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 his 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.”