Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

by Sara Gran

  37

  THE NEXT DAY I drove to the park on Annunciation and Third again. In front of me was the big white truck with a cherry picker I'd seen around the city. I still didn't know what it did. I looked at the license plate; it was covered with mud. I tried to catch sight of the people inside but I couldn't make much out, just two people in white jumpsuits. At Josephine it made a right turn and I didn't follow.

  The park on Annunciation was supposed to be a playground. No one was playing in it. But the same boys were hanging out, trying to sell the same drugs. One of them was small and had great big dreadlocks. I knew it was Lawrence.

  I parked and went over to Lawrence and introduced myself. Lawrence had flawless dark skin and a good-looking-enough face, but his best feature was his hair, which cascaded out and around him in well-tended locks like those of Shiva, the Hindu god. He wore tremendously large pants with an equally disproportionate gun in the waistband and a huge T-shirt that had a picture of a dead boy on it. HUSTLER 4 LIFE, the T-shirt said under the picture of the boy. In the cold I saw goose bumps on Lawrence's perfect brown arm.

  I shivered as we stood and looked at each other. Nearby, his friends, concealing enough weaponry to subdue Fallujah, watched us. I was glad for the .38 tucked into my jeans.

  Lawrence sneered at me. Only a mother could think Lawrence was innocent of anything. As far as I was concerned everyone was guilty of everything. Especially Lawrence.

  "Can I buy you lunch?" I asked. "It's kind of cold out."

  Lawrence shook his head and didn't say anything. He was playing it tough.

  I was tougher.

  "It's about Vic Willing," I said softly. "The lawyer."

  Lawrence pulled his lips together. He still didn't say anything.

  "Yeah, I know," I said. "Don't talk to the crazy lady about the lawyer."

  He didn't say anything. But his eyes were dying to talk. The story was strong. But Lawrence was stronger.

  "So I'm gonna guess," I said. "I'm gonna guess what happened between you and Vic Willing."

  Lawrence looked sideways, ignoring me, setting his jaw. But he didn't leave.

  I watched Lawrence. He stood tall and erect, but his back was stiff and rigid; it was bravado, not pride that held him upright. His shoulders pulled forward in a self-protective gesture. He stuck his hands in his pockets so I wouldn't see how hard it was for him to keep them still. I measured his rate of breath and the depth of his inhalations: fast and shallow. I looked into his eyes and read the marks on his irises. I studied his tattoos. In addition to the usual gang and neighborhood markers, a zipper was inked across his neck; it screamed suicidal ideation.

  It wasn't a hard tale to read. Just an old, sad one. One I knew better than I wanted to.

  "Vic heard about you from your mother, Shaniqua," I began. "She asked him some questions and told him all about you. And he offered to help. And he did help, didn't he? Got the charges dropped, got your record cleared. And he was so nice. He was about the nicest, coolest guy in the world. Right?"

  Lawrence said nothing.

  "Just like everyone said he was," I went on. "And after the case was over, he didn't leave. Not like—well, like just about everyone else except your mom, right? Vic didn't leave. He stuck around. And he was probably a good friend at first. Interested in you, listened to you, gave you good advice."

  Lawrence kept his eyes fixed on a spot on the other side of the playground and clenched his jaw. His chest puffed out like he was ready to fight.

  "But then one day," I said, shivering, "he wasn't so nice anymore, was he? He wanted more. He told you it was okay, that everyone did it. He wanted—well, he wanted sex. And when you said no, at first that was okay. He said it was fine. You didn't have to do anything you didn't want to do. And you could still be friends, right?"

  Lawrence didn't move a muscle. But shiny little pools formed in the corners of his eyes.

  "But he wouldn't stop trying. He wouldn't let it go. He took you to nice places. Bought you things. But he wouldn't stop trying. He said you could still be friends. And you wanted to still be friends. But he wouldn't stop. He just wouldn't stop.

