Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

by Sara Gran

A siren wailed past the house, the fifth one that night. There was some kind of battle on the streets Uptown: four murders in three days.

  Constance smiled. "When you get to hell, Claire, believe me, you'll know it. It's much hotter than this, for example. And dark—they don't have light bulbs there yet, or so I'm told."

  Constance was shot through the head, right at her third eye. And with her gone, I became the best detective in the world.

  33

  DISGUISE IS ONE of the arts of detection, and like most of our arts, it has fallen on hard times. Your average hack detective today thinks putting on a suit from the Goodwill and getting a haircut qualifies as a disguise. It does not. Neither does slapping on a little makeup or a wig, although, certainly, costuming is a good skill to have, and one you'll need. But disguise is far more than a new outfit and a change of facial hair. For a worthwhile disguise the detective must not only appear to be someone else, she must believe herself to be someone else. She must let her ego dissolve into the ether and must reach out into the collective unconscious and pull up a new person, fully formed, to borrow for as long as she needs her. She must let herself be possessed, if you will, by this new person, regardless of how unpleasant she may find her new persona to be. But this isn't the biggest challenge. The challenge for the detective who needs a disguise isn't taking on the new personality—it is letting her old personality go. To let go of the self is the highest calling of the self, something that few achieve. And something that every self, whether she knows it or not, aspires to.

  In the afternoon I went back to Congo Square. This time I went as Elmyra Catalone, African-Italian American recovering crack addict from Memphis, Tennessee, raised Baptist, now occasionally Pentecostal, occasional sex worker, victim of sexual abuse at the hands of a cousin, mother of four children, one dead, one in foster care, one in Angola, one living in the town of Celebration, Florida, with a wife and two children. Elmyra is off the crack cocaine but she likes her liquor and has a schnapps now and then to be sociable.

  Elmyra came to the park shyly at first, looking for a friend from Tallahassee she'd heard might be around here. She didn't see the friend but it looked like a place she could have a drink without causing too much trouble. If there was one thing Elmyra had had enough of in her life, it was trouble. From her plastic bag she took out a little bottle of peppermint schnapps and had a swig and found a bench to sit on. Trying to stay warm, Elmyra drank her schnapps and waited for her friend.

  The men at the picnic table were not kind to Elmyra.

  "Lookie here, there that same white bitch in dirty clothes."

  "She put some kinda shit on her face thinking we won't see."

  "Bitch."

  "White bitch."

  Jack Murray was silent.

  I had a slug of schnapps and threw my wig in the trash and left. On my way to the truck on North Rampart I saw Leon coming out of a record store. I thought I could avoid him but he spotted me when I opened the door to the massive truck with its ear-blasting remote.

  "Claire?" he said. "Is that you?"

  We made small talk. He asked how the case was going. I lied and said it was going swell.

  "Are you okay?" he asked. "Is everything okay?"

  "Of course," I said. "Thanks for asking."

  Leon acted strange and confused. When I got back to my hotel I remembered that I was still in Elmyra's clothes—some of which I had bought at a thrift shop and some of which I found in the garbage—and that I had splashed myself with some schnapps before going to the park, for effect. And that I was actually kind of drunk when I saw him. And that I smelled like crack from the pipe they'd been passing around in Congo Square.

  This day wasn't working out as I'd hoped.

  34

  THE HARDEST THING about buying a gun in Louisiana was that there were so many options I hardly knew where to begin. I heard shots at least once a day. Half the men in the city wore clothes so big, they could carry an arsenal under them. Out of the sliver by the river, spent casings and shells crunched underfoot on the sidewalk like crack vials or fall leaves. The suburbs west of the city were lined with pawnshops that advertised $99 SPECIAL ON 9 MILLIMETER and HANDGUN SALE and SPECIAL ON UZIS.

  But I decided a pawnshop was too risky. It wouldn't be as helpful to have a registered gun; besides, I wasn't sure if I would pass the criminal background check. I'd only brought paperwork for two other names with me, and I didn't want to waste them.

