The Boy Detective by Roger Rosenblatt

the kids of our neighborhood were not heading up to the Loew’s Lexington on Fifty-first or west to Eighth Avenue and the RKO on Twenty-third, we came here. My parents took me to Marx Brothers revivals at the Academy of Music when I was five and six. When I was older, I would go by myself. I saw House of Wax, the first 3D movie, with Vincent Price. It included a sort of juggler-barker who stood outside the wax museum and promoted it by hitting a rubber ball attached to a paddle by an elastic band. The ball shot straight at the audience. Everyone ducked. The movie was okay as a thriller, but not much of a mystery.
    Where the P.C. Richard & Son appliances gleam under fierce lights these days, stood Luchow’s, the famous German restaurant, with its sauced-up meats and Oompa Band and big, glorious tannenbaum at Christmas. In the 1890s Diamond Jim Brady proposed to Lillian Russell in Luchow’s, offering the musical theater star one million dollars if she’d marry him. He brought the money in a suitcase. Russell turned him down. My father said that Luchow’s had been a “Nazi hangout” during the war. I tried to picture that—Nazis in uniform lounging around the restaurant, elbows on the bar, just hanging out.
    Meanwhile, tonight, the ones who work for a living stoop and lift at a loading ramp at Trader Joe’s, hauling cartons on rollers as if they were hauling carts of coal in Pennsylvania or gold in Brazil. They deposit their shadows at the side of the ramp. They are muscular, black, biblical. I have no strength left in my arms. But they could haul a house, a pyramid if they had to. What wouldn’t I give, I think as I edge past them on the sidewalk, and they apologize for being in my way. I shrug to indicate that I am in theirs. And then—and such things happen in New York—the tallest one, with a tattoo of lightning on his neck, unbidden in the quickening cold, begins to sing “Someone to Watch Over Me,” in a bass so earthy, it seems to rise from the roots of a nearby oak. I stop in my tracks, and listen to the song until the end, when I reach for an imaginary glass and raise it to toast the man.
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    A ND NOW TO Irving Place, which runs six blocks between Fourteenth and Gramercy Park and is changed much less from when I was a kid. This street, too, was created by Samuel Ruggles when he created Gramercy Park. He gave it its name because he liked Washington Irving. He also named Lexington Avenue, to the north of the park, after the Battle of Lexington, which, I suppose, he also liked.
    Different stores here now, but located in the same old buildings. A cheese shop where the Sleepy Hollow Book Shop once was, and where my mother bought me children’s books. A Japanese restaurant. The Washington Irving High School is here still, a massive place nearly filling the square block between Sixteenth and Seventeenth and Irving Place and Third. At the northeast corner of the building, a big bronze bust of Washington Irving looking wan. The school was all girls when I was a kid, and had a rough reputation. Walking home from school one spring day, I passed a crowd in front of the building, pointing and murmuring. Police kept them back. A teacher, a young man, had jumped or been pushed from the roof, nine stories up. He lay like a slain deer on the pikes of the iron gate around the school, streaks of blood on his brown tweed sports jacket. I had no urge to solve that case.
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    M URDER . N OTHING LIKE it. All other crimes step aside when the word is spoken. Murder. In Green for Danger (1946), a nifty mystery movie, a parish nurse interrupts a dance party of doctors and nurses by stopping the phonograph music and announcing from a little balcony above the crowd that a patient’s recent death was not due to natural causes, as had been assumed. “It was murder,” she says, giving the word all the weight it can bear. Muurrderr . She holds the u and rolls the r