The Interpretation Of Murder

by Jed Rubenfeld

  I thought Miss Acton would burst out in some way. Instead she gave in, but only on the condition that she be permitted to continue her medical treatment tomorrow morning. 'Especially,' she added, 'now that I know my memory is not to be trusted.' This she said with apparent sincerity, but it was impossible to say whether she was faulting the trustworthiness of her memory or rebuking those who refused to trust it.

  She did not look at me after that, not even once. The silent ride down the elevator was excruciating, but Miss Acton held herself with a dignity lacking in her mother, who appeared to regard everything she encountered as a personal affront. An appointment was made for me to visit their house on Gramercy Park early the next day, and they departed in an automobile downtown. McClellan did the same. Banwell, casting a last glance in my direction, by no means benevolent, departed in a horse-drawn carriage, leaving Detective Littlemore and me on the sidewalk.

  He turned to me. 'She told you it was Banwell?'

  'Yes,' I said.

  'And you believe her, don't you?'

  'I do.'

  'Can I ask you something?' said Littlemore. 'Say a girl loses her memory. Just comes up empty. Then her memory comes back. Can you put money on it, when it comes back? Can you bank on it?'

  'No,' I replied. 'It could be false. It could be fantasy, mistaken for memory.'

  'But you believe her?'

  'Yes.'

  'So what are you saying, Doc?'

  'I don't know what I'm saying,' I said. 'Can I ask you something, Detective? What were you going to tell the mayor in Miss Acton's room?'

  'I just wanted to remind him that Coroner Hugel - he's in charge of the case - thought Banwell was the killer too.'

  'Thought so?' I asked. 'You mean he doesn't anymore?'

  'Well, he can't anymore, not after what the mayor just said,' Littlemore replied.

  'Couldn't Banwell have attacked Miss Acton even if someone else killed the other girl?'

  'Nope,' answered the detective. 'We've got proof. It was the same guy both times.'

  I went back inside, unsure of myself, my patient, my situation. Was it conceivable that McClellan was covering for Banwell? Would Nora be safe at her house? The front clerk called out my name. There was a letter for me, just delivered. It proved to be from G. Stanley Hall, president of Clark University. The letter was long - and deeply disturbing.

  Outside the Hotel Manhattan, Detective Littlemore made for the cabstand.

  From the old hack last night, Littlemore knew that the black-haired man - the one who left the Balmoral at midnight on Sunday - had climbed into a red and green gas-powered taxi in front of the Hotel Manhattan. That piece of information told the detective a good deal. Only a decade previously, every taxi in Manhattan had been horse-drawn. By 1900, a hundred motorized taxis tooled around the city, but these were electrically powered. Weighed down by their eight-hundred-pound batteries, the electric taxis were popular but ponderous; passengers occasionally had to get out and help push when going up the rare steep incline. In 1907, the New York Taxicab Company launched the first fleet of gasoline cars for hire, equipped with meters so that riders could see the fare. These cabs were instant hits - hits, that is, with the better class, who alone could afford the fifty-cents-per-mile charge - and quickly came to outnumber all other cabs, electric and horse, in the city. You always knew a New York Taxicab when you saw one, because of its distinctive red and green paneling.

  Several of these vehicles were parked at the Hotel Manhattan cabstand. The drivers told Littlemore to try the Allen garage on Fifty-seventh Street, between Eleventh and Twelfth avenues, where New York Taxicab had its main office and where he could easily find out who had been working the graveyard shift on Sunday. The detective's luck was good. Two hours later, he had answers. A driver named Luria had picked up a black-haired man in front of the Hotel Manhattan after midnight last Sunday. Luria remembered it distinctly, because the man had come not out of the hotel but out of a hackney. Littlemore also learned where the black-haired man had gone, and the detective went to that destination - a private house - himself. There his luck ran out.

  The house was on Fortieth just off Broadway. It was a two-story affair, with a gaudy knocker and thick red curtains on its windows. Littlemore had to knock five or six times before an attractive young woman answered. The girl was considerably underdressed for the middle of the afternoon. When Littlemore explained that he was a police detective, she rolled her eyes and told him to wait.

