Claire DeWitt And The City Of The Dead Part 21

Kelly hung up.

In the distance I heard sirens from police cars. My head pounded and my mouth was dry.

I sat up in bed and looked out the window. The coroner's truck drove by.

Today wasn't a good day for happy endings.

43.

EARLY IN THE MORNING on January 11, 1987, Kelly and Tracy and me stood on the subway platform underground at the Brooklyn Bridge station in Lower Manhattan. Kids would start to gather there in a few hours to see the graffiti that had been done the night before. At night graffiti artists snuck into the train yards to do entire cars, and other kids waited on the platform to see them as they came in, before they went off to be cleaned. We'd been out all night, first to a Broadway-Houston party and then writing on trains and then breakfast at the Square Diner in TriBeCa with some boys we knew. We had been drunk and high but now we were just tired, or at least Kelly and I were. Tracy wanted to see the trains come in. A boy she liked had gone to the train yards the night before and she wanted to see what he'd done, if anything.

"You b.i.t.c.hes do what you want," I said. "I'm going home."

"Me too," Kel said. "You coming?" she said to Tracy.

"c.u.n.ts," Tracy said. "I wanna see Marcus's train. I'm staying."

We lit cigarettes. There was no one to tell us not to. Rules and laws were for other people in other places; we did as we pleased. New York was our oyster; smoking on the subway platform was the best pearl we could wrench from it.

We heard the clang of metal on metal and felt the rush of wind. A train was coming. We would take the 4 up to Union Square and get the L back into Brooklyn; at Lorimer we would switch to the G and take that the rest of the way home.

I hugged Trace as the train curled around the tunnel toward us. "G'night, b.i.t.c.h," I said. "Call me tomorrow."

She smelled like the subway and cigarettes and her thrift-store leather jacket, with die yuppie sc.u.m written over her heart in silver paint pen. She wore her blond hair with short bangs; a thrift-shop sixties dress in green lame black tights; and real Doc Martens, a Christmas present from her father, who saved for months to buy them for her. Her voice was young but also a bit gravelly. She already smoked about a pack a day. She is always in that moment and always will be; she's stuck, dead, frozen, on the northbound 4/5/6 platform in 1987; this is where she will spend eternity.

"Night, s.l.u.t," she said. "Love you. Talk to you tomorrow."

Kelly and Tracy hugged and whispered similar words. An Uptown 4 pulled in to the station and Kelly and I got on. We waved goodbye to Tracy through the gla.s.s. As we took off she blew us a kiss off the palm of her right hand.

No one ever saw Tracy again. No one ever found a clue, no one ever found a suspect, no one ever found a lead.

Not even me. Especially not me.

Tracy had been missing for almost a full day before her father called me. Her mother had died in an accident when Tracy was two. Her father was a poor, broken-down Irish-Italian drunk who'd lived in the projects all his life. But Tracy loved him, and all he wanted was to get his kid the h.e.l.l out of Brooklyn. Less than a year later he died from alcohol poisoning and heartbreak.

I'd thought it was strange that Tracy hadn't called me after coffee that morning, but it wasn't a big deal. When her father called, it still wasn't a big deal. I called Kel and her phone was busy; sure enough, she'd been talking to Tracy's father too. None of us had heard from Trace. Kel and I figured she'd hooked up with the boy whose graffiti she'd been waiting to see.

We spent a sleepy, hungover day at the coffee shop on Myrtle Avenue. By four o'clock it was already dark. We took the G to Williamsburg and walked to Domsey's to shop for vintage clothes at two dollars a pound. I got a purple minidress, Kel got a bowling shirt. LYDIA, the shirt said across the breast. POLICE ATHLETIC LEAGUE BOWLING TEAM, it said across the back. We had dinner in a little Polish diner on Broadway and took the subway home. We watched TV at my place for a while, watching a Movie of the Week on my little black-and-white TV I'd thrifted from a Goodwill on Fifth Avenue. Valerie Bertinelli was held hostage by her obsessive ex-husband. Would she escape? Or would she be trapped there, forever, in the place she used to call home?

"I wonder what happened to Trace?" I said as I kissed Kel good night on the cheek. "I wonder where she is?"

Kelly shrugged.

I did too. She would turn up.

The next morning, when we still hadn't heard from her, we started to worry. Her father called again. We told him we were sure everything was fine. But we weren't sure. She should have called us. We didn't begrudge her whatever adventure she'd run into. But she should have called us.