  Instead I drove around Central City. As always, there was a small group of young men on every third or fourth corner. It was like looking at a long strip of fast food restaurants and convenience stores at a highway exit. They all looked equally good, or bad. It wouldn't be a complicated transaction, but a lot could go wrong—I could get robbed, the police could show up, or the kids could refuse to deal with me.

  From a pocket in my purse I pulled out two dice. One was lapis, one was jade. They had been Constance's. I held the dice in my hand for a minute and let them warm up. Then I tossed them on the passenger seat.

  I got seven. I made a left on the next block and a right on Seventh Street. After two blocks I saw a group of kids, slightly larger than the other groups, maybe eight or ten young men on the steps of a cottage, laughing. They were laughing at something the kid on the top step had said. The kid on top stood above them, not smiling even though he'd just made the others laugh.

  As I got closer I saw that the kid on the top step was Andray Fairview.

  I pulled up beside them. Two kids who stayed down on the street put their hands on their waistbands and looked at me. I rolled down my window and leaned over.

  "Hey, Andray," I said. "Remember me?"

  As the other boys looked on, amused, he came toward the truck and leaned toward the window.

  "What's up, Miss Claire?" he said. His face wasn't that different than it had been in OPP: vacant and depressed, devoid of qi. Again, it was clear that he'd shut his doors tight and had no inclination to let me in. It was like the night we'd gotten high together had never happened. I didn't blame him.

  "Come on," I said. "Get in the car. You can do me a favor and get on my good side."

  Without arguing he got in the passenger side of the truck and shut the door behind him.

  "What's up?" he said again, looking straight ahead.

  I thought about giving him some kind of I'm-not-the-enemy-here speech, but that wasn't exactly true. I liked Andray, but I kind of was the enemy. I wasn't at all sure he didn't kill Vic Willing.

  "So, listen," I said. "I need a gun."

  Andray turned and looked at me, his face a big question.

  "Yeah," I said. "Shocking, isn't it? A nice lady like me."

  He laughed. "I don't carry no more," he said. "If you gonna buy one anyway, I can hook you up."

  "Thanks," I said. "Seriously. I need some protection."

  "I hear that," Andray said. He lifted up his shirt to reveal a narrow washboard waist and a nine-millimeter pistol tattooed on his belly, tucked neatly into his fancy boxer shorts. "Turning the other cheek and all—that shit's hard."

  "Tell me about it," I said. "You ever think about moving? You know, people shoot each other much less in other places."

  We laughed. I don't know why. Yesterday more Americans had been killed in New Orleans than in Iraq. I figured when you counted up the kids shot in every city in America you probably had the Iraqis beat too.

  "Shit," Andray said, still smiling. "I ain't never leavin'. I love this city. I love New Orleans."

  "How do you know?" I asked. "You've never been anywhere else."

  Andray shook his head, smiling. "I couldn't love no place else more," he said.

  "Andray," I asked. "How many times you been shot?"

  "Three," he said. "How about you?"

  "Four," I said. "Well, four and a half. But that's not the point. I'm a private detective. You're a kid. No offense. But you're supposed to be in school, not dodging bullets."

  Andray laughed again. "Thi
s one, right here?" he pointed at his chest, at the scar I'd seen under his shirt in jail. "I got this in school."

  I shook my head. I felt like Grandma lecturing the kids about rock-and-roll. We middle-aged white ladies shot our wad a hundred years ago, with our lectures and nagging and Temperance Union. I didn't know how you explained to a young man that this time it really was different.

  "That doesn't happen in other places," I said.

  Andray shook his head. "Last time I got shot," he said, trying to explain his love of New Orleans to me, "you know how many people came to see me in the hospital? My uncle, aunt, all my friends, cousins. Shit, my room was full every day. I got people here—I wouldn't have that nowhere else."

  "I thought you grew up in foster care," I said. "Who are all these aunts and uncles?"

  "Oh, that wasn't my real aunt and uncle," Andray explained. "That was this guy, Mr. John."

  "Was he the Indian?" I asked.

