Compulsion

by Meyer Levin

  “The portable?” Elsa said helpfully. “Well, now, last time I saw it, it was just there, by the desk as usual.”

  “And when was that?”

  “She doesn’t know what machine she’s talking about,” Judd snapped. But her first words couldn’t be pulled back.

  The men searched the room, the closet, other rooms. “No use. I guess he got rid of it,” Padua said. The group started downstairs.

  “Did you find what you want, gentlemen?” Judd’s father asked.

  “Well, yes and no.” Padua put on his glittering smile. “Does your son own a portable Corona typewriter?”

  Hopefully, Judd realized that the old man might never have noticed the machine. “Why, a portable typewriter, no, I never bought him one that I recollect. He has a regular standard typewriter, I’m sure.” Steiner looked questioningly from one to the other. “Are you going to need my son much longer downtown?”

  “That’s hard to say. We haven’t got everything cleared up yet.”

  Judd showed his father an annoyed smile. The group departed.

  Judah Steiner stood there for a moment. His head was moving almost imperceptibly from side to side. Then he went to the phone. He was beginning to feel outraged. But his sister-in-law counselled him to have patience a little longer. And better to send Judd down some fresh clothing.

  More and more attackers were lunging at him, but he was fencing them off. If only Artie could see how he was holding them off! But once more they were separated. Once more Judd had been taken to the hotel suite, to be worked on. And there in the room stood Michael Fine, Harry Bass, Milt Lewis. They kept their eyes averted from his; but in quiet voices they formally identified the law notes, and said when and where and by whom they had been typed.

  Judd confronted them. “But I typed on my own machine, on my desk. Don’t you remember? Harry Marks must have brought along the portable.”

  Milt Lewis looked right into his eyes for the first time. “That was your machine. You had it right there. You bragged about having two typewriters, one for travelling.”

  Horn thanked the boys, and they went out.

  They stood with us in the other room.

  We waited, as outside a hospital door, for the doctor to emerge. But still it did not happen, and after a time the three boys departed.

  Across the street from the hotel, the Steiner chauffeur appeared in the State’s Attorney’s offices, carrying a suitcase of clothing. As he turned it over to Healy, reporters surrounded him for a feature story.

  Emil fled. He drove all the way back to the house. Somehow, while on the family’s errand, he had not been able to bring up his own thing. But back in the garage, he could not get out of the automobile. His wife came down. “I won’t be able to sleep,” Emil said.

  So he drove back downtown on his own errand.

  It was just then that Horn and Padua, still unable to break Judd’s denials, decided to try a little stratagem.

  During the evening’s frantic activity about Judd’s typewriter, little attention had been paid to Artie. Hour after hour, he had been sitting in the assistant’s office; Swasey didn’t even ask him any more questions.

  Now Padua came in. Artie jumped up. He confronted Padua. “Hey, maybe you can give me a straight answer. Am I supposed to be under arrest, or what?”

  Padua smiled.

  “You’re holding me, aren’t you?”

  “Well, you guessed it,” said Padua.

  “What for?” demanded Artie, with a show of petulance. “You haven’t got anything on me. I’ve told you all I know.”

  “You said you were with Judd Steiner all that day and evening.”

  “Yah, sure.”

  “Okay. Things don’t look too good for your friend. Besides the glasses, it turns out that his typewriter was the one the ransom letter was written on. Since you admit you were with him all the time, whatever we’ve got him for, we’ve got you for.”

  Artie’s cheek was twitching. “Are you nuts!” he shouted. “I told you we just went to pick up some janes.”

  “Yah, I know, that’s what you both said.”

  It was then that the chauffeur walked in. He marched past everybody toward the glass-doored offices. It was so unexpected that no one moved to stop him. Opening the door Emil stood rigid, like some converted sinner intensifying his resolve to confess. “I want to talk to the State’s Attorney.”

  Startled, Padua said, “The State’s Attorney is busy. What’s it about?”

  “I’m the chauffeur for the Steiner family.”

  “Yes, I know. I’ve seen you. Bring Judd’s toothbrush?”

