The Interpretation Of Murder

by Jed Rubenfeld

  'Your husband believed he could make Acton prostitute his own daughter?'

  'Harcourt was not required actually to hand Nora over, Doctor. All my husband needed was for Harcourt to feel that his own happiness was so dependent on me that he would be averse, deeply averse, to any rift coming between his family and ours. That way, when the time came, he would turn a blind eye and a deaf ear.'

  I understood. After Mrs Banwell entered into relations with Mr Acton, George Banwell made his first advance on Nora. His strategy evidently worked. When Nora protested to her father and begged him to send Banwell away, Mr Acton chose to disbelieve and scold her - just as if, Nora had told me, she had done something wrong. And she had: she had threatened his precious arrangement with Mrs Banwell.

  'You must think what it is like,' Mrs Banwell added, 'for a man such as Harcourt Acton to be offered what he has only dreamed of - indeed, what he never had the courage even to dream of. I truly believe the man would have done anything I asked.'

  I felt a peculiar pressure just below my sternum. 'Did your husband get what he wanted?'

  'Are you asking for professional reasons, Doctor?'

  'Of course.'

  'Of course. The answer, I believe, is no. Not yet, at any rate.' She returned the photograph of Nora to its place on the mantel, beside a picture of the girl's parents. 'In any event, Doctor, Nora is aware that I am - unhappy - in my marriage. I believe she is now trying to rescue me.'

  'How?'

  'Nora has a very fertile imagination. You must remember: even though to your man's eyes, Nora looks like a woman, a prize ready to be possessed, she is still just a child. A child whose parents have never had the slightest understanding of her. An only child. Nora has lived almost all her life in a world of her own.'

  'You said she was trying to rescue you. How?'

  'She may believe she can bring George down by telling the police he attacked her. She may even believe he did. Possibly we have overwhelmed the poor thing, and she is suffering from a delusion.'

  'Or possibly your husband did attack her.'

  'I don't say he is incapable of it. Far from it. My husband is capable of nearly anything. But in this case, it happens he didn't. George came home last night just after I returned from the party. It was eleven-thirty. Nora says she did not go to her room until quarter to twelve.'

  'Your husband might have left home in the night, Mrs Banwell.'

  'Yes, I know, he might well have on another night, but last night he didn't. He was too busy, you see, having his way with me. All night long.' She smiled, a very small, ironic, perfect smile, and rubbed one of her wrists unconsciously. Her long sleeves concealed her wrists, but she saw me looking. She took a deep breath. 'You might as well see.'

  She came very near me, so near I became aware of the diamonds glinting in her earlobes and the fragrant smell of her hair. She pushed up her sleeves a little and revealed a painful rawness, of fresh origin, on both wrists. I have heard there are men who bind women for pleasure. I cannot be sure this was the meaning of the bruised skin Mrs Banwell showed me, but certainly it was the picture that came to mind.

  She laughed lightly. The sound was wry, not bitter. 'I am a fallen woman, Doctor, and at the same time a virgin. Have you ever heard of such a thing?'

  'Mrs Banwell, I am not a lawyer, but I believe you have more than ample grounds for divorce. Indeed, you may not be legally married at all, since there was never consummation.'

  'Divorce? You don't know George. He would sooner kill me than let me go.' She smiled again. I could not help imagining what it would feel like to kiss her. 'And who would have me, Doctor, even if I could get away? What man would touch me, knowing what I have done?'

  'Any man,' I said.

  'You are kind, but you are lying.' She looked up at me. 'You are lying cruelly. You could be touching me right now. But you never would.'

  I gazed down at her flawless, irredeemably charming features. 'No, Mrs Banwell, I never would. But not for the reasons you say.'

  At that moment, Nora Acton appeared at the door.

  Detective Littlemore's stride, after his interview with the coroner, lacked its customary snappiness. The news that Harry Thaw was still locked up in an asylum had come as a blow to him. Ever since he read the Thaw transcript, Littlemore had imagined that this case might be bigger than anybody realized and he might be on the verge of breaking it open. Now he didn't know if there was a case at all.

