The Boy Detective (16 page)

For anyone in the detective trade the best thing about Murray Hill was Philo Vance, the courtly, effete, haughty, overeducated, overdressed consulting detective, created by S. S. Van Dine. And just as the name S. S. Van Dine is unbelievable, unless it also is the name of a steamship, Vance, too, was a story for which the world was not prepared, or ever would be. He had an apartment on East Thirty-eighth Street, with a roof garden, and a manservant named Curry. Van Dine described him as “a marked Nordic type,” with an aquiline nose and gray, wide eyes, and a mouth that displayed “cynical cruelty.” He was a three-handicap golfer, a champion archer and polo player, a master at poker, and a connoisseur of fine wine, food, and Chinese ceramics and tapestries. He was “largely educated in Europe,” whatever that meant. He smoked Régie cigarettes, whatever they were. As a boy, I barely understood a word Vance said. He swore, “My word!” and “By Jove!” He came out with things like “I shouldn't miss it for all the lost comedies of Menander!”

But he was so damn smart.
The Bishop Murder Case, The Benson Murder Case, The Kennel, The Greene, The Scarab, The Canary
murder cases, and more. Using not ratiocination but rather “his knowledge of human psychology,” he brought evildoers to their knees. And every crime occurred in the wealthy houses of New York, fancier than Gramercy Park but close enough for me to recognize the places where secret sins abounded and motives remained in hiding behind substantial closed doors. I might have been Vance, I thought, minus the affectations—the man apart who is aware of the terrors people are capable of, and of the justice that awaits them, solving the mysteries of the world and then returning to my home with a rooftop garden on East Thirty-eighth Street.

 

Y
ET THERE WERE
times in the dream of days when I patrolled Murray Hill looking at the lovely houses with casual melancholy, knowing that the happy and sophisticated faces therein could never be mine. The sky was a gray silence, and the fires flared in the slits of the drapes. And all sorts of clever talk transpired therein, and all sorts of exciting news was announced, and confidence contained each house like skin. But these things were not mine. The families who lived with such stately ebullience did not belong to me. And so, while I stared at the great windows, tall as medieval towers, or at the lower level kitchens, blazing with their brass pots caressed in the thick arms of cook, arms glistening with sweat, my heart leapt from joy to envy thence to despair.

For even as I coveted, I knew that the lives that seemed like glittering smiles would inevitably be revealed with a parting of the drapes as no less drab than my own. When I walked on, the moon would swing away toward stone villages elsewhere, and the stars as well, and I would be left bearing the weight of darkness. And in that—writer detective, detective writer—I felt at home.

 

E
VERY BLOCK AROUND
here has a history, but you can't see history. Dashiell Hammett, who moved around a lot, lived at 155 East Thirtieth when he was writing
The Glass Key
. At 19 East Thirty-first, the Herald Square Hotel, were the offices of
Life
—not the picture magazine but rather a sophisticated humor magazine, whose name was bought by Time Inc. in 1936. The Herald Square Hotel was also where Charles Dana Gibson created the fashionable “Gibson Girl.” The golden cherub above the doorway is flanked by the words
Wit
and
Humor
.

At the corner of Thirty-third Street and Park stands a Lewis Mumford skyscraper, built in 1927. Ayn Rand worked as a typist here while researching
The Fountainhead.
Rand lived at 120 East Thirty-fourth, till her death in 1982. In
The Age of Innocence,
Newland Archer moves to East Thirty-ninth Street after his marriage. The publisher Charles Scribner lived at 64 East Thirty-fourth. Henry Miller lived in the area. Enrico Caruso, too, briefly.

It's nice to know the history of these streets, but the present crowds out the past. The least interesting-looking pedestrian pushes Ayn Rand, Caruso, even Hammett out of my thoughts. There is a great deal of history in New York, but, as they say, nothing like the present. One feels the breath of history in places like Boston and Philadelphia. Not here. The present is the tense of the city. Tonight, you are here-and-now. Me, too.

