The Interpretation Of Murder

by Jed Rubenfeld

  'Choke me,' she said.

  I did nothing.

  'Please,' she said. 'Choke me.'

  I put my finger and thumb to the place on her neck where the reddish marks were. She bit her lip; it must have hurt. With these bruises covered, there was no sign of her previous attack. There was only her exquisitely turned neck. I squeezed her throat. Instantly her eyes closed.

  'Harder,' she said softly.

  With my left hand, I held the small of her back. With my right, I choked her. Her back arched, her head fell back. She gripped my hand tightly but did not try to pull it away. 'Do you see anything?' I asked. She shook her head faintly, her eyes still closed. I drew her in more firmly, pressing harder at her neck. Her breath caught in her throat, then stopped altogether. Her lips, vermilion, parted.

  It is not easy for me to confess to the wholly improper reactions that came upon me. I had never seen a mouth so perfect. Her lips, slightly swollen, were trembling. Her skin was the purest cream. Her long hair was sparkling, like falling water turned gold by sunlight. I drew her still closer to me. One of her hands was resting on my chest. I don't know when or how it got there.

  Suddenly I became aware of her blue eyes looking up into mine. When had they opened? She was mouthing a word. I hadn't realized. The word was stop.

  I let go her throat, expecting her to gasp desperately for breath. She did not. Rather, she said, so softly I could barely hear it, 'Kiss me.'

  I am obliged to admit I don't know what I would have done with this invitation. But there came, at that moment, a sudden loud rapping at the door, followed by the rattling of a key being worked frantically in the lock. I released her immediately. In the space of a second, she retrieved the teapot from the floor and placed it on the table, from which she also seized the note I'd left there. We both faced the door.

  'I remember,' she whispered urgently to me, as the knob turned. 'I know who did it.'

  Chapter Twelve

  At noon the same day, September 1, Carl Jung was taken to lunch by Smith Ely Jelliffe - publisher, doctor, and professor of mental diseases at Fordham University - at a club on Fifty-third Street overlooking the park. Freud was not invited; neither was Ferenczi, nor Brill, nor Younger. Their exclusion did not perturb Jung. It was another mark, he felt, of his rising international stature. A less magnanimous man would have been crowing about such a thing, rubbing the invitation in the others' noses. But he, Jung, took his duty of charity seriously, so he concealed.

  It was painful, however, to have to hide so much. It had started the very first day out of Bremen. Jung had not actually lied, of course. That, he told himself, he would never do. But it was not his fault; they drove him to dissemble.

  For example, Freud and Ferenczi had booked second- class berths on the George Washington. Was he to blame? Not wanting to shame them, he had been obliged to say that, by the time he bought his ticket, only first-class cabins were available. Then there had been his dream the first night on board. Its true message was obvious - that he was surpassing Freud in insight and reputation - so, out of solicitude for Freud's sensitive pride, he asserted that the bones he discovered in the dream belonged to his wife, rather than to Freud. In fact, he had cleverly added that the bones belonged not only to his wife but also his wife's sister: he wanted to see how Freud would react to that, given the skeletons in Freud's own closet. These were trivialities, but they had laid the groundwork for the far greater dissimulation that had become necessary since his arrival in America.

  The lunch at Jelliffe's club was most gratifying. Nine or ten men sat at the oval table. Intermixed with knowledgeable scientific conversation and an excellent claret was a goodly dose of ribald humor, which Jung always enjoyed. The women's suffragette movement bore the brunt of the raillery. One of the men asked whether anyone had ever met a suffragette he could imagine bedding. The unanimous answer was no. Someone ought to notify these ladies, another gentleman said, that even if they got the vote it didn't mean anyone would sleep with them. All agreed that the best cure for a woman demanding the suffrage was a good healthy servicing; that treatment, however, was so unappetizing one might as well give them the vote instead.

  Jung was in his element. For once, there was no need to pretend to be less wealthy than one was. There was no obligation to deny one's ancestry. After the meal, the members repaired to a smoking room, where the conversation continued over cognac. Their ranks gradually thinned until Jung was left with only Jelliffe and three older men. One of these gentlemen now made a subtle signal; Jelliffe instantly rose to leave. Jung stood as well, assuming that Jelliffe s departure indicated his own. But Jelliffe informed him that the three gentlemen wanted the briefest of words with him alone and that a carriage would be waiting when they had done.

