Not A Girl Detective (4 page)
Read Not A Girl Detective Online
Authors: Susan Kandel
“That must be very gratifying.”
“Very gratifying!” His laugh came from somewhere
deep in his belly. Had I said something funny?
“This, by the way, is for you.” I handed him
The Mystery of the Ivory Charm
. The shredded paper remained in my purse. Thank god the book hadn’t been damaged.
I swear I’d have Mimi declawed if it weren’t illegal in West Hollywood. The only city in the country.
“Much obliged.”
“Not at all.”
“I heard all about you from the twins. You’re from
New Jersey.”
“Asbury Park.”
“Teaneck,” he said, thumping his barrel chest. “And
a beauty queen.”
“I could tell.”
“Naughty girl. I mean you.”
“Strictly small-time.”
“Still got the hair.”
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I sighed. “A genetic curse.”
“
The Ghost in the Machine
. Great title.”
Jeez, those girls were motormouths. “Thanks. It refers to the ghostwriters hired by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, and also to Edward Stratemeyer himself, who died two
weeks after the first Nancy Drew book was published.”
“I know something you don’t know,” he said. “Ed-
ward Stratemeyer’s daughter Harriet, the one who kept Nancy Drew alive all these years, she had a heart attack, poor dear, while watching
The Wizard of Oz
for the first time on TV.”
“I know something
you
don’t know,” I replied. “Harriet decided to revise all the original Nancy Drew books in 1959, the year Barbie was born.”
“When was Ken born? That’s what I want to know.”
I laughed.
“What do you collect, Cece?”
“Does dust count?”
“No. Little tea sets? Salt and pepper shakers? Navajo baskets?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“Funny. You look like the type.” He took my arm and
steered me back toward the front of the house. Mitchell followed, but Jake was already out the door.
“My Edo fans,” Edgar declared proudly, gesturing to
a small group of folding paper fans with delicate wood-block prints arrayed on the dining room table. “The one in the middle, with the black and gilt lacquer—that one was carried by a courtesan famous for her exquisite
feet.”
Corns were another one of my genetic curses.
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“In seventeenth-century England, fans were an es-
sential part of one’s ensemble. They hid bad teeth. But you have lovely teeth.”
“Thank you.” Growing up, we had no money, but on
the subject of braces, my mother had prevailed: how
could I possibly be Miss New Jersey with an overbite?
Not that I’d made it even close.
“Let me tell you a story,” he said, pulling out a
damask-covered chair.
I sat down.
“There was once a rich American collector who be-
lieved a certain rare book in his possession was unique.
One day a disaster befell him. A disaster!”
I made myself comfortable. Edgar Edwards paced
the floor, twirling a fan in his left hand. It was un-adorned except for the carved ivory handle, which
matched the crisp black-and-white graphics of his shirt.
“The poor fellow,” he went on. “He discovered there
was another copy of this supposedly one-of-a-kind
book, in Paris. So he zipped over on the Concorde.
They were screening a Dudley Moore movie, but he
didn’t even enjoy it, he was so anxious. After the plane landed he went straight to the other collector’s house, near the Bois de Boulogne.
Très
ritzy.”
It suddenly dawned on me that I’d come across this
story someplace, but he’d thrown in Dudley Moore and
the Concorde.
“They sipped cognac. They smoked cigars. It took a
while to get down to business. When the time was right, the American made the Frenchman a good offer, but the Frenchman didn’t want to sell. They went back and forth for a while until finally the American offered the Frenchman a king’s ransom. The other gentleman agreed. The
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American wrote a check, handed it to his rival, took the book, examined it carefully, and then hurled it into the fire.” He paused. “Can you tell me why?”
I couldn’t resist. “He wanted to own the only copy of the book.”
Edgar snapped the fan he’d been holding shut. “Very
good.”
Bad Cece. I should’ve confessed prior knowledge,
but for some reason I wanted this man’s approval.
“Shall we take a look at my antique kitchen knives?”
“You collect those, too?”
