Claire DeWitt And The City Of The Dead Part 2

The boy with dreadlocks smiled like the cat who'd swallowed the canary, and stepped away. He tried to look mean but he just looked goofy. A funny, goofy kid with a nine-millimeter under his billowy white shirt.

The taller one didn't step away. He stayed where he was and looked at me and didn't smile.

I stood and looked at him. He was about my size and much, much stronger. Under his baggy clothes I could see the outline of a young, strong body. But if he could generate the energy to throw a punch, I'd be shocked. He looked like he was sleepwalking.

I figured he was looking for someone to take his life. I didn't want it.

Me and the boy looked at each other.

"You oughta thank him," Dreadlock Boy said, eyes bright, with an accent so thick I could barely understand him.

Suicide Boy and I looked at each other. The gray sky hung low above us.

"Yeah?" I asked. "Why's that?"

"He guardin' your truck for you," Dreadlock Boy said.

Suicide Boy looked at me. End it, his eyes said. Do it. Now.

I didn't say anything. I knew that look.

"It's true," Dreadlock Boy insisted. "He put a blessing on it for you. Now it's like, consecreted."

I figured he meant consecr Ated, but consecr Eted was pretty good too. A secretion that consecrates. I looked at my truck. There was a puddle under the front tire. The tire was wet. I figured Suicide Boy had peed on it. Consecreted it was.

Dreadlock Boy smiled. Suicide Boy didn't. He kept looking at me, hoping today might be the day he'd be put out of his misery.

It wasn't. Not as far as I was concerned.

"Hey," Dreadlock Boy said. "What those tattoos mean?" I have a dozen or so tattoos, but he could see only two: T on my left wrist and K on my right.

"I don't remember," I said. "I was drunk."

I walked around the truck to the pa.s.senger side and unlocked the car and got in. While I did, Suicide Boy finally pushed himself off the driver's side door and stepped away. I climbed into the driver's seat and started the truck and pulled out without looking at the two boys again, letting the small event die a natural death.

In my rearview mirror I saw the boys standing on the street. Dreadlock Boy was laughing. Suicide Boy wasn't.

As I drove back downtown I called a crime reporter I knew at the Times Picayune to see if he knew anything about Vic Willing.

"Hey!" I said. "Jimmy! It's Claire DeWitt."

He laughed. "Oh my G.o.d. Seriously, who is this?"

"Claire," I said. "Jimmy, it's Claire. I'm in the city."

"No, seriously," he said. "Come on. Who is this?"

"Really," I insisted, wondering if I was right. "It's me. DeWitt."

"Oh my G.o.d," he said. "For real? Seriously. You're actually calling me? On the phone? This is actually Claire DeWitt?"

"Yes," I said, less sure than ever that I was, in fact, Claire DeWitt. "It's me. Listen, I know we didn't quite-"

"Oh my G.o.d," he said again. "This is rich. This is truly f.u.c.king rich. Claire DeWitt. Oh my f.u.c.king G.o.d."

"Yeah, so I was thinking, I could really use your-"

"Oh, no. No. Absolutely not. I don't even know why I'm talking to you. No. I'm sorry, but no. I really shouldn't even be talking to you. You know that, don't you? In fact, I'm not talking to you. Goodbye."

He hung up.

It went better than I expected.

6.

MY HOTEL WAS guaranteed to come with free wireless. FREE WI-FI, their website said. When I reserved my room, I double-checked.

"You have wireless, right?" I'd asked.

"Absolutely," the clerk a.s.sured me. "All of our rooms come equipped with free wireless Internet."

The Internet service hadn't worked for more than three minutes at a time since I'd been there.

"It's c.o.c.ks" the clerk told me. At first I thought he was describing the men behind the broken wireless service. Later I find out he was talking about c.o.x, the Internet service provider. "They're really difficult to deal with. c.o.x. They just screw you."

After a few false starts the next morning I found a coffee shop on Frenchman Street that had wireless-not through their own service, which was similarly screwed by c.o.x, but from the bicycle shop next door.

"c.o.x loves them," the girl in the coffee shop told me bitterly as she made my espresso. "c.o.x always fixes their stuff first."

I had plans to meet Leon at Vic's apartment at three. I got there at two-thirty and parked the truck across the street and watched. Vic's place was on lower Bourbon Street, near the edge of the Quarter, an old Spanish-style apartment complex from the early 1800s. The block was quiet; the noise and crowds and vomit of upper Bourbon, a few blocks away, didn't reach here. I'd forgotten that in New Orleans every block was its own world; block by block was how locals described their city, good and bad. This block was a quiet one, entirely residential on the face of it, although you could bet at least a few illegal enterprises lurked behind the Spanish exteriors. Even the clip-clop of the horse-drawn carriage tours sounded far away. The street was picked up and the sidewalks swept clean.

