Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (5 page)

Inside was another disappointment. A crappy .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, swanky apartment buildings like Vic's, gar
dens 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 God,” 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 glass 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-swanky 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.

“Uh, no,” he said. “Was I supposed to?”

I picked up the chair and checked the rug underneath it. The dents were deep. This chair lived here.

I sat in the chair. If Leon looked straight ahead he saw the TV. But if
I
looked straight ahead I saw the bedroom.

No. Not the bedroom. The bedroom window. I looked around, changed position. There was nothing to see from this chair except the bedroom window.

I got up and went to the bedroom window. It had a little terrace that faced Bourbon Street. It was just big enough for two or three people to stand on. Next to it, coming up from the street, was a live oak tree. In the corner of the tiny terrace was a dead, potted bottle palm.

I stepped through the window to the terrace. I stood still and quiet and closed my eyes. It was cold, and at first I shivered, but I breathed slowly until I wasn't shivering anymore and I was just there.

I heard cars far away. Sirens. Three blocks from here a Dalmatian-Lab mix barked, twice. I heard children crying. Bass-heavy rap shaking a car. The pop of a gun on North Rampart Street. The everyday sounds of the city.

There was a clue here. I could feel it, like vertigo or a sunspot.

Clues are the most misunderstood part of detection. Novice detectives think it's about
finding
clues. But detective work is about
recognizing
clues.

Clues are everywhere. But only some can see.

I took a deep breath through my nose. I smelled food from the restaurant next door, smoke from a fireplace nearby, death, dirt from the potted plant—and something else. I breathed in again. Something grainy and earthy and good but musty, musky.

I opened my eyes. I went to the corner of the terrace and pushed aside the dead palm. Behind it was a wooden bird feeder. Underneath was a little pile of black earth. I took a pinch of the earth and sniffed it.

This was what I'd smelled. Decomposed sunflower seeds. The feeder had fallen off of the live oak tree next to it.

“Erk.”

I looked up. In the tree, two or three feet away from me, was a small green parrot. He was about eight inches tall and a brilliant jungle green, with a creamy white beak. Under his wings two blue feathers peeked out, one on each side. His little feet
gripped the branch, and he swayed slightly, as if he were drunk. But his eyes were sharp and sober.

The bird cocked his head and looked at me.

“Erk?” he said.

We looked at each other.

“Restaurant's closed, buddy,” I said. “Time to get a job.”

But the bird didn't move. He only looked at me with his funny little head moving from side to side. He looked like a clown with fat little clown pants on.

Each clue you find is like a new pair of eyes. Now I looked around the street, and in the trees nearby I saw more birds: finches, pigeons, a female cardinal, a grackle on the ground by the door to the building. I hadn't seen them before. But they were there.

I went back inside.

“He fed birds,” I said to Leon. Leon was still on the sofa.
Love Connection
had morphed into
Family Feud
.

Leon made a little face of disgust. People in New Orleans have a thing about birds.

“Oh. I forgot about that,” he said. “Those parrots. I think they've got some program going on to get rid of them. They're an inverted species or whatever you call it.”

“Invasive,” I said. “So are we.”

“Yeah. They eat crops,” Leon said.

“Unlike us,” I said.

He frowned. “They're dirty,” he said. “They spread disease.”

I looked at him.

“They're from—” he began, then stopped. “They live in—”

“I heard some of 'em are communists,” I said. “Watch out. Do you mind if I take fingerprints?”

“Fingerprints?” Leon said, confused. “They have fingers?”

“Uh, no,” I said. “Well, maybe. But not from the parrots. From the house.”

“Oh,” he said. “I guess not. Knock yourself out.”

From my bag I found a black leatherette case about the size of a composition book. I put the case on the coffee table and took out a small glass jar of black powder, a camelhair brush, and a
little book of sticky plastic pages, each page backed with stiff white paper.

First I needed a control print: Vic Willing's. I could probably find one online—in most states lawyers had to leave their prints on file with some regulating body or other—but there was no Internet service nearby and it would be a hassle in any case, so instead I found Vic's toothbrush and hairbrush. Carrying them with my fingernails, I brought them back to the coffee table and dusted them with the black powder. Prints bloomed under the powder like roses. I tore off a few sheets from the book of sticky paper. Carefully I peeled the clear sticky stuff from the white backing and pressed it to the handle of the hairbrush, and then spread it back across the white backing. There were a bunch of smudges and one perfect print. I did the same on the toothbrush. I got another perfect print.

