The Boy Detective

by Roger Rosenblatt

  On the ice-pocked plain of Fifteenth Street between Second and Third, there is much to be angry about. The man in the too-long camel’s hair coat is angry about his great aunt, of all people. The man in the white-tooled cowboy boots is angry about his insurance company, which has cancelled his coverage after the fender bender. The woman at his side is angry at him for the fender bender. And both are angry at me because I am not going anywhere and thus appear at peace. And the one who crashed into my shoulder may be angry at me for the same reason. But I still don’t want to hear about it. This aimlessness, I find, drives some people up the wall. Good.

  A murdered boy is buried in the foundation of the Greek Orthodox church near Twenty-second Street and Third. How would I have detected that without my illimitable walk, I ask you?

  ABOUT HATRED AND ANGER. They have no effect on their objects. They are real and virulent enough to you. But no one else feels them very long, and certainly not as long or as deeply as you do. All you have done by generating such weapons is to add to the vast hatred and anger of the world, which indirectly ends in the deaths of millions. Do you really want to commit second-degree mass murder all your life? This message is brought to you by the society for preventive detection.

  Once there was a boy who walked and walked. And where he walked the streets curled skyward and the trees went flat as dishes. Birds roared, beetles went about their business, and the tulips conversed with poets. All this occurred, and more, where the boy walked.

  FOUR THEORIES ABOUT the nature of a perfect crime. The first has it that the perfect crime is one in which you get away with murder. You did it, all right, but you don’t get caught. Say, you had an airtight alibi. Or better, that you had no motive for the act, like Leopold and Loeb, who did not know their little boy victim personally but simply wanted to commit the perfect crime. They might have got away with it, if not for their egotistical personalities. They were too intent on having others appreciate their brilliance—a very bad move for criminals seeking perfection.

  The second theory is that the perfect crime is one in which someone else is caught and punished for what you did. That way, everyone thinks the crime has been solved, case closed—everyone but you and the patsy you set up to take the fall. There’s a nice neatness to this sort of crime, especially if the real murderer confronts the falsely convicted with no one else present, on death row, for example, moments before the execution. At this point, it would be lovely to see the innocent man strangle the guilty so that divine justice might be served. Alas, in the realm of terrestrial justice, no one would know that the guilty party got his. All anyone would think is that the wronged man killed twice.

  Which brings us to the third theory—that the perfect crime is one in which the murderer dies without anyone knowing that he did it. Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, its title cleaned up from the original Ten Little Niggers, shows us a vengeful judge who knocks off ten victims, including himself. If the murderer dies without anyone knowing he did it, the crime may be seen as perfect, if somewhat unsatisfying for the mastermind. Go to the trouble of committing the perfect crime and you deserve to see the fruits of your labor.

  And here is where the fourth and final theory comes in, in that it involves the crime you commit, and see, and everyone sees, and nothing is done about it. I refer to the crime you committed when you walked past the wounded or when you failed to attend the depressed. Why, you clever bastard, you did it without leaving even a partial fingerprint, without any telltale ballistics. You did it without a trace. The crime of no passion. No witnesses. No body. And here’s the beauty of it. The world lies dead at your feet and no one knows you did it, not even the dead. Sweet.

  ENCLOSED FIND RECEIPTS from Mayfair Hotel in Dover, Delaware, as well as plane tickets to and from San Antonio, and a handwritten note from Ming, the owner of Ming’s in Seattle, in lieu of a formal receipt, stating that I spent $23 on a below-average mei fun dinner, plus a $4 tip for Ming’s son, Ming Junior. Find also six receipts for taxis, mostly from Des Moines, with one from Philly, along with a $240 cab fare receipt, from when I missed the Super Chief in Omaha and had to take a cab to Pierre, if I didn’t want to lose the trail of the guy from Braintree. Per diems for sixteen days’ work are expected upon receipt of bill. Started late afternoon on a Tuesday, so I didn’t charge for that day but did include a receipt from Candlegrasse’s Hardware for flashlight used to poke around the wine cellar of that lady in Cleveland Heights. No charge for cartridges. I would have bought them anyway.