  He was shown to a parlor with thick Oriental carpets on the floor, a dazzling array of mirrors on the walls, and a smother of purple velour on the furniture. The odor of tobacco and alcohol clung to the folds of the curtains. A baby was crying upstairs. Five minutes later, another woman, older and quite fat, came down the red-carpeted stairs in a claret-colored robe.

  'You've got a lot of nerve,' said this woman, who introduced herself as Susan Merrill - Mrs Susan Merrill. From a wall safe concealed behind a mirror, she withdrew a carved iron strongbox, which she opened with a key. She counted out fifty dollars. 'Here. Now get out. I'm already late.'

  'I don't want your money, ma'am,' said Littlemore.

  'Oh, don't tell me. You make me sick, all of you. Greta, get back in here.' The underdressed girl lounged in, yawning. Although it was a quarter past three, she had in fact been asleep until Littlemore knocked at the door. 'Greta, the detective doesn't want our money. Take him to the green room. Make it quick, mister.'

  'I'm not here for that either, ma'am,' said Littlemore. 'I just want to ask you a question. There was a guy who came here late Sunday night. I'm trying to find him.'

  Mrs Merrill eyed the detective dubiously. 'Oh, so now you want my customers? What are you going to do, shake them down too?'

  'You must know some bad policemen,' said Littlemore.

  'Is there any other kind?'

  'A girl was killed Sunday night,' Littlemore answered. 'The guy who did it whipped her. Tied her up, cut her up pretty good too. Then he strangled her. I want that guy. That's it.'

  The woman drew her burgundy robe around her shoulders. She restored her money to the strongbox and shut it. 'Was she a streetwalker?'

  'No,' said the detective. 'Rich girl. Really rich. Lived in a fancy building uptown.'

  'Well, isn't that a shame. What's it got to do with me?'

  'This guy who came here,' Littlemore answered. 'We think he might be the killer.'

  'Do you have any idea, Detective, how many men come through here on a Sunday night?'

  'This guy would have been by himself. Tall, black hair, carrying a black case or bag or something.'

  'Greta, do you remember anybody like that?'

  'Let me think,' mused the dreamy Greta. 'No. Nobody.'

  'Well, what do you want from me?' said Mrs Merrill. 'You heard her.'

  'But the guy came here, ma'am. The cabbie left him off right outside your door.'

  'Left him off? That doesn't mean he came in. I'm not the only house on the block.'

  Littlemore nodded slowly. It seemed to him that Greta was a little too blase, and Mrs Merrill a little too eager to see him leave.

  Chapter Thirteen

  She had asked me to kiss her.

  I was walking across town on Forty-second Street, but in my mind's eye I kept seeing Nora Acton's parted lips. I kept feeling her soft throat in my hands. I heard her whisper those two words.

  President Hall's letter was in my vest pocket. I should have had only one thought in my head: how to deal with the potential ruination not only of next week's conference at Clark but of Dr Freud's entire reputation, at least in America. All I could see, however, was Miss Acton's mouth and closed eyes.

  I didn't fool myself. I knew what her feelings for me were. I had seen it before, too many times. One of my Worcester patients, a girl named Rachel, used to insist on disrobing down to her waist at every analytic session. Each time she offered a new reason: an irregular heartbeat, a rib she feared broken, a throbbing pain in her lower ba
ck. And Rachel was just one of many. In all these cases I had never resisted temptation - because I had never been tempted. On the contrary, the emergence of seductive machinations in my analysands struck me as macabre.

  Had my patients been more attractive, I doubt their behavior would have inspired in me the same feelings of unwholesomeness. I have no particular virtue. But these women weren't attractive. Most of them were old enough to be my mother. Their desire repulsed me. Rachel was different. She was appealing: long legs, dark eyes - a little close-set, to be sure - and a figure that would have been called good, or better than good. But she was aggressively neurotic, which has never enticed me.

  I used to imagine other girls, prettier ones, consulting me. I used to imagine indescribable - but not impossible - events in my office. Thus it came to pass that whenever a new psychoanalytic patient first called on me, I found myself assessing her comeliness. As a result, I began to repulse myself, to the point where I wondered if I ought to continue holding myself out as an analyst. I hadn't taken on a new analytic patient all this summer - until Miss Acton.

