The Boy Detective Read online

  In the winter of 1952, not long after the presidential election, cabinet appointments were announced. I went over to the block beautiful to see Tom. As I rounded the corner, his family was getting into a big black car. I waved, but Tom didn’t notice me. That was the last time I saw Tom Brownell, the son of the future attorney general of the United States, under Dwight David Eisenhower.

  EVERYONE ELSE SEEMED to belong to something—a club, a group, an institution. Tom Brownell used to show up in school once a week wearing the quasi military dress uniform of the Knickerbocker Grays. I never figured out what the Knickerbocker Grays did, but it seemed to involve marching and other martial exercises. Tom Munnell, the best student in our class, and the most gentlemanly, took figure-skating lessons in the afternoons. In the summers, he was a competitive sailor in Connecticut, winning races that were reported in the New York Times Sports section. He never mentioned his accomplishments. Some kids belonged to synagogues, some to churches. The one group I joined was the Cub Scouts, which met once a week in the basement of St. George’s Church on Sixteenth Street and Rutherford Place. I remember only the blue uniform and the neckwear held together by a wooden clasp, and reading the Scout manual that taught you how to make a fire without a fire.

  We walk through so many different lives, they say, a few of them ours. I don’t buy it. Oh, we do different things, even look differently and think differently as we do them. But that is not the same thing as leading different lives. A principle persists in us, among all the changes—sometimes lived up to, sometimes denied. The deviations run their course. But eventually we settle upon who we are. Luke Appling, the once great shortstop for the Chicago White Sox, participating in an Old Timers game, hit a 360-foot home run into left center, at the age of seventy-five. That’s who he was.

  Who knows who you are? At the checkpoint, I demanded to see your papers. You blithely presented them as though you had done that a million times before. Such casual self-confidence. Such chutzpah. Driver’s license. Birth certificate. Amex card. That should do it, you said. But I’m afraid there’s been a mix-up (I’m trying to be polite). The name on your health insurance is not the name on your letter of recommendation, which, I may add, bears an illegible signature. And what you report as your blood type on your electric bill does not gibe with the character flaw noted on your passport. Would you mind stepping out of the line for a moment while we determine your IQ? It will only take a year or so, and then you can move along to Customs—whoever you are. Could you give me your name once more, for the record, but this time without the Lithuanian accent and the incessant shouting? Dimly, behind the steppes, the rising sun beckons you to originality. You. That’s right—Mister Whatever You Call Yourself.

  NOTHING PREPARES ME for this wind that comes in sideways at the corner of Twentieth and Third, flinging nails of ice and snow, and gulping and spitting in spurts so cold, you feel your eyes freeze in their tears. I cannot breathe. The owl, for all his feathers, is a-cold. It is as if this wind is telling me I have come to the end of everything, that there will be no going forward from this corner, no red sun in the offing, no flowers in bloom, only this shocking cold wall of air, from now on. The weight of it. If it could howl, I’d be deaf.

  And then, just as suddenly, it loosens its hold on me, like a lion distracted by a noise in the brush, and it veers away, as if it never had been interested in me in the first place, as if, at this corner, I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. One moment I am clamping down on my teeth. The next, I stand confused. Did I dream the wind? Was its attack on me an accident? I think not. I sensed malice. In my hand lies a Stone Age ax, blood on the blade.

  HAVE I TOLD you about the Case of the Decapitated Tulips? What am I saying? I know I haven’t. Fact is, I haven’t mentioned the case to anyone until now, because it happened to be one of those perfect crimes in which no one but the criminal knows who dunnit. I’m not even sure why I’m telling you about it now, because statutes of limitations do not apply to cases like this. Maybe I should keep my mouth shut. The perp is still at large. See if you can figure it out.

  It happened in the spring when I was ten, just after the annual Gramercy Park Flower Show at the National Arts Club. One afternoon in early May, as was the custom, the neighborhood kids were drafted into helping out at the show, which consisted of a lavish display of flowers and a sit-down lunch for, mostly, ladies in bright hats with wide brims. The ladies ordered us about this way and that as we served trays of olives with the pits removed, pears with the skins removed, and sandwiches with the crusts removed, containing cucumbers with the rinds removed. There was no hardship in the work, except the irritating feeling of participating, and being shoved around, in a pointless ritual. After the event, the ladies thanked us perfunctorily, and the kids went home. Everything seemed in order.

