Compulsion

by Meyer Levin

  For several minutes, Artie said, Judd had lost his nerve, crying, “Oh this is terrible, terrible!” And Artie had had to talk fast, make wisecracks, until Judd got hold of himself.

  “This is terrible, terrible,” echoed to me. It was no extenuation. But what did it mean, there at that moment? That the reality broke in, for one of them at least?

  For himself, Artie said, he noticed his pulse racing, he felt exhilarated, his blood beating intensely, from the moment the boy got into the car.

  The way Judd told it varied mainly on the question of who was driving. He had been at the wheel, Judd insisted, with Artie in the back seat; the blows had come from the tool in Artie’s hand.

  At the time, in the immense excitement of having the story, the dual accusation was only an ironic sidelight to the crime, and the fact that each accused the other only made them more alike in our minds. It was only later that the simple realization came that one of them must have been telling the truth.

  To this day, the crime has been thought of as a deed in which they were organically joined, like Siamese twins. This may be true as to legal guilt. But understanding will never come through such an assumption. And if we see them as two beings who became wedded in the deed, then it does become momentous that one, here, had been telling the truth while the other had been lying.

  I knew I had to phone Ruth. She should learn it all from me and not from the papers. In some shameful way, whatever I said would sound like a personal triumph. I procrastinated, telling myself I didn’t want to wake her with this news. Then when I finally called, she had already learned it, from a Tribune extra in the streets. Then she asked, “Sid, will you see him?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Sid, Sid.” It was as though she were crying, “Judd, Judd.”

  We rushed out to interview the families. They had been wakened with the news, and the Strauses let us all in, begging for us to tell them – hadn’t it been the third degree? As soon as the boys had rested, and had some sleep, they would repudiate the story. It was absurd, insane!

  Artie’s father left the room. Mrs. Straus held herself upright. “I won’t believe it,” she declared, “unless I hear it from Artie’s own lips.”

  And at Judd’s house, his father, in his measured voice, repeated to us only, “No, no, this is some mistake, it cannot be true.” His brother Max told us, “It must be the boys’ idea of a joke. They must be sore at the cops for keeping them so long.”

  After his confession Judd felt, if anything rather proud, as after making an unusually comprehensive report in class. He wished only that Artie had been there in the room – forgetting, momentarily, his rage at Artie for breaking down and talking. The crime had a certain altitude, he told himself; the action had a wholeness – the word was consistency. Now, through a trial, through an execution, he would maintain the same consistency, the same dignity of living and dying by a set of ideas. Even with the blunder, even with being caught, he and Artie had somehow achieved their aim. They had demonstrated something that was beyond the ordinary mind.

  The State’s Attorney, to his credit, had carried out the interrogation in exactly the proper tone, with respectful curiosity. Thus when it was all over Judd had been asked if he would like to rest. He stretched out on a couple of chairs, and, the tension gone, for a tumultuous second imagined himself and Artie mounting the scaffold together. Repeating to himself that he had no fear, that he was consistent, Judd presently slept.

  When Judd awoke there was coffee, and Horn was back, looking newly shaven. Then Padua came into the room with Artie.

  Artie was wearing a hiding, self-conscious grin. The nearness of Artie had brought in Judd the automatic throb of mind and heart together, but now there came an emptiness as he recalled what Artie was doing. In trying to twist the story, Artie was deserting their togetherness, killing it.

  Mr. Horn was amiable. “Now, boys, we want to read you your statements. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to give us your corrections.”

  Padua handed Judd a copy of Artie’s statement. At once Judd saw the little mistake about when they first planned the thing, and even that small error was incomprehensible to him. How could Artie have forgotten that night ride after raiding the frat? He read on, until there came the part about who was driving the Willys.

  This was the second moment of shattering for Judd, after having been told, the night before, that Artie was confessing. Now, Artie was breaking their union.

  Judd fixed his eyes on his friend, who had been reading Judd’s own confession. At that moment, Artie flushed and leaped up, talking angrily. “In the first place, he says the chisel was wrapped by me. It was wrapped by him, Judd Steiner, in Jackson Park. He wrapped that chisel while waiting there in Jackson Park on that little nine-hole golf course. All right.”

  Artie’s objection was partly true. Sitting next to each other in the car, Artie had said, “I’ll show you,” and started the tape around the hard blade, then handing it to Judd to wrap.

  “In the second place, he mentioned the idea of the thing, well, the main thing was to get the burial place, and the means of throwing that package. The place was his, and he struck on that idea of the train.”

  That was it, then – Artie wanted step by step to put the full blame on him, his idea, his burial place, his chisel, his killing! Artie would make himself out as only an accessory. For one instant the scene of their planning, the chummy evenings in the house, came back to Judd, and he felt grief. But he listened on. “He doesn’t mention the method of killing,” Artie declared. “He had that very well conceived and planned out, as evidenced by the ether in the car, which was absolutely the notion to be followed through. The boy was to be etherized to death, and he was supposed to do that because he had a number of times chloroformed birds and things like that, and he knows ornithology. I don’t know a damn thing about that.”

