My Darling Detective

by Howard Norman

  “Rudolph knows the name Lewis?” I said.

  “And why does he know the name? Because Rudolph works at J. Nelson Imports, that’s why! So right away Lewis says, ‘Hey, Rudolph, is that you? What are you doing?’ At which point Rudolph turns to his cousin and says, ‘Torrie, what should we do?’ So now both robbers’ names have been announced, and the robbers, I mean, what else could they do? They run out of J. Nelson Imports. Police pick up Rudolph, who went straight to a bar. And me and Tides and Hodgdon get assigned Torredon, who, as they say in the trade, was absent at his home address.

  Our meal was served, and I said to Martha, “Torredon’s still in Halifax, I take it?”

  “We get a tip that he’s snuck into his brother’s apartment, which is on South Hollis near the Halifax Gas Company building—you know, you can look out and see the lighthouse on Georges Island. Torredon’s left his door wide open. The place stinks of booze. So we call in through the door. Torredon’s clearly been drinking, because he’s in some back room, or the bathroom, and he’s shouting all sorts of nonsense, slurring his words, and we hear a bottle smash against a wall. ‘Torredon, we have your cousin in custody. Come on out. There’s three of us detectives here, Torredon!’ So, being the intelligent, sensitive fellow that Torredon Stilgoe is—as sensitive as a fjord, right?—he fires his weapon. In Halifax how often does this sort of thing happen? Really now, how often?”

  “So now, what, you had to shoot back?” I said.

  “No, actually, Torredon walks out with his hands up. No weapon in sight. He’d dropped it into the toilet. We heard it flush—he’d tried to flush a revolver down a toilet. Oh boy, what fun.”

  “So both the notorious Stilgoe cousins are now in jail.”

  “Right, right,” Martha said. “But Jake—Jacob, I have to show you something. I have to tell you something.”

  “What’s going on here, Martha?”

  Martha stood up, walked over to me, took my right hand, and placed it on her belt, to the left of the buckle. “Feel this,” she said.

  I ran my finger over the belt and felt where it had been gouged out. “The bullet whizzed right along my belt, Jacob. Thank God I was standing sideways and to the side of the door, because otherwise we might’ve been hit.”

  “So, Hodgdon and Tides were to the side of the door too?”

  “That’s not who I meant by ‘we,’” Martha said. She lifted my hand to just above the belt buckle and pressed it firmly against her stomach. “That’s why I didn’t want any wine, Jacob.”

  I stood and held Martha and said, “I could not be happier.”

  “I think I’m only two months along, Jake, so let’s not tell anyone else yet.”

  “Should we start thinking of names?”

  “No, it’s way too early.” We sat down again. “Yes, two months ago, I think I know the night, Jake. I believe it was during or just after the episode titled ‘Leah Diamond Solves a Case All By Her Lonesome.’ You might not remember it, but it had a whole minute or two, as if the microphone was touching her clothes, remember? It was sort of like hearing a striptease in progress. Leah Diamond is talking to herself, figuring out the clues. All the while, as she’s taking off her clothes, you can hear little oohs and aahs—and then into their hotel room walks Detective Levy. Well, I remember every minute of that, Jacob. And I really loved that. And I am totally convinced, right during or right after that episode, that’s when our child was conceived.”

  Visiting Nora at Nova Scotia Rest Hospital

  I’m not very good at psychologizing, but the fact is, I often dreamed of the auction at which my mother assaulted Death on a Leipzig Balcony. Also, Martha told me that now and then I’d cry out in my sleep, “No, it can’t be you!” Which were the exact words I shouted when my mother had thrown the vial of ink against the photograph’s glass. “You’re still back in that moment,” Martha would say. “That moment keeps coming back.”

  I think that’s why I hadn’t visited Nora yet. I couldn’t let go of that incident. And if I went to see her, I’d have to let go of it. At least this was Martha’s theory. She’s far better at psychologizing. I mean, she had to study psychology to become a detective.

  So after my morning tutorial at Dalhousie on June 27, I met Martha at the ferry dock, and we crossed the harbor to Dartmouth. It was a beautiful breezy day out on the water. I felt a little nervous. Why should this be when I was going to see my own mother?

