The Boy Detective (20 page)

 

A
ND THERE YOU
are, Dad, dying of congestive heart failure, which you tried to treat yourself, as I am flying back through the fog, on a winter night like this, trying to reach you. Officially, the El Al flight did not exist, since the plane was flying on a Saturday—no flights in Israel on Shabbat. I had arrived only the day before with a group of journalists invited to write about the country. At the airport, officials greeted me with the news of your dying. I spent the afternoon at the Wailing Wall doing my level best to pray, and the following morning I was off in the empty jet, trying to get back to you. I could not do it. New York was socked in. The fog was so thick, we had to land at Dulles and wait it out. I could not see past the window. Ginny and the children were with Mom and Peter. Peter answered the phone, and when he hesitated, I knew you were dead. In fact, I knew you were dead when I still was over the Atlantic, on my nonexistent flight.

And there you are, Dad, dead. And I am thirty-four, and sitting shiva with Peter and Mom, because Mom wanted the ceremony, with the mirrors covered with bedsheets and the dark apartment darker than ever. Mom's friends came, women with whom she had taught school so many years ago. And others from your old neighborhood. You would have cringed. Ginny had taken the kids home to Washington. I sank into the red upholstered chair as though a dense fluid were filling my body and weighing it down. A teacher friend of Mom's addressed me sympathetically. I looked so tired, she said. I started to answer her and fell asleep in midsentence. I must have spent that night in the apartment, but I cannot recall what room I slept in.

 

S
O LET US
now praise Dad for taking me to
The Band Wagon
when I was twelve. We often went to movies together, just the two of us, while my mother stayed home with Peter. And
The Band Wagon
was playing in the neighborhood, at the Gramercy Cinema on Twenty-third near Lex. I am passing the place right now. Today the theater shows live music groups. Back then it showed Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Oscar Levant, Nanette Fabray, and Jack Buchanan, an English music hall star who was wonderful in
The Band Wagon
. I could have watched that movie forever. I don't know why. The songs, perhaps, and a kind of sweet sadness to the story, though it ended well. It was a musical, after all. Maybe it was simply Fred Astaire, who, late in his career, seemed to swoop and glide over life like a melancholy tern.

The very next day, after school, I went over to the record store on Twenty-third, near Morton Stamps, but they only had
The Band Wagon
music on a 33⅓ rpm record, which my phonograph could not play. Yes, they could get me an album of 78s, but it would cost a fortune of $25. So I saved up. I clutched the album to my chest. At home, I played the set of records, everything in the movie, over and over. The triplets song, “Dancing in the Dark,” “You and the Night and the Music,” “I'll Go My Way by Myself,” and “Oh, Give Me Something to Remember You By.”

And let us praise him for a quiet sweetness that crept in from time to time, in spite of his efforts to keep it at bay. That nightly ritual, for instance, when he'd settle in his easy chair, a Scotch in hand, and watch
Perry Mason
reruns. For a detective like me, especially in my hypercritical teenage years, Perry Mason was clownish—those oversize people solving crimes in a courtroom, every suspect looking guilty but the killer. But Dad loved the neatness of the show. And I watched it with him, as if I liked it too.

And who can forget the time I told my parents I'd rather spend that Saturday wandering around the neighborhood alone than go for a ride with them and Peter, and after they had driven off, and I regretted rejecting their offer, Dad had circled the park to give me a chance to change my mind, which I did. That time. Or the time (where's the ledger?) I came upon a sparrow with a broken leg, lying on its side in a corner of the park. I brought it to my dad, whose office then was at number 45. It occupied the ground floor opposite another doctor, a man with a handlebar mustache who kept a talking parrot on a wooden perch on the sidewalk outside his office. I carried my sparrow inside, and my dad rigged a tiny splint. The bird looked surprised to be alive and to be wearing a splint. “What should we do now, Dad?” He said we should create a nestlike place on the sill outside my ninth-story window. When the sparrow felt strong enough it would fly, he said. One day, it did.

