The Boy Detective (7 page)

 

T
ELL US ABOUT
yourself, anyway.

Not much to tell.

Tell us anyway.

Look, Lieutenant, I try to cooperate with the police as much as possible. But I don't see—

Just a few basic facts.

Okay, a few. I play the piano by ear, jazz and pop mainly. Too lazy to learn to read music. I type with two fingers—one, really, the index finger on my right hand. The left index I use for capital letters. I swim with my head completely submerged, not turning it from side to side to breathe, as one is supposed to do. I play tennis by the seat of my pants, running around my backhand to convert it to a forehand. I bank by guessing my balance, keeping whatever I can remember about checks I've written in my head.

You don't!

I do.

Do you get the balance right?

Not even close. In fact, I've never learned to do anything properly except drive a car, which I did by taking lessons from the AAA after failing the road test twice because I was trying to imagine what the rules of the road might be.

What about writing?

I write by ear, too. Oh yes. One other thing I've learned to do correctly is kayaking. I took lessons in kayaking. That's about it, Lieutenant. Are we done?

 

I
NSTEAD OF ALL
those facts, how about some feeling? Feeling is first, says E. E. Cummings, after all. How I wish I could capture for you that intake of breath on a cloudy Saturday morning, when I had left the gloom of my home behind me, emerged from under the green awning into the leaden air, saluted Carroll the doorman, and started out on my day's adventure. The gashes of sunlight. The poem of the city—every person of every shape, style of dress, and color moving through the stanzas of the streets, each dreaming, in one dream or another, of love or money. A tremendous crime story lay before me, I was certain, a mystery so tangled, monstrous, so full of misleading coincidences, cross-purposes, blind alleys, and the darkest intents, that only the greatest sleuth in the world was capable of seeing into it.

That man there, at the perfume counter in Woolworth's. Wasn't he the one I had spotted two weeks earlier, coming out of the White Castle, wearing a yellow-and-blue plaid scarf and a long black cashmere coat, his hands stuffed hard in the pockets? Only two weeks ago, his hair was blond, not red, and he wore it longer, and his pants weren't creased, and he didn't walk with a limp. But it was the same fellow. I could tell by the ears. As every PI knows, you can change your appearance nearly completely, but never the ears.

The shadow at the base of a brown brick warehouse. The tunnels of alleys. The clip of footsteps. A hallway lit in silver. The ruins of a church. A slash of light from a window with the shades drawn. And then the shade rises. A hand. A patch of imagined gaslight. A lost letter lifted by the wind. A startled look of recognition as a stranger hustles past, then turns around halfway down the block at the very moment you turn around, and you both know something you will never tell anyone else.

Not in so many words did I tell myself that such mornings offered the best of life to me, but the evidence was all around me. Not in so many words did I understand that life was dark and wild, and that it insisted you look at it, pry into it, and face it with equal amounts of suspicion and affection. But who could not see this was so? I knew who I was, but I could not say it. Not in so many words. Yet, as I learned eventually, when words became the coins of my realm, how many words does it take?

 

I
N GENERAL, LESS
was said when I was a child. More was implied. Perhaps because there were commonly shared assumptions about things, both good and bad, or because people knew “their place” and everyone knew everyone else's place, which also was good and bad. But for one reason or other, less was said. Detectives never talk a lot anyway. You never met a detective who runs off at the mouth. Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle of the British TV series
Foyle's War,
which is set during the Second World War, for instance, never used a word that didn't count. Such a good writer.

I don't know that people did more thinking simply because they did less talking. One thing, though: Speaking less allowed for fewer careless outbursts, thus creating at least a veneer of civilization. The abrupt nod of the head. In my childhood I saw so many men, in particular, give one another abrupt nods that seemed to convey a good deal more than a mere greeting or agreement. Don't see many these days. The nod that seemed to be worth a thousand words has been replaced by them.

Detective Chief Superintendent Foyle had a habit of nodding just before he quietly clobbered someone with a devastating piece of information, which often revealed that person's culpability. He would go straight to the point. He would say “Right,” meaning “Wrong.” He would say “No. You're lying.” I miss the world where people said “No. You're lying.” Sometimes Foyle would just raise an eyebrow.