  The detective had formed a high opinion of Mr Hugel, despite all his outbursts and idiosyncracies. Littlemore felt sure Hugel could solve the case. The police weren't supposed to just give up. The coroner in particular wasn't supposed to. He was too smart.

  Littlemore believed in the police force. He had been on it for eight years, ever since he lied about his age in order to become a junior beat patrolman. It was the first real job he ever had, and he stuck to it. He loved living in the police barracks when he first joined up. He loved eating with the other cops, listening to their stories. He knew there were some rotten apples, but he thought they were the exceptions. If you told him, for example, that his hero Sergeant Becker shook down every brothel and casino in the Tenderloin for protection money, Littlemore would have thought you were pulling his leg. If you told him the new police commissioner wanted in on the game, he would have said you were crazy. In short, the detective looked up to his superiors on the force, and Hugel had let him down.

  But Littlemore never turned against someone who disappointed him. His reaction was the opposite. He wanted to bring the coroner back on board. He needed to find something that would convince the coroner the case was still alive. Hugel had been certain that Banwell was the perpetrator from the start; maybe he was right all along.

  To be sure, Littlemore believed in Mayor McClellan even more than he believed in Coroner Hugel, and the mayor had provided Banwell with a firm alibi on the night Miss Riverford was killed. But maybe Banwell had an accomplice - maybe a Chinese accomplice. Hadn't Banwell himself hired Chong Sing to work in the laundry of the Balmoral? And now it turned out that Miss Riverford's murderer might not have been Miss Acton's assailant: that's what Mr Hugel had just told him. So maybe Banwell's accomplice killed Miss Riverford, and Banwell attacked Miss Acton. It occurred to Littlemore that, based on this theory, Hugel would still have made a mistake. But the detective, while holding an elevated view of the coroner's powers, didn't regard him as infallible. And Hugel, Littlemore figured, wouldn't mind being wrong on a detail if he was right on the whole shebang.

  So the detective, regaining the spring in his step, knew he had work to do. First, he went up the street to headquarters and found Louis Riviere in his basement darkroom. Littlemore asked Riviere if he could make a reverse image of the photograph that showed the mark on Elizabeth Riverford's neck. The Frenchman told him to come back at the end of the day to pick it up. 'And can you enlarge it for me too, Louie?' Littlemore asked.

  'Why not?' replied Riviere. 'The sun is good.'

  Next the detective headed uptown. He rode the train to Forty-second Street and from there strolled over to Susie Merrill's house. No one answered, so he took up a position down the block and across the street. An hour later, the hefty Susie let herself out, wearing another of her enormous hats, this one boasting a fruit medley. Littlemore followed her to a Child's Lunch Room on Broadway. She sat down at a booth alone. Littlemore waited until she was served to see if anyone else was going to show up. As Mrs Merrill was attacking her plate of corned beef hash, Littlemore slipped into the seat across from her.

  'Hello, Susie,' he said. 'I found it - what you wanted me to find.'

  'What are you doing here? Get out. I told you to keep me out of it.'

  'No, you didn't.'

  'Well, I'm telling you now,' said Susie. 'You want to get us both killed?'

  'By who, Susie? Thaw's in a loony bin upstate.'

  'Oh, yeah?'

  'Yeah.'

  'I guess he can't be your murderer then,' she observed.
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br />   'I guess not.'

  'So there's nothing to talk about, is there?'

  'Don't hold out on me, Susie.'

  'You want to get yourself killed, that's fine with me, but leave me out of it.' Mrs Merrill rose, putting thirty cents on the table: a nickel for her coffee, twenty cents for her hash and poached egg, another nickel for the waitress. 'I've got a baby in the house,' she said.

  Littlemore grabbed her arm. 'Think it over, Susie, I want answers, and I'll be coming back for them.'

  Chapter Eighteen

  Clara Banwell didn't show any of the discomfort I felt under Nora's frozen gaze. Filling the air with an easy flow of words, she said her good-byes, acting for all the world as if she and I had not been caught standing several inches too close together. She extended her hand to me, kissed Nora on the cheek, and thoughtfully added that we need not see her to the door; she didn't want to delay Nora's treatment a moment longer. Seconds later, I heard the front door close behind her.

