The Boy Detective (24 page)

In summer camp, one of the horses died in the middle of the night. The pinto dropped dead in his stall. They brought in buckets of lye for his burial. He had to be cut up into pieces so that they could fit him in his grave, which had to be deep. So they cut him into pieces, and they dug the grave. All this they did before dawn, so none of us kids saw any evidence of the dead pinto, except for the streaks of lye on the fresh earth. We did see that.

Did you know that in Hiroshima, the Bomb blasted the legs off horses? They stood, momentarily, with no legs. Hard to walk with no legs.

 

E
ASY ENOUGH TO
say that you can be both a writer and a detective. A lot harder to pull it off. Sure, you can make up some easy explanation that both trades involve a searching for the truth, that both make use of research, that both require an appreciation of history, psychology, a knowledge of the patterns of human behavior, and so forth. You can add that the writer and the detective work on their own, that each knows a creative sort of loneliness, that their temperaments are similar—a mixture of toughness and childish optimism, of gruffness and a sense of play, of innocence and irony. A writer and a detective also learn to take rough treatment from the outer world, to take some hits, and to give as good as they get.

But, when you think about it, a detective builds his case on hard facts, ballistics and prints, types of weapons, eyewitnesses, people seen and heard here and there; on things that are real and really said. The fun in the TV series
Murder, She Wrote
was catching the inevitable slip of the tongue by the killer high up in the show, and then watching Jessica Fletcher, Angela Lansbury, nail the guilty party with it later on. The writer, on the other hand, builds his case from thin air. First he invents the crimes, then he manufactures the solutions. He may get as worked up about his mysteries as the detective does, but his mysteries never happened. I realize this business gets complicated when one is speaking of fictional detectives who are writers' creations. But once we start to read detective stories, the characters take on a life of their own, separated from the writers who gave birth to them. And while a writer may fancy himself a detective from time to time, not a single fictional professional detective has ever been a writer. Of course, sometimes the detective writes in the first person to tell his story, à la Philip Marlowe. But that is simply how the story gets to us. The writer is always a sidekick. Nero Wolfe had his Archie Goodwin, Vance had Van Dine, Holmes had Watson, whom he often accused of over-romanticizing his exploits.

Yet if you take the wider view, a writer and a detective may merge quite successfully, as each has what the other needs. The detective works principally with knowledge, the writer with feeling. And the most difficult cases are solved when these streams converge. George Eliot defined the poet's soul as “that which is equally quick to learn and quick to feel—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.” That's it, you see, and when both knowledge and feeling are applied in the service of the thing not seen, the thing imagined, not possible, such as the surprise identity of the criminal, well, then anything is possible.

The one thing they both require—the writer and the detective—is the desire to see what is not there, and to make it at once orderly and beautiful, as in a flower or the answer to a math problem. George C. Scott's Holmes saw the world only for what it could be. The sublime detective, the sublime writer.

 

A
ND EVEN WHEN
you see a little, you never see the whole thing, any more than you can the whole room in which you sit or the street on which you walk. There is always something unseen above you or behind you. Just like the truth in a murder case. You never see the whole. Just like the city. Plaza by plaza, esplanade by esplanade, you make your way in the discrete parts of the city the way you would travel the works of a clock, each block an intricacy of gears and wheels. At first, you wonder about the scope and shape of the entire entity, the larger machine. Then you see that the parts are self-sufficient, each park or square composed so that the residents might feel some level of control and understanding about where they live. No one lives in New York. Everyone lives on Tenth Street, or on St. Marks Place, or in Gramercy Park.

Or in Tudor City, where my walk takes me now. Strangely spiritless yet beautiful, the apartment house complex between Fortieth and Forty-second streets and First Avenue once constituted the first residential skyscrapers in the world. A developer named Fred F. French had a vision of an urban utopia, by way of Tudor England, which probably guaranteed his disappointment. The area was more dangerous yet interesting as a slum known as Goat Hill in the 1850s, a home for roving goats and gangs. French filled it with tulip gardens, golf courses, and private playgrounds, all of which remain, sans the golf course, in a kind of odorless splendor.

