The Interpretation Of Murder

by Jed Rubenfeld

  'They have every right to strike,' said Nora, clearly eager to be distracted. 'The capitalists should be ashamed of themselves, employing those people without paying them enough to feed their families. Have you seen the homes in which they live?'

  She described to me how, all last spring, Clara Banwell and she had visited families in the tenements of the Lower East Side. It had been Clara's idea. That was how, said Nora, she had met Elsie Sigel with the Chinaman whom Detective Littlemore had been asking about.

  'Elsie Sigel?' I repeated. Aunt Mamie had mentioned Miss Sigel to me at her gala. 'Who has run off to Washington?'

  'Yes,' said Nora. 'I thought her very foolish to be doing missionary work when people are dying for want of food and shelter. And Elsie was working only with men, when it is the women and children who are really suffering.' Clara, Nora explained to me, had made a special point of calling on those families where the men had run off or been killed in work accidents. Clara and Nora got to know many such families on their visits, spending hours in their homes. Nora would care for the little ones while Clara befriended the women and the more grown-up children. They started visiting these families once a week, bringing them food and necessaries. Twice they had taken babies to the hospital, saving them from serious disease or even death. Once, Nora told me more darkly, a girl had gone missing; Clara and she visited every police station and hospital downtown, finally finding the girl in the morgue. The medical examiner said the girl had been raped. The girl's mother had no one to comfort or support her; Clara did both. Nora had seen unthinkable squalor that summer, but also - or so I guessed - a warmth of familial love previously unknown to her.

  When she concluded, Nora and I sat looking at each other. Without warning, she said, 'Would you kiss me if I asked you?'

  'Don't ask me, Miss Acton,' I said.

  She took my hand and drew it toward her, touching the back of my fingers to her cheek.

  'No,' I said sharply. She let go at once. Everything was my fault. I had given her every reason to believe she could take the liberty she had just taken. Now I had pulled the rug out from under her. 'You must believe me,' I told her. 'There is nothing I would like more. But I can't. I would be taking advantage of you.'

  'I want you to take advantage of me,' she said.

  'No.'

  'Because I am seventeen?'

  'Because you are my patient. Listen to me. The feelings you may think you have for me - you must not believe in them. They aren't real. They are an artifact of your analysis. It happens to every single patient who is psychoanalyzed.'

  She looked at me as if I must be joking. 'You think your stupid questions have made me favor you?'

  'Think of it. One moment you feel indifference toward me. Then rage. Then jealousy. Then - something else. But it's not me. It's nothing I have done. It's nothing I am. How could it be? You don't know me. You don't know the first thing about me. All these feelings come from elsewhere in your life. They surface because of these stupid questions I ask you. But they belong elsewhere. They are feelings you have for someone else, not me.'

  'You think I am in love with someone else? Who? Not George Banwell?'

  'You might have been.'

  'Never.' She made a genuinely disgusted face. 'I detest him.'

  I took the plunge. I hated taking it - because I expected she would henceforth regard me with revulsion - and my timing was all wrong, but it was still my obligation. 'Dr Freud has a theory, Miss Acton. It may apply to you.'

  'What theory?' She was growing increasingly vexed.

  'I warn you, it is distasteful in the extreme. He believes that all of us, from a very early age, harbor - that we secretly wish - well, in your case, he believes that when you saw Mrs Banwell with your father, when you saw her kneeling before your father and - a - engaging with him in -'

  'You don't have to say it,' she broke in.

  'He believes you felt jealous.'

  She stared at me blankly.

  I was having trouble making myself clear. 'Directly, physically jealous. What I mean is, Dr Freud believes that when you saw what Mrs Banwell was doing to your father, you wished you were the one who - that you had fantasies of being the one who -'

  'Stop!' she cried out. She put her hands over her ears.

  'I'm sorry.'

  'How can he know that?' She was aghast. Her hands now covered her mouth.

  I registered this reaction. I heard her words. But I tried to believe I hadn't. I wanted to say, I must be hearing things; I actually thought for a moment you asked how Freud knew.

