The Boy Detective

by Roger Rosenblatt

  YOU ASK ABOUT the dog? “Asta!” Myrna Loy’s sexy-patrician voice admonishing the famous terrier of Nick and Nora Charles. Movie audiences first met Asta when he was stretching his leash taut, dragging Mrs. Charles into a chichi bar, where Mr. Charles, William Powell, was setting up a row of dry martinis. The dog appeared in subsequent Thin Man movies, generally playing more cute than heroic, though he barked to protect the Charles’s baby in one of the films. Few detectives have dogs. Philo Vance, a breeder of Scottish terriers, owned a Scotty named MacTavish in The Kennel Murder Case, in which another dog is instrumental in identifying the killer. Robert B. Parker’s Spenser has a German shorthaired pointer named Pearl. In fact, he owned a string of Pearls, along with a miniature bull terrier named Rosie. James Garner played a college cop in a movie about Dobermans trained as murderers—They Also Kill Their Masters. The dog is the chief suspect in a book by Clea Simon called Dogs Don’t Lie, described as a “pet noir.” Watson had a dog, unmemorably. So did Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles, but he never would have kept him as a pet. And in the story “Silver Blaze” there was the mystery of the dog that did not bark. Toby is a dog employed by Sherlock Holmes, belonging to a Mr. Sherman, introduced in The Sign of Four and described by Watson as an “ugly long-haired, lop-eared creature, half spaniel and half lurcher, brown and white in colour, with a very clumsy waddling gait.” Holmes said he would “rather have Toby’s help than that of the whole detective force in London,” which, as every Baker Street Irregular knows, isn’t much of a compliment.

  As a boy detective, I had the family Maltese, Ami (pronouned aah-mee), and named for amyloidosis, a disease that attacks the heart or the spleen, on which my father was doing research. The dog died before my career in detection gained full throttle. When the kids were small, Ginny and I acquired Chloe, a frenetic cairn who was so wound up, she would race back and forth nonstop on the shelf behind the backseat of the car when we took her with us on drives. It was safer to keep her in the car than let her stay at home, where she snacked on the legs of the piano. Since Chloe was a purebred, the American Kennel Club sent a form, asking us to register her more formal name. I filled out “Chlorox Bleachman,” which the AKC rejected. Her successor, Hector, a Westie, whom we got for our youngest son, John, in the 1990s, had a name that leaned toward detection, but he was more attuned to biting the hands that fed him.

  Edward Arnold played a blind detective in Eyes in the Night, a clunky movie that included a Seeing Eye dog named Friday, who possessed a large vocabulary, and could obey intricate commands. “Hide behind the bed, Friday. Then open the door and go for help.” James Franciscus played a blind insurance investigator in Longstreet, a TV series in the 1980s, but I cannot recall that he had a Seeing Eye dog. In fact, he used to fight bad guys all by himself, giving a new meaning to the idea of a handicap. Those were the days when a spate of disabled cops and heroes appeared on TV: Tate had one arm; Ironsides, played by Raymond Burr, rolled around in a wheelchair. To take note of this creative nonsense, I wrote a Time essay in the form of a newspaper TV schedule that highlighted “Barker”—about a three-legged German shepherd private eye who solved crimes with his nose. The piece was supposed to be satire. A producer phoned to ask if I’d like to write the script.

  BALANCING ON THREE paws, Ewing dragged himself toward me and licked my face. I watched him as I lay on the couch in our oldest son Carl’s house the other day. Carl named his yellow Lab after Patrick Ewing of the New York Knicks—a player I couldn’t stand. But I always loved the canine Ewing, who seems able to stand anything, even on three legs. Bone cancer corrupted his left rear paw, and the limb had to go if the dog was to be saved. The vet told Carl that cancer was almost certain to show up in Ewing’s lungs, and that the animal had nine more months at the outs. Ewing, ignoring his prognosis, adjusted himself in a matter of days to his tripod status, and seemed just as happy with his postoperative life as he was before. I pushed my face toward his big sloppy tongue to show him nothing had changed. Do animals say good-bye?

  I don’t know that I always felt as accepting of things like missing limbs as I am now, when my own old limbs aren’t in such hot shape either. Legs. I, too, am on my last. It is one of the things age quietly teaches you: Everyone is disabled. Time was when I might have winced at the sight of Ewing hauling his hulking body up a flight of stairs. Now I watched, not in awe exactly, but rather in an acceptance of the way the world can change on a dime and reveal a universe of missing parts.