  "Yeah," Andray said, smiling a little. "I told you 'bout him, I forgot. Mr. John, he wasn't related or nothing. He was just this guy. Had a house over on Chippewa Street. Sometimes, at night, he'd go out to houses where kids stayed. He brought blankets, sandwiches, shit like that. Sometimes I'd go stay with him. He had a room with all these beds in it, lined up like an orphanage or some shit." He laughed a little. "Sometimes, he took me out to Indian practice. Introduce me to his friends, like—"

  Andray stopped talking. He stopped smiling. Earlier, he'd told me Mr. John was shot coming home from work one night. Andray shook his head and made himself laugh, pretending he was fine. "I got real family too. My mom's around. She's just, you know, busy. I got cousins, aunts, uncles." He laughed again. "Shit. You a trip, Miss Claire, you know that?"

  "I'm often told," I said. "So, Andray. Why don't you tell me about Vic Willing?"

  Andray smiled a forced, tight-lipped smile. "I told you, Miss Claire. I cleaned his pool a few times, he invited me in, we got to talking about birds and shit and—" A quick frown flashed across his face. "And that's it."

  There was something he wasn't telling me—maybe a lot he wasn't telling me. But I had no idea how to get it out of him.

  "So," Andray said. "You want a nine? An Uzi? Or what? Chief over there, he can get you an M-sixteen, and he got a flamethrower at home. That shit works, too."

  I stopped and stared at him for a while. Then I told him that a simple handgun would do.

  Andray leaned out the window. "Terrell," he called.

  Terrell came out from inside the house. The windows were boarded up with plywood. Terrell held his pants up around his slim waist with his right hand. The boys who hung out on street corners in New Orleans were so achingly thin, I wondered if it was a fashion trend or they were trying not to exist, even less than they already did in the eyes of the world. Terrell wore a black sweatshirt with a skeletal white spine on the back, as if he were already dead.

  Terrell smiled. "What up?" he asked me. It was so rare that someone was happy to see me that I wondered what his angle was. Then I remembered I'd saved his life. Still, though.

  "What happened to the hotel?" I asked.

  Terrell laughed. "I got things to do! I can't be hiding out out there."

  I wanted to argue but I didn't. Eat your breakfast. Don't listen to jazz, it's the devil's music. Don't hang out on the same corner where someone tried to shoot you,.

  "You still got that thirty-eight?" Andray asked Terrell.

  Terrell looked at Andray like he was crazy. Andray nodded. Terrell made an it's-your-life face and nodded.

  "I can get it," he said.

  "All right," Andray said, opening the door. "Come on. We gonna hook Miss Claire up."

  Andray moved over and Terrell got in, shutting the door behind him. Terrell started to thank me again for the other night. I stopped him. Andray and Terrell broke out into a giggly conversation. When they spoke to each other their accents were so thick and their dialect so heavy that the only words I could make out were mothafucka and nigga.

  "How about you?" I asked Terrell. "You know a guy named Vic Willing?"

  Terrell busied himself getting a pack of cigarettes from his voluminous pants and lighting one up.

  "Shit," Andray said, laughing. "Terrell with me all weekend. I with him from Friday night till we get to Texas. Don't even fuck with that, lady. He ain't even know no lawyers. Boy never hardly met a cop."

  Both boys laughed. But nothing was that funny.

  "Where were you that weekend?" I asked Terrell. "During the storm?"

  Terrell kept the smile on his face, but it was forced. Cigarette in hand, he reached up and pushed his hair back, holding his dreads up in the air for a minute before dropping them back down his back.

  "Went to the Superdome first," he recited. "Then the Convention Center. Then we met up with some other people—Peanut, Lali, and them."

  Terrell looked at Andray, as if to check that he was getting the story right. Andray looked straight ahead and ignored him. Andray was right. Terrell was no criminal mastermind. He was a bright, funny kid who, if he had lived anywhere else, probably would have listed underage-beer-buying as his worst crime. I couldn't imagine any circumstance other than being born in New Orleans that would have led Terrell to pick up a gun.

  "And then we drove to Houston," Terrell went on. "Went to the Astrodome, but they ain't let us in."

  "So what'd you do after that?" I asked. "What'd you do after you got turned away from the Astrodome?"