That afternoon Kel came to my house and we drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and made calls. We called friends, acquaintances, boys. No one had seen her. At eight we took a break and went out for cheeseburgers and disco fries. After cheeseburgers, we started looking for Tracy. We found Marcus, the boy whose piece she'd been waiting for, drinking at Mona's on Avenue A. Mona's was one of a string of East Village bars that would serve a toddler with a fake ID. Marcus hadn't seen her at all. He didn't even know she liked him. We went to all the bars where teenagers went in the East Village: Lizmar Lounge, Alcatraz, Downtown Beirut, Mars Bar, Blue & Gold, Cherry Tavern, Holiday, International.

No one had seen Tracy.

Another day went by. Her father called the police. He called other parents. He called Kel and me every day. We told him we were sure everything was fine. But now we were sure it wasn't.

We expanded our circle of phone calls. We searched Tracy's room, her locker, her pockets. We looked through every sc.r.a.p of everything Tracy had owned or touched or been near. A phone number on a sc.r.a.p of paper, a notation in a V. C. Andrews book, a stain on a T-shirt, a lone high-heeled shoe, a crooked poster on the wall-nothing went unexamined.

But none of it helped. Weeks pa.s.sed, and we still had no sign of Tracy. The police got involved but lost interest quickly. The papers and the local news had a burst of interest in the first few weeks, but as they learned more about her family and her past, short as it was, they lost interest. Despite blond hair and blue eyes, Tracy was not a marketable victim.

We got clever. We tracked down the MTA employees who'd been on duty that night. We found kids we'd seen but whose names we didn't know. We learned how to get people to talk to us who didn't want to tell us anything at all. We showed up at one boy's house as very believable counselors from Stuyvesant High; we showed up at a another girl's house as less believable, but still convincing, STD social workers.

We stopped going to school. We stopped going to parties, stopped writing graffiti. Tracy's disappearance, the lack of her, became our world. Our lives revolved around the hole where Tracy had been. We applied Silette's principles of Detection to every facet of it. We threw ourselves into the case full-time. We fingerprinted her room, her clothes, her books. We broke into the school office and got her records. We tried to talk to her teachers, and when they didn't want to, we found ways of making them. We followed up on every matchbook we found in her school bag, every note on a sc.r.a.p of paper, every bird that flew overhead, every flower that bloomed. Omens were all around. Clues were everywhere.

But somehow, we still couldn't see.

"Mysteries exist independently of us," Silette wrote. "A mystery lives in the ether; it floats into our world on the wind like an umbrella and lands where gravity pulls it. And all the elements around it are now rearranged into the elements of a mystery: a tightly woven lace of clues and detectives, villains and victims. Yesterday's peaceful cottage is now a murder scene. The previously unremarkable b.u.t.ter knife on the counter is now an ominous weapon. The bland, unnoticed doorman is now a suspect.

"Those who step into this pattern, often through no fault of their own, have no choice but to follow the mystery through to its end. That, or live their lives stuck in its web. It isn't a matter of deserving or undeserving, good or bad. It is only what the facts tell us."

But in an Interview interview in 1979, Silette amended his words: "Perhaps, though, it isn't mysteries that create these webs," he said. "Perhaps the mystery is only what allows us to see them. Maybe that doorman really was capable of great evil all along. Maybe the b.u.t.ter knife has always been a complicated, portentous thing. But it was only their proximity to a mystery that allowed us to see it."

Months pa.s.sed. Tracy's father had her declared legally dead. Less than a year later, he died himself. Alcohol. We had learned absolutely nothing about what had happened to Tracy. We were no closer to the truth than we had been the day after she vanished.

We'd had nothing to do for weeks. I had a list of possibilities, all of them equally likely. In my heart, I was almost sure of one of them: she'd gone out writing graffiti, slipped in front of a train, and been crushed. As for why no one had found her body, I figured we just hadn't looked in the right place yet. New York City had hundreds of miles of subway tunnels, some of them abandoned by the MTA and used only by graffiti writers and the homeless. We'd been in plenty of them. But no one had been in all of them. It would take years to cover them all. As far as I was concerned, the mystery was solved by default. There was no other possibility.

I missed her every day. If I found her body, I wouldn't miss her any less.

Maybe I didn't really want to know. Maybe, like everyone who hires a detective, I didn't want to solve my own mystery. Maybe I wanted to keep Tracy as she was, blond hair and bangs, vintage dress and Doc Martens, smelling like subway and cigarettes. Maybe even detectives don't want to solve their own crimes. Because once a crime is solved, you have to close the case and move on.