  As for the weight of my report, thought it best for all concerned not to write it up, as it implicated you, nailed you, in fact, which, I must say, did not surprise me in the slightest. I have been in this racket long enough to know that half the time the one who hires you to solve a crime did it himself, though frankly I wonder why you went to the trouble to look me up in the first place. You could have saved us both a lot of time and green by confessing from the git-go, rather than waiting for me to catch you. Maybe you thought that if I didn’t catch you, then you didn’t do it. But I did. And you did.

  SO THERE I stood, inspecting myself in the full-length mirror at the tuxedo-rental shop on Fourteenth, getting my outfit for the senior prom. I had never worn a tux before. “Isn’t this supposed to be black?” I asked the proprietor who smoked a stogie and spoke like a gangster. “Black is out of style,” he said. The tux was cobalt blue with white trim on the lapels. At home, my brother asked to look in the box. “Isn’t it supposed to be black?” he asked. “Black is out of style,” I said.

  On the night of the prom, I picked up Ginny’s corsage at the Gramercy Park Florist, a gardenia. I felt that the other customers were staring at me. When Ginny opened her door, she seemed startled. “Black is out of style,” I said matter-of-factly. She smiled but said nothing. I pinned on her gardenia, and off we went. The night was cool and I began to feel more comfortable, forgetting about my cobalt blue tux, until we arrived at school and entered the gym. “What the hell?” said Valente as soon as I appeared. “Why are you wearing that?” I told him why.

  WHO COULD HELP but wonder what the Gramercy Park Florist thinks about the flowers that surround him in tall vases and ceramic bowls and pots? On tables. In planters. Behind the cold glass. Roses, hibiscus, phlox, gardenias. He dwells in the middle of a vast corsage. But what does the Gramercy Park Florist think when he looks around him? Does he follow his nose? Does he think of his lot as eternally beautiful, his temperature-regulated paradise? When he proffers sunflowers to others, does he think he is making the rest of the world golden and innocent and full of wonder, the way sunflowers can? Or would he rather be somewhere else? Is his lot like the soda jerks’ behind the counter, who wouldn’t eat a bite of ice cream if you paid them, and their tongues curling from a surfeit of bliss? If only he could toss away every goddam flower in the shop. Sell junk instead. Sell fish. At night he thinks of Charlie Chaplin in City Lights and of the blind girl in the flower shop, whom Charlie helps to make see again, so that she may love another.

  LIVE LONG ENOUGH as a detective, and you begin to realize something about the senses. The two you think you would miss the most if they were lost—seeing and hearing—may be the most expendable. Both reveal wonders, to be sure. Sunsets and the Rach Three. But they also can get things entirely backward, plain wrong. “I can’t believe my ears.” “I can’t believe my eyes.” Touch, taste, and smell, on the other hand, rarely are ever doubted. You never hear someone exclaim, “I can’t believe my fingers, my tongue, my nose,” because you can believe those senses. They are tied to reality. I live to see and hear the world. You, too. Of course we do. But, in my business, I do not trust the world I see and hear. The world I smell, however, the world I touch, and taste, well, that’s another kettle of fish. This a detective learns, if he lives long enough.

  To be sure, age insists on changes, a lighter gray here, a darker blue there. More people sit in judgment of you. There is more condemnation, reconsidered opinions. You tend to speak w
ith fewer friends, though with those few, once in a while, you talk your head off, or theirs. And that surprises you. But you also care less about all that, for there are other things to occupy your senses. These days, I walk slower and more carefully, like a pro athlete avoiding an expensive injury. I study the stone steps and take them as if I were an oaf in the universe. I clop from planet to planet, side-stepping the rings and the moons.