  Nora stood in the same spot Mrs Banwell had occupied minutes before. I had no business noticing her looks, given the harrowing events of the night before, but I couldn't help myself. It was absurd. One could walk for miles in New York City - as I had that morning - or spend a month at the Grand Central Station, and never see a single woman of surpassing physical grace. Yet in the space of five minutes, two had stood before me in the Actons' sitting room. But what a contrast between them.

  Nora wore no adornments, no jewelry, no embroidered fabric. She carried no parasol; she had no veil. She wore a simple white blouse, its sleeves ending at the elbow, tucked at her impossibly narrow waist into a sky-blue pleated skirt. The top of her shirt was gently scooped, revealing the delicate structure of her collarbone and her long, lovely neck. This neck was now almost unblemished, the bruises faded. Her blond hair was pulled back as always into a braid reaching almost to her waist. She was only, as Mrs Banwell had said, a girl. Her youth cried out from every plane and curve of her, especially in the high color of her cheeks and eyes, which radiated with youth's hope, its freshness, and, I should add, its fury.

  'I hate you more than anyone else I have ever known,' she said to me.

  So: I was now, more than ever, hoisted into the position of her father. As if led by some inexorable fate, she had come upon me and Clara Banwell closeted in a study just as she had come upon her father and Clara Banwell consorting in another study three years ago. The signal difference - that there was nothing between Mrs Banwell and myself - was evidently lost on her. That was unsurprising. It was not I she was staring angrily at now. It was her father, dressed in my clothes. Had I been seeking to cement the analytic transference, I could not have devised a better stratagem. Had I been hoping to bring her analysis to a climax, I could not have asked for a luckier conspiracy of events. I now had the opportunity - and the duty - to try to show Nora the erroneous transposition occurring in her mind, so that she could recognize how the rage she imagined she felt toward me was actually the misdirected anger she harbored for her father.

  In other words, I was obliged to bury my own emotion. I had to conceal the least shred of feeling I had for her, no matter how genuine, no matter how overpowering. 'Then I am at a disadvantage, Miss Acton,' I replied, 'because I love you more than anyone else I have ever known.'

  A perfect silence enveloped us for several heartbeats.

  'You do?' she asked.

  'Yes.'

  'But you and Clara were -'

  'We weren't. I swear it.'

  'You weren't?' •No."

  Nora began to breathe hard. Too hard: her outer clothes were not tight, but she seemed to be wearing something underneath that was. Her respiration was entirely concentrated in the upper part of her torso. Concerned she might faint, I guided her to the front door and opened it. She needed air. Across the street was the dappled grove of Gramercy Park. Nora stepped outside. I suggested that her parents ought to know if she was going out.

  'Why?' she asked me. 'We could just go to the park.'

  We crossed the street and, at one of the wrought-iron gates, Nora produced from her purse a gold and black key. There was an awkward moment when I helped her through the gate: a decision had to be made about whether I would offer her my arm as we walked. I managed not to.

  Therapeutically speaking, I was in a great deal of trouble. I did not fear for myself, although it was remarkable that my feelings for this girl seemed impervious to the fact that she might well be unstable or even mentally ill. If Nora had actually burned herself, there were two possibilities. Either she did it with full conscious deliberation and was lying to the world, or she did it in a dissociated state, hypnoid or somnambulistic, which was shut off from the rest of her consciousness. On the whole, I think I preferred the former alternative, but neither one was attractive.

  I did not regret having confessed my feelings to her. The circumstances forced my hand. But while declaring my love for her might have been honorable, acting on it would be the opposite. The lowest-bred cur would not take advantage of a girl in her condition. I had to find a way to let her know this. I had to extricate myself from the role of lover into which I had just stumbled and try to become her physician again.

  'Miss Acton,' I said.

  'Won't you call me Nora, Doctor?'

  'No.'

  'Why?'

