Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

by Sara Gran

I heard another cackle behind me. I turned around to see the regal woman's face, ruler of all she surveyed.

  "Boy, you fucking crazy," she said. She had a slight Gullah accent, probably from the Georgia Sea Islands. "You go on and get out of here."

  The boy on the bike laughed. "I ain't scared," he said.

  "Then you one stupid fuck," the lady said. She cackled loudly, and this time I cackled along with her. The boy left and we kept cackling.

  "You want me to tell you something?" the woman said.

  "Okay," I said.

  "Good," she said. "You go get me a little bottle and I'll tell you something."

  I jogged across the street to a grocery store and got her a forty. When I came back she was sitting on my bench. I sat next to her and gave her the bottle.

  "Now tell me something," I said.

  She took a long sip of the malt liquor. "You a crazy bitch," she said.

  We both cackled again.

  "I already knew that," I said. She took a sip from the bottle and then handed it to me. I had a drink and gave it back. After a while I took a joint out of my purse, lit it up, and handed it to her.

  "Bless your heart," she said with a smile, and handed the bottle back to me.

  We started cackling all over again. I couldn't have said what exactly was so funny, but something was.

  "You a crazy bitch," she said affectionately.

  "I told you, I know that," I said again. We cackled.

  We passed the liquor and we passed the joint and cackled until the sun went down and the moon came up. When the first forty was dead I ran to a store on North Rampart and got us another, and when that was gone I ran and got us another.

  "Bless your heart," the woman, whose name was Sandra, said over and over again. "Bless your heart."

  We drank and smoked and talked about childhood and about men and about liquor and drugs and work and birds. Jack Murray ignored me until, when the sun was coming up, I looked over and saw he was gone.

  41

  VIC WAS SITTING in his chair. His chair where he watched the birds. He looked out the window with a soft, dreamy look on his face. In between his chair and the window was the foot of the bed. Lying the wrong way on the bed, with his head at the foot, was a boy, or young man. He had long dreadlocks and dark skin. I couldn't see his face.

  I wasn't sure if he was alive. Maybe sleeping.

  I looked back to Vic. Tears were running down his face. He looked through the bedroom to the terrace. It was empty. No birds today.

  I heard a howl. Vic was sobbing. He let out a scream.

  The sky turned black outside. It started to pour, great lashes of rain sweeping into the bedroom, lightning shooting into the living room.

  Vic cried and wailed. His pain was tangible. It knocked me down like a wave, crushing me. The storm whipped the house, tearing it to pieces.

  I woke up screaming.

  42

  I'D JUST FINISHED my coffee the next morning when my phone rang.

  It was Kelly. I picked up. She didn't say hello or hey or how are you.

  "Tell me about the dream," she said.

  I told her about the dream about Tracy at the bar with Andray. I wasn't sure what it meant. Dreams are slippery things. There's no easy translation from that world to this one.

  "What was she wearing?" Kelly asked.

  I told her.

  "Huh. How old was she?"

  "Our age. The age she would be if..."

  "Huh." That was all she said about it. "While I've got you on the phone," she said, "do you remember the name of the boy, the boy hanging out by the keg at the, at a, at a Broadway-Houston party on—let me see, hmm, wait, I dropped it. Shit." I heard some papers rustling. Then I heard the phone fall to the ground and a crackle as she picked it back up.

  "December 30, 1984," she said. "He wore jeans and a black T-shirt and black creepers. About five-seven-and-a-half, dark hair. Oh, and he had a little star tattoo on his elbow. Near his elbow, sort of on the side of his arm. I think the last time you saw him was at Julian's on June 11, 1986. The pool hall," she clarified, in case I'd forgotten. I hadn't. A Broadway-Houston party was a kind of party kids had in the eighties, and maybe before: they would rent one of the dance studios near the corner of Broadway and Houston in Manhattan, buy a few kegs, and charge other kids four or five dollars to get in. Julian's was a pool hall on Fourteenth Street. One of the soda machines dispensed beer at night.

  Now the corner of Broadway and Houston was some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Julian's had been torn down long ago to build brick-façade housing for NYU.

  I heard a gunshot in the distance.

