Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (10 page)

“Take it,” Nick said on his last visit. He held his hand lightly on my wrist, taking my pulses. “Take the job. You have to tie up loose ends sometime.”

“I don't have any loose ends,” I said. “Not with that place.”

“You're lying,” he said.

“I'm not,” I said.

“You don't know you are,” he said. “But you are.”

I trust Nick.

I took the case.

“N
O ONE IS INNOCENT
,” Silette wrote. “The only question is, how will you bear your portion of guilt?”

Mick called me the next morning. Andray was out of OPP already. I figured in cops' salaries and guards' salaries and buildings and transportation and sundries it cost about ten grand to keep Andray Fairview off the streets for three days. Mick explained that the NOPD had no drug lab. It had been ruined in the storm. Because of a backlog that pre-dated the storm by years, it would take months to test the drugs from recent arrests elsewhere. It was easier just to release anyone with less than, say, an entire truckload of cocaine.

Over a sushi lunch Mick tried to sell me on Andray's pious innocence again. Mick was the worst type of guilty; the type who wanted to
help
. My guess was that just about now he was discovering what a depressing, useless job it was. Especially in New Orleans, where most people's idea of help was a bigger gun.

It turned out his criminal justice program wasn't Mick's first encounter with Andray Fairview. Mick already knew him from a drop-in center for youth where Mick
also
volunteered.

“Basically,” Mick said, picking at a seaweed salad, “I only go to make myself feel better. Like I'm doing something. Almost every one of these kids has major post-traumatic stress disorder. They're like vets, basically. They're like people who went
through a war. It's not just the storm. That's far from the worst thing that's happened to most of them.”

He stopped and looked at his seaweed for a minute, as if he were wondering how it got there and what it was.

“Anyway,” he went on, still looking suspiciously at the salad, “I knew Andray from there. He used to come by sometimes and take a shower, get something to eat, get some clean clothes. He's been on his own for a long time. As long as I've been going there, which is five years. These kids—well. The schools are a mess, the city's a mess, their families are gone. Anyway, Andray's different. He's a good kid. He's smart.
Really
smart. He used to sell dope and I can see him doing that again, you know, falling backwards a little, but killing someone—I don't think so. I really don't think so.”

“I'm sure,” I said. “I'm sure he's a
saint
.”

Mick looked up. “Claire, I'm telling you . . .”

I took a sip of tea.

“You're telling me a lot of things,” I said. “You're telling me that you're depressed. You're telling me that you're drowning in guilt. But you haven't told me anything so far that proves Andray Fairview didn't kill Vic Willing. His prints were in Vic's house, he's killed before—”

“You don't know that,” Mick said, weakly trying to fake liberal outrage.

“You don't
want
to know it,” I said. “But you know it just fine. He was in a gang since he was eleven. What do you think he's done?”

Mick looked at me like he was going to hit me. Then he leaned back into his chair and closed his eyes. I expected him to come back with a witty rejoinder but instead he stayed there, his head against the wall and his eyes closed.

“How about you?” I finally asked, looking at my sushi. The colors were so bright that it looked artificial; pink salmon, red tuna, green wasabi. “How'd you make out?”

Mick shook his head.

“That good, huh?” I said.

He shook his head and squeezed the top of his nose between
his thumb and forefinger, as if his sinuses ached. For the first time I noticed he wasn't wearing his wedding ring. “I lived in Mid-City, Claire,” Mick said. “I lost everything.”

“Oh,” I said. “What about—”

“She left,” Mick said. “She moved back to Detroit.” He opened his eyes and looked at me. “Less crime.”

“You're kidding,” I said.

He shook his head. “Not kidding.”

He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the wall.

Some people, I saw, had drowned right away. And some people were drowning in slow motion, drowning a little bit at a time, and would be drowning for years. And some people, like Mick, had always been drowning. They just hadn't known what to call it until now.

I
STARTED THE CASE
of Vic Willing again.