  In actual fact, Jelliffe was not a member of this club at all. He yearned to belong to it. The men with authority over the society and its membership were those now remaining with him. It was they who had told Jelliffe to bring Jung to them today.

  'Do sit down, Dr Jung,' said the man who had dismissed Jelliffe, gesturing toward a comfortable armchair with one of his elegant hands.

  Jung tried to remember the gentleman's name, but he had met so many, and was so unused to wine at lunch, he could not.

  'It's Dana,' the man said helpfully, his dark eyebrows setting off his silver hair. 'Charles Dana. I was just speaking of you, Jung, with my good friend Ochs over at the Times. He wants to do a story about you.'

  'A story?' asked Jung. 'I don't understand.'

  'In connection with the lectures we've arranged for you at Fordham next week. He wants an interview with you. He proposes a short biography - two full broadsheet pages.

  You'll be quite famous. I didn't know if you'd agree. I told him I'd ask.'

  'Why,' answered Jung, 'I - I don't -'

  'There is just one obstacle. Ochs' - Dana pronounced it Oaks - 'is afraid you are a Freudian. Doesn't want his paper associated with a - with a- Well, you know what they say about Freud.'

  'A sex-crazed degenerate,' said the portly man to the right, smoothing his muttonchop whiskers.

  'Does Freud actually believe what he writes?' asked the third gentleman, a balding fellow. 'That every girl he treats attempts to seduce him? Or what he says about feces - feces, for God's sake. Or about fastidious men wanting sex through the anus?'

  'What about boys wanting to penetrate their own mothers?' rejoined the portly man, with an expression of utmost disgust.

  'What about God?' asked Dana, tamping the tobacco from his pipe. 'Must be hard on you, Jung.'

  Jung was uncertain exactly what was being referred to. He didn't answer.

  'I know you, Jung,' said Dana. 'I know what you are. A Swiss. A Christian. A man of science, like us. And a man of passion. One who acts on his desires. A man who needs more than one woman to thrive. There is no need to hide such things here. These so-called men who don't act, who let their desires fester like sores, whose fathers were peddlers, who have always felt inferior to us - only they could dream up such vile, bestial fantasies, theorizing God and man into the sewer. It must be hard on you to be associated with that.'

  Jung was finding it increasingly difficult to absorb the flow of words. The alcohol must have gone to his head. This gentleman did seem to know him, but how? 'Sometimes it is,' Jung answered slowly.

  'I am not in the least anti-Semitic. You need only ask Sachs here.' He indicated the balding man on his left. 'On the contrary, I admire the Jews. Their secret is racial purity, a principle they have understood far better than we. It is what has made them the great race they are.' The man referred to as Sachs gave away nothing; the portly man merely pursed his fleshy lips. Dana continued: 'But last Sunday, when I looked up at our bleeding Savior and imagined this Viennese Jew saying our passion for Him is sexual, I found it difficult to pray. Very. I should think you might have encountered similar difficulties. Or are Freud's disciples required to give up the church?'

  'I go to church' was Jung's
awkward reply.

  'For myself,' said Dana, 'I can't say I see it: this rage for psychotherapeutics. The Emmanuels, the New Thought, mesmerism, Dr Quackenbos -'

  'Quackenbos,' harrumphed the muttonchops.

  'Eddyism,' Dana went on, 'psychoanalysis - they are all cults, to my thinking. But half the women in America are running around demanding it, and it's best they don't drink from the wrong well. They'll be drinking from yours, believe me, after they read about you in the Times. Well, the long and short of it is this: we can make you the most famous psychiatrist in America, but Ochs can't write you up unless you make clear in your lectures at Fordham - unmistakably clear - that you don't go in for the Freudian obscenities. Good afternoon, Dr Jung.'

  The rapping on the door of Miss Acton's hotel room continued as the doorknob turned this way and that. At last the door flew open, and in rushed five persons, three of whom I recognized: Mayor McClellan, Detective Littlemore, and George Banwell. The other two were a gentleman and lady of evident wealth.