  "And then one day he laid down the law. He wasn't asking anymore. He told you. You get with the program, or he would get the charges reinstated. Murder two—that's a big one. No one in the world wants to go to Angola for that kind of time." Of course, it was unlikely Vic could bring the charges back once they'd been dropped. But there was no point in telling Lawrence that now. "So you did it," I went on. "You—"

  Lawrence shook his head.

  "Uh-uh," he said, his voice full of emotion. "No. We did not —no."

  He made a strange motion with his head and sighed, turning his head toward the park, avoiding my eyes.

  I didn't say anything.

  "I just watched," Lawrence mumbled. "He liked to have someone watching. Some other boy did the ... you know."

  "How old were you?" I asked.

  "Fourteen," he muttered. "Thirteen and then fourteen."

  His eyes were glued on something twenty feet in the distance. It started to rain, almost as if he had made it happen by staring hard enough. I didn't think Lawrence just watched.

  We stood in the rain and tried living with what I'd just said.

  Neither of us liked it very much.

  If there was a cure for self-loathing, I'd give it to Lawrence, after taking a sip for myself. But there is no magic potion. Everyone has to find his own way out. Everyone has to carve his own road through the wilderness.

  But sometimes, maybe, you can leave a clue.

  "When it happened to me," I said, "I wanted to die."

  Lawrence kept his eyes fixed in the distance.

  "I mean," I went on, "I really, really just wanted to die, you know? To be honest, the only reason I didn't do it was because I was scared. Scared of what would happen after, scared of dying. And then, of course, I hated myself for being scared, too, so there was that. Then I found this book. And this guy, in this book, he said something I thought was really smart. It kind of changed things for me. It kind of like changed everything, like changed my whole life."

  I looked at Lawrence. He was still looking away. In the inner corner of his left eye, a well of tears shook and then broke and streamed down his face. He froze, trying to pretend they weren't there. Fast food wrappers and empty soda bottles rattled on the ground around our ankles, driven by the wind.

  "In this book," I went on, as if we both weren't crying, "this guy, he says, 'Be grateful for every scar life inflicts on you.' He says, 'Where we're unhurt is where we are false. Where we're wounded and healed is where our real self gets to show itself.' That's where you get to show who you are."

  Lawrence turned and looked at me. He didn't say anything. But he looked at me like he was drowning and I was holding out a rope.

  "From here," I said carefully, "you can go anywhere you want. Anywhere in the whole world. You don't ever have to be the same person you were yesterday. The same things will have happened to you, but you don't have to be the same person."

  Lawrence laughed and pretended he didn't understand what I meant.

  "This story," I said, "your story—it doesn't have to be the story where the victim dies alone and broke in a hotel room on Canal Street. It doesn't have to end at Angola. This can be a story where no day is ever this boring again. I mean, you've already lived through the worst possible outcome of any risk. You've really got nothing to lose."

  We looked at each other for a long minute.

  "I think you crazy," Lawrence finally said, laughing, choking back tears.

  "I am," I said. "Officially. Come on. Let me buy you lunch. I'll tell you about it."

  "Yeah," Lawrence said. "Okay."

  We walked up to Parasol's and got roast beef sandwiches and root beer and laughed some more until neither of us was crying. We didn't talk about Vic or the case. I just told Lawrence stories. I told him about the time the state of Utah had me declared officially insane. I t
old him a few stories about Brooklyn and then I told him a few about the rest of the world: Paris, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, San Francisco. I told him about solving mysteries and going crazy and getting kicked out of a tattoo convention in L.A. and being banned from the Sands in Vegas for life.

  There are no coincidences. Just opportunities you're too dumb to see, doors you've been too blind to step through.

  And for every one you miss there's some poor fucking soul who's been left behind, waiting for someone to come along and show him the way out.

  38

  ONCE, WHEN I WORKED for Constance, a friend of hers showed up at the house with a dozen or more little children. He was an Indian, the witch doctor from the White Hawks. He wasn't in costume, but I recognized him from Saint Joseph's Day, when we'd seen him performing in the park. He'd worn white that day, with a headpiece three feet high, and long synthetic braids coming down each side of his face. The man was fifty-ish and had a mean face—if he hadn't been in the company of a group of kids who adored him, he might have scared me. But the children clearly worshiped him; they ran around and climbed on top of him and crawled over him. They all called him Uncle, although I was fairly certain that none of them were related. The kids were unruly and not terribly clean and I figured they were system kids—fosters, group home children, or street kids.

