Compulsion

by Meyer Levin

  Then Captain Nolan, chief of detectives, recaptured the headlines from the chief of police. “Dope will be found at the bottom of it all,” he announced in one of his exclusive interviews with the Tribune. And every dope addict in town was to be picked up and examined.

  But as Nolan and Schramm failed to provide convincing suspects, our headlines were turned over more and more to State’s Attorney Horn and his eager staff of investigators. “The most important clue to appear so far,” we declared, had been provided by Horn, whose men had been questioning a railroad switchman oddly overlooked by the police. In Horn’s office we all listened to the switchman’s story. An elderly man with the scrubbed look of the intensely sober, he was quite convincing. On Wednesday night about midnight, he said, he had been driving home to Gary, and just past Hegewisch he had come upon a car stuck on a little side road. A dark sedan. It was a Nash or a Moon, not a Winton. He had given the car a push to get it back onto the road. Those people had been carrying a bundle of some kind, like something wrapped in a tent. He had even made a remark to the woman, “This is a hell of a time to go camping.” They had thanked him for the push. And one detail he remembered: their car had a broken front bumper.

  And then Detective Chief Nolan issued an extraordinary statement: “I ask everybody in Chicago to look around and ask whether his neighbours, friends, or acquaintances showed signs of muddy clothes last Wednesday night, or were away from their usual haunts or callings last Wednesday afternoon or evening.”

  “Hey, I saw mud on your shoes last Wednesday!” became the jest of the day, but Nolan’s invitation was followed by a new wave of telephone tips, letters, denunciations, arrests. Everyone was looking at his neighbour with strange eyes.

  And at night, police pounced upon a group of people in a vacant lot at Cottage Grove and 44th – a few blocks from the Kessler home. There were two men and a woman. They had been acting strangely, burning something on the lot. And they carried a small bundle. It proved to be a shirt wrapped around something hard, which was nothing else than a broken typewriter! But it turned out to be an Oliver.

  And near Aurora, police saw two cars stop. Their drivers got out, talked. A portable typewriter exchanged hands. The cars drove off in different directions. The police car chased one, and an officer commandeered a passing automobile to pursue the second fleeing vehicle. But the exchange proved to have taken place between a typewriter repairman and a respectable customer.

  Neighbours of a mysterious redheaded woman reported that her room was filled with newspaper clippings about the murder. “I know all about the case,” they had heard her say. She was arrested as she was parking her old grey car. In the car was a shoemaker’s hammer, a weapon that might well have caused the death wounds on the boy’s head. She turned out to be a harmless eccentric.

  Then we were haunting Steger’s block again. An anonymous telephone caller had informed the police that the dead boy’s clothing would be found “inside that block”. “We can’t afford to pass up anything,” Chief Schramm said, and the police combed the block. A woman was noticed acting suspiciously, running and peering under shrubs. But it was proved that she had merely lost her cat.

  Meanwhile a truck filled with street labourers arrived, the block was closed off, and the men began breaking open the pavement. With the other reporters, I ran up and down the stairs that led to Steger’s apartment. Front and back doors were locked; blinds were drawn. It was rumoured he had been rearrested. One of the officers who was friendly to Tom, Lieutenant Cassidy, swore he didn’t know anything new about the school teacher. As for the digging operation, he only repeated our own guesses. “Maybe the sewer is stuffed up.” Maybe Paulie Kessler’s clothes would be found stuffed in the sewer.

  The job continued into the darkness. Special lights were set up around the trench. In the crowd, the wisecracks flew, and the shocked, self-conscious giggles of flappers could be heard, as suggestions were made about what people might want to get rid of down the sewer. And in that same crowd, inevitably, Artie Straus had turned up with his satellite, Judd, hailing me, pausing to add a few horrors to the list, and swirling away among the watchers. I had a momentary impression of Artie’s voice laughing above some girlish shrieks, and then the sewer was finally opened. They found only a lot of muck.