  On the ferry, Martha said, “In some ways, Jacob, the hospital is a dump. Not quite shameful but not up to what it should be. Far from a medieval insane asylum but certainly not state-of-the-art, not by any means. Funding problems and all of that. But Nora has a nice clean room overlooking the harbor. I brought her a handmade quilt. The attendants on her floor seem very kind, very professional, nothing like Nurse Ratched in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. There are, however, some nasty rumors. And I’ve looked at complaints registered by families to the police department and some of those make me sick. I mean, how their loved ones are treated. You aren’t going to like this, but I look closely at Nora for bruises or any signs of physical mistreatment. I know that isn’t nice to hear. She always looks fine, though. She has so much pride in her appearance. She’s so dignified and she always looks good. I don’t think you need to worry.”

  “I should have been keeping close to this myself. I feel like shit about it.”

  “That’s a start,” Martha said. “Anyway, today’s Arts and Crafts, and it’s a hoot. In the historical literature on the hospital—Lord, what an education that is, which I’ve done some reading on. In one old book there’s a section called ‘Arts and Crafts for the Insane.’ I took some notes. And the truth is, what they do in Arts and Crafts today is pretty much what they did in 1900. Jacob, I’m not calling Nora insane. She’s not that at all. She’s . . . she’s . . . haunted.”

  “That goddamn photograph.”

  “Like Detective Tides always says, ‘There’s the symptom and there’s the cause.’ The photograph was the symptom, I think. But what’s causing Nora such torment? It has to be more than one thing.”

  “You’ve been so great, seeing my mother like you have. Thank you. I love you so much for it.”

  The wind was up a little, and the ferry rocked slightly on swells, and we stayed at the aft rail. The Dartmouth docks were coming into view. We could see the hospital looming just inland. “So what we’ll do is,” Martha said, “we’ll see what’s doing in Arts and Crafts. We’ll sit with Nora at a separate table and see how she is. I did alert the Arts and Crafts leader you were coming for a visit.”

  We registered our names in the visitors’ log at the front desk, and I followed Martha up the stairs to the third floor, then to a large room. Martha opened the door. There were about twenty patients, along with five attendants. Several patients shouted “Martha!” One of them, a woman in her early twenties, tall, her brown hair like a stringy wet mop, her eyeglasses so thick it seemed she could only see into them but not through them, dressed in pajamas and a robe and bedroom slippers, leapt up from her table and hugged Martha tightly, and an attendant had to pry her loose. “That’s okay, Roberta,” Martha said. This Roberta said, “You promised to arrest me one day, Martha, remember? You promised to arrest me and take me out on the ferry and push me into the harbor, remember? Is today the day, Martha, is it?”

  “Not today,” Martha said.

  The attendant led Roberta back to her Arts and Crafts table. “A promise is a promise,” she shouted back over her shoulder.

  I saw my mother sitting at a corner table near a window. A male attendant sat with her, a large man, I’d guess around forty years old, wearing a white shirt, white trousers, and white tennis shoes. He had a large, friendly face, with an old-fashioned handlebar mustache and muttonchops, like he was from the previous century. He was cutting out ovals from a square of black felt. The scissors were tied to his right wrist with twine. My mother was placing the ovals of felt along the top margin of a large piece of whit
e cardboard.

  “Go on over,” Martha said.

  As I crossed the room, I took in my mother’s appearance. Remember, I hadn’t seen Nora since March 19, 1977, and it was now late June of 1978. A wave of shame rolled through me. But the truth was, just as Martha said, my mother had always taken great care in her appearance. And this was immediately apparent at her Arts and Crafts table. When I was growing up, I never once saw her leave the house without, as she would say, “fixing herself up.” She didn’t have a deep closet, but she took great pride in her taste in clothes, and Jinx Faltenbourg liked to tease my mother: “Nora, for a chief librarian you always look like a night on the town, but for the fact that the Halifax Free Library doesn’t keep such late hours.” My mother was now fifty-nine years old, and when I sat at the table, she said, “Why, hello, Jacob. Your mother doesn’t look a day over fifty-eight, does she? Mr. Peter Ashkouline, my attendant, and I are re-creating the biblical Noah’s Ark on this piece of cardboard.” Peter Ashkouline and I shook hands. My mother held up twenty or so pieces of paper. “I’ve made preliminary sketches—I’ve placed the ark right out the window, in Halifax Harbor. Ferries, steamships, and the ark, all the centuries at once, and it’s quite entertaining, I think. For the past six months or so I’ve been specializing in the Old Testament. But how could you know that? My long-lost son. Perhaps Martha Crauchet mentioned it.”

