by Meyer Levin
At the same moment Artie was yelling triumphantly, “It’s here!”
Later on, we could ask ourselves whether it was a compulsion to bring down punishment on himself that drove Artie to reach closer and closer to the fire; for if Judd had been the one to leave a trail of clues during the crime, it was Artie who persisted in the days immediately afterward in taunting fate, pushing in among us, the reporters, and even among the police, like some perversely teasing, transgressing child, being bad and being bad until he brings the slap of anger down upon himself.
The fountain man and Mr. Hartmann told how they had answered the calls, about ten minutes apart, from a man asking for a Mr. Kessler. “He said look around and make sure,” the Negro recalled, “so I even yelled out in the store. Then I told him there was nobody of that name.”
“The nearest booth to the door,” the ransom letter instructed; now Artie went and stood in the booth, as though it might contain the presence of the criminal. “He must have come in here at some time, to copy down the number of this phone,” Mr. Hartmann said.
Artie even lifted the receiver and tried on a wild chance to trace yesterday’s calls. What was the man’s voice like? he demanded of Hartmann. “Any accent? Did he use good English?”
“You’d make a better reporter than I am!” I told him.
“Aren’t you going to call your paper?” he urged. “See! I told you I’d get you a scoop!”
I said Tom should make the call, and Artie ran ahead of me to Tom, waving his arms, yelling, “We found it!”
Our paper made much of the feat, crowing that the first tangible scent of the criminal had been picked up by the same Globe reporter who had identified the victim. It was a small thing to hail as a triumph, but there was no real news. The city seemed to stand transfixed by the murder. The case had seized the public imagination as a crime beyond other crimes. Perhaps it was because of the wealth of the boy’s family. But perhaps, I was to think as the story developed, because by some uncanny process people sensed from the beginning that this crime had meanings that would project far into our time.
We drove back to the campus. We ought to have him stick with us on the story, Artie insisted. He’d get us scoop after scoop!
On Woodlawn, spotting the red Stutz, he began to honk madly. “It’s Judd Steiner. You must know him,” he said to me. “Those clucks just had their Harvard Law entrance exam.” Artie pulled alongside. “Hey, Jock! I just got a scoop for the Globe! I found the kidnapper’s drugstore. How’d you come out?”
Judd quietly said he came out okay, it wasn’t a tough exam at all, and asked, “What was that? What drugstore?”
Artie explained how he was on the trail of the Kessler kidnappers, and in the same breath said, “Hey, Judd, you ought to celebrate. How about going out tonight?” He and a hot date were going to the Four Deuces, Artie said, and Judd should come along. Then turning to me: “Hey, drag a frail, we’ll make it a real party! Bring that babe of yours, Ruthie.”
Judd was trying to say something, but Artie called out, “I’m driving them to the inquest!” and zoomed off with us.
Paulie’s body had been moved to an undertaking parlour on Cottage Grove, a refined place with electric candelabra spaced along the walls. “This beats Balaban and Katz,” Artie whispered, yet with a proper note of commiseration under his remark. In a few moments he had crowded in among the police, among the reporters; he had gathered the arguments of the chief of detectives, who swore he would round up every known pervert in town, and he had caught the remarks of the chief of police, who maintained it was obviously a straight ransom job – there was no proof of perversion at all.
I was getting a little tired of Artie, his pitch of excitement was exhausting, and I felt relieved when his friend Judd suddenly appeared, pulling Artie aside. Presently Artie called to me, “See you tonight,” and they were gone.
The inquest itself only added to the uncertainty and hysteria. There were the identifications of the corpse by the uncle and the father, both of them controlled, unexpressive. There was the Polish workman who had found the body; he told nothing new. Then, importantly, his lips pursed over each statement, came Dr. Kruger to give the cause of death. Not the blows on the head, he declared, but suffocation. The tongue was swollen, and the throat. No marks of strangling. Suffocation. Perhaps from a gag. Death had occurred before nine o’clock. Previously, the victim had been subjected to an attack.
The word resounded. It was official now. A degenerate!
