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, expected 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.