Compulsion

by Meyer Levin

  There was Mike Prager from the Hearst afternoon paper, our direct rival. He was the inside-contact type, who would immediately take aside the most important official present and indulge in whispers. And then the Tribune’s star crime reporter arrived, a middle-aged man, or so he appeared to me then, though I suppose he was only in his thirties. Richard Lyman, like all Tribune men, seemed to take charge, not so much asking questions as demanding explanations. For a few details he had to come to me, and I gave him what I had, the spelling of the names of the men who found the body, things like that.

  It was then, as the plain-clothes men and reporters and police piled into the back room, that the pervert talk was heard. It seemed to arise of itself, as the natural, obvious explanation, and indeed I pretended that I too had thought of it at first glance. The men would look at the corpse saying, “Some goddam sonofabitch pervert,” and look again, as though a mark were there, for those who knew.

  I felt it was shamefully naïve of me not to know. And yet I wonder now how much the others really knew? All were ready to use the horror-word as a stamp to explain everything, and in the rage and disgust and fear that followed and pervaded the city for months to come, and indeed attached itself permanently to the Steiner-Straus case, there was a blanketing of homosexuality with every form of depravity, and despite all the “expertizing” that was to come into the case, there was little attempt to learn from it, to understand.

  For myself the subject was vaguely covered by the word degenerate, which we used often enough in the paper. I had even been sent out one Saturday to interview a woman on the west side whose little four-year-old girl had been attacked. For such matters, the word degenerate was used, and that explained everything. Chicago still reverberated with the horrors of the Fitzgerald case – the sex fiend who had been dragged half conscious to the gallows for attacking and killing a little girl.

  But with a boy, I was in my own mind perplexed. For in that time, among those of us who carried around the purple-morocco-bound volumes of Oscar Wilde, there was more knowingness than knowing. Love between men or love of boys scarcely seemed to suggest a physical act. I associated such love rather with purity, love of beauty, and high-mindedness. Lines from Keats, fantasies of an elderly philosopher, a Socrates, walking with his hand on the shoulder of a stripling youth, images of an elegant Oscar Wilde exchanging epigrams with an elegant young lord, seemed to make such love simply an avoidance of the clumsy, sometimes disgusting physical part of the act that took place with women.

  For at eighteen, and already a newspaper reporter in Chicago, the wicked city, I was innocent. At the frat house, I had taken part in the smut sessions, and in the gym I had taken part in the horseplay, and I could use the sex swear words as freely as the rest-so freely precisely because the words had for me no meaning in experience.

  Perhaps half, perhaps more, of my classmates, I think, were as innocent as I. At the frat there were those who bragged about their prowess at the cat houses, and those who loudly acclaimed that every girl they took out “went the whole way”. There were those who solemnly warned you against catching a disease, and those, like Artie Straus, who bragged about the “dose” caught at the earliest opportunity.

  The fear of disease, and an idealistic notion of “being fair” to the girl you would one day marry, perhaps a kind of magical sense that by keeping yourself pure you would insure her purity, had kept many of us innocent. And we did not even have, then, the common words that today denote the homosexual; pansy and fairy and nance were unknown because the whole subject was somehow legendary.

  So I stood in the circle of police and reporters, and we stared at the boy’s body as if it could reveal unspeakable last events and thereby show us the assailant. But there were to be seen only the few scratches that might have come from the concrete culvert, and the two small marks on the head. The face, around the mouth, had a yellowish discoloration; we did not yet know this was the only result of an attempt at obliteration with acid, and we speculated that this might have come from some chemical in the water where the body had lain all night.

  But if it were a deed of perversion, what did the kidnapping and the ransom have to do with it? And we speculated even upon the mystery of the actual cause of death, for the blows were not enough to have killed the boy, and he did not seem to have drowned.

  Then the coroner’s physician arrived, a paunchy man with dark eye pouches that gave him a constant look of irritation. In a shrill, authoritative voice, he cried, “One side, one side!” Even while Dr. Kruger was taking off his coat, Mike Prager’s huge, sequestering hulk was around him, Mike was enveloping him in whispers, and all the others were demanding, “Was it a pervert, Doc?”