Next I took prints from some spots around the house a visitor was likely to touch, labeling them as I went. The doorknobs. The refrigerator. The safe. The television—you'd be surprised how many murderers put the TV on before or after they kill someone. And the bird feeder. I put all my little papers in an envelope and stuck them in my purse.

I had a feeling there was more to the apartment than I'd seen. Vic had held secrets here. People bury things in their houses, things they can't get rid of but can't take with them. They aren't physical but they exist all the same. All houses are haunted. Some by the past or the future, some by the present.

I went to the bedroom and turned off the lights and lay down in Vic's bed. The sheets were crisp and possibly ironed and not very comfortable. I let my breathing slow down and my mind drain until I was almost asleep.

Almost immediately I sat up and got out of bed. What I'd felt wasn't rest or peace. It was struggle.

Vic was at war with himself. But so are most of us. It was ugly. But it wasn't much of a clue.

I asked Leon if I could hold on to the keys so I could come back and look for more clues if I needed to.

He said no.

“It's just that I only have one set,” he said, shuffling in place a little. “It's not that I don't trust you,” he clarified.

“It's just that you don't trust me,” I said.

He hemmed and hawed a little before I let him off the hook.

“It's okay,” I lied. “You will.”

“I'm sure,” he said. “I will.”

He was lying too.

C
ONSTANCE DARLING WAS
an unconventional teacher. She would drive me out to the swamps on a moonless night and leave me there to find my way home by the wind and the stars. She'd toss a newspaper clipping about a murder that took place in Manhattan in 1973 on my desk and tell me to solve it. She taught me to read fingerprints like tea leaves and eyes like maps. She taught me how to smell trouble literally and figuratively. She sent me to lamas and tulkus, to swamis and psychics. Like most detectives, she kept a police scanner in the kitchen, and if we weren't busy we'd go to crime scenes and solve the crimes before the NOPD even showed up. Not that they wanted our help. Most of the time they ignored us. But Constance was always right.

“There are two kinds of detectives,” Constance told me a long time ago. We were in her library in her home in the Garden District. “The first are those that decide to be a detective. The second are those that have no choice at all.”

We all get the call a little differently, she explained. For some of us it's a dream, sometimes an omen, sometimes one of those big famous life-changing moments—near-death experience, heart attack, loss of a loved one. When it's over you know you've got to do what's been in your heart all along and hang up your shingle as a PI. Whether you're fifteen or fifty, once the call comes to solve mysteries, eventually you'll have to give in.

Constance was a detective since the day she was born. I like to think I was too, even though I had a long, bumpy road between my first bottle of fingerprint dust and my PI union card. But then again, so have most of us.

I was eleven or twelve when someone gave my best friend Tracy the Official Cynthia Silverton Girl Detective Fingerprinting Kit. Something happened to us when we saw that kit; a déjà vu, a thrill of recognition even though we'd never felt it before. With our other best friend, Kelly, we spent weeks fingerprinting every surface of my parents' big, crumbling mansion in Brooklyn, even the south wing, which was supposed to be sealed shut because of the hole in the roof. Kelly lived with her parents in a cramped apartment nearby; Tracy lived in the projects across the street with her father. My house was much better for exploring.

Breaking in to the south wing was our first taste of crime, detection's twin sister.

Tracy, a born criminal, somehow broke open the lock that had been rusted shut for years. We each took a sharp breath when we got the door open and saw the sun streaming in on the broken wood floor, the rotting furniture still in place. Pigeons had moved in, and when I jimmied open the door the birds didn't fly away but looked at us:
What are you doing in our house?
My parents had given us the same look minutes before as we raced through the parlor, where they read a ouija board with their “adviser,” Dr. Oliver.
Money coming soon
, Dr. Oliver promised, as always.
I see a windfall any day now
.

But in the south wing my parents, and the whole rest of the world, were miles away. We trod carefully and kept quiet. We didn't know the words for it, but we each felt it—a drop in pressure, a smell, a shudder in the
nadis
, the opening of an inner door.