Under a gray sky in Jackson Square there were three people reading tarot cards and palms, two people handing out leaflets about how to get to heaven or hell, and about five men who met the description Leon had given me of Jackson. This was the man he said had seen Vic Willing the Thursday after the storm. Skinny guy, old, black, missing some teeth, gray and black woolly hair. Usually wore an overcoat and usually carried around one big bag of cans and another big bag of his stuff.

I looked at the potential Jacksons. Two looked mean. One looked crazy. One got up and walked away fast when he caught me looking at him. I didn't see Vic or Leon having a relationship with any of those men. That left one who could be Jackson.

I walked over to him and he smiled and held out a battered paper cup.

“Got any change today?” he asked with a thick southern accent.

“Sure,” I said. I put a five in his cup. He thanked me.

“Are you Jackson?” I asked.

He said he was. I introduced myself and asked if I could sit down with him for a minute. He said yes. I sat down and explained to him who I was and what I wanted from him—an account of when he last saw Vic Willing. He told me more or less what Leon had told me:

“It was Thursday,” Jackson said. “Down by the Convention Center. The National Guard, they rounded everyone up and brought them over there. They didn't know any better. I mean . . .” He paused for a second. “You'd think after they realized, they would have stopped.” He shook his head. “Anyway. The police was rounding everyone up and bringing them there. I was hanging out outside and I see Vic. He didn't know no one else there, I think—I mean, it was a lot of people like me. Not a lot of people like him. So I think he was happy to see me.”

“Maybe he was just glad you were okay,” I said.

Jackson wrinkled his brow, thinking about it. “Maybe,” he said. “I mean, Vic wasn't the type, so much, you know, concerned with other people like that. But it did seem like that, so who knows. So anyway, he comes over and says Hey Jackson and I say Hey Vic, I'm glad to see you okay, which I was. As bad as that place was, I was happy to see everyone who was there, 'cause I knew they were alive, at least. So I was happy to see him too.”

“Did he say where he'd been?” I asked.

Jackson thought before he answered. I liked this guy. He thought more in five minutes than most people did in a week.

“No,” he said. “No, he did not. At least not that I remember.” He looked at me and I thanked him and then he went on: “So I asked him if he was okay and he said yes, and he asked if I was okay, did I need anything, and I said no, thank you, because frankly I didn't think he had anything. I mean, money's no good if there's nothing to buy. I didn't understand people stealing TVs and things like that—I mean, you can't eat 'em. All we needed was food and water, and there wasn't any. Whole city cleaned out by then—restaurants, stores, everything. Kids went out, kids who knew how to steal, and they broke in to the stores and restaurants and got water and whatever else they could find and brought it back for the babies and the old folks. Some of those kids didn't eat nothing themselves, not one bite. But that was all done by then. There were people's houses but that's not something I would do. Not going in someone's house. Not at that particular point. Anyway. Vic asked if I was okay and I said
yes, and then he asked how I got there and I told him. He was acting real concerned, you know, like he cared. He asked where the water was coming from, what was going on and all that. I told him, as far as I knew, the water was everywhere. And he asked which levees had broke and I told him what I knew, which wasn't much. Rumors were flyin' all over. People were saying crazy things, like people eating dogs and babies and things like that. But some of the craziest things turned out to be true, like people on the rooftops in Lakeview and down in the Ninth Ward, and just about all of Arabi and Chalmette being all wiped out. So, you know, I told Vic that. I told him everything I knew. Then we shook hands and he was off. No, actually, he gave me some money first. I told him I didn't need it. Nothing to buy. But he gave it anyway.”

“So when you saw Vic,” I said. “You're sure it was Thursday?”

“I am,” Jackson said.

“How are you so sure?” I said.

He looked a little offended. “How you sure today's Tuesday?” he asked.

“Tuesday?” I said. “Tuesday? Are you sure? Because I thought it was Wednesday.”

“Tuesday,” Jackson repeated with confidence.

