by Sara Gran
Adam was gone.
The entire office was cleared out. It was like he had never been there at all. Not even an ashtray was left.
I went back out to the hall and looked on the door again. There was an eviction notice from the sheriff taped to the door.
I went and knocked on the closest door. Allied Natural Products. A woman’s voice called for me to come in. I did. It was a big messy office with stacks of boxes everywhere. Most of the boxes were labeled DESSICATED ALOE VERA JUICE DO NOT FREEZE. At a large messy steel desk was a small woman maybe fifty or sixty. A pair of chrome arm/leg braces were leaning against the wall next to her. She smiled at me.
“What do you need?” she said. “You here to see Nate?”
“No,” I said. “I’m here to see Adam. Next door. You know what happened to him?”
She made a sad face. “Adam!” she said. “They kicked him out. Guess he hadn’t paid the rent in I don’t know how long. I mean, he could have fought it. Instead he says, ‘You know what, Marie?’ That’s me—Marie. He says: ‘I’m going home.’ I booked him a flight—I used to be a travel agent, that’s my thing, I just help out here when they need me—anyway, I booked him a flight, he took off last week, says he has no idea if he’s coming back.”
“Home?” I said. “Where’s home?”
“Slovakia,” Marie said. “You didn’t know? I bet you thought: Lithuanian. That’s me. People always get us confused.”
I thanked Marie and asked if Adam had left an address. He had. She copied out a long, complicated Slovakian address on a scrap of paper for me and I thanked her again and left.
Out on the street the sun was like a hammer and I sat in my car and turned up the air-conditioning and tried not to break anything, because I would regret it later. I loved my car.
I needed to get my hours approved by Adam, and notarized, to even apply for a license from the CBSIS. To even begin the process.
At least I didn’t give up, I told myself, thinking of reasons why I might have believed Adam liked me. Why I was maybe not technically insane for thinking someone could have liked me.
At least I didn’t give up.
In my head I tried to compose the letter I would write to Adam when I got back to my typewriter at home.
Dear Mr. Dubinsky,
Hope you are enjoying Slovakia and your family is well. I have completed the additional hours you requested from me, which as you know must be both approved by you and notarized by a notary. Do you think you may return to the States anytime soon? Would it be more convenient if I came to Slovakia? Do they have notaries there?
Thank you for the opportunity to work on the Merritt Underwood Case—
I realized I hadn’t named the case. I had probably never gotten so far into a case before without naming it. Nothing brilliant sprung to mind.
* * *
The case was closed—or so it seemed—and there was nothing to do but tie up my loose ends and go home. Or go find a new home, since I wouldn’t be working in California anymore. Adam Dubinsky was my last chance at getting my license. But I didn’t have anyone else calling up and begging me to relocate to a new state and I’d left a few things back in San Francisco, so I figured I’d head back for a few weeks and think about what to do next. The thought of moving again made something that felt like a lump of coal form in my lower belly.
But here in Los Angeles there was one loose end in particular to be tied up first. And tight.
Back in the Richter building on Wilshire I checked with the receptionist and waited forty minutes before Christopher Collins’s assistant came out to smile and apologize and show me in to Christopher’s office. She left and closed the door behind her. Christopher was at his desk.
He smiled and stood up and said, “Claire, I—” and I took out my .45 and Christopher got a look on his face like I’d just called him ugly and I hit him with the .45 across the face, where his temple and his high, defined cheekbone met. He whimpered and stumbled down and I punched him across the other cheek, hard, with my fist.
Now he fell down. I remembered what he’d looked like naked: pale and thin, physically strong but spiritually weak.
How he’d been hungry. How I’d let him see me.
Christopher reached for his desk—I figured there was some kind of panic button there—and I kicked him away and then crouched down and brought my face close to his.
“Don’t even fucking think about it,” I said.
His face crumpled and tears came to his eyes and he gave up. I kicked him again. The red in front of my eyes turned to black and by the time I could see again he was unconscious and bloody. I checked his pulse. He was alive. His face wouldn’t be so pretty anymore, but he’d live.
For better or worse.
“Next time,” I whispered in Christopher’s ear, in case he could hear me, “I’ll kill you.”
I realized that I was panting and shaking. I sat down on the floor with my knees up and caught my breath. After a minute or two I was still shaking but I could breathe almost normally and see almost clearly.
On Christopher’s desk was a red marker. I took all the diplomas and certificates off his wall and broke them over the coffee table. Then I picked up the marker.
On the now-empty wall I took the marker and wrote CLAIRE DeWITT ALWAYS WINS.
Then I left.
CHAPTER 16
THE CASE OF THE INFINITE BLACKTOP
* * *
Las Vegas, 2011
Outside the printer’s, the sun was beating down on the Nevada desert. The fresh-ish air perked me up enough to realize how close to going down I was. I drove in the general direction of Mattie’s church. I knew I shouldn’t be driving; the edges of my vision were going glittery and black, and my eyelids were pressing down. The shimmering heat on the road seemed to make my eyes heavier. After a few minutes or lifetimes of semi-developed desert punctuated by liquor stores and closed grocery stores I came across a restaurant that looked like it used to be an International House of Pancakes and was now locally owned and called Holiday Pancake House. I parked in the lot, got out of my car, and my knees buckled. I steadied myself and made inside the cool dark pancake house, where a few scattered lonely men sat alone. None of them ate pancakes. All of them ate small steaks or eggs. I got both, a coffee, and a water, and as the words came out of my mouth I realized, as if on cue, how much was lacking in those things: my stomach growled and my mouth felt parched. I ate and drank and took two more of Keith’s pills and had another cup of coffee and felt like maybe, maybe, I could still win.