  "Julian's," I said. "I'm thinking." Tattoos were relatively uncommon in New York City back then, especially on young people. When we did our first tattoos on our wrists—a K for Kelly, T for Tracy, C for Claire—some people didn't know what they were. They thought they would wash off.

  "I think I do remember him. I think his name was Oscar. No, no. Oliver, maybe? I don't know his last name. I'm pretty sure he lived in Manhattan. Maybe Queens. Definitely not Brooklyn. He had a lot of friends from Stuyvesant but I don't know if he actually went there. For some reason I'm thinking Bronx Science. I don't know why."

  "Known associates?" she asked.

  "Huh. Hannah. You remember that girl Hannah? Livie. Todd. Nakita. Rain. Rain from Stuyvesant, not Rain from Midwood."

  "Known to frequent?"

  "Julian's pool hall. Maude's. Cherry Tavern. Blanche's. Sheep's Meadow—I remember seeing him there at least once."

  "Anything else?" she asked.

  I thought for a minute. Another gun responded to the first, a semiautomatic, pop-pop-popping in rapid succession.

  "He was cute," I said. "He dated this girl, a mod girl. She had red hair, long hair, bangs."

  "Like Manic Panic red?"

  "No, like a dark strawberry blond. Not natural but almost a natural-type color. Almost. Sometimes she wore a black and white checked miniskirt, a checkerboard check. She wore that with black tights and creepers, the tall ones."

  "Two and a quarter inch?"

  "Maybe even three inch," I said. "And she had this white leather jacket. This great vintage white leather coat with black fake fur collar. The kind of fake fur that's like a stuffed animal. It was a man's coat from, hmm, '73, '74, something like that. It was very sharp."

  "Wait," she said. I heard papers rustle as she looked through her files. "I knew it," she said. "The white jacket. I think we're talking about Nicole Abramowitz. I'm almost sure. Do you know she went to Packer? So, hmm, under her known acquaintances we have an Oscar Goldstein. Do—"

  "No," I said. "I remember Oscar Goldstein. He wasn't the boy with the tattoo."

  "Hmm," she said again. "Okay. Well, I've got nothing on him, then."

  "What's up?" I asked. "Did you find something?"

  But I knew what the answer was.

  "No," she said.

  Kelly hung up.

  In the distance I heard sirens from police cars. My head pounded and my mouth was dry.

  I sat up in bed and looked out the window. The coroner's truck drove by.

  Today wasn't a good day for happy endings.

  43

  EARLY IN THE MORNING on January 11, 1987, Kelly and Tracy and me stood on the subway platform underground at the Brooklyn Bridge station in Lower Manhattan. Kids would start to gather there in a few hours to see the graffiti that had been done the night before. At night graffiti artists snuck into the train yards to do entire cars, and other kids waited on the platform to see them as they came in, before they went off to be cleaned. We'd been out all night, first to a Broadway-Houston party and then writing on trains and then breakfast at the Square Diner in TriBeCa with some boys we knew. We had been drunk and high but now we were just tired, or at least Kelly and I were. Tracy wanted to see the trains come in. A boy she liked had gone to the train yards the night before and she wanted to see what he'd done, if anything.

>   "You bitches do what you want," I said. "I'm going home."

  "Me too," Kel said. "You coming?" she said to Tracy.

  "Cunts," Tracy said. "I wanna see Marcus's train. I'm staying."

  We lit cigarettes. There was no one to tell us not to. Rules and laws were for other people in other places; we did as we pleased. New York was our oyster; smoking on the subway platform was the best pearl we could wrench from it.

  We heard the clang of metal on metal and felt the rush of wind. A train was coming. We would take the 4 up to Union Square and get the L back into Brooklyn; at Lorimer we would switch to the G and take that the rest of the way home.

  I hugged Trace as the train curled around the tunnel toward us. "G'night, bitch," I said. "Call me tomorrow."

  She smelled like the subway and cigarettes and her thrift-store leather jacket, with die yuppie scum written over her heart in silver paint pen. She wore her blond hair with short bangs; a thrift-shop sixties dress in green lamé black tights; and real Doc Martens, a Christmas present from her father, who saved for months to buy them for her. Her voice was young but also a bit gravelly. She already smoked about a pack a day. She is always in that moment and always will be; she's stuck, dead, frozen, on the northbound 4/5/6 platform in 1987; this is where she will spend eternity.

