My Darling Detective

by Howard Norman

“I was exonerated on all charges.”

  “No, you just weren’t finally arrested. But guess what? There’s all sorts of new forensic techniques since you were police, Emil. Since your putrid self was police. Since you were part of the atmosphere in 1945. Mrs. Yablon might not’ve surfaced in the harbor, but she’s going to surface in this file on the table, here. You got two ghosts, Emil, and both are going to be screaming at you day and night until your putrescence of a soul shrivels up in prison. Why not just admit what you did.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Hodgdon slammed a phone book against Robert Emil’s head. Emil spun backward to the floor. Hodgdon left the interrogation room. When he entered the viewing room, he said, “Martha, you’re up.”

  Martha embraced me tightly and whispered, “You should leave now, Jake.”

  “Why’s that?” I said.

  “Because I don’t want you to see me deliver the coup de grâce.”

  “You think you’re going to get him to confess?”

  “I meant the coup de grâce for today. The just-keep-him-shaken-up coup de grâce. Please, really, I don’t want you to see this. Haven’t you seen enough for one day?”

  “What, are you going to hit him with a telephone book?”

  “Darling, please.”

  Detective Tides said, “Jake, don’t be a goddamn idiot. Detective Crauchet’s got work to do. Go sit in the library, maybe.”

  I said all right, I’d leave. But when Martha went in to interrogate Robert Emil, I stood by the door of the viewing room. Tides and Hodgdon were focused on Martha and Robert Emil. Martha sat down at the desk. She folded her hands together. Then she slapped Emil across the face. “Oh, sorry,” she said. “I don’t know how that happened.”

  Emil looked furious but didn’t say anything. Martha sighed deeply and said very slowly, “Did you know you had a son? Well, yes, you do have a son. His mother is Nora Rigolet. Your son is watching you right now, through that glass. He’s seeing you for the first time. He’s just learned what a useless piece of shit you are. He knows what you did.”

  With that, I finally left.

  Detective Emil Detects

  Martha came home that day at about five o’clock. She was carrying takeout from Mandarin Palace, including my favorite, spicy fried pot stickers, which Martha called heart attack fodder. The kitchen table was filled with small boxes of food, plates, chopsticks, and napkins, and I’d set my notes for a required essay, “The Origin and History of Card Catalogues,” on the counter. The radio played at low volume, classical music. Detective Levy Detects would come on at ten.

  Looking at the stack of notes, Martha said, “That the essay on card catalogues?”

  “I’ve got a lot of work to do on it still,” I said.

  “May I read it when you’re finished?”

  “I could really use some comments.”

  “Okay.”

  “How were you feeling today? Nora Elizabeth been announcing herself?” I reached over and stroked Martha’s belly under her oversize trousers, cinched to fit.

  “Kicking up a storm.”

  “How’s the desk work going for you, Martha? Do you miss the gumshoe part of the job?”

  “Less than I thought, though I’ll want to get back to it. Besides, Tides and Hodgdon keep me up to speed. They like to flop down on the ratty sofa in my office and go into detail. You want to talk about Robert Emil or not?”

  “I was worried. What if he got violent in there? What with the baby and all.”

  “I wouldn’t step around the desk. I got my two cents in today, but no more Robert Emil up close for me. You are absolutely right. It might’ve been reckless. And I promised you I wouldn’t be.”

  “You said you couldn’t hold him, but you think he’s a flight risk, so—”

  “He’s got to report in by phone three times a day. He’s back working at Deep Water Terminus, the forklift. The company can’t sack Emil until he’s in the slammer. That might never happen, or it could take months. Plus a hearing. It’s illegal for them to sack him just on the suspicion. Et cetera, et cetera.”

  “I’ve been thinking—I’d like to attend the next interrogation.”

  “I’ve already asked Tides and Hodgdon. They get it, that it’s something important to me, having you there. So protocol’s down the toilet, as Tides says.”

  “I’ve always found him a very articulate man.”

  “They’re bringing Robert Emil in again in about two weeks. He’s in deep shit, Jacob. Let me just say it. I read over Mrs. Yablon’s testimony again, and I can’t remember a better physical description, and she just outright says, ‘Oh, it was Officer Robert Emil running out of the alley.’ You hear her voice right there on the page, and there’s nothing but conviction—I guess I mean that in two ways.”

