Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

by Sara Gran

  ***

  I followed Jack, walking silently behind him. He wore the same tired overcoat from Congo Square, over an old suit that might have started off as any color but was gray now. He took us to the Moon Walk, the pathway by the river. We took up a few benches, and his strong unwashed smell was enough to guarantee our privacy. I was far from sober but I managed to get out a few questions, and I was just sober enough to remember his answers the next day. I remembered his face wobbling in the dark, spinning—or so it seemed to me—lit only by our cigarettes, or maybe they were joints, or maybe freebase, or maybe wet, the same long brown cigarettes soaked in poison I'd been smoking. Or maybe I should just say we each held something small and burning but I don't know what. I forgot my questions, but I remembered Jack's answers.

  "I knew Vic from way back," Jack Murray said. "We went to nursery school together, me and him. All the way up through Tulane. Two good little boys from Uptown, me and Vic." He laughed. "Yes. I do know what happened to him. But you got to find out for yourself, DeWitt.

  "You got all the clues you need. You just got to put them together. You trying to think with your head. But you got to remember what the man said. There ain't no coincidences. Believe nothing. Question everything. Follow the clues. Especially the first one."

  And later, after we'd smoked too much of whatever we were smoking and had drunk twice as much as was wise:

  "Now, me, I'm happy with my lot," Jack said. His face was calm above the light of his cigarette, his eyes clear and intent. "I solved my mysteries," Jack continued. "I found my answers, and that's between me and God. Me and God and no one else. I know it looks like I got nothing, but I got everything. I got my peace and that's all I ever wanted. You, DeWitt, I don't envy you. You still got a long way to go. I feel for you, 'cause you're gonna go to hell and back before you solve your mysteries. You already halfway there, but that ain't nothing."

  I was just sober enough to remember I'd never told him my name.

  "Being a good detective, see, people think that makes it easy for us," he explained. "But it makes it harder. Maybe some things come easy to you, but that just means you gotta do more. It means more's expected from you. It means you got a place, and that place needs you. It means there's a job for you. A job that only you can do. It means there's a book out there that only you can read. Constance knew that," he said. "She knew the truth isn't always in a book. It isn't always in a file, or on a piece of paper somewhere. It can be buried like a treasure. It can be in the sky. It can be in the water. It can be in here." He looked at his PCP-laced cigarette. "It can be inside you, in your own heart. You can leave little bits of it everywhere, once you know how. That way it's only for the people who have eyes to see. Ears to hear. You make it easy for people, you ain't doing 'em no favors. See, she understood. You can't do someone's job for them. You can't solve their mystery for them. Even after they gone, you can't solve it. It just go unsolved until they come around again. All you can do is hold it for 'em till they get back.

  "She ain't teach you everything, not by a long shot. There's a lot you still got to learn, DeWitt. She still teaching you. But you gone and closed your eyes. You shut your ears. The whole world teaching you. The whole world your school. But you stopped listening, just 'cause you lost your favorite teacher."

  And later, he said:

  "Now us detectives, our reward's in heaven. We ain't get much here on earth, but when we go upstairs, we gonna get ours. I been promised that, and I believe it. But a man like Vic, he don't know about that. He think he got to take his reward right here. So what was his reward?"

  "I don't understand," I said. "How do I find that out?"

  "I already told you too much," Jack said, scowling above the red light of whatever he was smoking. "And that's all I'm gonna tell you. That's all I can tell you. You got to find the rest out on your own. You got to find your own buried treasure, girl. Solve your own mysteries. I solved mine. I fucking been to hell and back, but I solved mine."

  I had a hard time staying awake. But I wasn't so drunk that I didn't see the tattoo above his heart when he reached into his chest pocket, looking for a cigarette butt.

  Constance.

  "I tell you one more thing," Jack said, before he left me alone and disappeared. "If you hoping for a happy ending, DeWitt, you lookin' in the wrong city."

  47

  I WOKE UP ON a park bench in Congo Square. I was panting. I heard a shrill squawk in my ear.

