The Interpretation Of Murder

by Jed Rubenfeld

  'Maybe Malley dies on the way up the elevator.'

  'Oh, I see,' said the coroner. 'Banwell kills him in the elevator, then leaves him there in order to maximize the probability of his being apprehended for two murders. Banwell is not stupid, Detective. He is a calculating man. Had he done what you claim, he would have taken the elevator straight back down to the caisson and disposed of this Malley in the same way you say he disposed of the Riverford girl.'

  'But the clay, Mr Hugel, I forgot to tell you about the clay -'

  'I don't want to hear it,' said the coroner. They had arrived at his office. 'I don't want to hear any more about it. Go to the mayor, why don't you? No doubt you'll find a ready audience with him. I told you, the case is closed.'

  Littlemore blinked and shook his head. He noticed the stacks of documents and the packing boxes spread out on the office floor. 'Are you going somewhere, Mr Hugel?'

  'As a matter of fact, I am,' said the coroner. 'I'm quitting this employ.'

  'Quitting?'

  'I cannot work under these conditions. My conclusions are not respected.'

  'But where will you go, Mr Hugel?'

  'You think this is the only city that requires a medical examiner?' The coroner surveyed the boxes of records strewn about his office. 'I understand a position is available in Cleveland, Ohio, as a matter of fact. My opinions will be valued there. They will pay me less, of course, but that is no matter; I have a substantial sum set aside already. No one will be able to complain about my records, Detective. My successor will find a perfectly organized system - which I created. Do you know what the state of the morgue was before I came here?'

  'But Mr Hugel,' said the detective.

  At that moment, Louis Riviere and Stratham Younger appeared in the corridor. 'Monsieur Littlemore!' cried Riviere. 'He's alive!'

  'Unfortunately,' agreed the coroner. 'Gentlemen, if you'll excuse me, I have work to do.'

  Clara Banwell was cooling herself in a bath when she heard the front door slam shut. It was a Turkish bath, with blue inlaid Mudejar tiles from Andalusia, installed in the Banwells' apartment at Clara's special request. As her husband's voice bellowed her name from the entry hall, she wrapped herself hastily in two white bath towels, one for her torso and another around her hair.

  Still dripping, she found her husband in their forty-five- foot living room, a tumbler in his hands, gazing out at the Hudson River. He was pouring himself a bourbon over ice. 'Come here,' said Banwell from across the room, without turning around. 'You saw her?'

  'Yes.' Clara remained where she was.

  'And?'

  'The police believe she did the injury to herself. They believe she is either mad or pursuing a vendetta against you.'

  'What did you tell them?' he asked.

  'That you were here at home all night.'

  Banwell grunted. 'What does she say?'

  'Nora's very fragile, George. I think -'

  The sound of a whiskey bottle banging down on a glass- topped table interrupted her. The table didn't crack, but alcohol splashed from the bottle's mouth. George Banwell turned to face his wife. 'Come here,' he said again.

  'I don't want to.'

  'Come here.'

  She obeyed. When she was close to him, he glanced down.

  'No,' she said.

  'Yes.'

  She undid her husband's belt. While she extracted the belt from the loops of his trousers, he poured himself another drink. She handed him the black leather strop. Then she lifted up her hands, palms together. Banwell corded the belt around her wrists, threaded its buckle, pulled it tight. She winced.

  He jerked her to him and tried to kiss her lips. She allowed him to kiss only the corners of her mouth, turning her cheek first one way, then the other. He buried his head in her bare neck; she took in a mouthful of air. 'No,' she said.

  He forced her to her knees. Though bound by the belt, she could move her hands well enough to unfasten her husband's trousers. He tore the white towel from her body.

  Sometime later, George Banwell sat on the davenport, fully dressed, sipping bourbon, while Clara, naked, knelt on the floor, her back to her husband.

  'Tell me what she said,' he instructed her, loosening his tie.

  'George' - Clara turned and looked up at him - 'couldn't it be over now? She is only a little girl. How can she hurt you any more?'

  She sensed immediately that her words had fueled, rather than dampened, her husband's latent anger. He rose to his feet, buttoning himself. 'Only a little girl,' he repeated.

  The Frenchman must have had a soft spot for Detective Littlemore. He kissed him on both cheeks.