  The man looked to be in his late forties, fair in complexion but sunburned and peeling, with a pointy chin, deeply receding hairline, and a white gauze bandage over most of his left eye. It was instantly clear that he was Miss Acton's father, although the long limbs that were so graceful on her frame looked effete on him, and the features so softly feminine in her case conveyed diffidence in his. The woman, whom I took to be Miss Acton's mother, was at most five feet tall. She was of greater girth than her husband, had a deal of jewelry and paint on her face, and wore shoes with dangerously high heels, presumably to add a few inches to her height. Possibly she had been attractive once. It was she who spoke first, crying out, 'Nora, you piteous, unlucky girl! I have been in agony since I heard the monstrous news. We have been riding for hours. Harcourt, are you just going to stand there?'

  Nora's father apologized to the stout woman, extended his arm to her, and conducted her safely to a chair, into which she dropped with a great cry of exhaustion. The mayor introduced me to Acton and his wife, Mildred. It turned out their party had just arrived in the lobby when someone called down to the front desk complaining about noises in Miss Acton's room. I assured them we were quite safe, rather wishing the teacup was not lying in pieces against the far wall. Their backs were to it; I think they didn't see.

  'Everything's going to be all right now, Nora,' said Mr Acton. 'The mayor tells me there has been nothing in the press, thank goodness.'

  'Why did I listen to you?' Mildred Acton asked her daughter. 'I said we should never have left you behind in New York. Didn't I say so, Harcourt? Do you see what has happened? I thought I would die when I heard. Biggs! Where is that Biggs? She will pack for you. We must get you out of here, Nora, at once. I do believe the rapist is here in this hotel. I have a sense for these things. The moment I walked in, I felt his eyes on me.'

  'On you, my dear?' asked Acton.

  I cannot say I observed in Miss Acton the warm affection or the sense of protection you might wish to see in a girl greeting her parents after a prolonged and eventful separation. Nor could I blame her, given the tenor of the remarks made to her so far. The odd thing was that Miss Acton had not yet said a word. She had made several starts at speaking, but none of these efforts had eventuated in speech. A furious influx of blood now came to her cheeks. Then I realized: the girl had lost her voice again. Or so I thought, until Miss Acton said, quietly and evenly, 'I have not been raped, Mama.'

  'Hush, Nora,' her father replied. 'That word is not spoken.'

  'You cannot know, poor thing!' her mother exclaimed. 'You have no memory of the crime. You will never know.'

  Now was the moment when, if she were going to, Miss Acton would have said that she had recovered her memory. She did not do so. Instead, the girl replied, 'I will stay here in the hotel to continue my treatment. I don't want to go home.'

  'Do you hear her?' cried her mother.

  'I will not feel safe at home,' said Miss Acton. 'The man who attacked me may be watching for me there. Mr McClellan, you said so yourself on Sunday.'

  'The girl is right,' the mayor replied. 'She is much safer in the hotel. The murderer does not know she is here.'

  I knew this to be false, because of the note Miss Acton received in the street. Miss Acton obviously knew the same. In fact, at the mayor's words I saw her right hand clench; a corner of the note was sticking out from her fist. Yet she said nothing. Instead, she looked from McClellan to her parents, as if he had quite vindicated her position. It came to me that she was avoiding Mr Banwell's scrutiny.

  Banwell had been eyeing Nora with a peculiar expression. Physically, he dominated the others. He was taller than anyone else in the room with the exception of myself and had a barrel chest. His dark hair was smoothed back with an unguent of some kind and graying handsomely at the temples. His gaze was fixed on Nora. It will seem preposterous, and another observer would no doubt have denied it, but the best way I can describe his expression is to say that, to me, he looked like he wished to do her violence. He now spoke, but his voice betrayed no such feeling. 'Surely the best thing is to get Nora out of the city,' he said with what sounded like gruff but genuine concern for her safety. 'Why not my country place? Clara can take her.'

  'I prefer to stay here,' said Nora, looking down.

  'Really?' replied Banwell. 'Your mother thinks the murderer is in the hotel. How can you be sure he isn't keeping watch on you even now?'

  Miss Acton's face reddened as Banwell spoke to her. Her whole body, to me, seemed tense with fear.

