by Sara Gran
He sounded like he was talking to a bill collector. We hung up. I called Andray back. His voice mail picked up.
“Hey,” I said. “It’s Claire. So I just talked to Mick and he doesn’t sound so good. I was thinking maybe you could go see him? See if he’s okay? I think they let him out of the hospital too early and I also think, you know. I don’t know how safe he is.”
Andray didn’t call me back and neither did Mick.
I canceled my ticket and didn’t go to New Orleans. Instead I did the rest of the coke and cleaned my apartment, meaning I moved stacks of unpaid bills and unopened mail from one table to another. I put unfiled papers closer to the file cabinets and put all my scraps of paper with very important notes on them (Nate DIDN'T HAVE THE LEMONADE. Fingerprints don’t match, 1952–58. Sylvia DeVille, DOB 12/2/71, not in system, likely not an abortion.) in a pile on the kitchen counter. I put the dishes in the sink. When the apartment was cleaner it felt empty and alone, like a tomb I might not escape from, and I got dressed and went out as quickly as I could. It was after midnight. I went to a bar in North Beach and ordered a beer and then a scotch and then another beer, and when a man I’d never met before asked if he could buy me another drink I said yes. He asked me what I did.
“I’m a private detective,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said with a little smile, thinking he knew, “and I’m a cowboy.”
15
AND THEN THERE WAS the Case of the Missing Miniature Horses. I took the case twenty-five days after Paul died. A man named Ellwood James had a ranch near Point Reyes, north of San Francisco, in Marin County. Ellwood James was the cousin-in-law of the district attorney of San Francisco, and he raised miniature horses. It was a surprise to see just how miniature the horses were. The tallest was three and half feet, on all fours. The horses looked a little sad and ashamed that they weren’t going to grow anymore. They reminded me of the kids from Flowers in the Attic, never growing after being locked in an attic a few years too long.
Ellwood James thought that someone was stealing his horses.
“I started off with one fifty,” he said. He sounded like a real rancher, as if he were talking about heads of cattle. “Births, deaths, what have you, six months in I got ninety-nine. Someone is stealing my horses.”
My theory was that the little fellows were running away to try to get some big boy genes back in the mix, or maybe committing suicide. I made a mental note to research equine suicides.
He took me around the ranch. Your basic low-security operation. I explained to him that if he wanted to stop the thefts, he needed to put up some higher fences, some lights, and maybe some razor wire. If he wanted to find out who, if anyone, was stealing the little guys, he’d be better leaving things as they were and investing in some surveillance.
Ellwood also bred peacocks.
“Peafowl,” he corrected me, using the gender-neutral term. “Peacock’s a male, peahen’s the female.”
He looked up; I followed his eyes to see a ring of vultures closing in.
“Goddamn it,” he said. We followed the vultures and walked across the pasture, tiny horses in all colors roaming and grazing. Dandelions and little purple flowers I couldn’t name dotted the green grass. The sky was so blue it almost hurt to look at it.
When we’d reached a hundred feet or so we saw what the vultures were so eager for. A dead peacock. Maybe a peahen.
“Goddamn it,” Ellwood said again. “Damn things were supposed to live to twenty.”
“Maybe she was twenty,” I said.
Ellwood nodded. Neither of us knew how to date peafowl, that was for sure.
A vulture swooped down and landed ten or fifteen feet from us.
“Might as well let her have it,” Ellwood said, and we walked back across the pasture.
“Not much of a job for a private eye,” I said.
“I want to know who’s doing this,” Ellwood said. “A man has his honor. His pride.”
I wasn’t sure where honor and pride fit into shrinking horses. When we got close to the barn one of the little guys, all black with a glossy coat, came toward me. I crouched down and we looked at each other. He looked sad and wise.
“I see your point,” I said to Ellwood. “But what I charge’ll cost more than you’re losing.”
“Money is not an issue,” Ellwood James said.
Magic words.
I took the case.
