Max, all dressed up, ready to leave, appeared in the hallway. “Look, kid, what’s this all about?”
“Can’t you see!” Judd snapped. “I’m looking for my glasses.”
“Well, so you lost your glasses, so what?” And to the detectives Max said, “This is ridiculous.” But he checked himself. “Of course, I realize you have to go through with it and make a thorough checkup. But-”
“I’ll have to go downtown with them again,” Judd said, “and explain.”
“Say-” Max half laughed at the idea of even having to make such a statement, but he told the detectives, “anyone you want to vouch for the kid here – why, Judge Wagner is a friend of my father’s. I understand, I’ve read in the papers, the Judge has been very helpful to the Kessler family. Now, Judge Wagner’s known Judd since he was a kid. Why don’t you give him a ring?”
“Well, that would depend on them downtown,” McNamara said.
“Do you want me to come along, Judd?” Max offered.
“Why, no! What for?” Judd was smiling again, but his hostility to his brother was rising in him, stronger than ever.
“Well, give Judge Wagner a buzz if there’s any complication,” Max repeated.
Now on the drive downtown the silence was ominous. Whatever he thought of saying might be interpreted the wrong way. Judd remarked only that he hoped his carelessness wasn’t going to keep them working very late. It was all right, they said; they were used to it.
McNamara asked about the birds, and Judd started to talk enthusiastically. “A kind of hobby?” the policeman inquired.
“Well, it’s more than that.” And he gave them examples of puzzling things about migration and mating. Perhaps all this would show them he was unworried.
The hotel room looked messier. The men had had sandwiches and coffee sent up; plates and cups were scattered on desks and chairs. McNamara handed the empty spectacles case to Padua. “He couldn’t find the glasses,” he said.
Padua picked up the horn-rimmed spectacles from his desk, slipped them into the case. He made nothing special of the little action, but, gesturing with the same hand, introduced Judd to an older man.
“This is Mr. Horn, the State’s Attorney,” Padua said.
On first sight, Horn had a way of confusing people. He was not so much ugly as odd-looking; his face was exactly half-moon in shape, with a tiny, almost caved-in nose. His torso was bulky, his legs were very short, his movement was abrupt. And his voice had a shrill, rather feminine pitch.
Horn’s presence had intensity. There was never anything relaxed about him. He had an intensity, I suppose, beyond his capacity; otherwise he would have become a very important man. The drive was there.
“Do you want to admit now that these are your glasses?” he demanded in his shrill voice.
Judd retained his schoolboy smile. “I don’t want to admit any thing I’m not sure is so,” he said.
Horn went in again. “You know this looks serious, Mr. Steiner.”
“Indeed I do,” Judd said. “It’s quite embarrassing. They may even be my glasses. But after all, my family is quite well known. Judge Wagner is a friend of the Kesslers and he knows me quite well-”
“Do you want to talk to Judge Wagner?” Horn said.
“Well, he could tell you something about me.”
“All right.” Horn tilted his head to Padua. “Let’s get Judge Wagner on the line.”
They all subsided into a kind of neutrality while Padua tried the Judge’s home, and finally reached him at the Kesslers. Padua handed the phone to Judd.
“Judge Wagner,” he began, “this is Judah Steiner, Jr… Yes, fine, thank you. I’m calling you in rather unusual circumstances, from the State’s Attorney’s office, or rather his suite at the La Salle Hotel. They are investigating persons whose glasses resemble those found in the Kessler case, and mine happen to fit. Well, I thought, or my brother Max thought, you might want to say a word-” Smiling, he handed the phone to Horn. The least it could do, Judd told himself, was to keep them from pulling any rough stuff. If they didn’t lay hands on him, he was sure he could ride it through.
Charles Kessler leaned close in to Judge Wagner, listening. Their faces had the same expression, troubled, disappointed and yet persistent. Of all they had hoped for, when the glasses would be identified, only this had come.
Judge Wagner repeated that Judd was a brilliant boy, a Phi Beta Kappa at seventeen, a law student, and the son of one of the most respected men in Hyde Park. “Still, you have your investigation to make,” he said. “Let justice take its course.”
Sighing as he hung up, he said to Kessler, “No, this is really impossible. Some kind of accidental coincidence.”
Horn replaced the receiver, musing. Padua turned to Judd, as with a new thought. “Tell us this, Mr. Steiner – Judah-”
“My friends call me Judd.”
“Well, Judd, if I may – you say you’ve been out to Hegewisch?”
“I should say a couple of hundred times. As I told Captain Cleary, I was out there quite recently, the Sunday before this awful event. I even remembered running across the mouth of the culvert there. I was trying to get a shot at a species of crane, and I tripped.”
“You tripped?”
They were all staring at him. “Why yes, I recall it distinctly.” He waited for one of them to make the connection, and Padua obliged.
“You could have dropped your glasses then?”
“Well, it doesn’t seem probable. I don’t recall bringing them along. As I said, I hadn’t used them for a few months. Unless” – he reflected – “unless I had quite simply left them in the pocket of my jacket and entirely forgotten they were there.”
They all looked at each other. A chubby, silent one, in a corner, taking notes, he didn’t like.
“Well,” Padua said, with that impersonal air of having to go on until every detail was clarified, “when you saw all this in the papers about the glasses, and you knew you had been on the spot, and even had tripped there, didn’t it occur to you that these might be your glasses?”
The moment had come for a decision. “Well, no,” Judd said.
“No?”
Horn put in, “Didn’t you check up to see if you had your own glasses?”
“Well, even if it had occurred to me, I believe I would have avoided checking on it.”
“How’s that?” asked Padua.
“In a hysterical situation of this kind” – he laughed, a bit nervously – “one wouldn’t have wanted to risk having to get involved. I might even have had some silly notions about the third degree.”
They all chuckled. Then Horn said, “Now Judd, you, a law student, ought to know better than that.”
“There were stories about what was happening to that teacher.”
“What stories?”
“Well, I happen to be acquainted with a newspaperman on the case-”
They wanted to know what newspaperman. And what had the newspaperman said. Oh, he hadn’t said anything specific, but it was just one of those popular ideas.
“Well, all right. No one denies there is a lot of talk about the third degree.” In Padua ’s smile there was almost a hint of “you’ll see for yourself”. But he persisted, “So even as a law student, you didn’t think it your duty to check whether they were your glasses, so you could identify them and save the state a lot of trouble if they were. And you also must have realized that in the meantime we were running down false clues, and giving the real culprit more opportunity to get away.”
“There might have been a question in the back of my mind,” Judd said. “But in the situation-”
Horn said, “Then you admit now that these are your glasses?”
“Why, I can’t say for sure. It could be possible.”
A point had been reached. There was a prodigious relaxation in the room; the note-taker put down his book; men moved around; Horn whispered something to McNamara, who went out.