Compulsion

by Meyer Levin

  Tom said nobody was bothering Artie much; he was just sitting in there. And Judd, at the La Salle Hotel, was still sticking to his alibi about their picking up the two girls. But Artie didn’t confirm Judd’s story.

  Late into the night, the situation remained unchanged. Judd had no idea that Artie was failing to corroborate his tale. Cool, in perfect control of himself, he kept repeating the details of the story, how they had picked up the girls, Edna and Mae, how they had taken them to the Coconut Grove and then to Jackson Park. He even appealed to Horn to have the newspapers request the girls to come forward. And so detailed was Judd’s story, in contrast to Artie’s vagaries, that Padua himself finally went over to question Artie. It seemed impossible, Padua remarked, that he couldn’t recall what he had done nine days ago.

  “Well, can you?” Artie challenged.

  Padua tried, and after a while, managed. But Artie had had his laugh.

  Then Padua asked, had Artie ever had dinner at the Coconut Grove?

  “The Grove? Lots of times.” He had dragged all kinds of dates there.

  Had he been in one of the parks, that Wednesday? Jackson Park? Lincoln Park?

  Had he ever heard of a girl named Edna? Or Mae?

  So Artie surely knew, then, that Judd was using the alibi; still he did not corroborate the story. He became a little more doubtful, saying he must have been blotto most of that day; he couldn’t remember anything for sure.

  Padua left Artie and returned to Horn’s suite at the La Salle. Now the questioning of Judd became a little harder. They shoved an envelope in front of him, and had him print out Kessler’s name and address. Then over again. And again.

  Several times I stepped out of the College Inn to see if the lights were still on, up on the eighth floor. “Do you think he is getting the third degree?” Myra would ask breathlessly when I returned. “Artie looks strong but he isn’t,” she said. “They could make him confess to anything!”

  I reminded her that the State’s Attorney would be a little careful with a Straus. Myra shuddered. “Ply me with liquor,” she said, and I replenished her glass. Then we danced.

  Dancing belly to belly, Myra whispered she wished she could get up the nerve to give herself to Artie. Virginity was just a rag; a girl should have the courage of her convictions. She didn’t want to be a fake – did I think she was a fake? But then, it wasn’t only sex attraction between her and Artie. She was his real friend. As far back as when he had that awful governess, Miss Nuisance – Newsome. Again, Myra sucked in her underlip. What a game it had been for years to fool Miss Nuisance, who practically never let Artie out of her sight, making a model boy out of him. The triumph was every Saturday afternoon, when Artie wanted to see the serial movies – you know, where the heroine was tied to the tracks, and the train was coming. Artie loved them, The Perils of Pauline, and of course Miss Nuisance would never allow him to see such things. So on Saturday afternoons he was supposed to go to the Children’s Symphony, with Myra, and her mother would leave them in the concert hall while she went shopping, and then Artie would slip out to a movie on South State Street, and Myra would cover up for him. Oh, the angelic face on Artie when he told Miss Nuisance about the symphony!

  I thought of the college-boy face on Artie, upstairs now answering their questions, and I thought of the easy laugh of Artie at the frat, telling us how he had got by some gullible prof with a borrowed term paper, and then I thought of that ghastly remark about the “cocky little punk”. Something must have shown in my face, for suddenly Myra’s fingers dug into my shoulder, frantically. “Oh, Sid, I’m saying all the wrong things. Sid, you believe he could have done it! You don’t know him, you don’t know him!” she pleaded desperately. “He’s just a playful kid. Judd is trying to drag him into it. Judd could have done anything!”

  In her hoarse, almost sepulchral voice, Myra kept begging me to say I didn’t believe Artie could have done a thing like that. Instead, something in me kept pressing forward those words of Artie’s; I kept wanting to tell her his remark: “the cocky little punk.” But I couldn’t let myself add to her fear. I began arguing it down in myself. A murderer would never have made a remark like that, a dead giveaway.

  We left the Inn. Up there in the County Building, the lights had gone out. “Do you think he is still there?” Myra asked. I said probably he had been taken somewhere for the night.