I paid, left, and got back in my car. I drove around the edge of the desert and the city, in and out of different subdivisions and service roads, about one streetlamp every half mile, looking for Mattie’s church. Finally I realized that the church was somehow part of the small, shabby housing complex I’d driven by eight times. I turned up the desert-sand driveway to a courtyard lit by a few spotlights. On either side was a small apartment building, probably six apartments each, low and painted beige-pink. At the end of the courtyard was a smaller building with two or four apartments. I parked my car and walked behind the small building at the end of the courtyard. The desert air was still hot and it was nearly black.
Behind the smaller building was a tiny trailer-type building with dark fake-wood paneling that made me guess the trailer was about thirty years old. Maybe seven hundred square feet. A floodlight above the front door lit up the fifty square feet in front of it. That was the church.
Inside eight people sat in a circle in mismatched folding chairs. Other than that the trailer was bare. In the eight there was Mattie, in the same outfit from work; four other women; two other men; and Howie. I couldn’t say exactly why I knew it was Howie, but I did.
I guessed Howie was in his late sixties, white, with a beard and combed-back hair. He wore boot-cut jeans, boots, and a trim T-shirt. He was the kind of man who shrunk as he aged, compacting into a wiry little cricket.
Everyone turned to look at me
when I opened the door. As I stood on the threshold of the trailer, the gears spinning inside me slowed down enough for me to realize where I was and what I was doing.
Maybe I was solving my mystery.
Maybe I was solving everything.
“Well there she is,” said Mattie. I apologized for walking in late. She told me not to worry about it and to grab a seat. I sat between two of the women, both of whom smiled at me as I sat down.
“Now,” Mattie said, “we were just talking about how complicated life can be. We all say we want to be good. I mean, most of us do. You hardly ever meet anyone who says they want to be a bad person.
“But wanting to be good isn’t being good. And being good isn’t always so easy. Even knowing what good is isn’t always so easy. Sometimes what people need isn’t really so nice. I mean, you see a little baby crawling into traffic, you don’t say well now can you please not. You see a man trying to kill another man, you can’t just tell him he ought to be better. He knows that already. I mean, earlier in the process, maybe just being nice is enough. I can think of days where one kind word saved my life. But there’s other times when it’s just too late for that. We have to make hard decisions. Sometimes the kind thing is the cruel thing. And sometimes we’re just looking for an excuse to be cruel.”
I don’t think I’m going to make it, I said to the mouse. But the mouse was nowhere around.
I was alone.
It was black-dark out through the windows of the trailer. You could feel the heat come up from the desert sand, feel the sunlight trapped there, fermenting into something stagnant and strange.
Mattie went on—
“The older I get, the less I understand. I don’t know what it would mean to be really good. I think sometimes we get caught up in trying to tell the world something about ourselves. Maybe even trying to tell ourselves about ourselves, you know, trying to keep up an idea of ourselves we can live with. But I think sometimes we need to stop worrying about all that and just do something. Just look for ways to help and then just try to help. Water a plant. Feed an animal. Help the people you see every day. We don’t have to make some big controversy over it, or get wrapped up in some drama. We make things so complicated. All we have to do is just be a little bit better than we are, and keep heading that way. It doesn’t have to feel good. You don’t have to like it. And you can have your doubts about it, too. You just have to do it.
“God tells us so little, and asks so much. There’s this lady in my building. She’s got two little kids, one’s a baby, actually, and her man left and she’s scared. She’s really scared about what’s going to happen next. So am I. I’m scared for her. There’s not a lot of help out there for people like her. So there’s a little bowl over there and if you can put something in there for her, please do that. Also, if anyone has a Costco membership, we all know what diapers and wipes and all that cost. I’m sure getting a week or two’s worth of diapers would mean just about everything to her right now. I think that could really just change everything for her. I would really, really like for her to believe the world is on her side right about now. Maybe we can make that happen for her. I hope so.
“Well, I guess that’s it for tonight. Hope everyone has a good night and see y’all on Sunday.”
Everyone stood up except me and Mattie and Howie. The six others chatted about traffic and the weather on their way out.
I was no longer at all sure that this was real and that I wasn’t dreaming. Supposedly you couldn’t see time in a dream. I looked at my phone. The time was blurry but then I rubbed my eyes and it was less so.
I popped another pill and washed it down with bad church coffee. But I knew that each pill would have diminishing effects. I was likely as wired as I was getting. From now on, if I kept myself standing, it would be pure will.
Mattie said, “Howie, I think you can help this lady with something.”
“I’ll try,” he said.
