anything interesting to say. Then we went over Andray's alibi, slim as it was. I asked Mick about the people Andray had spent the week of the storm with, or said he did.

“Huh,” Mick said, frowning. “Huh. Trey's gone, not dead, I don't think, but I don't know where. Peanut is no longer with us, unfortunately: definitely dead. Terrell . . . well, he's around, but I'm not sure—he's not really such a hot alibi. He's kind of, you know, in the life. Lali, she might be okay.”

He told me where to find Lali. Turn right at the abandoned gas station. Left at the fallen-down house. Watch yourself on the next corner; it's hot these days.

“I heard you were in the hospital,” Mick said. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “No. I don't know why everyone thinks that. I went to a spa for a while. That's all.”

I asked Mick if he knew why Andray would have a copy of
Détection
.

“Andray?” Mick said. “
Détection?
The Silette book?”

“Yeah,” I said. “The Silette book.”

Mick wasn't into
Détection
. He took what Constance had to offer but wasn't interested in what was behind it. To him it was just a crazy book, one of many crazy books Constance and I had passed back and forth. Mick thought books were just books.

He shook his head. “I can't even begin to imagine,” he said. “I'm not even sure how well Andray can read. I mean, he can get by, but that's a hard book.”

I sat up and told Mick to leave. He asked if he could take me to lunch the next day and I said yes. Then he left.

I remembered what he used to smell like, woodsy and sweaty. I rolled over on the bed to the spot where he'd been.

He didn't smell like that anymore. Now he smelled like pot and plaster dust and smoke and mold. Like sadness. Like New Orleans.

A
FEW MONTHS AGO
, after a hard case, I'd gone on a fast to purify myself from its ill effects. I stopped eating. I stopped sleeping. I did not stop using drugs. A week went by, then two, then a month. After fourteen days I could see the codes in grocery receipts and billboards. After thirty days I could read clues in the wind, see signs in the clouds. But on the thirty-second day I collapsed a few blocks from my apartment in Chinatown. The ER doctor in the Chinese Hospital sat on the side of my bed and looked at my chart. He made notes in Chinese. I'm not Chinese and he didn't know I could read what he wrote.
Affectless. Listless
.

“Dr. Chang says you're his patient,” he said. The doctor was young and looked pretty listless himself. But Chang's name gets you special treatment around here, and he pretended to be interested in me.

I nodded. I was studying the patterns of the fabric of the sheets. There were fractals in the warp, quadratic equations in the weave.

“Chang says you're a detective,” he said. “You solve mysteries.”

I nodded. I moved my gaze to the water in the plastic cup by my bed. When I moved the water shook, rippling the quantum particles in all directions of time. I had known of this before but had never seen it with my own eyes. I could see all kinds
of things now I couldn't see before; things I'd only read about, things I'd dreamed of.

“If you want to kill yourself,” the doctor said wearily, “this is, like, the least efficient way possible to do it. And it's going to be really, really unpleasant. Because we will make you eat. We will make you sleep. And you really don't want a feeding tube down your throat.”

“What do they put in those things, anyway?” I asked, suddenly curious. “Is it, like, ground-up food? Ensure? Glucose? Do you put vitamins in, because—”

“Yeah. It's a solution,” the doctor said.

“A solution,” I repeated. Every mystery has a solution. Maybe that was the solution to this one.

The doctor kept talking but I stopped listening. Some amount of time passed, or appeared to. The doctor wasn't there anymore. My own doctor, Nick Chang, came in. Dr. Chang is trained in Traditional Chinese medicine, in Chi Gong, yogic flying, ayurveda, and the teachings of Edgar Cayce. Among other things.

I thought he would understand.

“I can see everything,” I told him. “I'm not sick. I'm fasting.”

“Fasting you plan ahead of time,” Nick said. “You just stopped eating.”

“I'm spontaneous,” I said. “You know that.”

“You have three choices, Claire,” he said, trying to catch my eye. “Check in to hospital. Get put into hospital. Or come with me.”

I watched as a fly darted by, beating his little wings at exactly 108 beats per second. I read his thoughts, concerned only with bringing home food for his beloved. Flies! How I had misjudged them!

I looked at Nick, at his breath pouring in and out of his nose, his heart pumping, lungs rising and falling. I saw through his skin as his blood cells reproduced and died and reproduced again.

“My car's outside,” he said.

He knew I wanted his car, a snazzy green Karmann Ghia.

“Can I drive?” I asked.

“No,” Nick said. “Absolutely not.”

I didn't say anything. Time moved, backwards or forward. I wasn't sure.

“This isn't like the other time,” I said. “It's nothing like that.”

Nick didn't say anything.

Nick drove. We headed north and I didn't notice where we were going until we were halfway across the Golden Gate Bridge. Marin passed by in a green blur. We started seeing the signs near Santa Rosa.
SPOT OF MYSTERY
, the signs said. One had a photograph of two men, twins, standing in a room. One man's head touched the ceiling while his twin was two feet shy.
HOW CAN IT BE?
the sign queried.

The Spot of Mystery was one of those places where a house mysteriously slid down a hill and violated all the known laws of physics with its irregular floors and uneven walls and balls rolling uphill—which the tour guide would assure you are absolutely, definitely not optical illusions. Also featured were a small flock of pygmy goats, two hot springs, several large redwoods, and a gift shop. Behind all this were cabins for rent. The place was run by a retired PI from San Francisco named Jake. I'd heard about it for years. I'd never been there before. I'd never needed it before.

“Claire's going to take care of the goats,” Nick told Jake when we arrived. Jake nodded. A young man who may or may not have been Nick's son showed me around and set me up in a cabin. Taking care of the goats was hard work. The main thing was making sure they didn't get too fat. There was a vending machine for goat pellets, and they'd learned to look hungry. The fat goats had to be segregated in a separate pen where visitors couldn't feed them.

That night, after hours of shoveling goat shit, I slept again. A few days later, after more shoveling, fence mending, and goat-scolding, I started eating.

Nick came to see me once or twice a week, adjusting the herbs he brought in for me to take, working on filling in the holes in
my aura, discussing my treatment with the late Dr. Cayce. At the end of the third week I told him about it.

“It was a girl,” I said. I was sitting up in bed, looking out the window. “A case. A missing woman. A missing girl. I found her in the bay. She was—”

I didn't finish my sentence.

“You see bodies all the time,” he said.

“She was like me,” I said. “She looked just like me.”

“So?” Nick said.

“She didn't look like me,” I said. “She looked like someone I knew.”

“The girl who disappeared?” he said. “Your friend?”

I nodded.

“But it wasn't her,” he said. “That was a long time ago.”

“I know that,” I said. “I know that now.”

“You want to join her,” Nick said.

That wasn't exactly it. But close.

At night everyone at the Spot of Mystery gathered in the main house, behind the cabins, for dinner. I heard people talking about plans, schemes. I kept my nose clean and my head down. People pretended they didn't know who I was. Everyone knew who I was. Somehow word of my trip to the hospital had spread far and wide. Every PI in the country now knew Claire DeWitt was crazy. But most of them had already known that.

I concentrated on the goats. They were good company. They overlooked most of my personality defects and failures, my withdrawal of food from the fatties, and my inability to speak goat. It was strong medicine. After four weeks I couldn't see the signs in the clouds anymore, but I was fattened up myself and well rested and fairly grounded in this reality. In another few weeks I was ready to go back to work. That was when Leon called. I was ready to say no. I wasn't interested in going to New Orleans. I hadn't been there since Constance died.