But Kelly didn't give up. Kelly never gave up. She kept talking to people, kept riding the trains, kept looking for clues. When Tracy's father died she broke in to the projects and walled off Tracy's room, preserving the evidence forever. She plastered the wall over and facsimile-aged the plaster to match. The housing authority thought it was a paperwork issue that had changed a two-bedroom apartment in the projects into a one-bedroom. You could hardly blame them for not guessing the truth.

"Maybe," I said to Kelly one day over coffee, "it's time to take a break." We drank gallons of coffee; we lived in coffee shops.

"What?" Kelly said sharply. "Take a break from what?"

"You know," I said nervously. "The case. Tracy. I think maybe we've gone as far as we-"

"When we find her," Kelly said. "That's when we will have gone far enough."

I didn't say anything. I picked at my bagel. I'd turned seventeen a few months before. I hadn't been to school in nearly a year. I hated Brooklyn-hated its filthy streets, its dying trees, its rows of colorless brownstones, its attached houses that suffocated you, and most of all hated the rich yuppies who were taking it over neighborhood by neighborhood, murdering what little was good. It used to be a miserable, poor place where people talked to each other. Now it was a miserable, expensive place where people ignored anyone outside their clan. At least the kids who had pulled my hair and slapped my face had acknowledged my existence. The rich put on their Walkmans and looked right through you. They walked expensive dogs and rolled expensive babies in designer carriages and glared if you tried to pet either. I wanted to go.

I didn't leave home. Home left me, block by block.

Kelly had wanted to go too, once. That was the plan, the three of us. When we turned sixteen we were going to leave together. It didn't matter where. We weren't going to. We were going away from.

"I thought we were going to leave," I said finally. Kelly was going through her file of interviews, double-checking the testimony of a transit officer who may have maybe seen someone who kind of maybe looked like Tracy ten minutes after we left her. "I don't want to stay here forever."

Kelly looked at me as if she couldn't believe what I'd said.

"Yes," she said, astonished. "We were going to leave. Together. The three of us."

"Even if we find her," I said, "she's not coming with us."

We spent the rest of the day in silence.

After that day, I saw that I had to make a choice. I started giving things away, lightening my baggage. Kelly talked to me less and less. A crack had developed between us; soon it would grow into a valley. I started stealing more money from my parents to save; they were drinking more and didn't notice. I also started stealing more from stores, things I could sell: mostly books, which were easy to take and easy to sell to the Strand.

I didn't tell Kelly. She knew.

When I had a decent bankroll together, I packed what little I had and told my parents I was going to summer camp. They barely noticed.

I went to Kelly's apartment to say goodbye.

She opened the door. When she saw me standing there with my suitcase, she turned her back on me and closed it again.

I went to Port Authority and got a ticket for the next bus that was going far away. It was going to San Francisco. I got kicked off in Cleveland.

I knew if I stayed in Brooklyn, I'd be locked in that room forever, like Tracy and Kelly, walled off, slowly running out of air to breathe. I would drown in the Case of the Girl Gone Missing if I didn't let it go.

But Kelly never left. She never stopped. And slowly, a little bit at a time, she did drown. She opened a detective agency, but it was just a side project to fund her search. Nothing else mattered to her. She'd left an air-shaft window open to Tracy's room, and she was arrested a few times for breaking in to the projects, even though no one found the room. Twenty years of working on the same case had made her a great detective. And it had broken her. Everything that could have been hadn't and everything that should have been wasn't. It should have been the three of us traveling the world, the three of us solving mysteries, the three of us growing rich. But it was only me. There wasn't a moment I lived that I wasn't living for three of us. It's not the way to do it. But it was the only way I knew how. It wasn't enough to take one bite for myself. I had to take a bite for Trace and a bite for Kel too. I couldn't go back there, but I also couldn't let go, not really. It would be like losing them all over again.

Kelly and I talked once every few years, when we had dreams about her or other clues to share. Now, twenty years later, sometimes I still expected Trace to call me up on the phone. What's up, b.i.t.c.h, meet me at Mars Bar at ten tonight. I still expected Kel to be waiting for me at the G train to go write graffiti. What's up, b.i.t.c.h, you're late.

It isn't the dead we should feel sorry for. It's the living.

I didn't know how to solve the Case of the Girl Gone Missing. And I didn't know how to solve the Case of the Broken Levees. I didn't know how to save a city from drowning and I didn't think anyone else did, either. I could barely keep my own head above the water. The water line was already up to my eyes, and it wasn't getting any lower. I would have liked to rewrite both stories and give them a happier ending. But I couldn't do that. All I could do was solve mysteries, and go on.