  “I have some information I must give,” Emil stated.

  Padua’s manner changed. “I’m the attorney’s assistant. You can tell me.”

  Artie everyone listened. “I saw in the papers that Junior said he was driving the Stutz all day, the day it happened. I have to say that is a mistake. The Stutz was in the garage; he left it for me to put oil on the brakes; they were squeaking.”

  Artie seemed to sway. His gaze went from Emil to Padua. Then he moved back, and folded on to a chair. Not the glasses, not even the typewriter had had this effect on him. For both those points, there had been some degree of preparation. But Emil’s testimony fitted into that detective-story nightmare, the insignificant, forgotten detail.

  Padua was leaning over him. “All right,” Artie gasped, and ran his tongue over his lips, his eyes still evading, evading. “All right. Can I have a glass of water?”

  Padua hurried to the cooler, brought the water. Swasey pushed us away from the doorway, Emil among us, and closed the door.

  Emil swallowed, staring at the closed glass door. He had the bewildered look of a man who only gave someone a shove, a tiny push. How could he know the fellow would crumple, collapse? Healy led him into another room before we could ask him any questions.

  We waited. The men from the morning papers kept calling their offices, telling them to hold open for the big story.

  Presently, Czewicki came hurrying through, from the hotel. He went into the corner office. After a brief interval, he emerged, his expression hovering between a smirk and fright, his wide cheeks seeming to wobble.

  We besieged him. “Is he confessing? Did they do it?”

  “It’s on the way,” Czewicki said, officiously, happily. “It’s going on right now.” And he rushed back to the hotel to give his details to Horn.

  There, the chief came out into the hallway to meet him, and they walked up and down, Horn’s arms already making his choppy courtroom movements. Then the State’s Attorney returned to the room where Judd sat. “Your partner is confessing,” Horn said. Judd didn’t blink.

  “All right,” Horn said. “What about the Driv-Ur-Self agency? What about registering at the Morrison Hotel?”

  Judd gave him an almost abashed look. He arose, moving about in distress, murmuring, “He can’t be! He would stick till hell freezes over!”

  “He says it was all your idea,” Horn continued in a quiet voice, not without sympathy. “And you’re the one that struck the fatal blow.”

  If maturity can ever be traced to a single moment, perhaps this was the instant of transition for Judd Steiner. He began to shake his head, slowly. “Oh, the weakling,” he said. Then, with a spurt of anger: “So Mr. Straus imagines he can blame it all on me. You can go back and inform Mr. Straus that I shall tell the truth. The account I give shall be precisely accurate and complete.” Judd drew a full breath, then added, with a kind of satisfaction, as if after all the main results would be as desired, “I shall reveal the true purpose and meaning of the deed.”

  Book Two: The Trial of the Century

  We waited half through the night, with the news leaking out to us. The confessions were going well. The time was long because the State’s Attorney was going over each fact, nailing down the evidence so every point could be proven even if later some smart lawyers had the boys withdraw their statements.

  Thus we hovered
between the two rooms, catching bits of the story, certain it was turning out to be a sex murder, perversion, with the ransom plan tacked on to cover the act. We waited, the hours broken only by a call from Louisville informing the State’s Attorney that the almost forgotten drug clerk, Holmes, had died without talking.

  Behind each door the story was pouring forth; each of the culprits seemed bent on getting ahead of the other. And as usual when it came right down to the end, Horn’s assistants let us know, these smarties were like everyone else – they were frantically blaming each other.

  Then gradually a new and curious idea came out to us. This different idea was being insisted upon especially by Judd, with a kind of triumphant disdain for the authorities who, even with the murderers in their hands, failed to see the real nature of the crime. Judd vowed that lust really had nothing to do with it. And as for money – would two millionaire boys risk their lives for ten thousand dollars? He had a strange explanation to offer. This was a crime for its own sake. It was a crime in a vacuum, a crime in a perfectly frozen nothingness, where the atmosphere of motive was totally absent.

  And as we learned how Artie and Judd thought of their crime, the whole event again became a mystery. For was even their own notion of it the truth?