But immediately after Dr. Kruger, walking up hurriedly as if to correct a mistake, blurting his words before the questions could be asked, came a chemist, Dr. Haroutian, who had analysed the organs. There was no evidence of an attack, none at all, he declared.
Dr. Kruger leaped up, shouting. He had seen the body and if that wasn’t an attack -!
They began arguing about sphincters and muscle tension; it was too sad, too gruesome, and yet it seemed bitterly necessary to know just how, exactly how bestially some human had behaved. And as the argument grew, those who believed in the perversion became violently insistent, as though to exclude the evil of degeneracy would be virtually to condone the crime.
Both opinions had finally to be left in the record. Presently the inquest was over, and all of us, the reporters, were surging around the public officials, as though some extra word could settle what had happened to that poor boy on his way to his death.
With Harry Dawes of the Post, Tom and I traded details of our drugstore scoop in exchange for his story of a kid on Ellis Avenue who claimed he had seen Paulie get into a Winton car, a grey Winton.
But after we had phoned in and were sitting at a sandwich counter, Tom said it was clear that nobody knew a damn thing – we had done pretty well by ourselves so far; we would go off and work on our own. He kept speculating about the place itself, Hegewisch. All the kids who went to Twain had some time been out to that place. True, the science teachers who conducted the excursions had been cleared; they had airtight alibis. Still, by going out there we might get an idea.
It was a dreary nothing of an area, half swamp, half prairie, stretching from where the city left off, from streets of scattered frame cottages, out a few miles to where factory buildings began – steel mills and oil refineries. In walking over the ground, we first fully realized how far it was from where a car could park to where the body had been found. Had the boy walked? Willingly? Was it with someone he knew, who promised to show him something? Or had he been carried, already dead? Carried all this distance? And why, particularly, to be hidden in that culvert? We stood staring at the open cement pipe.
It seemed a haphazard choice, a wild, crazed choice, and yet there arose in me the tantalizing feeling of something unresolved that one experiences sometimes in the presence of the seemingly irrational. We speculated. Could the criminal be some poor local inhabitant who had picked up an acquaintance with the rich kids coming for their nature studies? Did people hang out here for anything? Fishing?
Strange how naked the area was only two days after the murder. Not even a policeman. But what would a cop be watching for, we kidded each other – the murderer’s return?
We decided to go back to the local police station. The captain himself, named Cleary, talked to us.
Well, he said, in summer kids went swimming there, and some guys went fishing, some of the Polacks, just for bluefish, and there was even a little rabbit hunting, but these Polacks around here were hard-working mill hands. Hell, in the first place none of them could even write a letter like that ransom letter.
Tom asked if there were any other teachers, besides those from the Twain School, who brought classes out there. Cleary said he didn’t know much about that; in fact, the prairie was officially outside his territory – it was state land, and the Forest Preserves had charge of it.
After we left, as it turned out, Captain Cleary telephoned a Forest Preserve guardian. He only wanted to protect himself. Captain Cleary asked the Forest Preserve man if he kn
ew of any natural-history teachers, or specimen collectors, or anything like that, hanging around the Hegewisch wilds. And he got an answer. There was some bunch went out there on Sundays sometimes, Warden Gastony said; some lad brought them out there – he had his name down because the lad had a gun permit for shooting specimens. A millionaire’s kid by the name of Steiner – Judah Steiner, Jr., a real studious boy. Young Steiner would know what classes went out there.
Captain Cleary made a note of the name.
Coming home from the visit to Hegewisch, I saw Artie, driving along my street as though he had been lying in wait for me. He hailed me, waving a Globe, with our scoop about the drugstore. And he reminded me of out date.
I had really intended to forget about it; I always felt ill at ease when going out with rich guys, always felt they might suddenly drag the party to some place expensive. But now there was no getting out of it; Artie said he had run into Ruth on campus and told her.