  Four legs, two legs, three legs. I never understood why that riddle was so impenetrable to everyone but Oedipus. Any average detective could solve it. Once you eliminate all other animals and start to think metaphorically, the riddle is a cinch. More interesting, I think, is the order in which the riddle is posed. Four, two, three, instead of counting down in reverse order, which might have made a better riddle. The Sphinx seems to accord a special place of honor to the crippled.

  I do not mean to romanticize disabilities. No dog in his right mind would choose three legs over four. The blind would rather see, the deaf would rather hear. The paralyzed, given the choice, would prefer to tango. Yet there is value in an adjustment to the unavoidable.

  At Twenty-fifth and Fifth, a beggar with eyes like rotting grapes and a leaf stuck to his forehead rolls on a wooden platform where his legs should be, and tips over on the sidewalk. I go to help him right himself. He does not thank me. When he rolls away, I follow until I see him set up shop at Twenty-fourth and Park. He stares ahead as people pass him by in the cold. Does he remember his legs anymore, I wonder. Do they remember him? I approach and offer him a twenty-dollar bill. He yells he doesn’t need my fucking money.

  TOUGH GUY? NAH. The toughest New Yorkers I ever knew were the residents of the Women’s House of Detention, which stood between Ninth and Tenth streets on Greenwich Avenue, before it was demolished in 1973 and replaced by the Jefferson Market Garden. Tonight, I look up to where that prison was, and is no more. From the rooftop exercise yard, the inmates called to us kids on the street below. We couldn’t see them for the fences around the exercise yard, but their voices carried out into the evenings: “Hey, Sonny. Come on up and get some.” Merely the thought of getting some from a female prisoner was enough to light the night, even if most of us were hazy at best about what it meant to get some. But how free they were, lusty, brassy in captivity, their tinny voices sparking through the air like downed electric wires. They were fearless. “Come up and visit us, boys. Watcha got to lose? Your virginity?” The spinning echoes of their taunting laughter. What were the guards going to do to them? Toss them in jail?

  And Tenth Street itself. In the summers, it was so crowded with trees in bloom, you could not see from one end of the block to the other. In winter, now, the sightline is clear—past the especially wide town houses, pink, white, and brown; the carriage houses; a tiny northern Italian restaurant beside an apartment house that wasn’t here when I was a kid; and Holistic Pet Care. Makes me miss my holistic terriers. Tonight, I walk west on Tenth, across Greenwich Avenue toward Patchin Place, a mews of little houses, then back up the avenue, between Tenth and Eleventh, pausing at Partners & Crime, mystery-book sellers, with old copies of Dorothy Sayers, Ellery Queen, and Mickey Spillane in the window. The store must be newish. I would have remembered if it had been here before.

  My first girlfriend, Abby Abrams, lived in a brownstone at the end of Tenth near Fifth. In the summer, her family invited me to their home on Fire Island. I was thirteen. Our bedrooms, Abby’s and mine, were on the second floor, across a short hall from each other. In the mornings, Abby would come into my room, wearing only a towel. A gifted artist. Big-hearted. She was a little younger than I, but way ahead of me, probably not in experience but definitely in instinct. I had no idea what was expected of me, so I just talked a blue streak. In the evenings, I’d play piano. In the daytime, I swam, swam a lot.

  At the time, I did not know about the things that made Tenth Street historically noteworthy, some of
which had connections to my detective work and to my life. The prison itself had a history of famous residents, including the black radical Angela Davis, the Catholic radical Dorothy Day, and Ethel Rosenberg, who awaited her execution there. A library at the corner, on Greenwich Avenue, once served as the Jefferson Market Courthouse where, in 1907, Henry K. Thaw was found insane after he’d shot and killed Stanford White, the preeminent New York architect of the period, one of whose buildings was the National Arts Club. White had been fooling around with Thaw’s wife. With its salmon-color turrets and traceries, the library looks as if it had a hard time deciding not to be a castle.

  Oh, but here is where George C. Scott, playing Holmes, did research in They Might Be Giants. And memorable real people lived on Tenth Street, too: John Reed and Louise Bryant, in number 1; E. E. Cummings, in number 4; Theodore Dreiser, Djuna Barnes, and Marlon Brando, in number 5; Mark Twain, in number 14, which was also the site of the murder of little Lisa Steinberg in the 1980s. Emma Lazarus, whose “give me your tired, your poor” poem is inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, lived in number 18. Dashiell Hammett lived in number 28, from 1947 to 1952, the height of my detective years. I wish I’d known it then.