  'I never told anyone that,' she whispered, turning scarlet all over. 'Not anyone. How could he possibly know?'

  I could only stare at her blankly, as she had stared at me a moment before.

  'Oh, I am vile! ' she cried. She ran away, back toward her house.

  After leaving Child's, Littlemore hoofed it over to the Forty-seventh Street police station, to see if either Chong Sing or William Leon had been collared. Both men had indeed been arrested - a hundred times, Captain Post told the detective irritably. Within hours of the perpetrators' descriptions going out, dozens of calls had come in, from all over the city and even from Jersey, from people claiming to have spotted Chong. With Leon it was even worse. Every Chinaman in a suit and tie was William Leon.

  'Jack Reardon's been running around town all day like his head was chopped off,' said Captain Post, referring to the officer who, having been present with Littlemore when Miss Sigel's body was discovered, was the only man Post had who had actually seen the elusive Chong Sing. Reardon had been dispatched to police stations all over town, wherever another 'Mr Chong' had been picked up, and everywhere he went, Reardon discovered another false arrest. 'It's no good. We locked up half of Chinatown, and we still didn't get 'em. I had to tell the boys to lay off any more arrests. Here. You want to run any of these down?'

  Post threw Littlemore a record of reported but not yet acted-upon Chong Sing and William Leon sightings. The detective perused the list, running his finger down the handwritten notes. He stopped halfway down the page, where a one-line description caught his eye. It read: Canal at River. Chinaman seen working docks. Said to meet description of suspect Chong Sing.

  'Got a car?' asked Littlemore. 'I want to have a look at this one.'

  'Why?'

  'Because there's red clay at those docks,' answered the detective.

  Littlemore drove Captain Post's one and only police car downtown, accompanied by a uniformed man. They turned on Canal Street and followed it all the way to the eastern edge of the city, where the immense, newly erected Manhattan Bridge rose up over the East River. Littlemore stopped at the entry to the construction site and cast his eyes over the laborers.

  'There he is,' said the detective, pointing. 'That's him.'

  It would have been hard to miss Chong Sing: a lone, conspicuous Chinese among a throng of white and black workingmen. He was wheeling a barrow filled with cinder blocks.

  'Walk right at him,' Littlemore instructed the officer. 'If he runs, I'll take him.'

  Chong Sing didn't run. At the sight of a police officer, he merely put his head down and kept pushing his wheelbarrow. When the officer put the arm on him, Chong submitted without a fight. Other workmen stopped and watched the uneventful arrest unfold, but no one interfered. By the time the officer returned to the police car where Detective Littlemore was waiting, the men were back at work as if nothing had happened.

  'Why'd you run away yesterday, Mr Chong?'

  'I no run,' said Chong. 'I go to work. See? I go to work.'

  'I'm going to have to charge you as an accessory to murder. You understand what that means? You could hang.' Littlemore made a gesture conveying the meaning of the last word he had spoken.

  'I don't know anything,' the Chinese man pleaded. 'Leon go away. Then smell come from Leon room. That's all.'

  'Sure,' said the detective. Littlemore had the officer take Chong Sing to the Tombs. The detective stayed behind. He wanted a c
loser look at the docks. The puzzle pieces were reconfiguring themselves in the detective's mind - and beginning to fit together. Littlemore knew he was going to find clay at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge, and he had a hunch that George Banwell might have stepped in that clay.

  Everyone knew Banwell was building the Manhattan Bridge towers. When Mayor McClellan awarded the contract to Banwell's American Steel Company, the Hearst papers had cried corruption, condemning the mayor for favoring an old friend and gleefully predicting delays, breakdowns, and overcharges. In fact, Banwell got those towers up not only within budget but in record time. He had personally supervised the construction - which gave Littlemore his idea.

  Littlemore walked toward the river, blending into the mass of men. He could mix with pretty much anyone, if he wanted. Littlemore was good at seeming easy because he was easy, especially when things were falling into place. Chong Sing had two jobs working for Mr George Banwell. Wasn't that interesting?