I walked up and down the street and back to Vic's building. Through the gate I saw a courtyard dominated by a pool. Around the pool were a few metal tables with chairs, and bougainvillea and bamboo grew around the perimeter. On a sunny day it was probably nice. Today it was cold and empty. At three-twenty Leon showed up. I met him by the gate and he let us in. Vic's apartment was on the second floor.

Houses are like people, only less annoying. To take them in you start with the big and work your way down to the small. First I walked through the apartment, looking, with Leon trailing behind. It was sw.a.n.k. Antique furniture, spotlessly clean aside from seventeen months' worth of dust, everything tasteful and neat and magazine-ready. Newish appliances in the kitchen and a hole where the refrigerator had been. Leon told me that's as far as he'd gotten in cleaning out the place. Thank G.o.d. Losing the refrigerator was bad enough.

There was a bedroom, an office, a living room, a dining room, and the kitchen. The office was the only room that had any personality. The personality was "I work a lot." Neat stacks of papers were piled on the desk. I flipped through them. Money stuff and work stuff, none of it interesting.

I walked through the whole place. Then I did it again, only more slowly, and then again, slower still. Nothing happened. In the kitchen were two sets of dishes, one for special occasions and one for every day. I asked Leon what happened to all the food.

"Well, they made us throw out the fridge," he said. "And the rest of it..." He frowned. "I don't know. I guess he ate out a lot."

"No soup?" I asked. "No crackers?" Everyone has a can of soup in the cabinets somewhere. Everyone has a can of something they thought they would want and then didn't want but won't throw away because it's perfectly good food.

Leon shrugged.

I went through the apartment again. In the bathroom cabinets I found a variety of prescription drugs dating back to 1995, including a pretty recent and nearly full bottle of Vicodin, which I stuck in my purse along with some penicillin and an almost-empty bottle of Valium. All three were prescribed by a DDS.

"Nothing interesting in here," I told Leon, swallowing a Valium. He sat on the sofa and turned on the TV, ignoring me.

It isn't enough to open drawers and look in closets and open the medicine chest. Everyone knows that you'll do that. Everyone knows that someday, someone will look in their medicine chest. Everyone knows that someday, someone will look in the locked desk drawer, the safe, the box under the bed. I'd look through all Vic's hiding spots, but I knew all I'd find there is what he thought was important. And people are usually wrong about what's important. If I wanted to find out what was really important I needed to look for the places he forgot about. What was so familiar that he didn't think to hide it? What slipped into the cracks of the house-in between the sofa cushions, behind the refrigerator? What had he left in the sink? What was next to the bed? Why these books? Out of millions of books in the world, why did Vic choose to keep these here in his office? The less books a person had, the less the books had to say. Not enough of a sample to observe patterns. One cookbook out of five books meant much less than twenty out of a hundred.

But Vic was easy. There were two cases, fiction and non-, almost all hardcovers. I skimmed the bookshelves. Most of d.i.c.kens, all of Flaubert and Zola, all of Poe, and the complete Mark Twain, all in decent editions. I pulled a copy of Therese Raquin off the shelf. Its cloth cover stuck to Nana on one side and Germinal on the other. I cracked the book open and it creaked. Vic hadn't read any of them. A decorator or bookseller had stocked the shelves for him.

In the nonfiction case Vic Willing had a manual for his computer, a manual for his car, and about a hundred books about New Orleans. These looked like someone had actually read them. They were roughly organized by topic: cookbooks, history, politics, architecture. At the end were about ten books on Mardi Gras Indians, also known as Black Indians or Indian gangs.

The Indians were groups of people-mostly black, mostly men-in New Orleans who on Mardi Gras and Saint Joseph's Day and other mysterious occasions got together to play music and dance and chant in their own strange language. They were not Native Americans. Some Indians, like Bo Dollis, were such good musicians that they went professional. In America no one knew who they were, but in Europe and Asia-and in their own neighborhoods in New Orleans-they were stars. The Indians organized themselves into tribes with names like the Wild Magnolias and the White Hawks. Within the tribe were ceremonial, ritualized rankings and jobs and positions. The Spy Boy from each tribe would go ahead and arrange or avoid encounters with other tribes, the Witch Doctor was the spiritual leader of the tribe, and the Big Chief was, obviously, the Big Chief. On holidays they dressed up in costumes that were somewhat Indian but more Vegas: sequined, beaded, and feathered.

I'd been fascinated by the Indians when I lived there, but never understood them. Constance had Indian friends, but she wouldn't introduce me.

"They're touchy," she explained. "Complicated."