  'Because I am still your doctor. You can't be Nora to me. You are my patient.' I wasn't sure how she would take that, but I went on. 'Tell me what happened last night. No, wait: you said in the hotel yesterday that your memory of Monday's attack had come back to you. Tell me first what you remember about that.'

  'Must I?'

  'Yes.'

  She asked if we could sit, and we found a bench in a secluded corner. She still did not know, she said, how it all began or how she got there. That part of her memory remained missing. What she remembered was being tied up in the dark in her parents' bedroom. She was standing, bound by the wrists to something overhead. She was wearing only her slip. All the curtains and blinds were drawn.

  The man was behind her. He had tied a soft piece of fabric - perhaps silk - around her throat and was pulling it so tight she couldn't breathe, much less call out. He was also hitting her with a strap or crop of some kind. It stung but it was not unbearable - more like a spanking. It was the silk around her throat that scared her; she thought he meant to kill her. But every time she was on the verge of passing out, he would relax the stranglehold ever so slightly, just enough to let her catch her breath.

  He began to strike her much harder. It became so painful she thought she couldn't stand it. Then he dropped the whip, stepped behind her, so close she could feel his harsh breath on her shoulders, and put a hand on her. She didn't say where; I didn't ask. At the same time, a part of his body - 'a hard part,' she said - came into contact with her hip. The man made an ugly sound, and then he made a mistake; the tie around her throat suddenly went slack. She took a deep breath and screamed - screamed as hard and as long as she could. She must have passed out. The next thing she knew, Mrs Biggs was by her side.

  Nora maintained her composure while recounting all this, her hands folded in her lap. Without changing attitude, she asked, 'Are you disgusted by me?'

  'No,' I said. 'In your memory of the attack, was the man Banwell?'

  'I thought so. But the mayor said -'

  'The mayor said Banwell was with him Sunday night, when the other girl was murdered. If you remember Banwell being your attacker, you must say so.'

  'I don't know,' said Nora plaintively. 'I think so. I don't know. He was behind me the whole time.'

  'Tell me about last night,' I said.

  She poured out the story of the intruder in her bedroom. This time, she said, she was certain it was Banwell. Toward the end, however, she turned away from me once more. Was there something she wasn't saying? 'I don't even own any lipstick,' she concluded earnestly. 'And that horrible thing they found in my closet. Where am I supposed to have gotten that?'


  I made the obvious point: 'You are wearing makeup now.' There was the lightest hint of gloss on her lips, and the faintest blush on her cheeks.

  'But this is Clara's!' she cried. 'She put it on me. She said it would suit me.'

  We sat in silence for a time.

  At last, she spoke. 'You don't believe a word I've said.'

  'I don't believe you would lie to me.'

  'But I would,' she answered. 'I have.'

  'When?'

  'When I said I hated you,' she replied, after a long pause.

  'Tell me what you're keeping back.'

  'What do you mean?' she asked.

  'There is something else about last night - something that makes you doubt yourself.'

  'How do you know?' she demanded.

  'Just tell me.'

  Reluctantly, she confessed that there was one inexplicable piece of the episode. Her vantage point, as she saw the awful event unfold, was not from her own eye level but from a place above both herself and the intruder. She actually saw herself lying on the bed as if she were an observer of the scene, not the victim. 'How is that possible, Doctor?' she cried softly. 'It's not possible, is it?'

  I wanted to console her, but what I had to say was not likely to be comforting. 'What you are describing is how we see things sometimes in dreams.'

  'But if I dreamt it, how did I get burned?' she whispered. 'I didn't burn myself, did I? Did I?'

  I could not answer. I was picturing an even worse scenario. Could she also have inflicted those terrible wounds - the first set of wounds - on herself? I tried to imagine her drawing a knife or razor along her own soft skin, making it bleed. It was impossible for me to believe.

  From far downtown, a roar of human voices suddenly erupted in a great distant cheer. Nora asked what it could be. I said it was probably the strikers. A march had been promised by union leaders in the aftermath of some labor trouble downtown yesterday. A notorious firebrand called Gompers vowed a strike that would bring the city's industry to a halt.