Just when I was ready for the date, a call came from Tom. He was at the Bureau. A suicide had been found, at least a dead man, off the Oak Street Beach. And a typewritten letter had come to the police, confessing to the crime and saying, “When you get this I will be a dead man. I am very sorry I did this inhuman piece of work.” It was signed, “A Sorry Man.” Chief Nolan believed the note had been written on the ransom-note typewriter, and an expert was checking it. Tom was staying with the story at the Bureau, and if I wanted, I could go out to the suicide’s address; it was on West Madison. Sounded like a flophouse.
I called Artie, catching him at home. Perhaps he could pick up Ruth, and I would meet them later. Artie became intensely excited over the new clue. Sure, sure, he’d pick up Ruth; in fact, Judd didn’t have a date, so Judd could take care of Ruth for me. Why not let Judd pick up the girls, and he, Artie, would drive me over to West Madison Street on my story?
But I had had enough of Artie’s jittery intensity. I said he had better go fetch Ruth since she didn’t know Judd. Then I called her and joked about how this was what it would be like to be married to a newspaperman.
It was indeed a flophouse on West Madison. The manager, elderly and tired of everything, said, Nah, this John Doe had flopped there for a few days – nobody knew anything about him; there were no possessions. The cops had taken a couple of rags of shirts he had had there in a bag. As for his being the kidnapper, the murderer, “Hell, how could that bum have done it?” the manager said. “He was laying here all boozed up most of the time.”
I even ran out to the morgue at the county hospital and looked at the corpse, a runty, meagre body, a battered, boozy face. Had he written that note?
Certainly I knew, even as a young punk reporter, that every crime drew lunatic confessions, but downtown Chief Nolan was already declaring the crime had been solved. It was a degenerate vagrant who had murdered the boy and then tried to extort money, and finally, in fright, committed suicide.
Before it was over, the case was to reach into many such pitiful corners, like a random cyclone that leaves exposed the refuse of a city’s cellars.
I met Tom at the Bureau and gave him what I had. Between us we decided this was nothing at all, even though the morning papers were giving it their banner headlines. It was by then ten o’clock. I almost wanted to ask Tom to come along to the speakeasy, but we might seem like kids to him, I thought. So I said good night and went on to my date.
The place was a cellar night club. I ran down the stairs, slightly apprehensive about Ruth being with those smoothies, and I was curious, too, about Myra, whom I knew only from a poetry class. I felt full of importance, breathless with my impressions of the morgue and of a derelict’s death, while all they knew about was college life.
The room was a dim-lit box, with a few burly men around the doorway. Liquor was served openly there, I saw. The brassy music, slapped down by the low ceiling, made the whole box throb. This was a place already known among the knowing ones, the people like Myra and Artie who always knew ahead of the rest of the crowd.
The lighting was a subdued rose colour, on walls of a kind of yellowish stucco that was considered fancy at that time, and there was a small square dance floor. The Negro band sat on a strip of platform with their heads against the ceiling. I could not have known that in years to come jazz enthusiasts would look back reverently to this dim cellar as the birthplace of the Chicago style.
I made out first, from the stairs, Artie and Myra dancing, and even in that glimpse I caught something about Myra, the way she was entirely given over, her glossy head tilted, lost. I saw Ruth and Judd at a far table, their heads bent close together so as to hear each other under that noise. Ruth caught sight of me, raising her face, and there came over it the glow that was for me – but slowly, as though it had to be summoned, so absorbed had she been with Judd.
Artie broke off dancing and came rushing toward me. He wanted to know the news. Was the suicide really the murderer? I said it didn’t look like it. Breathlessly, Artie speculated, “Maybe it was a plant – the real murderer wrote the note and found this bum and gave him some knock-out drops and pushed him in!” We reached the table. “That would be a good move for him to get the police off the trail, wouldn’t it?”
Myra shook her head over his imaginings, and Judd said why didn’t he leave the case to the police? A chair had to be pulled up for me, and I sat at the corner of the table, feeling it was I who was the extra man since the party was a celebration for Judd.
I had seen Judd around campus, but now I had my first full impression of him, and I was made uneasy by the dark glow of his eyes in their disturbing intensity. And I felt at once that those eyes, that entire personality, fascinated Ruth.