  “Yes, but the ether wasn’t used, was it?” Horn asked. “Who hit him with the chisel?”

  Artie snapped, “He did.”

  “Who is he?”

  Judd tried again to catch Artie’s eye, to look him straight in the eye. Artie affirmed, “Judah Steiner, Jr. He was sitting up in the front seat-” and then he caught himself.

  At Artie’s terrible slip, a double impulse of pity and of exultation, like some reversible electric current, went through Judd, and as Artie floundered Judd even felt an anxiety for his partner, now at last proven the weaker.

  “I mean I was sitting up in the front seat,” Artie started again. “This is obviously a mistake. I am getting excited.” The prosecutors scarcely concealed their smiles. “This Kessler boy got up in the front seat. He didn’t see Judd till he was inside the car.” Artie was fully recovered now, and despite his own powerful desire to intervene and contradict, Judd felt a satisfaction that Artie was doing better. “I introduced Judd to this Kessler boy and then took him into the car.”

  With these words Artie turned, pouring the rest out directly at Judd. “I have been made a fish of right along here. This story – all this alibi, all these women, and being drunk in the Coconut Grove and everything – we planned that definitely. It was definitely decided that that story was not to go after Wednesday noon, which was to be a week after the crime. After that we were just to say we didn’t know what we were doing. We felt that you were safe with your glasses after a week had passed and that your glasses being out there would not necessitate an airtight alibi. And then you came down here Thursday and told the story you had agreed not to tell!” Artie was shrieking now. “I came down to Mr. Horn, I denied being with you, Steiner, and being at the Coconut Grove; I stuck to our agreement! But when they started talking about the Grove and Lincoln Park, I put it together and knew you had told the alibi story you should not have told, so I stepped in to try to help you! And I think it is a damned sight more than you would have done for me. I tried to help you out because I thought that you at least, if the worst came to the worst, would admit what you had done and not try to drag
me into it in that manner.”

  Artie was staring into his face. It was for Judd like the moment that comes to any man in the discovery that the woman who had glowed for him, whom he loved, is a slut, and there is a bewildering dismay in him, and he thinks to himself, But I knew it all the time; I knew it when she was abandoned with me, when she did all those dirty things with me – they don’t count for dirty only because you yourself are doing them – but I knew she would do the same with other men. And sinkingly the man knows he may have to love her still and be alone for ever in his love.

  So at this moment Judd felt eternal solitude coming upon him. The dignity, the consistency, of the deed had been broken; they were no longer wilful gods, but caught boys squirming to throw blame, and he wanted only to detach himself so he might at least retain his own idea of integrity.

  Judd turned on Artie. “I am sorry that you were made a fish of and stepped into everything and broke down and all that. I am sorry, but it isn’t my fault.”

  Horn broke in. “Now listen, boys. You have both been treated decently by me?”

  Judd responded, “Absolutely.”

  “No brutality or roughness?”

  “No.”

  Artie was still silent. “Not one of you has a complaint to make?”

  “No,” Judd said.

  “Have you?” Horn asked Artie.

  “No,” Judd heard Artie mutter.

  As they were led out, Artie didn’t look at him.

  With unrelenting speed and energy, Horn sought to sew up his hanging case before lawyers could get to the boys and tell them to keep their mouths shut. Horn thought ahead to the defence. An insanity plea, undoubtedly. Some chance, with their brilliant school records! And Horn sent out men to secure depositions from fraternity brothers, from teachers, and from girl friends – had they ever known Judd or Artie to be anything but intelligent and self-possessed?

  When we assembled again in Horn’s office, the boys were brought in to us, refreshed, alert, though hostile to each other.

  A new phase of the bizarre story was opening.

  At once came our questions about remorse. Artie said he was sorry, but only because the adventure had not succeeded. Judd said, “I have examined my reactions and can’t say that I have experienced any such sentiment as remorse.”

  Would he do the thing again?

  No, Judd said, with deliberation, but only because he now knew that there could be no perfect crime – some error would always be made.

  While Artie scarcely spoke, Judd suddenly became torrential. After all, he said, it was not entirely wrong that they had been caught. Now they could fully explain their ideas; even if they paid with their lives, it was in a sense the only way to establish the new concept that had guided them. The failure, the slip-up, was a flaw in the experiment. The magnitude of the idea remained.

  He began then to explain his superman philosophy – the freedom from all codes, sentiments, superstitions, even from fear of death itself. He was to go on talking all day, as our cavalcade retraced the path of the crime.

  A half-dozen limousines were lined up in the street, but they were already insufficient for all the newsmen, the sob sisters, the photographers, the out-of-town press people who were arriving in droves.

  With Sergeant McNamara behind him, Judd came over to where I stood with Tom. “I understand that we owe our predicament in good measure to you gentlemen,” Judd said, “but I want to state that I don’t regard it as anything personal. In fact, I must congratulate you on your accomplishment.”

  I looked at him, trying to erase in myself the knowledge that he was a murderer. There had to be something human, something worthy, to draw a girl like Ruth – or was all love a delusion? Or was this worthier quality buried so deeply that only an occasional rare person like Ruth could sense it?

