Private Investigations

by Victoria Zackheim

  I was the only staff woman ever to accept a call for skit writers for the annual Gridiron Show and was invited to a gala dinner because the pro writers wanted to see this skit-writing “nobody” from advertising. I ended up next to Mr. Five Dollars and, when asked, said, “I’d like to be up where you are.” GIII then catapulted me into the women’s department as a reporter. I’d crashed the Newspaper Guild union without a journalism degree. The tickled ad manager, GII, showed me the “Overqualified. Should last a year” he’d written on my employment form. God bless ’em both. Male manager mentorship for women would not become a movement for years. Life was changing, but where was the mystery? At my fingertips, on the outdated mechanical typewriters we used. These women’s departments, ignored by male management, were moving from society news, fashion, and food to women’s equality issues and even protest bombing. Reporting is detective work. I learned to hear lies muttered over the phone. To track down a dodging source well before the Internet made it easy. I always called them at home on Sunday mornings so they’d know I was impolite and implacable. I met and learned from the homeless to the famous. My young artsy exploits gave me a chance to interview touring Golden Age (1930s through 1960s) actors and writers. My first “get” was the First Lady of the American Theater, Helen Hayes. I nearly swooned. The investigative articles and series that women’s department reporters wrote changed and challenged society and won awards.

  But… big surprise, male management didn’t even read our section. Soon a national “news you can use” newspaper strategy had women’s department reporters writing do-it-yourself articles on cleaning your gutters. Not what I had dreamed about. I had to escape the cage of a union-guaranteed wage “good for a woman” that clipped my wings. Time to finish my long-sidelined Gothic mystery and fiction-write my way out of this deteriorating job. That college-started novel would be the key, but it took another celebrated godfather to turn it.

  SPLIT-LEVEL WRITING

  Age: Twenty-four to the present

  Location: Wherever I am

  My tendency to use both humor and dark themes in my mystery novels perhaps can be explained by my “catholic” reading tastes as a college English and theater major choosing to read The Red and the Black and Remembrance of Things Past—and similar heavy-lifting sagas—but never deserting my childhood mystery genre loves, Sherlock Holmes and Nancy Drew. I binge on mysteries. Raymond Chandler for prose style, Ellery Queen, Josephine Tey, Dorothy Sayers (Dorothy Dunnett for historical suspense), and I love to escape into historical Gothic mystery paperbacks. To me, Jane Eyre provides a groundbreaking working woman heroine. (The earliest English novels, by men, were about working women as streetwalkers.) Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is the most distinguished descendent of the genre. Yet the popular fictional governess heroines of my college days are terrified milksops getting locked into crypts from which wealthy and titled Englishmen condescend to rescue them. I want women who rescue, whether it is cats, people, or, if necessary, impossibly dreamy heroes. Where are they? In short supply.

  So… I began to write. After three opening chapters, I had a protagonist, Amberleigh Dunne, a bankrupt suicide’s disgraced daughter, an Ireland setting, and a title from an Irish protest song, One Faithful Harp. I listed the heroine’s musts: she must be loyal to another woman, though it costs her dearly; she must have a man friend who is not a romantic interest; she must risk her life to save someone; and she must be recognized by Lord Whatsit as his equal. Or better, his superior. On a teenaged trip to Ireland, I had fallen in love with the lush, verdant land, the famous Irish charm that matched the haunting folk music. I recall sitting in a hotel parlor and watching a well-stuffed, veddy British couple as the woman intoned in her impeccable British accent, “Oh, this hotel. So dismal, and the staff”—a young Irish woman whisked by—“so slovenly.” He replied, “So true, my dear.” What? Untrue! Open anti-Irish bias still alive and well in long-postfamine Ireland? Shocking to a girl living in America’s civil rights heyday. That dialogue fueled my vague urge to write a Gothic mystery novel with a mission and a theme: the indelible stain of ethnic hatred. My nineteenth-century heroine would be half Irish and half English, conflicted and endangered by ancient political divisions and plots. I was going mainstream. And I would not do it alone.

  THE GODFATHER IV, ACT I

  Age: Twenty-eight

  Location: St. Paul department-store restaurant, muted gray-and-gold elegance

  Golden Age film and stage director and writer Garson Kanin is making an interview point by balancing a heavy restaurant-ware fork on his eloquent fingers. I adore his Old Hollywood stories of Kate Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.

