Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran Read Free Book Online

fingers?”
    â€œUh, no,” I said. “Well, maybe. But not from the parrots. From the house.”
    â€œOh,” he said. “I guess not. Knock yourself out.”
    From my bag I found a black leatherette case about the size of a composition book. I put the case on the coffee table and took out a small glass jar of black powder, a camelhair brush, and alittle book of sticky plastic pages, each page backed with stiff white paper.
    First I needed a control print: Vic Willing’s. I could probably find one online—in most states lawyers had to leave their prints on file with some regulating body or other—but there was no Internet service nearby and it would be a hassle in any case, so instead I found Vic’s toothbrush and hairbrush. Carrying them with my fingernails, I brought them back to the coffee table and dusted them with the black powder. Prints bloomed under the powder like roses. I tore off a few sheets from the book of sticky paper. Carefully I peeled the clear sticky stuff from the white backing and pressed it to the handle of the hairbrush, and then spread it back across the white backing. There were a bunch of smudges and one perfect print. I did the same on the toothbrush. I got another perfect print.
    Next I took prints from some spots around the house a visitor was likely to touch, labeling them as I went. The doorknobs. The refrigerator. The safe. The television—you’d be surprised how many murderers put the TV on before or after they kill someone. And the bird feeder. I put all my little papers in an envelope and stuck them in my purse.
    I had a feeling there was more to the apartment than I’d seen. Vic had held secrets here. 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.
    I went to the bedroom and turned off the lights and lay down in Vic’s bed. The sheets were crisp and possibly ironed and not very comfortable. I let my breathing slow down and my mind drain until I was almost asleep.
    Almost immediately I sat up and got out of bed. What I’d felt wasn’t rest or peace. It was struggle.
    Vic was at war with himself. But so are most of us. It was ugly. But it wasn’t much of a clue.
    I asked Leon if I could hold on to the keys so I could come back and look for more clues if I needed to.
    He said no.
    â€œIt’s just that I only have one set,” he said, shuffling in place a little. “It’s not that I don’t trust you,” he clarified.
    â€œIt’s just that you don’t trust me,” I said.
    He hemmed and hawed a little before I let him off the hook.
    â€œIt’s okay,” I lied. “You will.”
    â€œI’m sure,” he said. “I will.”
    He was lying too.

7
    C ONSTANCE DARLING WAS an unconventional teacher. She would drive me out to the swamps on a moonless night and leave me there to find my way home by the wind and the stars. She’d toss a newspaper clipping about a murder that took place in Manhattan in 1973 on my desk and tell me to solve it. She taught me to read fingerprints like tea leaves and eyes like maps. She taught me how to smell trouble literally and figuratively. She sent me to lamas and tulkus, to swamis and psychics. Like most detectives, she kept a police scanner in the kitchen, and if we weren’t busy we’d go to crime scenes and solve the crimes before the NOPD even showed up. Not that they wanted our help. Most of the time they ignored us. But Constance was always right.
    â€œThere are two kinds of detectives,” Constance told me a long time ago. We were in her library in her home in the Garden District. “The first are those that decide to be a detective. The second are those that have no choice at all.”
    We all get the call a little differently, she