From Ellwood James’s place I drove back to the 101 and up to Sonoma County and got off near Santa Rosa and drove out to the Spot of Mystery. The Spot of Mystery was one of those places where a very mysterious house slid down a very mysterious hill and now defied every known law of physics, if you squinted just right. Other highlights included a gift shop, a petting zoo of fainting goats, hot springs, and some extremely tall redwoods with names like Old Buddy and Faithful Susan.
Jake, the man who ran the Spot of Mystery, was a retired police detective from San Francisco. In the cabins behind the main building he ran a kind of halfway house for detectives and cops, men and women who were halfway between one mystery and another. I told him I needed some people for surveillance and he said he would set it up. I trusted him to do it right. I ran down the plan for him and gave him some cash to start paying two people. I would have my assistant, Claude, check in with Jake once a day and monitor the situation.
I went to say hello to the goats. They remembered me from a stint I’d spent with them a few years back. I wondered if they liked what they saw. Probably not. I told myself I didn’t care.
That was the Case of the Missing Miniature Horses.
16
ON THE THIRTIETH DAY after Paul died I heard from the cops about the bullets. There were no matches—it was a new gun, or at least one unknown to the national database. I’d been through his house a few times since the day of the crime and found absolutely nothing interesting. Both the cops and I tried fingerprinting the place and got nowhere—Paul and Lydia had people over a lot, and their house wasn’t small. There were hundreds of partials, a few clear impressions, but no matches. The stolen instruments, which I thought would be the clincher, still hadn’t shown up. Since the murder I’d gotten a rough list from Lydia of what was stolen and I’d sent alerts to every pawnshop and music store I could find. Like a lot of musicians Paul was constantly buying and selling instruments, so it was hard to pin down exactly what was missing. The case had gotten a lot of media attention and been in all the papers, and I figured the thief—who was likely also the murderer—knew that, and was sitting on the gear to sell it when things cooled down.
I went back to Paul’s house again. I talked to his neighbors. No witnesses. No one heard anything except the neighbor who’d heard the shot to begin with.
The neighbor’s name was Freddie. Freddie was a white man, somewhere between fifty and a million, who seemed like the least happy person on earth. He seemed like a man who had devoted his life to misery.
He had on a worn bathrobe over pajama bottoms and a T-shirt and fake leather slippers that had seen better days, although I think it would be fair to say that none of their days had been exactly good. We stood on the steps of his house. It was foggy and cold. Living in San Francisco was a war of endurance. I knew many people who had, after years of winning, one day lost the battle with the fog and moved back east or down south.
“With the noise around here,” Freddie said. “I mean, the Mexicans and now these club kids or hipsters or whatever. And the musicians. Everyone’s a musician.”
His kind, the cranky-middle-aged-white-men of the world, weren’t exactly known for their silence, but I let it go. I also didn’t mention that his house was worth approximately a billion dollars and he could easily move to a neighborhood with fewer Mexican club kids if he chose.
“But you knew it was a gunshot,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “living around here, you learn. You know, the Mexicans.”
“And the Salvadorans,” I added. “And I think some are Guatema
lan.”
“Exactly.”
“So you went over,” I said.
He nodded. “I don’t know what I was thinking. What am I gonna do if someone’s shooting? But I went, took a look, didn’t see anything obvious, called the cops.”
It was the world’s most boring story.
I hugged myself against the cold. The fog of the Kali Yuga. Paul deserved so much better. He deserved a grand theft, a jewel heist, murder by a crazed fan. Paul deserved to die in a duel, to tumble down the Himalayas, to be mauled by wildcats on the Serengeti. Instead, some asshole wanted his guitars, shot Paul, and took them. He should have been killed in a high-speed chase in a Lamborghini, poisoned by a duchess, taken out with the candlestick in the conservatory.
Or he could have just lived.
“This neighborhood,” Freddie said. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
It should have been you, I thought but didn’t say. You should have died and Paul should have lived.