  Not to jail! Oh, why didn’t Artie just leave that devil Judd to his fate!

  It was after three. Myra couldn’t bear to go home yet; she wanted to walk to the lake. As we walked, her spirits lifted. She quoted Edna St. Vincent Millay, about burning the candle at both ends, and about the ferryboat, and then I quoted Carl Sandburg about the lake and the fog coming in on little cat feet. Some day, she said, perhaps I would get to know the real Artie who was like us, who was only trying to escape the futility, the nothingness, of the world. It was nearly four when we got into a cab.

  In the lobby of her hotel, there were only a few lights. Out of sight of the desk, she told me good night, and then turned her whole body to mine, her mouth to be kissed. It was partly the conventional goodnight kiss of a date, and yet it was voracious, with a ghastly emptiness.

  Then in her husky voice, she begged that whatever I did, I wouldn’t put her name in the paper. I said of course not, as if it were sacred.

  I had the driver take me back downtown to the La Salle. Tom was just coming through the lobby. “They took them someplace to sleep,” he said. “That’s all for tonight.”

  We sat in an all-night Thompson’s. We went over everything again. I described both girls, feeling myself a betrayer, but telling myself it was not for the paper; it was truly to help solve the crime that I betrayed their emotions. I told about Ruth. “She really feels Judd could have done it; I can tell. Something happened between them in the last few days – I don’t know. But when I told her about the glasses-”

  “That’s your girl, Ruth,” Tom said.

  I said Myra too believed Judd could have done it. But not Artie.

  Tom looked up with an odd smile. Nobody had really suggested it could have been Artie. He was only being held because of Judd’s phony alibi. So why had Artie’s girl felt she had to deny the possibility?

  Then I recognized that Myra was as afraid as Ruth.

  The families, Tom said, seemed not to be worried. They had called Horn, and he had assured them the boys would be sent home as soon as certain technicalities were clarified.

  And that seemed all that was known. “Listen,” I said to Tom, “I promised we wouldn’t use the names of the girls.” He shrugged.

  We went out and picked up the morning papers. The Tribune had dug up some campus talk about Judd: “a brilliant atheist.” His friend Artie Straus, it said, had not yet confirmed Judd’s alibi.

  And there was one new item, exclusive. A chisel had been picked up on the night of the murder by a private night watchman who had seen it thrown from a car, on Ellis Avenue, not far from the Kessler house. The blade of the chisel was wrapped in adhesive tape. There was blood on the tape. The chisel was believed to be the murder weapon. And the car from which it had been thrown was a dark sports model. It could have been a Stutz, like the one owned by Judd Steiner.

  The Examiner had more about the millionaire playboy suspects. Judd was a strange sinister genius who kept to himself. Artie, whom Judd was trying to involve in his alibi, was one of the most popular men on campus, especially with the girls. Myra ’s name was mentioned, as was Dorothea Lengel’s – “girls of good family” often seen with him.

  We went up to the office. At daybreak, there wasn’t a soul in the Globe building. We went to Tom’s desk, and on a sheet of paper began to enumerate the points against Judd. The glasses. An unproven alibi. Now, the chisel.

  Coldly enumerated, in the calm of that huge empty room, each point in itself seemed dubious, and the whole monstrous accusation seemed a nightmare. But for me, the strongest point of all, unwritten, was Ruth’s weeping. Yet th
is too seemed to have a thousand possible meanings. Perhaps she had wept in dismay that I could be trying to prove Judd a murderer, only because he had gone out with my girl.

  Tom too, starting to put together our story, said we had better be careful. There was nothing really definite. Boys from families like that couldn’t be held much longer. Probably some big lawyer would appear the moment the courts opened, with a habeas corpus writ.

  Instead, we heard that Horn was permitting an interview. Thus the families could be reassured that the boys were receiving no rough treatment. After the late-hour questioning, Judd had been sent to rest up, at the South Clark Street station, and Artie to Hyde Park.

  I felt sure that when I saw Judd face to face, I would know. I would see him somehow as with Ruth’s eyes, with Ruth’s intuition.