  I leaned over and took my mother’s hands in mine. “I’m very sorry I haven’t been to visit you, Mom,” I said. “It was stupid of me. It was very wrong.”

  “Never once visited,” Peter Ashkouline said, cutting out more felt clouds. “And just think, we have people here who hallucinate visits from family more times than you visited. Which was none.” He rose from the table and left the room.

  “Guardian angel, that guy,” I said.

  “He likes to think of himself as that,” my mother said.

  I took Nora in fully now. Since the last time I had seen her, her hair seemed to have become more salt-and-pepper. It was cut fashionably short; Martha had arranged for a hairstylist to come in and paid for it out of pocket. Nora was wearing a dark green skirt with black tights, a white blouse under a black cardigan sweater, and black flats. She wore the same modest amount of makeup she always had worn. My mother looked quite sophisticated, and not just because she was against the backdrop of institutional pale green walls and the deprived light of the room, especially on such an overcast day. We could hear the steam horns of ferries out in the harbor.

  Martha sat down at the table and started cutting out felt clouds, picking up where Peter Ashkouline had left off. “Your Martha’s been my true guardian angel,” my mother said, smiling at her. Nora set a small notebook in front of me. “Take a peek, Jacob,” she said. “It’s my register of visitors.” I opened the notebook. At a glance I saw that Jinx Faltenbourg had visited at least once a week since March of 1977. Of course Martha’s name was everywhere in the notebook. I recognized the names of other librarians and a few friends, such as Mildred Michaels, who was a bookbinder the Halifax Free Library kept on retainer. “You may write your own name in if you’d like,” my mother said. “That’s okay, Mother,” I said. “Maybe next time.” But as I was about to close the notebook, Martha kicked me under the table as she stared at Nora’s notebook. It was then that I saw that on June 25, 1978, just three days earlier, was entered the name Robert Emil.

  Martha’s Seven-Month Plan

  On the return ferry to Halifax, gulls keening just off the aft rail, Martha said, “Creepy, creepy, creepy. Robert Emil’s actually been there. Why in hell would he visit her? How did he find out where she was? These are things I can’t know—and I can’t ask anyone about. I don’t go to visit Nora as a detective, officially. I just sign her notebook like anyone else. Though the thought did occur to me that it was Nora herself who wrote in the name Robert Emil. You know, a moment of weakness and she scribbled his name. But I’ve voted against that. Jacob, we have to get Nora out of that place.”

  “But she’s supposed to be there at least another year. That’s what her doctors told me in a letter.”

  “I don’t care. Nora will get worse the longer she stays. The thing that happened with Death on a Leipzig Balcony—it’s all mixed up in Nora’s mind with the fact that it was taken two days after you were born. Add to that emotional mix Bernard Rigolet getting killed. And after what she had done with Robert Emil? There isn’t a woman alive who wouldn’t be tormented by guilt. Married. Her husband away at war. It’s the perfect recipe for merciless guilt, Jacob. But here’s the thing: Nora’s doctors don’t know shit about any of this. Not in detail. I only know it because I’ve become Nora’s interlocutrix. And let me tell you another thing. Today seemed a good day for Nora. She was clearheaded. But some days she’s muddled. They’ve got her on an antianxiety medication, of course. But a very light dose.”

  “What are the options, do you think?”

  “I spoke with Jinx Faltenbourg and she was direct with me. She said Nora couldn’t get her old position back. But she also had no doubt that Nora could be on part-time salary at the library, as an assistant of some sort or other. Jinx said she would see to that. In time, Jinx said, there was the possibility of Nora becoming a licensed librarian again.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “But where your mother finds employment is step two. Step one is to get her out of the hospital, Jake. Officially, she doesn’t come up for review for six months. But, see, I’ve been thinking about this. And I’ve got a seven-month plan.”

