Claire DeWitt And The City Of The Dead Part 1

Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead.

Sara Gran.

1.

IT'S MY UNCLE," the man said on the phone. "He's lost. We lost him in the storm."

"Lost?" I said. "You mean, he drowned?"

"No," the man said, distressed. "Lost. I mean, yeah, he probably drowned. Probably dead. I haven't heard from him or anything. I can't imagine how he could still be alive."

"So what's the mystery?" I said.

A crow flew overhead as we talked. I was in Northern California, near Santa Rosa. I sat at a picnic table by a clump of redwoods. A blue jay squawked nearby. Crows used to be bad omens, but now they were so common that it was hard to say.

Omens change. Signs s.h.i.+fts. Nothing is permanent.

That night I dreamed I was back in New Orleans. I hadn't been there in ten years. But now, in my dream, it was during the flood. I sat on a rooftop in the cool, dark night. Moonlight reflected off the water around me. It was quiet. Everyone was gone.

Across the street a man sat on another rooftop in a straight-backed chair. The man flickered in and out of focus like an old piece of film, burned through in spots from light. He was fifty or sixty, white, pale, just on this side of short, with salt-and-pepper hair and bushy eyebrows. He wore a three-piece black suit with a high collar and a black tie. He scowled.

The man looked at me sternly.

"If I told you the truth plainly," the man said, "you would not understand." His voice was scratchy and warped, like an old record. But I could still make out the tinge of a French accent. "If life gave you answers outright, they would be meaningless. Each detective must take her clues and solve her mysteries for herself. No one can solve your mystery for you; a book cannot tell you the way."

Now I recognized the man; it was, of course, Jacques Silette, the great French detective. The words were from his one and only book, Detection.

I looked around and in the black night I saw a light s.h.i.+mmering in the distance. As the light got closer I saw that it was a rowboat with a lantern attached to the bow.

I thought it had come to rescue us. But it was empty.

"No one will save you," Silette said from his rooftop. "No one will come. You are alone in your search; no friend, no lover, no G.o.d from above will come to your aid. Your mysteries are yours alone."

Silette faded in and out, flickering in the moonlight.

"All I can do is leave you clues," he said. "And hope that you will not only solve your mysteries, but choose carefully the clues you leave behind. Make your choices wisely, ma'moiselle. The mysteries you leave will last for lifetimes after you are gone.

"Remember: you are the only hope for those that come after you."

I woke up coughing, spitting water out of my mouth.

That morning I talked to my doctor about the dream. Then I called the man back. I took the case.

2.

January 2, 2007.

The client already knows the solution to his mystery. But he doesn't want to know. He doesn't hire a detective to solve his mystery. He hires a detective to prove that his mystery can't be solved.

A cab dropped me off at Napoleon House in the French Quarter. The client was already there. I sat across the table from him and listened to him pretend he wanted me to solve his mystery. He didn't know he was pretending. They never do.

My client was Leon Salvatore: male, late forties, graying and s.h.a.ggy, with something that could have been a beard or maybe the leftovers of a few weeks without shaving. He looked like an old hippie who was never really a hippie at all. He wore jeans and a T-s.h.i.+rt that said CAMERON PARISH CRAWFISH FESTIVAL 2005 above a picture of a smiling red crawfish throwing himself into a kettle.

That would be their last crawfish festival for a while.

Leon ordered a beer. I got a Pimm's Cup and a bowl of jambalaya.

"So," I began. "The last time you saw your uncle was..."

"Saw him?" Leon said. "Saw him?" I had an image of him sawing his uncle in half. "Well, I don't know. Maybe a few months before."

"So," I began again, "when was the last time you spoke to him? Or, you know, can otherwise pinpoint his location in time and s.p.a.ce and so on."

"Oh, okay," Leon said agreeably. "I talked to him on the phone Sunday, the night before the storm hit. He was home, and he said he was going to stay home."

"Which was...?"

"Just a few blocks from here. Vic lived on lower Bourbon. He was going to stay there. I tried to tell him, you know, this is not a good idea. I offered to come get him, to take him with us. I went to my girlfriend's, former girlfriend's, house in Abita Springs. That was a f.u.c.king mistake, but at least we were able to leave pretty easily. So I called Vic on Sunday to see if he'd changed his mind. I talked to him Friday and then again Sat.u.r.day and again on Sunday. I tried to convince him to evacuate. Obviously, that didn't work. By Monday the phones were down and..."

The rest of his sentence was obvious and he didn't say it out loud.

"So," Leon went on with his story. "You know. It was a while before I was worried. It was a few days before we could get out of Abita Springs. We were safe up there, but we didn't have any power or water or anything and not a lot of food, so we left when they had the roads cleared. Cleared of the big stuff. It still took us about ten hours to get to Memphis-we had to clear s.h.i.+t off the road every few miles. So, first we went to Memphis for a while, maybe seven days, but that was really crowded and all we could get was this tiny hotel room out near Graceland. And it was full of, you know, Superdome people, and they were really angry, and, you know. It was kind of scary. So then we flew to, hmm, Austin. Right. We have some friends out there and we stayed in a trailer on their place for a while. Then they had some friends coming and we had to go, so we went to stay with some friends in Tampa for a few weeks. Then we went back to Abita Springs for a while. Then-"

The waiter brought our drinks and my food. He set everything down on the table carefully, just so, and I could tell it was the first day he'd ever waited tables.