  In this muck, all the activity seemed to have come to a dead end. Of the hundreds of perverts and morons arrested and grilled, a score were still being held, among them an ex-policeman. We had taken to filling out our stories about them with the views of alienists, as we called them in those days. We quoted Dr. Arthur Ball, whose own grandson had been a playmate of Paulie Kessler and who declared that the killer would be found to be a degenerate of “the same mental type as Fitzgerald”, the sex maniac who had been hanged only two years before for mutilating a little girl.

  After the alienists came the turn of the psychics. From Detroit, the police received a telegram signed by a Mme Charlotte High, who declared she had had a vision of the killing and could describe the killers.

  Reese had me get her on long distance. A strange voice, breathless, masculine, poured out the detailed vision. “There are two men; one has a sort of grey streak in his hair. I see him hiding, in a big place, a hotel, in the south-west part of the city. The boy’s clothes are there. In my revelation I saw a car,” she continued. “It is not a Winton, as the police think, but a Buick. I traced the course of the car. A woman wrapped her skirt over the boy’s mouth to gag him, and he strangled. They went to a red frame house on Wabash Avenue at the end of the line where cars turn. In a day or two, someone will attempt to commit suicide. There will be a confession.”

  And indeed on the next day someone did try to commit suicide. It was again the poor deranged druggist, Clement Holmes, who had escaped from the hospital. Now the news came from Louisville, where Holmes had been found in a rooming house, again nearly dead from poison. Police were waiting at his bedside for a confession. Only a thread of life remained. Would he live long enough to confess?

  The report had come late in the day. Tom and I hurried back to the Bureau, hoping for the confession. If Holmes lived, Tom was to take the sleeper down to Louisville.

  As we walked across the Loop, we felt that our job together on this story was drawing to an end. Somehow it was in the air – the murderer was about to be caught. We both felt, with our fagged-out nerves, that the thing was culminating.

  We had worked together without rest all week. I had cut my classes, certain that in this assignment I was at last gaining my maturity. And with Tom I had experienced something I had never known before, a kind of partnership that I was to find rather rare even as I went on in my newspaper work. More and more as the week wore on, we had taken to keeping together, going out on the leads together instead of dividing them up. I knew only the barest facts about Tom Daly’s life, and he knew little more about mine. Yet we could curse each other out, call each other Hebe and Mick; each could tell when the other had reached a limit of fatigue, yet each would overcome his own fatigue to run down one more clue. And while Tom kidded me about my literary ambitions, I made in him the startling discovery that not all newspapermen intended to become writers; some thought of eventually becoming managing editors.

  The Bureau was tense. The case was coming to a head. We couldn’t see Nolan; Cassidy was just going in. Tom caught Cassidy’s sleeve as he passed. “All set for Louisville?”

  “Hell, what do we want with Louisville now!” Cassidy let out excitedly as he hurried to his chief.

  What could he mean? We looked at each other. “You chase over to Horn’s,” Tom said. “I’ll see what I can get here.”

  I found the State’s Attorney’s suite strangely quiet. The large outer office was deserted. But at a desk near the door was an oldish fellow, a kind of ward heeler on a sinecure. “Everybody gone to Louisville?” I asked.

  He smiled slyly. “They don’t have to go that far on this case.”

  That was all he would tell me. Clearly, Horn and h
is staff were questioning some new suspect, in secrecy. Or did all the other reporters know? Where were they all?

  “Dick Lyman been here?” I asked. “Mike Prager?” He waved his hand reassuringly. “I told them boys all to go home.”

  I hurried back to the Bureau. I found our rivals were all on hand. In the same mysterious way that had worked with us, others too had felt impelled to look in on the Bureau. Someone had recalled it was to the tracing of the spectacles that Cassidy had been assigned.

