The Feral Detective Read online

  Dedication

  In memory of

  MICHAEL FRIEDMAN

  ARDEN REED

  DAN ICOLARI

  Epigraph

  Only too well do I know the Yahoos to be a barbarous nation,

  perhaps the most barbarous to be found upon the face of the earth,

  but it would be unjust to overlook certain traits which redeem

  them. They have institutions of their own; they enjoy a king; they

  employ a language based upon abstract concepts; they believe, like the

  Hebrews and the Greeks, in the divine nature of poetry; and they

  surmise that the soul survives the death of the body. They also uphold

  the truth of punishments and rewards. After their fashion, they

  stand for civilization much as we ourselves do, in spite of our many

  transgressions. I do not repent having fought in their ranks against

  the Ape-men.

  —JORGE LUIS BORGES, BRODIE’S REPORT

  Granted there is no artifice here, no trickery, what motive has this

  man for having no motive?

  —DAWN POWELL, TURN, MAGIC WHEEL

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part I: The Wash

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part II: The Mountain

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part III: The Desert

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Part IV: Night and Morning

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Part V: Cobble Hill

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Part VI: Mountain, Wash, Desert

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Part VII: Desert Hot Springs

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Jonathan Lethem

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part I

  The Wash

  1

  I WAS TWENTY MINUTES LATE FOR MY APPOINTMENT WITH THE Feral Detective, because I drove past the place twice. In daylight, broad flat morning, in a rental car with GPS that only sort of betrayed me. It was the feeling the place inspired that betrayed me worse. The feeling, specifically, that it was a place for driving past, and so my foot couldn’t find the brake. White stucco, with redwood-clad pillars and a terra-cotta tile roof. A deck ran around the second floor, accessible from stairs on the parking lot side. The windows were all barred.

  The signage at the various doors was either crappy plastic or just banners printed vertically, nailed through eyelets to the pillars. One said only TATTOO, another SPA. Upstairs, WARRIOR SUTRA BODY PIERCING. In the window of SPA, in front of closed curtains, neon bulbs in red and blue said OPEN. I assumed I knew what spa meant in this case. It was nine on a Saturday morning, January 14, 2017. Or nine twenty, since I was, as I said, late. It seemed impossible to be late for an appointment with anything at a building such as this.

  To make an appointment here was to have dropped through the floor of your life, out of ordinary time. You weren’t meant to be here at all, if you were me.

  Having missed the destination, I drove a ways on Foothill Boulevard before figuring it out. The malls and gas stations and chain restaurants took on the quality of a single repeated backdrop, such as Fred Flintstone would motor past. Space was different here. I doubled back and slowed. The building wasn’t dark, exactly—nothing could be, in this glare. But it had a warty density that made it easy to miss.

  The problem was also the immediate surround. Beyond the parking lot, a wide-strewn trailer park. On the right, behind cyclone fence, a tundra of pits and heaped hills of gravel, in a lot the approximate size of Central Park. Maybe I exaggerate. I do. Half the size of Central Park. In this wasteland the building seemed fake. It claimed a context where none was possible. I mean, human beings, ones you’d want to be or know. The power that had caused me to drive past was more than unappealing. The building made you aware of mental blinders. To park your car here was to not be who you thought you were. Maybe I wasn’t now.

  Plus, the blue was killing me. I don’t mean the blues, as in the white girl blues. (I did have those, though I’d never resort to such bogus shit aloud.) It was the blue of the sky that was killing me, that and the way, across the street, with no sense of proportion or taste, snow-capped peaks argued intricately with the flat galactic blue. Beneath the peaks, white bandwidths of fog clung to the contours of rock. There was nothing like these in the sky itself.

  If I stared at the places where the blue met the white, it freaked me out. It was a thing you only saw in the movies, with actors costumed as dwarves running up a CGI mountain, except here there was no black frame, no exit sign floating in the periphery. Just the blue. I considered the word unearthly and then discarded it as stupid. This was the earthly, precisely. I parked in the lot behind the building and looked for suite number eight.

  I had to go up the stairs to find it. The second-story deck put me in a new relation to the expanse of trailers, the suburban vacuity beyond. It didn’t solve the mystery of what was tucked inside those gravel arroyos, though, or how the white fluff could be stuck to the mountains when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

  Lady, you did this. You went west. Now, suck it up. I knocked.

  2

  IN CASE IT ISN’T OBVIOUS, THERE’S A DETECTIVE IN THIS STORY. BUT I’M not it. I had myself halfway cast in the role when I got on the plane, but no. Sorry. Then again, the story does involve a missing person, and it could well be me. Or you or practically anybody. As he said to me once, who’s not missing? He was prone to these low-ebb oracular remarks. To my surprise, I learned to like them.