I looked around. A group of chubby tourists were about ten feet away, taking pictures of the Presbytere.

“HEY,” I called out to them. “Hello.”

They looked around with a little fear and located me as the source of the sound. That did not reassure them. I'd dressed in a hurry and I wasn't at my visual best. I wore boots, jeans, two black sweaters, and a red vintage women's overcoat with an ermine collar that probably should have been retired. I was also suffering from an unfortunate homemade haircut/bleach job that had involved pinking shears. I could see how it didn't inspire confidence.

“What's the day,” I hollered to them. They looked at each other and then turned away. You know how it is in the city.
Those fancy slickers could be up to anything with their trick questions and clever tongues.

Jackson and I looked at each other and shook our heads. Tourists.

“The day,” I yelled at them. “That's all I'm asking.”

Finally one tall brave man in his fifties hollered back. “January ninth,” he called.

“Thanks. But I meant Tuesday or Wednesday,” I called out.

“Oh,” the man said. “Tuesday.” He gave me a smile full of pity and turned back to his group. Then he thought better of it and turned back around, smiled again, and came over and handed me a folded-up dollar bill before retreating back to his tribe.

“Bless you,” he said.

“You too,” I said, taking the dollar. The man smiled and left. Jackson looked at my new dollar bill. I put it in my pocket. Jackson frowned.

“Okay. It was Thursday,” I said. Jackson nodded.

“How did you know Vic, anyway?” I asked him.

Jackson shrugged. “I know everyone around here. And everyone know me too. That's just the way it is. I go all over getting my cans. You see everyone that way.”

I asked him if he remembered anything else and he said no. I asked if I could come back and see him again if I had more questions and he said yes. I gave him twenty dollars and left.

I believed Jackson. Vic Willing had been alive on September first. He hadn't died in the flood.

One cause of death ruled out. Only an infinite number of possibilities to go.

L
ALI VALENTINE WAS
the only decent alibi Andray had given me. Ms. Valentine's last known address was on Baronne Street in Central City, a few blocks away from the Garden District. This was where Andray was from, right on the other side of St. Charles Avenue from the District, like two sides of the same coin. Even the floodwaters seemed to have known the difference, slowing to a trickle by the time they reached St. Charles and coming to a gentle stop at Prytania Street.

When I got to Lali's address it was gone. A big pile of lavender painted wood shards lay where the house had stood. In between the shards I could see little bits and pieces of a home: a pink sock, a can of tomato soup, a Lil Wayne CD, a White Hawks record.

Two men were hauling everything out of a house down the block, and I went over and asked them if they knew Lali.

The men were filthy, covered in plaster dust and mold. One of the men took off his dust mask and frowned.

“Lali,” he said. “Lali. I think she's staying with her cousins on Magnolia Street. I don't know the number. It's a blue house, right across from the projects. You can't miss it 'cause it's, like, folding.”

“Folding?” I said.

“You'll see what I mean,” he said. He went back to work.

I thanked him and went back to my truck, but then I stopped. On the corner was the truck with a cherry picker. In the cherry picker was a man doing something to a transformer—one of the little power boxes on top of a pole, twenty-five or so feet up. In some cities they were underground; in New Orleans they were above ground, wires strung around the city like a cat's cradle.

The man wasn't from Entergy, the idiotically named power company. Their people had blue uniforms. This man was in white. Another man was in the truck, operating the crane.

“Hey,” I said to the man operating the cherry picker. “Hi.”

He either didn't hear me or pretended not to hear me.

“Hey. Hello.”

No answer. I saw he had earmuffs on, the kind men use when they tear up the sidewalks.

I went back to the man who'd given me directions to Lali. This time his smile was less genuine.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Sorry to bother you again. But I was wondering. Do you know what those men are doing over there?”

The man shook his head. “It's funny, I been wondering the same thing. They're not Entergy. And the phone company got nothing to do with the power, and that's what's up there—transformers. So no, I got no idea. What do you think?”