 

A
ND LET US
now praise Peter, who could be funny when we needed it, who, when we were sitting in the professionally somber waiting room at the Frank E. Campbell funeral home on Madison, arranging for Dad's cremation, having just spoken with the professionally somber funeral director, glanced at the box of Kleenex on a table and said, “I'm surprised the Kleenex isn't black.” And thoughtful. Some weeks ago he sent me a masterly charcoal drawing he'd made of Poe's raven, along with “The Black Cat,” in
Pictorial National Library,
the original magazine in which it was published in 1848. A first edition of the story. He found it in New York's old Argosy Book Shop many years ago and bought it because he loves Poe. But he knows that I am a detective, and so he just decided to give it to me. The other day, I was startled to read, for the first time, Poe's poem “Alone”: “Then in my childhood, in the dawn / Of a most stormy life—was drawn / From every depth of good and ill / The mystery which binds me still.”

 

T
HERE IS A
moment on a walk when you look away from something or someone you have been looking at, and then look back. The object appears farther away than when you first saw it. The act of looking away, of deliberately ignoring the object—or perhaps you were distracted, it makes no difference—the act of looking away seems to have distanced the object from you. The object has receded from your point of view. That bench over there in Union Square, for instance. I was walking straight toward it, when I averted my gaze for no more than a few seconds, and then returned it. Though the bench was actually closer to me, it appeared to have moved back a few yards. Nothing had happened to the bench, but something had happened to me. In the instant I looked away, I drifted and forgot where I was. I occupied a different place from Union Square, though I cannot say what. Perhaps I was dwelling in the past, or in the stars, so when I returned to the world in which I walk, everything seemed new and strange to me, almost alienated. We appear to be near things and to one another. Yet we are just as close to being far away.

 

L
ET ME SPEAK
to you of three walkers—Rousseau, Hesse, and Bashō, especially of Bashō. All three made good use of walking, according to their different temperaments. Rousseau, the most analytical of the three, called his walk-thoughts “reveries,” but they are more like sorrowful rants than to dreams. He took his long walks at the end of his life, and while he has a number of philosophical bulletins for the world that has rejected him, he thinks principally about himself, his self-imposed exile, smarting from every real and imagined persecution. Even as he searches for rest and calm, he seems incapable of avoiding the methodical. There is one nice moment. He calls himself a solitary wanderer but acknowledges that no one is truly solitary but God, to whom he ascribes complete solitude, thus complete happiness.

Less deliberate, Hesse called his account
Wandering.
His tone is far more serene: “The world has become lovelier,” he says. “I am alone, and I don't suffer from my loneliness. I don't want life to be anything other than it is.” Unlike Rousseau's forced march, there is nothing irritating about Hesse's sojourn, which is kept quiet by interspersed drawings and poems. Still, one gets the picture of his walking against the tide, an awareness that the calm he has achieved runs counter to his former self. And we can hear the din of that rejected world in the background.

But Bashō. Wonderful Bashō. The wanderer's wanderer. The pure observer, as he takes to
The Narrow Road to the Deep North,
in the Japanese provinces during the seventeenth century. Where Hesse insists on his enlightenment, Bashō is imbued with it. He perfected the haiku, which seems the ideal form for recording discrete moments of a walk. How lovely is this: “Breaking the silence / Of an ancient pond / A frog jumped into water / A deep resonance.” Bashō said, “Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine.” A first-rate private eye, that Bashō.

 

A
S WAS BLIND
Hector Chevigny. When he came storming around the park, you'd better not leave your bike or skates in his way. He could wield that white stick like a scythe, and he seemed angry enough as it was without anyone doing anything to irritate him further. Neither his blindness nor his temper impressed me as much as his being a writer, and a mystery writer, to boot. He wrote scripts for the
Mr. and Mrs. North
series. We had actors aplenty in Gramercy Park. John Barrymore was said to have lived in number 36. Humphrey Bogart married Helen Menken in the Gramercy Park Hotel. John Garfield died in the sack in number 4. In my lifetime, there were John Carradine, and Royal Dano who played Lincoln, and Margaret Hamilton, whom younger kids approached with caution whenever she was sitting in the park, lest she let out the witch's cackle that made her famous in
The Wizard of Oz
. James Cagney lived in number 34 for a few years. I saw Charles Coburn once, stepping out of the Players Club, yet another Stanford White building. I waved. He waved.