  In vest and shirt sleeves, the physician leaned over the body. Death had taken place some time in the evening, he said. It didn’t appear to be from drowning. Probably suffocation. Look at the throat muscles, swollen.

  “Was he mistreated?” the Tribune man insisted.

  The coroner’s physician turned over the body. A cop kept saying, “Imagine the kind of sonofabitch fiend.”

  “It certainly looks like it to me,” the physician said.

  A growl, almost of satisfaction, went through the room. Richard Lyman asked if it could be positively stated that there had been an act of degeneracy, and Dr. Kruger shrugged – hell, they could see as well as he, but as for proof, it would take an autopsy, and then maybe nothing would show up. The body had been in the water all night; anything would have been washed out.

  I looked, with the others, feeling as though everything were being dirtied – the dead boy too – feeling I was truly in the midst of it now, the real bottom muck of the city, of humanity.

  The Tribune man pre-empted the phone, and we all hurried out to look for nearby booths. I had only the words of Dr. Kruger to phone in, but seeing Jonas Kessler leaving, I walked quickly after him, asking if I could ride along. He gave a little nod, as if to acknowledge my feat in identifying the boy. A few of the reporters stared after me as I got into the car, and again there came the little sense of triumph.

  The uncle said, “We have to tell them he didn’t suffer, you understand? Death was instantaneous. The papers too ought to say it.”

  I promised my paper would handle it that way.

  For a few blocks we were silent, though I felt burningly that I was losing an opportunity.

  Again it was Kessler who spoke. Why, why should it come on Paulie?

  I tried, “Did his father have any enemies?”

  He shook his head. Who would do a thing like that, even to his worst enemy? And his brother was a respectable businessman, a real-estate man, practically retired. He had no enemies.

  He shook his head. His brother was a respectable real-estate man.

  The car swept across the Midway, past the university. “Paulie was going to go there in a few years,” the uncle said.

  “I go there; I’m just graduating,” I remarked, and I thought of the sensation I would make about this, with my campus crowd, with Ruth. We crossed Hyde Park Boulevard. The area of red-brick apartment houses ended, and there began the enclave of tree-shaded streets, with mansions set far back on their lawns.

  It was odd that I had never penetrated this section, though it was only fifteen minutes’ walk from the university and a few minutes from where Ruth lived. Indeed, this was where some of my rich fraternity brothers came from. And it struck me, only just then, that none of them had asked me to visit their homes here. I recalled that he Straus mansion was supposed to be a palace.

  It might even be that this was a hostility that entered into the case and caused me to become so persistent, so obsessed, when suspicion began to fall on Artie Straus and Judd Steiner. It may be that I was driven by envy, and the sense of not really belonging that I had experienced at the frat. For soon after being pledged and finding myself among the rich boys from Hyde Park and the North Shore, I had concluded that I had been let in simply because I was a sort of freak all-A prodigy, ex
pected to bring glory to Alpha Beta.

  The last year, I had moved out of the house on the pretext that my newspaper work demanded another kind of setup, my own phone and all. But whenever I appeared they would slap me on the back and demand how the hot-shot reporter was doing, so they could say an Alpha Bete was a big newspaperman.

  The Pierce-Arrow halted in front of an imitation English brick-and-beam mansion. An officer stood inside the portico. He deferred to the Pierce-Arrow, but gave me a questioning look. I said, “Globe,” and the uncle said, “He’s all right, officer. He’s with me.”

  We entered a large room, with heavy dark furniture. It was filled with men, more reporters and photographers, and important-looking plain-clothes men. Tom Daly was in the midst of them all, his note-taking yellow copy paper in his hand, and the sight of him was both a disappointment and a relief to me.

  At the same time I saw the father of the boy, getting up from his high-backed, carved chair and coming toward his brother. The two men walked to an alcove. The father’s face was like the brother’s, contained, clueless; it seemed to me to grow a shade darker as they stood there talking.