"There are moments in life that are quicksand," Silette wrote. "A gun goes off. A levee breaks. A girl goes missing. These moments of time are different from the others. Quicksand is a dangerous place to be. We will drown there if we can't get out. But it tricks us. It tricks us into confusing it with safety. At first, it may seem like a solid place to stay. But slowly we're sinking. You will never move forward. Never move back. In quicksand you will slowly sink until you drown. The deeper you let yourself sink, the harder it is to claw yourself out.

"These spots of quicksand are unsolved mysteries. Only the detective can descend into the quicksand and come out alive. Only the detective can pull things and people out of quicksand and get them back on solid ground."

But how the detective pulls herself back up-well, Silette never wrote about that. And I still don't know.

44.

WHEN I GOT off the phone with Kelly my head was pounding too loudly for me to go back to sleep. There were plenty of other symptoms too, but I could sleep through those. After a thousand cups of coffee and one of the Vicodin I'd stolen from Vic Willing's house, I felt well enough to check my voice messages. Leon had called while I was sleeping.

I had a shower and more coffee and called Leon back. I gave him a vague report on what I'd learned. He sounded unhappy. Clients are often unhappy. Especially when you tell them their uncles might be pedophiles and you still don't know who killed them. They're funny about that.

"Are you sure?" Leon kept saying. "Really?" He asked if I could come over to his house a little later. I was pretty sure what was coming, but there was nothing to do but let it come.

I got to Leon's house at about three. We sat down in the living room. He fixed me a drink right away. I knew that was too good to be true.

He sat on the chair opposite me. "We need to talk," he said.

I rolled my eyes. Clients.

"I don't think things are working out," Leon said gently, as if we were breaking up. "This isn't going the way I hoped it would. I really hoped we would have made more progress by now."

I sighed and began my standard lecture for impatient clients. "Leon," I began. "In these busy, fast-paced times, people often have unrealistic expectations of how private investigation works. This isn't Matlock, Leon. This isn't Magnum, P.I.-"

Leon frowned and interrupted me: "I don't watch Matlock. I didn't think this was Matlock."

"Okay," I continued. "You don't watch Matlock. No one's accusing you of anything, Leon. I was explaining that detection isn't a sprint. It's a marathon. Anyone can jump to conclusions. You don't need a private d.i.c.k for that. You want the truth. As do I. We're united in-"

"Thanks," Leon said, frowning again. "Thanks, but no. I don't think it's going to work out."

"Leon," I said. "At some point in the development of the detective/client relationship, it's natural for the client to want to fire the PI. It's a part of the process, and that's okay. But we need to move past that, to a better place-a place of healing, if you will."

I didn't think any of that was true, about clients wanting to fire their private d.i.c.ks. They usually wanted to fire me. That was true enough. Almost always they wanted to fire me. Actually, every time. Every time except one, the time in Dallas when the guy killed his own mother and then hired me to find the killer because he didn't know the murderer was one of his other personalities. He never fired me.

"No," Leon said. "I don't think so. I think this is over. I'll pay you for what you've already-"

"Leon," I said. "You can't fire me. I'm going to keep working on the case. Then, when I solve it, you're going to see how truly wonderful and clever I am. Then you're going to pay me for the whole time, and you are going to do it happily. You are going to do it with bells on. So let's just-"

Leon let out a little breath of frustration.

"No," he said again. "No. I-I really don't-I mean, I just can't imagine that. No. This is over. This is completely over. I haven't been happy with your, uh, performance. To begin with, you don't check in enough. And as far as I can tell you haven't, you know, accomplished anything. And the"-he looked at the bottle and made a little tipping-back gesture with his hand-"the drinking and the, the everything else, whatever it is you're doing, smoking morning glory seeds or whatever-"

"Ololiuqui," I said. "It's not exactly a morning glory. It's a flowering shrub-"

"And the voodoo or whatever-"

"Oh, come on!" I cried. "No one was even possessed!"

"No," he said again, cutting me off with a frown. "No. I don't want to give you the wrong idea. Here." He handed me a check for the work I'd done so far and a piece of typed paper. It was an official notice of termination. On the bottom was a seal; I saw that it had been notarized by a notary public. He wasn't taking any chances.

"I think that makes it official," he said, standing up. "I think we're all done."

I stood up. "You'll see," I said.

"Sure," Leon said. "Okay. I think you should leave now."

I stood up and left.