The Boy Detective Read Online Free Page A

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    H ERE’S WHAT I mean: Twenty-ninth Street between Madison and Park Avenue South. Something fishy about this block. That so-called health club, Exhale—a “mindbodyspa.” I’ll bet. And the storefront notice that an artist has posted as an ad for his photographs, taken in New Mexico, describing them as “a metaphor for the timeless interior landscape of the mind.” This is code, don’t you think? And what monkey business goes on at the low, wide office building that purports to contain the Community Prep High School “for learners and leaders”? And what should we make of this? Stampworx. The x . And this: Technetron Electronics. What’s cooking here, I’d like to know. The graffiti on a couple of walls: SIN and ETAH ( hate backward). Somebody’s picking up a message, no? And the three-story red town house with the soldered metal door. Yet the windows have air conditioners. Who lives there?
    While we’re at it, in what country is this block? On the southeast corner, an eight-story, glacierlike apartment house with tiers of Plexiglas balconies, called the Gansevoort (The Netherlands). And Gansevoort happened to be Melville’s mother’s maiden name, as well as that of his brother. What should we make of that? Next door, Winston’s “La Maison de Champagne” (France). Across the street, a parking garage (Mexico), beside a two-story house with a roll-down metal door and a red fire escape out front leading up to a square iron balcony like Juliet’s (let’s say England). And next to that, another town house with a sign NEW AGE INNER VISION , and a picture of gypsies (let’s say Romania, or Hungary), which sits beside the Lalabla restaurant (Ethiopia), which sits across the street from La Campanile (Italy). And down the block, the Lola Hotel (who knows?) next door to the Habib American Bank (Egypt?), across from a grand old office building called The Emmet (Ireland). In the middle of the block, on the north side of the street, stands the Permanent Mission of Moldova to the United Nations (Moldova). Moldova, my foot. Something’s up here, I swear. I smell a rat.
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    H ERE’S LOOKING AT you, city of going going going. City of gorgeous surprises and oh-Jesus! coincidences, such as bumping into people you know or haven’t seen for years, in the place where millions walk. Or bumping into Elizabeth Bishop’s “Letter to N.Y.” as you are poring over the copyedited manuscript of a memoir—where she writes of “taking cabs in the middle of the night . . . and the meter glares like a moral owl.”
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    D ID YOU KNOW that Detective Poe was involved in a real murder case, in the 1840s? A man named John Anderson had a tobacco shop near Duane Street on lower Broadway. In his employ was a twenty-year-old woman named Mary Cecilia Rogers, whose good looks were so well known she was celebrated in the city. A writer for the New York Herald described her “heaven-like smile and her star-like eyes,” and she was dubbed the “Beautiful Cigar Girl.” However heavenly Mary appeared, her activities were more terrestrial, involving several men of low reputation, as they put it in those days.
    On July 28, 1841, Mary’s body was found floating in the Hudson. She had been the victim of either a brutal gang beating, as initially thought by the police, or of a botched abortion, or both. One suspect was Daniel Payne, a cork cutter and a drunk, who lived at the boardinghouse run by Mary and her mother. Payne took poison shortly after Mary’s death, but he’d had an alibi for the night she died.
    Enter Poe, who, along with Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, frequented Anderson’s cigar emporium and was said to be smitten with the Beautiful Cigar Girl. He would question Anderson about her incessantly. A year or so after her death, Poe published “The Mystery of Marie