Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway (7 page)

Tracy, Kelly, and I were detectives. According to Silette, we’d always been detectives, of course, but we’d recognized that fact a few years ago and we’d been solving cases ever since. We’d started off in our neighborhood in Brooklyn and, as our reputation spread, started taking on cases around the city. Who’d planted the answers to Tuesday’s quiz in Dori’s locker? Who’d stolen Jamal’s weed? Who was Janelle’s real father? Being girl detectives in Brooklyn made cases easy to come by, but solutions were rare and troubling.

It was Chloe who disappeared. With her keys.

Tracy got the call late one Monday night. It was January, after the holidays but before school had started again. The next afternoon Tracy, Kelly, and I met Reena and Alex, her boyfriend, in Sophie’s. Reena and Alex looked exhausted and hungover, with dirty hair and circles under their eyes. Their hands shook and they chain-smoked. The time for heavy drinking had passed; instead, they each nursed a big mug of draft beer. Reena wore a fake leopard coat with a wide collar, coat wrapped tightly around her. Blinking white Christmas lights were still strung over the bar.

The last time Alex and Reena had seen Chloe was Thursday night. Reena and Alex stayed home and watched TV. “We’re like an old married couple,” Reena said, a little embarrassed. Chloe came home at about midnight. Ace Apocalypse, the filmmaker she worked for, was making a documentary about a band called Vanishing Center. The movie was called
The End of the World.
Chloe and Reena exchanged a few words and Chloe went to bed. A few minutes later Alex walked home. He had to get up early the next day—he worked in construction—and it was Reena’s day off and she wanted to sleep in. At eleven the next morning the ringing phone woke her up.

It was Ace Apocalypse. He was wondering where Chloe was. She hadn’t shown up to work. Reena went to Chloe’s bedroom, planning to wake her up. But Chloe wasn’t there.

Reena was a little worried but not excessively so, she told us.

“I mean, shit happens, right?” she said through a cloud of Camel smoke. “I mean, maybe she decided to call in sick or whatever and go have a fun day. And Ace, he’s
cra
-zy. Crazy mad fucked-up guy. So I’m thinking maybe he’s got the wrong day or time or whatever, and Chloe’s out waiting for him in Queens somewhere or wherever, right? And when I saw her, she didn’t actually say she was going to work the next day. I just assumed. So, you know. It wasn’t a really big deal.”

“And then we didn’t see her Friday night,” Alex said. He looked as concerned as Reena. I made a note in my notebook (
Alex: good boyfriend
)
.
“Obviously. So that was when it first started to seem, you know, a little weird. We called Ben—”

“That’s this guy she used to date,” Reena interjected. “Do you guys know him? He’s a bartender at the Horseshoe Bar over on Seventh and B?”

I nodded.

“A little,” Kelly said. “Go on.”

Ben, Horseshoe
, I wrote down.
Ex-boyfriend.

“Right,” Reena said. “They used to date, but as far as I know, they hadn’t seen each other for a while. But I figured, you know, it was worth a try?”

We three detectives nodded encouragingly; yes, it had certainly been worth a try.

“He hadn’t talked to her in, like, forever.” Reena went on. “But, well, we were worried, but we didn’t want to be ridiculous. I mean, we’re all grownups, right? It’s not like she has a curfew or anything. It’s not like we’re her parents. But then on Sunday, her friend Rain calls and leaves this long, pissed-off message on the answering machine. I guess Chloe was supposed to see her that night, they had this big night planned, to have dinner and see a movie at Theatre Eighty.”

“What movie?” I asked.

Reena looked at me. “What movie? Why would that matter?”

“Everything matters,” Tracy assured her.

Theatre 80
, I wrote in my book.
Sunday, evening show.

Reena shrugged. “I don’t know. But they hadn’t seen each other in a while, and neither of them had a boyfriend, so they decided to make a thing of it. I called Rain and asked her. They were supposed to meet at Dojo’s for dinner at six thirty and then see the movie at eight and then probably go out afterward. But Chloe never showed up, never called, nothing.”

“When did they make the plans?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Reena said. “I didn’t ask.”

“That’s not like her,” Alex said. “That’s
totally
not like her.”

“That’s pretty much it,” Reena said. “We didn’t find out anything at all. We don’t want to call the cops—”

“But we will,” Alex said. “If you think we should.”