“My mother was a castrating rhymes-with-witch. It
was a no-brainer.”
“I think we might have something in common.”
“We have a lot in common,” he said, studying me in-
tently. “Ever heard of a glitter trap?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You set it up over a person’s desk. You run a string from the back of one of the drawers, up the wall, into an acoustic tile ceiling. You’ve got to have an acoustic tile ceiling.”
I nodded.
“When the person goes to open the drawer, boom!”
Boom! I nodded again.
“It triggers a mousetrap. Snap!”
Snap!
“Up snaps a thin card covering a funnel, releasing a
handful of glitter which falls through a hole in the ceiling tile onto the person’s head.”
“You have a very lyrical sense of humor.”
“First, the muffled noise, then the slow, glittery descent of a cloud of brightly colored dust. You get me, Cece, unlike certain persons in my employ. I set a glit-N O T
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ter trap for Mitchell yesterday. He was positively ker-flummoxed, poor thing.”
“I can hear every word you’re saying,” Mitchell
yelled from the other room.
“I used to place strands of hair across my
Charlie’s
Angels
diary so I’d know if my brothers were trying to read it,” I volunteered.
“Were they?”
“They couldn’t have cared less.”
“Let’s nix the knives. I want to show you my Nancy
Drews.”
At last.
The stairs were covered with a rose-patterned kilim.
“Is it from Turkey?” I asked, following him up. Gam-
bino and his first wife had gone to Turkey on their honeymoon. He’d kept the rug.
“Turkey by way of Pottery Barn,” Mitchell inter-
jected snarkily from the bottom of the staircase.
“Be a dear and marinate the chicken,” Edgar yelled
without turning his head.
We entered a small bedroom decorated all in blue—
blue carpeting, blue floral wallpaper, blue checkered bedspread, and three narrow blue bookcases holding
Edgar Edwards’s world-famous collection of Nancy
Drews.
“Blue was my mother’s favorite color,” he said. “She
used to stay in this room when she visited.”
“Did she get you started on Nancy Drew?”
“Don’t get me started on what that woman got me
started on.”
He ran his finger across the top row of books, pris-
tine in their blue linen covers and sparkling white dust jackets. The first thirty-eight Nancy Drew titles were 28
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released by Grosset & Dunlap between 1930 and 1961.
Of these, the first twenty-five are considered the real deal, and all but three of those were written by an in-trepid former
Toledo Blade
reporter named Mildred Wirt Benson. (Mildred bolted temporarily when the
syndicate wanted to cut her pay from $125 to $75 per
book during the height of the Great Depression, but
came back at her usual fee for
The Clue of the Broken
Locket
.)
“My Blue Nancys,” he said. “Never been touched—
well, more or less. Like our heroine, come to think of it!”
“May I?”
He handed me some thin white gloves. “Please.”
I put on the gloves and pulled out a copy of
The Sign
of the Twisted Candles,
which had my favorite cover.
Grace Horton/Nancy Drew was wearing a white cloche
hat pulled down low over her eyes, a white satin dress with a skinny red patent leather belt and matching
clutch purse, plus strappy white stilettos. Russell
Tandy, the illustrator, made his career in fashion and it showed. He loved Grace/Nancy in red and white.
“You’d look good in that,” said Edgar.
“Actually, I think I’d look better in this,” I said,
pulling out
The Message in the Hollow Oak,
which featured Grace/Nancy in a honey-colored bias-cut skirt and navy-blue cropped jacket, very foxy-girl-on-the-go.
“Oh, yes. You’re absolutely right.”
There was also a complete set of “Yellow Nancys,”
which comprised the revised texts to books 1 through
38, plus 39 through 56. These had no dust jackets and yellow, wraparound covers.
“These are the versions I read as a kid,” I said wistfully. “Of course, my mother threw them all out.”
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Edgar shook his head.