  We were herded into the cars. I managed to crowd into Artie’s car with Padua, Mike Prager, and a sob sister from the Herald, a stringy blonde named Rea Knowles.

  He was now being serious and penitent. “I don’t see how that cold-blooded fish can sit in that other car and laugh over this thing,” Artie told us. Rea asked if he felt the meaning of what he had done, and Artie said, “The first few days I didn’t feel it; it seemed to me that I could have carried this secret the rest of my life. But now I feel it.”

  She immediately got after the girl story. “You went out on dates, during this last week, didn’t you, Artie? Didn’t it bother you when you were out with a girl?”

  With his boyish candour, Artie said, “No, just a thought or two at times. But I’m appreciative of the thing now. Every once in a while the whole thing comes up and a realization of the thing we have done comes over my mind.”

  He paused, as if it had come just then. “This thing will be the making of me,” Artie declared. “I’ll spend some years in jail, I suppose, and then I’ll be released. I’ll come out to a new life, I’ll go to work and have a career.” We all stared at him. Could it be that it hadn’t really hit him yet? Or did he feel so sure his people could get him off?

  Artie turned the questioning on us. Did we think any lawyer could save his life? Inevitably, the name of Jonathan Wilk was mentioned. Artie had already been thinking of him. “But he only defends the poor,” he said. “Do you believe he would take our case?”

  There was a silence. Padua, sitting up front, turned his head with a curious smile, and Rea resumed her attack. If he went to jail, did he have any girl in mind who might wait for him? And Artie said remorsefully that he didn’t know if any woman could ever marry him after the thing he had done. Though sometimes he felt as though it were another person who had done it -

  Mike Prager leaped on this. Did Artie believe he had been dominated by Judd Steiner, in the crime?

  Artie looked at us candidly, including Padua in his open gaze. “What do you think?” As one thought of the swarthy Judd, with his intense dark eyes, there could be only one answer to the boyish Artie: Judd, the master mind.

  Was it true that Judd was unpopular, that he didn’t go out with girls? Rea asked Artie.

  “Oh, we’ve been on double dates.” Artie eyed me confidentially.

  “Well, you know what I mean. Has he ever been in love?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Artie said.

  “Have you ever been in love?”

  He smiled winningly for her. “Lots of times.”

  “Yes, but I mean just once. The real thing.”

  Artie winked. “Now, kid-” I revelled in my private knowledge, in having it all over Rea and Mike Prager.

  The cavalcade had halted in front of the Driv-Ur-Self place. The manager, confronted with Judd, gasped, “Yes, I remember him – James Singer. Rented a Willys a couple of times. We made our usual full check-” he started to say, but Horn reassured him, “That’s all right.”

  At the next stop an incident occurred. It was the lunch counter where Artie, as the reference for Mr. Singer, had waited for a telephone call.

  When the crowd started into the place, a round-faced woman behind the cash register pointed at once to Artie. “That’s him!” Artie half pitched against the wall, fainting. A detective caught him, propping him up.

  “The poor weakling.” We all turned our eyes to Judd. His voice had had neither contempt nor pity; there was merely the effect of a statement.

  Artie was revived; he made an effort to joke it off, saying he usually required a pint before he passed out. The cavalcade was resumed.

  We were following the death ride. From the turnoff lane to Hegewisch, briskly Judd led the group across the prairie, indicating where the body was carried and how he had pushed it into the concrete tube. “A few inches farther and it would never have shown,” he remarked, and his voice had that odd, clacky classroom tone.

  Someone in the crowd asked, “Why, particularly, in this place?” And at this, Artie burst out, “This was all Mr. Steiner’s idea. I’m not even familiar with this place. I couldn’t even find it again!�
��

  And vaguely, I think I felt then what Judd may have felt: the cistern, the close snug fit, as when little kids, finding a packing box or a barrel, feel impelled to crawl in and hide.

  “Why here?” someone repeated, and Judd looked confused. He turned away. He was in conversation with McNamara about his chances. The big cop had become familiar. “I don’t think I’ve got a chance before a jury, do you?” Judd said. “They’d hang us.” McNamara agreed, professionally, that a jury would be a big risk. Sometimes a judge could be friendlier.

  “I suppose our families will secure the best legal talent for us,” Judd said. “Maybe with a smart lawyer before a judge, our lives could be saved. What do you think?” That speculation was to provide a fantastic climax to the trial.

  Down the lane, Judd showed where the belt buckle could be dug out, and it was found, and then the shoes. We drove to the beach, where the half-cindered remnants of the lap robe were located, and finally to the lagoon in Jackson Park, where divers sought the remains of the typewriter. Thus it was all proven, exactly, exactly.

  When we came downtown again and struck Michigan Boulevard, we encountered a parade, and Judd cried, “Oh, yes, Memorial Day!” And he added, “The annual parade for legalized murder.”

  Then it was dinnertime and Horn expansively ordered the entire cavalcade to proceed to Crown’s, near Lincoln Park. Several huge round tables were commandeered. Judd again became discursive, like an instructor following up his laboratory demonstration with a lecture.