On a winter night, Tudor City feels no more lifeless than it does on a summer day. Hard to know why. I walk in and out as I did when I was a boy detective, no suspects in sight, with no residual interest in the place except for the fact that my parents lived here before I was born. My mother described their Murphy bed, which disappeared into a wall. An innocent detail. My one noteworthy item about Tudor City.

 

W
HAT DO YOU
think, pal? Is there such a thing as an innocent detail? Apparent guilt means innocence, apparent innocence, guilt? It's nonsense, of course. But that's what Perry Mason was about, and Miss Marple and Nick Charles, and Charlie Chan, too. Holmes was made of subtler stuff. Assemble the sus
pects,
as Nick Charles pronounced the word, in one room. Scan the crowd from face to face. And the one who bears the blandest expression, who appears to have no reaction to the event, and seems to be present in the lineup merely as filler, he or she is the one. “
You
are murderer,” says Charlie Chan to the least demonstrative of the lot.

I suppose it's the mystery writer's version of the appearance versus reality business taught in university literature courses. But it doesn't wash in life. In life, just as often, the guilty look guilty, the innocent look clean as a whistle, and everyone looks every possible way. In my own childhood pursuits of the killer, I never assumed that he would look anything but guilty, if he appeared to me at all. The light of hell in
They Might Be Giants.
In my many childhood wanderings, I could imagine something similar. Oddly, I could never foresee my bringing my criminal to justice or even taking him down in a shoot-out. But I could see myself facing him and finding my triumph in that moment of confrontation.

And I wondered what my quarry would find in that same moment. Would he look upon his adversary, his nemesis, and be afraid? Or would he assess me top to bottom, boy that I was, and conclude that I was as he always had imagined me? And would he have surprised me with a twist of plot and lashed out, “
You
are murderer”?

 

C
AN YOU DIRECT
me to the National Arts Club?

Can you direct me to the fish market?

Do you happen to know the location of the nearest public library?

Do you happen to know where a guy can get laid around here?

Where's a cop when you need one?

Am I going east or west? I'm going south?

Are you from here?

Do I know you?

 

Y
OURS IS THE
clarity, the shape, and the theme. Mine is the shambles. And if I say that I am lost in admiration of you, while that is true, it is truer that I am lost, period, lost in everything. Nonetheless, I proceed even without a course or destination. Without a firm location, I proceed. Are most things nowhere? Stars, for instance. Isn't space the antithesis of place? Or can an object be tethered to nothing? By what do stars read their own positions?

But I probably am wrong in my premise. The “you” I address who seems to have clarity, shape, and a theme is more likely a fiction reserved for strangers. Or for people one invents to look down on. No one has clarity, shape, and a theme. The detective only has the lives of other people under control. His own is in shambles, the very material he draws on to solve his cases and close his books. Shambles. The headlights of cars fill your face, clear as rain. Do I know you?

 

W
HO DOES SHE
remind me of, the one in the red-checkered scarf, looking up at me now, startled, as if I were a car horn, before trudging on in the cold? I know. I was giving a talk in Washington at the Hay-Adams Hotel, on a piece I'd done for the
New York Times
Magazine
. And this young woman—brown hair, soft voice, sad eyes that kept her beauty in the background—walked up to say that her husband, who had been killed somewhere, had been moved by something I had written sometime, and that she had read whatever it was herself, and that it had helped her, somehow. But there was more to her than that, and more to the way we came together in the public room. And then there was someone else saying something else, and all at once she was borne away with the crowd, as if on a raft blown by the wind. And at the end of my talk, there was more chatter still, with strangers, and I had lost sight of her, until, outside the Hay-Adams, as my hired car started off, there she was again, standing in front of the others, looking directly through the car window at me. And what I might have done was to tell the driver to stop, to have flung open the car door, to have taken her small hand and pulled her inside, beside me, on that black leather seat, and asked her about her husband and her life.