 

T
HAT PLACE WE
lived in on the Upper West Side was on the second story of a brownstone on Eighty-seventh. The downstairs apartment was occupied by a woman in her thirties whose working routine was known to Ginny and me—out by eight in the morning, back by six. She was a pleasant neighbor. We greeted one another by name, but were no more familiar than that.

One morning, as I was walking our dog, I noticed that the woman's apartment door was wide open and the lights were on. It was well after eight, but I presumed nothing was amiss, even after I returned from my dog walk twenty minutes later. An hour or so after that, Ginny and I were headed out when I glanced at the woman's apartment, which remained as it had been earlier. Door wide open, lights on. I called her name. Nothing. Louder. Still nothing. Hesitantly, I approached her door and called her name again. When there was no response this time, I decided to look inside, full of trepidation. The apartment was lit brightly. A PBS coffee mug on the counter. A yellow bowl with remnants of corn flakes or Special K clinging to the sides. A beige bra drooped over a ladder-back chair. An unmade bed. No one in the bathroom. And no young woman, dead or alive. She'd probably been in a rush that morning and left the door open.

But I tell you, poking around that apartment, which is what detectives and police do all the time, was chilling. It was entering someone else's life and all of the accoutrements peculiar to that life. And while it is exhilarating to do the very same thing as a writer of fiction, when you have created a person and the apartment out of the materials of your mind, to snoop around in reality makes you feel like the lowest sort of intruder. You are where you are not supposed to be, not invited or welcome. And whether or not the worst that you feared comes to pass, you feel ashamed, as though you had committed a crime yourself. That evening I told the woman what had happened, and what I'd done. She thanked me and shrugged it off. Whenever I spoke with her after that day, however, I made it brief.

 

W
HY IS MEMORY
more self-punishing than approving? A woman I ran into some years ago, the sister of a boy from the neighborhood, told me she had never forgotten a day when the kids were choosing up sides for a softball game. No one would take her because she was a girl, she said, and I had welcomed her to my team. And recently, a man who wanted me to join him in some money venture (I didn't) tried to persuade me by recalling my reckless bravery as a boy on an occasion when I fought a Third Avenue thug who was pushing us around and pinned him to the sidewalk. I had no recollection of either incident.

What I do remember is a feeling of remorse every time I found myself in a fistfight—win, lose, or draw—and many more instances of cowardice than bravery. If someone else's memory paints me as generous and courageous, and my own memory thinks much less of me, it might mean that I am better than my self-assessment for the very severity of my self-criticism. Then again, if I am right and they are not, I could be even worse than I imagine for deliberately forgetting a slew of sins. In any event, the competition is not among truths. It is among memories—some woman's, some man's, versus mine. Does all this mean that the “who am I” question is up for grabs? I prefer to think that who we are depends not on scraps of information tossed up by a perception of the past, but rather on present actions, which wards off memory in the interests of simply doing. See? If no one believed in time, this wouldn't even be a problem. You are what you are now, the eternal now, unencumbered by high or low expectations informed by memory, which is untrustworthy anyway.

Now,
this
comes back: a kid in summer camp, sort of a henchman to the bunk bully, who had persuaded himself that he was as tough and strong as the bully he served. One night he decided to try out his imagined prowess on me. He jumped on my back and started to punch me in the neck. I got him in a headlock. “Give!” I told him. He did not surrender. His face reddened. “Give!” I repeated. Harder, tighter, relishing my shameful victory. He gave.

 

H
ERE'S A MEMORY
so faint it arises as a palimpsest, present and absent. It involves a Halloween party. But that is the only fact it involves. The event itself—was it Halloween?—is associated with the scent of creosote. And the people—was I there?—were dour and disapproving. Something to do with a mask of the Frankenstein monster, I think. Or of President Eisenhower. Ike. Ice. Maybe it wasn't a party. All that is left is a feeling of being out of place. But that could be anywhere.

