Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

by Sara Gran

  I called Claude. The lama had called him, so he knew I was alive at least.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “You were really cool and I treated you like shit.”

  “I didn’t see,” Claude said. “The whole time we were working on the case, I didn’t get it, what was going on with you.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “No reason you should have.”

  “Yeah, well,” he said. “I am trying to be a detective.”

  We both laughed.

  “Do you still want to work for me?” I asked. “It’s cool if you don’t. I’ll give you a recommendation, your last few weeks’ pay, whatever.”

  Claude paused for a second. “Do you still want me to?” he said.

  “Of course,” I said. “You’re the best.”

  “Then I do,” he said firmly. “Working for you is the best thing that ever happened to me, Claire. I’d be lost without you.”

  I stopped and didn’t say anything for a minute. Then I got him started working on the murder case I’d picked up at the Fan Club. The woman had sent me a few emails with all the information she had about her brother’s case. I believed her that he was innocent. Maybe we could save him. Or at least get him out of jail.

  59

  SOMEHOW ME AND DELIA became friends. I told her all about Lydia in her big loft in SoMa.

  We sipped hot tea and looked out her giant windows at the gray foggy street outside. Delia seemed sad. I knew she missed Paul, missed Lydia, missed everything and everyone, like I did.

  “Hey,” I said. “Want to see something cool?”

  We drove for nearly two hours and by the time we got to the Double J Ranch it was night. Before we turned up the drive I made a few adjustments to the security system. No one would know we’d been here at all.

  I cut the lights and turned up the drive and stopped at the gate. I opened up and let us in. Most of the little horses were sleeping, except a few who snacked on grass and dew. We got out of the car and looked at them.

  “Oh, Claire,” Delia said. “They’re beautiful.”

  “I know,” I said. “I kind of love them.”

  The little black guy was sleeping when we got there. But after he heard my voice he woke up, shook himself awake, and stood up and came toward me.

  “Oh, Claire,” she said again. “He likes you so much.”

  I scratched the little guy just where he liked, on the hard top of his head, and Delia fed him some carrots she’d brought from her fridge.

  Then we opened the gate and we let them out. We let them out the back door, not the one that led to the highway, but the one that led to the Bohemian Club’s woods. To Paul’s woods.

  It turned out a neighbor was poisoning them. He was putting tiny amounts of poison in very small apples and tossing them over the fence. No one knew why. Did he hate all horses? Did he especially hate tiny horses? Mysteries never end. A guy from the Spot of Mystery saw one of the horses wandering off to the woods to die. He was a smart man, an ex-detective from Houston, Texas, who’d gotten into trouble with liquor and bad women. But he was still smart, and when he saw the horse lie down he took a hair sample from the dying little thing. Jake paid to get it tested and they came up with arsenic. Now the neighbor was facing charges and the horses were safe and the man from Houston was becoming a detective again. I gave him a good chunk of the fee I’d gotten for the case and he’d gotten his own place in Santa Rosa and had been dry for two months.

  Delia and I opened the gate, but no one left. We stood there with the gate open and some of the horses came and sniffed at it and eyeballed it, but no one left.

  Except the little black guy. He came to the door and stepped halfway through and looked at me. Then he went all the way through and stopped and looked at me again.

  “You’re welcome,” I said. “But you know it’s gonna be rough out there? No one’s gonna feed you or comb your hair. You’re gonna be on your own. You’ll tell the other animals where you’re from and no one will believe you. They’re gonna think you’re a fucking lunatic. You know that, right?”

  Delia crouched down and looked into his eyes.

  “He knows,” she said. “He’d rather be real.”

  He ran. He galloped away like a fucking stallion. We locked up the gate behind us and left.

  And that was the Case of the Missing Miniature Horses.

  That night I drove to Oakland in my rented car and sat around the fire with the Red Detective.

  “Solved your case?” he said.

  “Kind of,” I said. “She did it. The wife in the living room with the gun.”

  “How’s it feel?” he asked.

  “Like it’s still not done,” I said. “Like I’ve still got a case to solve.”

  “Like a missing girl case?” he asked smugly.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Told you,” he said, and it was the first time I’d seen him smile, which he tried his hardest to conceal.

  “What is left behind when a mystery is solved? Is there a nothingness, a vacuum, a hole?” Silette wrote. “Is it possible that some mysteries are better left unsolved, that we are sometimes better off with nothing than something?”

  The next day I went to go solve my case. My missing girl case.

  Lydia met me in an interview room, ugly and institutional. She was in her orange jumpsuit, handcuffed, dirty, and humiliated, just as she should have been. If we had been anywhere else I would have killed her with my bare hands.

  She was already crying when I came in.

  I told everyone that I went to Peru for the Case of the Golden Pearl and just lost touch with Paul, but that wasn’t what happened. What happened was that he asked me to call him.

  “You never call me,” he said. “And then you do that thing where you leave.”