  I announced that I would be leaving. Miss Acton looked up at me anxiously. I added, as if just recalling something, 'Oh, Miss Acton, your prescription - for the sedative I mentioned. Here it is.' I withdrew a script from my pocket, quickly filled it out, and handed it to her. On it was written, Was it Banwell?

  She saw my message. She nodded to me, slightly but definitively.

  'Why don't you give that to me?' asked Banwell, narrowing his eyes on me. 'My man downstairs can run to the pharmacy right now.'

  'Very well,' I replied. From Miss Acton's hand, I took my note. I handed the latter to him. 'See if your man can fill that.'

  Banwell read it. 1 half expected him to crush it and glare at me menacingly, revealing himself like the villain in some cheap romance. Instead, he exclaimed, 'What the devil is this - Hold your tongue? You'd better have an explanation, young man.'

  'This is a warning Miss Acton received on the street this morning,' I said, 'as you well know, Mr Banwell, since you wrote it.' A stunned silence followed. 'Mr Mayor, Mr Littlemore: this man is the criminal you are looking for. Miss Acton remembered the attack on her just minutes before you came in. I advise you to arrest him at once.'

  'How dare you?' said Banwell.

  'What is this - this person?' asked Mildred Acton, referring to me. 'Where does he come from?'

  'Dr Younger,' said Mayor McClellan, 'you do not appreciate the gravity of a false accusation. Withdraw it. If Miss Acton has told you this, her memory is playing a trick on her.'

  'Mr Mayor, sir - ' began Detective Littlemore.

  'Not now, Littlemore,' the mayor said calmly. 'Doctor, you will withdraw your accusation, offer Mr Banwell an apology, and tell us what Miss Acton has said to you.'

  'But Your Honor - ' said the detective.

  'Littlemore!' the mayor barked so furiously it drove Littlemore back a step. 'Didn't you hear me?'

  'Mayor McClellan,' I broke in, 'I don't understand. I have just told you Miss Acton remembers the attack. Your own detective seems to have something confirmatory to add. Miss Acton has positively identified Mr Banwell as her assailant.'

  'We have only your word for that, Doctor - if that's what you are,' said Banwell. He looked hard at Miss Acton; it seemed to me he was laboring strenuously to restrain a powerful emotion. 'Nora, you know perfectly well I have done nothing to you. Tell them, Nora.'

  'Nora,' said the girl's mother, 'tell this young man he is under a misimpression.'

&nb
sp; 'Nora dear?' said her father.

  'Tell him, Nora,' said Banwell.

  'I won't tell him,' answered the girl, but that is all she said.

  'Mr Mayor,' I said, 'you cannot allow Miss Acton to be cross-questioned by the man who attacked her - a man who has already murdered another girl.'

  'Younger, I am convinced you mean well,' replied the mayor, 'but you are wrong. George Banwell and I were together Sunday night, when Elizabeth Riverford was murdered. He was with me - do you hear it, with me - all that evening and night and well into Monday morning as well. Two hundred fifty miles out of town. He could not have killed anyone.'

  In the library, after Jung's departure, curling tails of smoke wafted up to the ceiling. A servant removed glasses, replaced ashtrays, then quietly withdrew.

  'Do we have him?' asked the balding man, who had been referred to as Sachs.

  'Without doubt,' answered Dana. 'He is even weaker than I had imagined. And we have more than sufficient to destroy him in any event. Does Ochs have your remarks, Allen?'

  'Oh, yes,' answered the portly, sideburned gentleman with the thick lips. 'He will publish mine the same day he interviews the Swiss.'

  'What about Matteawan?' asked Sachs.

  'Leave that to me,' Dana replied. 'What remains is to block their other means of dissemination. Which, by tomorrow, we will have done.'

  Even after hearing the mayor exculpate him, I could not accept Banwell's innocence. Subjectively, that is. Objectively, I had no grounds for disbelief or protest.

  Nora refused to go home. Her father pleaded. Her mother was indignant at what she called the girl's obstinacy. The mayor resolved the situation. Now that he had seen the note, he said, it was clear the hotel was no longer safe. But the Actons' home could be secured. Indeed, it could be made safer than could a large hotel with its many entrances. He would station policemen outside the house, front and back, day and night. Moreover, he reminded Miss Acton, she was still a minor: under the law, he would be obliged to effectuate her father's wishes, even against her will.