The Interpretation Of Murder

by Jed Rubenfeld

  Before anyone else was up, I examined the Monday morning newspapers in the opulent rotunda of the Hotel Manhattan, where Clark University was housing Freud, Jung, Ferenczi, and myself for the week. (Brill, who lived in New York, did not require a room.) Not one of the papers carried a story about Freud or his upcoming lectures at Clark. Only the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung ran anything at all, and this was a notice announcing the arrival of a 'Dr Freund from Vienna.'

  I never intended to be a doctor. It was my father's wish, and his wishes were supposed to be our commands. When I was eighteen and still living in my parents' house in Boston, I told him I was going to be America's foremost scholar of Shakespeare. I could be America's hindmost scholar of Shakespeare, he replied, but fore or hind, if I did not intend to pursue a career in medicine, I would have to find my own means of paying Harvard's tuition.

  His threat had no effect on me. I didn't care at all for the family's Harvardiana, and I would be happy, I told my father, to complete my education elsewhere. This was the last conversation of any length I ever had with him.

  Ironically, I was to obey my father's wish only after he no longer had any money to withhold from me. The collapse of Colonel Winslow's banking house in November 1903 was nothing compared to the panic in New York four years later, but it was good enough for my father. He lost everything, including my mother's bit. His face aged ten years in a single night; deep creases appeared unannounced on his brow. My mother said I must take pity on him, but I never did. At his funeral - which compassionate Boston avoided in droves - I knew for the first time I would go on in medicine, if able to continue my studies at all. Whether it was a newfound practicality that drove my decision or something else, I hesitate to say.

  It was I, as things fell out, on whom pity had to be taken, and Harvard that took it. After my father's funeral, I notified the university that I would be withdrawing at year's end, the two-hundred-dollar tuition being now far beyond my means. President Eliot, however, waived the fee. Probably he concluded that Harvard's long-term interests would be better served not by giving the boot to the third Stratham Younger to trudge through the Yard, but by forgiving the demi-orphan his tuition in expectation of future rewards. Whatever the motivation, I will be forever grateful to Harvard for letting me stay on.

  Only at Harvard could I have attended Professor Putnam's famous lectures on neurology. I was a medical student by then, having won a scholarship, but was proving an uninspired doctor-to-be. One spring morning, in an otherwise dust-dry account of nervous diseases, Putnam referred to Sigmund Freud's 'sexual theory' as the only interesting work being done on the subject of the hysterical and obsessional neuroses. After class, I asked for readings. Putnam pointed me to Havelock Ellis, who accepted Freud's two most radical discoveries: the existence of what Freud called 'the unconscious' and the sexual aetiology of neurosis. Putnam also introduced me to Morton Prince, who was then just starting his journal on abnormal psychology. Dr Prince had an extensive collection of foreign publications; it turned out he had known my father. Prince took me on as a proofreader. Through him, I got my hands on almost everything Freud had published, from The Interpretation of Dreams to the groundbreaking Three Essays. My German was good, and I found myself consuming Freud's work with an avidity I had not felt for years. Freud's erudition was breathtaking. His writing was like filigree. His ideas, if correct, would change the world.

  The hook was sunk for good, however, when I came across Freud's solution to Hamlet. It was, for Freud, a throw- away, a two-hundred-word digression in the middle of his treatise on dreams. Yet there it was: a brand-new answer to the most famous riddle in Western literature.

  Shakespeare's Hamlet has been performed thousands upon thousands of times, more than any other play in any language. It is the most written-about work in all of literature. (I do not count the Bible, of course.) Yet there is a strange void or vacuum at the core of the drama: all the action is founded on the inability of its hero to act. The play consists of a series of evasions and excuses seized on by the melancholy Hamlet to justify postponing his revenge on his father's murderer (his uncle, Claudius, now King of Denmark and wed to Hamlet's mother), punctuated by anguished soliloquies in which he vilifies himself for his own paralysis, the most famous of them all beginning, of course, To be. Only after his delays and missteps have brought about ruin - Ophelia's suicide; the murder of his mother, who drinks a poison Claudius prepared for Hamlet; and his own receipt of a fatal cut from Laertes' envenomed sword - does Hamlet at last, in the play's final scene, take his uncle's triply forfeited life.

