Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

by Sara Gran

  We shook our heads. Ben looked at us and sighed. He closed his eyes and drew one hand down his face, like he was trying to wipe something away that wouldn’t come off.

  “Dope,” he finally said, opening his eyes.

  “What?” Tracy said. “Chloe? Heroin?”

  Ben nodded and opened his eyes. “I thought you were her stupid little dope friends. Some of them have been in looking for her.”

  “Wait,” I said. I got out my notebook and my pen. “When did Chloe start using?”

  Ben raised his eyebrows. “Six month ago, maybe. Maybe longer—I don’t know anymore. She made these new friends. That’s who I thought you guys were—sorry about that. This whole crowd of little fucking sluts, fucking skeeves. These girls, Soon Yi and Nico, and all those trashy little sluts they hang out with.”

  Soon Yi, I wrote down. Nico. Trashy little sluts. We knew them.

  “How about those other trashy little sluts?” I asked. “Know any of their names?”

  “Hmm,” Ben said. “One of them is called Cathy, she’s this girl from the projects. And there’s Georgia, this little girl who I actually think is homeless—I think she stays with Cathy most of the time.”

  We knew Cathy and Georgia too.

  “Is that why you guys stopped seeing each other?” I asked. “Dope?”

  Ben nodded. He looked sad and I was sorry I had asked. I was sorry I’d had to ask.

  “I was so in love with her,” he said. “I was going to—I was hoping we would, you know. I thought we’d stay together. I mean, I know she was young, but she was so fucking mature. She was, like, you know, a regular person. Not like a kid at all. And then she started that. I wasn’t mad at her. Not at first. I thought she was just experimenting, just trying, and hey, I’ve done it. I’ve done pretty much everything. I couldn’t really tell her not to. But then. You know how it goes. It was every weekend and then every night and then every day.”

  “You broke up with her?” I asked. “Or did she end it?”

  “Neither of us did, really,” Ben said. “That’s the fucked-up thing. We just stopped. She started spending less and less time with me and then when she did, we were fighting.”

  “About drugs?” Tracy asked.

  “Yes,” Ben said. “No. Everything.” He sighed. “When I first met Chloe, she was this amazing, smart, together girl. She had a great job, her own place, totally responsible. She seemed totally, you know. Totally sane.”

  “And then?” I asked.

  “And then it started to, like, unravel,” Ben said. “Not just the drugs. Hanging out with those fucked-up girls, going out too much, not paying bills, not returning phone calls. It was like she was starting to fall apart around the edges. Or like she never was that responsible, together girl at all. Like she was always this totally fucked-up chick underneath and she had just done a really good job covering it up all this time. And she just couldn’t do it anymore. I mean, God, fuck, I felt terrible.”

  “You tried to help her?” Tracy asked.

  “Of course,” Ben said. “I tried talking to her, yelling at her, telling her I loved her, everything. But she just kept, like, running away. What I said mattered less and less.”

  “When was the last fight?” I asked.

  “The last fight,” Ben said. “Well, one night I came home and she was there with a bunch of her little skeeve friends. And they were getting high, right there in my place. Just sitting around passing a little bag of dope like it was nothing. Nodding out on my living room floor. Mine. And I—you guys don’t know this, but my mom is an addict. And I have a rule in my house, which is No drugs. Like I said, I’ve tried everything, and I don’t judge. But that’s the house I grew up in, and that’s not the house I want to live in anymore.”

  We nodded. We both understood that.

  “So I kicked her friends out,” Ben went on. “And Chloe, well, she was high. I guess I should have let her sleep it off or something. But I was, you know, freaking out. So I just lost it. I just started yelling at her. I love you, what the fuck are you doing. What happened to you. And she just laughed. She sat on the floor, her eyes all, like, rolling back in her head and shit. And she was laughing.”

  Ben shook his head. There was something else. Something he wasn’t saying. I saw it in the way he wrinkled his brow, the way the whites of his eyes dimmed.

