My Darling Detective Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Interlocutrix

  Halifax Isn’t Mentioned in the Old Testament

  So You’re Telling Me That I Was Born in the Halifax Free Library and the Man I Thought Was My Father Was Not Really My Father

  You Detectives Stopped By Quite Early

  Arts and Crafts

  Delinquent Notices

  The End of the War Café

  The Auction in London

  Library Science

  Look How Much Can Happen of an Evening

  At the Kitchen Table

  My Father, Officer Robert Emil Part One

  My Father, Officer Robert Emil Part Two

  Your Father May Still Be Right Here in Halifax

  Radio Detective Frederik Levy’s Love Life

  Letter from Bernard Rigolet

  Straight-B Student

  The Deeper Concerns of Martha

  Visiting Nora at Nova Scotia Rest Hospital

  Martha’s Seven-Month Plan

  Nora’s Over the Moon

  Housewarming

  My Life in Library Science

  In the Waiting Room

  Letter from Bernard Rigolet

  Questioning Robert Emil Part One

  Detective Emil Detects

  Blaming Ghosts

  Questioning Robert Emil Part Two

  Letter from Bernard Rigolet

  Homage to Forest Potsholme

  Questioning Robert Emil Part Three

  Ours Is Not a Lending Library

  I Couldn’t Bear It If Something Terrible Should Befall Leah Diamond

  Deeply Communing with the So-Far Invisible World

  Intuitive Prophecy

  Silent Night

  Eleven Very Crowded Hours

  The Tahiti Portfolio

  Letter from Bernard Rigolet

  Family Life

  Acknowledgments

  Sample Chapter from NEXT LIFE MIGHT BE KINDER

  Buy the Book

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2017 by Howard Norman

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-544-23610-3

  Cover design by Martha Kennedy

  Cover photograph © Pawel Piatek/Trevillion Images

  eISBN 978-0-544-23708-7

  v1.0317

  “I Wish That I Could Hide Inside This Letter.” Words and music by Nat Simon and Charles Tobias. Copyright © 1943 by Shapiro Bernstein & Co., Inc., and Ched Music. Copyright © renewed. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

  To Emma

  Things keep their secrets.

  —HERACLITUS

  Interlocutrix

  The auction was held at 5 p.m. in the street-level drawing room of the Lord Nelson Hotel, here in Halifax. Death on a Leipzig Balcony, by Robert Capa, was the first item on the docket. The auctioneer had just said, “. . . taken on April 18, 1945,” when my mother, Nora Ives—married name, Nora Ives Rigolet—walked almost casually up the center aisle and flung an open jar of black ink at the photograph. I heard, “No, it can’t be you!” But it was my own voice, already trying to refute the incident. My mother was tackled to the floor by the auctioneer’s assistant. An octopus of ink sent tentacles down the glass. My mother was lifted roughly to her feet by two security guards and escorted from the room. And here I thought she was safely tucked away in Nova Scotia Rest Hospital, across the harbor in Dartmouth, room 340.

  I had been at the hotel to bid on Forest of Fontainbleau, an 1863 landscape by Eugène Cuvelier, the tenth photograph on the docket. Of course I lost out on that. Because immediately I went to the police station on Gottingen Street. There, through the one-way window, I witnessed my mother’s interrogation at the hands of my fiancée, Martha Crauchet. “We get the Chronicle-Herald in the common room, interlocutrix,” my mother said to Martha. I saw Martha jot down a word on her legal pad; I assumed it was “interlocutrix.” “Last week, Tuesday’s edition, maybe it was Wednesday’s, there was a notice of the auction. Right then I put my thinking cap on.” My mother fit on an invisible cap, like screwing in a lightbulb. “I decided it was best to leave during tea. You must understand, interlocutrix, that the hospital staff is always distracted during tea. I filched money from the attendant’s station. A little tin box they keep there. Then I slipped out the food service door. Free as a bird.”

  “Then what—you made your way down to the wharf, right?” Martha said.

  “I had on my good overcoat,” my mother said. “Not to worry I’d catch a cold.”

