The Boy Detective (21 page)

 

Y
ET WHY DID
he do it? If that question is asked in a mystery story, it usually comes after the crime has been solved and the criminal is caught or dead. An innocent asks why he did it. And the detective often says something vague and poetic. After the Maltese falcon brings about a couple of murders, the cops ask Sam Spade what the bird was. He could have said “money,” but his answer is Shakespearean—“the stuff that dreams are made of.”

That answer could apply to more stories than
The Maltese Falcon
.
Only in the simplest mystery stories are motives clear-cut. In
Double Indemnity,
why does an insurance agent who has followed the straight and narrow all his life turn on a dime and conspire with a beautiful woman to murder her husband and get his money? Is his motive the money? The woman? Or is it something unseen, unspoken of in the story itself—attached to the straight and narrow of the salesman's life, or to something buried way in his past? Or to nothing articulate? A motive may be untraceable yet still be a motive.

Ask the why-did-he-do-it question of the grease monkey in
The Postman Always Rings Twice
or of the hapless attorney in
Body Heat.
In both cases the men seem duped. They never murdered anyone until love and money combined to prompt them. The women, too, may serve as evil temptresses, but until the right wrong guy came along, no blood was on their hands either, as far as we know. If you think that sex and a fortune are enough to drive people to do the worst things in the world, you don't know much about the world. The lovers in all these stories could have walked away after second thoughts, but they didn't. Why did they do it?

For the detective, motive is no more or less important than any item of information leading to the crime's solution. Unless, as in
The Maltese Falcon,
he gets involved with the murderer herself, he couldn't care less about motive. And even in that story Spade had decided long ago that dreams, of love or money, make no killing excusable. I'm not even sure how much motive matters for the reader, since he too gets drawn toward the solution of the crime rather than the inner workings of the criminal. But in life outside detective stories, why does anyone do anything? Murder. Mass murder. I used to think that boredom, ennui, was the reason for most of the world's crimes, like wars. But boredom is merely the fallow field for that awful still silence in which our minds show themselves capable of anything. Hitler, for instance. Why did he do it?

 

A
LL RIGHT
, I'
LL
TALK.
But you'll never take me alive. I've seen to that. My side of the story? You really want my side of the story? About my military skills? My ambitions to conquer Europe? About the Russia fuck-up? About my youth as a painter? I'm just yanking your chain. I know what you're after.
Why?
You really want to know? You won't like it. Oh, what am I thinking? You don't like anything about me. I bet you suppose it has something to do with their money, don't you? Well, for one thing, most of the ones I dealt with didn't have ten deutschmarks to their name, and those who did I admired. Having money means you stepped on someone to get it. I'm all for stepping on someone.

Or you think it was their clannishness, which, I'll admit, did get under my skin. (I know you don't want to hear about skin. Can't take a joke?) But I didn't really care if they kept to themselves. Fact is, the camps were logical extensions of their clannish behavior. Involuntary to be sure, but no one can say I didn't keep them together in one place or in several, until, of course. . . . But no, it wasn't the clannishness either. Or the hairdos. Or the hats. Or the language. Or any of the tools they used to shut the world out.

You really want to know why? Because they endured. That's why. Because, century after century, visionaries like myself have tried to wipe them from the face of the earth, and you've got to admit, I came close. The closest. No luck. The reason I tried at all is because Jews endure. Hate 'em, love 'em, ignore 'em, shoot 'em, they just walk on and on and on. Who could stand by and watch that happen? I ask you. Happy now?

 

S
O NICE NOT
to be going anywhere tonight. I could be on my way to my publisher, to promote myself in my appealing self-effacing way. I could be going to the supermarket, where I would chuck my assignment to buy aluminum foil and fresh peas and bananas, and pick up a fistful of Devil Dogs instead. I could be strolling over to my friend Garry's house, where we could figure out something to do, because long ago we concluded that life consists of something to do. I could be headed for the dermatologist so that she could tell me that the melanoma-looking stain on my left leg isn't melanoma after all, and she's shocked because she knows I go out in the sun without sunscreen, and she could frown. I could be going to the funeral of a former colleague at which I am to speak, rehearsing what I shall say so that it appears spontaneous. Or I might be going directly to the gravesite. But I am not going anywhere tonight.

Some use solitude like this productively, creatively. Many of my writer friends hide away in far-off places to do their work. I do not make any such use of my solitude. In fact, I write more easily in the company of others, when my family is in the house and I can sense their warming presence in distant rooms. When I am alone, I usually just sit around watching sports or movies on TV, or take a walk, as I am doing now, feeling more like myself than I do with people. Aloneness is my place in the world. It no more pleases or displeases me than my skin.

The solitude of city walking is different from the kind that mountains give you or the sight of violet trees in the fall. City solitude does not befall you like a blessing, does not insinuate itself. You earn it. Instead of shutting out the noise of the people around you, you embrace all the noises on your cluttered walk, remaking solitude into multitude. How to walk in the world? Surely, that question is not mine alone. Everywhere is within walking distance.

A backcourt man at the University of Arkansas, a playmaker, was going through a cold spell. He couldn't shoot. His passes missed their targets. He asked his coach what he thought was going wrong. The coach told him to get a friend to take a stopwatch and time exactly how many minutes and seconds the player had his hands on the basketball during a game. The player was astonished to report that in a regulation forty-minute game, he had touched the ball only slightly over two minutes, the discovery being all the more surprising since, as a point guard, he would have his hands on the ball more than his teammates would. “So what do you learn from this?” asked the coach. The kid shrugged. “You learn that most of the game is played away from the ball.” I am a very small part of these streets.