  In the skull of the sky, I hear a rattling. In the rosy shells on the beach, the hoots of owls. In the midst of some trivial transaction, my fingers run idly over the piano keys, and the bank teller with whom I deal sings “Beale Street Blues” by Bach. In the nonexistent churchyard in back of my house, a pregnant girl lies supine, her brown belly a Quonset hut between the markers. Once in a blue moon, I swing my chain and hurtle into the stadium, shouting war cries.

  I’LL LET YOU in on an advantage in growing old. You begin to believe what you feel. It takes a number of years to do this, quite a number in fact, but one morning in the shower or running home during a snowstorm, anywhere, anytime, you find yourself muttering something you’ve said your whole life. Only earlier in your life, it sounded like a mere suspicion of a truth, available to continuous correction and revision, or total dismissal, and now, in older age, it feels like the truth itself. It is the truth. When you were shadowing yourself as a boy detective, you were never sure enough about your feelings to call them you. In older life, suddenly (not really) they are you. Sure enough.

  This is how we get down to cases with ourselves, I think—the wanderings of the mind that very slowly over the years coalesce into a system of belief. Intuition shows itself as faith. And after all the heavings and torments of the spirit, when you hated this and resented that, and felt you knew the reasons why, there was still, during all that seething time, a quiet wind of thought working through you that contradicted all that. Give yourself time, and that wind becomes the only thing you truly trust.

  Most of what we call a philosophy of life when we are young are merely moods. Eventually the mind craves more, like a child at a puppet show (non-Platonic) who, however much he relishes the gestures of the arms and heads, soon wants to know who is working the puppets. Sixty years ago, when I walked these streets, I was all moods. No longer. I feel myself molting toward truth. The bitterness withers of its own accord. The moods, having contended among themselves, have settled upon a leader, a set of principles. I love. Therefore I walk. This, by the way, is the best time of life to write, when writing makes you happy. “We are happy,” said Yeats, “when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us.” I love these streets. They love me back.

  WITHOUT THE SMELL of fresh oranges; without the pickle brine; without the puke stench on the subway platform or the cold sweetness of the fruit stand; without the scent of warm beer, grilled cheese, coffee, gasoline in the parking garage, the lobby air, the elevator air; without the sweat on the bus, or the odor of chocolate emitting from a fancy candy store, or soap from a fancy soap store, or the horses, dog shit, herring, saltines; without the whiff of perfume squirted on a wrist in a department store; without the stink of the zoo; without all that every step of the way, where would we be, pal? Minnesota. That’s where.

  WHY DO I think of this now? It was after a high school party at a classmate’s town house. The house was on East Seventeenth Street, one block from our school, yet my classmate was late every day. No one could understand it. He was short, fattish, unsure of himself. His mother was pleasant enough, like fruit. She seemed to have settled into her place in the world. His younger sister, the same. His father, a doctor, had his office on the ground floor of their house. Also short and fat, he was unkind to his son, always comparing him unfavorably to his more assertive, apparently self-assured friends, like me. He would say things in front of his son—“Why can’t you be more like him?”—that made me uncomfortable. His son would stare up at him in a terrible bewilderment.

  So, I think of the night of that party, after I had taken Ginny home and was walking back to my own home, around midnight. It was spring and Stuyvesant Park was dark, the leaves and the trees dark. And I walked past the house of the doctor and his wife and daughter and son, all of them backlit in the blazing window of the second-floor living room. They were cleaning the room, picking up glasses and plates, and putting things back as they were, after the only party my classmate ever gave, or ever would give, in high school.

  AND, WITH NO connection, this: the blizzard of 1947, and six-year-old me snowbound in a snowsuit, looking like a moon walker, standing atop the buried cars around the park, jumping from roof to roof and thinking, one could make a tunnel in all this snow, many tunnels, a network of underground corridors, in the city of cold dreams. Why, man, the snow that winter was the height of the park gates. White, white. The white-capped birds. Life blanketed like memory. The whole night, white.

