by Meyer Levin
Toward the end of the meal, Judd wanted to go to the men’s room. He had been drinking a great deal of water – was his thirst a sign? As he arose, Fleury made an involuntary movement to follow the suspect, but Horn shook his head.
The moment Judd was away from the table, the discussion began.
“That was a pretty fishy story about those broads,” Sergeant Fleury offered, to make an impression on Horn.
Czewicki pursed his lips. “He’s a smart cooky. He had a whole week to fix up a better story, if he had anything to do with it.”
“I think he did it,” Padua said.
They all looked to Horn. “We’ll damn well find out,” he said, his voice rather shrill.
When the detectives picked up Judd, Artie felt excited to the point of elation. Of course Judd would get out of it, the bastard. Or were they swatting him? Judd couldn’t stand a scratch. He’d bawl. He’d confess.
Maybe the best idea would be to scram, right now. But if he beat it, the game would be up. What did the cops have so far? If they knew anything much, they’d have arrested him, too. Then, if it was only Judd, it could be the glasses. Or it might be only some more questioning about birding. That was it. The police were baffled. They were going over the same old ground. Judd had got through it once; he’d do it again.
Artie decided to go home and wait for Judd to call.
Suppose he beat it up to Charlevoix? That could be natural – merely running up there ahead of the Memorial Day crowd. And then, if he heard anything bad about Judd, he could jump into a boat, hide out among the islands. Go across to Canada, up to Alaska…
At home, Artie retreated to his room. Two hours had passed. Surely Judd was back from downtown. The little bastard was teasing him.
Artie phoned the Steiners. The maid answered. She told him in an anxious puzzled voice, Mr. Judd had come back with those men, but he had gone again.
“What?”
Yes, they had all come back, to look for Mr. Judd’s eyeglasses. Mr. Max had been home at the time.
“Did Max go with Judd and those detectives?”
No, Mr. Max had gone out to a social engagement, she believed.
Artie hung up. Still, it couldn’t be too bad, or Max would have gone along with Judd.
His mother was talking about the weekend at Charlevoix. Did he want to invite anyone special? Artie held back the news about Judd. He made all kinds of funny suggestions about Charlevoix. How about Fatty Arbuckle? There was a good man for a party!
“Arthur! Fun is fun, but do you have to be so vulgar?”
Putting on a record, Artie snapped his fingers to the music. He seized her and danced her around for a moment. Then, all through dinner, he was subdued. Mumsie even remarked on it. He was thinking of his future, Artie said, and everyone laughed. His father remarked, “Well, in fact it’s about time.” But Mumsie said he was still only a baby.
After dinner he watched from an upstairs window. And he saw the Marmon drive up. That goddam little bastard, could he have confessed! Artie rushed into his room, seized his automatic. Should he shoot it out?
His mother approached, calling from the stairs in a puzzled voice that there were some gentlemen to see him. Artie threw the pistol into the drawer. Carrying a gun might spoil things. Coming down with Mumsie, he recognized McNamara and the other guy. “Hi!” he said. And to his mother: “It’s some friends of mine from the detective force. I’ve been helping them on the Kessler case. There’s an important new clue.”
“Oh God, I hope they’ve found the culprit,” she said.
As he went out of the door with them, Artie said, “I’ve always wanted a ride in one of your Marmons.”
“You’ve got it,” said McNamara.
With a dozen other reporters, I was on watch in the State’s Attorney’s office. We had been there for hours. Somewhere, we knew, Horn was questioning the possible owners of the glasses.
All we could do was wait. A couple of squad men were on duty, and whenever one of them left the room, several reporters jumped up and followed, hoping to be led to Horn. Most often, it would be to the toilet, and we’d all guffaw. Whenever the phone rang, to be answered by Olin Swasey, an assistant on duty, we pleaded to talk to his chief, if that was Horn on the wire. But he only smiled, shaking his head.
It was then that Artie Strauss came in with McNamara. We all stirred. But Artie was not an unfamiliar figure, and it actually did not occur to us that he was brought in for questioning.