  A week later, I came into the office to hear the news: “You missed him. Garson Kanin called. Loved your story.” Interview subjects had written but never called! (Five years later, I would call him on Martha’s Vineyard to announce that my first novel had sold.)

  ENTER GODFATHER V, FELINE EDITION

  Age: Twenty-nine

  Location: St. Paul Pioneer Press office

  Journalists rejoice in finding a “hot story” in an unlikely place, a diamond in a hay bale. While perusing the pets category in the classified ads, I find an inordinately long, high-dollar ad seeking a home for a stray cat. It is big and black and has been flown two thousand miles as a “rescue” to Minnesota.

  My feature on this savvy survivor illustrated all the hallmarks of a classic noir detective. He’d slunk around a fancy Palo Alto motel, cadging meals from room service trays and decimating the equally fancy $2,000-a-fish koi population in the pond when not ankling up to solo women guests at the outdoor snack machines and getting a bed inside on chilly nights. The guests called him Midnight Louie. Perfect. Although it wasn’t done in journalism, I wrote the story from the cat’s point of view. Sam Spade with claws.

  THE GODFATHER IV, THE SEQUEL

  Age: Thirty-three

  Location: Minneapolis Cheshire Cheese Room restaurant

  I am assigned to reinterview this enthusiastic subject, and Garson Kanin gleefully shows me my earlier article from the Pioneer Press sandwiched between his press-kit profiles in the Los Angeles and New York Times. I have never been one to leverage my job, but, overwhelmed, I mention my completed novel, hoping for an agent’s name. He asks, “Is it good?” I chuck Midwestern modesty and say, “Yes.” He volunteers to take the manuscript to New York! I surreptitiously check the level of his Bloody Mary (untouched) to ensure that I am not taking advantage of him. Then I drive back to the Minneapolis hotel that evening on an appropriately Gothic dark and stormy night to dash inside and leave One Faithful Harp, all 634 pages, at the front desk.

  Kanin’s Doubleday editor wrote that she would have bought it two years earlier (ouch!), but it was now “off-market.” (You think?) “It’s particularly well done,” she said, recommending two other editors. The first bought it, and I was able to thank Sally Arteseros in person thirty-some years later. Liftoff. Whenever I feel kicked to the curb by life’s inequities, I go to my final mentor’s Wikipedia entry. He was a self-taught man, an “autodidact,” of Renaissance creativity whose own mentor was triple Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist-playwright Thornton Wilder. Garson Kanin will forever be that charming, kind, unassuming writer-director fellow from Golden Age Hollywood and Broadway. Visit him online. You’ll be amazed. And he keeps me hopeful and humble.

  THE BOOK DETECTIVE

  Age: Forty-two

  Location: Sunny Texas

  In One Faithful Harp, retitled Amberleigh, I learn I’ve written a chaste, nineteenth-century novel when bodice-rippers with rapist heroes were in florid flower. I skedaddle to high fantasy, offering imaginative adventure, but as sexually innocent as a hobbit.

  My first two fantasy novels became “surprise” national bestsellers. The vice president of the publishing house told me the sales force was begging for my next book, and I soon would make the New York Times bestseller list. Surprise! Eventually, two publishers and three editors failed to capital
ize on this gift from the publishing gods, and I became box-office poison in the fantasy genre after selling 400,000 books.

  Time to visit Garson online. He had passed on, but his assistant said a book of mine had been permanently installed on his personal above-desk shelf. Still humbled. “We’ll always have mystery,” his ghost whispered to me, like Bogart to Bergman in Casablanca.

  GODFATHER V, SHERLOCK HOLMES

  Age: Forty-three

  Location: My bookshelf

  It is time to revisit my bookshelf of beloved reads. There are many male-written Holmes spin-off series featuring secondary male characters as detectives. Why not a woman? Woman author, woman character. Someone should do that. It is a mystery to me why no woman has.

  So I reinvented Irene Adler, an American opera singer and the only woman to outwit Holmes. Latter-day books and films cast her as a sexy criminal or a villain’s pawn. I envisioned her as a clever and bold independent woman of substance with personal and professional integrity, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had done. I might have been late to the historical Gothic mystery table, but now I became the first woman to create a spin-off series from the Sherlock Holmes canon and the first to take a woman character as a new detective protagonist. A decade after One Faithful Harp debuted as Amberleigh, my first Irene Adler novel won two mystery awards and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. A favorite writer, Sir Arthur, had gotten me to the New York Times again.