  “She said something,” I said. “Something to you.”

  “Yeah,” he began softly. “She said. She said. She said she knew I never really loved her anyway. And then I really lost it, and I threw a glass at her—not at her, but at the wall above her. Because, she had to know—I mean, I had done everything. Everything I could.” He frowned again. “Everything I knew about, at least. I mean, what the fuck do I know about love?”

  We sat at the bar and didn’t look at each other’s eyes. For the first time I noticed the tattoo on his arm was still dark, and nearly new. LOVE KILLS.

  “There’s this book,” Tracy said, looking at her shot glass. “This guy, he says, ‘The teller has no responsibility to make the listener believe in the truth. Each must take the words and make them their own. No one can do this for another.’ That’s what he says in this book we like.”

  This book we liked. Like this air we breathed, this sun that shone on us.

  Ben frowned and looked at Tracy.

  “You think so?” he said.

  “Absolutely,” Tracy said.

  Ben and Tracy looked at each other and something passed between them—a secret handshake, a code word. The moment passed as quickly as it’d come. Ben poured us each a shot of tequila and knocked on the bar, telling us in the ancient code of bartenders that the drinks were on the house. We thanked him and we threw back our shots and he poured us another round.

  “So,” I said, bringing us back to topic. “That was the last time you saw her?

  “Yeah,” he said. “I left the apartment and stayed out pretty much all night. When I came back she was gone. The next day I changed my locks. A few weeks later, I changed my phone number. I never wanted to see her again.”

  “So the skeeves and whores,” I asked. “They’ve been around looking for her?”

  “A few times,” Ben said. “They didn’t seem concerned or anything. Just mentioned they hadn’t heard from her.”

  None of us said anything. A customer came in. Ben left to get him a drink and came back.

  “Tell me something else,” Tracy said. “Tell me something about Chloe.”

  Ben took a deep breath.

  “I loved her,” he said. “And I never want to see her again as long as I fucking live.”

  A few more customers came in and Ben left to take care of them, finishing his second shot before he did.

  “You know where we can find them?” I asked Tracy. “Cathy and Georgia?”

  “Maybe,” Tracy said. “Got some quarters?”

  I dug some change out of my bag and Tracy went to the pay phone in the back. She came back twenty minutes later with information.

  “Chris Garcia, this guy I know who slept with her a few times, says Cathy hangs out at Cherry Tavern.”

  “And where Cathy is,” I said, “Georgia will be nearby.”

  I knew Georgia. I hated Georgia. I thought of her pretty face and her dark eyes and something in me burned hot.

  Sometimes it seemed like every teenager in New York was separated by only two or three degrees. Like it was a secret world you gained admittance to at fourteen and left at twenty, swearing never to repeat what you’d seen. No one would believe us, anyway.

  24

  San Francisco

  FIFTY DAYS AFTER Paul died I drove across the Bay Bridge to Oakland. I passed the spot where Paul had left his car and thought I might feel something and I didn’t. Or so I told myself. Traffic on the highway was bad and I got off at the wrong exit and ended up stuck in traffic in downtown Oakland. It was like downtown Brooklyn—a lot of beautiful old buildings, built for the respectable middle-class shopper, now f
illed with “New York style” clothing stores and shops that sold gold teeth and fish-and-chips restaurants and, now, medical marijuana joints. A few old holdouts like I. Magnin somehow held on by their nails.

  Homeless people congregated under an awning at Broadway and Thirteenth, trying to stay dry as it started to rain. A few blocks farther a man in a wheelchair weaved in and out of traffic, asking for change, his wheels slippery on the wet pavement. He knocked on my window. I didn’t want to open it.

  He kept knocking. The light changed but I didn’t go—I wasn’t sure how close the man was, if the wheels of his chair intersected with the wheels of my battered Mercedes. He was annoying, but I didn’t want to kill him.

  “Bitch!” he spat. “Bitch. In your fancy car. You give me some money.”

