Compulsion

by Meyer Levin

  “Yes, of course,” I said.

  But self-destructiveness wasn’t enough of an answer, Willie declared. Had I read the confessions? The different people they had picked to kill, at one time or another during their planning stage?

  “Yes, you were on the list,” I said. “But everybody has a little list.”

  He brushed aside my remark. “But whom did those people represent? Whom did they really want to kill?” He stared at me. “It would make a fascinating study. Fascinating. What an opportunity! Now that they’re isolated. What an opportunity for a great study!”

  I could get no more out of him that day.

  As I walked the half-empty sunny Sunday streets, the conversation lay on my mind. Whom had they really wanted to kill? And the chisel…

  I called Tom. Presently he met me, driving up with his brother Will, who was on the police force. They were in Will’s Ford.

  “That chisel-” Will ruminated, after I told them of my interview with Willie Weiss. We drove over to the Hyde Park station and Will talked to a friend of his, Sergeant Lacey.

  Come to think of it, Lacey believed he had heard of at least one other chisel wrapped in tape picked up in the neighbourhood. Some months before. One of those private watchmen around the rich homes had found it on a lawn. Looked like something a footpad might have used, but it didn’t check with any crime; so as far as he knew it had been chucked away.

  But of course! This was what Willie Weiss had meant. The weapon.

  We got into the Ford and went to work again, questioning watchmen and gardeners in the neighbourhood. Yes, one or another had seen a chisel something like that, with tape on the blade. Yet we couldn’t track anything down precisely.

  When we returned to the Hyde Park station, Will’s friend Lacey told him on the quiet about a search that had just been made in Artie’s room. In an old trunk in the closet, under some toys, they had found a whole lot of men’s wallets and ladies’ purses. No money in any of them.

  When I got to my room there was a note under the door to call Miss Seligman. Though it was after ten, I called. Myra implored me to come directly to her room, which could be entered from the hotel corridor.

  The room had a studio effect, and Myra was wearing a Chinesey kind of dressing gown; as she took my hand, her palm was hot and moist.

  “Sid,” she said, “Sid, they were here! I don’t know if I did the right thing – I talked to them, I told them things about Artie-”

  “Who?” I asked.

  Two men from Horn’s office had appeared. Of course she wanted to help Artie, they said to her, and she had said, of course. They had been nice men, very considerate, and they had wanted to know all about Artie, since she had known him from childhood. He had always been of exceptional mentality, hadn’t he? And she had said, of course, he was brilliant! And certainly not abnormal.

  Now she sucked in her lower lip, in that naughty-child way she had. “Do you think I said the wrong things, Sid?”

  I said they were probably taking depositions from everybody.

  She looked guiltily at me. They had asked about the last times she had been out with Artie and she had mentioned our date at the Four Deuces with him and Judd. They had wanted to know if Judd had a girl. She had mentioned his taking out my little friend Ruth.

  Ruth would surely have been questioned in any case, I reassured her.

  Her voice hoarse, Myra told how once she and Artie had made a suicide pact – she supposed all kids did that, but people only thought of Artie as always happy-go-lucky. And now, today… I didn’t move. After a moment she came and slipped to her knees, going limp against me. “Oh, tell me what to do,” she begged. “I would do anything to help him.”

  “There’s nothing you can do,” I said. “You’re not mixed up in it.”

  “I am, I am. Everybody who knew him is. Everybody who let him come to a thing like that.”

  I tried to say that it was surely a sickness, that there was nothing she could have done. “Oh, I’m worse than a whore,” she cried. “Do you think if I had given myself to him… oh, we’re all such frauds – we pretend we’re so emancipated. Sid, if I had, if I had, then maybe he wouldn’t have got all tangled up with that awful Judd. That’s what got him into it. I feel such a complete failure.”

  I believe that even at the time I saw that her obsession, her constantly putting everything in terms of sex, was only because it was the only name then given to love.

  Sunday evening, the boys were finally brought to the real jail, the heavy, square building with walls of grey stone, almost black with dirt.