  “You mean up to when the baby’s going to be born. Right around then?”

  “I’ve got it all figured out. In another month, I’ll take a desk job. No way am I going to pound the pavement through my pregnancy. I’ve already told Tides and Hodgdon. I also told them not to gab about my situation at work. Probably they already have, though. I get a three-month maternity leave once the baby arrives. As for Nora, I’m going to find a private psychiatrist to visit her and talk to the doctors at the hospital. Let’s start with that and see what happens. What do you think?”

  “What I think is, my mother seems just like she always has, except in a foreign location. I love her dearly. She’s the most remarkable person. But the more you find out, the less I feel I actually know who she is. Who she really has been all along. But when I saw her today, I thought, It’s Nora, it’s the same woman. Except she also threw ink at that photograph. I’ve got some confusions there, obviously.”

  “Seven months. To my way of thinking, in seven months everything will be moving like clockwork, Jake. Have a little faith.”

  “Don’t do anything reckless in the meantime.”

  “Like Leah Diamond said on the radio, ‘I might’ve done a foolish thing or two, but I ain’t no fool,’” Martha said.

  When the ferry was tied up, we stepped down the gangplank, walked to the Wired Monk, and sat down for coffee.

  “It occurred to me,” Martha said, “maybe Robert Emil read about the incident with the Robert Capa photograph. I mean, Jacob, the auction was reported in the newspaper. And Nora’s name was mentioned. He might’ve waited for a while but then decided to take things from there somehow. I don’t know. Unless we get him into interrogation, it’s still guesswork.”

  “Maybe he’s kept track of my mother all along. Maybe my mother and Emil have been in touch without me knowing it.”

  “One thing I’ve learned in detectiving is that maybes don’t always end up to be facts.”

  “But what about your cold case?”

  “Yes, I have to tell Tides and Hodgdon about your mother’s visitors’ book, Robert Emil’s name written there. I’m bound by law to tell them. And when I tell them, they’ll go straight to the hospital and make inquiries. They’ll try and trace an address for Emil. They’ll certainly tell the attendants to contact them should Emil show up again.”

  “Why would he even visit in the first place?”

  “He runs on perversities, is my guess.” />
  Nora’s Over the Moon

  Night of July 15—I had a tutorial that day, and marked it on the calendar—the way Martha put it was, “Since getting pregnant, have you noticed, I want to . . . swoon into bed with you before dinner. And after. Morning sickness has been pretty light compared to what I’ve heard it can be. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.”

  “Swoon?” I said.

  “Swoon where swooning is called for.”

  “I think you should move into my house with me, Martha.”

  “I’ve wondered about it. We could save money on my not paying rent. Anyway, my program’s about to begin.” Martha got up from bed, threw on her bathrobe, set the radio on the kitchen table. We sat down just as “The Case of Mara English” began.

  In summary, Leah Diamond and her coterie of gangsters set out to help Detective Levy locate a woman who is cashing bad checks around Toronto under the name of Mara English. The gangsters send word out on the street, and in no time at all, Mara English is spotted in a hotel on Yonge Street. “The hotel where this gal’s got a room makes our hotel look like the Ritz,” Leah says to Detective Levy. “It’s got rats for bellhops, the concierge is a cockroach, the breakfast cook’s got one of those World War One mustard-gas coughs, and the dining room doubles as a funeral home.”

  When Detective Levy goes over to Mara English’s hotel alone, jimmies the lock, and enters her darkened room, he finds a driver’s license from Ontario province, plus licenses from Utah, California, and Florida, each under a different name. Then he hears a cough coming from under the bed. He aims his flashlight at her. “Okay, Mara,” he says, “slide on out from under there.”

  “Say, how’d you find me?” she says.

  “I looked under the bed,” Detective Levy says.

  Mara English stands up and covers her eyes against the flashlight’s glare. “Hey, that moonlight’s fake. You want to romance a girl, take her out on the veranda and look up at the real thing.”