“Yeah, we will,” Reena said. “But we’d rather not.” The police were not to be counted on for help, and besides, at any given moment we were each engaged in at least a few illegal acts—at the moment, underage drinking and smoking. “After we talked to Rain we decided we’d give it one more day before we freaked out. So then on Monday, well, we freaked out,” she said, laughing a little. “And we know you guys have this whole detective thing, with your book or whatever. So we figured . . .”

“We can do it,” Tracy said, the little professional in her Dr. Martens boots, vintage orange minidress, and black leather coat two sizes too big. “We can find her. And since she’s a friend, there’ll be no fee. Except”—she looked at me and then back to Reena—“I think Claire and Kelly should get the staff discount on clothes at the store. They’ve been totally cool about paying full price while the rest of us pay, like, nothing. And they have like
no
money. It’s only fair.”

“I can’t do staff discount,” Reena said. “Not for anyone anymore. They put the kibosh on that. But I can do twenty percent. Plus my eternal gratitude.”

Tracy looked at me. I nodded. We looked over at Kelly. She agreed. We looked back at Reena.

We had a deal.

We would find Chloe.

“The last time you saw her, that Thursday night,” Tracy said. “Let’s go over that again.”

Reena bit her lip. “Well,” she began, “me and Alex were watching TV. And—”

“What were you watching?” Kelly asked.

Reena looked at Alex.

“
Simon and Simon
,” Alex said.

“So we were watching TV and smoking a J and I think I was eating cereal—”

“Lucky Charms.” Alex broke in. He was getting the hang of this.

“And Chloe walks in and we said hi, hello, normal stuff. She looked a little, well, like maybe she’d been drinking a little. Her eyes were kind of red and . . . what’s the word? Bleary. She was bleary-eyed.”

Bleary-eyed
, I wrote in my book.
Lucky Charms.

“So she got a bowl of cereal and watched TV with us for a few minutes. And then she stands up and says . . . What did she say?”

Reena looked at Alex.

“‘Enough of this shit,’” Alex quoted. “She said, ‘Enough of this shit. I can’t take any more.’ And then she went to bed. Or so we thought.”

“I thought she was talking about the TV show,” Reena said. “Now . . .” She closed her eyes and frowned. “I don’t know. Now I just want to find her. I just really, really want to find her.”

A quivering, shaking look, like crying, passed over her face. She swallowed it away.

“Did she take her keys?” Tracy asked.

Keys
, I wrote in my book. It was a good question.

“Uh, I, yeah,” Reena said. “She did. I noticed that when I was looking through her stuff. Her keys weren’t there.”

Next to keys I wrote,
Took them.
Tracy looked in the notebook. She took the pen out of my hand and wrote,
Left, not taken.
It wasn’t until later that I realized she meant Chloe.

I looked through my notes and went back to
Lucky Charms
and wrote down what I remembered from the commercial:
Pink clovers. Green horseshoes. Yellow diamonds. Blue stars. Orange Moons. Purple hearts.

We made plans to come over later—Reena had a staff meeting at the clothing store. Alex went wherever he went. Kelly and Tracy and I stayed in the bar and got another round of dollar glasses of beer.

Kelly and I looked at Tracy. Tracy knew Chloe best.

“Do you think she would . . .” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Tracy said. “I mean.”

She frowned.

“We’ll assume she didn’t,” Tracy said firmly. “We’ll assume she’s alive, and out there somewhere, until proven otherwise. Okay?”

Kelly and I nodded; we agreed.

Kelly stood up.

“I gotta go,” she said. “Jonah’s got a show tonight.”

Jonah.
Tracy and I must have rolled our eyes because Kelly said, “You bitches just wish you had boyfriends.”

Tracy and I each made a face. Maybe we did wish we had boyfriends. Or maybe we just didn’t want anyone else to have them. Jonah didn’t seem like such a prize to me. He was in a band that played at parties and all-ages punk shows. Kid stuff. He almost never talked to me and I’d stopped trying to get along with him. He didn’t seem to be especially nice to Kelly, either. He was a boyfriend; he was an accessory like a new bag or a new pair of shoes but the best one of all, the one who kept you company when you were bored, the one who made you more interesting to other girls, more desirable to other boys. But I wouldn’t want to actually be alone with him. Sex was more interesting in theory than practice to me and Tracy.