“Well for crissake! Are you on the force now?” I joked.
“The boy reporter!” he greeted me. “You seen Judd? Say, Sid, were those really his glasses?”
Before I could fully grasp the immensity of his remark, the whole crowd converged on him. Judd? Judd who? Startled, Artie turned silent. The pack wheeled on me, on McNamara. Meanwhile Swasey rushed Artie into a private office.
The morning-paper men beat angrily on the door. Why should the Globe get all the breaks? they complained.
Swasey said he would telephone for instructions. A moment later he emerged and said all right, the glasses belonged to Judah Steiner, Jr., a law student at the University of Chicago. Artie Straus was a friend of his. That was all.
Everyone knew the Straus family. And the Steiners? The word spread that they too were multimillionaires. Instantly, we were all on the phones, trying to contact the two families. At the Steiners, no one was home.
I saw Mike Prager hang up his phone and go out. He was probably rushing out there to see if he could find someone.
At the Straus mansion, a brother, James, made a statement. Artie had been trying to help from the beginning, he said, and would surely do all he could to aid the police now. As for Judd Steiner and his spectacles, he was confident some reasonable explanation would be forthcoming.
Meanwhile Olin Swasey had begun to question Artie. The interrogation was matter of fact, and had Artie then given the same story as Judd, about the two girls, suspicion might have been turned away from them for a time, perhaps altogether. But the week of their alibi compact was over, and so Artie utilized their agreement that after one week it was “each man for himself”. He was the master criminal making his own getaway.
Wednesday? he repeated. He’d hung around the frat, maybe played cards. No, he hadn’t been with Judd Steiner.
Swasey didn’t press his questions. Indeed, after going over the story a few times, he left Artie sitting with McNamara, and slipped out through a side door. But as it happened, an extra man from the Examiner, just arriving, recognized Swasey coming out of the building and followed him across to the hotel and up to the mysterious suite. Thus, the hiding place of the State’s Attorney was uncovered. Soon we were all there.
We couldn’t get to see Judd Steiner. But from Sergeant Fleury we learned that Steiner had definitely taken a bird-lore class out there to Hegewisch the Sunday before, when he must have dropped his glasses. That seemed the end of all the excitement. A false alarm again.
Tom and I went into a Raklios for coffee. I started to speculate on whether it was even remotely possible that Judd could have committed such a crime. Why, I had been out with him last Friday. Ruth had been going out with him since then. And suddenly my sense of a fated personal involvement, whose meaning had not yet been disclosed, came over me again, and I believed it was possible.
Tom brushed speculation aside. The hell with the psychology, he said; that comes later. “Isn’t Judd the fellow we saw Artie talking to, coming out of that law exam, the day Artie helped us locate the drugstore?” Tom recalled. “Maybe some of the boys in his law class would remember when he wore his glasses the last time.”
Then the whole drugstore incident stood in a new light. Artie’s weird insistence on our going out with him in the rain, to search for it. And another recollection struck me. How Artie had said, about Paulie, “If you were looking for a kid to kidnap, that’s just the kind of a cocky little sonofabitch you would pick…” There came again to me the whole perverted side of the s
tory, and I found myself matching Judd to it. That night at the Four Deuces, his ceaseless sex talk, his lustrous eyes. I began to visualize him with the murdered boy. And then a shuddering anger took hold of me. All week, what he might have done, going out with Ruth!
She was downstairs in the drugstore, taking care of the soda fountain, as she usually did when her parents went out. Ruth was wearing one of those white waitress coats that I loved to see her in. A middle-aged man was eating a sandwich. I went to the other end of the counter.
Ruth drew coffee, and as she leaned to give it to me, I wanted to take her face in my two hands. She had put on a provocative smile, and was going to inquire about my big activities, but changed as she saw my own expression. “Is anything wrong, Sid?” Then: “You look so tired.”
I told her quietly, “Listen, Ruth, the glasses in the Kessler case, they’ve found out they belong to Judd Steiner.”
She kept staring at me, her pupils getting dark.