  He didn’t say it as an accusation; he presented it as a fact. We were on the phone. It was late at night. That was when we had all our real talks, late at night on the phone.

  It was true: I never called him, and I did this strange thing where I would leave, in the middle of the night after sex or the next morning or sometimes just while we were hanging out, having dinner or watching a movie or walking around the city.

  It was always a case. But it was never a case. I left because every time we spoke we were getting closer. Because every time, something seemed to be revealed between us. Oh I always and That’s my favorite too and I know just what you mean and I can’t believe you also and the unspoken but always present How have I not known you forever? How is it I was here without you, and now you are so close to being everything? Something that seemed like it had been there all along.

  “I’ll call you,” I said. “It’s, you know, it’s hard for me. But I’ll call you.”

  “Because you know,” he said, and he said it without accusation, without anger, “I can’t keep doing this. This isn’t fair.”

  He was also bruised, scarred by life. Who wasn’t? I had no monopoly on pain, I knew that.

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I’m just—”

  “Don’t be sorry,” he said, and I thought I heard him smile. “Just call me sometimes, okay?”

  I promised I would. And then a few days later I got on a plane to Peru without telling him and I never called him again.

  I couldn’t imagine any circumstance, in any lifetime, where I would be able to tell Paul how I felt about him. That I loved him.

  We didn’t speak for a while, when I got back. I heard he was dating someone else and I pretended I didn’t care and everyone believed me. I took a case finding out what had happened to a missing girl and it turned out she’d drowned in the bay. I stopped eating and stopped sleeping and ended up in the Chinese Hospital, Nick Chang by my side. Then I went to New Orleans on the Case of the Green Parrot and when I came back I ran into Paul and Nita in the vegan place in Chinatown and he told Nita he’d been in love with me.

  We’d spoken occasionally after that, friends, and when we’d run into each
other that night at the Shanghai Low I felt that undertow again, that thick black current pulling me back toward him. And I thought maybe, just maybe . . .

  And then Lydia walked in.

  Lydia sat in her prisoner’s chair in her prisoner’s outfit. I sat down in the chair across from her.

  “I loved him so much,” she said, still crying. “I couldn’t stand it. It made me crazy, loving him so much. He always loved you more,” she said. “I knew. I pretended I didn’t but I did. I was his fucking substitute, his second-best. It should have been you together, not us. None of this would have happened if you’d just loved him back.”

  “Is that why you killed him?” I asked. “Because you were jealous?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “I didn’t mean—I never wanted to. It’s not like I planned it. You think I wanted this to happen?”

  “I don’t know what you wanted,” I said.

  “I thought—” she began. “I don’t know what I thought. I really don’t. But I guess in some way. With the gun. Like, I could make him love me. Like, I never knew—I never knew how to make anyone love me, and I knew no one ever did. I mean, I know why. I know that. But I thought, not consciously, I mean, of course I know you can’t force someone to love you. I just wanted him to love me so much and . . .”

  She trailed off and started to cry harder.

  “I’m so scared,” Lydia said. “I’m going crazy.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I keep thinking he’s here,” she said. “I keep thinking, Well, I’ll call Paul and . . . Or I keep thinking he’s really with me, in the room, and he knows what I did and—”

  “Maybe you’re not crazy,” I said. “Maybe he is with you.”

  That made her cry harder.

  “I want to die,” she howled. “Please, just kill me, Claire. I know you want to.”

  I thought about it. It wouldn’t be hard. I figured she meant it, and she wouldn’t fight back.

  I could take her neck and just snap it.

  I did want to kill her, kind of.

  I reached across and put my hand on her arm, right above the elbow.

  “Oh, Claire,” Lydia said. “I’m so scared. Please don’t forget about me,” she said. “Please don’t forget about me in here. I’m so scared.”

  “I won’t,” I said. I squeezed her arm.

  “I want to die,” she sobbed. “Oh God. I don’t want to live. Please. Please help me.”

  There are no coincidences. Only doors you didn’t have the courage to walk through. Only blind spots you weren’t brave enough to see. Only tones you refused to admit you could hear.

  “I’ll visit you,” I said. “I won’t leave you alone. I promise. I won’t forget about you. We’re going to be okay,” I said. I reached over and put both my hands on her arms and kissed her on the forehead. “We’re going to be fine.”

  I didn’t know if I believed it. Maybe not this time around. But someday.

  I stayed with her until the guards made me leave.

  The Case of the Kali Yuga was closed.

  60

  THAT NIGHT, AT HOME, I found the Cynthia Silverton comic I’d taken from Bix. I flipped through until I found the ad I was looking for on page 108.

  BE A DETECTIVE, the ad read, MONEY! EXCITEMENT! Women and men admire detectives. Everyone looks up to someone with knowledge and education. Our HOME STUDY course offers the chance to earn your DETECTIVE’S BADGE from THE COMFORT OF YOUR OWN HOME.