Oh, how I’d loved those stories. Nancy was every-
thing I wasn’t. Brave. Forthright. Not Italian. Best of all, she didn’t have a mother. Her life was a Freudian fantasy come true. Just a girl, her father, and a housekeeper. You had to love Hannah Gruen. The woman
could take phone messages like nobody’s business,
make a dozen different puddings from scratch, and
pack Nancy’s bags on a moment’s notice. Day dresses,
evening gowns, tennis skirts, scuba gear—whatever
might be required for a teenager pursuing the truth in such far-flung spots as Hong Kong, Scotland, and dark-est Peru. What mother would do that? What about frig-
ging homework?
Back then, of course, I’d had no idea that the Yellow Nancys were considered highly suspect—not by
Freudians, but by conspiracy theorists in the Society of Chums. They frothed at the mouth at the mere mention
of them. The official, Stratemeyer-sanctioned story was that Mildred’s Blue Nancy texts needed to be revised
because they were dated—full of forgotten colloqui-
alisms and racist innuendoes. Villains were inevitably dark and swarthy (Jewish) or drunk and mentally defi-cient (African-American). True enough. But the con-
spiracy theorists insisted that this was not the only reason for the revisions.
There was also the fact that Harriet Stratemeyer
Adams, who’d taken over the syndicate after her fa-
ther’s death, wanted to cut the cost of production by de-creasing the number of pages in each book. And that
she wanted to transform Nancy into a more passive, traditionally feminine heroine, not unlike Barbie. But the real reason for the revisions, the conspiracy theorists 30
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claimed, was so that Harriet, by virtue of these
changes, could once and for all lay claim to the mantle of authorship—to the hallowed name of “Carolyn
Keene.”
The battle between Harriet Stratemeyer Adams and
Mildred Wirt Benson over the phantom body of Carolyn
Keene was the leitmotif of my chapters two through six.
“Don’t you adore memorabilia?” asked Edgar, wav-
ing a Madame Alexander Nancy Drew doll in my face.
“Limited release! And look!” He handed me a Nancy
Drew jigsaw puzzle and a promotional poster from a
1939 Nancy Drew movie starring Bonita Granville.
“You gotta love eBay, Cece!”
I was deathly afraid of eBay. God knows what trou-
ble I could get myself into.
“One of Harpo Marx’s harps was on there the other
day. Did you know someone once gave Harpo a harp
with barbed-wire strings? What a present! Look into it, if you don’t believe me! Wish I’d thought of it!”
Another blue shelf held Edgar’s foreign editions of
Nancy Drew.
“In Sweden, Nancy Drew is known as Kitty,” I noted,
“and in Finland she’s Paula.”
“In France,” he said, pulling out
Alice et la statue qui
parle,
“she’s Alice Roy. ‘Nancy,’ as you know, would never fly in France. It’s the name of an unsavory port town. Our heroine doesn’t walk on the wild side.”
“She missed out.” Maybe I could log on to eBay just
once. Intellectual curiosity.
He raised an eyebrow.
“Well, how can you be an inspiration if you spend
your whole life never making a mistake?”
“I am so glad you said that.”
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I smiled. “I guess you could say I’ve lived that.”
“In which case I think I’ve got something you’ll ap-
preciate.”
He opened the door to the closet and pulled out a
small oil painting in an elaborate gilt frame.
“Mitchell Honey found this little treasure for me.
And I have to say, he’s been beside himself ever since it came into this house. Beside himself! It’s the jewel in the crown. Look! It’s signed
Russell H. Tandy
!”
“Now you’ve gotten me curious,” I said. “I thought
all the original cover art burned up in a fire at the Tandy home.”
“Oh, this was not a cover, dear,” he said with a laugh.
Edgar held the painting up about an inch from my
nose. Looking back at me was none other than blond,
blue-eyed Grace Horton.
But she wasn’t wearing red.
And she wasn’t wearing white.
Grace Horton—aka the goddess that is Nancy
Drew—wasn’t wearing anything.
Except a killer smile.
What the hell did you do to him?” The voice on the
other end of the cordless phone blared in my ear.
“Who is this?” I sat up in bed and rubbed my eyes,
