Detective Levy replies, “Well, I’m looking at a man lying here on the floor, and his face perfectly matches the face in this photograph, and this mug’s wife hired me to find him.”
“So now you found him,” the woman says.
“So did a bullet, by the looks of it.”
“He never mentioned the word ‘wife.’”
“Maybe he couldn’t pronounce it.”
“What happened was this,” the woman says. “He insisted we right away get horizontal. But I say I want to stay vertical. He says, ‘Aw, come on, sugar.’ I say no. He gets a certain look. So I shot him. So he got his wish. He’s horizontal.”
Martha lifted her sweater off over her head and tossed it onto the overstuffed chair near the bed. “You have to admit,” she said, “that woman’s got a way with words.”
The woman on the radio then says to Detective Levy, “See that room with the bed in it? It’s called a bedroom. Whattaya think about adding to my sins?”
“I’m of two minds about that,” Detective Levy says.
“I’m of two minds about it too,” she says, “but they’re both thinking the same thing.”
Martha and I got undressed and under the bedclothes. We made love through the rest of the episode, listened to repeat episodes, and then fell asleep. But at about 6:30 in the morning, we found ourselves making love again. It just happened. I had turned one way, she turned the same way. “I’m not quite awake,” she said, but she had reached down and slipped me inside her; we were both facing the east window.
“I can come this way so easily,” she said, “but I don’t want to yet.”
And at that moment Detective Tides called up rudely from the street. Then, equally disregarding the time and the neighbors, Detective Hodgdon pounded on Martha’s door, saying loudly, “Detective Crauchet, it’s your colleagues! Wake up. We’re on official business here. You alone? Come on, Martha, get up!” Knock knock knock.
Martha made me leave her, if you know what I mean. “Sorry, darling,” she said. “As much for me as for you, believe me.” She threw on a bathrobe and walked to the door. I heard her open it and say demurely, “You detectives stopped by quite early,” as if she’d forgotten she had invited them for tea or something. Then, with crankiness, “This better be something. I was getting my beauty sleep.”
“Got any coffee?” Detective Hodgdon said. “I take it black. Course, you know that from the office.”
Dressed now, I walked into the kitchen. “Oh, oh, oh, look who was invited to the slumber party,” Detective Tides said, pointing me out to Hodgdon. “Son of the librarian who went loony at the auction.”
“Oh, the pieces are all falling into place,” Hodgdon said archly. “This is just too much for me. I have to sit down.”
I saw that both detectives were unshaven, their suits rumpled, and it seemed that Hodgdon was already caffeine-wired.
“What pieces, pray tell?” Martha said. “That I have a private life and you don’t? Does your wife know that? Probably she does.”
“What what what? Is she always this off-tilt first thing in the morning?” Tides said to me. “It’s Jake, isn’t it?”
“What couldn’t wait that you had to barge in like this?” Martha said.
While I served coffee all around, Tides and Hodgdon got down to business. “Look, sorry for the ungodly hour,” Tides said. “You know as well as me, ‘off duty’ and ‘on duty’ are just figures of speech. Anyway, we’ve been up all night on a stakeout that didn’t amount to shit. We were in the neighborhood. And besides, we wanted to let you know something. Being your devoted colleagues.”
“What something?” Martha said.
Hodgdon sighed deeply, looked at Tides, who nodded and said, “As senior detectives, we’re obligated to review your notes on file—just routine stuff. And we noticed in the file of Nora Ives Rigolet that your research surfaced a fellow named Robert Emil.”
Martha looked at me and gestured for me to leave the room, but I refused, and she shot me a look.
“Oh, yeah, Robert Emil,” Martha said. “Sounds vaguely familiar—maybe a footnote in Nora’s life or something.”
“Well, maybe so, maybe a footnote,” Hodgdon said. “But we were wondering if you intended to follow up on this Robert Emil or not. You know, to see if he stays just a footnote or, lo and behold, becomes something else. Possibly something other than a footnote, say.”
