The Boy Detective Read online

  William Sydney Porter, O. Henry to his readers, lived a bit better than most of the area writers, at 55 Irving Place, because he had a steady job writing weekly stories for the New York World at $100 a pop. He spent most of his time hanging around Healy’s Café across the street, and getting stinko with fellow writers, artists, and musicians. Healy’s Café became Pete’s Tavern, in which O. Henry was said to have written “The Gift of the Magi.” During Prohibition, Pete’s posed as a flower shop. Patrons walked past the cases of refrigerated flowers on their way to the bar. Summers, when we were in college, Ginny and I would sit here at the outdoor tables, nurse beers, and speak of the life ahead of us. Tonight the tables are cold and white with frost.

  Oscar Wilde lived at Seventeenth Street and Irving Place for a while. Minor literary figures, such as Carl Van Vechten and Paul Rosenfield lived on Irving Place as well. Local dinner parties were jazzed up by the likes of George Gershwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser, Ethel Barrymore, and Langston Hughes. They spilled gaily into what Van Vechten had called “the splendid drunken twenties.” In 1927, Nathanael West took a position as night manager of the fleabag Kenmore Hotel on Twenty-third, where he wrote The Day of the Locust and snuck other writers into the hotel. Dashiell Hammett registered under the name Mr. T. Victoria Blueberry. West gave him the swankiest suite in the joint, where Hammett wrote The Maltese Falcon—telling of wicked women, murderers, and treasure three blocks from where Herman Melville, PI, alone and unnoticed, had tracked evildoers down the vast gray streets of the sea.

  TO THIS PRECIOUS PLACE, Dr. Milton B. Rosenblatt brought his bride, Mollie Ruth Spruch, in 1939, one year before I was born. Suspicious characters, both. Even their names were aliases. My mother was born Marta, but when she entered grade school, the authorities told my German grandparents that Marta was not an American name, as compared to, say, Mollie. No one seemed to know where my father came from. Whenever I asked, the answer was different each time. Sometimes Poland, sometimes Russia, occasionally Lithuania. As for his alias, the B. stood for Barrington, which he picked up on a drive through Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He thought the name gave him WASPy class, which he both sought and derided. He rises from his own ashes, my fastidious father, and dusts himself off.

  He wore three-piece suits. He wore hats from Cavanaugh’s—gray felt hats in the winters and straw skimmers in the summers. He wore neckties indoors, and smoking jackets, sitting alone in the silent home he made. I have a photograph of him when he was two or three, wearing a girl’s dress as all infants did in those days. He looked old even then, with his grim, displeased expression and his Edward G. Robinson jowls. As a child, I was expected to be old, too. “Roger,” he said one day, “that’s no way for a twelve-year-old boy to behave.” “Dad,” I said, “I’m eight.”

  So angry was he with life, his fury often came out funny. All my childhood, I was assailed by his rules for successful living, such as “Never trust a Hungarian.” At the age of three, it was hard to know how to apply such advice. In my teens, he told me, “Never go out with anyone from Brooklyn,” which expanded to include the Bronx, Queens, and New Jersey as well. Reared on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, he hated that fact, too. He spent his remaining years trying to get away from the poverty associated with the Lower East Side, and to shake off Judaism as if it were a local curse. He wanted to be up and out. Up from DeWitt Clinton High School. Up from City College, where he was a boxer. When he became a doctor, he and my mother moved up in the world to Gramercy Park, where he had his first office. Later, he moved his office farther uptown, to 1040 Fifth Avenue at Eighty-fifth Street. When Jackie Kennedy moved into the building in 1964, he complained about the Secret Service men. He hated them. He hated her, with whom, of course, he never spoke. He was made chief of medicine at Doctors Hospital, the ritziest if not the most efficient hospital in the city. Ever combative, he told me he won the position “over all the Harvards and Yales.”