I noticed that none of them had asked me my name, or anything about me. I showed Howie the Cynthia Silverton pages. He took them and turned the pages carefully, looking over each one.
“Look at the gutters,” Mattie said. “Look at the colors. I don’t know who could’ve done it.”
Howie looked the pages over for another long minute and then he looked up with a wide bright-eyed smile and said, “Look at this. This right here is something very special, young lady.”
None of us were young but we all knew he meant me. Mattie and I looked at him. Mattie’s eyes were wide and joyful.
“This little book,” he said, “was printed by Songbird Press.”
“Well my word,” said Mattie. She looked delighted. “Well, just. I mean. Who would’ve.”
They both looked at me, smiling like cats with mouths full of feathers.
“I bet you’d like to know what we’re talking about,” Mattie said.
“I would,” I said. “I really, really would.”
“All right,” Howie said. “I’m going to tell you about Songbird Press. And I think we might just about blow each other’s minds.”
Out behind the church a few picnic tables were set up under more spotlights on a patch of gravel. We sat at one of them and Howie told me about Songbird Press. It looked like things were moving around us in the dark desert as my chemical cocktail brought the shadows to life: coyotes; wolves; men; a sea of Rorschach ink.
“Look at this—”
Howie pointed to the same circular marks in the gutters—the inner margins of the pages—that Mattie had pointed at earlier. On another page was a different set of marks in the gutter—a series of small bars in different shades of black and gray.
“You see that?” he said. “Now this right here, this is not a perfect reproduction, because one of many things Songbird is famous for is the colors. Darn near perfect colors. Perfect blacks. This isn’t so perfect. But this here, that’s their test patterns. No one does it quite like that. God—I mean, gosh darn. Sorry Mattie. OK. So about 1976, there was a man named Pakshee. He’s long gone now. Anyway, he was working over at EZ—EZ press over in Henderson—”
Mattie made a little snort-laugh sound.
“They’re not the best,” Mattie said by explanation.
“It is not a high-quality shop,” Howie said diplomatically. “You know what they say: a job can be good, fast, or cheap—you can pick two. Well, with them maybe you’d be lucky to hit one. But to be honest, plenty of other shops in town are nearly as bad. So, this is back in, maybe, 1976? So anyway, Nick Pakshee, he was running the floor there—well, the story is that one day he saw a cocktail menu come off the presses so out of register, with such muddy colors, such ridiculous type—just so shabby, just so bad, just so shameful—that he walked off in disgust. He was just ashamed to have anything to do with it. Just sick about the whole thing.
“Pakshee disappeared for about a year after that. I mean, disappear is a big word. The authorities weren’t involved or anything. Let me put it like this: I sure as—uh, something, don’t know where he was for that year. And I don’t know where he got the backing. But just about a year later, he had his own shop up and running. It was like something magic, the way it rose up out of the desert. Seemed like it went up overnight. And then all the machinery—every day there was something new. Offset and also letterpress and a little stamping and die cutting and, if I remember right, even some hand binding. I’m not sure if I am remembering it right.
“Now, this was a full-service shop of the kind that just doesn’t exist anymore. Your workman pamphlets and menus and all that, but he could also do some very fine printing. Hand-set type. Foils. He had some very fancy people take notice, I tell you. Quality people.”
I asked Howie if he knew any way I could find out who had had the comic book printed.
He thought for a long moment and then said, “No. I don’t see how you could. Everything burned. I can’t imagine anyone had copies of any—”
But for the first time since the Lincoln hit me I f
elt some kind of certainty in my heart. I knew that he knew more. Life was often cruel and usually unfair and often pretty fucking unbearable.
But now, with my lack of sleep and blood loss and trauma imposing on me what I was pretty sure they meant when they said a natural high—on top of all the drugs and their gift of unnatural highs—now it seemed obvious that as vicious as life could and would be, there was a logic to it. It wasn’t a logic a human could understand, but it was there nonetheless, and sometimes, if you let nature and pills open enough doors, you could just barely see the edges of it, see the shadow of the patterns, even if your eyes weren’t wide enough to see the patterns themselves.
Howie stopped talking for a minute and looked out at the black desert and then said, “Well, maybe,” and I felt my heart skip a beat.
Everything was real and everything was true.
Everything mattered.
I popped two more pills in my mouth and swallowed them with a bottle of water I didn’t remember acquiring but was in my hand nonetheless.
The desert sparkled and roared.
I took a third pill to celebrate.
I was solving a mystery.
CHAPTER 17
THE CLUE OF THE CHARNEL HOUSE
* * *
New York City, 1985
It was the Case of the Stolen Seashell. You don’t know what little things can mean to a person—a seashell, a paperback book, a piece of plastic jewelry—not unless you’re a detective. Then you see. All the big things in life, the enormous transitions in and out of existence, in and out of partnership, motions through and across space—if you trace them back to their origins, all of them start with something small. A look that came out wrong. A misplaced word. One single egg and one lonely, lustful interloper.
The Case of the Stolen Seashell had started off as That Case Where That Lady Stole Her Sister’s House. It wasn’t until months of work that Kelly and Tracy and I found out its true name and the true origins.
