The Boy Detective Read Online Free Page B

Rogêt”—Mary Rogers—in which Dupin proved that the girl was murdered by a young naval officer who earlier had tried to elope with her. In the story, he had dragged her body to the river after the botched abortion. Poe’s version became the accepted solution to the murder, but it was just a story. No one ever solved the case. Some thought Poe had killed her himself. I may be making this up.
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    A LL RIGHT , I did it. I killed her. But it was an accident. Sort of. Sort of an accident. I didn’t mean to do it, but I did. That is, I did mean to do it, but I didn’t. If you want to arrest someone, why don’t you nab that naval officer who knocked her up? And I didn’t even care about that. I mean, I would have liked to be the first, but with Mary, that would have taken an awfully early arrival. I didn’t want her to have the abortion either. I was perfectly willing to live with her and the baby, in a little place I have on Third Street, or another in the Bronx. Anywhere. We could have made a life together. I would have given up booze.
    But when I said all that to her, pleaded with her that night down by the river, where I had pursued her . . . when I said all that—and I was sober as a judge—she laughed. She said, Why would I marry a skin-and-bones doped-up drunk who gets his rocks off by writing about life instead of living it? And when I told her that art was more important than life, she laughed harder, because she could see in my maddened eyes that I didn’t mean a word of it, that I would have tossed away all the poems, all the stories, for the love, the real love, of a woman. She saw that—the tobacco girl. She understood intuitively that I’d become a writer because no one would love me. And that insight of hers was at once so saddening and enraging to me that I put my hands on her throat, her white, white throat. And at that point she spun away and freed herself from my grasp and stood there, and danced a taunting little jig. But as she did, she slipped on a wet rock and cracked her head half open. What was I to do? I pushed her body in the water, and went home.
    All I wanted was her heart. Now I hear it beating in the walls of my room. But you know that.
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    O NCE IN A rare while my boy detective would actually solve a mystery, insofar as mysteries can be solved, as in the case of the bent old woman—black coat, black dress—who used to walk around Gramercy Park hurriedly, as if she were chasing something. She muttered to herself, occasionally looking up to see the kids of the neighborhood staring at her, and mocking her. “There’s the witch,” we said. “Witch!” And she would shake her tiny fist at us and walk on, never slowing, around and around the park.
    One Saturday afternoon when I was ten and alone, I watched from a distance as she made her rounds. Eventually she veered off and headed toward Twenty-third Street, then up to Twenty-sixth and Park (no Park Avenue South in those days either) to the Horn & Hardart Cafeteria. I followed. She looked to the left and to the right and entered, moving in spurts to the wall of food behind the little glass doors. She dipped her hand into her black purse, extracted several coins, and, with great care, pushed them into one of the slots, opening the little glass door tentatively, as if she were about to be surprised by what lay behind it. She removed a thick wedge of cheesecake on a heavy cream-color plate, and studied it. Then she looked to the right and left again, and, determining that it was safe, moved to a corner table, away from others in the cafeteria, and slowly ate. After that, I tried to dissuade the other kids from calling her the witch—after seeing her and the wedge of cheesecake on the heavy cream-color plate before her, at a table in the Horn & Hardart Cafeteria.
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    D O DEAD SPIRITS walk among us? What’s your opinion, pal? From time to time I catch