  3

  A VOICE BEHIND THE BRASS #8 CALLED, “IT’S OPEN.” I PUSHED IN. The usual law of glaring sunlight
applied, so I was blinded in the gloom. There wasn’t a foyer or waiting area, let alone a secretary screening his appointments. I’d lurched into the so-called suite, a large, cluttered, murky space that grew darker when the voice said “Close the door” and I obeyed. In the instant I’d had to discern outlines, I made out the boat-sized desk, the figure behind it, the shapes along the walls, all inanimate. No other bodies waiting in ambush, I felt reasonably sure. I could be back through the door before he’d be around the desk. I had pepper spray and a tiny compressed-air klaxon horn in my purse. I’d never used either one, and the klaxon was maybe a joke.

  “Phoebe Siegler?” The only lamp in the room sat on the desk. All I saw was jeans and boots. The lamp had for company only a landline, a heavy black office phone. No computer.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I said, just to say something.

  He dropped his feet from the desk and rolled forward in his chair and my eyes adjusted first to find his worn red leather jacket, cut and detailed like a cowboy shirt, with white-leather-trimmed vest pockets and cuffs. The leather was so stiff and dry, it was as if a cowboy shirt had been cast in bronze, then spray-painted. An absurd jacket, though I came to take it for granted. More than that, as an emblem. I’ve still never seen another like it.

  Above, his big head came into the light. His eyes were brown under bushy, devilishly arched brows. His hair streamed back from his wide forehead, and his sideburns were wide and beardy enough to seem to stream from his cheeks too. Like his whole face had pushed through a gap in a web of hair, I thought absurdly. Where the burns stopped he needed a shave, two days’ worth at least. He resembled one of those pottery leaf-faces you find hanging on the sheds of wannabe-English gardens. His big nose and lips, his deep-cleft chin and philtrum, looked like ceramic or wood. Somehow, despite or because of all of this, I registered him as attractive, with an undertow of disgust. The disgust was perhaps at myself, for noticing.

  A minor nagging mystery for me had always been what did Meryl see in Clint anyhow? I think I caught that movie on cable when I was eleven or twelve, and I’d found him only baffling and weird. So maybe that was the mystery I’d come all this way to solve. Realizing I find someone attractive is often like this for me, a catching-up of the brain to something as remote as if on some faraway planet. I guess I could cross it off my bucket list: I’d now felt a jerk on my chain for a fiftyish cowboyish fellow. Go figure.

  That didn’t mean I wanted to flirt. I was terrified, and showed it. He said, “I’m Charles Heist,” and moved farther into the light, but didn’t stick out his hand. My eyes adjusted enough to tabulate the array of stuff along the walls. On the left, a narrow iron-frame bed, with heaped-up blankets, and pillows lined the long way, against the wall. I hoped he wouldn’t suggest I consider it a couch. On the right, a battered black case for an acoustic guitar, a two-drawer filing cabinet, and a long blond wood armoire, one I couldn’t keep from noting would have been a pretty swank piece of Danish modern if it wasn’t ruined. But this was my brain pinballing to irrelevancies.

  He helped me out. “You said on the phone you were looking for someone.” I’d called a number the day before and been called back—from the phone on the desk, perhaps.

  “My friend’s daughter, yes.”

  “Sit.” He pointed at a folding chair between the file cabinet and armoire. While I took it and scissored it open for myself, he watched, seeming frankly unashamed not to show any gallantry. I preferred the desk between us for now, and maybe he felt this, so that in fact the deeper gallantry was on view.

  “Jane Toth sent you?”

  “Yes.” Jane Toth was the social worker whose name the local police had given me after they’d finished shrugging off my expectation that they’d be any help in my search for Arabella Swados, whose trail had led to Upland. Eighteen-year-old Reed College dropouts three months missing didn’t meet their standard for expanding their caseload. So I’d gone to find Ms. Toth, a local specialist in destitutes and runaways. After subjecting me to a sequence of expectation-lowering gestures herself, she’d jotted Heist’s name and number on the back of her card and mentioned his weird nickname. She’d also warned me that his methods were a little unorthodox, but he sometimes produced miraculous results for families with trails grown cold, like Arabella’s.

  “You bring some materials?”

  “Sorry.” I would try to stop saying that. I dug in my purse for Arabella’s passport, with a photo taken just a year before, when she was seventeen. “I guess this means we don’t have to look in Mexico.”

  “We’re not that near to Mexico here, Ms. Siegler. But if you wanted, there are places you could cross the line with a driver’s license.”

  “I don’t think she has one.”

  “Is she using credit cards?”

  “She had one of her mom’s, but she’s not using it. We tried that.”

  “Or you wouldn’t be here.”

  The passport I’d slid onto his desk was clean and tight, and the tension in the binding snapped it shut, not that he noticed. Heist—I should call him Charles, only he wasn’t that to me, not yet—didn’t look at the passport. He stared at me. I’ve endured my share of male strip-you-bare eyework, but this was more existentially blunt, souls meeting in a sunstruck clearing. For an instant he seemed as shook that I’d entered his office as I was.