  “I don’t feel anything in particular when I look at Emil. I mean, I don’t stand there and think, Wow, my real father, I really want to get to know him. Nothing like that. He’s like seeing someone on a Wanted poster.”

  “But your feelings must get complicated, right?”

  “It’s more trying to imagine what Nora saw in this creep. But how can I know, really? During the war and all. Like Tides—or was it Hodgdon—said, the atmosphere.”

  “Yeah, the atmosphere nine months before April 1945. Just take care of yourself, Jacob. The pain of all of this may be, I don’t know what, delayed.”

  “Still, when Robert Emil is next interrogated, I want to watch.”

  Martha and I ate and talked a little more, and then she said, “I’ve got to show you something.” She walked into the bedroom, returning with her black satchel. She sat down again, held her stomach, and said, “Hey, feel this.” I reached over and felt our daughter kicking. Really something, that. “Not to worry, Jake. It’s all going along as it should.”

  Martha reached into the satchel and took out a book and handed it to me. It was a hardcover copy of Detective Emil Detects. The subtitle was Adventures of a Halifax Policeman. I turned to the back flap and saw a photograph of Robert Emil wearing his police uniform. Under that, the author’s bio read: “Robert Emil was a policeman in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and received citations for bravery in the line of duty. This is his debut novel.”

  “Novel my sweet ass,” Martha said. “Sure, call it anything you want, but there’s so much in that book that squares with actual historical incidents and facts. Tricky in court to use so-called fiction as evidence of anything but the imagination, as a prosecuting attorney told me. But Tides, Hodgdon, and I can use this book in questioning Emil. You wait and see, Jake. We had a big confab about it, in fact. Laying out our strategy.”

  I handed the book back to Martha, who put it in the satchel. She got up, hung the satchel on the silent valet by the front door, and walked back to the kitchen. “I’m going to take a nap,” she said, and went to lie down on our bed. I continued work on my essay.

  Martha slept until almost ten o’clock. When she stepped yawning from the bedroom, she said, “I don’t mind cold Chinese,” and served herself a plateful. I turned on the radio. We had a few moments before the program started. “You missed the episode where Leah Diamond had her daughter,” Martha said. “Big drama. She had the baby delivered right there in the hotel.”

  “You filled me in, though, remember?”

  “Oh, right.”

  That night’s episode was titled “The Kidnapping, the Murder.” Martha got quite upset, as it was about Leah Diamond and Detective Levy’s two-month-old daughter, Lily, getting kidnapped and held for ransom. Naturally, the gangsters and gun molls came to the rescue. Not only did they locate Lily, but they murdered the kidnapper, though that wasn’t the end of it. Because as it turned out, three employees of the Devonshire Hotel—a concierge, a dishwasher, and a bellman—conspired in the kidnapping. It was the concierge, a guy named Miklos Noyes, who was found with Lily by Leah Diamond’s pals in another hotel two blocks away. That’s when one of the molls carried Lily out into the hallway, and the rest of th
e gang screwed on their silencers.

  “I don’t know,” Martha said. “That was pretty rough to listen to all the way through, I admit. Still and all, Leah Diamond’s my role model in all womanly things brave and true.”

  “Was it the kidnapping part especially?” I asked. I could see she was a little shaken.

  “Yes, of course, that. But also, there it was again. Just like when that bullet creased my belt that time. I mean, what if, in the radio episode, there had been a shootout and baby Lily was right there?”

  “Naw, wouldn’t happen,” I said. “Never would’ve happened.”

  “Why not?” Martha said.

  “The scriptwriter would’ve got all sorts of hate mail, and nobody would want to listen anymore.”

  “Honey, I’m really zonked. I feel like, with my eyes open, I’ve already started tonight’s dream.”

  “I guess that could happen.”

  “Figure of speech, but I’m going to bed. You want to lie down with me?”