And all this emerged from a sense of justice, a font of justice, because the detective we most admire and honor is imbued with justice and is not simply assigned to see that justice is done. He must not only think justice is right. He must not only believe that civilization depends on its enactment. Justice must flow in his microbes and genes, so that when he goes after a bad guy or arrests him, he is satisfying something essential in his own makeup. In truth, he could no more live without justice than without air or water. I am thinking of all of them, the best of them. Holmes, Maigret, Poirot, Marple, Lord Peter Wimsey, Philo Vance, Marlowe, Spade, Archer, Wolfe. But here on this walk of mine, I am thinking especially of Foyle, who, even after he retired from the police department, could not let an injustice stand, particularly as it involved the weak. In the last episodes of
Foyle's War,
the war is over, and crime is not officially Foyle's business. Yet he pursues unfairness, cowardice, and bigotry for no other reason than that they must be pursued. Foyle was not merely a policeman. He was a man. His job, his position in the world, was that of being a man. What child would not wish to grow up to be Detective Chief Superintendent Foyle? What child with a nose for crime?

 

H
ERE'S HOW NOSY
I could be: When I was six, my parents rented a small summerhouse in Westport, Connecticut, on a leafy street. It came with a collie named Lady, which was great for me because our own dog had died the previous winter. On the first day there, as my parents unpacked, I took a stroll down the new street and came to a large Tudor house with a glass-walled sunroom in the back. Peering in, I saw a gleaming concert grand. The door was open, so I walked in, just like that, and I began to play “Danny Boy” and “The Blue Danube,” the two pieces I had picked out some months earlier. As I played, a blonde in her twenties, who looked like a princess in a fairy tale, entered from the main house, stood at the far end of the piano, and gently smiled. She listened to me play, gave me cookies, took me back to my parents, and told them the story of my bold visit. She called it remarkable. My parents came up with another word.

Has anyone seen Dr. Teucher lately—he who, during that summer in Westport, took out his .22 pistol and shot kittens in his basement? One night I heard the shots. If you crossed the street to Dr. Teucher's home, and looked past the Bilco doors into the dark, you could see the kittens lying on their sides in blood and fur. Their eyes were closed. Four, seven, maybe twelve. “Why did Dr. Teucher do that, Dad?” My father made a grim smile. “Too many kittens, I guess,” he said.

Our second summer in Connecticut, Peter had been born. My parents rented a house in Weston, a farm community then. No neighbors in sight. My father commuted to the city and remained for two, three weeks at a time. My mother stayed with my brother, sometimes in the garden, mostly indoors. That marked the beginning of her long retreat into caring for Peter, and away from my father, and from me. A few years later, I read about a comedian, Jack Douglas, who had written a bestseller called
My Brother Was an Only Child.
I got the joke.

In Weston, I rode my bike for miles every day, past hayfields, pastures, and orchards, meeting no one and looking for crime. Holmes always thought the worst crimes were committed not in the city, but in this brooding quietude of the countryside, the dead calm. Yet it's hard to spot crime in a rural setting unless you're Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers. The whorls of birds. The shadows of horses. Returning to the house one late afternoon, I saw a patrol car in the driveway, and my mother with a policeman. She was flapping her arms and, in her quiet way, shouting. My father had driven off and a copperhead had been coiled under his car. By the time the police arrived, it had disappeared. I went snake hunting in the tall dry grass.

 

I
DON'T KNOW
a lot about nature, but I know what I like—the feeling of impersonal companionability in the countryside, walking in the woods or fields. Trees tilting at slight angles like cowhands on a break, birds wheeling in the wind, all of nature leading a life independent from your own, yet involved with it by implication. At the age of three, in Chatham, when I would wander away from my parents' cottage, I never felt any fear, though nature towered over me. Only comfort. At
Time,
I wrote a series on people who had accomplished heroic things for the environment. I visited a rain forest in Suriname that was dazzling with its red ants, howler monkeys, and bright-colored toads. Nature putting on a show. Yet I've always felt more at home in the less dramatic places, such as the New England woods, which is a marketplace of small activities—caterpillars and beetles going about their business as you go about yours.