  "Night, slut," she said. "Love you. Talk to you tomorrow."

  Kelly and Tracy hugged and whispered similar words. An Uptown 4 pulled in to the station and Kelly and I got on. We waved goodbye to Tracy through the glass. As we took off she blew us a kiss off the palm of her right hand.

  No one ever saw Tracy again. No one ever found a clue, no one ever found a suspect, no one ever found a lead.

  Not even me. Especially not me.

  Tracy had been missing for almost a full day before her father called me. Her mother had died in an accident when Tracy was two. Her father was a poor, broken-down Irish-Italian drunk who'd lived in the projects all his life. But Tracy loved him, and all he wanted was to get his kid the hell out of Brooklyn. Less than a year later he died from alcohol poisoning and heartbreak.

  I'd thought it was strange that Tracy hadn't called me after coffee that morning, but it wasn't a big deal. When her father called, it still wasn't a big deal. I called Kel and her phone was busy; sure enough, she'd been talking to Tracy's father too. None of us had heard from Trace. Kel and I figured she'd hooked up with the boy whose graffiti she'd been waiting to see.

  We spent a sleepy, hungover day at the coffee shop on Myrtle Avenue. By four o'clock it was already dark. We took the G to Williamsburg and walked to Domsey's to shop for vintage clothes at two dollars a pound. I got a purple minidress, Kel got a bowling shirt. LYDIA, the shirt said across the breast. POLICE ATHLETIC LEAGUE BOWLING TEAM, it said across the back. We had dinner in a little Polish diner on Broadway and took the subway home. We watched TV at my place for a while, watching a Movie of the Week on my little black-and-white TV I'd thrifted from a Goodwill on Fifth Avenue. Valerie Bertinelli was held hostage by her obsessive ex-husband. Would she escape? Or would she be trapped there, forever, in the place she used to call home?

  "I wonder what happened to Trace?" I said as I kissed Kel good night on the cheek. "I wonder where she is?"

  Kelly shrugged.

  I did too. She would turn up.

  The next morning, when we still hadn't heard from her, we started to worry. Her father called again. We told him we were sure everything was fine. But we weren't sure. She should have called us. We didn't begrudge her whatever adventure she'd run into. But she should have called us.

  That afternoon Kel came to my house and we drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and made calls. We called friends, acquaintances, boys. No one had seen her. At eight we took a break and went out for cheeseburgers and disco fries. After cheeseburgers, we started looking for Tracy. We found Marcus, the boy whose piece she'd been waiting for, drinking at Mona's on Avenue A. Mona's was one of a string of East Village bars that would serve a toddler with a fake ID. Marcus hadn't seen her at all. He didn't even know she liked him. We went to all the bars where teenagers went in the East Village: Lizmar Lounge, Alcatraz, Downtown Beirut, Mars Bar, Blue & Gold, Cherry Tavern, Holiday, International.

  No one had seen Tracy.

  Another day went by. Her father called the police. He called other parents. He called Kel and me every day. We told him we were sure everything was fine. But now we were sure it wasn't.

  We expanded our circle of phone calls. We searched Tracy's room, her locker, her pockets. We looked through every scrap of everything Tracy had owned or touched or been near. A phone number on a scrap of paper, a notation in a V. C. Andrews book, a stain on a T-shirt, a lone high-heeled shoe, a crooked poster on the wall—nothing went unexamined.

  But none of it helped. Weeks passed, and we still had no sign of Tracy. The police got involved but lost interest quickly. The papers and the local news had a burst of interest in the first few weeks, but as they learned more about her family and her past, short as it was, they lost interest. Despite blond hair and blue eyes, Tracy was not a marketable victim.

  We got clever. We tracked down the MTA employees who'd been on duty that night. We found kids we'd seen but whose names we didn't know. We learned how to get people to talk to us who didn't want to tell us anything at all. We showed up at one boy's house as very believable counselors from Stuyvesant High; we showed up at a another girl's house as less believable, but still convincing, STD social workers.