Kelly left. Tracy and I didn’t say anything. Jonah had been occupying more and more of Kelly’s time since they’d been going out, nearly six months now. But this was the first time she’d walked out on a case.

Ever.

“Well,” Tracy said, answering the unasked question. “I guess we’ll begin with their apartment.”

I agreed. I didn’t know Chloe well. Her fondness for Tracy only extended halfway to me and Kelly. She was nice to me, but we’d never spent time alone. I was a little in awe of her. She had short hair that she dyed black and wore long in front of her eyes. She knew all the after-hours spots and every doorman at every club. She knew the bartenders at all the bars and probably hadn’t paid for a drink in years. Everything about her seemed effortless and natural. She was the first girl I knew to get a tattoo, a little bluebird on her back. She’d been an extra in a bunch of Ace’s movies. She wasn’t the prettiest girl—she had an overbite and a wide mouth and she was too skinny, with a nearly flat chest and bones sticking out through her vintage clothes—but boys always liked her. She had a quick smile and a fast tongue, and I’d seen her slap a girl in a club who’d pushed her away and refused to apologize.

I looked at Tracy and I figured she was thinking the same thing I was. That if
Chloe
could slip away, if
Chloe
could disappear . . .

Chloe, who seemed so solid, so real.

The Case of the End of the World had begun.

T
RACY AND I MET REENA
back at her and Chloe’s apartment. It was a one-bedroom with a big living room, which Alex the carpenter/boyfriend had split into a living room and a separate, illegal bedroom. In the living room was a futon and a coffee table and a TV on a stand and a bookshelf overflowing with books: Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick,
The Stranger.

“Those are all Chloe’s,” Reena said. “Mine are in my room.”

“Does she read them?” Tracy asked. She crouched down to see the titles.

“Sometimes,” Reena said. “To be honest, she seems to like start one, get halfway through, and then give up.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. She likes real books but has, like, no attention span. Sometimes she’s holding a book but then when I look at her she’s just staring at the wall. I read, like, V. C. Andrews and Judith Krantz. Sometimes I read romances.”

There was nothing remarkable about the apartment: wood floors, white walls, views to fire escapes and air vents. Everything in it was from thrift shops or street corners. Reena opened the door to Chloe’s room, the real bedroom.

“There you go,” Reena said nervously, as if Chloe might come in at any second and catch us going through her stuff. “Knock yourselves out.”

We shut the door behind us.

It was less than a hundred square feet. A bed, a closet, a desk, an armchair. Messy but not unusually so. On one wall was a Joe Strummer poster, Strummer’s face positioned to watch over Chloe as she slept. On another wall was a Vanishing Center poster. The singer, CC, was bleeding from where he’d cut an
X
into the skin of his chest with a razorblade. On another wall was a group of five or six postcards.

We stood near the door and looked around the room, both thinking the same thing:
What if I were Chloe?

Tracy pointed toward a desk near the door. On the desk was a little bowl of change, a small pile of mail. That’s where she would stop first. Tracy went over and flipped through the mail. I watched over her shoulder. Bank statement, credit card offer, junk mail. You could feel that this was where her keys would go.

Tracy took the letters and put them in her bag, a cheap version of a Dutch schoolbag. Then she went and flopped on the bed. She looked at Joe Strummer.

I looked at the postcards on the far wall. Sid Vicious, scowling at the camera. Iggy Pop, blood dripping from his chest.

“Sid Vicious,” I said. “Iggy Pop. CC.”

Tracy looked at me. I held up my right hand and used it to cut my left wrist.

“They all cut themselves,” she said.

Tracy sat up and looked around. She slipped her hand in the narrow space between the bed and the wall. I came over to help her look. We pulled and pushed the futon to look in its cracks and crevices.

“Got it,” Tracy said after a minute.

“Got it?” I said. I was holding the mattress up and couldn’t see what she was looking at.

“Got it.” She took whatever she was holding and I let the corner of the mattress go.

We looked at what Tracy found. Just what we expected: a razorblade wrapped in a dirty paper towel.

Cutter
, I wrote in my notebook. Girls like that weren’t rare—when the pressure mounted, they took little nips at themselves to let it out. Neither me or Tracy did it, but we understood it well enough.