  Why doesn't Hamlet act? Not for lack of opportunity: Shakespeare gives Hamlet the most propitious possible circumstances for killing Claudius. Hamlet even acknowledges this (Now might I do it), yet still he turns away. What stops him? And why should this inexplicable faltering - this seeming weakness, this almost cowardice - be capable of riveting audiences around the world for three centuries? The greatest literary minds of our era, Goethe and Coleridge, tried but failed to pull the sword from this stone, and hundreds of lesser lights have broken their heads on it.

  I didn't like Freud's Oedipal answer. In fact, I was disgusted by it. I didn't want to believe it, any more than I wanted to believe in the Oedipus complex itself. I needed to disprove Freud's shocking theories, I needed to find their flaw, but I could not. My back against a tree, I sat in the Yard day after day for hours at a time, poring over Freud and Shakespeare. Freud's diagnosis of Hamlet came to seem increasingly irresistible to me, not only yielding the first complete solution to the riddle of the play, but explaining why no one else had been able to solve it, and at the same time making lucid the tragedy's mesmerizing, universal grip. Here was a scientist applying his discoveries to Shakespeare. Here was medicine making contact with the soul. When I read those two pages of Dr Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, my future was determined.

  If I could not refute Freud's psychology, I would devote my life to it.

  Coroner Charles Hugel had not liked the peculiar noise that came from the walls of Miss Riverford's bedroom, like an immured spirit wailing for its life. The coroner could not get that sound out of his head. Moreover, something had been missing from the room; he was sure of it. Back downtown, Hugel rang for a messenger boy and sent him running up the street for Detective Littlemore.

  Yet another thing Hugel did not like was the location of his own office. The coroner had not been invited to move into the resplendent new police headquarters or the new First Precinct house being built on Old Slip, both of which would be equipped with telephones. The judges had got their Parthenon not long ago. Yet he, not only the city's chief medical examiner but a magistrate by law, and far more in need of modern utilities, had been left behind in the crumbling Van den Heuvel building, with its chipping plaster, its mold, and, worst of all, its water-stained ceilings. He abhorred the sight of those stains, with their brownish- yellow jagged edges. He particularly abhorred them today; he felt the stains were larger, and he wondered if the ceiling might crack open and fall down on him. Of course a coroner had to be attached to a morgue; he understood that. But he emphatically did not understand why a new and modern morgue could not have been built into the new police headquarters.

  Littlemore ambled into the coroner's office. The detective was twenty-five. Neither tall nor short Jimmy Littlemore wasn't bad-looking, but he wasn't quite good-looking either. His close-cropped hair was neither dark nor fair; if anything, it was closer to red. He had a distinctly American face, open and friendly, which, apart from a few freckles, was not particularly memorable. If you passed him in the street, you were not likely to recall him later. You might, however, remember the ready smile or the red bow tie he liked to sport below his straw boater.

  The coroner ordered Littlemore to tell him what he had found out about the Riverford case, trying his best to sound commanding and peremptory. Only in the most exceptional matters was the coroner placed directly in charge of an investigation. He meant Littlemore to unde
rstand that serious consequences would follow if the detective did not produce results.

  The coroner's magisterial tone evidently failed to impress the detective. Although Littlemore had never worked on a case with the coroner, he doubtless knew, as did everyone else on the force, that Hugel was disliked by the new commissioner, that his nickname was 'the ghoul' because of the eagerness with which he performed his postmortems, and that he had no real power in the department. But Littlemore, being a fellow of excellent good nature, conveyed no disrespect to the coroner.

  'What do I know about the Riverford case?' he answered. 'Why, nothing at all, Mr Hugel, except that the killer is over fifty, five-foot-nine, unmarried, familiar with the sight of blood, lives below Canal Street, and visited the harbor within the last two days.'

  Hugel's jaw dropped. 'How do you know all that?'

  'I'm joking, Mr Hugel. I don't know Shinola about the murderer. I don't even know why they bothered sending me over. You didn't happen to lift any prints, did you, sir?'