  In the 1960s, when I was in my twenties, he became a neocon Republican like many FDR Democrats, and was sneeringly contemptuous of every liberalizing event I celebrated. Often we would argue late into the night, and although I was in the right in our arguments, he always managed to gain the upper hand. One evening, we were seated next to each other in identical red upholstered chairs, watching the seven o’clock news, when Alabama’s governor George Wallace came on. This was in 1968, before Wallace had been shot, saw the light, and was crowned a “national treasure.” In those days he was purely a fearmonger with sweet talk. When he addressed the nation, as he did for a full three minutes that evening, you knew you were getting hate and death, unsullied by platform politics. My father, not taking his eyes from the TV screen, thought for a moment, giving himself just the right pause. Finally he said, “You know, in a decent country a jackass like that would not be given ten seconds on television. But now, thanks to you liberals, he can talk his brains out.”

  WHOA! SPEAKING OF TALKING: Here’s a guy, underdressed for the weather in jeans, a T-shirt, and a blazer, quick-stepping up Thirtieth and braying into his cell in behalf of a business deal he hopes to pull off. I can’t make out the particulars. He yammers on into a small crowd ahead of me, gaining speed, and explaining about how “It’s a lock, Phil” and “Let’s just do it!” It is evident that Phil is not ready to just do it, if he ever will be, and sensing this, our public speaker grows louder and more dramatic in his self-promotion. A self-revving engine. The crowd expects that he’ll take off. And just as this thought occurs, why yes, his left foot rises on the air and then his right, and all at once he is lifting into the cold dark, two or three inches off the ground, speaking ever more urgently. “You don’t see this happening, Phil? Of course you do! Of course you do!”

  At first, finding him merely pathetic, I listen to his pitch with a disinterested malice, waiting for his voice to sink in despair as he grows aware of his inevitable failure. Phil says no, emphatically. My man droops his head, held so high until that moment. But now, as he approaches Thirty-second, I find myself quietly cheering his lusty desperation, as if he were speaking for all mankind knocking its head against a brick wall. And you can feel others on the street pulling for him, too, though not a syllable of encouragement is uttered. In his relentless effort to win Phil over, he has become the leader of our pack of strangers, our head bird. We are swept along in his tail wind. “Come on, Phil. You know it’s going to happen. It’s gotta happen!”—the last words we hear from him as he goose-steps toward the moon.

  IF YOU DON’T want to be around people who talk their brains out, why live in New York? Talking freely is the city’s thing—you can feel it—what the city does, and has done from the start, when the Dutch carried the prizes of tolerance and openness from Holland across the Atlantic and planted those bright, fat tulips here. Free thought became free markets. The Dutch republic of the 1600s boasted the most gloriously diverse culture in Europe. Bertrand Russell called seventeenth-century Holland the birthplace of “freedom of speculation.” I cannot claim that as a boy I was aware of any of this history, but even a nine-year-old could feel the city’s extravagant freedom in the air—every block, every home inviting you to speak your mind. On my detective’s walks, though I hardly knew it, I strutted as a young colonial, escaping the tyranny of a silent house.

  Who, after all, is more suited to the liberal life than the detective, who, by dint of his very profession, defies restrictions of government, of the police, and of conventional, predictable thinking? If in some ways detectives are also arch conservatives, in that they tame the behavior of their clients, indeed tame society itself, and make it orderly, still, they function according to their own rules of honor and justice arrived at independently. The private enterprise of the private op. Every detective story depends on their freedom of speculation without which no mystery can be solved.

  As I wandered the city on my cases, I did not think that I existed anywhere other than where I happened to be at the time—in Madison Square Park or the Vi
llage or Murray Hill or St. Marks Place. Yet I could not help but sense that I was also treading a path that had been laid out before me centuries earlier by those who believed the human mind was built to confront mysteries. The detective story is that of free speculation at work. And the Dutch wrote it for the world long before Holmes pursued Moriarty, or I, the bad guys of my own manufacture.