  AS TO THE twin beds with the red roses on the headboards: One day my room was mine and then it wasn’t. I was informed that from then on (I was seven) I would be sleeping in one of my parents’ twin beds. My mother would be sleeping in the other. My father would occupy my baby brother Peter’s room, and Peter would be in mine. Years passed (I was ten) before my parents shared their bedroom again, but little else until my father’s last few years. A recollection of not being able to fall asleep in my father’s bed, of making a pup tent of the duvet, and crawling under. A recollection of the light shadows sidling across the ceiling above my head, created by the headlights on the street nine stories below. A recollection of wanting answers to everything.

  THE TROUBLE WITH trouble when you are young is that you have no words for it, and without words you cannot clarify it or objectify it, and without clarity or objectivity you’re stunned. Stunned like a stuffed owl. Your eyes are glass, your feathers glued. Something is happening around you, a lot actually, and much of it involves you. But you cannot get ahold of it or move toward it for a closer look, because you lack the words, you see, you do not have the words. You cannot wheel around the trees. For a while, all I would envision in the streets I walked was my forfeited future. I strode into the past. There was something wrong, dead wrong. But no one gave me the words. Which, I suppose, is why I am what I am today, what I have made of myself. A man of letters.

  Stumped, Mr. Spade? Another case, another book. Close the book. Book him. Feel the power of the quest as it rolls through us? Be my partner, I’ll be yours. We’ll get through it. We will move through our life alone and within sight of each other. And if one of us is killed, the other will bring the bitch to justice, will send her over, no matter what, because that is what a detective does when his partner is killed. That’s what he does.

  THE WIND LIFTS like a bedsheet flapped over dry grass in the backyard, in the days when laundry was hung out to dry on a line. It takes my breath away, then gives it back. I would give my right arm to know what my parents said to each other before the knife passed between them, and then, after the long years and Dad’s three heart attacks, what they said to make peace. Well, maybe my left arm. Just below the elbow.

  Even if I were to make an educated guess, I’d probably be light-years off the mark. Truth is a sly fox anyway. You can receive the right words in the right order, every last one, and still hear babble. I think the hedge schools in Ireland a hundred years ago had the right idea. Hide from the ones who don’t want you to learn something, so that, though you never actually learn a thing, you feel as if you do because of the hiding. Sometimes, when the laundry was strung out like smiling teeth, I would press my forehead against the bark of an elm and listen to the sheets chatter.

  That was in Chatham, or Westport, or Weston, before or after a Little League game in which I hit a triple or a single that I stretched into a double. Either that, or I struck out with the bases loaded. Looking.

  A YOUNG WOMAN in a bright green ski vest, jeans, and, for some reason, riding boots sits weeping near the statue of William Seward in Madison Square Park. Her left arm is
extended along the top of the bench while her right arm is crooked and covers her face the way people do in a room full of smoke, to shield herself from the gaze of passersby. I pass by, on the verge of asking her, “Are you OK?,” while a blind man could see that she is anything but OK. Love. That’s my guess. She has lost her love. She may be the woman I saw in Starbucks earlier in the evening, the one in conversation with the young man with the TODAY hat. Maybe they went horseback riding. Maybe they were together a while, and now they’re apart. He broke up with her. The TODAY hat was not from the TV show after all. He’d had it made to order to express his carpe diem attitude toward love. Here for her TODAY, gone tomorrow. In any case, ought I to retrace my steps and ask her if she’s OK? Once I asked her if she was OK, I then could tell her that everything will be OK. Why would I tell her that?

  ’SUP, WILLIAM SEWARD? His statue goes neglected in Madison Square Park. Sculpted by Randolph Rogers, it was unveiled in 1876. Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, and a New York senator before that, not to mention his Alaska, which everyone does—mention Alaska. A quill pen is sculpted in his hand, signifying, one supposes, the signing of the purchase called “Seward’s Folly.” He was a worthy man, a prominent man, his “folly” notwithstanding. Yet it is the folly that withstands. And his statue.