  “And of course you now had pocket money for the ferry.”

  “Once I arrived Halifax-side, I made my way to the Lord Nelson and sat down in the room where the auction was held. Have you ever been to the Lord Nelson, interlocutrix?”

  “I have. Yes.”

  “A very nice hotel, don’t you think? I sat there just as I pleased. Just like that. It was all quite exciting. I had my little jar of ink in my coat pocket. From Arts and Crafts.”

  —TRANSCRIPT, MARCH 19, 1977, HALIFAX REGIONAL POLICE

  The interrogation ended around 7 p.m. Before a police officer accompanied her on the return ferry to Dartmouth and then to Nova Scotia Rest Hospital, I watched my mother, still in the interrogation room, make a drawing of Halifax Harbor for Martha. She drew it on a napkin. My mother had been given cups of coffee and a scone to tide her over. She signed the drawing, and in addition wrote, “Thank you for the warmest conversation I’ve had in possibly three years. Let’s please stay in touch.”

  I lived in the cottage out back of 112 Spring Garden Road, a big Victorian house owned by Mrs. Esther Hamelin, my employer. The other person who lived on the property was a Mrs. Brevittmore (whose position was referred to as the “all-purpose”), who occupied a large, sunny room toward the rear of the house, overlooking the spacious, manicured lawn and garden. Mrs. Hamelin had turned seventy on March first. As she put it, “I was born into money. It was from the fisheries.”

  Mrs. Hamelin’s photographic collection was mostly on the walls of the master bedroom, down the hall from the library, and two guest rooms on the third floor had some photographs on their walls. Also, there were fifteen late-nineteenth-century French photographs in the library. In my time working for Mrs. Hamelin, I knew her to have plenty of people in for tea. Plenty of professors of art from far-flung places. Plenty of dinner parties, but no overnight guests. Depends, of course, on what one means by overnight guest. Because one morning at about 4:30 I did notice Mrs. Brevittmore leave Mrs. Hamelin’s bedroom, carrying a tray with teacups and saucers and a teapot on it. I had been an insomniac in the library, studying up on Avignon Pont St. Bénezet, 1861, by Édouard Baldus, which I was to bid on in London a week later. (I lost out on it seconds before the final gavel.) It depicted wooden boats along a riverbank, an unfinished stone bridge, quiet waters. Anyway, I heard a rustle in the hallway, looked up, and saw Mrs. Brevittmore closing Mrs. Hamelin’s bedroom door. When I mentioned this to Martha, she said, “Well, either they’d just had a rendezvous or they didn’t. Either/or, it’s none of your business. Love is difficult enough to find in the world, isn’t it, and judgments don’t have a place here. You’re either happy for someone
or you’re not. I’m happy for them. If you aren’t, then I’m not happy with you. Like my mother put it, ‘Some things say a lot, even if you can’t pronounce all the words.’ Then again, my mother read a lot of Victorian novels.”

  “Okay, fine, but by ‘rendezvous’ you mean—”

  “Use your imagination, Jacob. It’s the one thing left you when someone’s door is closed. I want to meet those two. Please introduce me to them soon. It’s just not right that I haven’t met them yet.”

  “Mrs. Hamelin wants to meet you too,” I said. “She told me she’s looking at her calendar for when.”

  “She’s been looking at it a long time,” Martha said. “But I refuse to get grumpy about it. I just won’t. Things happen when they’re meant to, mostly. But you have told her we’re serious, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, I have,” I said. “I most definitely have.”