“Maybe the Mexicans will move out,” I said. “Go back to Spain.”
“Maybe,” he said. “I don’t think so. I think they like it here.”
I looked at Paul’s house. Flyers and phone books were starting to pile up by the front door.
Maybe all the Mexicans would move out and Freddie could have his shitty neighborhood back again. Maybe everyone would move out, maybe everyone would die, maybe everyone would realize that life really was as dreary and awful as Freddie told them it was, as it seemed today, and there would be a mass suicide and Freddie could have the whole world all to himself.
Freddie and I stood on his porch and looked at the fog around us. At the Kali Yuga.
“Mysteries never end,” Silette wrote. “And we solve them anyway, knowing we are solving both everything and nothing. We solve them knowing the world will surely be as poorly or even worse off than before. But this is the piece of life we have been given authority over, nothing else; and while we may ask why over and over, no one yet has been given an answer.”
17
AFTER FORTY-ONE DAYS PAUL'S Bronco turned up in an impound lot in Oakland. They wouldn’t let me see it. I’d tried looking for it and gotten nowhere. Lydia was barely able to get out of bed the first three weeks, so she wasn’t looking. She’d been spending most of her time up in Sonoma County, in a house Paul had on Bohemian Highway. I didn’t blame her. No one wanted to live in a murder scene. I’d called her a few times and she didn’t feel like talking much. I didn’t blame her for that, either.
The car had been found on the Bay Bridge early in the morning the day after Paul died. But with the DMV being the DMV and with Lydia not checking the mail, no one made the connection until now. I’d called and the cops had called, but that’s life sometimes.
“It was the alternator,” Ramirez told me over the phone. I was home. I’d called him four times before I caught him by surprise by calling from a different phone, a cheap disposable cell. “Probably driving the car, lost steering, got scared, pulled over to the shoulder, and either called for help or flagged down a passing motorist or a patrol car.”
While I talked to Ramirez I felt something in my chest and I found the remains of a bag of coke I’d gotten from Tabitha and snorted a bit off the tip of a key.
That night I drove to the Bay Bridge, which I’d driven over many times but never driven to. At about the middle of the bridge I pulled over to the shoulder and put my hazards on. I checked my phone: no reception. He must have gotten lucky with highway patrol or a good Samaritan coming to his aid. There never seemed to be any bad Samaritans. But what did I know?
Back in my car, I did another bump to kill the strong dark thing that was screaming in my chest.
18
ON SUNDAY NIGHTS I usually had dinner with Claude to talk about what we’d done or hadn’t done the previous week and would or wouldn’t do in the week to come. I didn’t have an office—that would only encourage people—and so Claude worked sometimes from his place in Berkeley and sometimes at my apartment. That Sunday, forty days after Paul died, we went to the Enlightened Mistress’s place. Claude was keeping a close eye on our miniature horse ops and I gave him an A+. There was nothing to report on the Case of the Kali Yuga—no clues, no hunches, no suspects. Around us a few big Chinese families had Sunday supper. It was damp and cold outside and everyone in the restaurant seemed to have either a hot cup of tea or a bowl of soup in front of them. Some days in San Francisco it seemed like the weather moved inside of you and the chill was something you would take with you wherever you went, forever.
That night I spoke to Lydia on the phone. She was in the house on Bohemian Highway.
She was doing as well as you could expect. She had a lot of friends to help her with the practical stuff. But she said no one talked to her about Paul. About how he was dead now, and gone, and never coming back. Instead they said things like “He’s home now” or “He’s with the angels” or “His suffering is over now.” It was as if, Lydia said, they thought she didn’t know he was dead.
“It’s like they haven’t fucking grasped that he’s dead,” she said. “I mean, it’s like they think I don’t know how bad it is so they shouldn’t fucking tell me.”
She sounded angry. Most people shy away from death, seal themselves off from widows and widowers and grieving parents as if losing the people you love is contagious. But if death is contagious, I was already infected.
