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Omens change. Signs shift. Nothing is permanent.
“If I told you the truth plainly,” the man said, “you would not understand.” His voice was scratchy and warped, like an old record. But I could still make out the tinge of a French accent. “If life gave you answers outright, they would be meaningless. Each detective must take her clues and solve her mysteries for herself. No one can solve your mystery for you; a book cannot tell you the way.”
“The last time you saw your uncle was . . .” “Saw him?” Leon said. “Saw him?” I had an image of him sawing his uncle in half.
On any given day in court, Vic would be wearing the most expensive suit in the place. If anyone minded, they kept it to themselves. New Orleans was a little like England: people were comfortable with class distinctions.
New Orleans’ labyrinthine legal system, based on the Napoleonic Code, didn’t help matters.
New Orleans had both the highest murder rate and one of the lowest conviction rates in the country.
“When a person disappears,” Silette wrote in Détection, “the detective must look at what she took with her when she left—not only the material items, but what is gone without her; what she carries with her to the underworld; what words will go unspoken; what no longer exists if she is made to disappear.”
DETECTION, Silette
“The detective will never be thanked for revealing the truth,” Silette wrote. “He will be despised, doubted, abhorred, spat upon. There will be no parades, no flowers, no medals for him. His only reward will be the awful, unbearable truth itself. If that is not enough, he is in the wrong line of work, and must rethink his calling altogether.”
I saw more sitting on porches, doing what people do when they’re overwhelmed. Just trying to think of where to begin was enough to make you sit back down and not get up.
They were as similar as Wall Street brokers in gray flannel suits or white-coated doctors in a hospital or Marines in uniform—and like those other people in uniform, their sameness subdued something in them, made them forget a piece of themselves. Something that should have been in their eyes wasn’t there.
The streets got quieter until the quiet was a roar, eerie and deafening.
It had been more than a year since the storm. But on some blocks it was as if nothing had happened since then; literally nothing, not even a breeze or a rainfall or a bird or even a breath.
The car set off an alarm to let everyone know it had hurt itself.
The tire was wet. I figured Suicide Boy had peed on it. Consecreted it was.
Houses are like people, only less annoying.
“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.
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.
nadis,
I printed out everything I could find on Andray Fairview, the long, sad public record of his life. Andray Fairview, this is going down on your permanent record.
Andray’s mother was the county and his father was the state.
“There are no coincidences,” Silette wrote. “Only mysteries that haven’t been solved, clues that haven’t been placed. Most are blind to the language of the bird overheard, the leaf in our path, the phonographic record stuck in a groove, the unknown caller on the phone. They don’t see the omens. They don’t know how to read the signs. “To them life is like a book with blank pages. But to the detective, it is an illuminated manuscript of mysteries.”
Once you know the truth, there are no second chances. No do-overs, no changing your mind, no turning back. The door shuts behind you, and locks.
Détection was a door to another world; a world where, even if we didn’t understand things, we were sure they could be understood. A world where people paid attention, where they listened, where they looked for clues. A world where mysteries could be solved. Or so we thought. By the time we realized we were wrong, that we had misunderstood everything, it was too late. Silette had already branded us. For better or worse, we were not the same girls anymore.
“The detective thinks he is investigating a murder or a missing girl,” Silette wrote. “But truly he is investigating something else altogether, something he cannot grasp hold of directly. Satisfaction will be rare. Uncertainty will be your natural state. Sureness will always elude you. The detective will always circle around what he wants, never seeing it whole. “We do not go on despite this. We go on because of it.”
a uniformed mugging
Both arrests ended in a release after sixty days. That was the usual down here. The locals called it a sixty-day homicide or a misdemeanor murder or a 701—701 being the code that said the cops had sixty days to charge the suspect or let him go. Sixty days was a long time to put a murder charge together. Sixty days was a long time to put the Constitution on hold. But not long enough for this town. More than ninety percent of people arrested for murder in New Orleans were released in sixty days.
People kill each other everywhere. The difference was that in New Orleans, no one tried to stop them.
“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.”
“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.”
“For the detective whose eyes have truly been opened,” Silette wrote, “the solution to every mystery is never more than inches away.”
“The mystery is not solved by the use of fingerprints or suspects or the identification of weapons,” Silette wrote. “These things serve only to trigger the detective’s memory. The detective and the client, the victim and the criminal—all already know the solution to the mystery. “They need only to remember it, and recognize it when it appears.”
I was pretty sure early death was a job benefit for Andray.
“NO ONE IS INNOCENT,” Silette wrote. “The only question is, how will you bear your portion of guilt?”
in New Orleans, where most people’s idea of help was a bigger gun.
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.
He was now in full Indian regalia: Vegas showgirl meets Buffalo Bill.
Calea zacatechichi
“Simplicity,” Silette wrote. “Is the refuge of fools.”
She had the fast-disappearing Yat accent, equal parts Brooklyn and Boston, and sharing the same origins. It used to be common in New Orleans; now it had moved out to Chalmette and up to the North Shore.
“It isn’t about me,” he said. “People always say that,” I said. “But it’s always about them.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m working on being as stupid as everyone else but I’m not there yet. I’m hoping more drugs will help. They say they kill brain cells.”
Depression can make people stupid, as I well knew.
“What will fill the void left by the missing person?” Silette wrote. “Who will now breathe his air, eat his food, marry his wife? Who will fill the job that would have been his? Who will fill his seat at the university lecture, the football game, in the old armchair at home? Who will read his books? Wear his clothes? Watch his movies? And most important, who will attend to the mysteries that would have been his, and hold them until the missing person can return?”
I was, I don’t know. Kind of just floating. Just not really doing anything and drinking too much and kind of, kind of drowning, if you know what I mean. Just kind of drowning in place.” “I think I do,” I said.
haint blue
I think they started making them after the Civil War; fighters who’d lost their wars and lost their fight. Even when their side won, they lost.
Interviewer: What does it mean to you to be a Silettian detective? Murray: (Pause.) It means I was blind, and now I can see. Interviewer: And the drinking? Murray: Well. Some people need glasses to see, you know.
“Only a fool looks for answers,” Silette wrote. “The wise detective seeks only questions.”
In New Orleans, it’s hard to tell where your murder case ends and everyone else’s begins.
Those people didn’t know what life is like in the city of the dead. They didn’t know how easy it is to die.