  We took off our clothes and lay in bed, and Martha said, “Don’t forget tomorrow, Arts and Crafts. I’ll meet you over in Dartmouth.” Then she fell asleep. I lay pressed against her back, my hand on her belly. No kicking at first, then a little kicking. Then I looked through the open door and saw Martha’s satchel on the silent valet. It hung there like a reproach, in the sense that suddenly it felt as if I should be keeping up with Martha’s cold-case investigation to whatever extent I could. I admired how Martha looked at everything she’d learned about my mother’s past as if it was some rare opportunity to deepen her understanding of me, of us. Sure, it was part of her detectiving. But it had gone beyond that months ago. She was bending the rules, allowing me to watch the interrogation of Robert Emil. It didn’t seem to be causing difficulties with Detectives Tides and Hodgdon, but then again, maybe it was.

  I got out of bed, threw on a robe, took the satchel from the silent valet, and carried it to the kitchen table. I took out Detective Emil Detects. I started reading it at around 11:30 p.m. and set it down, after reading the last page, at 5:15 the next morning. Jesus H. Christ, what a horrible writer, I thought—I mean, just the style of it, the way it reads sentence by sentence. So many clichés, and no policeman could perform so many heroic acts in a single week. The entire story took place between April 7 and April 19, 1945. Looking through a couple of folders in Martha’s file in her study, I discovered that those dates coincided with a number of anti-Semitic incidents in Halifax, including a police tear-gas canister being thrown through a window at Baron de Hirsch Synagogue. The very week I was born in the Halifax Free Library.

  When I got into bed, Martha groggily said, “Everything okay, darling?”

  Blaming Ghosts

  Martha and I had dinner at Mrs. Hamelin’s on Sunday, October 23, and that evening we met the fellow who had replaced me as her assistant and auction bidder. His name was Brice Falter. He was about thirty and had a degree in art history from McGill University, and was himself a painter. He used the smallest guest room as his studio, which was cleared out for tables and easels. “Brice is a good painter,” Mrs. Brevittmore said at the table. “Quite enamored of Matisse, though not enough enamored of the Moroccan interiors, in my opinion.”

  Brice struck me as a little stodgy but very intelligent, and when he said that his sister, Rose, was seven months pregnant, Martha said, “Oh, my own due date is January 14,” and talked with great animation. Brice obviously felt comfortable enough to share that not only was Rose a high school English teacher but also the coach of the fencing team, and fencing while that far along in a pregnancy presented all sorts of comical travails. “She would murder me if she knew I did an imitation, so just let your imagination suffice,” Brice said. I could tell that Martha liked him.

  At one point after dinner, Brice sat next to me on the sofa while everyone else remained at the dining room table. “You know,” he said, “lately I’ve lost out on three consecutive photographs at auction. Mrs. Hamelin is none too pleased. With every other part of my job, I think she’s pleased. But just last month, in London, I thought I’d locked into the cadence of the bidding perfectly, you know? I was in a kind of duel with an Australian, and it was going along, going along, and then the bid jumped. But it jumped only slightly above what my ceiling bid was supposed to be. Then the photograph was gone—and not to the Australian bidder, but to a Brit, someone who hadn’t been heard from up to that point. Gone. Just like that. I really need this job, and I wondered if you had any advice.”

  “I can’t offer much,” I said. “I lost out often, and brought some back. Mrs. Hamelin is the world’s greatest expert in showing disappointment. She might actually not be disappointed—she knows it’s a tough world she’s thrown you into, auctions. But that may be separate from how she’s implying disappointment. Make any sense?”

  “You know her much better than I do,” Brice said.

  Now everyone was sitting in the living room. “Jacob,” Mrs. Brevittmore said, “I understand from Martha that you’re to give a public lecture.”

  “Not exactly a lecture,” I said. “Every degree candidate in library science is required to present a paper, an essay of some sort. You present it to the faculty and the other students in the program. And whoever else shows up.”

  “We’ll be there,” she said. “Won’t we?”

  “Most certainly,” Mrs. Hamelin said.

  “Please don’t bother,” I said.

  “Nonsense,” Mrs. Hamelin said. “What’s your topic?”

  “It’s very . . . unconventional,” Martha said.

  “Really?” Mrs. Brevittmore said. “Jacob, we’re already proud of you. Unconventional?”