  I looked around. From the sidewalk two cops watched. They didn’t do anything and they didn’t look like they would anytime soon.

  The man banged on my window.

  “Bitch!”

  People behind me honked.

  “Bitch! You give me some money, bitch.”

  I leaned on the horn. The man didn’t seem to notice and didn’t move.

  “Fuckin’ bitch in a Mercedes. You gonna give me something.”

  Behind me more horns honked. Finally the cops stepped toward us.

  The man wheeled himself away, screaming in the rain.

  I wound my way through downtown, made a few more wrong turns, and finally righted myself going up the mountain. Sick of my car, I stopped at the first park entrance I found, parked, and entered the woods by a hiking trail.

  The rain stopped. In a half mile I veered off and followed a deer path up a hill. Mushrooms bloomed on either side of the trail. I didn’t see another person until in ten or fifteen minutes I heard a woman’s voice, singing lightly in Spanish. After a few more minutes I came across a group of ten or twelve people in a clearing, about half of them indigenous people from somewhere in the southern part of the Americas—my guess was Peru, although I wouldn’t have bet on it. Most of them were lying around not really doing anything, but two of them, a tiny indigenous woman and a tall white woman, were standing.

  The indigenous woman sang. The white woman said, “As the medicine starts to take effect, you might start to see things. These things might seem real, or they might not. But try to remember what you see. No two people will see the same things. These are private communications to you from the spirit of the vine.”

  I climbed higher up the mountain. Near the top I veered off to another trail, this one fainter. In half an hour or so the trail took me around the mountain to the other side. No one was around; no one I could see, at least.

  Finding landmarks in the woods wasn’t easy for me. I’d lived most of my life in cities, and most trees looked alike to my untrained eye. But after a few wrong turns I found the spot I was looking for, a ring of redwoods around a giant stump, blackened and hardened by fire. When a redwood dies five or ten more grow in a circle around the remains of the mother. It’s how they reproduce. This grove had been hit by fire, maybe back in the Oakland fires in the eighties, maybe a hundred years ago. A few trees in the circle had holes burned in their bases, caves big enough for a small person to curl up in. But they were still strong.

  Sitting on a big rock nearby was the Red Detective.

  “Look at you,” he said. “You got so many lies on you, you ain’t even know the truth no more.”

  I shrugged and sat next to him.

  “You wanna read cards?” he asked. “Or you just wanna sit?”

  “I think I just wanna sit,” I said.

  “Too bad,” he said. “I wanna read cards.”

  From his pocket he pulled out his dirty old Rider-Waite tarot deck and shuffled and pulled a card. The Moon.

  “Told you so,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  The Red Detective was not ever actually a detective, not in the way most people think of it. He never had any clients or solved cases. Instead he’d spent most of his life on the other side, committing crimes and getting caught for it. He had a heavy southern accent that showed his parents’ origins in Louisiana—a southern accent is common in Oakland, where it seems half the population can trace their roots to Louisiana or Alabama. By the time he was thirty-three, they say, and I don’t know if they’re right, he’d spent more than half his life in jail. He was out for three months when they got him for murder, first degree. It was a life sentence, no questions asked, if he lost the trial.

  After that the story gets dim. In Oakland they say he knew how to work roots and that he “fixed” the judge, who threw the trial out on a technicality. In Berkeley, of course, they say that’s racist. They say he used his intellect to find a technical loophole the judge and all the lawyers had overlooked, that his brilliant mind, honed from years of jailhouse lawyering, outlawyered the law. In San Francisco they say it was a woman, that the Red Detective was a pimp and one of his women worked on the judge until he gave in and found a reason to throw the case out.

  The Silettians have another story. The Silettians say that in prison, the Red Detective read Détection. And although the book makes sense to almost no one else, it made sense to him. And using what he learned in that book, combined with his army of prison and street acquaintances, he found the real killer—because he had not, after all, committed the murder he had been charged with, although surely he had committed others.

  But Silettians don’t worry about justice. That’s for courts and judges. Silettians worry about one thing only, and that’s the truth.