“He says he dropped them out there, the Sunday before, when he was birding.” I had meant to be roundabout; perhaps I had even intended to try to find things out about Judd from her. But under her gaze I had to say it all at once, so as not to seem to be personally accusing him.
Without taking her eyes from me, Ruth came around the counter. This was an old signal; we would go to the back of the store, to the prescription cubicle. We had used to go there, and swiftly kiss. Through a slot that showed the store proper, you could see if anyone was coming.
Ruth seized both my hands. “Sid. You want to prove he did it.”
“I want to find out,” I said.
Her mouth had remained slightly open. Now the tears came slowly, on her cheeks. I could not know, then, about the night before at his brother’s engagement party, and about the ride she had taken with Judd, and the misery in him she had felt, against her breast. I could not know about the strange time on the beach. Yet it was all conveyed, somehow. I knew something had happened in Ruth. And if I had not seen her in these last days, it had not been only because I was so busy; surely I had remained aside, with the instinct of a man who knows he must give a rival emotion a chance to prove itself, or to run itself out.
My heart hurt for her. It seems that I can still feel the ache of it, today. “You poor kid,” I said. I held her close, to comfort her.
“Sid.” She controlled herself enough to talk to me. “I don’t know what it is. But – things happened between us. I feel he is somebody, somebody who – you can’t explain.” I stroked her hair.
The man at the counter had finished; there was a pharmacist on duty, who came from behind the drug counter to take his money. Still holding Ruth, I watched them as though there were some importance in the transaction. I kept saying to myself with murderous irony, Now you can get a scoop, the girl angle, Judd Steiner’s girl, exclusive story. Or would I now become one of those people trying to keep a girl’s name out of the papers? My own girl, who happened to have had a few dates with Judd Steiner while I was busy on the story.
Was she still my girl? If Judd proved really to have done the crime, and got convicted and executed, would I not always feel that but for the crime, Ruth’s love for him would have developed?
“Ruth, can’t you tell me?” I begged. “Not for the paper. For us.”
“Oh, Sid. I don’t know what I feel. Only, last night, he was so terribly, terribly unhappy about something.” She gasped.
I thought that perhaps we were both being melodramatic. Judd might simply have been frightened, all this week, knowing that the glasses could be identified. His whole story could be true.
I tried to tell this to Ruth, sitting her on a stool by the prescription bench. She became calmer. But now we couldn’t meet each other’s eyes at all. We both knew the dreadful truth of her first intuitive reaction. It could be Judd. Knowing him closely now, she had admitted it was not impossible.
Presently I left. A bitterness and a grief for Ruth kept mounting in me. I grappled with the image of Judd Steiner, someone like myself, my own age, a prodigy like myself, graduating at eighteen, in the same school, reading the same books, and attracted to the same girl.
If we were in so many ways alike, surely I would come to understand him. And yet he had done that most incomprehensible, that most horrible murder. Yes, he had done it. Ruth had known it instantly, and now I knew it. And I would somehow find the means to prove it.
It was a fury that seized me then. A fury that there were so many things in Judd like those in myself. I would find what else there was in him, to prove that he was far, far different from myself.
I had walked to the Fairfax. I remembered that last Friday, Artie’s girl Myra had told me I must call her, at the Fairfax. And I marvelled ruefully at the symmetry, the reporter’s rote, that had led me from Judd’s girl – for so I must now think of Ruth – to Artie’s girl.
Myra was home. Her voice had that combination of surprise and knowingness that girls have for young men who they were sure would one day phone. I said I was downstairs; could I come up? Myra was heartbroken, but she was going out – why hadn’t I given her more warning? I told her I was there in my working capacity and she became quite intrigued. Her date hadn’t yet arrived, so would I please come up?
I entered the huge living room and Myra settled me beside her on a huge custom-built sofa. I told her the news.
Her thin cigarette-stained fingers clutched my sleeve. Could anything happen to Artie? Myra’s voice, in excitement, had a hoarse quality.