  YOU’D THINK IT would have been Edgar Allan Poe who coined the word detective, because Poe wrote the first detective stories, that is, stories with the now-familiar components of the know-it-all sleuth, the invaluable stooge or sidekick, the bumbling police, and so forth. But though Poe created “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Purloined Letter,” and “The Gold Bug,” along with C. Auguste Dupin, the little genius who solved his crimes, the term for Dupin was not detective. Poe might have used that term had he written his mysteries after 1843. That was when Sir James Graham, the British home secretary, seeking to give the ablest officers in the London police force a special designation, formed a unit called “the detectives.” Even if Poe had known the word, he would not have pinned it on Dupin without prefixing the word private, because, like all great independent or “consulting” detectives, Dupin never would have been associated with the police. A detective worth his salt has no use for institutions—not only because he’s smarter than the institutions, but also because he cannot survive in a group.

  Take Dupin himself, who in fact was not an amateur sleuth or committed to crime fighting in any way. He was more like an unemployed philosopher, equipped with the reasoning intelligence Poe called “ratiocination,” and driven by a near-manic curiosity. A collector of rare books, he had retreated from Parisian society until he chanced to meet the person who turned out to be the narrator of “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Thence, Dupin’s legacy.

  When I first took up the trade as a boy, I wondered about the word detective, as detector might have seemed more fitting. You wouldn’t say “lie detective.” The suffix -ive suggests something or someone performing a specific action, or a condition, such as in defective or directive or corrective. But what makes the word right, I think, is that detective seems more detached than detector, which intimates a more personal passion. A true detective had better not care too much about the cases he’s involved in, lest he lose the objectivity that gives him his powers. Hard-boiled private eyes often come perilously close to falling for one dame or another, and sometimes there is a hint of a great love in the past. Holmes’s heart held Irene Adler of “A Scandal in Bohemia,” referred to afterward, with a pang, as “the woman.” Yet, to do his work effectively and dispassionately, the detective must remain the detective. He walks at an even pace. He measures his steps with a cold eye.

  Now that I think of it, that quality of self-control might explain why Poe wrote detective stories in the first place. A wild man in everything else he did, he turned his pen to stories of orderly expectations and rational deductions. Could it be that he saw the world as frenzied and manic, and by creating the detective story, he felt he could contain that chaos within the seemingly immutable laws of reason? Or maybe he invented the detective story as a way of holding madness at arm’s length, to avoid going crazy himself. There is justice in a detective story, and none in madness. And while there is danger in a detective story, it eventually is put to rest, which distinguishes a detective story from life, where the mysteries are illimitable.

  HERE’S WHAT I mean: Twenty-ninth Street between Madison and Park Avenue South. Something fishy about this block. That so-called health club, Exhale—a “mindbodyspa.” I’ll bet. And the storefront notice that an artist has posted as an ad for his photographs, taken in New Mexico, describing them as “a metaphor for the timeless interior landscape of the mind.” This is code, don’t you think? And what monkey business goes on at the low, wide office building that purports to contain the Community Prep High School “for learners and leaders”? And what should we make of this? Stampworx. The x. And this: Technetron Electronics. What’s cooking here, I’d like to know. The graffiti on a couple of walls: SIN and ETAH (hate backward). Somebody’s picking up a message, no? And the three-story red town house with the soldered metal door. Yet the windows have air conditioners. Who lives there?

  While we’re at it, in what country is this block? On the southeast corner, an eight-story, glacierlike apartment house with tiers of Plexiglas balconies, called the Gansevoort (The Netherlands). And Gansevoort happened to be Melville’s mother’s maiden name, as well as that of his brother. What should we make of that? Next door, Winston’s “La Maison de Champagne” (France). Across the street, a parking garage (Mexico), beside a two-story house with a roll-down metal door and a red fire escape out front leading up to a square iron balcony like Juliet’s (let’s say England). And next to that, another town house with a sign NEW AGE INNER VISION, and a picture of gypsies (let’s say Romania, or Hungary), which sits beside the Lalabla restaurant (Ethiopia), which sits across the street from La Campanile (Italy). And down the block, the Lola Hotel (who knows?) next door to the Habib American Bank (Egypt?), across from a grand old office building called The Emmet (Ireland). In the middle of the block, on the north side of the street, stands the Permanent Mission of Moldova to the United Nations (Moldova). Moldova, my foot. Something’s up here, I swear. I smell a rat.

