by Meyer Levin
Feeling Reese’s eyes still on me, I had drifted down the aisle, and was standing near Tom. At the moment it didn’t even strike me as important that the paper indicated some words omitted after “falling out”. Perhaps they had been undecipherable. There was more to the letter. Judd begged Artie for his decision, yes or no, and he suggested that in any case they keep up an appearance of friendship such as “salutation on the street” and on all occasions when they might be thrown together in public.
But what did it mean? Aside from showing the intensity and violence of their relationship, what bearing could it have on the murder of Paulie-Kessler?
Tom was typing rapidly, to catch us up on the story. He had a scrawled copy of the letter on his desk. That bastard Mike Prager had gone out with the squad last night when the cops had ransacked Judd Steiner’s room. Mike had pocketed this letter. Only just now, after his paper was on the stands, had Mike turned the letter over to Chief Nolan.
Tom handed me up his notes, containing the left-out words. “The motif of ‘a falling out of a pair of c -’ would be sure to be popular…”
I saw again the naked body of the boy, I heard again the gruesome argument at the inquest, I saw the candid smile of Judd Steiner, whom I had just left, I saw the boyish smile of Artie Straus, whom I had just left, and I felt a sick bewilderment, an inadequacy. I was too innocent; I was unable to recognize the ugly and the bestial that lay underneath the smiling world.
They had seemed so bland. I had made a fool of myself just now, telling Reese, “They’re clean.” These diseased creatures, these perverts, they had been going out with me and with my girl. Judd had done something to Ruth, disturbed her deeply in some way. Perhaps something of this was what she had known. Through Judd’s ways, she knew they had done it. They had done it to Paulie Kessler.
Then I held myself back. I tried to tell myself the word could have been used in jest, the way we commonly used it around the frat house. I tried to tell myself, even if they were perverts with each other, that still didn’t prove they had done anything to Paulie. I tried to tell myself not to let my anger run away with me.
“What do you think of your pals now?” Tom said.
“God, this looks like they really might have done it.”
“You can’t prove it from this,” he said.
“And Horn looked about ready to let them go.” I told him of Judd, so easy in his interview; I told how Artie had finally confirmed Judd’s alibi about picking up a couple of girls.
“Picking up a boy, he means,” Tom said. While he typed, he handed me a few more pages, copied from Judd’s letters.
First there was a document that had been attached to what was to become known as the “c – letter”. It was a legal-sounding document, and its purpose was explained in the letter itself: “I wanted you this afternoon, and still want you, to feel that we are on an equal footing legally, and therefore, I purposely committed the same tort of which you were guilty, the only difference being that in your case the facts would be harder to prove than in mine, should I deny them. The enclosed document should secure you against my changing my mind in admitting the facts, if the matter should ever come up, as it would prove to any court that they were true.”
Then came the document: “I, Judah Steiner, Jr., being under no duress or compulsion, do hereby affirm and declare that on this, the 20th day of November, 1923, I for reasons of my own locked the door of the room in which I was with one Arthur Straus, with the intent of blocking his only feasible mode of egress, and that I further indicated my intention of applying physical force upon the person of said Arthur Straus if necessary to carry out my design, to wit, to block his only feasible mode of egress.”
I stared at Tom. As he sent up his story, we tried to reconstruct what had gone on between the two boys. Judd was handing Artie “evidence” that he had locked Artie in a room, saying, meanwhile, “I purposely committed the same tort of which you were guilty.” So, apparently, in a bitter wrangle they had been locking each other up! First Artie locking up Judd, because he claimed Judd had betrayed a confidence, had been “treacherous”. And then Judd locking up Artie.
It had a weird overwrought echo of childhood games, locking someone in a closet – “I won’t let you out until you tell me the secret.” But these were university graduates, prodigies of eighteen. Where on earth did Judd imagine, before what “court”, would Artie presumably ever produce Judd’s legal-sounding admission of a “tort”?