  Such information would come to me piece by piece in later life. In those days, all I knew was that at the Greenwich Avenue end of the block were the lady sirens yelling at us to come and get some, and near the Fifth Avenue end, sweet Abby was calling to me in a more innocent way to do the same thing. Someday, I hoped, I would know what all that meant. One cool thing about a private eye: He can look like he knows what he’s doing, when he hasn’t a clue.

  NOW, GINNY, I will go back with you to those evenings when we walked in Gramercy Park, made love and talked, and waited for our lives. At sixteen, each of us had evacuated our Dresden homes, in which the bomb had not detonated. It lay in our living rooms like a hog dozing, and no bomb squad would go near it. “Hair trigger,” they said. “Too unpredictable.” What could we do but get out of there—knowing that we would have to return to Dresden and the bomb sooner or later. But in the meantime, in the evenings, we had the shadows of trees, dark leaves, the rustle of shrubbery, the deceptive stars, the soft brown earth, and each other.

  THERE WAS A women’s prison of sorts in my own neighborhood, on Eighteenth between Irving Place and Third. Not a prison really, but an institution for unwed mothers who had no place else to go. Founded in 1857 by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, the brownstone stood a few houses down from Pete’s Tavern, still and neat, like a cloth coat. I paused there whenever I passed on my wanderings, occasionally catching sight of a resident coming in or out. I had only the vaguest idea of what an unwed mother meant, but it was evident that the term was both accusatory and shunning. And they were mothers, so where were their children? Those were the days, as well, when orphanages were called orphanages, all such places stating clearly and directly what they were about, though there was a little obfuscation in a home for “Friendless” women set up on Twenty-fourth Street. Official places for deserted people. The world was impelled to create a “home” for them. I wondered and noted. Sometimes I would stop in my tracks before the house on Eighteenth, and just stare at the silent door.

  BETWEEN THE SECRET and the sigh. Between the laughter and the sin. Between the lies. Between the lines. Between the nights and the mornings and the pale shocked face in the glass. Between land and sea, and the silence, and the bursts of anger and the sentimental word. Between the daring and the tremor. Between the real and the weak, and not telling them apart. Between you and me. Between you and me and the lamppost.

  THE MIDDLE OF nowhere seems to me a more comforting place than the outer limits of nowhere which, logically, must be closer to somewhere. Of course, if one prefers to be somewhere, then this preference of mine must seem nuts. I can hear the Academy members right now, shouting from their tiers of wooden benches in the Academy auditorium, Sir! Who in his right mind would choose the middle of nowhere over the outer rim where, at least, one could get a glimpse of the somewhere everyone in his right mind wants to be? But, gentlemen, I would tell them, if and when I am released from the chains in which I am bound at the front of the room, beside the lectern. . . . Gentlemen, I am in my left mind. At which, the president of the Academy will snort, calling it the stupidest thing he has ever heard. I could not agree more, I should say, even if I understood what that meant. Or by no stretch of the imagination, for that matter.

  Here in front of Gray’s Papaya, at Twenty-third and Third, a boy with a face like mine, only rounder, unscarred and unlined, examines with eyes exactly like mine the people passing. Now he walks down the street amazed. I remain unmoving, like a government official, like a postal inspector, as he goes by. I see what he sees. I know what he knows. Mon semblable. Open as the sea. What do I feel for him? Everything. What can I do for him? Nothing. He does not notice me. He walks right through me, through my body. It’s just as well. A boy like that? That boy could do anything.

  “YOU MADE ME drop it!” says the string bean in the red bow tie, about six-six, who has deliberately bumped into me and deliberately dropped his BlackBerry on the sidewalk.

  “The hell I did,” I say. “You dropped it yourself.”

  “You’re going to pay me for it,” he says. I shake my head. “I’m gonna punch you in the face.”

  “Take a hike,” I say, and move on.

  “Fuck you!” he says, and moves on, too. What did he take me for? A rube?