  HERE’S LOOKING AT you, city of going going going. City of gorgeous surprises and oh-Jesus! coincidences, such as bumping into people you know or haven’t seen for years, in the place where millions walk. Or bumping into Elizabeth Bishop’s “Letter to N.Y.” as you are poring over the copyedited manuscript of a memoir—where she writes of “taking cabs in the middle of the night . . . and the meter glares like a moral owl.”

  DID YOU KNOW that Detective Poe was involved in a real murder case, in the 1840s? A man named John Anderson had a tobacco shop near Duane Street on lower Broadway. In his employ was a twenty-year-old woman named Mary Cecilia Rogers, whose good looks were so well known she was celebrated in the city. A writer for the New York Herald described her “heaven-like smile and her star-like eyes,” and she was dubbed the “Beautiful Cigar Girl.” However heavenly Mary appeared, her activities were more terrestrial, involving several men of low reputation, as they put it in those days.

  On July 28, 1841, Mary’s body was found floating in the Hudson. She had been the victim of either a brutal gang beating, as initially thought by the police, or of a botched abortion, or both. One suspect was Daniel Payne, a cork cutter and a drunk, who lived at the boardinghouse run by Mary and her mother. Payne took poison shortly after Mary’s death, but he’d had an alibi for the night she died.

  Enter Poe, who, along with Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, frequented Anderson’s cigar emporium and was said to be smitten with the Beautiful Cigar Girl. He would question Anderson about her incessantly. A year or so after her death, Poe published “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”—Mary Rogers—in which Dupin proved that the girl was murdered by a young naval officer who earlier had tried to elope with her. In the story, he had dragged her body to the river after the botched abortion. Poe’s version became the accepted solution to the murder, but it was just a story. No one ever solved the case. Some thought Poe had killed her himself. I may be making this up.

  ALL RIGHT, I did it. I killed her. But it was an accident. Sort of. Sort of an accident. I didn’t mean to do it, but I did. That is, I did mean to do it, but I didn’t. If you want to arrest someone, why don’t you nab that naval officer who knocked her up? And I didn’t even care about that. I mean, I would have liked to be the first, but with Mary, that would have taken an awfully early arrival. I didn’t want her to have the abortion either. I was perfectly willing to live with her and the baby, in a little place I have on Third Street, or another in the Bronx. Anywhere. We could have made a life together. I would have given up booze.

  But when I said all that to her, pleaded with her that night down by the river, where I had pursued her . . . when I said all that—and I was sob
er as a judge—she laughed. She said, Why would I marry a skin-and-bones doped-up drunk who gets his rocks off by writing about life instead of living it? And when I told her that art was more important than life, she laughed harder, because she could see in my maddened eyes that I didn’t mean a word of it, that I would have tossed away all the poems, all the stories, for the love, the real love, of a woman. She saw that—the tobacco girl. She understood intuitively that I’d become a writer because no one would love me. And that insight of hers was at once so saddening and enraging to me that I put my hands on her throat, her white, white throat. And at that point she spun away and freed herself from my grasp and stood there, and danced a taunting little jig. But as she did, she slipped on a wet rock and cracked her head half open. What was I to do? I pushed her body in the water, and went home.

  All I wanted was her heart. Now I hear it beating in the walls of my room. But you know that.

  ONCE IN A rare while my boy detective would actually solve a mystery, insofar as mysteries can be solved, as in the case of the bent old woman—black coat, black dress—who used to walk around Gramercy Park hurriedly, as if she were chasing something. She muttered to herself, occasionally looking up to see the kids of the neighborhood staring at her, and mocking her. “There’s the witch,” we said. “Witch!” And she would shake her tiny fist at us and walk on, never slowing, around and around the park.