And there was the curious, even touching intensity of his plea for Artie to decide the whole issue. “Now, Artie, I am going to make a request to which I have perhaps no right, and yet which I dare to make also for Auld Lang Syne. Will you, if not too inconvenient, let me know your answer (before I leave tomorrow)? This, to which I have no right, would greatly help my peace of mind in the next few days when it is most necessary to me. You can if you will merely call up my home before 12 noon and leave a message saying, ‘Artie says yes’, if you wish our relations to continue as before, and ‘Artie says no’, if not…”
I felt almost guilty, peering into so intimate a confession. Judd, at one moment pleading with Artie to judge him, to “inflict physical punishment, or anything else you like”, if he had been “treacherous”, and at the next moment arrogantly vowing that he had been ready to kill Artie. For the first time, I began to understand the strange bondage, to glimpse a love relationship entirely outside my knowledge.
And what could Artie think Judd had betrayed that was important enough to have brought the boys to imprisoning each other and to threatening death?
“Something Judd knew about Artie,” Tom reasoned. Again, we studied the dense wording. At bottom it was a sort of “you said he said I said” affair. It had the ring of tempestuous accusations among children and – yes – among girls.
And I tried to set this image against the two young men I had seen only an hour ago, sophisticated, self-possessed, superior to their little predicament.
Tom handed me another sheet. This was a copy of a letter Judd had written two days later, from a train; he had been making a trip to New York. It was clear that Artie had in the meantime chosen to “continue their relationship” by taking back his accusation of “treachery”. And Judd was “forgiving” him.
The point in the whole controversy, Judd said in the forgiveness letter, was to determine which of them was guilty of a mistake, for a mistake was the greatest crime a person of their sort could commit! “But I am going to add a little more in an effort to explain my system of the Nietzschean philosophy in regard to you. It may not have occurred to you why a mere mistake in judgment on your part should be treated as a crime when on the part of another it should not be so considered. Here are the reasons. In formulating a superman, he is, on account of certain superior qualities inherent in him, exempted from the ordinary laws which govern ordinary men. He is not liable for anything he may do, whereas others would be, except for the one crime that it is possible for him to commit – to make a mistake.
“Now obviously any code which conferred upon an individual or upon a group extraordinary privileges without also putting on him extraordinary responsibility, would be unfair and bad. Therefore, the superman is held to have committed a crime every time he errs in judgment…”
Tom repeated a phrase from the beginning, “… exempted from the ordinary laws which govern ordinary men…” I read that part over: “In formulating a superman, he is, according to the superior qualities inherent in him, exempted…”
“These dirty perverts think they can do any damn thing they want,” Tom said.
I was trying to recall things from Nietzsche, but then I realized that it really didn’t matter what Nietzsche had said or meant. What mattered was the meaning expressed here by Judd himself – he and Artie were playing some kind of game, a superman game, and these were their rules. If Judd and Artie were “exempted from the ordinary laws which govern ordinary men”, then what would stop them from murder?
It was
as though two dense curtains had shrouded the possibility of seeing these rich, clever boys as perpetrators of the crime. The outer curtain was the negative one, the one that excluded them from the action, a curtain of “why they would not”. For all the fears of punishment, all the laws of man provided a “why not”. And this curtain seemed now to be lifting. If they really believed in this idea of being superior to ordinary law, then there was no “why not” for them. The inner curtain was the “why?” and was still impenetrable, though the sexual motive provided a rent in it.
Yet their superman idea was hard to grasp because I had seen them in everyday life. It was hard to believe that within their very appearance of living under the same rules as the rest of us, they had their own contrary rules. It was hard to take their own words and believe them, just as it was to be hard, only a decade later in our lives, to believe that an entire nation could seriously subscribe to this superman code.
What I had sensed emotionally, intuitively, the night before, from Ruth, I was now trying to justify by fact and by reasoning, and the effort seemed heavy, like trying to provide a mathematical formulation for an answer you had already glimpsed.