  “I guess you don’t work along those lines so much, tracing documents and so on.” Duh. I was blithering.

  “Not at all.”

  “In high school she worked on an organic farm in Vermont.” Saying this, I found myself flashing on the mountains, the blasted expanses I’d just ducked in from. The blue. Arabella and I, we were an awfully long way from Vermont’s village green rendition of the rural now. “She got onto a kind of off-the-grid idea there, I think. You know, from similarly privileged kids who didn’t know any better than she did.”

  “Off-the-grid isn’t always a terrible idea.” He said this without venting any disapproval my way, as much as I’d invited it.

  “No, sure, I didn’t mean that. So, that is the kind of thing you do?”

  “Yes.” Now the blue light of his stare was the same as that sky: killing me. Perhaps in mercy, he broke the tension, opened a desk drawer at his right. Of course a gun could come out. Or maybe this was the part of the script where he produced a bottle and two shot glasses. Perhaps I closely resembled the woman who had broken his heart. I leaned a little forward. The drawer was deep, and scraped free of the desk heavily. He scooped his hand down low and brought out a furry gray-striped football with a cone-like white snout and soft pink claws like the hands of a child’s doll. I surprised myself knowing its right name without even trying—an opossum.

  The creature’s legs and thick bare tail dangled on either side of Heist’s arm, but it wasn’t dead. Its black eyes glistened. I sat back a little. The room had a warm woody smell, like underbrush, and now I credited it to the animal I hadn’t known was hiding in the drawer. Heist stroked the creature with one blunt finger, from between its catlike ears, down its spine, seeming to hypnotize it. Or maybe it was me that was hypnotized.

  “Does it work like a bloodhound?” I joked. “I forgot to bring a scrap of clothing.”

  “Her name is Jean.” He spoke evenly, still unaffronted by my flip tone. “She’s recovering from a urinary tract infection, if it doesn’t kill her.”

  “Just a pet, then.”

  “Some people thought so, but they were misinformed. I took her off their hands.”

  “Ah. So now she lives in your desk?”

  “For the time being.”

  “Then what—you release her to the wild?”

  “If she lives. She probably won’t.”

  It all sounded a little righteous to me, but I didn’t have the zoological grounds to quibble. Still, I couldn’t keep from the impression that Heist cuddled the animal not for its own sake, and not even to impress me, but to salve his own desolation. Maybe just hearing about lost girls was too much fo
r this person. I’d begun kicking myself for imagining he could locate one.

  “What do you need to go forward?” I asked. “I mean, concerning Arabella.”

  “I’ll ask around.” He stroked the opossum, who blinked at me.

  “Should I pay you?”

  “Let’s see what I find, then we’ll talk. Are there other names?”

  “Other names?”

  “Other names she might go under. Or names she’s thrown around, part of this time in her life. Friends, boyfriends, enemies.”

  “I think she quit throwing names around. Quit calling home entirely. But I’ll check with her mom.”

  “Anything is better than nothing.”

  “There is one name, though I hesitate.”

  He and Jean waited, all eyes on me.

  “Leonard Cohen.”

  “Go on.”

  “She was a bit of a freak about him, I think that might be worth mentioning. Even before he died, I mean. It could be that’s the point of this, ah, general destination.” Not to add that I couldn’t think of one other fucking reason in the universe a thinking, feeling teenage vegan would migrate to this locale, but I didn’t want to insult the precinct Charles Heist and his little friend called home.

  “You think she went up the mountain.”

  “I couldn’t dismiss the coincidence.” Here was exactly as far as my sleuthing had gotten: Mount Baldy, one of those mountains Upland lay at the foot of, was home to Leonard Cohen’s Buddhist guru, had been for a decade or so his place of retreat. I couldn’t pick it out of the lineup of white-topped peaks, but for that I had the rental’s GPS, or maybe now this guy.

  The prospect seemed to trouble him, and he waited a long time before producing his totally unsatisfying reply. “Okay. I’ll put it on my list.”

  I wished he’d actually exhibit a list, even if it were scrawled on a Post-it, but it was at least good to hear him invoke the word. Action items, procedures, protocols, anything but this human freak show in a red leather jacket soothing or being soothed by his comfort opossum.

  Well, wasn’t I the judgmental Acela-corridor elite? The bubble I’d fled, coming west, I actually carted around on my back like a snail’s shell, a bubble fit for one. As my fear abated, in its place a kind of rage coursed through me, that I’d come to this absurd passage, that I’d placed Arabella in hands such as these. Or that Arabella had placed me in them; it could be seen either way. Seeming to read me again, Heist lifted his free hand from Jean’s ears long enough to palm the passport into an interior pocket of the jacket. Too late for me to take it back. I was an idiot for not making a photocopy and for letting him near the original.