  And when I saw him my instant reaction was one of shame, for having last night been half convinced of his guilt. A large group of us, reporters and photographers, assembled in the South Clark Street station. We were led to the rear detention cells. Judd was in one of them. He greeted us with utter calm, chatting about his “adventure”, and answering, with politeness and gravity, even the silliest sob-sister questions.

  Some food had just been brought in for him; there was coffee, but no spoon, and Judd eased the atmosphere at once by borrowing a pencil from Richard Lyman with which to stir his coffee. “I hope you have another one for your notes,” he said. And recognizing me, he said “Hello” with a smile that admitted social acquaintance, but made it clear that this would not give me an edge in the interview.

  We joked a bit about his few hours in jail, and Judd declared that in Mr. Horn’s place he would do the same – it was the State’s Attorney’s duty to make an absolutely thorough investigation.

  Lyman took the lead, and asked about the glasses.

  “It’s queer,” Judd said. “All along when I read in the papers about the glasses, I had a feeling they might be mine.”

  “Why didn’t you check on it?” Mike Prager cut in.

  “Well, I suppose there are things we don’t really want to find out. Wouldn’t that be the psychology of it?”

  The questioning got to his alibi. “I certainly hope those girls come forward,” Judd declared. “It may be a bit embarrassing, but it is more embarrassing for me if they don’t.”

  We all laughed, and made the point about their honour being safe since they walked home. Peg Sweet said archly, “That is, if they did walk home?”

  Judd smiled amiably. Somebody behind me asked, “What would you do with ten thousand dollars?”

  Eagerly Judd replied, “Why on earth should anyone imagine I would kidnap someone for ransom? I get all the money I want from my father, and besides, I teach three classes in bird lore, and get paid for it.” He seemed to be speaking directly to me. And in that moment I was sure he was innocent. What indeed had I been blaming him for? An interest in sixteenth-century Italian pornography? Did that make him a pervert and a murderer? Confronting him, I found the whole idea impossible to believe, and from that moment, I suppose, there had to grow for me the mistrust of human confrontation that is so deep a mark upon our time. What could you truly know of anyone by looking into his face, his eyes?

  Tom’s stock phrase – “What do you know for sure?” – reverberated in my mind as I walked from the police station. For besides Judd’s story, there was Artie’s. If you believed one, you couldn’t believe the other. Yet both were polite, smiling, and eager to help solve the dreadful crime.

  Artie had been brought back to the State’s Attorney’s headquarters. Through the glass door to the corner office I could see him talking to Padua. Artie waved to me, and presently Padua came out.

  “Listen, Sid, maybe you can help us.” Wasn’t I the one who had been with Artie that day, finding the drugstore? And wasn’t I a fraternity brother of Artie’s?

  I nodded, but said that didn’t mean an awful lot.

  Still, he said, maybe I could talk to Artie. The other fellow, Judd, had at least told some kind of a story. But Artie wouldn’t remember anything. “You know how it is. We don’t want to keep these fellows any longer than we have to. Ask him for God’s sake just to tell the truth. Maybe they were up to some kind of shenanigans-”

  I didn’t believe Artie would tell me anything, but I couldn’t refuse to try.

  “Just one thing,” he said. “Don’t tell him Judd’s story.”

  I went in. “Hail the boy reporter!” Artie said. “Hey, have you got me in the papers?”

  “You’re famous.”

  “Am I a suspect? Hey, this is the nuts!”

  I grinned. “Well, you know this is a hell of a case, Artie, and the glasses were all they had to go by.”

  “Oh, I don’t blame them,” he said. “But my mother is kind of upset, otherwise this would be fun.” He threw away a half-smoked cigarette and almost instantly lighted another.

  “Artie, look,” I said. “Why don’t you tell the truth, whatever it is, and get it over with? Whatever you and Judd may have been up to, it isn’t worth being suspected of the crime.”

  “You think I was up to something with Judd?” he asked.

  “Oh, hell, you’re always together,” I said.

  “That what he said?” He smiled back at my smile. “Yah, you’ve been busy making time with my girl!” he kidded. “I’ve got my spies in operation. Hey, what does Myra think? She think Judd could have done a thing like that?”