In Horn’s office, too, they were puzzling over the letters. Horn was no reader of Nietzsche. He tended to brush aside the superman letter as show-off kid stuff; you never could hang anybody with that.
Perhaps he was right. We were to see the philosophy for a time as an explanation – it was even offered as a kind of excuse. But could it ever have been a cause?
The first letter, Horn said, was only a lot of wild talk about some silly quarrel. Except for the perversion business. But even that had to be taken up carefully. In a roundabout way, Padua might try to find out if these fellows had anything to do with young boys. One thing was sure after these letters: you couldn’t let these two fellows go so soon.
Padua and Czewicki had a short discussion of their own. Padua had always meant to read Nietzsche, but never found the time; perhaps Nietzsche could have helped him trip these wiseacres. Czewicki wasn’t so sure. He had read Ecce Homo in a Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Book. It didn’t tell you you could go out and murder anybody.
But the strange letters, published in the papers, even with the key words omitted, had raised an active apprehension in one other person who was to enter the case. Edgar Feldscher was a cousin of Randolph Straus, Artie’s father. A lawyer, engaged with his brother Ferdinand Feldscher in corporation work for various members of the family, Edgar Feldscher had interests outside the law. He was something of an aesthete, a bachelor in his early forties who went often to Europe. He read a great deal, and was fond of Havelock Ellis and D. H. Lawrence. He was also acquainted with the works of Freud, and when people made jokes about suppressed desires or the inferiority complex, Edgar Feldscher was apt to start lecturing on the serious meaning of the terms.
Edgar Feldscher telephoned Artie’s father. He was a little disturbed, he said. Of course he knew the boys had been close to each other for several years. But if stuff like this was going to be dragged through the papers, it might prove harmful to them and to the families. Besides, who could tell what might turn up? It might be time, he suggested, to get Artie, at least, out of the hands of the State’s Attorney.
“The harm’s already been done,” Randolph Straus said wearily. Every reporter in town knew what the unprinted word was in that letter. In a way, he almost wished the police would give Artie a good pushing around, to teach him not to play detective and get himself into this kind of a mess. After all, what did Artie know about the Kessler murder? To go in now and demand his release might only make things worse, give the papers a story about the family trying to use influence.
“Yes, there’s something to that,” Edgar Feldscher agreed. The feeling of apprehension was deepening in him, but he couldn’t find it in himself to utter the real question. No, it was impossible that the boys had done it…
At the university, I tried to find Willie Weiss. For it was he who had been involved in Judd’s wild letter to Artie. And wasn’t it Weiss who had lunched with Judd and Artie on the day of the kidnapping? Perhaps he would tell me what kind of a secret it was, of Artie’s, that Judd was supposed to have betrayed. And also, Willie Weiss might remember whether Judd was wearing his glasses during lunch that Wednesday.
It was hard to find anyone that afternoon – people were going away for Memorial Day. The frat was almost empty. I thought of two fellows I had seen coming out of that law exam with Judd Steiner – Harry Bass and Milt Lewis. Bass had already gone home to the North Shore, but Milt Lewis, one of the brothers said, might still be on the tennis court.
Starting for the court, I ran into our chapter president, Raphael Goetz. God, he said, he was glad about only one thing in this mess – that Judd Steiner had never been let into the frat. It was bad enough with Artie, but if Judd had ever got into the Alpha Beta! The papers would make out we were all a bunch of perverts. Oh, he’d been getting funny questions all morning, from police, from reporters.
Well, I said, he knew he could trust me to handle anything he told me, in a way that would protect the frat as much as possible. But whatever was known about the fellows would have to come out.
Raphael was a huge fellow, a halfback on varsity, a good student, and one of those men who endow any meeting with an atmosphere of earnest good will. So now, putting his arm around my shoulders, he said, “Have they really got something on them?”