  But the following morning—and no one ever linked the Flower Show or the Arts Club to the crime—when the Gramercy Park attendants came to work, they discovered that every tulip in the park had been beheaded. The flowers, fifty or so, had been planted in neat rows in a large rectangular flower bed near the statue of Edwin Booth. Now their fallen heads—pink, yellow, white, and red—lay at the bases of the stems. It was horrible to behold, a massacre, reported the park attendants, those beautiful little tulips lying dead. Who would do such a thing? Most likely, the criminal acted alone. A gang of any size would have been noticed in the park on a spring evening at dusk. Someone from outside the neighborhood, “a troubled youth,” probably. He must have climbed the gate, since it was unthinkable that anyone who lived on the park and possessed a key “would perpetrate an act of such wanton vandalism.” And yet there were jagged cuts in the stems, which possibly could have been made by a key swung at the end of a chain. To this day, the case remains open. Solved it yet?

  NOT TO MENTION THIS, not to mention that. Not to mention Joanna Miles’s diary, which was on her bookshelf one time when she wasn’t in her room, so I opened it and read it as any detective would. When she caught me in the act (she was a woman of eleven, I a boy of the same age), she told me in no uncertain terms, that PEOPLE DO NOT READ OTHER PEOPLE’S DIARIES. I should have known better. I probably did, though I don’t think I’d ever seen a diary before or known anyone who kept one. Joanna was very sophisticated. She grew up to be quite a good actress. I used to love to go horseback riding with her and her friends in Forest Hills. But after that rainy afternoon, either she banished me from her house or I banished myself out of shame and embarrassment, and lost her friendship.

  Hers was the oldest apartment house in New York, the very first one built, in 1870. It consisted of five floors, no elevator of course, with two apartments per floor, and in the center, a grand staircase with a brass railing that could have come from a European palace. (When Richard Widmark pushed the old lady in the wheelchair down the stairs in Kiss of Death, those were the stairs.) Dormers stuck out of a shingled mansard roof. And each apartment had seven large rooms and four fireplaces. Dark wood walls and wall sconces with converted gaslights. One day in the 1960s, a gang of dimwitted official hit men casually tore the building down, replacing it with a cheap-looking white brick apartment house. Nothing about it spoke of beauty, or of secrets.

  NOT TO MENTION the slow raising of the barrel, as Dr. Donaldson, a crony of my father’s, told me to lead the grackle and fire ahead of it, accounting for its flight path. “Wait. Wait.” Not to mention the cold lawn of Dr. Donaldson’s house in Smithtown, Long Island, and the brown leaves fallen. Not to mention the words of approval and encouragement as I squeezed the trigger, as instructed. Or the dead glass eye of the bird lying on its side, or the bellyache of helpless stupidity at the shower of congratulations.

  FOR THE RECORD, let me state unequivocally that winter is a poor season for self-recrimination. The dead leaves lie sodden at the roots of the trees, and the roots look sallow, and the air is perturbed by an imaginable ice storm, and it’s all wrong, the atmosphere, all wrong. There’s no enchantmen
t in it. Spring would make a better time. Bright summer, better still. Yet it can’t be helped. It’s winter. Make the worst of it.

  On the other hand, let me also say, on behalf of winter, that it is quite a good season for horses. They stand in the hardened fields with their blank, dark eyes, still as boulders, and they see everything. They may appear to be idle or asleep, dying even, but they see everything. I liken myself and all PIs to the eye of the horse. Just wanted to state that for the record.

  REDEMPTION IS HORSESHIT anyway. The nails in Jesus’s hands. Redeemed in that? The efficient cruelty of tyrants? Is that redeemed by prayer? By conversion? By apologies? Look at the one in need before you, right now. Tend to her wounds. Or wipe the raspberry ice cream from her chin. Or give her a fresh pink tulip. Perk up. It is all the redemption a life requires. Of course, if you don’t believe me, you can always spend your life on your knees, hoping you’ll be noticed. People do.

