Claire DeWitt And The City Of The Dead Part 5

"Never be afraid to learn from the ether," Constance told me. "That's where knowledge lives before someone hunts it, kills it, and mounts it in a book."

I figured I had it solved. Andray Fairview broke in to Vic's house, found him at home, took some food, and took Vic too. Andray probably planned to take Vic to an ATM for a withdrawal. When he found out they were all down, he killed Vic and ditched him in the floodwaters. It wasn't a perfect crime, but it was a d.a.m.n good one. Given that teenagers are rarely criminal masterminds, I figured the case would be over in a few days. The case of Vic Willing was as good as closed.

Or so I thought until I fell asleep that night.

12.

I WALKED DOWN a long street that used to be in a city. Now it was deserted, covered with white ash and dried gray mud. Brown plants died along the side of the road. Ruins of cars and houses sat still and broken on either side of the street. The air smelled sweet and sickening, like organic decay.

I saw something at the end of the street-a house or a truck or a large animal. When I got there I saw it was a tank, the old-fas.h.i.+oned kind with a long barrel.

Out from the top popped Vic Willing.

Mardi Gras beads hung from the tank's barrel. Send to Tom Benson, someone had written along one side. George Bush's Lunch Box was written on the other.

On Vic's shoulder was a green parrot, the kind I'd seen in front of his apartment.

"It's the end of the road," Vic said. His voice was different from what I'd imagined: grainier, better, more southern.

"Yeah," I said. "I see that."

"There used to be a city here," he said.

"That was a long time ago," I said carefully, weighing my words in my hands.

He nodded.

"She told me to tell you," Vic said. "Remind you."

"Remind me what?"

"There are no maps here," he said.

"Then how do I find my way?" I asked.

Vic smiled at me. "Follow the clues," he said. "You already missed one. Here."

He tossed something at me. It somersaulted through the slow, thick air to my hand. I caught it. It was a copy of Detection. The book fell open to [>]. I couldn't read the text.

"She told me to tell you," Vic said. "Believe nothing. Question everything."

"What?" I said. "Who?"

But Vic just turned his tank around and drove off, chug-a-chug, down the street.

"She told me to tell you," I heard him call from the tank. "Follow the clues. Believe nothing. Question everything. That's the only direction you need."

When I woke up I rushed to my copy of Detection and opened it to 108.

"You cannot follow another's footsteps to the truth," Silette wrote. "A hand can point a way. But the hand is not the teaching. The finger that points the way is not the way. The mystery is a pathless land, and each detective must cut her own trail through a cruel territory.

"Believe nothing. Question everything. Follow only the clues."

I knew the case of Vic Willing wasn't over yet.

13.

THE WAITING ROOM off Orleans Parish Prison, famously known as OPP, smelled like fear and disinfectant. Most of the other people in the waiting room were mothers and lawyers. Across the room from me was the boy with dreadlocks who'd been with Andray when he'd peed on my truck. He didn't recognize me. He flipped through the pages of a telenovela someone had left in the waiting room. In the corner of the room two other boys, both white, leaned forward in their chairs, elbows on their knees. They wore big but short pants with long white socks and white unders.h.i.+rts and baseball hats on sideways. They scowled and tried to look frightening. They succeeded in looking a little frightening.

After waiting an hour and watching other people come and go, I went up to the guard.

"I think you forgot me," I said. I gave him my name.

"I ain't forget you," he said defensively. "You ain't on the list."

"I put my name on the list when I got here," I said.

"It ain't here now," the guard said.

We put my name back on the list. I had to start all over again. It would be at least half an hour before I was called. I went outside for some air.

The two white boys were sitting on the steps, smoking. They looked at me. I looked at them. One was brunette, average build. The other was a redhead and rail-thin. Both had tattoos on their arms like the other boys I'd seen-numbers, letters, codes, memorials. The redhead also had a rosary tattooed around his neck.

There are no coincidences. Only clues you've been too blind to see, doors you haven't found the key to open.

"For the detective whose eyes have truly been opened," Silette wrote, "the solution to every mystery is never more than inches away."

I went over to the boys and sat next to them, inches away.

"Hi," I said. "I'm Claire DeWitt. I'm a private eye from Brooklyn, New York."

They sat up and looked at me. No matter how far downhill it goes into yuppiedom, Brooklyn always impresses people. Between that and the PI business I had a good introduction to anyone under the age of forty who'd ever owned a hip-hop alb.u.m.

"I'm here working on a case," I said. "A very important case."

The boys nodded, and tried to look dependable and upright.

"And what I need to know," I said, "is if either of you has ever seen this man."

I took out my picture of Vic Willing and showed it to them.

They looked at the picture. When they did, something happened to the redhead. It was like a door shut across his face and locked tight. He didn't blink. He didn't wrinkle his forehead or move his eyes or any of the other normal things someone would do looking at a photograph. Instead he locked up, like a car that'd run out of oil.

The brunette boy looked at the photo and shook his head.

"Uh-uh," he said. "Sorry." He was telling the truth.

The redhead shook his head. "Sorry," he muttered.

He was lying. I looked at him. He started to look nervous. His foot tapped. Suddenly he stood up.

"f.u.c.k this s.h.i.+t," he said angrily to the other boy, throwing his cigarette on the ground. The brunette looked confused. "This is bulls.h.i.+t," said the redhead. "Waiting here all f.u.c.king day to see that n.i.g.g.a. He ain't even come visit me when I was in Charity, not once. f.u.c.k this."

