The Boy Detective (10 page)

 

Y
OU ASK ABOUT
the house? The house is everything to a good mystery, be it the grand country manor where the weekend party occurs (see Christie's
Murder for Christmas,
A. A. Milne's
The Red House Mystery,
or Margery Allingham's
Police at the Funeral
), or the hut, or the trailer, or your place. Members of the household are prime suspects. (Did the butler ever do it? Why would you have a butler do it?) It is the house that contains the seethings and the loathings and resentments that end in murder. Someone creeps about the house. The body is discovered in the house, in the pantry, in the library. To the house the detective comes, an inspector calls, the intruder in the house who will shake up the inhabitants and rattle the cage.

The body is discovered in the library. Yes. How often that occurs, as if the authors of mysteries instinctively are drawn to locate the murders in the room closest to their hearts. Nearly always in the great creepy old mystery movies of the 1930s and 1940s a library is shown, with floor-to-ceiling shelves spilling over with misshapen volumes rising to an indoor mist. In a cracked leather chair slumps the body, positioned by the killer to make it look like a suicide. A quick inspection, and the detective can see it wasn't a suicide, could not have been a suicide. The angle of the shot is all wrong. The entry point of the bullet far too high. And the gun was in the victim's left hand.

All this started in England with a real case of murder, in 1860, called the Road Hill case. A three-year-old boy was found mutilated, the body stuffed down the hole in an outhouse on the grounds of a country estate in Wiltshire. The suspects were the inhabitants, family and servants. A history of insanity there. The press clamored for justice, but the police got nowhere until Inspector Jonathan Whicher—one of the first members of the London detective force—was called in. Basing his hypothesis on the missing nightdress of one of the dead boy's half-sisters, he named her the killer, and he was proved right. Yet the public reviled him. How could a murderous child reside in the domestic sanctum, the place of safety, where all good people live? The house.

The Road Hill murder initiated what Wilkie Collins called “a detective fever” in England and elsewhere.
The
Moonstone
(1868) was full of facts gleaned from the Road Hill case, though Collins watered down his story, substituting a jewel thief for a murderer. People became enthralled with the pure puzzles of murder cases, perhaps because they proved to be so close to home, and all the fictional cases that followed (Marple, Holmes, and the others) had Road Hill as their point of departure. Whicher himself gave birth to the laconic, ordinary-seeming detective—Collins's Sergeant Cuff, Chandler's Marlowe—whom no one notices until it is too late.

Still, the most lasting legacy of the case was the house. It constituted a world of close relationships in which anything could happen, especially something terrible, in close quarters. See the country house in Henry James's
The Turn of the Screw,
and the governess and the impassive children imprisoned within. See it there at dusk, looming on a hill, its windows blazing, the great front door shut tight. Black clouds settle over the fields behind the gabled roof of the silent house.

 

Y
OU ASK ABOUT
the dog? “Asta!” Myrna Loy's sexy-patrician voice admonishing the famous terrier of Nick and Nora Charles. Movie audiences first met Asta when he was stretching his leash taut, dragging Mrs. Charles into a chichi bar, where Mr. Charles, William Powell, was setting up a row of dry martinis. The dog appeared in subsequent
Thin Man
movies, generally playing more cute than heroic, though he barked to protect the Charles's baby in one of the films. Few detectives have dogs. Philo Vance, a breeder of Scottish terriers, owned a Scotty named MacTavish in
The Kennel Murder Case,
in which another dog is instrumental in identifying the killer. Robert B. Parker's Spenser has a German shorthaired pointer named Pearl. In fact, he owned a string of Pearls, along with a miniature bull terrier named Rosie. James Garner played a college cop in a movie about Dobermans trained as murderers—
They Also Kill Their Masters.
The dog is the chief suspect in a book by Clea Simon called
Dogs Don't Lie,
described as a “pet noir.” Watson had a dog, unmemorably. So did Holmes in
The Hound of the Baskervilles,
but he never would have kept him as a pet. And in the story “Silver Blaze” there was the mystery of the dog that did not bark. Toby is a dog employed by Sherlock Holmes, belonging to a Mr. Sherman, introduced in
The Sign of Four
and described by Watson as an “ugly long-haired, lop-eared creature, half spaniel and half lurcher, brown and white in colour, with a very clumsy waddling gait.” Holmes said he would “rather have Toby's help than that of the whole detective force in London,” which, as every Baker Street Irregular knows, isn't much of a compliment.

