The Boy Detective (3 page)

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.

 

H
ERE'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.

 

H
ERE'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.”

 

D
ID 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.

 

A
LL 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 sober 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.

 

O
NCE 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.

One Saturday afternoon when I was ten and alone, I watched from a distance as she made her rounds. Eventually she veered off and headed toward Twenty-third Street, then up to Twenty-sixth and Park (no Park Avenue South in those days either) to the Horn & Hardart Cafeteria. I followed. She looked to the left and to the right and entered, moving in spurts to the wall of food behind the little glass doors. She dipped her hand into her black purse, extracted several coins, and, with great care, pushed them into one of the slots, opening the little glass door tentatively, as if she were about to be surprised by what lay behind it. She removed a thick wedge of cheesecake on a heavy cream-color plate, and studied it. Then she looked to the right and left again, and, determining that it was safe, moved to a corner table, away from others in the cafeteria, and slowly ate. After that, I tried to dissuade the other kids from calling her the witch—after seeing her and the wedge of cheesecake on the heavy cream-color plate before her, at a table in the Horn & Hardart Cafeteria.

 

D
O DEAD SPIRITS
walk among us? What's your opinion, pal? From time to time I catch them moving on the streets, dodging cars, and potholes, though for the life of me I can't see why. What on earth do ghosts have to fear? You wonder if people live with one another or with these spirits. A topic of my memoir class. Everyone dwells in one past or another, and to a greater or lesser extent, is ruled by it. The coarse sleeve of her long black coat. It touches my arm. I shiver. Ghosts address a man on a walk.

Were I to believe in reincarnation, what would it be like for reborn me to walk these streets again? Would there come to the brand-new mind and body—the Iraqi girl's, the wheaten terrier's—a breeze of recollection of my former life, my life as it is now? Would it be a simple flash of déjà vu? Or something more vague, like a tremor of unease, attributed to no objective experience, born only of itself? From time to time, I feel that chill today, so perhaps it is a sign that we live once and again. It better suits me to see such moments as parts of dreams. They may well be dreams.

In my sleep, my father appears two or three times a year, never confronting me directly. I simply watch him or overhear him as he declaims on one topic or another. Then I wake into dreams, and he is clearer to me. If I concentrate, I probably could see all the ghosts of my life, here at the corner of Thirty-first and Madison, bundled in their winter coats, huddled in a scrum, all of us waiting for the light to change.

 

F
OR THAT MATTER,
I may be a ghost of my own life. Since we never leave our childhood, I see myself as a boy on these streets I walk now as a man. I am the spitting image of myself. How like myself I am. This is why I do not believe in time. How could I if I feel the presence of the boy as completely as I do the man, in many ways more completely since the boy is more completely realized. He who existed in me over half a century ago walks with me today.

But it makes sense, doesn't it? We live through future generations, so why shouldn't past generations live through us? It may be as much of immortality as we can expect, or bear. On this walk, whenever I pass a restaurant with high marble walls and pressed tin ceilings, I know the building was a bank a hundred years ago. I see the restaurant, I see the bank. Possibly it was a trading house a hundred years before that, dealing in horses or slaves. Might have been a cathouse before it was a trading house. Don't think of it as history. Rather, see the whores, the horses and slaves, the potbellied bankers and the careful eaters as one—all of life packed into a crowded present, each iteration reachable by a mere flick of the imagination. The point is, though time was invented to keep things from happening all at once, things do happen all at once, and all the clocks in the world, including the one at Greenwich, England, can't do a thing about it. Boy detective, man detective, writer, god-knows-what. Questions then, unanswered now.

So you can ask me till you are blue in the face, but I have no explanation as to why I sat at the kitchen window at the back of the vast apartment, day after day, that looked out over the courtyard nine stories below, and beyond, past the blackened wooden water tanks on the rooftops of other buildings to the east, and toward the river. There I would remain for hours at a stretch, parked at the windowsill that was a slab of veined marble, white, gray, and darker gray, studious, purposeful, using a butter knife to chisel away at a crack in the marble until the underneath was exposed like the bones of birds. I gouged a crevice, a dark valley in the shape of a delta that deepened and widened with every day's effort. It may have appeared that I was digging for something buried in the slab. A clue? A fingerprint? Something. For the life of me, I cannot remember what.

 

J
UST ANOTHER CASE.
Open and shut or, more like it, shut and open. Everything is a case. A while ago I was chatting up this meter maid, name of Marisol (her badge), when a guy slammed his Accord into a Civic right before our eyes. Accord, my ass! I nearly said to Marisol. But I held my tongue lest she conclude that I was some candy-ass intellectual, which I sometimes am, or, almost as bad, a cop. It's easy to mistake us private eyes for cops. So I said, “Shit! Did you see that!” And she said, “Twice a day at least,” while smiling a smile at once coquettish and indicative of “Look, mister, I need to get back to work.” And I didn't intend to keep her, but “I wanted to ask you,” I said, “what alternate-side-of-the-street parking means, since I hear that phrase on the traffic reports every morning. What exactly constitutes the alternate side?” And the look she gave me, full of contempt and pity, should have been enough to tell me that if you really want to understand the city, or your life for that matter, you need to solve your own mysteries.