I'd seen Indian practice, far away from the tourists and months away from Mardi Gras, just a group of men together in a dirty park in New Orleans, chanting and playing instruments. It was ten years ago. I'd just got the news that Constance had been killed, and I was driving around the city for no reason at all, taking in what I could before I left. Without her there was no reason to stay. I was near Shakespeare Park when I heard their drumming, and I circled into the park, hoping to catch a glimpse of them.

The men huddled together, some with cowbells and blocks and tambourines, tapping out a beat as they sang. One man stood in the center, his eyes rolled up to heaven, whites shaking under the pink of his eyelids, calling out a chant.

But then the men saw me watching and the practice broke up. The chanting died down, and the men each went in a different direction, and by the time I got out of my car it was as if no one had been there at all.

Most of what the men chanted was in their own Indian language, but a few words were in English.

Sister Constance, Sister Constance, You left us all too soon...

Apparently Vic had been fascinated by the Indians too, or at least interested. I got a chair and looked on top of the bookshelf. Nothing. As long as I was up there I looked around the room. Nothing but dust.

Under the sideboard was the safe. I craned my head and looked under the desk. There was the combination, scotch-taped to the underside: 8a18-85. I looked at the serial number on the safe. It was the date he bought it.

Inside was another disappointment. A c.r.a.ppy .22 revolver that was practically frozen from rust and less than a grand in cash. I left it open for Leon.

I settled down at Vic's desk. There were some papers on the desk, not filed yet, and I went through those first. Nothing interesting. I turned on the computer. It was nearly empty. Weather, TV schedule, more weather, and sites for three different Mardi Gras krewes. His e-mail was boring and work-related or boring and personal. He was invited to a lot of dinner parties. He didn't go to many.

That was it for the office. I asked Leon if I could use the house keys for a minute. He looked confused but said yes.

I took the keys and left the house and walked down to the corner. Then I stopped, turned, and walked back. Nice block, lots of cute houses, sw.a.n.ky apartment buildings like Vic's, gardens with bougainvillea and banana trees, lots of bright fresh paint. His building didn't have parking, so likely Vic would often have to park a block or more away. Every day Vic would walk down this block, see these gardens, and those cute houses, and then get to his house. His house stood up well by comparison. It was as nice as any in the neighborhood.

I let myself in. Stopped and chatted with a few imaginary people by the pool. I looked at the concrete floor of the courtyard. No bullet marks.

I said goodbye to my imaginary neighbors and climbed the stairs. I opened the door to the house and put the keys on the little antique table placed by the door for just that reason. I looked at Leon, who'd turned on the TV.

"Shoot me," I said.

Leon lifted up his hand into the shape of a gun and shot me. I fell back. I rolled over and looked at the floor where I'd fallen. Nothing. No gunshot, no stab marks, no blood.

"Can you do me a favor?" I asked.

Leon looked unsure. "Of course. Sure. It depends."

"Can you go outside and ring the doorbell?"

Leon looked relieved and went outside. I sat on the sofa. He rang the doorbell. I didn't answer. He rang it again. I flipped through channels on TV. Leon rang the doorbell again. This time I stood up, walked to the door, and answered.

"Oh my G.o.d," I said. "It's you."

Leon smiled, getting into the swing of things. Everybody loves a mystery.

"And I have a gun," he said.

"You're threatening me," I said. I took a few steps back.

"Yes," Leon said. "I'm making threats with the gun. Real threats with a real gun."

I thought for a moment. Leon kept his gun hand fixed on me.

"He would have turned," I said. "And run toward his gun."

I turned toward the office.

"Bang," Leon said behind me.

"Bang," I repeated. I crouched down and looked at the floor. No bullets, no scars.

"Do you have a metal detector?" I asked Leon.

"Ah, no," Leon said.

Sometimes I don't get people. For people like Leon it was always someone else's job to bring the metal detector or the magnifying gla.s.s or pony up the fingerprint dust. In any case, it was unlikely Vic was shot in the house. No blood, no bullets, nothing out of place.

I left and walked around the block again and thought about nothing. When I came back my mind was fresh. I opened the door and started again. Leon was sitting on the sofa watching Love Connection.

"You kept the cable on?" I asked.

"No," Leon said. "Just the power. They just never shut it off."

I put my keys and some imaginary mail down on the little antique table by the door. I took off my boots and went to the bathroom. I went to the kitchen and pretended to look for something to eat. With my imaginary snack, I went back to the living room.

That was when I saw it. Something in the living room was off. I stood and looked at the room for a few minutes before I saw what it was.

It was the furniture. The furniture arrangement was off. In a traditional-sw.a.n.ky place like Vic's, the living room should have been symmetrical. But it wasn't.

The sofa was good and centered. One wing chair sat off to the side at a proportionate distance. But the other wing chair was off, a good two feet away from where it should have been.

"Did you move this chair?" I asked Leon.