  Horn had got all he wanted from them; so he turned them over to the sheriff, to be booked at last, charged with their murder.

  There was a narrow connecting bridge, between the administration building and the cells, and Artie went first over it, getting ahead of the turnkey, who snapped, “What’s your hurry? You’ll have plenty of time here.”

  He didn’t feel out of place. The closing door, the turning lock had familiarity. Artie looked to his cellmate with an almost mischievous glance, as though they were two kids. But the cellmate was a dull-witted farm lad, who didn’t even seem impressed by who Artie was. After brief exchanges of what they were in for – the cellmate had done a robbery with a gun – Artie stretched on his bunk.

  He had seen himself often, lying behind solid dungeon walls. After Miss Nuisance had tucked him in tight and placed his teddy bear beside him and gone out, shutting the door as the lights went off, he would turn to the bear, and it came to his lips now, the magic beginning, “and now, Teddy…” But here the light never really went out.

  And now, Teddy, they got us. But the master criminal, the greatest of them all, cannot be held by locks and bars. No, Teddy, this place is easy – you saw that guard, that screw, give me the eye, the one at the main gate. He’s in our pay; he’s part of the master criminal’s gang. And in a few days, as soon as we’re ready, we’ll tip him the wink, and the gate will accidentally be left open and we’ll walk right out of here.

  Meanwhile we’ll play the game just like we did with Miss Nuisance. We will be model little boys. They will trust us, and we’ll wander around and get the layout…

  But Mumsie hasn’t come to say good night to poor Artie. Only Miss Nuisance. Mumsie is busy with her baby. A new baby must be taken care of by Mumsie. All right for you!

  Is Nuisance gone? Safe in her room? Sneak the flashlight from under the mattress. The detective book. The master criminal kidnappers. Snatch the baby right in his own house, and bring him up to the hiding place in the garret; everything works perfectly. That Italian organ grinder outside plays the signal-tune that says the ransom is ready. That means ten grand is ready.

  No, we’ll do it differently. We’ll pretend to play cops and robbers with little brother. Yes, Mumsie, I’d love to play a game with Baby.

  Shh, Teddy, here’s the plot. That little stupe believes everything you tell him. You pretend you’re on his side, helping him catch the master criminal, and I will be lying in wait at the top of the stairs. You bring the little bastard up, and pow! I’ve got him! It was an accident! Nobody knew the pistol was loaded. Poor baby, oh, my sweet little kid brother!

  Then, punishment. They lock you in your room.

  Revenge! Do the same to them!… “Now, Artie, this is your new governess, Miss Newsome, and you must be very nice to her.” There she goes into her room! Turn the key on her! Listen to the prisoner pound on the door! “Oh, Artie! Arthur! You naughty -!”

  Then Miss Nuisance made him sit on a chair. Mumsie didn’t save him from her. Mumsie said obey Miss Newsome. All right for you, Mumsie, I’ll get even with you. In some dark hallway, pow!

  They were leading him to the scaffold and Miss Nuisance was walking behind, reading A Tale of Two Cities out loud to him…

  Turning over on his pallet, feeling something crawling under his clothing, Artie sat up. Bugs, lice.

  Judd folded his trousers and his coat, placing them on the floo
r. He said a terse but civil good night to his cellmate, a car thief. The immense loneliness came over him.

  He lay down with his hands under his head. And then all at once, in the quiet of the cell, Judd understood how stupid he had been in the last two days. A superman was not bound by the conventions of telling the truth! It was not against him, personally, that Artie had lied, but for his own self, as a god made his own truth.

  A wave of relief passed through Judd. He had Artie back.

  Would he see Artie tomorrow? In the yard?

  The next morning when they were marched into the jail yard, Judd went up to Artie at once, his hand extended. “We got into this together, let’s go through with it together,” he said. “I’m sorry if I did anything that might strain our friendship.”

  Artie blinked, then put out his hand, too, while over his face came that roguish, college-boy grin.