My set-up came, and Judd poured some of his liquor into it. Artie ordered me to catch up fast. Myra said she had wanted to get to know me in the modern-poetry class – wasn’t this music like Vachel Lindsay’s “The Congo”? We recited it, Artie beating out the rhythm with spoons. Judd asked if he could dance with my girl. For a while I watched them; he seemed to keep on talking while they danced, and Ruth remained absorbed.
In the middle of the number, Artie excused himself and dragged Myra up. Then they were doing the Charleston in a spectacular way, but with great ease; presently half the floor was watching them. Ruth and Judd came back, and we clapped for Artie and Myra. The tenor saxman stood up. The drummer rattled and jerked his head to the flash of Myra’s knees.
Did I feel, already then, something heartbreakingly intense about Myra – a peak reached, yet an imprisonment, because no matter how fast, she couldn’t get free? Later, we discussed love like, oh, such emancipated people. Judd insisted that sex should be quite free and apart from love, and Myra said breathlessly that’s what it was like in Russia, where women at last were as free as men. But what about children? asked Ruth. Judd said the state should take care of all children, as was of course suggested in Plato’s Republic. Didn’t he believe in parental love? Ruth inquired, and Judd declared he didn’t believe in emotion; emotion was illogical and weak.
He was deadly serious, his eyes burning. Ruth drew him on, so understandingly, with her way of making a man feel she understood on his own level. Judd was beyond any shyness now. Ideas poured out of him.
Put down coldly, that sort of talk sounds sophomoric, and yet it sounded bright and even important at the time. Why were children supposed to have emotional feelings for their parents? demanded Judd. Did children have any opportunity to select their parents? Or even vice versa? It was pure chance – one spermatozoon out of trillions. He, for example, certainly had very little in common with his father.
Now Judd had become vehement. Myra said, suddenly, “Let’s dance,” and led me on to the floor. Artie took Ruth.
Myra moved her long bare-feeling body into contact with mine, and it seemed utterly pliant, boneless. Her head fell back a little. “Oh listen to that trumpet!” Then, with a peculiar, sudden assumption of intimacy, she asked if I were going to marry Ruth, and I said, oh, we hadn’t
gone that far. “But you’re in love with her?” she repeated.
I said, “How is one supposed to know?”
“You know, I think Judd is getting a crush on her,” she remarked, and I glanced at Judd alone at the table. His eyes were following Ruth.
“What about you and Artie?” I asked, out of form.
She answered with a peculiar eagerness and sincerity. She was fond of him, Myra said, since they had been kids, but of course Artie had a million girls. “Artie’s just a baby,” she confided. “He’s so immature. Although sometimes I do get worried for him. He has black moods – you wouldn’t imagine it. He’s deeper than he lets on.” Then suddenly Myra thrust her belly in and belly-rubbed for an instant. As the dance broke and we started back to the table, she said, “You know I’m just a tease. I try to prove to myself I can get every man I meet away from his date.” She squeezed my hand. “Friends?”
“Sure,” I said.
Ruth was flushed and so beautiful as she sat down. I looked from one girl to the other.
Myra made me talk about being a newspaperman – was it the best way to become a writer? – and I described going to the scene of the murder. We were on the favourite subject again. Artie got all excited about our interview with Captain Cleary about who hung out at the swamp. Nature lovers. Did I know that Judd was a big natural scientist? He had discovered some very rare bird – a crane or stork.
Ruth became quite interested, drawing Judd out, and soon we were discussing Judd’s question. Did birds have intelligence? He was convinced they could think. Thinking was choosing, he said, between one set of acts and another.
“Bushwah, it’s all mechanical reaction,” Artie declared. Every action had a mechanical cause – and from there we were soon on the question of free will. “With humans, too, it’s all mechanical,” Artie shouted. The trumpet was screaming high, but Artie outyelled it, in some passion to prove his point. “Schopenhauer!” he cried. “He proved there is no free will. We are all a bunch of slaves to our instincts!”