I said I was sure Artie was only being questioned as to whether he had been with Judd on Wednesday. Judd had to be checked in every detail, because of the glasses.
“That little worm. That devil. Oh, Sid!” Her eyes glowing darkly, she became solemn. “Do you think Judd could have done it?” Myra sucked in her lower lip. I didn’t answer.
“I always told Artie Judd would get him into real trouble. You know, Artie likes to have fun, and he’ll do wild things, but he’d never hurt anybody. But Judd-” Then she said no, this was beyond Judd. How could the police even imagine, even of someone like Judd..?
And yet she was imagining it, with me.
“Did Artie say he was with him?”
“I don’t think so.”
Oh, Artie had probably been out chasing girls that night. Didn’t I know Artie! But he had his serious side, too, she said. All his playboy act was a cover-up. He could be extremely sensitive. Whereas Judd really gave her the creeps. She had nearly broken up with Artie over his constant companion. And did I know that Judd had been taking out my little friend, that attractive, lovely girl, Ruth? Judd had taken her last night to his brother’s engagement party.
“Yes. I know. In fact-” I stopped.
Myra ’s huge burning-coal eyes examined me. She moved a trifle closer, and lowered her voice.
“You know, Judd’s never really had a girl,” she said. “I mean – if there is really something serious between you and Ruth – he’s probably just experimenting. He likes to experiment.”
I shrugged, to show I wasn’t worried about Ruth, and she hurried on, “I don’t mean there’s anything wrong with him; it’s just he’s such a conceited intellectual. He thinks women are inferior.” She was babbling as though to distract herself from the real, the dreadful question. “You know what he sometimes called Artie? Dorian.” Myra sucked in her lip again. We looked at each other.
Then I asked if she could remember about Judd’s glasses. Had she seen him wearing his glasses early last week?
She shook her head. “I’m almost ashamed to try,” she began. Then, again, intimately: “Sid, you don’t really think he could have-” Soon she went on: of course, this wouldn’t be for the paper, I must swear. But we were friends, weren’t we? Well, from what she had heard was done to that poor little boy, and Judd was obsessed with pornography, we had to be ready to face the ugliest truths in the world. Didn’t I remember the other night how he kept bringing perversions into the conversation? In fact he had tr
anslated some especially pornographic thing from Aretino, the thirty-two perversities. And he was always talking about the decadents, Oscar Wilde and Sade. “I used to think it was a pose.”
I said maybe it was. Nothing had as yet been proven.
Myra clutched my arm again. “Oh God, Sid!” And then, determinedly: “I’ll say I was with Artie on Wednesday.” But it was with a feeble laugh, at the pathetic preposterousness of anyone like herself taking part in an alibi.
Her mother came in, and Myra jumped up. “Sid is taking me downtown,” she told her mother. “Artie arranged to meet us at the Sherman.”
“Oh?” her mother said, and smiled. “You youngsters all went out together last week, didn’t you? That’s nice, I like it better when you go in a group. Have a good time, dear, and don’t stay out too late.”
All the way downtown, Myra talked incessantly, a flood of coquetry, of sophistication, shot through with sudden worried remarks about Artie, but simply as though he were in a scrape, and quite confidentially she told me now, Artie was always in scrapes – there was the time he had nearly killed someone, in Charlevoix, and nearly killed himself too in the accident, his car overturning, and the worst was, he had stolen out of the back window to drive to a dance. She giggled. But it was only things like that he did, madcap things; Artie would never hurt anybody deliberately. Then came gasping questions about law, as though at moments the possible reality struck her. Then she would tell me all about Artie’s girls – of course every flapper on campus was chasing him, but for all his flamboyance, for all his clowning, she said, Artie was really very unsure of himself.
We got out by the County Building, and I showed her the lighted windows on the eighth floor, where Artie was; and I walked her over to the College Inn. She begged me to go and see how things were, so I left her while I hurried over and talked to Tom. I had Artie’s girl at the Inn, I told him, but I didn’t want to use her name, and as for Judd, she couldn’t remember seeing him with his glasses.