  'Fingerprints?' asked the coroner. 'Certainly not. The courts will never admit fingerprint evidence.'

  'Well, it was too late by the time I got there. The whole place was already cleaned out. All the girl's things were gone.'

  Hugel was incensed. He called it tampering with evidence. 'But you must have learned something about the Riverford girl,' he added.

  'She was new,' said Littlemore. 'She only lived there a month or two.'

  'They opened in June, Littlemore. Everyone has lived there only a month or two.'

  'Oh. Well she was a real quiet type. Kept to herself.'

  'Is that all? Was anyone seen with her yesterday?' asked the coroner.

  'She came in around eight o'clock. Nobody with her. No guests later. Went to her apartment and never came out, as far as anybody knows.'

  'Did she have any regular visitors?'

  'Nope. Nobody remembers anybody ever visiting her.'

  'Why was she living alone in New York City - at her age and in so large an apartment?'

  'That's what I wanted to know,' said Littlemore. 'But they clammed up on me pretty good at the Balmoral, every one of them. I was serious about the harbor though, Mr Hugel. I found some clay on the floor of Miss Riverford's bedroom. Pretty fresh too. I think it came from the harbor.'

  'Clay? What color clay?' asked Hugel.

  'Red. Cakey, kind of.'

  'That wasn't clay, Littlemore,' said the coroner, rolling his eyes, 'that was my chalk.'

  The detective frowned. 'I wondered why there was a whole circle of it.'

  'To keep people away from the body, you nitwit!'

  'I'm just joking, Mr Hugel. It wasn't your chalk. I saw your chalk. The clay was by the fireplace. A couple of small traces. Needed my magnifying glass before I saw it. I took it home to compare with my samples; I got a whole collection. It's a lot like the red clay all over the piers at the harbor.'

  Hugel took this in. He was considering whether to be impressed. 'Is the clay in the harbor unique? Could it come from somewhere else - the Central Park, for example?'

  'Not the park,' said the detective. 'This is river clay, Mr Hugel. No rivers in the park.'

  'What about the Hudson Valley?'

  'Could be.'

  'Or Fort Tryon, uptown, where Billings has just turned over so much earth?'

  'You think there's clay up there?'

  'I congratulate you, Littlemore, on your outstanding detective work.'

  'Thanks, Mr Hugel.'

  'Would you be interested in a description of the murderer, by any chance?'

  'I sure would.'

  'He is middle-aged, wealthy, and right-handed. His hair: graying, but formerly dark brown. His height: six foot to six-foot-one. And I believe he was acquainted with his victim - well acquainted.'

  Littlemore looked amazed. 'How -?'

  'Here are three hairs I collected from the girl's person.' The coroner pointed to a small double-paned rectangle of glass on his desk, next to a microscope: sandwiched between the panes of glass were three hairs. 'They are dark but striated with gray, indicating a man of middle age. On the girl's neck were threads of white silk - most probably a man's tie, evidently used to strangle her. The silk was of the highest quality. Thus our man has money. Of his dexterity, there can be no doubt; the wounds all proceed from right to left.'

  'His dexterity?'

  'His right-handedness, Detective.'

  'But how do you know he knew her?'

  'I do not know. I suspect. Answer me this: in what posture was Miss Riverford when she was whipped?'

  'I never saw her,' the detective complained. 'I don't even know cause of death.'

  'Ligature strangulation, confirmed by the fracture of the hyoid bone, as I saw when I opened her chest. A lovely break, if I may say, like a perfectly split wishbone. Indeed, a lovely female chest altogether: the ribs perfectly formed, the lungs and heart, once removed, the very picture of healthy asphyxiated tissue. It was a pleasure to hold them in one's hands. But to the point: Miss Riverford was standing when she was whipped. This we know from the simple fact that the blood dripped straight down from her lacerations. Her hands were undoubtedly tied above her head by a heavy- gauge rope of some kind, almost certainly attached to the fixture in the ceiling. I saw rope threads on that fixture. Did you? No? Well, go back and look for them. Question: why would a man who has a good sturdy rope strangle his victim with a delicate silk? Inference, Mr Littlemore: he did not want to put something so coarse around the girl's neck. And why was that? Hypothesis, Mr Littlemore: because he had feelings for her. Now, as to the man's height, we are back to certainties. Miss Riverford was five-foot-five. Judging from her wounds, the whipping was administered by someone seven to eight inches above her. Thus the murderer's height was between six foot and six-foot-one.'