In his
Confessions,
Tolstoy admitted that as a small child he knew next to nothing about nature. He assumed he must have been privy to flowers and leaves, yet up to his fifth or sixth birthday, he had no memory of the natural life. This separation he calls “unnatural,” because he was aware of it, implying that to be away from nature is to yearn for it unconsciously. The separation is akin to a separation from one's passions—from love, from family, from one's very senses.

Most of city life is separated from nature, and citizens, aware of the penalties, seek compensations. No one can imagine New York without Central Park, which makes the autocratic decisions of its chief imaginer and builder, Frederick Law Olmsted, all the more remarkable. In 1857, Olmsted and his partner, Calvert Vaux, could picture 843 acres of greenery, fountains, and footbridges in the midst of the farms and run-down villages that constituted that area of the city, as well as picturing a future of suffocating steel towers. It is as if, by foreseeing the centrality of their park, they were looking into their own hearts.

Yet, this distant friendship of nature's is like the city's friendship, too. A walk in the Village or up Madison seems much like a walk in Vermont in that you feel part of your surroundings without committing yourself to them. You are aware of the bees and of your fellow citizens in casual and indirect ways. I suppose you're also alert to the fact that an enemy, a mugger or a wolf, can materialize at the drop of a hat. But the presiding feeling is simply that of being with your world, and it with you. And there is nothing either of you wishes to do about it but live and wonder.

 

G
RAMERCY
P
ARK HAD
its local naturalist in Theodore Roosevelt, whose town house stood on Twentieth Street, between Park and Broadway. My mother took me to the Theodore Roosevelt Museum dozens of times before Peter was born, always, it seemed, on rainy days. The museum is easy to miss, tucked like an afterthought inside what was a block of wholesale houses when I was young, and now is squeezed, like the Little House of the children's story, between a Realtor called New York Living Solutions and a bar called No Idea, affording both the accurate and evasive answer, I suppose, to the accusing question of an angry spouse: Where
are
you?

So quiet, the home of the wild man president, he of the Rough Riders and Mount Rushmore and the blank goggle eyes and the grillelike teeth. In fact, the museum is not his original home, but rather a reconstruction of the house he was born in, on October 7, 1858. Here he lived till he was fifteen. The museum stands exactly where his home did, before it was demolished in 1916. The newer house was rebuilt in 1919, funded by prominent New Yorkers who wanted TR to have a proper monument.

So the rooms of the museum are as they were between the years 1865 and 1872. I used to go about inspecting the zebra skin on the wall, the tiger skin rug, the full-size taxidermy lion standing on a pedestal. Mounted heads of wild boar, antelope, and mountain sheep. A glass cabinet contained an eyeglass case with a bullet hole in it, which would catch the attention of any detective. A would-be assassin had taken a potshot at TR in Milwaukee, in 1912. He was saved by his own poor eyesight. Victorian dark, the house. Rugs dark green and maroon, black chairs stuffed with horsehair. The stairs creaked as they did in
The Spiral Staircase.
There were chandeliers once gaslit, like the one in
Gaslight.
My eyes widened at everything in the place.

TR's dad gave the boy a shotgun when he was eleven. The old Abercrombie & Fitch ideal of manhood. I could picture him at my age, his imagination impelling him up and down the staircase, in and out of the rooms. “Charge!” The cry of San Juan Hill. “Charge!” The cry of the nutcase old man in
Arsenic and Old Lace,
who kept popping up from the basement yelling “Charge!” But TR was only part nutcase. To be sure, he built the Panama Canal by stealing Panama from Colombia, and there was all that loony rough-riding. But he also started the Pure Food and Drug Administration, enacted the first child labor laws, and set up the national parks, which made him our first environmentalist president. Let's just say he was conflicted—part do-gooder, part do-badder, a tough case to crack. His first wife and his mother died on the same day, Valentine's Day.