Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

by Sara Gran

  "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.

  3

  IN 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 Hat fields 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.<
br />
  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.

  4

  THERE 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.

  5

  ON 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 mi
ssing 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.