  “Maybe what Martha means is, I’m not very good at academic thinking,” I said. “There’s a whole lot I’m weak on, but I’m not weak on everything, and as I learned from my mother, the library science degree isn’t everything. So much happens once you’re actually working in a library. All kinds of practical knowledge.”

  “That has to be true,” Mrs. Hamelin said. “But as for my question, what is the subject of your paper, Jacob?”

  “Ghosts,” I said.

  “I see,” Mrs. Brevittmore said, sipping her tea.

  “More to the point, ghosts in Canadian libraries throughout history,” I said.

  “Interesting,” Brice said.

  “Not interesting yet,” Mrs. Hamelin said. “Tell us more, Jacob.”

  “Okay—well, I ran across this personal reminiscence from a librarian from 1901, here in Halifax. She was a very poor woman who slept in the storeroom of the library. That particular library was demolished in 1926, but almost every night when this librarian slept in the storeroom, she was woken by a ghost. And according to her reminiscence, the ghost pretty much performed the same task every night.”

  “And what was that?” Mrs. Brevittmore said.

  “Refile the A-to-C drawer of the card catalogue,” I said.

  “Only that drawer?” Mrs. Hamelin said.

  “According to the reminiscence, yes.”

  “A mystery to be solved,” said Mrs. Brevittmore. “And was it?”

  “The librarian came to think that she was looking at herself.”

  “Herself in the past, or herself in the future?” said Mrs. Hamelin.

  “Definitely the past. The library had been built almost eighty years before.”

  “And your essay is about her?” said Mrs. Brevittmore.

  “I did more research, and it turns out there’s quite a few reports of ghosts like that. These ghosts supposedly created all sorts of mischief, and some were destructive. So I’m trying to write a kind of brief history of ghosts in Canadian libraries. I might not have the glue yet, listening to myself here.”

  “Darling, I’m getting very tired,” Martha said.

  “Martha,” said Mrs. Brevittmore, “clearly Jacob is at sixes and sevens with this essay. It’s to be a public address. There’s much at stake. Would you consider lying down in the guest
room—top of the stairs immediately to your right—while we will work through the topic with Jacob? Then we’ll wake you, and Brice will drive you both home.”

  Martha nodded in agreement and walked up the stairs. “Brice,” Mrs. Brevittmore said, “be a dear and go fetch a bottle of Scotch, and a bottle of the lemon vodka too, please.”

  For half an hour Mrs. Brevittmore and Mrs. Hamelin were like interlocutrixes. They really raked me over the coals. They said that I had no real topic except some “generalized attraction to ghost stories,” and there was a great possibility I’d fall flat on my face in public. “No doubt it won’t affect your getting the degree, Jacob,” Mrs. Hamelin said, “but if you can avoid embarrassment, that’s best, don’t you think?”

  For the next few hours they helped me reach an understanding of what my real subject ought to be. Mrs. Brevittmore’s advice was, “First, don’t wear yourself out climbing a staircase of abstraction”—she may have been quoting some philosopher or poet there—“and try to grasp that your real subject is not whether anyone believes in ghosts, or if ghosts were actually seen in various libraries, as reported. You must instead try and think from the ghost’s point of view: After death, why choose to remain in a library? What is the intrinsic and unique spirit of a particular library—or libraries in general—that would make it the perfect place to dwell in the afterlife, should one believe in the afterlife? Your thinking is too low. You need to lift your thinking up.”

  At nearly three o’clock in the morning, Mrs. Hamelin said, “Look, Jacob, go after something that may be slightly out of reach. Show some savvy. Show some braininess. Show some passionate thought. Anyone can just collate together ghost sightings and anecdotes. Good entertainment, perhaps, but is that useful scholarship?”

  “I totally agree,” said Martha, who had appeared on the stairs. I don’t know how long she’d been listening in. “Let’s go home now, Jake.”

  I worked hard over the following weeks, and when I gave the presentation, on December 1, it went well. Though the faculty and students were dressed in everyday street clothes, Mrs. Brevittmore and Mrs. Hamelin were dressed to the nines. Martha was too. After the mild applause and somewhat bewildered looks on the faces of my faculty, the four of us repaired to Halloran’s for dinner, paid for by Mrs. Hamelin. Brice joined us for dessert.