"Anyway," Leon said when the waiter left. "What was I saying?"

"Your uncle," I reminded him.

"Right," he said. "Vic. So it was a while before I realized he was, you know, missing. I mean missing missing. Disappeared, not just, uh, misplaced. See, I knew he didn't have phone service, and I figured he lost his cell phone or it never started working again or whatever, so I wasn't surprised not to hear from him for a while. Not for a few days. I figured he probably wouldn't go to the Superdome or the Convention Center. They were forcing people to go, but he was a smart guy and I figured he'd avoid that. And he had, you know, connections. He wasn't just some guy."

He wasn't. I hadn't known Vic Willing, but I knew who he was. Vic Willing had been an a.s.sistant district attorney for the New Orleans prosecutors' office for more than twenty years. He was fifty-six at the time of the storm. He prosecuted murderers and rapists and drug dealers. Like most New Orleans prosecutors, he didn't do it very well. But he did it better than the other prosecutors in his office. He was known as a square-dealing, decently intelligent DA who probably could have actually won cases had he been someplace else-someplace where the cops and the DAs were on speaking terms, someplace where there were less than three or four murders a week, someplace where the prosecutors had secretaries and their own copy machines and government-issued phones.

I'd seen him in court, but I'd never spoken to him. Vic was from a rich neighborhood Uptown, and most of the lawyers from his world-and there were plenty of them-went into something way more lucrative. On any given day in court, Vic would be wearing the most expensive suit in the place. If anyone minded, they kept it to themselves. New Orleans was a little like England: people were comfortable with cla.s.s distinctions.

Vic had disappeared sometime after August 28, 2005. His French Quarter apartment didn't flood. The whole neighborhood suffered only wind damage and minor flooding from a burst water pipe under the wax museum. He had plenty of food and water available from the dozens of restaurants nearby, some of which stayed open, all of which were broken in to and left open. He even had a small backup generator in his building-not uncommon in New Orleans, where power outages were at least monthly and more often weekly, depending on the time of year and your neighborhood. Leon had looked for Vic, and Vic's friends had looked for Vic, and even the cops had looked for Vic. They had found nothing.

He'd vanished.

"Now, by the next Sat.u.r.day," Leon continued, "after they'd cleaned out the city, I started to worry. I mean, really worry. Because he should have been able to get to a phone by then. There were bulletin boards you could check. Places online you could check for missing people. So I started with the bulletin boards, the phone calls, all that. I called all the evacuee centers, the nursing homes, the hospitals. Nothing."

"Any leads?" I asked.

Leon shook his head. "No. No sign of him. I followed up every 'Elderly' or 'Middle-Aged White Male' I came across. And there were a lot of them. You know, some people just lost it. Especially older folks-a lot of them couldn't take the strain and just cracked, mentally. A lot of people didn't know who the h.e.l.l they were anymore. Thank G.o.d for the Internet. You know, hospitals put pictures of old people up, hoping someone would claim them. Young people too. Especially anyone who was, you know, disabled, or ill, or mentally ill to begin with." He paused. "It was kind of like a lost and found. But for people."

We were quiet for a minute. The sun came out for the first time all day. It lit up Leon's face just enough to show his scars and then went back behind a cloud. He was scarred under the surface, scars you wouldn't see unless you'd trained your eyes to see.

Leon frowned and continued. "Anyway. So I did all that. I called hospitals, nursing homes, I went through all the aid groups, everyone. Nothing. No sign of him. I tried the coroner's office here in the city, thinking maybe they had him. Nothing. That's more or less where I gave up. And then I called you."

"So," I said. "What do you think happened?"

"I don't know," Leon said. "I mean, the storm-there were some people you just never saw again. It wasn't like a war, where someone comes and knocks on the door and tells you that your loved one is deceased or whatever. There was no organization or anything like that. People just disappeared."

We looked at each other.

"How tall was he?" I asked.

"Tall?" Leon said. "Tall? About six feet?" That's what people say when they don't know how tall a man is. For a woman the answer is five-five. In any case, he was probably close to that, and the water was nowhere near that high in the Quarter. If he'd drowned, he would have had to try pretty hard to do it.

"Is it possible he went to help?" I asked. "Went out on one of the rescue boats?"

"Well, sure," Leon said. "It's possible. I guess he could have drowned someplace else. I guess he could have gone toward the water, trying to help, but you know, I don't think so. Vic wasn't exactly that type. Not that he was a bad guy," Leon qualified. "I mean, he was nice and everything. But swimming around helping people, getting dirty-I don't really see him doing that. He wore these buckskin shoes in the summer and if someone stepped on them, you know, he wasn't happy. So, no, I don't see that. Anyway. He could have been out somewhere, looking for food or whatever, just walking, and he could have been drowned that way. You hear about these walls of water-it's hard to know exactly what happened where. But it's unlikely. So, you know. That's pretty much all I can say."