  'I got to play dead more often,' said Littlemore. 'This is the nicest you've ever been to me, Louie.'

  Riviere pressed a large folder into the detective's arms. 'It came out perfectly,' he said. 'I have surprised even myself, actually. I did not expect such detail in an enlargement. Very unusual.' With this, the Frenchman withdrew, calling out that it was au revoir, not adieu.

  I was now alone with the detective. 'You - played dead?' I asked him.

  'It was just a joke. When I came to, I was in an ambulance, and I got the idea it might be funny.'

  I reflected. 'Was it?'

  Littlemore looked around. 'Pretty funny,' he said. 'Say, what are you doing here?'

  I told the detective I had made a discovery potentially important to Miss Acton's case. Suddenly, however, I found I wasn't sure how to put things. Nora had experienced a form of bilocation - the phenomenon of seeming to be in two places at the same time. From my Harvard days, I dimly remembered reading about bilocation in connection with some of the early experiments with the new anaesthetics that had so altered surgical medicine. My research confirmed it: I was now convinced that Nora had been given chloroform. By morning, there would have been no odor and no significant after-effects.

  My problem was that Nora had confessed to me that she hadn't told Detective Littlemore anything about the strange way in which she experienced the event. She had been afraid he wouldn't believe her. I decided to be direct: 'There was something Miss Acton didn't tell you about last night's assault. She saw it - that is, she experienced her own participation in it and her own observation of it - as if she were external to it.' Hearing my own lucid words, I realized I had chosen about the least accessible, least convincing explanation possible. The look on the detective's face did nothing to change that impression. I added, 'As if she were floating above her own bed.'

  'Floating above her own bed?' Littlemore repeated.

  'That's right.'

  'Chloroform!' he said.

  I was dumbfounded. 'How on earth did you know that?'

  'H. G.Wells. He's my favorite. He's got this story where that exact same thing happens to a guy getting operated on after they put him under with chloroform.'

  'I've just wasted an afternoon in the library.'

  'No, you didn't,' said the detective. 'You can back it up - scientifically, I mean? The chloroform-floating thing?'

  'Yes. Why?'

  'Listen, file this for one second, okay? I got to check something while we're here. Can you come with me?' Littlemore set off along the corridor and down the stairs, limping badly. Over his shoulder, he explained. 'Hugel's got some real good microscopes down here.'

  In the basement, we came to a small forensic laboratory, with four marble slab tables and medical equipment of excellent quality. From his pockets, the detective took out three small envelopes, each containing bits of a ruddy earth or clay. One of the samples, he explained to me, came from Elizabeth Riverford's apartment, another from the basement of the Balmoral, and the third from the Manhattan Bridge - on a pier belonging to George Banwell. These three samples he pressed onto separate glass slides, which he then placed under separate microscopes. He moved from one to the other rapidly. 'They match,' he said, 'all three of them. I knew it.'

  Then he opened up Riviere's folder. The photograph, I could now see, showed a girl's neck marked wit
h a dark, grainy round spot. It was, if I understood the detective correctly, which I may not have done, a reversed image of the picture of an imprint they had found on the neck of the murdered Miss Riverford. Littlemore examined this photograph carefully, comparing it to a man's gold tiepin that he withdrew from another pocket. He showed the pin to me - it bore the monogram GB - and invited me to compare the pin and the photograph.

  I did so. With the tiepin in hand, I could see the outline of an unmistakably similar ligature insignia in the dark round spot in the photograph. 'They're alike,' I said.

  'Yup,' said Littlemore, 'almost identical. Only problem is, according to Riviere, they shouldn't be alike. They should be opposites. I don't get that. Know where we found that tiepin? In the Actons' backyard. To me, that pin proves Banwell was at the Actons', climbing a tree, maybe, to get in Miss Acton's window.' He sat down on a chair, his right leg evidently too sore for him to stand on. 'You still think it was Banwell, right, Doc?'

  'I do.'

  'You got to come with me to the mayor's office,' said the detective.