  “Well, those glasses were pretty embarrassing,” I said. “And the fact that you don’t remember anything specific about Wednesday makes it look worse for him.”

  “It looks bad for him?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that exactly. But I guess the question has to be cleared up.”

  “Listen, you don’t think they’re going to make him confess, or any crap like that?” he demanded. “If they start pushing him around…”

  I said I didn’t think there was any pushing around. “But, Artie, if you know anything, if you can help him out of it – you know him better than anybody.”

  “He says I was with him?”

  “Well-”

  “Aw, can it, Why would the cops pick me up if it wasn’t to check on his story? I didn’t lose any glasses anywhere.”

  “Well, if you were with him, no matter what you were up to,” I repeated, “it can’t be as bad as this. Otherwise, they can’t let him go. There’s nothing to prove his story.”

  Artie stared at me. Again he flung away his cigarette. “Okay, kid.” He walked around, then perched on the desk. He cracked, “If you see Myra, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” Then he said, “Stick around out there. I may give you another scoop.”

  Padua looked inquiringly at me as I came out. I smiled but shrugged. He hurried back into that office. Now Artie began to remember a few details about Wednesday. He had been all ginned up all that day and evening, he said, but some of it was beginning to come clear.

  I suppose Artie feared that with his story uncorroborated, Judd might break down. If Judd confessed, would he not in his bitterness involve his partner? Then the only hope for both of them now was for him to help Judd get released.

  So Artie now recalled that there had been a couple of broads involved – he could even think of their names: his was Edna, kind of redheaded. They had picked up the girls on 63rd Street… And so, point by point, he told the same story.

  Why had he waited so long to tell it? “My mother doesn’t like me to run with these cheap broads,” he said.

  Yet, even his waiting could be interpreted favourably, For if it were simply an alibi that the boys had agreed upon, wouldn’t Artie have come out with it at once, the way Judd had?

  And so, that morning, the suspicion was lifting. Judd Steiner, cheerful and candid. And Artie Straus finally corroborating the story of Mae and Edna.

  Probably, because of their wealth, I thought, I had been resentfully ready to believe anything of them.

  As I entered the newsroom, Rees
e tilted his chin, a signal for me to step to his desk. “I think they’re clean,” I said. “Artie Straus just told exactly the same story as Judd Steiner, about the two girls.”

  He shoved the early edition of the American toward me, with part of their lead story circled in red pencil. It was a beat on us. A letter, a carbon found in Judd Steiner’s room. “Dear Artie,” it began. It seemed to deal with some bygone incident between Judd and Artie and Willie Weiss, and at first glance I could not see its importance. There was some quarrel about whether Judd had betrayed to Willie Weiss a secret that Artie had confided to Judd. This letter was Judd’s denial of betrayal. It had been written after a big scene between them. A passage, printed in bold type read: “When you came to my house this afternoon I expected either to break friendship with you or attempt to kill you unless you told me why you acted yesterday as you did.” This was Judd, to Artie.

  The letter continued: “You did, however, tell me… Now, I apprehend, though here I am not quite sure, that you said that you did not think me treacherous in intent, nor ever have, but that you considered me in the wrong and expected such a statement from me. This statement I unconditionally refused to make until such time as I may become convinced of its truth…”

  It was a strange letter, but what did it have to do with the case? I glanced back at the date – months ago, last November. I went on reading: “The only question, then, is with you. You demand me to perform an act, namely, state that I acted wrongly. This I refuse. Now it is up to you to inflict the penalty for this refusal – at your discretion, to break friendship, inflict physical punishment, or anything else you like, or on the other hand continue as before. The decision, therefore, must rest with you. This is all of my opinion on the right and wrong of the matter.”

  I looked up, puzzled. Reese was watching me. I shook my head to show my mystification, and resumed reading: “Now a word of advice. I do not wish to influence your decision either way, but I do want to warn you that in case you deem it advisable to discontinue our friendship, that in both our interests extreme care must be had. The motif of ‘a falling out of -’ would be sure to be popular, which is patently undesirable and forms an irksome but unavoidable bond between us…”