  I took out a piece of paper and a pen and wrote:

  To Whom It May Concern:

  I am already a professional detective, but I would like to improve my skills. Do you offer a continuing education course? Or may I enroll in the standard home study course despite my age and experience? Please reply at this address . . .

  I wrote in my address, signed it, and mailed it to the address in the ad.

  61

  A FEW DAYS LATER I called the lama. Still no word from Andray. He’d called Trey, who’d likewise heard no news.

  I was on Stockton Street, in front of the vegan Chinese place. Through the plate-glass window I saw the TV inside.

  Enlightened Mistress is one and all, the TV streamed. Everyone is an Enlightened Mistress. Service is happiness, happiness is your birthright, and nirvana is a bird in your hand. Even in the darkest night, one star will always shine.

  When I hung up with the lama I called Claude.

  “Start a file,” I said. “We’re starting a new case.”

  “What should I call it?” Claude asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “But I’m going to find Andray. That’s our next case. We’re finding Andray.”

  62

  A FEW DAYS LATER I set out early to Las Vegas in my rented Kia. I’d agreed to keep it for the month. No sign so far of my Mercedes, which I figured was for the best. At least it wasn’t a homicide scene.

  I was in Oakland before I was sure I was being followed. It was a 1982 Lincoln Continental, one of my favorite cars. White exterior, blood-red interior.

  I began to think he was following me on the Bay Bridge. Since just about the spot where Paul’s car died. He’d been with me since Chinatown but I thought I was being paranoid—it wasn’t so strange that someone else would be driving from Chinatown to the East Bay on this oddly sunny day. Then halfway across the bridge he didn’t pass me when I braked a little, taken strangely by surprise to be reminded of Paul again, Paul again and again. I decided to find out for sure: I hopped off the highway in Oakland and drove to an obscure spot I knew, a little marina and landing where a few Victorian buildings had somehow lasted through Oakland’s many renovations.

  The Lincoln kept pace. I wasn’t being paranoid.

  The Lincoln lagged a little behind but then when I stopped at a red light it put on speed to keep up with me. Not many people were around. A few women who were maybe prostitutes, a few workers from the factories nearby, looking for lunch.

  And didn’t stop.

  The first time the Lincoln hit me from behind I didn’t think; I just ran through the red light I’d been stopped at—there was no cross traffic—and put on speed as fast as I could. But the Lincoln was faster than I would have guessed and soon it cracked my rear bumper again, sending a sickening, shuddering thump through the car.

  I got my ass in gear and tried to outrun it. I didn’t. The third time, the Lincoln hit me from the side, ramming its massive front bumper nearly through my passenger door.

  The Lincoln sent me sideways into a parked van and I was going to die.

  It backed up. I realized I wasn’t dead. My door was crammed shut against the van. I undid my seatbelt and made a dash for the passenger-side door.

  It was stuck.

  I dropped to my back and pulled my legs into my chest, planning to kick out the window. But before I could I heard screaming and a screech and a terrible, grating metallic crash. I felt like I’d been tossed about by waves at the beach and lost my footing; underwater, kind of fun, and then you remember: Oh, wait, I’m drowning.

  “Holy shit!” I heard someone scream. “You killed her! You fucking crazy? You killed her!”

  My head cleared and the sound of metal on metal stopped and I resurfaced.

  I think maybe he has, I thought. I looked and saw a flash of red and white where I thought my legs should have been. I really think maybe he has.

  “Motherfucker!” I heard someone else scream. “That lady’s gonna die!”

  The irony that I may now be dying in a car crash was not lost on me.

  I felt my eyes close. The waves pulled me back under. When I swam up Tracy was waiting for me at the shore. Tracy was an adult, my age, and she wore a black dress and a big, ratty black fur coat, her white hair in a ponytail. Behind her I saw the Cyclone cycle and the Wonder Wheel spin.

  When I came out of the water, soaking wet, she laughed, a little smirk playing around the corners of her mouth.

  “You’re in for it this time,” she said. “And
I am really going to enjoy watching you get out of this one.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “What did I do?”

  “You started looking for the truth,” she said. “And now, you’re gonna finish.”

  Seagulls squawked overhead, circling us, hoping for food. It was winter. The beach was empty except for a few Polar Bears in the ocean, the old men who come and swim in the icy water every winter.

  “Is this it?” I asked. “Are we at the end?”

  “Not yet,” Tracy said. “But don’t worry. We’ll get there soon enough, Claire DeWitt.”

  Visit www.hmhbooks.com to find all of the books in the Claire DeWitt series.

  About the Author

  SARA GRAN is the author of five critically acclaimed novels, including Come Closer and Dope as well as the Claire DeWitt series. She also writes for film and TV (including TNT’s “Southland”) and has published in the New York Times, the New Orleans Times Picayune, and USA Today. She is a former bookseller and a native of Brooklyn.