  Tom came over to me, putting his hand on my shoulder. “We got a clean beat!” He looked at his watch. “Know any more?”

  “His brother says he’s got no enemies.” We looked at the two men. In a peculiar way they were now our adversaries; if they wanted to keep anything of their lives private and secret, we would nevertheless have to pry and prod and find out. Impeding me was still my sense of awe before a bereaved person, and my sense of awe before a millionaire.

  But even the bereaved may be suspect. Tom said, “Sure, nobody has enemies.” And we wondered what secrets of the past they might be combing. If a man is struck by misfortune, surely he must have committed some sin. And thus the victim immediately becomes the accused.

  “Show me a pawnbroker that hasn’t got an enemy in the world,” Tom I went on.

  I was startled. “His brother said he was a real-estate man.”

  “Years ago he ran a fancy hock shop,” Tom informed me.

  I looked around the room. Here was this imposing house, with its beamed ceilings, in this solid millionaires’ neighbourhood; thirty years of respectable business dealings had accumulated to cover the early days, but the sting of the pawnbroker stigma was still strong enough for the brother to have kept silent, to me, about the shop.

  Vengeance, money, degeneracy, the rubber-stamp motives took their turns in the forefronts of our minds. Tom came back to the last; it was first again. “You saw the kid. Could you tell -?”

  I said, “It can’t be proved. But Doc Kruger thought so.”

  “Sonofabitch pervert,” Tom muttered like the others, and he turned to a theory that it was one of the teachers. Indeed, the entire room seemed to hum with it now. Those private-school teachers were all a bunch of perverts. Besides, look at that ransom letter. It was clearly the letter of an educated man.

  We went over to the table, where one of the photographers was copying the letter, carefully laid out on the desk. The postmark was the Hyde Park station’s, only a few blocks away. The address, printed in ink. Mailed last night. That meant after the boy was dead.

  And there was the use of the word we. Then more than one criminal was involved.

  The letter was typed, but not professionally. Here and there, a mistake had been typed over. About the way I typed, I reflected. That, too, fitted the teacher idea. Suppose it were some teacher who had been misusing the boy. And who needed money. Those teachers were paid very little, anyway. Suppose he got the idea of satisfying the two desires at one stroke – sequestering the boy, and at the same time collecting ransom. Since the boy could later expose him, he had to kill the boy. Indeed, the crime might even have started with Paulie Kessler’s threatening to tell on some teacher who had been making advances.

  Tom drew me aside. “Sid, why don’t you take a look around the school?”

  Just as I was leaving, there was a stir at the door as the chief of detectives appeared. Captain Nolan strode in, a huge man who looked as if he had been picked for size. Captain Nolan expressed his sympathy to Kessler briefly, and then, with an air of getting down to business, went over all the facts we had already shredded to bits.

  Charles Kessler had mastered himself so well that one could not have recognized, offhand, that he was the father of the slain boy. All his energy was available; grief had not drained him. Throughout the case this impressed me. It was not that I felt he lacked emotion; it was simply that his remarkable control seemed in some obscure way linked to a pattern that lay beneath the entire crime, a pattern of feelings pushed down so that nothing could show.

  “I am racking my brain,” the father kept saying to Nolan. “It had to be someone who knew Paulie, or Paulie would never have gone with him. Paulie was not a boy to go with a stranger. If they tried to take him in a car he would have put up a struggle. It had to be someone he knew.”

  Tom motioned me to be on my way.

  I walked down the block where Paulie had walked perhaps at this same hour just the day before. The body I had seen on that zinc table had walked under these trees, past these hedges, past these fine brick walls, and somewhere along here he had been snatched from life.

  I pictured the kid, idling home from his after-school ball game. A man approaches – but it must have been in a car. A boy of thirteen doesn’t respond to an offer of candy. An ice-cream soda, maybe – an offer from a teacher, driving home?