“So I’ve got a case near you,” I said. “Point Reyes. These miniature horses.”
“Horses?” she said. “What, did they do something?”
“Maybe,” I said. One of them did look pretty guilty, a mini-palomino with murder in her eyes. “How about I take you out for a cup of coffee next time I’m up there?”
“Sure,” she said. “Let me know.”
“Oh,” I said. “And the keys.”
No one had ever found Paul’s house keys. Was the murderer planning to come back? Steal whatever was left to steal?
“Can I have a set?” I asked. “I wanted to check something in the house again.”
“Sure,” she said. “I’ll mail a set to your place. So, yeah, let me know when you’re coming up. We’ll get a coffee.”
But she said it as if it was just another promise the world was going to break, another bitter cup she’d have to drink.
19
LATER THAT NIGHT I tried Mick again. I called him once or twice a week. He never answered. I got Mick’s voice mail. I called Andray. He also didn’t answer.
There weren’t many people who wanted to talk to me, it seemed. I thought of other people I could call who wouldn’t answer. People who were dead or people who were gone or people who hated me or just didn’t like me.
It wasn’t like anything had happened. I knew Mick wasn’t angry at me. He just had never liked me that much to begin with. I knew he kind of sort of loved me, but that isn’t the same as liking someone. If I’d been almost dead he’d probably call me and I probably wouldn’t pick up. Neither of us was doing very well or really even passing the grade with this humanity business.
I hung up and lit another joint and tried to sleep. I tossed and turned for a while, and when I did fall asleep I had nightmares: Mick was underwater, locked in some kind of glass box, like Houdini. It started off as an act but then he couldn’t get out. He didn’t have his keys; he’d had them when he’d come in and lost them somewhere inside. His air was running out and he couldn’t escape. He didn’t have his keys . . .
When I woke up I felt sick to my stomach, a terrible anxiety as if I’d lost something important and irreplaceable. It was three in the morning. I couldn’t fall back asleep. I got up and made a pot of chamomile tea with rosebuds and mint.
I went over the case again. The keys. So someone cared little enough about Paul to kill him and steal his guitars, but cared enough to lock the door behind them.
Or maybe they didn’t know they’d killed Paul and figured by locking him in the house they’d get a head start. Maybe
they’d just shot him and hadn’t known how well they’d hit their target. The police would have all kinds of tests and analysis by now that would explain how close or far the shooter had been. They wouldn’t share it with me, so it didn’t matter. And besides, I didn’t particularly trust any of it.
I wrote Keys on a piece of paper and added it to my stack of very important scraps of paper on the kitchen counter. I stared at it for a while and nothing brilliant or interesting came to me. Nothing at all. I checked my phone. Paul’s sister, Emily, had called again. I deleted her message without listening to it.
There was a message from Kelly. Kelly from Brooklyn. I hadn’t heard from her since I was in New Orleans.
Hey, (mumble mumble) it’s me (phone drop)—call me.
I didn’t call either of them back. I put a Maria Callas record on my record player and smoked another joint and gave up on sleep. Instead I lay in bed and thought about the horses, so sad and crying because they would never grow up, trapped in a living death in their tiny bodies, living in the attic with that cruel grandmother . . .
I stood in the pasture at Point Reyes with the little black horse I’d seen at the ranch, the horse with the glossy coat and wise eyes. It was night, and the moon was round and full behind him. I gave him a tiny bottle of potion and he grew into a big, strapping stallion. He reared up on his hind legs and roared.
“Your science will not confuse me,” he roared. “Your lies will not stop me from knowing the truth.”
20
Brooklyn
WE’D FOUND ACE Apocalypse’s shooting schedule for The End of the World in Chloe’s room. The next shooting day was Friday. They were filming CC and Vanishing Center at a loft in Brooklyn. We hoped we’d find her before then, but if not we could find Ace at the loft in Brooklyn and see what he knew.