Love at first sight? It wasn't that. There is no such thing as love at first sight, because it takes the imagination a while to dream up what love is. The one you catch sight of, on whom you have bestowed your sudden love, may be, at best, the perfect being revealed to you only after all the imperfect beings who preceded her. And if that is so, then love at first sight means love at last, the opposite of what it says. None of this applies to the one in the red-checkered scarf, since I have known my love-at-last since high school. Still, I might have spoken with her, so that we could have exchanged parts of our lives, in a world where daughters and husbands drop like flies. So that's who she reminds me of, the one in the red-checkered scarf.

 

C
LEAVE ME INTO
my parts and make me choose? I'd pick the heart over the head any day, because everybody is smart, you know, but not everybody is kind. That fellow with the lowered eyes, who sits in the frosted window of the print shop at Fortieth and Third, what words can I bring to ease his burden? None. Not a single intelligent word. But I could sit beside him on a stool and say nothing. That I could do. A tear is an intellectual thing, said Blake.

The thing about John Lewis playing Bach, you see, is that his right hand plays Bach straight, as it's written, and his left hand plays jazz and does the improvising. You might say that his left hand lives in the moment, and his right hand in the past. You get the allusion? Hear what I mean? Or, am I beating a dead horse?

 

I'
D SAY WE
were nearing the end of our illimitable walk, but as you know, that cannot be. I may be near the end of my personal walk, but that's a smaller matter. So let's just say that I am at Fifty-first and Lex, which is a bit north of my range. I am here nonetheless, because the Loew's Lexington movie theater used to be here, with its pool of glittering goldfish in the center of the lobby. Neighborhood kids passed whole Saturdays at the Loew's. We were herded into the children's section patrolled by “matrons” with white uniforms and great thick hands, and we watched a double feature of A and B movies, short subjects, such as the Pete Smith comedies, the glorious cartoons of Chuck Jones, and Movietone News. We would arrive at the theater at ten in the morning, cough up our twenty-five cents for admission, and be out no earlier than four in the afternoon.

It was here that I saw the noir film
Shadow on the Wall,
which presented a lesson on how to make use of confusing information in a murder case and elsewhere.
Shadow on the Wall
was about a girl my age, eight or nine, and I saw it at the time I was sleeping in my parents' bedroom and was watching shadows on the ceiling. The little girl witnesses a murder committed by a woman who killed her sister in a jealous rage. The murderess wore a hat with a prominent feather. So traumatized is the little girl that she temporarily loses her memory, and all she can tell the police is that the murderer was an Indian. The murderer, knowing that the girl's memory will return, plans to kill her.

Down the length of Lexington Avenue we kids would walk in the late afternoons dueling with invisible swords if the movie we had just seen was
Scaramouche,
or howling through the jungle, if the movie was
Tarzan
. Past the place that sold candy apples and caramel apples. Past the Army, Navy and Marines Club, twin gray town houses with American flags sticking out on poles. Past Joe's Photo Shop on Twenty-fourth, where I had my first job, at age eleven, sweeping out the store on early Saturday mornings and earning two dollars, so that I had a fortune to take to the movies. Past the George Washington Hotel, where I got haircuts and smelled of witch hazel. Then down to Gramercy Park, where Lexington Avenue ends or begins, depending on one's perspective.

Traffic moved two ways on Lex in those days. When the one-way change was instituted, and all the cars moved south toward the park, drivers at night would often build up a head of steam, hurtle down the avenue, and plough into the Gramercy Park gate. Awakened, I would hear them yell, “Who put this park here!” A conversation-stopper, in case you run out: Lexington Avenue was the site of the first speeding ticket issued in New York, in 1899. A cabdriver was pulled over for going twelve miles an hour.