  MIDNIGHT LOUIE RIDES AGAIN

  Age: Forty-eight

  Location: My North Texas office

  In 1992, I promote my newspaper-article cat, Midnight Louie, to a feline PI and noir commentator on the sleuthing of two men, two women, two pro, and two amateur detectives. What is it about Louie, about any cat, that draws in readers? The cat’s air of mystery compared to obviously emoting dogs? Maybe, but Louie’s witty caustic comments are a wonderful vehicle for social issue explorations, being both homage to and critique of the great American noir male private eye tradition. In the Midnight Louie mysteries, I can invert classic mystery clichés such as the reluctant cop buddy who assists the despised PI… with both of them women.

  Louie is no ordinary cat—his intermittent narrative voice dates from my gradeschool reading of two early-twentieth-century satirical and social-issue-oriented (like me) newspaper columnists. Don Marquis reported what a cockroach named archy (who couldn’t reach the shift key) typed on his manual machine overnight, and Damon Runyon penned Guys and Dolls and other cynical-sentimental tales of down-and-outers on Prohibition- and Depression-era Broadway. Louie’s Las Vegas setting parallels Broadway gamblers, showgirls, and mob bosses, and forty million annual visitors provide murders with such satire-rich characters as celebrity dance contests and Elvis-tribute artists.

  Murder is where humor leaves off. Every death has a poignant history behind it… sins of envy, lust, greed, wrath, and simply, as in Cool Hand Luke, “a failure to communicate.” A cozy-noir mystery series can have gravity as well as humor, mixing amateur and professional investigators: a single-mother homicide lieutenant with a devastating family secret, a newly laicized young Catholic ex-priest, a magician-agent with a tragic death in his wake. The One Ring to bind them all is Miss Nancy Drew all grown up on spike heels, as Louie describes his roommate and partner, petite but strong-souled female amateur detective Temple Barr. Protective Louie calls himself her muscle in Midnight black. Like a Yorkie terrier who can dominate mastiffs, Temple is little but fierce, ready to root out vermin when murder strikes at events she reps for public relations. Louie is dogged by a tough unacknowledged daughter, Midnight Louise, who keeps his politically incorrect macho self in line. Again, the complex mysteries of the secret feline parallel universe intersect with the social and criminal realities of human lives and times. Definitions of “strong women” may vary, but this writing goal gives me multiple issues to play out in the plots and characters who provide the depth that I need in order to challenge them for, well, twenty-six years.

  SOME GIRLISH GOALS ELUDED ME. THROUGHOUT MY LIFE OF crime in writing, I have never owned a horse or lived in Manhattan, but I have visited London, Paris, and Las Vegas for research, and I have contemplated naked, ruinous death and not fainted on tours of medical examiner facilities.

  My childhood losses, creative drive, and struggles with right and wrong have clearly and unconsciously made a writer of me.

  And yet I’ve also managed to be an actor all along in roles for which no director was needed to cast me: proper parson’s daughter Nell Huxleigh, Irene Adler’s “Watson,” and Watson himself; savage Kitty and the earnest ex-priest, Matt; unwed mothers from two generations of American women. Sherlock Holmes and Sarah Bernhardt and Howard Hughes as a vampire.

  And in creating my own version of the cast of Cats, including sassy Midnight Louise and tough Ma Barker, who is Midnight Louie’s mother and the matriarch of the Las Vegas Cat Pack. And so the cozy-noir night goes on as the crime and mystery and T. S. Eliot and the cats go on.

  And to the ghost of my one and only father, I can say that I have always been true, in life and fiction, to myself and my ideals and imagination and your beloved cats.

  THE MYSTERY OF MY LOST VOICE

  – Caroline Leavitt –

  I’M AT THE TUCSON FESTIVAL OF BOOKS, PROMOTING MY tenth novel, Is This Tomorrow. Though I am a New York Times bestselling author, the turnout in this auditorium is small, and not only is that upsetting to me, but I’m on the verge of a cold. When I speak, my voice turns raspier than usual. I don’t mind. I’ve had this voice since I was in junior high, when my voice inexplicably became so hoarse that my doctor was concerned it could be a sign of cancer. But I got a clean bill of health and, to my delight, a tonal shift that made me suddenly sound different than my mom or my sister, who kept pushing me to be more like them.