  A man I knew once, when he wasn’t passing his days in church or praising Jesus, was occupied betraying others. Since he would tell them he betrayed them, he thought himself redeemed. Even now, fully forty years later, I see his face in its practiced innocence, sitting across from me at lunch, cleansing his little soul as he explained why he betrayed me. He felt better after that. I bleed in you. You bleed in me.

  Oh well. We’re all entitled to a few million mistakes. The vacant lot on Twenty-second and Lex, and the gang from Little Italy, rock-hard, pale, spectral, hurling chips of bricks at the tent we had pitched, and me running like crazy to escape, to fetch Mrs. Morris, too, but mainly to escape with my coward’s heart intact. That definitely was in there, somewhere. Not to mention that, either.

  One student asked, “What do these exercises have to do with our memoirs?” I told her, anyone can write a memoir about the events of a life. To do something originally yours, you must write about the dreams of your life, which are best disclosed in things you already know. “Is a memory a dream?” she asked. I don’t know, I said. Most of them feel like a dream. “So many moments in a life,” said another. “Yet life seems like just one moment,” said a third.

  AND YOU? TOI? Hold your breath, feel the balance of the barrel, lead the target, and squeeze the trigger. Everyone around you will die. And the world will bring you a report. Would it not feel better to hold your breath and stand there empty-handed? No gun or key chain. Who can ever get over the Rach Three—how he held all those instruments in his head all at once? You never know what is moving in your heart. The grackle in my sights no longer stirs, he of the still feathers and the stone eye. Sorry. You are not forgiven.

  And yet were you not the one who ran toward the sea and spat back the salt and flipped your hair, peering through the droplets, through your own exploding breath, into the dark box? Remember him? Sure you do. The one who lay on his back on the fifty-yard line of the football field and swirled the stars? The one, there, standing head high in the light of the world? The one who spoke the truth? That, too, was you.

  If you hope to improve your soul, you need to engage in self-destructive acts. Small ones, at first, until you get the hang of it—choosing the job that is wrong for you, or the town that is wrong for you. Once you are comfortable with those choices, you may move on and up to the wrong friends and lovers and mates, whose natures assure you of ruin. Then finally, there is you—your own worst acts and motives that gnaw at your skin in the sleepless nights, till you would cry out in the agony you have brought upon yourself. In these moments, you will feel a quiet heaving in your chest, and you will hear a voice very much like your own, telling you to “Wait. Wait.” Then wonder about those you hardly know. Then wonder about those you will never meet. That is your improved soul.

  A HORSE I rode in Forest Hills, a chestnut named Prince, tried to crush my leg against a wall as we participated in a ceremony for the opening of an indoor ring. I didn’t take it personally. He wanted to get me off his back. A reasonable ambition. But I had to show him who was boss, so every time he sidled up to the wall, edging his flank closer, I hit him with my crop and dug in my spurs, yanking his bit to tear at the sides of his mouth, so that he, too, would feel pain. This is how it went with us, beating each other up, riding in a circle of show horses, other riders carrying flags, he hating the ceremony he was forced to participate in, I hating it, too.

  Would anyone really mind if I rode Prince through my old neighborhood at night at a full gallop, squeezing his barrel ribs with my thighs, nudging his belly with my silver spurs, belting him with my crop, from time to time, whack!, between the flattened ears. Past Pete’s Tavern. Whoosh! Past the chattering clusters of ladies and the sleeping dogs. Oh, they might complain about my walloping the shit out of the animal just to make good time—a galloping horse makes one hell of a lot of noise. Sounds like a war, actually. I wasn’t doing it for speed, I’d tell the cops. I could not give a rat’s ass if someone else held the record for racing a horse through Gramercy Park at night at a full gallop. And the cops would say, And, for our part, we don’t give a rat’s ass why you were doing it, mister. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on! So, I guess that answers my question.