  The detective arrived at the crowded central pier just in time for a change of shifts. Hundreds of dirty, booted men were trudging off the pier, while a long line of others waited to take the elevator down to the caisson. The din of the turbines, a constant mechanical throbbing, filled the air with a furious rhythm.

  If you had asked Littlemore how he knew there was some trouble, some unhappiness, in the air as well, he could not have told you. Engaging a few of the men in conversation, he quickly learned of Seamus Malley's bad end. Poor Malley was, the men said, yet another victim of caisson disease. When they opened the elevator door a couple of mornings ago, they found him lying dead, dried blood trailing from his ears and mouth.

  The men complained bitterly of the caisson, which they called 'the box' or 'the coffin.' Some thought it cursed. Almost all had ailments they ascribed to it. Most said they were glad their work was almost finished, but the older heads clucked and replied that they'd all be missing their sandhog days soon enough - sandhog being the word for a caisson worker - when their pay stopped coming in. What pay? one of the boys replied. Was three dollars for twelve hours of work supposed to be called pay? 'Look at Malley,' this one said. 'He couldn't even afford a roof over his head with our "pay." That's why he's dead. They killed him. They're killing all of us.' But another replied that Malley had a roof, all right; he just also had a wife - that was why he was spending nights down in the box.

  Littlemore, observing tracks of red clay all over the pier, knelt to tie his shoes and surreptitiously collected samples. He inquired if Mr Banwell ever came down to the pier. The answer was yes. In fact, he was told, Mr Banwell took at least one trip down to the coffin every day to inspect the work. Sometimes even His Honor, the mayor himself, would go with him.

  The detective asked what Banwell was like to work for. Hell, was the answer. The men agreed that Banwell didn't care how many of them died in the caisson, if the job got done faster that way. Yesterday was the first time they could remember when Banwell had ever shown any concern for their lives.

  'How's that?' asked Littlemore.

  'He told us to forget about Window Five.'

  The 'windows,' the men told Littlemore, were the caisson's debris chutes. Each one had a number, and Window Five had jammed up earlier this week. Normally the boss - Banwell - would have immediately ordered them to clear the blockage, a job the sandhogs hated, because it required a difficult, dangerous maneuver with at least one man inside the window when it was inundated with water. But yesterday, for the first time, Banwell told them not to bother. One man suggested the boss might be getting soft. The others denied it; they said Banwell didn't see any point taking chances with the bridge so near completion.

  Littlemore chewed this information over. Then he went to the elevator.

  The elevator man - a wrinkly codger with not a hair on his head - was perched on a wooden stool inside the car. The detective asked him who locked the elevator door two nights ago, the night Malley died.

  'I did,' said the old man, with a proprietary air.

  'Was the car up here at the pier when you locked up that night, or was it down below?'

  'Up here, o'course. You ain't too quick, are you, young fella? How can my elevator be down there if I'm up here?'

  The question was a good one. The elevator was manually operated. Only a man inside the car could take her up or bring her down. Hence when the elevator man completed his last run of the night, the car was necessarily up at the pier. But if the elevator man had asked Littlemore a good question, the detective replied with a better one. 'So how did he get up here?'

  'What?'

  'The dead guy,' said Littlemore. 'Malley. He stayed below Tuesday night, when everybody else came up?'

  'That's right.' The old man shook his head. 'Blamed fool. Not the first time, neither. I told him he oughtn'ta. I told him.'

  'And they found him right here in your car, at the pier, the next morning?'

  'That's right. Dead as a dead fish. You can still see his blood. I been trying to clean it off two whole days now, and I can't. Washed it with soap, washed it with soda. See it?'

  'So how did he get up here?' asked the detective again.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Carl Jung stood straight and tall in the doorway to Freud's suite. He was fully, formally dressed. Nothing in his demeanor suggested a man who had just been playing with sticks and stones on the floor of his hotel room.

  Freud, in vest and shirtsleeves, begged his guest to make himself comfortable. His instinct told him this interview was decisive. Jung decidedly did not look right. Freud gave no credence to Brill's accusations, but he began to agree that Jung might be spinning out of his - Freud's - orbit.