  Smith Ely Jelliffe, lodged comfortably in a front-row seat at the Hippodrome, the world's largest indoor theater, wept quietly. So did most of his fellow playgoers. The spectacle so moving to them was the solemn march of the diving girls, sixty-four in all, into the seventeen-foot-deep lake that was part of the Hippodrome's gigantic stage. (The water in the lake was real; underwater air receptacles and subterranean corridors provided an escape route backstage.) Who could keep tears away as the lovely, dignified, bathing- suited girls disappeared into the rippling water, never to see Earth again, doomed to perform forever for the Martian king in his circus so far away from home?

  Jelliffe's bereavement was alleviated by the knowledge that he would be seeing two of the girls again - and shortly. A half hour later, with a high-heeled diving girl on each arm, Jelliffe strode with considerable satisfaction into the colonnaded dining room of Murray's Roman Gardens on Forty- second Street. Behind Jelliffe trailed two long pink boas, one from each of his girls. Before him stood the Gardens' massive, leafy plaster columns, rising up to the ceiling a hundred feet overhead, where electric stars twinkled and a gibbous moon crossed the firmament at an unnaturally advanced clip. A triple-decker Pompeiian fountain discoursed in the center of the restaurant, while nude maidenly figures frolicked in the trompe-l'oeil distance on every wall.

  By weight, Jelliffe was worth both his diving girls put together. He believed this middle-aged girth made him a most impressive man - to the female sex, that is. He took special pleasure in his diving girls because he was anxious to make an impression tonight. He was dining with the Triumvirate. They had never asked him to dinner before. The closest he had come to their inner circle was the occasional luncheon at their club. But his stock had plainly risen with his connections to the new psychotherapeutics.

  Jelliffe did not need money. What he wanted was renown, esteem, standing, prestige - all of which the Triumvirate could give him. It was they, for example, who directed Harry Thaw's lawyers to him, giving Jelliffe his first taste of fame. The grandest day of his life was the day his portrait appeared in the Sunday papers, naming him 'one of the most distinguished alienists in the state.'

  The Triumvirate had also taken a surprisingly close interest in his publishing house. They were obviously progressive men. At first they had barred him from accepting any articles mentioning psychoanalysis, but their attitude had changed. Roughly a year ago, they instructed Jelliffe to send them the abstracts of all submissions touching on Freud, notifying him afterward of the ones they sanctioned. It was the Triumvirate who advised him to publish Jung. It was they who encouraged him to take on Brill's translation of Freud's book when it looked like Morton Prince in Boston might publish it instead. Indeed, they had hired Jelliffe an editor to help smooth Brill's translation.

  Jelliffe had considered carefully the number of girls to bring to dinner. Girls were his specialty. He had cemented more than a few social and professional connections with such mortar. He knew all the best gentlemen's establishments. When asked, he invariably recommended the Players Club in Gramercy Park. With the Triumvirate, Jelliffe had never been asked. When, however, they invited him to join them at the Roman Gardens, Jelliffe sensed the occasion was propitious. As every man-about-town knew, upstairs at the Gardens were twenty-four luxuriously appointed bachelor's apartments, each of which contained a double-sized bed, separate bath, and a bottle of champagne on ice. At first, Jelliffe had pictured four girls and four rooms, but on reflection this seemed insufficiently collegial. So he had secured two of each: the business of taking turns, he felt, would add sauce to the geese.

  Jelliffe did make an impression, but not the one he intended. Shown to the private alcove where the Triumvirate had their table, the bon vivant and his ladies met with an unequivocal froideur from the three gentlemen seated there. None of them even stood. Jelliffe, failing to detect the cause, manfully greeted his hosts, called out to the maître d' for extra chairs, and announced that two bachelor's suites awaited them all after dinner. With a wave of an elegant hand, Dr Charles Dana belayed the order for extra chairs. Jelliffe finally grasped the nettle and mumbled to his girls that they had better wait for him upstairs.

  Shortly thereafter, the Triumvirate procured from Jelliffe the information that Abraham Brill had, without warning, indefinitely postponed publication of Freud's book. Pity, said Dana. And what of Dr Jung's lectures at Fordham? Jelliffe reported that his plans for the Fordham lectures were proceeding apace - and that the New York Times had contacted him to arrange an interview with Jung.

  Dana turned to the portly fellow with the muttonchop sideburns. 'Starr, weren't you interviewed by the Times as well?'