  And now she had invited me to kiss her. There was no hiding, from myself, what I wanted to do with her. I had never experienced so violent a desire to overpower, to possess. I very much doubted I was in the throes of the counter-transference. To be candid, I had felt the same desire practically the first instant I laid eyes on Miss Acton. But for her the case was clearly different. She was not just recovering from the trauma of a physical attack. More than this, the girl was suffering a transference of the most virulent strain.

  She had shown every sign of disliking me until the moment when she felt her suppressed memories flooding back, released by the physical pressure I had applied to her neck. At that moment, I became for her some kind of masterful figure. Before then, dislike was too mild a term. She hated me; she said so. After that moment, she wanted to give herself to me - or so she thought. For it was plain as newsprint, sorry though I was to admit it, that this love she felt, if love it could be called, was an artifact, a fiction created by the intensity of the analytic encounter.

  Although I have no memory of crossing Sixth or Seventh Avenue, I found myself abruptly in the middle of Times Square. I went to the roof garden at Hammerstein's Victoria, where I was to have met Freud and the others for lunch. The roof garden was a theater in its own right, with a raised stage, terraces, box seats, and a roof of its own fifty feet overhead. The show, a high-wire act, was still going. The tightrope artist was a bonneted French girl, clad in a sky-blue dress and blue stockings. Each time she threw out her parasol for balance, the well-dressed women in the audience would scream in unison. I have never understood why audiences react that way: surely the person on the high wire is only pretending to be in danger.

  I couldn't find the others. I was obviously too late; they must have gone on. So I went back up to Brill's building on Central Park West, where I knew they would eventually return. No one answered the buzzer. I crossed the street and took a seat on a bench, quite by myself, Central Park behind me. From my briefcase I pulled out Hall's letter. After rereading it at least a half dozen times, I finally put it away and took out some other reading matter - I need hardly say what it was.

  'You have them?' Coroner Hugel demanded of Louis Riviere, head of photographic facilities, in the basement of police headquarters.

  'I am varnishing now,' called out Riviere, standing over a sink in his darkroom.

  'But I left the plates for you at seven this morning,' Hugel protested. 'Surely they're ready.'

  'Be tranquil, if you please,' said Riviere, switching on a light. 'Come in. You can look at them.'

  Hugel entered the darkroom and pored over the pictures with nervous excitement. He went through the plates rapidly, one by one, casting aside those in which he was not interested. Then he stopped, gazing at a close-up of the girl's neck, showing a prominent circular mark.

  'What's this, here, on the girl's throat?' he asked.

  'A bruise, no?' said Riviere.

  'No ordinary bruise would be so perfectly circular,' the coroner replied, taking off his glasses and bringing the picture within an inch of his face. The photograph showed a grainy, round black spot against an almost white neck. 'Louis, where is your glass?'

  Riviere produced what looked like an inverted shot glass. The coroner snatched it from his hands, placed it on the photograph where the dark spot was, and put his eye to it. 'I have him!' he cried. 'I have him!'

  From outside the darkroom came Detective Littlemore s voice. 'What is it, Mr Hugel?'

  'Littlemore,' said Hugel, 'you're here. Excellent.'

  'You asked me to come, Mr Hugel.'

  'Yes, and now you'll see why,' said the coroner, gesturing for Littlemore to look through Riviere's magnifying glass. The detective complied. Under magnification, the grainy lines inside the black circle resolved into a more distinct figuring.

  'Say,' said Littlemore, 'are those letters?'

  'They are indeed,' replied the coroner triumphantly. 'Two letters.'

  'There's something funny about them,' Littlemore went on. 'They don't look right. The second one could be a J. The first one - I don't know.'

  'They don't look right because they are backward, Mr Littlemore,' said the coroner. 'Louis, explain to the detective why the letters are backward.'

  Riviere looked through the glass. 'I see them: two letters, interlocking. If they are backward, then the one on the right, which Monsieur Littlemore called J, is not J but G.'

