Compulsion

by Meyer Levin

  A hall door opened, and I could hear an entire segment of argument about whether to call the girls at all and expose them to cross-examination. Horn would stop at nothing; he would surely confront even the girls with the homosexual thing.

  Suddenly a question stood clear in my mind. If Artie was the actual murderer, and Judd was involved only because of his homosexual love, what would Judd be if released from that love? Hadn’t some such release been taking place, through Ruth? Hadn’t he shown himself on the way to normal emotions?

  As if my thoughts had summoned him, Willie Weiss stopped at my side. And with his uncanny penetration, he asked, “Worried about your girl going on the stand?”

  It didn’t strike me then that he could have meant Myra, since I had brought her. I needed help, and in some stumbling way I made it clear to him, telling him all I knew about Judd and Ruth. He perched on the edge of a telephone table, immensely intrigued.

  “You mean you think Judd was about to come out of it?” he asked.

  “That’s what I want to know,” I said. And just then, as Dr. McNarry passed through the hall, Willie caught his arm. “This is quite interesting,” he told the alienist. And looking around: “Let’s go where we can talk.”

  We tried the dining room, but it was in use. Mrs. Wilk, sighing, offered us the maid’s room behind the kitchen.

  So we sat on the cot in the tiny room. There was an unshaded overhead bulb, and I felt Dr. McNarry studying me.

  Wasn’t I the reporter, he inquired, who was so much involved in the case? Unfortunately he hadn’t been present during my testimony.

  “I’m perhaps even more involved,” I said, and told about my friend, Ruth Goldenberg.

  “Your girl?”

  “Well, not exactly. Not any more, I’m afraid.”

  “Judd’s?” He identified her then as the girl Judd had not wanted to name during all the examinations. Yes, Judd had even talked about leaving home and marrying this girl. But – McNarry touched his fingers together – it had all seemed rather a fantasy.

  Willie stated the problem that was troubling me. “Sid has been wondering if this sudden attachment to a girl could be a sign that Judd was overcoming his pathology? I think it’s an interesting question.”

  Dr. McNarry studied his fingertips. “Of course it happens. Homosexuals can behave simultaneously as heterosexuals – that seems to have been true in both these boys – but they can also go over, as we sometimes see, to normal relationships. In fact, in late adolescence that’s a common pattern, isn’t it?” He gazed at me. “Judd’s nineteen.”

  “Doctor,” Willie broke in, “couldn’t the murder have acted as a kind of catharsis, freeing Judd from his homosexual bond?”

  An appreciative smile came over the alienist’s face. “But then the bond has apparently reasserted itself,” Dr. McNarry said.

  “Because now, in jail, he has no alternative,” Willie argued. “But in the week after the crime, in fact virtually the day after, for the first time in his life he had what seems to be a true emotional reaction to a girl.”

  Dr. McNarry asked, “The young lady was affected by him?”

  “Yes,” I said, hurt by Willie’s having to hear it. “I believe she intends to testify.”

  He looked at his hands again.

  One more question pressed itself forward in me. That time with Ruth on the beach – wasn’t it somehow a proof that Judd, by himself, could master his impulses? The doctor stared at me. I finally had to ask: Would it help if something like that were brought out in court?

  Instantly, under his gaze, I had an intense feeling of shame at my own thought of Ruth on the stand questioned about physical intimacy.

  “This is the girl Judd brought to his brother’s engagement party,” Willie remarked. Dr. McNarry nodded, as though he had known.

  Then he sighed, not as a doctor but as one of us. “The poor wretch.” He shook his head. “All in the wrong time. The poor wretch.”

  It was just as Myra was taking the stand that I saw Ruth enter the courtroom. Willie pulled Ruth into the room and led her to the front bench, filled with witnesses. The fellows moved together to make room for her. Ruth saw me watching her then and gave me her serious smile.

  I felt her somehow changed, and an anguish came over me; I wiped sweat from my face, so I could furtively dry my eyes. Would Ruth say Judd had asked her to marry him? Would that somehow for ever close me away, as though my girl had really given herself to another man?