  We stopped going to school. We stopped going to parties, stopped writing graffiti. Tracy's disappearance, the lack of her, became our world. Our lives revolved around the hole where Tracy had been. We applied Silette's principles of Détection to every facet of it. We threw ourselves into the case full-time. We fingerprinted her room, her clothes, her books. We broke into the school office and got her records. We tried to talk to her teachers, and when they didn't want to, we found ways of making them. We followed up on every matchbook we found in her school bag, every note on a scrap of paper, every bird that flew overhead, every flower that bloomed. Omens were all around. Clues were everywhere.

  But somehow, we still couldn't see.

  "Mysteries exist independently of us," Silette wrote. "A mystery lives in the ether; it floats into our world on the wind like an umbrella and lands where gravity pulls it. And all the elements around it are now rearranged into the elements of a mystery: a tightly woven lace of clues and detectives, villains and victims. Yesterday's peaceful cottage is now a murder scene. The previously unremarkable butter knife on the counter is now an ominous weapon. The bland, unnoticed doorman is now a suspect.

  "Those who step into this pattern, often through no fault of their own, have no choice but to follow the mystery through to its end. That, or live their lives stuck in its web. It isn't a matter of deserving or undeserving, good or bad. It is only what the facts tell us."

  But in an Interview interview in 1979, Silette amended his words: "Perhaps, though, it isn't mysteries that create these webs," he said. "Perhaps the mystery is only what allows us to see them. Maybe that doorman really was capable of great evil all along. Maybe the butter knife has always been a complicated, portentous thing. But it was only their proximity to a mystery that allowed us to see it."

  Months passed. Tracy's father had her declared legally dead. Less than a year later, he died himself. Alcohol. We had learned absolutely nothing about what had happened to Tracy. We were no closer to the truth than we had been the day after she vanished.

  We'd had nothing to do for weeks. I had a list of possibilities, all of them equally likely. In my heart, I was almost sure of one of them: she'd gone out writing graffiti, slipped in front of a train, and been crushed. As for why no one had found her body, I figured we just hadn't looked in the right place yet. New York City had hundreds of miles of subway tunnels, some of them abandoned by the MTA and used only by graffiti writers and the homeless. We'd been in plenty of them. But no one had been in all of the
m. It would take years to cover them all. As far as I was concerned, the mystery was solved by default. There was no other possibility.

  I missed her every day. If I found her body, I wouldn't miss her any less.

  Maybe I didn't really want to know. Maybe, like everyone who hires a detective, I didn't want to solve my own mystery. Maybe I wanted to keep Tracy as she was, blond hair and bangs, vintage dress and Doc Martens, smelling like subway and cigarettes. Maybe even detectives don't want to solve their own crimes. Because once a crime is solved, you have to close the case and move on.

  But Kelly didn't give up. Kelly never gave up. She kept talking to people, kept riding the trains, kept looking for clues. When Tracy's father died she broke in to the projects and walled off Tracy's room, preserving the evidence forever. She plastered the wall over and facsimile-aged the plaster to match. The housing authority thought it was a paperwork issue that had changed a two-bedroom apartment in the projects into a one-bedroom. You could hardly blame them for not guessing the truth.

  "Maybe," I said to Kelly one day over coffee, "it's time to take a break." We drank gallons of coffee; we lived in coffee shops.

  "What?" Kelly said sharply. "Take a break from what?"

  "You know," I said nervously. "The case. Tracy. I think maybe we've gone as far as we—"

  "When we find her," Kelly said. "That's when we will have gone far enough."

  I didn't say anything. I picked at my bagel. I'd turned seventeen a few months before. I hadn't been to school in nearly a year. I hated Brooklyn—hated its filthy streets, its dying trees, its rows of colorless brownstones, its attached houses that suffocated you, and most of all hated the rich yuppies who were taking it over neighborhood by neighborhood, murdering what little was good. It used to be a miserable, poor place where people talked to each other. Now it was a miserable, expensive place where people ignored anyone outside their clan. At least the kids who had pulled my hair and slapped my face had acknowledged my existence. The rich put on their Walkmans and looked right through you. They walked expensive dogs and rolled expensive babies in designer carriages and glared if you tried to pet either. I wanted to go.