Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway Read Online Free PDF

of Jacques Silette’s little yellow book
Détection
in my parent’s musty, bitter house in Brooklyn. After that we were ruined: being detectives was all that mattered to us. Especially Tracy, who became the best detective of us all—and when she vanished a few years later became a mystery herself, leaving only a Tracy-shaped hole behind, a paper doll cut out from the page.
    To me, Silette and his students were rock stars, celebrities. I was always surprised when no one else seemed to have heard of them.
    Wasn’t solving mysteries important? Didn’t the truth matter? Of course, Silette had foreseen this. He knew the truth always was, and always would be, the most unpopular point of view. “If there is anything that can unify us,” he wrote to Constance during the Paris uprising, already old and bitter, “it is our love of deceit and lies, and our abhorrence of the truth.”
    Constance was pleased enough with me when the HappyBurger case was done, but I hardly let myself hope she would take me on as a permanent assistant. Or as close to permanent as we get; she died three years later, shot in New Orleans for the few hundred bucks she had in her Chanel bag, a bag that was now mine.
    Constance had set me up in a room at the Chateau Marmont down the hall from her own. I didn’t know what she was doing now that we were done with the case. I figured I’d hang around the Marmont until she kicked me out. I had no place to go, anyway. I’d let my cheap Hollywood Boulevard hotel room go when she hired me, and when we were done I’d sleep in the bus station or maybe in Griffin Park, up by the observatory. When Sean paid me I’d get another hotel room or a room in a share.
    But the next morning Constance called me to her room.
    “DeWitt,” she said. She was sitting at a table drinking a cup of coffee with chicory, a woody smell I didn’t recognize at the time but would later. She peered at me, head tilted like a little bird. Constance was already old. She was born old, with her Chanel suits and spectator pumps and white hair in a topknot.
    “DeWitt, are you free for another job tomorrow?”
    “Sure,” I said, heart thumping.
    “Do you drive?” she asked.
    “Legally?”
    Constance flicked her hand in the air. The law was for people who needed instructions, she would later tell me. The same people who needed to be told not to put a baby in the dryer or a dog in the microwave.
    “We’re going to Las Vegas,” she said. “Or close to it. Do you know the way?”
    “I’ll get a map,” I said. “Give me the address and I’ll plan it tonight.”
    She nodded and tossed me the keys to her car. For the trip she’d rented a Jaguar identical to the one she drove in New Orleans, as she would in every city we visited.
    That night I plotted out our trip on a few maps. I asked the concierge at the hotel for recommended stops along the way, and I marked the least filthy gas stations and the best date shakes. When I was done I took the Jaguar and drove around Los Angeles, up Sunset Boulevard into the hills and out toward the ocean.
    It had been eight years since Tracy had disappeared from a subway platform in New York City. We were going to grow up to be great detectives together, Tracy and Kelly and I. We were detectives already, just not great ones. But we were pretty good for kids.
    Now Tracy was gone and Kelly was becoming someone ugly. She was so devastated by our inability to find Tracy that I was pretty sure she’d never left New York City at all, scared of overlooking a single clue, missing the phone call that would explain everything. She hated me for leaving. She hated me for being here while Tracy, so much wiser and kinder and prettier, was gone. I agreed. But there was nothing I could do about it.
    On the end of the Sunset Strip I pulled over to a pay phone and put in a handful of change. First I called Tracy. She’d disappeared in 1987. No one knew if she was alive or dead. Kelly had fixed her old phone number so