“If that’s your suggestion, sure,” Martha said. She was so obviously uncomfortable with the direction this conversation was taking that she took it out on me. “Jacob, darling, this is police business, you know. Maybe you want to get some more sleep or something.”
“Yeah, but it’s about my mother’s file,” I said.
“Yeah, but your mother’s police business,” Martha said.
“Let me cut to the chase here, Martha,” Tides said. “You, me, and Detective Hodgdon caught a cold case.”
“How cold?” Martha said.
I stood against the counter; Martha, Hodgdon, and Tides were sitting at the small kitchen table. “How cold?” Martha said again.
“It’s from 1945,” Hodgdon said. He placed a file folder on the table. “The one we caught is very complicated. It was sensational in the city when it happened. It was really one for the books. Had centrally—centrally—to do with this fellow named Robert Emil. That’s why a warning flag went up when we read the Nora Rigolet file. You see, life is strange, isn’t it, but back in 1945 Nora Rigolet had been under surveillance in connection with an event involving Robert Emil. Some coincidence, eh?”
“Yes, some coincidence,” Martha said, almost in a whisper.
“Actually, it was Officer Robert Emil,” Tides said. “He was Halifax police.”
“Oh, goody,” Martha said cynically. “We get to investigate one of our own. Could a day start out with any worse news? Is this Robert Emil still with us?”
“There’s no death notice, at least nothing official,” Tides said. “In 1945 Officer Emil was thirty-two years old. Which, if he’s alive, would make him sixty-five.”
Martha poured herself a second cup of coffee. “What’d Officer Emil do,” Martha said, “that warrants such high priority over thirty years after the fact?”
“Apparently,” Hodgdon said, “near the end of the war, this goddamn idiot Emil started up a personal Jewish hate thing toward a man named Max Berall. Now, this Max Berall played the piano at all sorts of events at Baron de Hirsch Synagogue—you’ll find a photograph of him in the file. The whys and wherefores had a lot to do with a flare-up of anti-Semitic incidents at the time, spring of 1945. The end of the war, there were a lot of those. Some sick stuff, if you study up on it. Officer Robert Emil’s part in one of these incidents—a murder. Possibly two. His involvement could never be proven. But according to his file, it was pretty obvious he was responsible.”
“A Jew-hating police officer,” Detective Tides said. “He was forced into retirement. But get this: he kept his pension.”
“Max Berall, he was an important man in his community,” Hodgdon said.
“Found him in an alley,” Tides went on, “not too far from Baron de Hirsch. Shot with two bullets. Wallet intact. Expensive watch on his person. What’s more, an eyewitness identified Officer Robert Emil running from the alley. This witness, a Mrs. Yablon, gave her description to a sketch artist. The likeness to Emil was considerable. More than considerable.”
Hodgdon slid the artist’s sketch from the file onto the table and set next to it a photograph of Officer Robert Emil. He looked at me and said, “This was all in the newspapers at the time, Jake—that’s why you’re allowed to see this evidence. Otherwise, we’d send you out for some breakfast, eh?”
“But guess what?” Tides said. “On her way home from the sketch artist, Mrs. Yablon disappears. She doesn’t show up for Sabbath services on Saturday at Baron de Hirsch, which she never once missed in twenty years. It’s all in the file.”
“What’d Officer Emil have agains
t Jews?” Martha asked.
Tides said, “It’s in the Robert Emil cold-case file.”
“I’ll study up on it,” Martha said.
“Three musketeers, us three,” Hodgdon said.
“All for one, one for all,” Tides said, sipping his coffee.
“Yeah, well, the thing is, Martha,” Hodgdon said, “I think with a closer look we’re all going to find out that Robert Emil maybe wasn’t—”
“—merely a footnote in 1945,” Tides said.
Arts and Crafts
Early on the morning of April 10, three weeks after my mother had attempted to destroy Death on a Leipzig Balcony, Martha and I sat with cups of coffee at her kitchen table. Martha said, “Remember from the interrogation room? How your mother wrote on the napkin, ‘Thank you for the warmest conversation I’ve had in possibly three years’?”
“I read it every time I open your refrigerator,” I said.