I showed hit the story containing Judd’s letter. He already knew the omitted word. “That all happened when they were up in Michigan,” he said. And Goetz told me about the Morty Kornhauser incident. “He caught them at it, and they tried to take him out in a canoe and drown him.” We stopped. We stood facing each other, feeling gravely that the fate of others might be in our hands. “Morty even tried to get Artie thrown out of the frat.” But all the fellows thought it was Judd who was to blame. “Hell, you know Artie – he’ll try anything just for the hell of it. He’s happy-go-lucky, but Judd, there’s something that gives you the shivers about him.”
We talked more. About Artie’s being such a drinker, about his betting high stakes at cards, all that stuff, but you still couldn’t say he was capable of murder. He was just a loose character. Being such a prodigy, he’d been pampered since he was a kid, and with all that dough in the family, naturally the guy was spoiled. But you couldn’t say he was a pervert – why, hell, Artie was playing half the girls on campus.
I said I knew.
“I’d believe anything of Judd Steiner, but if Artie is in trouble, I’ll bet that little bastard dragged him into it.”
And suddenly I saw why Artie had held back from admitting he had been with Judd on Wednesday. For if they had been together, they could have been together committing the crime! Judd was capable of anything. Why not even of murder? Artie’s hesitation in placing himself with Judd actually tended to confirm the crime. The story about the picked-up girls was a fake they had agreed upon in advance, but then Artie had held back from telling it, trying to save himself from implication with Judd should the alibi collapse. Artie’s hesitation was actually the proof!
And just then, as if the thought of their guilt in itself caused me to find the conclusive evidence, I noticed Milt Lewis. He was in his tennis clothes, hurrying into the house. I caught up with him. “Listen, Milt,” I said, “the early part of last week, do you remember if Judd Steiner was wearing his glasses?”
“I refuse to answer on the grounds of possible self-incrimination,” Milt cracked. “And who the hell could remember on what day some guy was wearing or not wearing his glasses? All I know is I read in the papers that Judd Steiner lost his glasses in a very inconvenient place.”
We were climbing up to his room. “That’s it,” I said. “He claims he lost them on Sunday. But if he was seen wearing them, between Sunday and Wednesday-”
“Listen,” Milt said, “if you’re trying to hang that conceited bastard, I’m with you.”
“He claims
the last time he actually used them was in March.”
“Hell no, I’d say more recently than that. Wait a minute.” Milt Lewis seemed to pick an image out of the air. “At his house, about three weeks ago. A gang of us went there to make some notes on equity. Judd put his glasses on when he opened that portable and started typing. I can just see him sitting there under all those birds, because I kidded him that he looked like one of those owls, with his horn-rimmed glasses.”
A few weeks ago? That still wouldn’t prove anything. But – “You say he was typing on a portable?”
“Yah, we had two machines going. Harry Bass was using a big machine Judd had there, and Judd opened his portable.”
“Did you notice, was it a Corona?”
“How should I know?” He stared at me. “Hey listen, Hawkshaw-” Then he grinned. “All right, I’ve got carbons of that typing, right here, from both machines.”
He began pulling out papers, folded in among his notebooks. There were indeed two kinds of typing. In itself there was nothing startling in the fact that there should be two typewriters in a millionaire’s house. The second machine might have belonged to his brother. Or he might have bought a portable when he went to Ann Arbour.
I stared at the typing, feeling somehow silly to be going so far, and yet headily sure. “Anybody got a Corona in the house?”
Milt was excited now. We ran through a couple of rooms, located a Corona. The style of lettering seemed the same as on one set of notes. But still, there were millions of Coronas.
For real comparison, I needed a copy of the ransom letter. It had been reproduced in the papers, only a few days ago, but while the house was usually littered with old newspapers, we could now find nothing.
I ran along the street, found a cab. The ad-taking counter at the office was just inside the main door. There was a file of papers kept for the public. I found the page, exactly a week ago, with the reproduced ransom letter. Our story, alongside, quoted typewriter experts, pointing out that there was a faulty p, and that the tail printed faintly on the y. The same faults were on Judd’s law notes! I tore the page from the file.