  It was my phone. I picked it up and checked the display. It was Mick. It was one in the afternoon. I ignored it.

  I stood up, dusted myself off, and found a taxi to take me back uptown to get my truck.

  I'd lied to Andray. There was no way I was leaving New Orleans.

  "Not one detective in a thousand will hear my words," Silette wrote, "and of those, one in one hundred will understand. It is for them who I write."

  Detectives are superstitious, and over the years people started to read more into Détection. It was code for a secret plan. If you said it all at once, without stopping, you could crack any case. If you put every seventh or ninth or forty-fourth or one hundred and eighth word together you would get something that meant something else. It hadn't been written by one person, but by a secret cabal of detectives. It was a channeled message, and Silette didn't understand it any better than the rest of us.

  People thought that because they didn't understand. They weren't the one in one hundred in one thousand.

  Silette hadn't written for them. He had written for me.

  48

  I WENT BACK to my room and went back to sleep. When I woke up again it was dark. I went to a restaurant on Frenchman Street and ordered sunny-side-up eggs. But when they came, they didn't look like eggs at all. They looked like something terrible and inedible. They looked like punishment.

  It's a great thing to be at rock bottom, I reminded myself. There's nowhere to go but up.

  After breakfast—or maybe it was dinner—I called Mick. I didn't plan on telling him what had happened with Andray. On a different day it might have been fun to break his heart. Not today. I told him I'd fallen asleep early the night before and hadn't learned anything new.

  Then I told him my truck had died. I asked if I could borrow his car, a dark gray sporty little Nissan from 1990-ish.

  "Died?" he said.

  "Well, hopefully not died," I said. "That would be sad. But it's not running."

  "Won't the rental place give you a new one?"

  I exhaled a loud, annoyed sigh.

  "Then you call them," I said. "Maybe they can give you a car before noon tomorrow, which probably means four or five. Maybe for you they'll have a spare car of any kind at any price, because for me they certainly—"

  "Okay," Mick said. "Okay. Take a cab on up and meet me here. Give it back to me tomorrow morning."

  I went back to my hotel room and got my gun from where I'd hidden it in the box of tissues in the funny little slot hotels always have, as if there were something untoward about a bare tissue box. I gave it a quick check for functionality, and when everything looked good I went back out and got a cab on Decatur to take me uptown. Mick met me out in front of his place. He gave me the keys to his car with some instructions: Sometimes the lights stick and you have to jiggle the thing a little. Sometimes it stalls at red lights. The driver's window only goes down halfway and then you have to push it down, but don't because it's a bitch to get back up.

  I'd forgotten what it's like to be poor.

  "So where are you going?" Mick asked. "Did you get some leads, or—"

  "Nope," I lied. "No leads. No plan, really. Just figured I'd drive around and see what happens."

  Mick nodded and pretended he thought that was a good idea. I knew he didn't.

  He would have liked the truth worse.

  It was less than five minutes from Mick's house to Central City. Andray and Terrell were in the same place on their regular corner. Some other boys were with them, but I didn't recognize
any of them.

  Terrell saw me first. He nudged Andray and pointed me out. They thought, of course, that I was Mick. I drove past them and parked at the end of the block. Andray walked down the street to see what I—Mick—wanted.

  He came to the car and leaned down toward the window.

  I rolled it down and pointed my gun at him.

  "Surprise," I said.

  Andray ran. He ran back into a house nearby, probably to go through a back door and come out on the other side of the block. I drove around the block until I saw him running out of the front yard of another house. I left the car running, jumped out, and caught him on the corner, just as he was about to step off the crumbling curb and into the street. I grabbed Andray by the shoulder with one hand and pointed the gun at him with the other. Both of us were panting, our breath visible in the cold air.

  Andray rolled his eyes and tried to look blasé and tough. But for a second he had the same look he had had on his face when I first saw him. As if he were drowning. As if he hoped I would just shoot him already and get it over with.

