AT TWENTY-THREE I WAS LIVING IN Los Angeles, if you can call it living. I had nothing else to do. A detective I knew named Sean Risling had me working on an encyclopedia of poisonous orchids he was putting together. I sampled and researched and wrote. At night I bought littletwenty-dollar bindles of cocaine and sometimes cheaper bags of heroin wrapped in pages ofCat Fancy magazine on Sunset Boulevard. I slept in a series of hotel rooms in Hollywood. When Constance Darling, the famous detective from New Orleans, came to town on the HappyBurger Murder Case and needed an assistant, Sean introduced us. Risling said little and knew much.
Constance was famous — famous to other detectives, at least. Years ago, when we were finished being children, my friend Tracy found a copy of Jacques Silette’s little yellow bookDétection 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