We looked at each other for a minute. I s.h.i.+vered. The air was forty degrees and gray, hovering next to snow. This being the South, it was unlikely it would ever quite get there.

"Tell me about your uncle," I said.

"He was a lawyer," Leon said. "You know that."

"Yes," I said. "I know that. What was he like as a person?"

"Huh," Leon said, as if thinking about it for the first time. "Well. You know. He seemed nice. We weren't really close. We used to all get together over the years for Thanksgiving and Christmas, birthdays, funerals, whatever. After my mom pa.s.sed on, I was Vic's only family here in town, so I tried to check in with him every once in a while. Probably not as often as I should have. But he was busy. Work kept him real busy and he had this big social life-he went to b.a.l.l.s and that kind of thing, all that rich-person stuff. He was in a lot of clubs, a lot of Mardi Gras stuff. Hmm. He'd lived in New Orleans all his life. I think you know all this."

"Where's the rest of the family?" I asked.

"Well. My parents are gone. They're gone for a long time now. Vic was my mother's brother. My sisters, one is in New York and one is in L.A. They're great. On my father's side there's still a lot of people here in the city, but that's another family. They saw Vic at holidays and stuff like that, but they weren't close. And Vic, he never had kids. He dated, you know, but nothing ever developed. I don't think he wanted it to develop. I think he liked living alone."

"So as far as that family goes, your mother's family, it was just the two of you?"

Leon nodded. "Here in the city, yes. Just us two. It was just my mother and Vic. They had some cousins, but they were older and they're all gone now."

"Did you love your uncle?" I asked.

"Well," Leon said, frowning. "He was my uncle."

"'Cause you know," I said. "This kind of investigation is going to be a lot of money and a lot of time and you might not like what you find out. So if you didn't love him, you might want to rethink this while you can. It's a big thing, and there's no going back."

Leon paused for a minute before he answered. I finished my jambalaya. The waiter came and took my bowl and spoon and napkin just as slowly and carefully as he had given them to me.

"Vic left me everything," Leon finally said. "He didn't have to do that. He had this property-little pieces of land all over the city. He'd inherited it all from his father. I knew there'd been some money there but I didn't know there was that much. It probably would have gone to me no matter what. There was no one else. But Vic, he went to a lawyer and made a will. He made sure I got everything and knew where it was and all that." He paused again and frowned. "I thought I would be okay. Until I started cleaning out the apartment. His apartment. And then I realized it wasn't right. It wasn't right to leave him like this. I guess I feel like I owe him. Like maybe I owe it to him to find out what happened. Personally-well, he's my uncle. It's not like I didn't love him. It's not that I don't like him or anything like that. I just. Well. You know."

"I know," I said.

"You know what it says in the Bible," Leon said with resignation. "Look out for thine uncle as you would thineself. Or whatever."

"I don't think that's in the Bible," I said. "But it's a nice thought."

Leon shrugged.

"Oh, and there's one more thing," he said. "A kind of important thing. Even though I don't really think it's true."

"What's that?" I asked.

"There's someone who says he saw him."

"Saw him?" I asked.

"This crazy guy," Leon said. "Jackson. I mean, I don't think that's his real name, but that's what people call him. And I don't think he's that crazy, either, but he's, you know, a street person. He hangs out in Jackson Square. Homeless guy. Used to be a musician, I think. I don't really know. Anyway, I saw him when I came back in town and we stopped to talk for a few minutes. And he said he had seen Vic. He knew that Vic was my uncle. Jackson said he saw Vic down near the Convention Center. On Thursday."

"Thursday," I said. "After the big flood?"

"So he says," Leon said doubtfully. "He said they stopped and talked and Vic gave him a few dollars."

"Thursday," I said. "So that would mean he was still alive after the worst of the flood. No wall of water or anything like that."

"Well, yes, that's what it would mean," Leon said. He shrugged. "I don't know. Jackson's a nice guy but, you know. I'm not sure he has a firm grasp on the day of the week."

We sat quietly for a minute.

"Can I ask you a question?" Leon said.

"Yes," I said. "Ask."

"How old are you?"

"Forty-two," I said. I was thirty-five. But no one trusts a woman under forty. I'd started being forty when I was twenty-nine.

"Wow," Leon said. "Sorry. Just, you know. You look really young. Wow. Do you do something, or-?"

"Water," I said. "I drink a lot of water. Eat a lot of fresh fruit. And I do a lot of yoga." I'd never done yoga. I rarely drank water. "It really helps with the collagen."

"And I heard you were in the hospital, maybe," Leon said hesitantly. "That there was some issue regarding-"

"Oh, no," I said. "That. No. Not a hospital. It's crazy how rumors spread. That was like a retreat I did. Like an ashram?" I'd never been to an ashram. I'd had something like a nervous breakdown and had ended up in the hospital. "Now can I ask you something?"

"Okay," Leon said agreeably. "Sure."