  Terrell froze, doubtless trying to remember the story Andray had fed him to back up his alibi. Then he burst out laughing.

  "Shit, lady," he said. "I like to help you. But I try to forget all that. I don't want to think about it no more."

  I gave up. Trying to get these boys to talk was like trying to lasso cats. Terrell directed me to an abandoned, half-collapsed house a few blocks away. Stuck in the lawn, half buried in the rubble and garbage, was a construction sign. I guessed the house was halfway renovated before the storm brought it back to the beginning:

  Another FINE job from

  Ninth Ward Construction.

  Call Frank!! I can Help!!

  The sign was ringed in yellowish-brown watermark lines.

  I parked in front and Terrell sprinted inside while Andray and I waited in the truck. A few minutes later Terrell came back and we drove to another deserted block and parked again. He took the gun out of his pants and laid it on the dashboard.

  "May I?" I asked. Both boys nodded. I picked it up and looked at it and fiddled around with it for a few minutes. It was loaded. It looked good.

  "What do you want for it?" I said.

  Terrell looked at Andray and then me and then back at the gun. "No thin'," he said. "You saved my life. I don't need to make no money from you."

  "I can give you what you paid for it, at least," I said. Usually I didn't buy contraband from children, but I figured if I was going to, I might as well not profit off it.

  We haggled over the price and settled on one hundred. I took the gun and gave him five twenties. Terrell reached into the endless pockets of his huge pants and pulled out a small plastic bag of dark brown hand-rolled cigarettes before he pulled out a fat roll of money. He added the money I'd given him to his roll and started to put the money and bag away, but Andray stopped him.

  "Hook a friend up," he said to Terrell.

  Terrell looked at me.

  "Go ahead," I said. Terrell took out one of the long, thin, crinkly cigarettes and lit it. We passed it around. When it came to me I inhaled deeply and held the poisoned air in as long as I could.

  Drugs take you places—some fun, some terrible. But the important thing about those places isn't whether or not they're fun. The important thing is that, sometimes, in some places, you can find clues.

  Soon I was sleepy and pretty sure the truck was listing to one side, but I was more or less awake. The two boys started talking. I could hardly understand a word of it. I watched them as they talked: They were different bo
ys together than they were alone. Together they were alive and hopeful and maybe even happy. They had their own language, forged from years of exchanging secrets and truths.

  As I watched them I noticed something I hadn't before: Terrell and Andray had matching tattoos, a combination of two Ts and an A in a circular, almost Celtic sort of design on the inside of their right forearm, just past the crease of their elbow.

  "Who's the other T?" I asked, interrupting their conversation.

  They stopped talking and looked at me.

  "Your tattoos," I said. "Who's the other T?"

  Neither of them said anything, but I felt the mood in the truck change instantly. All laughter was gone, flown far away.

  "You guys know each other a long time?" I asked, looking for another way in.

  "All our lives," Terrell said. "Andray my brother."

  The boys did some kind of special handshake and smiled. But something was missing. You could smell the sadness in the truck.

  "Who was the other T?" I asked.

  No one said anything. We passed the cigarette around again. Now I was sure we were parked on a steep angle of some sort and the truck was leaning far to the left. I was surprised I didn't tumble out of my seat. I thought maybe it had been a mistake to disconnect the airbags.

  After a long while, Andray said, "It was Trey. He the other T."

  "Where is he?" I asked.

  For another long while we smoked and no one said anything.

  "I shot him," Andray finally said.

  "You shot him?" I repeated. He handed me the brown cigarette but he didn't look at me. I took it and took another big inhale.

  Andray nodded. "Yep. I shot him." He was so reserved—or so high—that it was impossible to tell what he was thinking. He leaned back and closed his eyes. Terrell did too.

  "What happened?" I asked.

  "See, when we got back," Terrell began, "we—"

  "No, no," Andray said. "Lemme start at the beginning. See, the three of us, we grew up together. We were friends all our lives."

  "Real friends," Terrell said. "Not like people around here, always sayin' they your friend when they don't give a shit if you live or die. No. Us, we was like brothers."