  Draining an oyster into his mouth, Starr said he bloody well had been interviewed and that he had been blunt about it too. The conversation then turned to Harry Thaw, concerning whom Jelliffe was advised in no uncertain terms that there should be no further experiments.

  As the dinner drew to a close, Jelliffe feared he had not advanced his cause. Dana and Sachs did not even shake his hand as they left. But his flagging spirits improved when Starr, who had lingered behind the others, asked whether he had correctly heard Jelliffe to say that he had booked two rooms upstairs. Jelliffe confirmed it. The brace of corpulent gentlemen regarded each other, both picturing a boa-clad showgirl reclining next to an iced, unopened bottle of champagne. Starr expressed the opinion that things paid for ought not to be wasted.

  'Have you lost your mind, Detective?' asked Mayor McClellan behind the closed doors of the mayor's office Thursday evening.

  Littlemore had requested a crew of men to go down to the Manhattan Bridge caisson to investigate the malfunctioning window. He and I were seated across from the mayor's desk. McClellan was now standing.

  'Mr Littlemore,' said McClellan, who had evidently inherited his father's military bearing, 'I promised this city a subway, and I delivered it. I promised this city Times Square, and I delivered it. I promised this city the Manhattan Bridge, and by God I'm going to deliver it if it's the last damned thing I do in office. Under no circumstances is the work on that bridge to be hindered - not by one single goddamned minute. And under no circumstances is George Banwell to be interfered with. Do you hear me?'

  'Yes, sir,' said Littlemore.

  'Elizabeth Riverford was murdered four days ago and, so far as I can tell, all you've done since is lose her blasted body.'

  'Actually, I found a body, Your Honor,' said Littlemore meekly.

  'Oh, yes, Miss Sigel,' said McClellan, 'who is now causing me more trouble than even Miss Riverford. Have you seen the afternoon papers? It's all over them. How can the mayor of this city allow a girl of good family to be found in a Chinaman's trunk? - as if I were personally responsible! Forget about George Banwell, Detective. Find me this William Leon.'

  'Your Honor, sir, with all respect,' said Littlemore, 'I think the Riverford and Sigel cases are connected. And I think Mr Banwell
is involved in both.'

  McClellan folded his arms. 'You think this Leon was not Miss Sigel's killer?'

  'I think it's possible, sir.'

  The mayor took a deep breath. 'Mr Littlemore, your Mr Chong - the man you yourself arrested - confessed an hour ago. His cousin Leon killed Miss Sigel last month in a jealous rage, after he saw her with another Chinaman. The police have been to this other man's home, where they found more letters from Miss Sigel. Leon strangled her to death. Chong witnessed it. He even helped put the dead body into Leon's trunk. All right? Are you satisfied?' 'I'm not sure, sir,' said Littlemore.

  'Well, you'd better make yourself sure. I want answers. Where is Leon? Was Miss Acton attacked last night or not? Was she ever attacked at all? Do I have to do everyone's job? And let me tell you one more thing, Detective,' said McClellan. 'If you or anyone else comes running into my office yapping that Elizabeth Riverford was murdered by the one man I know could not have killed her, I'm going to fire the lot of you. Do I make myself clear?' 'Yes, sir, Your Honor, sir' was the detective's reply. We were mercifully released. Out in the hallway, I said, 'So at least the mayor is squarely behind us.'

  'I didn't lose Miss Riverford's body,' objected Littlemore, showing uncharacteristic spleen. 'What's come over everyone? I've got a tiepin, the clay, an unexplained death on the guy's site, he fits the coroner's description, he scares when he sees Miss Acton, she tells us he attacked her, and we can't even go down and see what's blocking the guy's underwater garbage chute?'

  I made the obvious point that if Banwell was out of town the night Elizabeth Riverford was murdered, he couldn't have killed her.

  'Yeah, but maybe he's got an accomplice who did it,' replied Littlemore. 'Know anything about the bends, Doc?'

  'Yes. Why?'

  'Because I know what I got to do,' said Littlemore, whose limp had grown still worse, 'but I can't do it by myself. Will you help me?'

  When I heard the detective's proposal, I initially thought it the most foolhardy plan I had ever heard. On reflection, however, I began to think differently.