  As Wilk and Ferdinand Feldscher came into the consultation cell, the boys rose, Artie with a sheepish look toward Feldscher, and Judd to address Wilk with undisguised adulation. “I am a great admirer of yours. May I say I consider you one of the greatest minds of our time?”

  Well, he would try to be of help, Wilk said. But he did not see much hope. What had made them talk so much!

  Raising his head, Judd said he guessed he had wanted to show off.

  “All right. Now that’s finished with. Remarks like this thing about finding a friendly judge-” Wilk shook his head, eyeing Judd sadly. “You didn’t really say that?”

  Judd declared that he couldn’t recall, exactly.

  “Henceforth,” Feldscher admonished, “no matter what is asked, by reporters or anybody, you reply, ‘I must respectfully decline to answer upon advice of counsel’. Got that?”

  “I must respectfully decline…” they parroted.

  Feldscher glanced from one to the other. “Have they questioned you about other crimes?”

  Artie’s face twitched.

  “The papers are full of stuff. They claim you did everything from that gland atrocity to the killing of Cock Robin.”

  “Have you got the papers?” Artie asked eagerly.

  Feldscher shook his head. “Everybody is finding taped chisels all over Chicago.” His eyes had not left Artie’s face.

  Artie returned his gaze unblinkingly. “I must respectfully decline to answer upon advice of counsel.”

  For the time being they let it stand that way.

  It was Wilk’s telephone now that rang incessantly with anonymous and obscene threats. A hundred and ten killers saved from the gallows? He himself would hang from a street lamp before he could add these two to his list!

  And at midnight, flaming up beneath his windows, was the burning cross.

  When news of it came, I rushed to the Midway, to see only the charred remnants, as of a huge box kite. Fire engines were pulling away. It was the Ku Klux Klan. The first burning cross in Chicago. No, no one had seen hooded white figures. Some said a truck had stopped, a dozen men had set up the ready cross, touched matches to it, and driven off.

  For Wilk? I was dazed. What had this crime to do with the K.K.K.? All I knew were the general things. K.K.K. was something to be joked about, yet vaguely menacing. All those men in their white sheets, their regalia, were subjects for Mencken’s jokes in The Smart Set. They were symbols of stupidity. And they had seemed rather distant from Chicago. Wasn’t it a Southern thing that had started after the Civil war, against Negroes? The nearest that it had ever come to Chicago was some town in Indiana. A burning cross had been reported there. And they would come at night and grab somebody – some minister involved in a scandal, perhaps – they would grab him and take him to a wood and whip him. They were not only against Negroes. Catholics and Jews, too.

  And Wilk. An atheist. A defender of Jews.

  Then a remark of my father’s came to my mind. When I had called home, on Sunday, his only remark about the case had been, “One thing is lucky in this terrible affair, Sid. It’s lucky it was a Jewish boy they picked.” My father, with his one yardstick. What will it do to the Jews?

  It was to take me a long while to perceive the inverted, subterranean way in which there was a meaning to their all being Jewish. The immediate result of the cross-burning was a police guard set around Jonathan Wilk. Despite his protests.

  Then the defence called a press conference. Wilk was sitting with his back to the windows as we filed in, but he got up at once and assumed his celebrated Lincolnesque stoop; his coat hung loosely open, and his left thumb was automatically hooked under his braces. He waved us in, the ageing speckled skin of his hand transparent in a sunny.

  We were handed copies of a prepared statement. The families pledged themselves in no way to make use of their wealth to influence justice. Lawyers’ fees would be determined by the Bar Association. The families felt that the boys should be permanently removed from society; however, they hoped that their lives would be saved.

  Did that mean an insane asylum? we asked. What would the defence be?

  First, said Edgar Feldscher, the defence would try to assemble the facts.

  Mike Prager snapped, “Hasn’t everything already been found out?”

  The outward facts, yes. But a team of the very best alienists would make a study to determine the inward facts.

  “Then you are going to plead insanity?”

  The plea, he repeated smilingly, would depend on the study. It was to be purely scientific. Indeed, the defence still held open to Mr. Horn the offer for a joint mental study.