“Well, sitting at my desk, I got to thinking about it. And it broke my heart. Really it did. I mean, look: if sitting in a room getting interrogated provided the warmest conversation she’d had in three years—that’s way past irony, Jacob. Way past irony. That really said something about what Nora’s life’s been like in that hospital over in Dartmouth.”
“Even though we’re not married, you’re already a good daughter-in-law, is how I see it.”
“I can start practicing, at least.”
“You’re going to visit her, aren’t you? Isn’t that what you’re saying?”
“No, I’m saying I already did visit her.”
“When was that?”
“Yours truly participated in Arts and Crafts yesterday. I waited to see you in person to tell you.”
“What do they do in Arts and Crafts?”
“That question proves you’ve never participated, right? Why haven’t you?”
“I just haven’t got around to it.”
“You haven’t seen your mother since the auction. You used to visit her once a week. You should give that some thought. We could do it together, the two of us.”
“I don’t know.”
“Anyway, I must admit, Arts and Crafts is very well organized. You know, it’s not remotely like that movie we saw, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The one with Jack Nicholson. Nova Scotia Rest Hospital is advanced civilization compared to that nuthouse. Well, there’s one lady, Evelyn what’s-her-name. Evelyn Accord—unusual last name. She’s quite bonkers. Always on suicide watch, an attendant told me. I flash my detective badge and people talk to me. That’s just how it works.”
“Look, I’m grateful you went to see my mother. I think it’s nice.”
“Jacob, it’s not that I’m such a quick study, but you know, don’t you, that Nora has no business being there. No goddamn business whatsoever. I mean, just during Arts and Crafts—we were making something called Chinese finger traps, those woven things you stick a finger in either side and can’t get them out. Of course you eventually can. Though Evelyn Accord asked your mother to cut her finger trap with a scissors, which Nora did. She cut the finger trap in half and Evelyn wore the halves like extended witch fingers the rest of Arts and Crafts time. Six of us sitting at a table making Chinese finger traps. Big sunny day right out the window.”
“Now you know how to make Chinese finger traps.”
“Anyway, during the Chinese finger traps, Nora provided me her complete history as a librarian. From her childhood inclinations toward reading to her nervous breakdown in the library—what, nearly three years ago. I mean complete history. And talk about reading books—I counted eighty, more or less, in her room.”
“She’s got access to interlibrary loan, Martha. Special dispensation for my mother there. She’s become—”
“Yes. She’s become the librarian of Nova Scotia Rest Hospital.”
“No surprise there.”
Martha poured us each another cup of coffee. She was dressed for work; I was wearing pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. “Can you please call in sick, at least a half-day?”
“So you yourself have no work to do for Mrs. Hamelin?”
“Later, she’s starting me in on research for an auction in three weeks.”
“Where?”
“London.”
“I don’t have enough vacation time left.”
“That’s the only reason I didn’t ask you to come with me.”
“My question is, how’d Nora end up in the hospital in the first place? She’s saner than I’ll ever be. What happened, Jacob? I don’t understand. I want to know. I feel I should know.”
“I shouldn’t have waited for you to ask. Sorry. I should’ve told you already.”
“Jake, the thing is, I’ve resigned myself to the idea that our courtship, as it pertains to Nora, is unconventional. First, look how things have been so far. How they actually are. Not necessarily how I’d have preferred it, but life provides. I meet your mother for the first time because I’m interrogating her as part of my job. Clearly you haven’t yet told her we’re engaged to be married. That’s okay, Jacob, I’m not reproaching you. So I’m in the interrogation room strafing her with questions, but all the while, in the back of my mind, I’m thinking: This is my future mother-in-law, this is Nora, Jake’s own mother. That very tug-of-war was almost enough to have me committed to Nova Scotia Rest Hospital myself! Taking up Arts and Crafts.
“As far as I know, your mother thinks I’m just some nice woman detective in need of human company who’s come to visit her. She actually said, ‘Now, dear, don’t feel bad about the things you asked me at the police station. I understand.’