As a boy detective, I had the family Maltese, Ami (pronouned
aah-mee
), and named for amyloidosis, a disease that attacks the heart or the spleen, on which my father was doing research. The dog died before my career in detection gained full throttle. When the kids were small, Ginny and I acquired Chloe, a frenetic cairn who was so wound up, she would race back and forth nonstop on the shelf behind the backseat of the car when we took her with us on drives. It was safer to keep her in the car than let her stay at home, where she snacked on the legs of the piano. Since Chloe was a purebred, the American Kennel Club sent a form, asking us to register her more formal name. I filled out “Chlorox Bleachman,” which the AKC rejected. Her successor, Hector, a Westie, whom we got for our youngest son, John, in the 1990s, had a name that leaned toward detection, but he was more attuned to biting the hands that fed him.

Edward Arnold played a blind detective in
Eyes in the Night,
a clunky movie that included a Seeing Eye dog named Friday, who possessed a large vocabulary, and could obey intricate commands. “Hide behind the bed, Friday. Then open the door and go for help.” James Franciscus played a blind insurance investigator in
Longstreet,
a TV series in the 1980s, but I cannot recall that he had a Seeing Eye dog. In fact, he used to fight bad guys all by himself, giving a new meaning to the idea of a handicap. Those were the days when a spate of disabled cops and heroes appeared on TV: Tate had one arm; Ironsides, played by Raymond Burr, rolled around in a wheelchair. To take note of this creative nonsense, I wrote a
Time
essay in the form of a newspaper TV schedule that highlighted “Barker”—about a three-legged German shepherd private eye who solved crimes with his nose. The piece was supposed to be satire. A producer phoned to ask if I'd like to write the script.

 

B
ALANCING ON THREE
paws, Ewing dragged himself toward me and licked my face. I watched him as I lay on the couch in our oldest son Carl's house the other day. Carl named his yellow Lab after Patrick Ewing of the New York Knicks—a player I couldn't stand. But I always loved the canine Ewing, who seems able to stand anything, even on three legs. Bone cancer corrupted his left rear paw, and the limb had to go if the dog was to be saved. The vet told Carl that cancer was almost certain to show up in Ewing's lungs, and that the animal had nine more months at the outs. Ewing, ignoring his prognosis, adjusted himself in a matter of days to his tripod status, and seemed just as happy with his postoperative life as he was before. I pushed my face toward his big sloppy tongue to show him nothing had changed. Do animals say good-bye?

I don't know that I always felt as accepting of things like missing limbs as I am now, when my own old limbs aren't in such hot shape either. Legs. I, too, am on my last. It is one of the things age quietly teaches you: Everyone is disabled. Time was when I might have winced at the sight of Ewing hauling his hulking body up a flight of stairs. Now I watched, not in awe exactly, but rather in an acceptance of the way the world can change on a dime and reveal a universe of missing parts.

Four legs, two legs, three legs. I never understood why that riddle was so impenetrable to everyone but Oedipus. Any average detective could solve it. Once you eliminate all other animals and start to think metaphorically, the riddle is a cinch. More interesting, I think, is the order in which the riddle is posed. Four, two, three, instead of counting down in reverse order, which might have made a better riddle. The Sphinx seems to accord a special place of honor to the crippled.

I do not mean to romanticize disabilities. No dog in his right mind would choose three legs over four. The blind would rather see, the deaf would rather hear. The paralyzed, given the choice, would prefer to tango. Yet there is value in an adjustment to the unavoidable.

At Twenty-fifth and Fifth, a beggar with eyes like rotting grapes and a leaf stuck to his forehead rolls on a wooden platform where his legs should be, and tips over on the sidewalk. I go to help him right himself. He does not thank me. When he rolls away, I follow until I see him set up shop at Twenty-fourth and Park. He stares ahead as people pass him by in the cold. Does he remember his legs anymore, I wonder. Do they remember him? I approach and offer him a twenty-dollar bill. He yells he doesn't need my fucking money.