  In any case, the Red Detective was now free. Of course, he wasn’t the Red Detective back then. He was, maybe, just Red. Free, but, the story goes, with nothing—no friends, no family, no money, no place to stay. First he stayed on the streets of downtown Oakland for a while, moving in and out of shelters, following the clues to learn what the streets had to teach him. Slowly, a few blocks at a time, he started moving up the mountain.

  I’d met him on the Case of the Washboard Killer. I’d heard about him for years but had not exactly believed he was real. Back then he was not quite up the mountain and into the woods. He was still in downtown Oakland, huddling under awnings to stay dry. He pointed out to me the clue I’d so stupidly missed: the killer had dirt under his fingernails long after he claimed to have left the park. Sometimes we are so blind. He didn’t talk to most people and wouldn’t have talked to me at all except he knew who I was; he and Constance had exchanged letters when he was locked up. I set the Red Detective up in a little place in Berkeley for a while, but he didn’t dig it at all. That was when he started to see that the woods were the place for him. He never thanked me, but he never forgot me either, and if I needed a pair of fresh eyes on a case he was always around.

  “This missing girl case,” he said. “That’s why you come up here all in a funk.”

  “It’s not a missing girl case,” I said. “It’s a murder case.”

  “Every case is a missing girl case,” he said. “There’s no murder case, robbery case, missing girl case. Every case is every case.”

  I nodded.

  “I see that,” I said. “I do. There’s a lot going here. Definitely robbery. Definitely murder. But I don’t see a missing girl case.”

  “You find that girl,” he said, “you solve your case.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “That’s extremely un-fucking-helpful.”

  He laughed.

  “Good luck,” he said, still laughing a little. “Good luck with that missing girl.”

  25

  THE NEXT DAY I turned the poker chip from Paul’s house over to Claude. The chip was for fifty dollars. It didn’t have a casino name on it. I asked him to look into it.

  “Right,” Claude said. “Of course.” Then he blinked. “No. I don’t really understand what I’m supposed to do with that. Sorry.”

  “Start with where it came from,” I said. Then I realized Claude didn’t know how to do that. “The first thing to look f
or is a maker’s mark of some kind. So go over the thing with a magnifying glass. There’s a few reference books on poker chips for collectors. They’ll have them at the big library at Civic Center. So go there next. And if that doesn’t pan out, I know a guy.”

  “A guy?” Claude said.

  “A guy,” I said. “But he’s the last resort.” The poker chip man could be unpleasant, and besides, I figured Claude could use the practice. Claude was excellent at library research, but he was still working on putting all that research together into a narrative that was not only possible but true. They aren’t teaching that in school these days.

  “Okay,” Claude said. He sounded relieved to have some clear instruction at last. “I’m on it. Oh, and I got that address you wanted. It’s in your email.”

  “Just tell me,” I said.

  “I don’t remember,” he said.

  “You do,” I said.

  “I’ll get it wrong.”

  “You won’t.”

  He sighed, and gave me the address in Concord.

  It was dark when I parked my car on Hemlock Drive in Concord, a bland East Bay suburb. Number 404 Hemlock was a low-slung little suburban number with a patch of green lawn in front. I got out and rang the bell.

  A man answered the door who looked pretty much like I expected. He was white and forty-ish and strong and wore blue jeans and a T-shirt.

  “You Craig Robbins?” I asked.

  “You are?” he said, wary.

  “Claire DeWitt,” I said, flashing my ID. “PI.”

  He looked at me blankly.

  Craig Robbins worked for the city towing cars—cars that were stuck, cars that were abandoned, cars that died, and, in Paul’s case, cars whose owners died.

  “I’m investigating Paul Casablancas’s murder,” I said. “You found his car.”

  “I did?” he said.

  “You did. Ford Bronco. Old one. You found it by the side of the Bay Bridge, four fifty a.m., forty-nine days ago.”

  Craig wrinkled his brow. “I did,” he said, surprised.