“Second, I realize I can get to know Nora on my own. And maybe while doing that, I can find out what you and I both need to know, Jacob. Because I very much think we both need to know what’s up with that photograph. What’s with Death on a Leipzig Balcony? Where the hell is Leipzig, and what’s so personal about it, and what’s with Robert Capa, and who’s your father, anyway? When I marry someone, I want to know something about his family. So I won’t be worried about what I don’t know about his family.”
“You and me both. What we both don’t know.”
“So my question to you is, how’d she end up there in the first place? What really happened?”
“Interlocutrix of your fiancé in your own kitchen, him in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt.”
“Don’t be that way.”
“Three years ago, my mother had a series of nervous breakdowns—they called it ‘nervous shock’—and each time it happened in the Halifax Free Library. Finally, the Province of Nova Scotia legally stepped in, or something like that. Next thing I know, I’m visiting my mother in Nova Scotia Rest Hospital.”
“But why did the nervous breakdowns happen in the first place, is what I’m asking.”
“That’s what her doctors are supposed to find out, right? To my knowledge, so far they haven’t. Or not completely they haven’t.”
“My sense is that Nora needs to get out of there.”
“Aren’t you late for work?”
“I’ll trade night shift with Tides. No problem there. He’s always up for that.”
“So I’ll stay at Mrs. Hamelin’s house tonight, then.”
“Up to you.”
“I could stay here and have breakfast waiting in the morning.”
“What I wonder is, what happened to Nora in the first place, darling? Maybe she’ll tell me. Through a hundred more Chinese finger traps. Then again, maybe she won’t.”
Delinquent Notices
At age fifty-five, my mother had been appointed head librarian at the Halifax Free Library, after working in the library system since she was thirty. At the time, I was sitting in on Introduction to Art History at Dalhousie; there weren’t many art history courses, but the professors were considered excellent. One professor was from Copenhagen, another from Florence. When I looked at the art history students, I considered them worldly. I met my first real girlfriend, Alexis Boyce, in that class. One
day when a bunch of hipster students from the Nova Scotia School of Art came into the Wired Monk Café on Morris Street, my own favorite café, Alexis and I struck up a conversation with them. They told us that Allen Ginsberg had recently visited their school; walking up to the podium, Ginsberg suddenly kissed the man who’d introduced him, a painter named Theodore Bowler—whose wife was also on the faculty and in the audience—on the lips. Then Ginsberg read his poems, and later hung out with students till all hours. Ginsberg declared he had always wanted to give a reading in Halifax because Oscar Wilde had lectured here. Ginsberg’s presence was all the talk of the bohemian students. People might not commonly think of Halifax as having a bohemian scene, but it does.
That evening at the Wired Monk, once the NSSA students left, Alexis and I talked for a couple of hours, during which time I embarrassed myself by asking if Allen Ginsberg had been friends with Oscar Wilde. Alexis tapped me gently on the shoulder and, with a look of astonished pity, said, “There, there.” Coffee after coffee. But for the one waiter and the woman making the drinks, who were themselves holding hands and smooching at a corner table, the café was empty.
Between Alexis and me there weren’t necessarily sparks, but a kind of slow burn. She was fidgety, her nails bitten to the quick, had a ring on each of her fingers, and when she saw me glance, as young men will do, along her body, then look quickly away, hoping not to have been caught out, she said, “I have a dancer’s figure, but I’m really too tall and gangly, and if you saw me try”—at which point she stood up, got into a ballet position, and then wobbled sideways, catching herself at the last moment before flailing onto our table—“you’d know I can’t do ballet shit to save my soul.” Alexis fell into such wonderful laughter that I think right there I was, in a preliminary way, smitten. Alexis was in fact five feet ten inches tall, two inches taller than I am.
“If I ate exclusively crème brûlées by the dozen, three meals a day, I’d probably not gain an ounce. I’d like to gain some ounces, actually. Food-wise, I don’t have a mental problem, by the way. Probably I’ll one day wake up at three hundred pounds. It’s just that I’ve always had this kind of woodstove in my stomach, or something, that burns up calories. Anyway, what you see is what you get.”
My Darling Detective Page 3