  The questioning of Myra had begun.

  She was dressed in white, like a nurse, in a straight white linen frock, with only a few huge buttons to show it wasn’t a uniform. Ferdinand Feldscher was questioning her in a soft fatherly manner.

  Yes, she had known Artie since childhood.

  And would she characterize him as a stable character?

  Highly unstable, she said. He was nervous, smoked nervously, throwing away his cigarettes after a few puffs. He was given to lying for no reason at all, making up stories the way kids did, like his bootlegger stories, and then, often, he behaved in an infantile way, so much so that it was embarrassing, and everyone had remarked on it.

  “Can you think of an example?”

  “Quite recently, I had a date and Artie dropped in just before my date arrived. When the bell rang, he put on my sash, and ran to the door…”

  There was giggling at the story. Horn was grinning. Of course, Myra said, such antics could be due to high spirits, but with Artie they often became disturbing.

  “Would you say that he was fully developed, mature?”

  “Oh, no, decidedly not. He was very childish.”

  “Childish? In his emotions?”

  “Yes. Very much so.”

  The lawyer made the point over and over, then backed slowly away, and Horn approached Myra; he was still grinning, but his voice was bland.

  She was a cousin of Artie’s?

  A distant cousin.

  She had been his playmate as a child?

  One of them.

  “Would you call yourself his sweetheart?”

  She flushed and couldn’t answer.

  “You kissed, I presume, at times?” he demanded, hard. Despite objections, the judge directed her to answer.

  “Yes,” she said, her resentment helping her to regain her composure.

  “And would you call these kisses from a grown sweetheart childish emotional behaviour?” Over the full laughter, Horn rubbed it in. “Were they childish or mature kisses?”

  The judge rebuked him.

  “As his childhood playmate and young lady friend, you would help Artie out if you could?”

  “Certainly,” she said, “but not-”

  “Being a lady, you wouldn’t be lying now, to help Artie out?”

  “I don’t lie!”

  There was a knowing murmur from the courtroom. “Oh, wouldn’t she!”

  “Haven’t you been lying, right here on the stand?” Horn demanded. He glanced at some papers in his hand. “You made a statement, did you not, to a representative of the State’s Attorney’s office, the day after Artie Straus and Judd Steiner confessed to this crime?”

  “I was asked some questions. I was very upset at the time.”

  “Let me read to you from the statement. Question: ‘Would you say that Artie is intelligent?’ Answer: ‘Exceptionally.’ Question: ‘Mature in his ideas?’ Answer: ‘Oh, very mature in his ideas.’ Now, do you remember giving that answer?”

  “I might have said it, I don’t know. I didn’t know what they meant by mature – I said a lot of other things they didn’t put down-”

  “Miss Seligman, in this signed and sworn statement, you declare this man to be mature. Here on the stand you testify-” He had the court stenographer read back her testimony. “Question: ‘Would you say he was fully developed, mature?’ Answer: ‘Oh, no, decidedly not. He was very childish -’”

  Horn cut in, his arm outflung, finger pointing at her. “When were you lying, ten minute
s ago in this courtroom, or now?”

  Myra’s face squeezed, contorted. “But – but-” She struggled to speak.

  “Excused,” Horn snapped. Ferdinand Feldscher rushed to help her as she stumbled from the stand. Wilk glared at Horn with utter loathing, red spots of fury on his cheeks.

  With a frantic movement, Willie Weiss was across the enclosure, on the other side of Myra. We all rushed from our press seats as Myra was carried into the judge’s chambers. Presently, Feldscher came out to us. Dr. Allwin had given Myra a sedative, he announced, and she was being taken home.

  When I resumed my place in the press box, I saw that Ruth was no longer in the courtroom. “No more girl witnesses,” Tom told me, as he left for the office to write the story. “Wilk cancelled them all.”

  I caught Judd’s eye. I told myself that he, too, felt relieved.