  It passed as quickly as it had come.

  "Fuck," he said.

  I pointed the gun at him and held it there while I searched him. I pulled out a nine-millimeter pistol and a hunting knife, both of which I stuck in my purse.

  "We're going to the car now," I said.

  Andray shook his head.

  "I'm not going to hurt you," I said. "We're just going to talk."

  He shook his head again, fighting to keep his face calm. "If you gonna shoot me," he said, "you can shoot me right here. I can die right here."

  I realized he was terrified. He thought I was going to kill him. Like a lot of people who thought about suicide, Andray didn't actually want to die. Dying was the hard part. He just wanted to be dead already.

  By then some of the other boys had come around the corner to see. They kept an eye on us, but none of them rushed to help Andray. I saw what he and Terrell had meant about false friends. The other boys seemed more amused than anything else.

  "I am not going to hurt you," I said again, softly and slowly. "But—"

  "I ain't getting with you in that car, lady," he said again. "No fucking way."

  I looked around. I could have put my gun down. But I wasn't sure about the boys around us.

  I'd done some dumb things before, but I was realizing that this was one of the dumber.

  "Okay," I said to Andray. "You're going to tell your friends that everything's cool. When you do that, I will lower my gun. We won't get in the car. Forget about the car. Okay?"

  He nodded and swallowed.

  "Tell your friends everything's cool."

  "Yo, G," he called out to one of the boys. I lowered my gun. "It's cool. She my friend, man. She just pissed off, it's okay."

  The boy, G, looked at us.

  "It cool," Andray said again. "Just back off, G. We need some space, that's all. She need to calm down."

  G looked at us long and hard. Then he turned to the other boys and led them toward the corner. I inhaled and put my gun away.

  Andray shifted his weight from one foot to the other, eyes wide. He reminded me of everyone I knew in New Orleans—scared of everything he shouldn't have been and accepting what should have terrified him.

  "Where can we talk?" I said.

  He shrugged. He tried to swallow but couldn't and instead he spat.

  "Listen," I said. "I don't want to hurt you. I don't want to shoot you. And I really don't want to kill you. But if you hurt me again, if you try to hurt me again, I will do any and all of those things. Okay?"

  He nodded.

  "And if you don't, I won't," I said. "I like you, Andray. I'd rather be friends. Or at least not kill each other. Okay?"

  He nodded again.

  "Will you get in the car now?" I said.

  "No fuckin' way," he said, shaking his head.

  "Okay," I said. "We'll walk."

  The daiquiri was the national drink of New Orleans. Different chains of daiquiri shops sold them like slushies, in sixteen- or thirty-two- or sixty-four-ounce plastic cups from big machines. There were even daiquiri drive-thrus, although not in this neighborhood. The nearest daiquiri shop to Andray's corner was on St. Charles and Josephine. We walked there silently.

  Inside the daiquiri joint everything was painted black. We got a table in the corner and I got us each a daiquiri, strawberry for Andray and coconut for me. Old soul music came from the speakers, which suited the clientele, mostly my age and up. A few drunk couples danced, but mostly people sat at tables, talking loud and laughing or talking quietly and looking very serious.

  I'd put Andray through a confusing and stressful hour, and when I looked at him now I saw what every foster parent and drug dealer had seen in him before—an ache that would never be relieved but that he would do anything to dull for a while. He looked at me with big, pretty eyes. You did it, the eyes said. Now fix it.

  "Andray," I said. "I know you didn't kill Vic Willing. I'm pretty sure I know what happened to him. But I still need to know why you took me that night, and I need to know what you know about Vic. Because I know you've been lying, and I have to find out the truth. That's what I do. No matter what it is, I promise, no going to the cops, okay?"

  He nodded. I didn't know what he was thinking.

  "Don't believe me because I'm an authority figure," I said. "Believe me because I'm friends with Mick, and he's never been anything but good to you. Believe me because you know me, at least a little bit, and I've been pretty good to you."