  'Correct,' said the coroner.

  'But why,' Riviere asked, 'should the writing be backward?'

  'Because, gentlemen, it is an imprint left on the girl's neck by the murderer's tiepin.' Hugel paused for dramatic effect. 'Recall that the murderer used his own silk tie to strangle Miss Riverford. He was clever enough to remove that tie from the murder scene. But he made one mistake. On his tie, when he committed the act, was his pin - a pin embossed with his own monogram. By chance, the pin was in direct contact with the soft, sensitive skin of the girl's throat. Because of the extreme and lengthy pressure, the monogram left an impression on her neck, just as a tight ring will leave an indentation on the finger. This imprint, gentlemen, records the murderer's initials as definitively as if he had left us a calling card, except in mirror image. The letter on the right is a reverse G, because G is the first initial of the man who killed Elizabeth Riverford. The letter on the left is a reverse B, because that man was George Banwell. Now we know why he had to steal her body from the morgue. He saw the telltale bruise on her neck and knew I would eventually decipher it. What he did not foresee was that stealing the corpse would be useless - because of this photograph!'

  'Mr Hugel, sir?' said Detective Littlemore.

  The coroner heaved a sigh. 'Shall I explain it again, Detective?'

  'Banwell didn't do it, Mr Hugel,' Littlemore said. 'He's got an alibi.'

  'Impossible,' said Hugel. 'His apartment is on the same floor of the very same building. The murder occurred between midnight and two on a Sunday. Banwell would have returned from any engagement before that.'

  'He's got an alibi,' Littlemore repeated, 'and what an alibi. He was with the mayor all Sunday night until early Monday morning - out of town.'

  'What?' said the coroner.

  'There is another flaw in your argument,' interjected Riviere. 'You are not so familiar with photographs as I. You took these pictures yourself?'

  'Yes,' replied the coroner, frowning. 'Why?'

  'These are ferrotypes. Most retrograde. You are fortunate I keep a supply of iron sulfate. The image you have here differs from the reality. Left is right, and right is left.'

  'What?' said Hugel again.

  'A reverse image. So if the mark on the girl's neck is the reverse of the true monogram, then the photograph is the reverse of the reverse.'

  'A double reverse?' asked Littlemore.

  'A double negative,' said Riviere. 'And a double negative is a positive. Meaning that this picture
shows the monogram as it would actually look, not a reverse of it.'

  'It can't be,' cried Hugel, more injured than disbelieving, as if Littlemore and Riviere were deliberately trying to rob him.

  'But undoubtedly it is, Monsieur Hugel,' said Riviere.

  'So that was a J,' said Detective Littlemore. 'The guy's named Johnson or something. What's the first letter?'

  Riviere put his eye to the glass again. 'It does not look like a letter at all. But it is possibly an E, I would like to say - or no, maybe a C.'

  'Charles Johnson,' said the detective.

  The coroner only stood where he was, repeating, 'It can't be.'

  At last a taxi pulled up at Brill's building, and the four men - Freud, Brill, Ferenczi, and Jones - piled out. It turned out they had gone to a moving-picture show after lunch, a cops-and-robbers affair with wild chases. Ferenczi could not stop talking about it. He had, Brill told me, actually dived out of his seat when a locomotive appeared to steam straight at the audience; it was his first motion picture.

  Freud asked me if I wanted to take an hour in the park with him to report on Miss Acton. I said I would like nothing more but that something else had come up; I had received unpleasant news in the post.

  'You're not the only one,' said Brill. 'Jones got a wire this morning from Morton Prince up in Boston. He was arrested yesterday.'

  'Dr Prince?' I was shocked.

  'On obscenity charges,' Brill continued. 'The obscenity in question: two articles he was about to publish describing cures of hysteria effected through the psychoanalytic method.'

  'I shouldn't worry about Prince,' said Jones. 'He was mayor of Boston once, you know. He'll come out right.'

  Morton Prince was never mayor of Boston - his father was - but Jones was so definite I didn't want to embarrass him. Instead I asked, 'How could the police know what Prince was planning to publish?'