  And could it have helped him? Even if Ruth had been able to make everything known – everything, even the inner, uncompleted feelings…

  Then, to our surprise, the defence used Milt Lewis, despite his having produced the fatal typing notes. Milt told about the day in law class when Judd had insisted that a superman was above the law.

  “Can you fix the date?” Ferdinand Feldscher asked.

  “Well, I know it was in between the crime and the apprehension.”

  “At the time of the discussion, did you think it was strange?”

  “It was just one of his nutty ideas.”

  “Nutty, did you say? Meaning irresponsible?”

  “Well, exaggerated. Things you couldn’t take seriously.”

  “Can you recall some other such – nutty ideas?”

  “He said he was a nihilist-”

  “A nihilist, what is that?”

  “A kind of anarchist who wants to destroy things.”

  “Even worse than an anarchist, then? Destructive?”

  “Yes. He felt no restraint as far as authority was concerned, and he said he believed in destruction merely for the sake of destruction. I remember one argument when he said there was no value to life in itself.”

  “Was this a part of his Nietzschean philosophy?”

  Judd was whispering excitedly now; Wilk was trying to calm him.

  “No, I wouldn’t say it was exactly in line with Nietzsche.”

  “Would you accept the Nietzschean philosophy?”

  “No,” Milt said, “because the founder of that philosophy was insane a good part of his life. Nietzsche himself died in an insane asylum.”

  “But Judd accepted it?”

  “Hook, line, and sinker,” Milt said.

  Horn’s cross-examination was simple. Hadn’t all the students been exposed to Nietzsche?

  “The Nietzschean theory is just one small phase of the entire field of philosophy,” Milt said ponderously.

  “All of you didn’t take it as a licence to go out and murder?” The question was withdrawn after defence objection.

  Milt left the stand with a virtuous air.

  A grave problem confronted the defence. It concerned the stolen Storrs-Allwin report. If neither Storrs nor Allwin were called, could the damaging items from the report be kept out of the courtroom? Crimes A, B, C, D? Wouldn’t Horn himself produce the report?

  In the morning the defence called Dr. Allwin. Even when the defence produced the snapshot of four-year-old Artie in his cowboy suit, aiming his pistol at his teddy bear, Horn let it go into the record, only chortling aloud as Dr. Allwin explained the significance of Artie’s “intent expression”, an indication that, even at that early age, fantasy and reality were confused in the boy. Horn waited for his chance to cross-examine.

  Then, holding the Storrs-Allwin report in his hand like a Bible, the prosecutor attacked.

  “Couldn’t the boys have cheated on some of these tests, since they are so smart, such good liars, as your report observes?”

  “No,” said Dr. Allwin.

  “And why not?”

  “Because I am smarter than they are,” he said softly.

  Because of the very abundance of the material he had received from them, consistent lying would have been most difficult, he explained. Judd, he felt, had been on the whole fairly truthful, decidedly more so than Artie. But Artie had lost the normal person’s ability to distinguish between truth and fantasy.

  “Well, what constitutes normality?”

  “A proper balance between the intellect and emotion.”

  “And these boys are abnormal?”

  “Yes, but in different ways.”

  Horn snorted. In what he understood by abnormality, they were the same, he said. In fact, to the State they were plain perverts. Didn’t their compact provide that Artie should consent to certain acts, in exchange for Judd’s help in his criminal adventures? What were those acts?

  “They were sexual acts,” Dr. Allwin said.

  “How often?” Horn demanded.

  Several women pressed their way down the aisles, to get closer. Angrily, the judge ordered, “I want every woman to leave this room!”

  Finally, the courtroom was partly cleared. The judge had the testimony continued. In a voice refined and regretful, Dr. Allwin described the acts, calling Judd the aggressor. But this was the only such relationship, apparently, that Judd had ever developed. On Artie’s part, the incidents had been passive. They had occurred a few times a month.

  Judd’s eyes were cast down. His father’s head was bent low, the eyes closed.

  There lay the sickness, finally frankly exposed before us. Was it so dreadful a thing? In all the history of human behaviour, of the sick and ugly and distorted and careless and sportive and mistaken things that humans did, was this so much more?