  We could, in that night, only grasp their claim of an experiment, an intellectual experiment, as Judd put it, in creating a perfect crime. Their act sought to isolate the pure essence of murder.

  Before, we had thought the boys could only have committed the murder under some sudden dreadful impulse. But now we learned how the deed had been marked by a long design developed in full detail. What was new to us was this entry into the dark, vast area of death as an abstraction. Much later, we were to seek the deeper cause that compelled these two individuals to commit this particular murder under the guise, even the illusion, that it was an experiment.

  Just as there is no absolute vacuum, there is no absolute abstraction. But one approaches a vacuum by removing atmosphere, and so, in the pretentious excuse offered by Judd, it seemed that by removing the common atmospheres of lust, hatred, greed, one could approach the perfect essence of crime.

  Thus one might come down to an isolated killing impulse in humanity. To kill, as we put it in the headlines, for a thrill! I think the boys themselves believed this was what they had done.

  At first their recital sounded much like an account of daydreams that all could recognize. They had been playing with the idea of the “perfect murder”. Is not the whole of detective-story literature built on this common fantasy? True, in such stories we always supply a conventional motive. We accept that a man may kill for a legacy or for jealousy or for revenge, though inwardly we may make the reservation – that’s foolish, the butler wouldn’t go so far. We accept that a dictator may unleash a war out of “economic needs” or “lust for power” but inwardly we keep saying, “Why? Why? Why?”

  But Judd Steiner and Artie Straus were saying that they had killed the boy, a victim chosen at random, truly for the deed alone, for the fascinating experiment of committing a perfect crime.

  Each related how the plan had begun, Artie vaguely saying “a few months ago”, but Judd, with his passion for precision, saying “the first time we thought of a thing like this was on the twenty-eighth of November” and telling us how on that night they had robbed the fraternity house in Ann Arbour, and how they had quarrelled on their weird drive homeward. Quarrelling lovers must break, or bind themselves into deeper intimacy, and so their pact was made to do some great and perfect crime together. That it should be a kidnapping came out in Artie’s thought – perhaps it had been waiting in him.

  Then, the step of pure logic: for security, the victim must never be able to identify the kidnappers; therefore he must be killed at the earliest moment. Thus the killing was non-emotionally arrived at; it was incidental to the perfection of an idea.

  How needlessly emotional people had always been about death! In the pursuit of an impersonal plan, it was nothing, as Judd was to insist; it was no more meaningful than impaling a beetle, than mounting a bird.

  The truly intriguing element of the problem would follow: how to secure the ransom, without risk of contact? Though money was not the actual motivating force, still it was part of the set exercise. After the feat of a perfect murder came the feat of a perfect transfer of ransom. And so came the idea of a transfer in moving space – the train, the rented car, an abstract identity.

  “And so you registered at the Morrison Hotel as James Singer?”

  “Yes, Artie brought an old valise – we left it there.”

  Instantly, McNamara was hurried over to the Morrison. The registration was found: James Singer. In the storeroom, the tagged, abandoned valise. For weight, a few books. So clever, so careless the perfect plan – books from the university library, one of them containing a library card made out to Artie Straus.

  By such tangible items the whole nightmarish, incredible tale began to become real even while the recital continued, behind each door. The rented car – and putting up the side curtains so no one could see into the rear. And then the lunch with Willie Weiss, and then hunting the victim, and the boy coming into the car.

  “And at that moment it was not too late to stop?”

  Was it? You could think it was too late from the moment Judd first met Artie, from the moment when he was born so bright, born a boy though a girl was wanted. Or you could believe that even with an arm upraised, holding the taped chisel, it was not yet too late… How many murders are halted only as a thought in our minds? I could kill that sonofabitch! In how many tales do we have the moment of the pointed gun, the Go ahead and shoot, and instead, the dropping arm? When the first chosen victim, Dickie Weiss, had disappeared on 49th Street, it had seemed the end of their adventure. And yet the arm came to be raised.

  “And in that moment you were still able to distinguish between right and wrong?”

  “Right and wrong in the conventional sense, yes,” Judd answered.