  I had no idea what they were doing there. They all went out to the garden, where Constance grew her herbs, the most dangerous kept behind a locked gate. The children gathered around the man and he took out a tambourine and began teaching them chants. I'd been in New Orleans long enough by then to recognize the Indian songs, even though I didn't know what they meant. But I was surprised that Constance knew all the chants without missing a beat, and taught along with him.

  I watched them for a while and then went back to work, sifting through files. We were working on the Case of the Missing Miners and I was researching the genealogy of the mine owner, Alfred Stern—which turned out to be a waste of time because the miners, in the end, were never really missing at all. Just misplaced. When I needed a break I went in the kitchen to get a drink. Constance was sitting at the table with one of the little boys, reading his tea leaves. The boy beamed; her attention was like a life vest to a drowning child.

  "When the time comes," I heard her say to the boy, "you'll know it. Okay?"

  The boy nodded, smiling. Constance reached over and rubbed his head.

  "Remember," she said. "Remember this."

  I went back to work. The man and the kids stayed until dark. After they left, Constance and I cleaned up together, picking up half-full glasses of lemonade and plates of cookie crumbs from around the house. Constance answered my question before I asked it.

  "You can't change anyone's life," she said. "You can't erase anyone else's karma."

  "But—" I began.

  Constance stopped me, shaking her head. "All you can do is leave clues," she said. "And hope that they understand, and choose to follow."

  39

  BACK IN MY ROOM that afternoon, I called Leon.

  "Was your uncle abused as a child?" I asked.

  "Huh," Leon said. "Abused? No. I mean, him and his dad weren't close, but I don't think it was abusive. And his mom was kind of cold, but—"

  "No," I said. "Sexually. Sexually abused."

  "Oh, God," Leon said. "No. I mean, not that I know of. God, no."

  We hung up. I called Mick and told him what I'd found out. As we talked I threw the I Ching.

  "Jesus," Mick said. "Jesus. Out of everything I would have guessed."

  I added up the coins and checked the book. Hexagram 55: Lonely smoke.

  "I know," I said. "That's the thing about the truth. It's just like your car keys—always in the last place you look. Did Vic ever prosecute Andray?" I asked. "Or try to?"

  "No," Mick said. "I looked into that right away. Never."

  Smoke without a fire misses his sister. The wise man follows the smoke to its spark. A lonely king cannot rule his people. Love spoils the rice and sours the clouds.

  "Are you there?" Mick said.

  "I'm here," I said.

  "So what do we do now?" he asked. "I mean, do you think this is why he was killed? I've been going through all his financials, and I think—"

  "Forget about his financials," I said. "This is it."

  "What do you mean? You mean Lawrence—"

  "Not Lawrence," I said. "But this is it—this is the mystery. It has to be."

  "How can you be sure?" Mick asked, always suspicious. "I'm never sure of anything," I said. "But I'm fairly fucking certain this, uh, proclivity of his has something to do with why Vic was killed."

  "Well, I still think I should keep going through his records," Mick said. "You never know—"

  "You do whatever you want," I said. "I'm gonna go try to get an alcoholic in Congo Square to be my friend."

  I was on my way out the door when Leon called back.

  "Hi, Claire," he said.

  "Hi, Leon."

  "So, I was thinking—my mother never left me alone with Vic."

  "Never?" I said. "Never ever?"

  "Never ever," Leon said, sounding a little queasy. "I mean, that doesn't mean—it doesn't—I remember once she made a comment like, oh, Uncle Vic doesn't know anything about kids. Something, you know, totally innocent."

  "Not even once?" I said. "Not even if she ran out for cigarettes?"

  "No," Leon said. "If she had to go somewhere she took me with her. Always. Not even once."