 

T
OUGH GUY
? N
AH.
The toughest New Yorkers I ever knew were the residents of the Women's House of Detention, which stood between Ninth and Tenth streets on Greenwich Avenue, before it was demolished in 1973 and replaced by the Jefferson Market Garden. Tonight, I look up to where that prison was, and is no more. From the rooftop exercise yard, the inmates called to us kids on the street below. We couldn't see them for the fences around the exercise yard, but their voices carried out into the evenings: “Hey, Sonny. Come on up and get some.” Merely the thought of getting some from a female prisoner was enough to light the night, even if most of us were hazy at best about what it meant to get some. But how free they were, lusty, brassy in captivity, their tinny voices sparking through the air like downed electric wires. They were fearless. “Come up and visit us, boys. Watcha got to lose? Your virginity?” The spinning echoes of their taunting laughter. What were the guards going to do to them? Toss them in jail?

And Tenth Street itself. In the summers, it was so crowded with trees in bloom, you could not see from one end of the block to the other. In winter, now, the sightline is clear—past the especially wide town houses, pink, white, and brown; the carriage houses; a tiny northern Italian restaurant beside an apartment house that wasn't here when I was a kid; and Holistic Pet Care. Makes me miss my holistic terriers. Tonight, I walk west on Tenth, across Greenwich Avenue toward Patchin Place, a mews of little houses, then back up the avenue, between Tenth and Eleventh, pausing at Partners & Crime, mystery-book sellers, with old copies of Dorothy Sayers, Ellery Queen, and Mickey Spillane in the window. The store must be newish. I would have remembered if it had been here before.

My first girlfriend, Abby Abrams, lived in a brownstone at the end of Tenth near Fifth. In the summer, her family invited me to their home on Fire Island. I was thirteen. Our bedrooms, Abby's and mine, were on the second floor, across a short hall from each other. In the mornings, Abby would come into my room, wearing only a towel. A gifted artist. Big-hearted. She was a little younger than I, but way ahead of me, probably not in experience but definitely in instinct. I had no idea what was expected of me, so I just talked a blue streak. In the evenings, I'd play piano. In the daytime, I swam, swam a lot.

At the time, I did not know about the things that made Tenth Street historically noteworthy, some of which had connections to my detective work and to my life. The prison itself had a history of famous residents, including the black radical Angela Davis, the Catholic radical Dorothy Day, and Ethel Rosenberg, who awaited her execution there. A library at the corner, on Greenwich Avenue, once served as the Jefferson Market Courthouse where, in 1907, Henry K. Thaw was found insane after he'd shot and killed Stanford White, the preeminent New York architect of the period, one of whose buildings was the National Arts Club. White had been fooling around with Thaw's wife. With its salmon-color turrets and traceries, the library looks as if it had a hard time deciding not to be a castle.

Oh, but here is where George C. Scott, playing Holmes, did research in
They Might Be Giants.
And memorable real people lived on Tenth Street, too: John Reed and Louise Bryant, in number 1; E. E. Cummings, in number 4; Theodore Dreiser, Djuna Barnes, and Marlon Brando, in number 5; Mark Twain, in number 14, which was also the site of the murder of little Lisa Steinberg in the 1980s. Emma Lazarus, whose “give me your tired, your poor” poem is inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, lived in number 18. Dashiell Hammett lived in number 28, from 1947 to 1952, the height of my detective years. I wish I'd known it then.

Such information would come to me piece by piece in later life. In those days, all I knew was that at the Greenwich Avenue end of the block were the lady sirens yelling at us to come and get some, and near the Fifth Avenue end, sweet Abby was calling to me in a more innocent way to do the same thing. Someday, I hoped, I would know what all that meant. One cool thing about a private eye: He can look like he knows what he's doing, when he hasn't a clue.

 

N
OW,
G
INNY,
I will go back with you to those evenings when we walked in Gramercy Park, made love and talked, and waited for our lives. At sixteen, each of us had evacuated our Dresden homes, in which the bomb had not detonated. It lay in our living rooms like a hog dozing, and no bomb squad would go near it. “Hair trigger,” they said. “Too unpredictable.” What could we do but get out of there—knowing that we would have to return to Dresden and the bomb sooner or later. But in the meantime, in the evenings, we had the shadows of trees, dark leaves, the rustle of shrubbery, the deceptive stars, the soft brown earth, and each other.