  The panel ends, and I’m happy to leave the auditorium. Then the whole festival ends, and I feel better, less depressed because now I can go home and not think about any of this. That’s what I tell myself, anyway, but I brood about it on the plane. I have the small turnout on replay, and I can hear the thunderous applause for a writer in another room—another writer who isn’t me. I brood about it at home, too, not really taking good care of myself, and I promptly get bronchitis, and my voice grows even weaker. I know all about the mysterious mind-body connection because when I’m stressed, I can count on a cold the next day and for my voice to sound as if it has been rubbed with sandpaper.

  But this time, after the bronchitis has been knocked out by antibiotics, after I’ve given myself a stern talking-to about calming down so I can get better, I still can’t breathe, and my asthma meds aren’t working. “You need to see a doctor,” my husband, Jeff, tells me, so I go to a local clinic, and they give me a nebulizer treatment, which means breathing in a mist of albuterol, opening up my lungs. It does help, but only a little, and two days later, when I wake up, I can hardly breathe, and when I try to talk, my voice is reduced to a whisper. I’m panicking so much that Jeff calls my pulmonologist for me, who says to come in immediately, and I do. He runs breathing tests and then comes out and says, “I don’t know what it is, but it isn’t asthma. I want you to go see this ENT immediately.”

  So I do, and this doctor squirrels a tiny camera through one nostril down my throat while I grip the edge of my seat. It doesn’t hurt, but it feels invasive and uncomfortable, and I still can’t breathe. He finally takes it out and announces that I have laryngopharyngeal reflux (LPR), which happens when stomach acid gets into your lungs. I need to take proton-pump inhibitors, which reduce the production of that acid. “It could also be your heart,” he says, “and I want you to see a cardiologist right away.” I take the proton pumps for a week, and nothing changes, except my panic grows. I see a cardiologist, who tells me my heart is perfectly fine and I need to see a new ENT.

  So I do, and this one tells me it’s yeast in my throat, and he can clear it up in a day. “Yeast?” I whisper, and he dismisses me with “That’s wh
at I said” and then hands me a prescription. I get expensive antiyeast pills, and I don’t get better. The pills make me dizzy, and they make everything taste like it has a fine layer of soot on it.

  I next see an allergist, who says he thinks I have an infection in my vocal cords. It’s the first time I’ve heard this, and he gives me small doses of Elavil, which I take as soon as I get home. They almost immediately make me worse. My voice vanishes. When I call him, gasping, he sounds annoyed. “I’m at the park with my kids,” he says. He tells me to go into a steamy bathroom, which I do. It doesn’t help.

  I come out of the bathroom to find my teenaged son playing Scrabble with my husband. They both scrunch their faces with worry. “Are you okay?” my son asks, and I stand up straighter until the furrow in his brow uncreases. “I’m fine,” I say, straining my voice so that I sound louder. I know it isn’t true, but I want them to feel better. I’m determined to get to the bottom of this, plus I want my son to know that you don’t have to take any expert’s word for anything, that doctors are consultants, not gods. You can trust your own gut.

  “I’m taking care of it,” I tell him.

  But Jeff, my husband, is more and more worried, and the two of us begin to research my symptoms nonstop. “I don’t care if the right doctor is in Spain,” he tells me. “Wherever there’s hope, we’re going.” We stay up until two most nights, each on our own computer, calling across the hall when we find something. “Maybe it’s a virus,” Jeff says. “Wait,” I call. “Here’s a woman who had something like this, and it was an infection.” But while there are lots of stories, lots of suggestions, there aren’t any real cures. Worse, some of the articles I read insist that mysterious illnesses are usually all in your head, because if they weren’t, medicine would cure them. The articles mention Morgellons disease, where colored fibers supposedly live in your skin (some people think they are signs of alien life. Joni Mitchell has this disorder, and she’s hardly flaky). There are psychosomatic disorders, where people actually go blind even though their optic nerve is absolutely fine. But is this what I have? What is this mystery illness that is stealing my voice and making me question myself?