He turned and walked away without looking at me. The brunette boy, confused, trailed behind him.

The truth may have been inches away. But I still wasn't close enough to grasp it.

I went back inside and read a book I'd brought with me on Mexican witchcraft. When my name was called I went through two metal detectors, both of which missed every piece of metal I had on me, and ended up in a square room that had the same smell and more lawyers and less mothers. A guard pointed to a round table near the middle, where Andray Fairview sat waiting for me where a guard had left him.

I sat in the plastic chair across from him. He didn't look up.

"Hi," I said. He looked up, saw me, and looked back down. I didn't know if he recognized me or not. I doubted it.

His eyes were big and pale brown, the whites streaked with red and pink. Under the neckline of a thin T-s.h.i.+rt a gunshot scar blossomed on his chest. His eyes were fixed down on the linoleum floor, and his breathing was long and shallow. He sat slumped in his chair as if it took all of his energy to stay sitting up.

"I'm Claire DeWitt," I said. "I'm a private investigator."

That usually gets a good response. Everyone loves a mystery. But Andray just looked up and lifted his eyebrows and then let them fall back down, gradually, to his occipital ridge. If he recognized me, he gave no sign of it.

"I found your fingerprints in someone's house," I said. "A man named Vic Willing."

I gave Andray time to respond. He didn't say anything. But under the affected blankness on his face I saw something else-fear, maybe, or just loathing. He didn't like me, I saw that. But I couldn't quite make out if he was scared of me too.

Andray had two sharp wrinkles going from the top of his nose to above his eyebrows. Above that three thin creases were etched horizontally across his forehead. He had a lot on his mind for an eighteen-year-old kid. Either he was smart or anxious or both.

Usually I can read people. Most are easy. A hand to the face means they're lying, an extra blink gives away nervousness, a raised eyebrow signifies surprise. But Andray wasn't easy. All the clues were there, but I couldn't put them together in a way that made sense.

I knew one thing. He wasn't happy to see me.

And whatever he knew about Vic Willing, I wouldn't get it easy.

On his arms he had a series of tattoos, most of them coded references to neighborhoods, housing projects, gang affiliations, and sundry other historical markers, in bold gothic print. One tattoo stood out. It was on the back of his right hand. In fancified, delicate script, it said LALI.

"Who's Lali?" I asked.

"No one," he said. It was the first time he'd spoken to me: his voice was deep and his accent was heavy. "No one" came out as one short, hostile word: no-un.

"No one," I repeated. "I got some tattoos like that too."

He ignored my attempt at a joke. For a split second, I saw something in his face. It was a question, asking for something. Save me, it said. Or maybe Kill me.

"She your girlfriend?" I asked.

He looked away again and didn't say anything.

"Vic Willing disappeared sometime during the storm," I said. "I'm trying to find out what happened to him." I'd noticed that when people in New Orleans said "the storm" they didn't mean the literal storm, which only lasted a few hours. They mean the whole week, the time between when evacuations began and when they ended seven or eight days later.

Andray didn't say anything.

"Can you tell me where you were?" I asked. "During the storm?"

"Convention Center," he mumbled.

"Let's start earlier than that," I said. "Let's start with Friday night. The Friday before the storm. What'd you do that Friday night?"

He took a deep breath and sat up a little and looked at me directly for the first time.

"Friday night," he said. "Friday night was just normal. Sunday night, that's when it started. We went down to the Superdome. We got out of there fast. They didn't want to let no one out, but we found a way."

"We?" I said.

Andray nodded. "Me and Terrell," he said.

"Who's Terrell?" I asked.

Andray looked like he was surprised I didn't know Terrell. It wasn't unreasonable in New Orleans, where everyone knows each other.

"No one," Andray said, blinking. "A guy I know. You ain't know him. It was me, him, and Trey. Trey, he gone, so you ain't getting no alibi from him. So then I start looking for my girlfriend, Lali. Ever since the storm she don't want nothing to do with me, but then she was my girlfriend. So I go to this house where she's at and I get her. Then, me and Terrell and Lali and Trey, we go looking for my mother."

"You find her?" I asked. I hadn't known he still knew his mother. That wasn't in the file.

He shook his head, and came to life, which in this case meant getting angry.

"So then I went down to the Superdome, to look for her," Andray went on. "By then, they had people in the Convention Center too. So we went over there and, you know, that was some f.u.c.ked-up s.h.i.+t. So me and my friend Peanut-he dead so don't waste your time looking for him-we go off and we got a car for everyone to get out of town in. And so me, Terrell, Peanut, Pee Wee, Lali, Peanut's little sister, her kids, Pee Wee's girl, her kids-we all drove out to Houston. Drove right up to the Astrodome, and those mothaf.u.c.kas turned us down. Said we weren't authorized or some s.h.i.+t like that. But then these other people, they saw us get turned away. And they took us back to their own house, their own house where they lived, and they made us dinner, found us a place to stay, all that. Nelson, was their name. Tom and Mary Nelson. So, you know," he said, in case I was wondering, "they got some good people out there too."

"What day was that?" I asked.

Andray shrugged. "I lost count," he said. "One day just bleed right into the next."

I changed tracks again.

"How did you know Vic Willing?" I asked.