Peter Heller: My Mother the Gumshoe

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My mother was a private eye.  She was petite and elegant, she could shoot and drive, and she was a crack investigator.

She was born in Paris in 1933 to an American banker and a Connecticut socialite and lived there until the Germans drove them out.  She arrived in Manhattan speaking only French, and all she wanted to do was return to France and fight in the French Resistance.  She was seven.  Everywhere she went in New York City she would listen to groups of people talking and try to make out from their tone and gestures who was a Nazi spy.  She had the investigative bent early on.

Once she had kids she got her P.I. license.  About a week later the FBI called.  They wondered if she could help them track down the perpetrator of a large fraud on the Bank of New York.  They thought they knew with whom he kept contact, and they didn’t have an agent who could mix with the silk stocking set in Greenwich, Connecticut.  Mom was thrilled.  It took her about an hour and a half to track him down.  She thought she recognized the surname and she pulled out the Social Register to confirm and called her aunt.  It turned out that Aunt Maribel played tennis with his aunt in Woodstock, Vermont.  So my mother called the old dowager.  Mom had done her research and she said she was an old flame of Franklin’s and had his 10th Mountain Division dog tags and she thought he might want them back.  Could mom send them?  The aunt tittered and said that she had had a beau like that once, too—”Every girl should have one, shouldn’t they?”—and she gave mom the address where he was staying.

Mom climbed into her fifteen year old Volvo wagon and drove up to southern Connecticut.  She parked on a hill above a fancy horse property with white rail fences and a big clapboard house and pulled out her opera glasses.  (Later she would use Swarovski compact binoculars but these worked just fine.)  After a while a man came out of the back door.  He matched the description and he climbed into a gold-colored Mercedes coup and drove up the road.  Mom tailed him and she claims they had a car chase through the back roads of Darien.  She was a very skilled driver so I don’t doubt her.  After about twenty minutes the man pulled over.  It was a lonely country road and I guess his curiosity got the better of him: who was this little woman in a beat up wagon who could barely see over the steering wheel but seemed, in silhouette, well-coiffed?  Mom pulled up behind him and got out.  Click click on the pavement went her Italian pumps, jingle jingle went the gold bangles on her wrists.  Warily he rolled down his window.

“Franklin,” my mom said, “What you’re doing is wrong.  It’s not good for you, it’s not good for your family, and you need make this right.  What we’re going to do is: I’m going to follow you back to where you’re staying, and then we’re both going to drive together down to the Bank of New York and you’re going to settle this thing.”

And he did!  My mother’s moral authority is inarguable.  They called the bank and drove down to Manhattan and Mom said that when the special agents put the cuffs on him, Franklin looked so crestfallen and brokenhearted that she never wanted to do perp cases again.  She decided she would reunite birth families.

Caro Watkins Heller and her partner Pete Beveridge reunited over a hundred birth families.  These are mostly very cold cases, and often the names and places given are wrong, and so the investigative work is tough.  They did it pro bono for people who could never afford a P.I.  But I often wonder if she completely gave up that other life.  She was gone a lot.  The bookshelf above her bed was not only stuffed with Dick Francis and Agatha Christie novels, there were manuals on surveillance, firearms, breaking and entering.  I know she had developed another identity—she said it was for fun—complete with credit cards and driver’s license, and when we opened her safe after she died we found eight handguns, speed loaders, ankle holsters, pen recorders, and wigs.  My little mother was a certified badass.

I miss her a lot.  I grew up and became an author and wrote a novel based on her life called Celine.  Mom is in there, as written.  I write in a lot of genres, but if sometimes I write crime thrillers you can see why.

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