Oh, pay no attention to me. I was just another lost boy, a lot luckier than most. Better that I pay you a visit, inquire as to your health, read something to you, if you like, until you fall asleep. I could read to you during your sleep. Several years ago, I read to a girl in a coma. The fifteen-year-old daughter of a friend had been hit by a car and medivaced to the ICU. She lay in her white bed like a princess under a spell. I read her
Crime and Punishment
(I have no idea why) and wondered when she awoke, if she would call for Dostoyevsky or demand never to hear his name again. Neither occurred. When she did awaken at last, we all were too grateful to worry about her education in Russian literature. Not that I ever finished
Crime and Punishment
myself. Every time I try, I get only as far as the
Crime.

As for loneliness, I exaggerate it. My troubles were my own, but no different in size or depth from that of any kid. Everyone bears a burden. And mine were pretty lightweight. In the mid 1970s, I wrote a weekly column for the
Washington Post.
Standing at the urinal one day beside Howard Simons, the
Post'
s managing editor, I said, “Howard, why does one pronounce the
n
in
columnist,
but not in the word
column
? Shouldn't
columnist
be pronounced without the
n
?
Columist
?” Without looking up, he said, “Roger, I wish I had your problems.”

 

B
UT YOU,
PAL
.
How are you feeling these days? The docs assured you that you'd be on your feet in no time. And here you are, on your feet, yet worried to death about the matter of no time. Should we speak of every topic but radiation? Or should we speculate about how much radiation you have absorbed, comparing you to the citizens of Hiroshima, and calculating that you may have been given the bigger dose? We could share a good laugh over that. You know? You touch my heart. Do you realize that?

Here, then, I pause, and imagine you, in your sorrowful beauty and your low, lovely voice. What are you doing out there among the shady characters? Will you speak in my dreams and walk down the street ahead of me, knowing I am behind you, yet never turning to face me? Athens comes to mind, and I see Mount Lycabettus at Easter and you in the silent spiral of pilgrims' candles in the night. What is your role on this random walk? I sit at a small round table covered with a checkered cloth, in the back of the café, in my trench coat, with my fedora angled over my eyes, pulling on a Marlboro and watching you admiringly. You have endured so much. Are you there?

 

A
WORD IN
favor of policemen? No one will admit it, but without the presence of the get-everything-wrong cops, detectives could not get anything right. Not only is it the policeman who first deals with the corpse (position of, nature of wound, autopsy, etc.), but it is also he who gives us everyone who did
not
do it, thus, in effect, becoming the ass-backward advocate of Holmes's explanation to Watson in
The Sign of Four,
that “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Yet outside these purely functional attributes is the policeman himself, his official drudgery, his glamourless heroism. At one point in
The Maltese Falcon,
the head cop berates an underling for not being thorough enough—“So, ya seen your duty and ya done it.” But that's just it about cops. They see their duty and they do it. And, while the best moments of any mystery, including the solution, are given to the outsider detective, it is the civil servant cop who keeps the laws in place and maintains civilization, such as it is, not for a single flashy case, but every day, day after day. Who would want a world made up solely of Philo Vances? I wonder what it would be like to end a mystery story, not with a wisecrack or a self-satisfied remark of the great detective, but instead with a shot of the cop hauling away the killer the detective discovered, and cuffing him, and printing him, and locking him up. Or better, a shot of him going home well after the story is finished, and Holmes or Wolfe has already raised a glass to his own genius, and we see the dog-tired policeman lay his gun and badge on top of his dresser and strip down to his civvies, and turn on
Dancing with the Stars.

 

I
NTERESTING, THAT SO
many detectives speak peculiarly. Vance's fancy patter was barely intelligible. Poirot said, “Never will my English be quite perfect,” and he was always tossing in French phrases to make his point. Holmes's English was frequently snotty, archly witty. Sam Spade spit out English through his teeth. Charlie Chan hardly spoke it at all, resorting to the wisdom of Confucius and other aphorisms, and speaking a pidgin English that had no use for
a,
an,
or
the.
In
Murder by Death
(1976), which burlesqued all the famous detectives, a talking moose head on a wall was so exasperated with Chan's English, he yelled out, “Use the article!”