  Finally Nolan emerged with his arm around Cassidy, and he let Cassidy tell the story. It was the rims. The horn rims had a slightly unusual hinge. Cassidy’s optician across the street didn’t handle any such rims, but from a catalogue he had found the name of the firm that made them, in Brooklyn. Cassidy had written to the Seemore Company, and discovered that only one store in Chicago handled their product.

  For the time being, Nolan said, he had to withhold the store’s name. We all shouted our guesses. When Almer Coe, the biggest optical shop on Michigan Avenue was mentioned, we could see from Cassidy’s face that we were right.

  “That special frame, on that prescription of the glasses – it cuts the prospects down,” Cassidy said.

  “How many?” we all wanted to know.

  Chief Nolan shook his head, smiling. “Just a few, just a few.” Now would we please play square with him? He had played square with us. He could not divulge that little list, and it would be no use pestering Almer Coe. Mr. Horn was checking on each and every one of those people. Before the night was over, he promised, the owner of the glasses would be known.

  On Monday, Ruth was sitting in the university library. She had drawn a large volume filled with pictures of birds, and she was reading in it when Judd sat down next to her.

  It was somehow an impulse that took hold of students, when a new romance was coming upon them, either to linger around Sleepy Hollow or to go and sit in the main reading room, with its cathedral windows and the soft light lying across the tables.

  Judd had caught her nicely. Had she really become interested in bird behaviour? he asked. Mostly, she replied, in what it might explain about people. And she didn’t want to seem such a nitwit if he talked to her again. In a low library voice he asked whether she was angry with him about Saturday. She looked at him, her eyes fully open. She shook her head. “I suppose you couldn’t help it.”

  In those remaining few days, were they in love? Judd was living under heightening tension. A week, he and Artie had agreed, might be enough to let them feel in the clear. The week had not quite passed. The pressure was still within him to live as if each day were his last, as if the gripping hand might fall at any moment upon his shoulder; this was indeed what he had sought – the intensification of life. And he carried it, containing in himself all the pressure, with no outward change in his manner.

  But inwardly Judd seethed with a sense of being on the verge of a whole new area of cognition. It was not only the murder that had so sharpened his awareness, he felt. It was what had happened to him with Ruth on Saturday. Would it not be unique for a person of really unusual intelligence to permit himself to enter into an ordinary experience of love, to see what would happen? He might transmute that love into something hitherto unknown, something unusual, for it had to be said that Ruth was quite intelligent, exceptionally so for a female. As to the idea of the rape, it had turned in another direction; the force of the idea had propelled him into what might prove to be a novel experiment. What if he began something of importance to himself with this girl and in the meantime were caught? Wouldn’t he then suffer more than if he allowed no feeling to develop about loving a girl? And Judd even found himself thinking, Would it be fair to the girl?

  They had their date that evening, and spent their time analysing what they might feel for each other. Judd maintained that there was no such entity as love, that it could always be reduced to self-interest or physiological response. “In your presence,” he explained, “I experience a certain ocular stimulation that causes a heightened activity in my glands.”

  Ruth sat smilingly before him. But why, she inquired, should this stimulation be higher in the presence of certain members of the opposite sex than in that of others? And even if you explained the entire physical mechanism, she said, weren’t you still left with the same question? If you felt a longing for one certain person, and just wanted to be with that person and not with anyone else, didn’t you have to admit it was more than physiological?

  I find it somewhat painful even today to project myself into this love scene between Ruth and Judd, for as I summon her up, I respond to the glow of her as though I were sitting opposite, at the small, round table with the menu card against the flower glass. I hear the music, “The Japanese Sandman”, and see all the couples around us, and feel Ruth’s own wonder at what was happening in herself, in regard to this boy, and in regard to me. Was she going to discover that what she felt for me was only “girlish attraction” and that her fate was with this tangled and intense boy, sometimes a genius, sometimes so childish about the most obvious things?