  Andray looked away, then looked at me and nodded. He took a deep breath and relaxed a little. So did I. We'd made a deal.

  "What the fuck?" I said. "What was that all about?"

  "Shit," he said. "I'm sorry, Miss Claire."

  "Well, yeah," I said. "But what the fuck? Why'd you do that?"

  Andray sighed deeply. "Shit," he said again. "Those boys I was with—they was looking for you. They heard you saw that kid Deuce almost get shot on Frenchman Street the other day. They wanted to, you know. When I hear them talking about crazy white lady there, see the whole thing, I figure it was you. I told 'em I handle it."

  "You mean they were going to kill me," I said. "They thought I was a witness and they were going to kill me."

  Andray nodded.

  "You stopped them," I said.

  He didn't say anything.

  "That is so fucking noble," I said. "My heart is bursting, Andray. Bursting. As we speak. Why—" I paused. "You hear that? It's the pieces of my heart, falling to the floor."

  He laughed. He looked at me, and for the first time he looked to me like an ordinary boy, with an ordinary smile on his face. In a quick vision I saw what Andray might have been if he had been born anywhere else but here. An endless arc of possibilities flashed before my eyes. None of them involved guns or foster parents or jail.

  "Andray," I said. "I need to know the truth. What happened between you and Vic Willing?"

  He sighed and looked around the room.

  "Look," I said. "I could have had you arrested twice already—once for Vic and once for the other night. I didn't do it either time. Use your head. Can you trust me, or not?"

  He sighed again. I could almost see his mind waver: yes, no, yes, back to no again.

  "Stop sighing," I said. "It's annoying. Think. Can you trust me?"

  Yes, no, yes, no.

  He sighed again.

  Yes.

  "Okay," Andray finally said, decisively. He looked me straight in the eye. "I was there. I knew that fucker have beer and water and shit like that. So I went to get some. I—I been there before."

  I gave him time but he didn't say anything. "When?" I said gently. "When had you been there before?"

  "Mr. Vic," he said, looking at the table. "He paid—shit. If he got you in a case he would. You know. You could work that off. And sometimes, he also paid guys to come to his place with him and, you know." I nodded. I knew. "So I went there a few times
—I mean, I didn't do nothing. I mean, nothing. But he liked people to watch, so I watched. It was easy money. But I only did it a few times. I ain't like that shit at all. Not just 'cause it's two guys. I—I don't know. It was just sad. Just sad all around. Like, one person needing one thing so bad—money—and the other person just needing something else so bad. I—I don't know. Just sad."

  I nodded. I doubted he was telling the truth about just watching, but I didn't care. That was his own business.

  "Why'd you tell people not to talk to me?" I asked.

  "'Cause I knew you ain't believe me," Andray said. "You had your mind already made up. I told everyone they help you, they dead. Besides, most people, they know that without me saying anything. They know you don't talk to cops."

  I mulled it over. It made sense.

  "How did you meet Vic?" I asked.

  "First working on his pool," he said. "That was the truth. And then, like I said, he took me in. We had a nice lunch, told me about the birds and stuff. At first I thought—I thought he was just being nice. He said I reminded him of an old friend. We hung out a few times. I thought he was cool. But then, you know, he said if I needed money we could. So I didn't hang out with him no more after that. But then, once, I really did need the money. I was hungry, I didn't have nothing. So. I think—I think he knew it wasn't right. I do."

  "Why?" I said.

  "'Cause he always apologized afterward," Andray said. "And give you extra money, more than he promised."

  I nodded.

  "So when the storm comes," Andray said, "me and Peanut and Slim and some other boys—you ain't know 'em—we go to get food and water and shit, and we go to Vic's house. We broke right on in."

  "When was that?" I asked. "Exactly?"

  "Wednesday night," Andray said. He swallowed. "'Bout ten, twelve. See, from over there, most people gone by then. Fucking open house over there. So I went over to see what I could get. And Vic, he ain't there. House totally empty—whole neighborhood empty, almost. That it. That the real story."