  ARE WE GETTING anywhere? Luckily, we’re not going anywhere, so there’s nowhere to get. One of the difficulties of detective work, even for an old pro, is that a false lead can divert you for years, as it does in writing, and by the time you realize you’ve been moving in circles, the criminal could be living high off the hog in São Paolo. But if your walk is illimitable, no trail goes cold. Such a nice scene in the movie Body Heat, when William Hurt, having been framed by Kathleen Turner, sits bolt upright in his prison cot as he realizes, too late, that Turner had faked her own death. She had killed the friend whose identity she had bought and assumed, tossed the body in the boathouse, incinerated it, and boom! “She’s alive!” says Hurt. And all at once the scene is Brazil, with that recognizable mountain in the background, and Turner in a chaise, bored, wearing blue-lens sunglasses, and listlessly agreeing with her boy-toy Latin lover that “It’s hot.”

  In writing, the trail goes cold all the time. The wise old prophet in whom you have placed the telling of your tale ought to have been an idiot boy, or a girl, or a dog. You started your piece of work in the inner city. You should have begun it at a lakeside resort in New Hampshire, and the whole book written in dialogue, or in rhymed couplets. And this happens in more than a single piece. Your entire existence as a writer can follow dead-end trails, and then one morning you sit bolt upright in your bed and boom! She’s alive. If your desire to be a writer coincides with your desire to be noticed, why, pal, you can waste decades writing bad stuff or perfectly acceptable stuff that you simply never wanted to write. That person was you, and yet it was not. You can spend an awfully long time pursuing the cold lead of your long and winding life. Believe me. I know.

  EXCEPT FOR THE CHAINS, I would not mind being a prisoner in Plato’s cave. The allegory has it that the prisoners were bound and limited by more than chains because they could not see reality, and thus were deprived of the truth. They could see only the shadows of the puppets that the puppeteers cast on the cave’s wall, and believed that the shadows were the puppets themselves. Being unable to turn their heads, they knew nothing of what caused the shadows. If they had seen the shadow of a book, say, or of a man, they would have mistaken appearance for reality—a destructive and unforgiveable error, according to Plato, and the theme of most of modern literature, according to university professors.

  But is this so? See here: I recognize that man walking across Park Avenue South toward the Starbucks on the northwest corner of Twenty-ninth Street under the lurid light of a streetlamp. It is Sidney Homer, the ma
n whose apartment on the ninth floor of 36 Gramercy Park mirrored our own. A Wall Street investor, he is the son of Marian Homer, the opera singer, and the grandson of Winslow Homer, the painter. When I was four or five, he used to greet me in his booming voice and ask when I planned to enroll at Harvard. When I got to Harvard eventually, the Homers gave me a leather-bound early edition of Johnson’s dictionary, which I keep today in an antique book press. So there is Mr. Homer, tall and elegant, striding across the avenue to get his morning coffee. I see him clear as daylight, though he died thirty-five years ago.

  Would you say that he is less real to me than the young man in the baseball cap advertising the TODAY show, who actually is crossing to Starbucks? The shadow of Sidney Homer is cast upon the wall of my mind’s cave. “What is REAL?” the Velveteen Rabbit asks the Skin Horse, who answers that when you are loved, you begin to become real. “Does it happen all at once, like being wound up?” asks the Rabbit. “It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept.” If one wants to get technical about it, the Rabbit is no more real for having been loved, or for growing old. Yet only strict Plato would say that he does not represent the truth. They say that no one ever survives old age, but that is hardly true. To the Aborigines, dreaming was the way to prolong the life about them. Here on this walk, I dwell in an eternal gloaming, just like you. We survive and love in an ageless present.

  NOW THE YOUNG man sits in Starbucks, near a young woman who is reading Wallace Stevens. He says hi. She says hi. He asks where she is from. She asks if he likes snow. His arm grazes her shoulder. She comments on the traffic. He remembers the title of an old TV show. She tells him how close she is to her folks. She embraces him impulsively during a laugh. She is embarrassed, a little. He is emboldened, a little. For no reason, he thinks of Nick Nolte. For her part, she likes Nick Nolte. He wonders if she’d care to have dinner with him sometime. She says, “I’d love to have dinner with you sometime.” He mentions how peaceful she seems. She looks away and says, “Thank you,” and asks him something about when he was a kid. They discuss childhood, his and hers. Suddenly they both are silent, and neither says a word for quite a long while. When at last they speak, they speak at the same time, and neither can make out what the other has said. He says he is sorry about something. She says she, too, is sorry about something. But that’s all right. That’s all right. Now it is spring. He confesses his dreams. She makes him believe they are original and important. He begins to trust his dreams. They sit close to each other in an outdoor restaurant by the water, under a windfall of lights.