 

T
HIS IS
T
WENTY-SIXTH
and Madison, the site of New York Life, where a depot stood in the 1860s, until P. T. Barnum turned it into Barnum's Monster Classical and Geological Hippodrome. It was renamed Gilmore's Garden in 1876. William Henry Vanderbilt renamed it once again as Madison Square Garden and opened it for cycling. Stanford White (he got around) designed the second Madison Square Garden, which opened at the same location in the 1890s and was torn down in the early 1920s. A new one was erected on the West Side in 1925, and there have been two more Madison Square Gardens since, neither of them near Madison Square.

What New York kid reared on basketball did not dream of playing in Madison Square Garden? In the vast echoic place that smelled of sweat and hot dogs, my high school friends and I watched the great pro players like Bob Cousy and Paul Arizin, and the great college players like Bill Russell and Jerry West and Oscar, each of us bouncing in the cheap seats high above the court, dreaming ourselves into every pass and shot, locked in our private tales of triumph. I can recall few pleasures equal to the flick of the wrist and the lowering arm and the ball arcing toward the basket. At its best, it was like writing at certain mystical moments. You didn't plan it. You didn't think about it. You jumped and let the right word fly into the hole. All net.

And then, all of us loping downtown toward home and shouting to one another as we relived the game. This pass. That shot. The cold mist of our breath. The fires of memory. Air-passing and pantomime dribbling around and shooting over the heads of the grim grown-ups on the street and the scowling cops.

 

I'
D LIKE TO
go back to your life statement, if I may.

I thought we were finished, Lieutenant.

Almost. You said you never bothered to learn how to do things the right way.

Well, not the way they're supposed to be done, anyway.

Whatever. You sound . . . and I went over my notes to make sure I got it right. You sound as if you have lived impressionistically.

Impressionistically. Yes. I think you could say that.

But aren't you concerned that by so doing, you've missed a lot? I wonder if you think the Impressionist painters missed a lot, too. Or, do you think they would say it was others who missed a lot?

Everyone misses something. The trouble with us impressionists is that we don't know we're impressionists. We think we're realists.

That's messed up.

“Journey of life like feather in stream. Must continue with current.”

Bashō?

Charlie Chan.
In Egypt.
Can I go now?

One more question. Why did you become a detective?

To punish the guilty and rescue the innocent.

And did you accomplish these things?

Sure. Of course I did. You bet.

 

I
F YOU LIVE
like an impressionist, there's no carrying things too far. When I wasn't occupied with a case as a kid, I spent a good deal of time in Miller's and Kauffman's, examining bridles, bits, crops, and saddles for my horse. The fact that I did not have a horse never affected my enthusiasm for window-shopping for equipment for which I had no use and I couldn't afford anyway. Looking back, I'm not sure what I was doing in the saddlery shops, but I must have had the impression that I owned a horse or soon would own one. If ever a salesperson in Miller's or Kauffman's approached to ask if I needed help, I said no thanks.

 

I
MAGINE WHAT YOU
know. Shelley said something close to that in his
Defense of Poetry,
and I have appropriated the idea in my memoir course. In the early classes, I talked about the difference between invention and the imagination—the difference between, say, inventing a horse that merely talks, like Mr. Ed, and creating a horse that has something to say, like Swift's Houyhnhnms that bear the burdens of civilization. The imagination has different levels. You can imagine something that has never been seen before. And you can imagine something that has always been seen, yet never in the way you see it. For that you need to dream into the object of your attention, to see the inherent nobility in the animal that has borne so much without complaint and to make that animal ruler of the universe. Imagine what you know, I tell my students, and what you know will become wonderfully strange, and it will be all yours. More truly and more strange.

To push this idea along, I give them short exercises for their dreaming. The first day of class, I brought in a pair of old sneakers, running shoes, tossed them in the middle of the seminar table, and asked the students to imagine the ordinary sneakers before them. One young woman produced a piece about a man in the apartment across from her, who left one sneaker in the hallway outside his door every morning, because he had but one leg, and he needed that one sneaker, and then he put two sneakers out at night, as if to indicate that the other leg existed. In another exercise, I asked them to listen to a piece of music and to write a piece on what the music inspired. Poetry, fiction, memoir, anything. I did the same for a painting. And for a flower: Dream into a tulip. I asked them to write a piece from the point of view of a part of the body, and another from the point of view of a punctuation mark. You're a semicolon, a hyphen. I asked them to write a piece from the point of view of a machine, to dream into the machine. The students became a bathroom scale, two clocks, an iPad, several cars, a guillotine, a vibrator, and a tattoo needle that spoke in rapid stutters. More dreams. I eat their dreams like candy.

 

L
AST NIGHT
I dreamed I was in my grandparents' tenement apartment at the corner of Ninth Street and Second Avenue, where I am standing now. Only in my dream the apartment did not consist of three smallish rooms, with a view of the sooty shaft that dropped to a dark pit three stories below. This dreamed-of apartment was a network, more like a maze, of some twenty rooms and five or six bathrooms. And I was trying to shave and get dressed so that I could join my friends, many of them, who were also in the apartment. We all were about to travel somewhere, and there was much hurrying-up and preparatory activity before we got under way. But I could not find my two suitcases, and I could not find my clothes. And by the time I did, and shaved, and prepared to join the others, most of the people were already out the door. “Patta,” I said when I ran into my grandfather at the dream's end. “I did not remember that your place was so big.” “Oh yes,” he said. “It has always been very big.”

How long before I return to the monuments of my former yearning and feel nothing? Now, on Twelfth Street and Second Avenue, I pass the Village East Cinema, which was the Stuyvesant Movie Theater when I was a kid. Past where the Jade Mountain Chinese restaurant stood until a few years ago, where my family got takeout nearly every Sunday. I tired of the routine. Peter tells me that one Sunday I finally balked and told my parents, “I don't want to go to the Jade Mountain or any other mountain.”