  'Unless he was standing on something,' said Littlemore.

  'What?'

  'On a stool or something.'

  'On a stool?' repeated the coroner.

  'It's possible,' said Littlemore.

  'A man does not stand on a stool while whipping a girl, Detective.'

  'Why not?'

  'Because it's ridiculous. He would fall off.'

  'Not if he had something to hold on to,' said the detective. 'A lamp, maybe, or a hat rack.'

  'A hat rack?' said Hugel. 'Why would he do that, Detective?'

  'To make us think he was taller.'

  'How many homicide cases have you investigated?' asked the coroner.

  'This is my first,' said Littlemore, with undisguised excitement, 'as a detective.'

  Hugel nodded. 'You spoke with the maid at least, I suppose?'

  'The maid?'

  'Yes, the maid. Miss Riverford's maid. Did you ask her if she noticed anything unusual?'

  'I don't think I -'

  'I don't want you to think,' snapped the coroner. 'I want you to detect. Go back to the Balmoral and talk to that maid again. She was the first one in the room. Ask her to describe to you exactly what she saw when she went in. Get the details, do you hear me?'

  On the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-third Street, in a room no woman had ever entered, not even to dust or beat the curtains, a butler poured from a sparkling decanter into three etched-crystal goblets. The bowls of these goblets were intricately carved and so deep they could hold an entire bottle of claret. The butler poured a quarter inch of red wine into each.

  These glasses he offered to the Triumvirate.

  The three men sat in deep leather armchairs arranged around a central fireplace. The room was a library containing more than thirty-seven hundred volumes, most of which were in Greek, Latin, or German. On one side of the unlit fireplace stood a bust of Aristotle atop a jade- green marble pedestal. On the other was a bust of an ancient Hindu. Over the mantel was an entablature: it displayed a large snake curled into a sine wave, against a background of flames. The word charaka was engraved in capital letters underneath.

  Smoke from the men's pipes
caressed the ceiling high above them. The man in the center of the three made a barely perceptible motion with his right hand, on which he wore a large and unusual silver ring. He was in his late fifties, elegant, gaunt in the face, and wiry in build, with dark eyes, black eyebrows below his silver hair, and the hands of a pianist.

  In response to his sign, the butler put a spark to the hearth, causing a thick set of papers therein to catch and burn. The fireplace glowed and crackled with dancing orange flames. 'Be sure to preserve the ashes,' said the master to his servant.

  Nodding his assent, the butler silently withdrew, closing the door behind him.

  'There is only one way to fight fire,' continued the man with pianist's hands. He raised his goblet. 'Gentlemen.'

  As the two other men raised their crystal glasses, an observer might have noticed that they also wore a similar silver ring on their right hands. One of these other two gentlemen was portly and red-cheeked, with muttonchop sideburns. He completed the elegant man's toast - 'With fire' - and drained his glass.

  The third gentleman was balding, sharp-eyed, and thin. He said not a word but merely sipped his wine, a Château Lafite of the 1870 vintage.

  'Do you know the Baron?' asked the elegant man, turning to this balding gentleman. 'I suppose you are related to him.'

  'Rothschild?' the balding man replied blandly. 'I've never met him. Our ties are with the English branch.'

  Chapter Three

  For Freud's first destination in America, Brill chose Coney Island, of all places. We set off by foot for the Grand Central Station, just down the block from our hotel. The sky was cloudless, the sun already hot, the streets clogged with Monday morning traffic. Motorcars accelerated impatiently around horse-drawn delivery wagons. Conversation was impossible. Across from the hotel, on Forty-second Street, a colossal scaffold had been erected where a new building was going up, and the pneumatic drills set up a deafening clatter.