  But there was something more connected with the sexual act, Horn insisted, when the open trial resumed. Wasn’t it a part of the compact, that each act was linked to a crime? What, then, were the other crimes?

  No, no! Ferdinand Feldscher protested.

  Forcefully, Horn read from the Storrs-Allwin report the section about crimes withheld. Of Artie, it said, “Without any indication, facial or otherwise, he would lie or repress certain instances.” He turned on the alienist. “So there were gaps in Artie’s story of his crimes?”

  “Yes. I said that.”

  “And he might have been advised not to tell you these things?”

  “He might have been.”

  Horn read on: “‘His older brother does not know of these untold stories, but the patient says he will not tell him unless the family advises him to.’ You wrote this?”

  “Yes, that is just what I wrote.”

  “So just how important these matters are that he has been advised not to tell you, you don’t know?”

  “I don’t know,” Allwin replied, unruffled.

  With heavy emphasis, Horn read, “‘On the other hand there is a certain legal advantage in minimizing the broadcasting of these episodes.’ In other words, it is to the advantage of the defendants to have withheld certain information from you so that the conclusions you have arrived at won’t be disturbed, is that true?”

  “I was interested in the one crime, the Kessler crime,” the doctor said.

  Horn read on, arriving at the crucial mystery. “‘Though Artie denied the so-called “gland robbery” and the “ragged stranger” murder, he referred to four other episodes where the letters A, B, C, D were suggested. It was found forensically inadvisable to question him about these.’ By ‘forensically’ you mean legally, don’t you?”

  Allwin hedged. “Just a pressure of time. We were concentrating on this case and to get our report in before the doctors came from the East.”

  Horn shook his head. “What does ‘forensic’ mean?”

  “Form the forum.”

  “It means legal?”

  “Yes, legal, or pulpit.”

  “So this might have said, ‘It was found legally inadvisable to question him about these’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Get this, ‘It was found f
orensically -’”

  “Yes, that was the reason,” the doctor persisted. “That is the forensic reason.”

  There was laughter.

  Horn kept after him. “Yes, but legally it was found inadvisable – now what do you mean by that? That it would not help his case if you went into these other episodes?”

  “No – to get the report through by the twenty-first if we could possibly do it.”

  “Why didn’t you say that? That you didn’t have time?”

  “That is the way I felt about it,” the doctor snapped.

  “And you thought the court and the rest of us would understand by that sentence that you did not have time to go into these other matters?”

  The sarcasm was the final jolt to the doctor. “Absolutely not,” he said, testily, “and for this reason. This report was not prepared for you, it was prepared for other physicians who were coming on from the East. I had no idea this report would be submitted to the public or to you.”

  Horn breathed a loud “Aha! So we weren’t supposed to know even this much.” Then he said, “But there is someone who knows. In your report, Artie Straus is speaking here of his associate, Judd Steiner. He says, ‘I have always been afraid of him, he knew too much about me’. And you, Dr. Allwin, wrote here, ‘He was somewhat afraid his associate might betray him. He had thought of pointing a revolver at his associate and shooting him.’ You say Artie Straus said, ‘The idea of murdering a fellow – especially alone – I don’t think I could have done it. But if I could have snapped my fingers and made him pass away of a heart attack, I would have done it.’”

  The boys were looking at each other with pale, self-conscious grins. Horn went on. “‘He wanted to kill his associate, because he knew too much!’ What did he know?” He stared at Judd, then at Artie. If only he could have dragged them on to the stand! It was utterly clear now that the defence would never risk putting the boys in the witness chair.

  Judd stared back at Horn. It was a bold look, a look that contained inner pride. He had not betrayed, he had kept the code.

  That strange, brooding, perversely obstinate look of Judd’s remained with me as one of the fixed moments of the trial. Could it not have occurred to Judd that if a succession of crimes proved Artie demented, their fates might have been separated? Artie’s to an asylum, and his own, perhaps, for less than life in jail.