  And so the blow was struck and perhaps even directly afterwards it seemed not to have happened and that the deed could still be halted. And then came that strange burial, the vain attempt at effacement.

  “Then it was our plan to pour acid on the face in order to oblitterate the identity, in case of the finding of the body.”

  But in the actual deed, suddenly it had seemed necessary, essential to go on pouring. “And when we were doing it, we continued pouring it also on another part of the body-”

  “Where?”

  “The private parts.”

  Then wasn’t it after all a sex crime? Something sickening, to be hastily covered up, and turned away from? But the questioners had to be relentless. In that closed room, Judd was asked, “What made you do that?”

  “We believed – yes, we were under the impression that a person could also be identified by-” He stopped.

  In that intensely charged confession room, with all the men staring at him – Horn, Czewicki, the stenographer, as though staring through his clothes, and with all the dirty meanings in their eyes – could there then have flashed through Judd’s mind some image from his childhood, seemingly disconnected, undressing somewhere, naked, and fellows, maybe even his brother, making crude jokes? For myself, I recall an incident as a boy, in a shower room – one of the kids closing his legs so that only the hair showed and jumping around yelling, “I’m a girl! A girl!” And the ribald laughter. Could some such image have pressed itself forward? Could it perhaps have given Judd a shadowy hint as to the meaning of that attempted obliteration?

  Thus, there was the deed, poured out, relived in that night of confession. The body dissolvingly anointed over mouth and genitalia, then pulled into the mire, pulled blood-flecked through the swamp water and pressed into the dark tube.

  Then hurriedly away, dragging the bloodied robe, up the night lane. Wait. To scoop the earth with the sharp chisel, and bury the belt buckle which never would burn. And farther on a piece, bury the shoes
under a crust of earth. Then as far as the road, the city streets and lights. And stopping at a drugstore, Judd to phone home – the dutiful son, “I’ll be a little late” – and Artie calling a girl – “I got held up, babe, detained, puss, make it tomorrow.” Then to Judd’s house, and parking the Willys a few doors away while pulling out his Stutz to drive his aunt and uncle home, leaving Artie calmly playing a hand of casino with Judah Steiner, Sr. And then Judd back – “Good night, sir,” as Pater retires upstairs – then both into the Willys, the robe, the clothes still inside it. Then to Artie’s house, sneaking down to the basement, the clothes bundled into the furnace, but not the lap robe – “It’ll make a stench. We’ll stuff it behind a bush, get rid of it tomorrow. If anyone finds it, that’s virgin blood – boys will be boys, ha ha.” But wait – the blood in the car. Take the gardener’s watering pail, wash off the worst of it – “Can’t see, that’s good enough,” says Artie. “Park the damn Willys in front of some damn apartment house. Clear the stuff out of it.” Then drive Artie home. “Wait – get rid of the frigging tool!” And driving along Ellis Avenue, Artie flinging the taped chisel out upon the stupid world…

  “Premeditated – why, they planned this thing for weeks, months,” Horn told us when he emerged into the hotel corridor. “I’ve got a hanging case, no question. I don’t care how many millions their families throw in to try to save their skins.” He was not vindictive, not bloodthirsty. He was a man who had carried out a most difficult task and could be satisfied that he had handled it well.

  The confessions were being typed up, he said. There was only one basic difference between them, and he chuckled at the predictable. “Each says the other struck the fatal blow.”

  Soon we had their own words. Artie had pictured himself as driving. “I pulled up alongside of Paulie and said, ‘Hey Paulie’, and Paulie came over and I asked, ‘Want a ride?’ and Paulie said no, he was only a block from his house, and then I said, ‘I want to talk to you about that tennis racket you had the other day’, so Paulie said okay and Paulie got in beside me. I introduced him to Judd, who was in the back seat, and I asked Paulie, ‘You don’t mind if I drive around the block?’ and Paulie said okay, and I pulled away from the curb and as I turned the corner the blow came from behind, three or four quick blows on the head, and the hands were over Paulie’s mouth before he could yell, and then he was dragged into the back seat and a cloth stuffed into his mouth.”