  My employment had originally been listed in the Chronicle-Herald: “Wanted: Live-in assistant. Must have special interest in travel. Interviews by appointment.” During my interview, Mrs. Hamelin asked how much education I’d had. I told her one year at Dalhousie University. She asked why I had dropped out. I told her I couldn’t afford the tuition. “Oh, I see,” she said, adding, “even though I’ve heard it’s modest for residents of Nova Scotia.” She asked my age. I told her I was twenty-nine. She asked how I’d been supporting myself, and I said, “Receiving and sorting stock at John W. Doull, Bookseller. Also, weekends I worked in the Halifax Free Library. My mother formerly was head librarian there.” She asked if I read a lot. I dissembled by replying with a question, hoping there was just enough irony in my voice to imply that the answer should be obvious. “Well, I am around books seven days a week, aren’t I?” She laughed hesitantly and asked if I’d done particularly well in any subject during my one year at university. I said, “That would have been a course called Introduction to Psychology.” She asked, “Why do you suppose you did well?” I said, “Because as I understood it, it was all about taking notice of people’s behavior and having strong opinions about it.” She said, “Good, good. Taking notice of people’s behavior at auction is very useful. You have to be competitive, especially at the opportune moment. You have to keep your wits about you. Do you think you’re up to that, Jacob?” “Yes,” I said truthfully, “and I also need the work. I’m helping support my mother.” She listed what would be my other responsibilities and then I was hired. “We’ll give it a try, then, you and I,” she said. Five weeks later in Amsterdam, I bid for and brought home Rock-Tombs and Pyramid, 1857, by Francis Frith, for three hundred dollars below what Mrs. Hamelin instructed was to be my ceiling bid. And that was exactly my bonus, three hundred dollars. A small fortune to me at the time, and still would be.

  What were those other responsibilities? Daily shopping—list provided by Mrs. Brevittmore. Calla lilies to be picked up every Monday at the Flower Shop on Granville Street, a standing order. Purchase of new books, titles provided by Mrs. Hamelin. Carpentry as needed; I was good at that. Chauffeuring, though not often, because Mrs. Hamelin, as she put it, was “something of a homebody.” I drove her American car, a 1956 black Buick four-door sedan, with the word Dynaflow gliding across the glove compartment in silver metal cursive. Every other Sunday I would drive her to Mount Olive Holiness Church for the 9 a.m. service; I would sit in the back pew. Once I escorted her to a play by Harold Pinter, No Man’s Land. On rare occasions I would drive Mrs. Hamelin and Mrs. Brevittmore to the movies. They preferred matinees, tea afterward in the lobby of the Lord Nelson. In the lobby I would sit on a sofa in the corner and watch the comings and goings.

  I was originally hired in March 1975, the fifteenth to be exact. All of that July I painted the exterior of Mrs. Hamelin’s house. In the first twenty-two months of my employment, my passport was stamped by customs officials in Amsterdam, London, Paris, and Copenhagen. In Paris and London I lost out on the bidding. I have already mentioned my success in Amsterdam. And I was successful in Copenhagen too, with Château de Bagatelle, c. 1860, by Charles Marville.

  I often slept at Martha’s three-room apartment at 406 Cunard Street. That’s how I knew what my mother wrote on the napkin. Martha had put it in a transparent evidence bag and stuck it to the door of her refrigerator with a magnet. Late on the night of the auction I got up from Martha’s bed, walked to the refrigerator to pour a glass of ice water, and there it was, in plain sight. I studied the drawing a moment. Its one seagull wasn’t just the letter V floating in the sky; it had feathery definition and a keen eye. Clouds were filled-in black. Rain in the offing. In my mother’s depiction of a tugboat, I could make out the pilot in the wheelhouse. Life preservers. Mops. A fire ax and an accordion of hose behind glass. Old tire fenders along the rail. The drawing was altogether not bad.

  I set the water glass on the bedside table and got under the bedclothes. Martha stretched her legs along mine and pressed against me. “I couldn’t get enough of you before,” she said. She breathed gently at my ear for a full minute at least. “Does your mouth hurt? Mine does. You don’t realize you’re kissing that hard until later. Maybe I’m feeling guilty, how I had to speak to Nora earlier.”

  “Well, that’s what I call putting your guilt to good use,” I said.

  “I know it’s my job, but after all, it was your own mother I was questioning. I’m sorry you had to watch me do it.”

  “Martha, I asked to watch. I wanted to try and figure out what happened. Same as you tried. Besides, you weren’t exactly putting the screws to her.”