  Jung was, Freud knew, more intelligent and creative than any of his other followers - the first one with the potential to break new ground. But Jung undoubtedly had a father complex. When, in one of his earliest letters, Jung begged Freud for a photograph of himself, saying he would 'cherish' it, Freud was flattered. But when he explicitly asked Freud to regard him not as an equal but as a son, Freud became concerned. He told himself then he would have to take special care.

  It occurred to Freud that, as far as he knew, Jung did

  not have any other male friends. Rather, Jung surrounded himself with women, many women - too many. That was the other difficulty. Given Hall's communication, Freud no longer could avoid a conversation with Jung about the girl who had written claiming to be Jung's patient and mistress. Freud had seen the unconscionable letter Jung sent to the girl's mother. On top of all this, there was Ferenczi's report on the state of Jung's hotel room.

  The one point on which Freud had no qualms was Jung's belief in the fundamental tenets of psychoanalysis. In their private letters and in hours of private talk, Freud had tested, prodded, probed. There could be no doubt: Jung fully believed in. the sexual aetiology. And he had come to his conviction in the best of all possible ways, overcoming his own skepticism after seeing Freud's hypotheses confirmed again and again in clinical practice.

  'We have always spoken freely to each other,' said Freud. 'Can we now?'

  'I should like nothing more,' said Jung. 'Especially now that I have freed myself from your paternal authority.'

  Freud tried not to appear taken aback. 'Good, good. Coffee?'

  'No, thank you. Yes. It happened yesterday, when you chose to keep hidden the truth of your Count Thun dream in order to preserve your authority. You see the paradox. You feared losing your authority; as a result, you lost it. You cared more for authority than truth; with me, there can be no authority other than truth. But it is better this way. Your cause will only prosper from my independence.

  Indeed, it already is prospering. I have solved the problem of incest!'

  Out of this rush of words, Freud fastened on two. 'My cause?'

  'What?'

  'You said, "your cause",' Freud repeated.

  'I did not.'

  'You did. It is the second time.'

  'Well, it is yours - is it not? - yours and
mine. It will be infinitely stronger now. Didn't you hear me? I have solved the incest problem.'

  'What do you mean, "solved" it?' said Freud. 'What problem?'

  'We know the grown son does not actually covet his mother sexually, with her varicose veins and sagging breasts. That is obvious to anyone. Nor does the infant son, who has no inkling of penetration. Why then does the adult's neurosis revolve so frequently around the Oedipal complex, as your cases and my own confirm? The answer came to me in a dream last night. The adult conflict reactivates the infantile material. The neurotic's suppressed libido is forced back into its infantile channels - just as you have always said! - where it finds the mother, who was once of such special value to him. The libido fastens onto her, without the mother ever having actually been desired.'

  These remarks caused a curious physical reaction in Sigmund Freud. He suffered a rush of blood to the arteries surrounding his cerebral cortex, which he experienced as a heaviness in his skull. He swallowed and said, 'You are denying the Oedipal complex?'

  'Not at all. How could I? I invented the term.'

  'The term complex is yours,' said Freud. 'You are retaining the complex but denying the Oedipal.'

  'No!' cried Jung. 'I am preserving all your fundamental insights. Neurotics do have an Oedipal complex. Their neurosis causes them to believe that they sexually coveted their mother.'

  'You are saying there are no actual incestuous wishes. Not among the healthy.'

  'Not even among the neurotic! It is marvelous. The neurotic develops a mother complex because his libido is forced into its infantile channels. Thus the neurotic gives himself a delusive reason to castigate himself. He feels guilty over a wish he never had.'

  'I see. What then has caused his neurosis?' asked Freud.

  'His present conflict. Whatever desire the neurotic is not admitting to. Whatever life task he can't bring himself to face.'

  'Ah, the present conflict,' said Freud. His head was no longer heavy. Instead, a peculiar lightness had come to him. 'So there is no reason to delve into the patient's sexual past. Or, indeed, his childhood at all.'