Hot Night in the City

put on the shelf for a while, and we went back to daydreaming about the things we would own and do when I became a rich diagnostician, famous for my unique 'hands-off' technique.

Mother's bouts of illness always followed the same pattern. She would come down with a fever and she'd hack and cough, gasping for breath as she hung over the edge of her bed to help the phlegm 'come up', a process that tested the limits of my squeamishness. I would sit on the edge of her bed late into the night, trying to relieve her wracking cough by making and applying mustard plasters and by rubbing her back with Baume Bengue. (As a little kid I had marveled at how Dr Bengue managed to sign all those tubes. Each and every one! And later I was embarrassed at having been so gullible.) As she dozed, worn out by her ordeal, I would read library books she got for me because I was too young to have a card for the adult section. When I woke at dawn, having dropped off over my book, I would be sweaty and my clothes would be all twisted. The apartment would smell of mustard and eucalyptus, but usually her coughing would have abated and her temperature would have dropped enough that we could go to school. But the next evening the fever and coughing would begin again until the attack had run its course, leaving her wan and thin.

While I was shuffling the pinochle cards, I mentioned that I had made a nickel doing Mrs McGivney's shopping for her.

'Mrs McGivney?' Anne-Marie asked, shuddering at the thought of getting close to a crazy lady.

'How did you happen to run into Mrs McGivney?' my mother asked, and I told her how I was playing in the back alley, and she got my attention by tapping on her window with the nickel.

'And you went up to her apartment?' Anne-Marie asked.

'Sure.'

'You weren't afraid?'

'Nah.'

'You didn't go in, did you?'

'Sure. She gave me a cookie.'

'And you ate it?'

I asked Mother about Mrs McGivney, but she didn't know much: just that she had lived in that same house for as long as anybody could remember. 'It's nice of you to run errands for her,' she said. 'The poor old thing.' She patted my hand. 'You're a good boy, Jean-Luc.' I had the feeling I was being pressured into visiting Mrs McGivney again. My mother had a good-hearted desire to do things for people, and when she couldn't manage it herself, she would volunteer me. I didn't like that, but I never complained because, as she said, I was a good boy. A resentful good boy.

The possibility of a game began to take shape in my mind. 'Ah-h, do you know anything about Mrs McGivney's husband?' I asked casually, dealing out the cards.

Mother said she'd never heard anyone mention a Mr McGivney. She was pretty sure Mrs McGivney was a widow, or maybe an old maid that people just called 'Mrs' out of courtesy.

Glimpsing the intriguing possibility that I just might be the only person on the whole block who knew about Mr McGivney, I shifted the subject away from them and, with the part of my mind I didn't need to play cards, I began a story game of detective in which my followers and I helped radio's Mr Keene: Tracer of Lost Persons track down the mysterious Mr McGivney, famous hero. Meanwhile Anne-Marie sat on the floor, muttering complaints on behalf of her actress paper doll about how dull, dull, dull all the clothes in the shops were, then she gasped with astonished delight when Anne-Marie's newest 'creation' was revealed.

The next day after school I climbed over our back fence into the alley to play my new game. I sat in the doorway of a shed with my back to 232 and a book up in front of my face as though I were reading it, but in reality I was keeping watch on Mrs McGivney's windows, looking over my shoulder through a small mirror I had borrowed from my mother's handbag. I could see nothing through the lace curtains. My followers complained about being bored with this no-action game, but I reminded them that the stakeout was an important part of detective work. All right, so maybe it wasn't all that much fun! But it had to be done, and we were the ones chosen by Mr Keene to do it. They could quit, if they wanted to, but me, I'd stay at my post until hell froze over, if that's what it took! I turned my face away and refused to listen to their apologies, until Uncle Jim and my faithful Japanese valet, Kato, pleaded with me to forgive them for complaining. But my admiring young niece, Gail, continued to whine about this being a dull game, so finally Tonto and I (sometimes I borrowed Tonto from The Lone Ranger) began a careful examination of the ground, using a magnifying stick to look for clues. We found what might be part of a footprint, and there was a very interesting piece of broken glass, and a half-covered cat turd that Tonto said had been dropped since the last full moon, but that was all. Searching for Lost Heroes was beginning to lose its zest as a game, and I was considering changing back to driving the Nazi Strong Troopers out of their bunkers with my blasting stick, when I heard three crisp clicks of metal on glass above me and I looked up to see Mrs McGivney smiling down from her window, holding a nickel up for me to see and motioning for me to come up. At first I felt bad: it's pretty shoddy detective work when the suspect spots the stakeout; but then I realized that maybe I could get into the apartment in the guise of a kid willing to run an errand, and do some undercover snooping around. I told my followers to wait for me there. I'd report back after I'd grilled the old dame. If they got bored, they could blast Nazis.

Mrs McGivney met me at the top of the dark stairs and I followed her into the apartment, where her husband still sat straight backed at the window, looking out over the alley, his pale eyes empty She told me that she had forgotten to write 'pickle' on her list, and she knew that Mr McGivney would just love to have one of Mr Kane's big plump dill pickles.

I couldn't be sure to get a big plump pickle, because Mr Kane's practice was to roll up his sleeve and reach down into his barrel and give you the first one he touched. If it was little, he wouldn't drop it back into the brine and try for a bigger one because, as he explained, he'd pretty soon be left with nothing but little pickles, so people would go somewhere else to buy pickles where they had a chance of getting a big one. When I returned with an average-sized pickle wrapped in white butcher paper I found the little round table by the window set up with napkins and little plates and sugar cookies and milk for two. I told Mrs McGivney that I really couldn't accept the nickel she was trying to press into my hand, not for buying something that had only cost a nickel; but she said I had walked the same distance as if I'd been sent for a whole bagful of groceries, and therefore I had earned the nickel; but I said no, I hadn't really earned it so I couldn't take it; but she continued to hold it out, standing there with her head cocked and giving me one of those ain't-I-the-cutest-thing glances out of the corners of her eyes, the kind of look Shirley Temple used when she wanted to get her way. Adults thought Shirley was just too adorable for words, with her dimples and her pouting sideward glances, shaking her pudgy finger at people she thought were being naughty, but every red-blooded American boy yearned to kick her in the butt. Hard. In the end, I took the damned nickel. Jeez!

Those sugar cookies had something against me. They didn't get caught in the corner of my mouth this time, but I had just bitten one when Mrs McGivney asked me how my mother was, and when I tried to answer through the cookie, I coughed and sprayed crumbs and ended up feeling stupid and clumsy. Not much of a start for a slick detective.

I was curious to know what was wrong with Mr McGivney, but I didn't think I should ask. Instead, I told her I'd have to be getting home before long because my mother was sick.

'Still? Oh-h, I'm sorry to hear that.'

'She's almost over it.'

'Is she often ill, John-Luke?'

'Only my mother calls me John-Luke. Yes, I guess you'd say she's sick pretty often. She's got weak lungs.'

'And you take care of her?'

'My sister helps.'

'What about your father?'

My sister and I knew our father only from a photograph taken during their two-day honeymoon in New York City in 1929: a handsome man in a linen summer suit, his jacket held open by a fist on one hip to reveal his waistcoat, a straw hat tipped rakishly over one eye, his disarmingly boyish smile both knowing and mischievous. 'I don't know anything about him.'

'Oh... I see. Well... the important thing is to always be a good boy and take care of your mother.'