  And once in the car? Perhaps a suggestion to go to the teacher’s house? No, that would risk being seen. Just to take a ride, then. Out through the park, and toward Hegewisch.

  Somewhere, the perversion had taken place. I tried to imagine in my own body the impulse to do such a thing. I suppose this is a test that everyone makes. I tried to call up in myself such a sick lust, and to watch my own reaction. Could I comprehend such a perverted impulse? Only kid things in back alleys came to me. In today’s popularized Freudian knowledge, I suppose I should say that I stopped myself from homosexual imaginings because of some fear. But at that time, walking on Ellis Avenue, I felt, rather sanctimoniously, that it wasn’t in me.

  As I turned the corner, there was the Mark Twain Academy, a square brick structure annexed to a former mansion. And there was the baseball lot where Paulie had played. The lot was deserted.

  Indeed, the street was deserted. This was ordinarily an hour when children loitered outdoors, but though the murder itself was not yet known, the disappearance of Paulie had by now filled the exclusive neighbourhood with rumours. The moment school was over, mothers had appeared in cabs, or chauffeurs had appeared, or governesses had come to walk the children home.

  And then the quiet was broken by a newsboy shouting, “Extra!” He came at a half run, a large boy, and he kept on yelling while I was buying my paper. “Extra, all about the kidnapping, murder!” I gulped the banner, MILLIONAIRE BOY SLAIN. And in large type the lead read, “Identified by a Daily Globe reporter today as Paulie Kessler, son of-”

  I wanted to tell that newsboy it was I – I, the Daily Globe reporter. But he rushed on.

  I read Tom Daly’s story, Tom’s and mine, then folded the paper and approached the school. If the fiend who signed himself “Harold Williams” was indeed one of the teachers, he would have been careful to attend to all his normal duties today, slipping out only to make the ransom phone call mentioned in Tom’s story.

  There was still a small group of teachers in the entrance hallway, discussing what was to them, until that moment, only the mysterious disappearance of Paulie Kessler. They didn’t look like the teachers I had had as a kid. More of them were men than in a public school, and these wore tweedy jackets and pullovers.

  “Reporters, already?” said one of the young lady teachers, with an air half annoyed, half intrigued, as I introduced myself. “Really, we don’t know a thing. We’ve no idea where he can be.”

  “He’s been found. He’s dead,” I said dra
matically, and handed them the paper. I was watching their reactions, looking them over with the question in my mind, Is this one a pervert? A murderer?

  When the exclamations had died down, I asked if any of them had had Paulie in class, and two men spoke up. The tall, athletic young man in the belted sports jacket had taught Paulie American history. He had that inordinately clean, scrubbed look that certain people achieve; I half imagined a British accent when he spoke. Could this be a degenerate?

  Today, an intonation, a movement of a hand in a night club is enough to bring a laughing roar of recognition. But I looked for I don’t know what – some indication of nervousness, I suppose.

  No teacher had been absent from school that day, they told me, the first young woman taking the lead in answering, a slight asperity in her tone. As for Paulie, the usual things were said, several joining in. He was alert, a likable boy. Not at the head of his class, but a real boy, intelligent and quite popular.

  Paulie’s other teacher now dropped a remark of the kind newspapermen seize upon for feature touches. Why, only day before yesterday, Paulie had won a debate on capital punishment. Paulie had been on the negative side.

  This teacher’s name was Steger. He had soft, red cheeks, and he spoke in a somewhat breathless voice. He went on talking, it seemed to me almost defensively, mentioning how he had noticed the kids after school yesterday at their ball game as he was going home.

  Indeed, several of the teachers seemed to be dropping alibis into their remarks, telling, as though accidentally, what they had done last night, whom they had been with. And they seemed to be breaking away from one another, under the uneasy, spreading suspicion. How could anyone know what was inside the mind and heart of his nearest colleague? Beneath all human communication there was a dark ocean, lava-like – the real human action lay there, the force we could not measure, nor check, nor even detect from the surface.