  In summer camp, one of the horses died in the middle of the night. The pinto dropped dead in his stall. They brought in buckets of lye for his burial. He had to be cut up into pieces so that they could fit him in his grave, which had to be deep. So they cut him into pieces, and they dug the grave. All this they did before dawn, so none of us kids saw any evidence of the dead pinto, except for the streaks of lye on the fresh earth. We did see that.

  Did you know that in Hiroshima, the Bomb blasted the legs off horses? They stood, momentarily, with no legs. Hard to walk with no legs.

  EASY ENOUGH TO say that you can be both a writer and a detective. A lot harder to pull it off. Sure, you can make up some easy explanation that both trades involve a searching for the truth, that both make use of research, that both require an appreciation of history, psychology, a knowledge of the patterns of human behavior, and so forth. You can add that the writer and the detective work on their own, that each knows a creative sort of loneliness, that their temperaments are similar—a mixture of toughness and childish optimism, of gruffness and a sense of play, of innocence and irony. A writer and a detective also learn to take rough treatment from the outer world, to take some hits, and to give as good as they get.

  But, when you think about it, a detective builds his case on hard facts, ballistics and prints, types of weapons, eyewitnesses, people seen and heard here and there; on things that are real and really said. The fun in the TV series Murder, She Wrote was catching the inevitable slip of the tongue by the killer high up in the show, and then watching Jessica Fletcher, Angela Lansbury, nail the guilty party with it later on. The writer, on the other hand, builds his case from thin air. First he invents the crimes, then he manufactures the solutions. He may get as worked up about his mysteries as the detective does, but his mysteries never happened. I realize this business gets complicated when one is speaking of fictional detectives who are writers’ creations. But once we start to read detective stories, the characters take on a life of their own, separated from the writers who gave birth to them. And while a writer may fancy himself a detective from time to time, not a single fictional professional detective has ever been a writer. Of course, sometimes the detective writes in the first person to tell his story, à la Philip Marlowe. But that is simply how the story gets to us. The writer is always a sidekick. Nero Wolfe had his Archie Goodwin, Vance had Van Dine, Holmes had Watson, whom he often accused of over-romanticizing his exploits.

  Yet if you take the wider view, a writer and a detective may merge quite successfully, as each has what the other needs. The detective works principally with knowledge, the writer with feeling. And the most difficult cases are solved when these streams converge. George Eliot defined the poet’s soul as “that which is equally quick to learn and quick to feel—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling and feeling flashes ba
ck as a new organ of knowledge.” That’s it, you see, and when both knowledge and feeling are applied in the service of the thing not seen, the thing imagined, not possible, such as the surprise identity of the criminal, well, then anything is possible.

  The one thing they both require—the writer and the detective—is the desire to see what is not there, and to make it at once orderly and beautiful, as in a flower or the answer to a math problem. George C. Scott’s Holmes saw the world only for what it could be. The sublime detective, the sublime writer.

  AND EVEN WHEN you see a little, you never see the whole thing, any more than you can the whole room in which you sit or the street on which you walk. There is always something unseen above you or behind you. Just like the truth in a murder case. You never see the whole. Just like the city. Plaza by plaza, esplanade by esplanade, you make your way in the discrete parts of the city the way you would travel the works of a clock, each block an intricacy of gears and wheels. At first, you wonder about the scope and shape of the entire entity, the larger machine. Then you see that the parts are self-sufficient, each park or square composed so that the residents might feel some level of control and understanding about where they live. No one lives in New York. Everyone lives on Tenth Street, or on St. Marks Place, or in Gramercy Park.

  Or in Tudor City, where my walk takes me now. Strangely spiritless yet beautiful, the apartment house complex between Fortieth and Forty-second streets and First Avenue once constituted the first residential skyscrapers in the world. A developer named Fred F. French had a vision of an urban utopia, by way of Tudor England, which probably guaranteed his disappointment. The area was more dangerous yet interesting as a slum known as Goat Hill in the 1850s, a home for roving goats and gangs. French filled it with tulip gardens, golf courses, and private playgrounds, all of which remain, sans the golf course, in a kind of odorless splendor.