  We took the defence offer to Horn. He laughed. “I’ve got my own alienists, the best in the business. Old Wilk is trying to pull a deal. First, a joint examination. Then he’ll offer a guilty plea. Oh, no, you can tell old Jonathan the Great that I’m not playing. I’ve got an airtight hanging case and those boys are going to swing.”

  Had there been feelers from the defence? Was there a chance of a deal on a guilty plea before the Chief Justice?

  “You know what the chances would be if I was still sitting up there!” Horn said ominously. He was reminding us that before running for State’s Attorney, he had himself occupied the post of Chief Justice of the Criminal Court. He was putting Judge Matthewson on notice.

  The formal arraignment was to take place on the following morning, and late into the night we hovered near the Wilk apartment, still held by Horn’s angry hint that there might be a plea of guilty instead of a great show trial.

  Edgar Feldscher had returned from Atlantic City, bringing two of his alienists. Willie Weiss was there too, hurrying in and out of various rooms, and from the doorway I managed to get his attention. He came out and walked around the block with me, talking incessantly. He was going to work with the defence! There was Dr. Hugh Allwin, a very advanced man who had just come from Vienna with the very latest techniques! And with him was Dr. Eli Storrs, a brilliant psychologist. “They’re really going to do a job!” he said. “Nothing like this has ever been done before. Complete psychological and physiological studies, the latest gland stuff. Wilk’s also got Dr. Vincenti, the best endocrine man alive!” The boys would virtually be taken apart, to see what made them tick.

  But upstairs, I gathered, the insanity strategy was in question. Precedent alone, straight legal precedent, presented to a judge, might be the soundest approach, for no minor in Chicago had ever been hanged on a guilty plea.

  On the morning of the arraignment we still did not know how they would plead. Then, as we were leaving for court, Reese beckoned to Tom. Somebody named Al Capone, the owner of a speak-easy called the Four Deuces, had just been picked up for shooting a top gangster named Joe Howard. A new kind of cold-blooded killing. The car had simply swept past Joe Howard on Clark Street, and he had been shot full of holes.

  Tom hurried to police headquarters and I went on alone to cover the arraignment of the boys.

  As word spread that the thrill killers would appear, there were scuttlings from all the corridors; from nowhere, the courtroom filled.
>
  The boys were brought in. It was Artie’s nineteenth birthday, and the sob sisters were ready. Had he received presents from his best girls? From Myra Seligman? From Dorothea Lengel?

  Artie smiled teasingly. Other questions came, for both. What was jail life like? Would they prefer hanging to life sentences? And they replied courteously, but like a vaudeville team, “We must respectfully decline to answer upon the advice of counsel,” smirking at their lawyers.

  We laughed, and then for an instant they bent their heads together, and Artie came out of the huddle, grinning. “We have a statement, fellows.” We all bit, readying our notepaper. “The sun is shining,” said Artie. “It is a pleasant day.” So we laughed again and noted that they had recovered their friendship and their bravado.

  The judge entered. It was the Chief Justice himself. In certain events, chance seems to exert itself to choose the proper persons, as if there were an ordainment to show mankind from time to time a complete symbol. So in this case Judge Matthewson had precisely the bearing for his rôle He had the fullness of years, but with no suggestion of frailty of age.

  The clerk called the case.

  Horn and his staff had prepared a formidable indictment, for felonious assault, murder by strangulation, kidnapping with intent to kill – everything – as if afraid of some wizardly loophole evasion. But Wilk sat relaxed, loose, with no papers before him. When the time came, he and Ferdinand Feldscher stood, one on each side of the two boys, as they were asked, how did they plead?

  “Not guilty,” said Judd, as though answering a classroom question, and Artie said, swallowing his words, “Not guilty.”

  Horn was smiling. He would have his chance to take on the great Jonathan Wilk before a jury. The judge set the day, a few weeks ahead.

  Wilk pleaded for a delay to prepare a defence. “The defence needs no more time than the prosecution!” Horn cried.