  Most people who've been abused as children never hurt a fly. But of all the people who hurt flies, almost all of them have had their wings broken themselves.

  She knew. Leon's mother knew.

  40

  THAT EVENING I WENT to Congo Square for the last time. I didn't try to be friendly or work any disguises. I didn't try anything at all. Instead I just sat in the square and watched the men ignore me. Jack Murray was at his usual place at the picnic table. I took three packs of cigarettes with me. I was robbed of the first one in ten minutes.

  "Got a cigarette?" the man had said to me. He was at least fifty, wearing clothes that hadn't been washed in a year.

  "Sure," I said.

  When I took the pack out of my purse to give him one, he snatched the whole thing out of my hands and walked away. I suppose I could have killed him, but it hardly seemed worth it. Cigarettes are cheap in Louisiana.

  I heard someone laugh. I turned around and saw a woman sitting in the grass behind me. She was as regal as a president, holding a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor, a bright green wrap on her head, sitting under a tree with all her possessions in a shopping cart next to her, laughing at me.

  I turned back around.

  My next visitor was another old man, forgotten long ago, in the shabby trench coat all hard-living men acquire somewhere in between jail and the Goodwill, the liquor store and the halfway house.

  "You got a dollar?" he asked.

  "No," I said. "Sorry." I should have thought to bring small bills and change with me, but I hadn't.

  The old man lunged for my purse. I pulled back and put a hand on his chest. The men at the picnic table, including Jack Murray, watched, bored.

  The black alligator purse had been Constance's. Supposedly it had been custom made for Constance in Paris by Mademoiselle herself. It was bigger on the inside than on the outside and could get almost anything through an x-ray machine or a Geiger counter. It had pockets inside pockets, secrets inside secrets. The solution to approximately seventeen mysteries could be found in this purse at any given moment. In a jam it could unfold into a tent and I could live in it until circumstances improved.

  "No," I said to the man.

  He swatted at my hand and kept fighting.

  "Stop," I said. "Really. Stop."

  He pushed my hand away and went for my purse again.

  "Seriously," I said. "Come on. I don't want to hurt you."

  The woman behind me laughed again, more
of a cackle. The man and I squirmed around for a few minutes, not exactly fighting but wrestling our way toward my purse.

  "Come on," I said. "Just go."

  "Gimme that purse," he panted, getting winded.

  "No!" I said, annoyed now. "Go away!"

  But he didn't go away. Instead we squirmed around for another minute, and then I lost patience. I stood still and pushed hard to get a little space and then kicked him in the hip with my left leg, and as he contracted toward the pain as I knew he would, being just a man made old before his time and not much of a fighter, I smacked him in the face with my right hand and then with my left.

  I didn't hurt him too bad. Not physically. But he seemed wounded in some other way. He stood and looked at me with his mouth open, looking crestfallen.

  "Fuck YOU," he said, looking hurt, as if I'd started it. Everyone was watching us now.

  "Fuck YOU," he said again.

  "Okay," I said softly.

  He stood and looked at me for another minute. Maybe he was expecting some kind of resolution. I didn't give him any. Finally he shambled off.

  I went back to doing nothing for a while. I figured I'd come here every day for the rest of my life if that's what it took. I was glad I wasn't pretty anymore. It was so much easier to do things like this without being pretty. I'd come here every day and beat people up until Jack Murray talked to me. True, I'd go through a lot of cigarettes, but at least I'd keep in shape. I'd studied martial arts for years—Constance had insisted on it—but I hadn't been to the studio in ages and my chops were way down. Constantly being mugged, I'd get my high kicks back. I was absorbed in a daydream of actually doing this, living in the park for the rest of my life, when a bike stopped in front of me. On the bike was a boy. He was white, with dirty-blond dreadlocks, and tattoos on his face. His kind seemed to have made a mass migration to New Orleans lately, apparently under the impression that New Orleans didn't have enough jobless, antisocial ne'er-do-wells of their own fighting for scraps.

  "Got a cigarette?" he said.