But Mr. Chevigny, the mystery writer, was in a class by himself. He quick-stepped everywhere, as if on a furious mission, his own “Wizard,” his German shepherd, at his side. Often he walked too fast for the dog, which was why we kids had to be alert not to leave anything he could trip over in his path. His autobiography was an homage to Wizard. He called it
My Eyes Have a Cold Nose.

One day, when I was thirteen or fourteen, he invited me to his apartment in number 34, where he lived with his wife, a kind and gracious woman, and his two gifted children, one of whom, Paul, became a writer, too. I do not know why he summoned me. Perhaps someone had told him I was a detective. I had no idea he knew I existed. We sat together in his study. It was my first time talking with a blind person, and I wasn't sure where to look. His ferocity had vanished, as he spoke of the special difficulty of writing for radio. “It's tricky,” he told me, “especially hard to impart information, like exposition.”

“How do you let an audience know something that one of the characters can't know?” I asked him.

He said, “Have one of them whisper to another.”

One night I was listening to
The Shadow.
There was a moment when Lamont Cranston needed to inform the audience that some time had passed between scenes. Cranston said, “Well, Margot, here it is the next day.”

 

23 P
ACES TO
Baker Street.
Have you seen it? Another movie about a blind detective, or rather about a blind playwright in London, who overhears a kidnapping plot and takes on the role of detective. Van Johnson as the writer, embittered because his blinding was sudden and recent, caught in the old predicament of knowing that a crime is to be committed with no one believing him, especially Scotland Yard. A murder is involved, and a couple of attempted murders. The movie appeared in 1956, when I was fifteen, past the years of my boy detective in the streets, and I had no creative outlet for my solitude. My family remained remote, my school a waste of time. I kept returning to
23 Paces to Baker Street.
There was much to glom onto in the story. Baker Street. The foggy atmosphere of London. The writer-detective from whom everything was taken, and what was not taken he cast away. Eventually he is proved right about the crime, of course. But until he abjures his bitterness, he is alone.

 

D
OES A BLIND
mystery writer feel his way into his work? Writing isn't science. Neither is most detective work. Explaining why he picked teams at random in a football pool, Chief Superintendent Foyle told his sergeant, “Science is not my strong suit,” which is generally true of the trade. Exceptions are Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta novels, the TV show
Bones,
and the TV series
Quincy, M.E.,
about a forensic expert played by Jack Klugman. But most private ops operate by intuition and by knowing how people tick. Vance made a fetish of his understanding of character and personality. Others don't speak of it directly, yet it is clear to the reader that however many hard clues may lead to the guilty, it is character that does them in. To kill for envy, one must be capable of envy. To kill for passion, one must not necessarily be outwardly passionate, but rather have passion smoldering within. See Clifton Webb in
Laura
. Or Laird Cregar in
I Wake Up Screaming
.

And this capability to delve into the human psyche, however corrupt that psyche may be, accounts, I think, for the deep vicarious pleasure we take in a mystery story. Mysteries are like sports. Someone wins, someone loses. And that clean conclusion is always satisfying in anything. But the mystery story is better than a baseball game or a tennis match, or a football game, European or American, because there is always a tinge of ambiguity to be detected and relished—some trace of mixed feelings, or sympathy for the culprit, along with a deeper understanding of human nature as a result of the crime. The story told to us is more organized and more complete than our own lives. And it has an ending. A case is closed, unlike anything in reality. But before that door clicks shut, before justice prevails, we may dwell in the house of a mind other than our own and see into a human capability that we may, and must, deny ourselves.

Would you kill for money if you were assured of money, a great deal of money? Would you kill for revenge if you were assured of revenge—just, satisfying, delicious revenge? Advancement in business? Triumph in love? Would you kill for such things if the mere act of killing would hand them to you on a platter? Probably not. I do not know you that well, but probably not. Still, is it not intensely pleasurable to watch someone else act in your worst self's behalf, commit the crime for you, as your surrogate, and then take the rap for you, too? Better than that, as a reader, it was you who tracked yourself down. It was you who made the fatal error, that slip of the tongue, and it was you who caught it, and you who brought yourself to justice. So now you may breathe two sighs of relief. No football pool will give you all that.