  “No, but there’s protocol and conniving strategies and psychological tricks of the trade they teach us. None of that I much mind when the person’s a creep. I get mostly lowlife creeps, I’ve told you. But your mother, she seemed, I don’t know. Mainly she seemed disoriented, and I’d say kind of excited. Obviously a very intelligent woman, Nora. All those librarian awards and citations. She’s read, what, maybe five thousand books, you said. A very intelligent woman to talk with.”

  “Anyway, you put her at ease. She was so shaky at first. And I haven’t seen her smoke a cigarette in ages.”

  “The thing is, I’d have liked to have met your mother for the first time under different circumstances, for God’s sake. I mean, you proposed marriage October second, last year.”

  “Same day you accepted.”

  “Strange, don’t you think, how she kept calling me interlocutrix? I had to look the word up.”

  “I looked it up too. Technically speaking, you do fit the definition, but it sounds so medieval torture chamber or something.”

  “Interlocutrix, that’s me.”

  “I’m confused. She was doing so well, my mother. The hospital said no episodes for eleven months. And then that photograph set her off. I have no earthly idea why.”

  “You and me both.”

  “Say the glass shattered. Say the photograph got splinters of glass. Say it was damaged. I’m talking thousands of dollars, maybe.”

  “Luckily, it’s just ink on glass. Still and all, darling, a crime was committed. But factoring in that your mother’s been living in a hospital like she has, it’s unlikely she’ll go to jail. You’ll have to face the music tomorrow with Mrs. Hamelin, right?”

  “First thing in the morning, I’ll go back to the house. She won’t have read about it in the papers probably till lunch. If it even makes the papers.”

  “Want me to go with? To Mrs. Hamelin’s.”

  “Sweet of you, but no. I’m just going to tell the truth and say why I lost out on the French photograph.”

  “How do you think she’s going to take it?”

  “Esther? Oh, probably get into a foul mood. She suffers from a kind of acquisition fever—her words. Of course, I’ve come back empty-handed before. Just because she’s rich as Croesus doesn’t mean I always get to outbid everyone. This one time in London, I bid higher than she’d instructed I should—it was reckless, way above my assigned ceiling bid. And I still got trounced. Esther brooded for a mo
nth, very aggressively.”

  “I’ve noticed, to me she’s Esther, to everyone else she’s Mrs. Hamelin. What do you call her day to day?”

  “Mrs. Hamelin. But I’m always thinking Esther. Two years of working for her, I allow myself that secret informality.”

  “If you want, give me a call after you speak with her.”

  “Want to sleep?”

  “Definitely not. I haven’t shared this bed with you four nights in a row this week.”

  Halifax Isn’t Mentioned in the Old Testament

  The next morning, I watched Martha slip from bed, holding her auburn hair up behind her head, sleep creases along her shoulders. She took such good care of herself—she bicycled ten miles every Saturday morning, unless weather or some urgency at work prohibited. She had slim hips and an ever so slightly noticeable, and to me endearing, oddly syncopated walk, from a childhood injury. She only had a bathtub, no shower, and took quick morning baths, but in the evening could linger in the tub a long time, adding hot water, listening to the radio. There was nothing she liked more than to have a glass of wine delivered to her in the bathtub, to step from the bath, slip on her robe, and have dinner waiting on the kitchen table.

  This morning she teased me by pulling back the bedclothes and lying down atop me, breasts pressed to my back. She kissed both of my ears, then said, “Oops, time to go.” She put on her street clothes and left the apartment. I got up from bed and turned off the radio. Martha had left a cup of coffee with a book set over it, to keep the coffee warm. The book was The Journals of Susanna Moodie, a collection of poems by Margaret Atwood. At John W. Doull, Bookseller, on Barrington Street, she had said to me at the cash register, “That’s right, I’m a detective who reads poetry. By the way, thanks for the employee discount. Every little bit helps.”

  Setting the book on the table, I drank the coffee and thought back to my mother’s interrogation. When I’d asked Martha if I could watch and listen through the one-way glass, she’d said, “Against policy, but sure. Just don’t let the two other detectives give you any grief. If they snap at you, snap right back. Just, if they ask, say Detective Crauchet said it was okay to be there.”