  Judd must have tried to analyse what, in particular, drew him. He had a few times before experienced sudden compelling drives to “make” some certain girl – you gave the girl a rush, but always with the feeling of hurrying back to tell Artie. Now, since that stupid spilling of Saturday, he hadn’t wanted to tell Artie anything about himself and Ruth. He felt an endless need of exploration with this girl.

  Was there for Judd a possible going-over? Was the time nearing for his going-over? Another day, another day, and would the emotion grow deep enough in him to hold?

  So I torment myself with their little scene, with the certainty that while sophisticated words poured out, their fingers touched, and they reacted like any two kids made goofy at the contact. I see them later in the car, sitting mooning by the lake, perhaps only their hands clasped on the seat between them.

  And he is still talking, talking as he never before talked to a girl, or to anyone. The slight clacky accents of self-satisfaction, so often irritating when Judd speaks, fade down and vanish. He tells her, his tone just barely tinged with sorrow, that he has never had a true friendship with a woman and has never thought it possible, because every connection between men and women becomes falsified through sexual desire. (There wings through his mind the image of his father, his mother, but how could his father ever have understood the delicacy, the fastidious quality, the purity of Mother Dear? The times when they must have copulated, since children were born, Judd banishes as gross, gross moments that didn’t really count in her life.) And so he explains to Ruth that pure love, disinterested love, can be felt only between men, just as Socrates said, for only then is nature unable to intrude her ulterior motive and to make people imagine they are in love. Yet as he speaks, Judd reserves within himself the knowledge that he includes the component of physical love between men. This knowledge gives him a feeling of power over her, the power of deception, but tinged with a tender shade of protectiveness – she need not know this thing in him, and how he has always felt toward Artie.

  As he talks, headlong, about pure love, abstract love, it is almost as though he were exorcising the moment when he will be caught by that same dreadful purpose, by the demands of real life, that make a bond between men and women. He is still free, and perhaps in the crime he has committed with Artie he has made himself free forever, for as the toils of natural love reach toward him, the toils, also, of the punishing law may be reaching to seize him.

  And thus as Judd talks, his sense of inverse pleasure increases: it is as though a self-thrust knife were already in his flesh, to cut off this prospect of love, and as he twists and turns in his emotions the heightening tension of his muscles presses exquisitely against the ready blade.

  This, too, in her innocence Ruth cannot know. And Judd hints only darkly; he says he does not believe happiness ever to be obtainable for himself. And when she spoofs, “Oh, Judd, you’re just having Weltschmerz,”
he pretends perhaps she is right, but lets her feel there may indeed be something more, something dark and personal.

  “But what is it, Judd?” Ruth begs. “Why do you have these fits of melancholy?”

  “Oh, the whole world,” he says. “It disgusts me. The things people do.”

  “I know,” she says. “Sometimes you wonder how human beings can be so ugly, when they are capable of beauty, too.”

  He plays with the idea of a sudden Dostoevskian confession. To tell her everything, the crime, and even how he intended to rape her. What would she do? Could he possibly discover in Ruth a soul so deep that it could encompass the horror of his own? Or would she jump out of the car? He feels she might burst into prolonged tears. That would finish everything.

  But perhaps the black knowledge would draw her in, seal her to him, like the time, the breathless night, when Artie had let him guess about the body pushed into the lake. From that night, he had felt sealed to Artie; and the whole need to take part with Artie in another such crime was perhaps a need to put himself beyond the reach of ever squealing on Artie.

  Could Ruth be up to it? In the remaining days, if only days remained, to treat all of life like some Huysmansesque Black Mass! Could she join him in a carnival of the senses?

  “A penny,” she says.

  And with a short laugh Judd reminds himself that Ruth is nevertheless a nice girl, that this is a component part of his permitting himself to be drawn to her, as an experiment. Perhaps a girl like Myra could go into some mad final carnival, but not Ruth. So he responds to her conventional query with, “Oh, just the same old subject.”