“It’s on the way,” Czewicki said, officiously, happily. “It’s going on right now.” And he rushed back to the hotel to give his details to Horn.
There, the chief came out into the hallway to meet him, and they walked up and down, Horn’s arms already making his choppy courtroom movements. Then the State’s Attorney returned to the room where Judd sat. “Your partner is confessing,” Horn said. Judd didn’t blink.
“All right,” Horn said. “What about the Driv-Ur-Self agency? What about registering at the Morrison Hotel?”
Judd gave him an almost abashed look. He arose, moving about in distress, murmuring, “He can’t be! He would stick till hell freezes over!”
“He says it was all your idea,” Horn continued in a quiet voice, not without sympathy. “And you’re the one that struck the fatal blow.”
If maturity can ever be traced to a single moment, perhaps this was the instant of transition for Judd Steiner. He began to shake his head, slowly. “Oh, the weakling,” he said. Then, with a spurt of anger: “So Mr. Straus imagines he can blame it all on me. You can go back and inform Mr. Straus that I shall tell the truth. The account I give shall be precisely accurate and complete.” Judd drew a full breath, then added, with a kind of satisfaction, as if after all the main results would be as desired, “I shall reveal the true purpose and meaning of the deed.”
Book Two: The Trial of the Century
We waited half through the night, with the news leaking out to us. The confessions were going well. The time was long because the State’s Attorney was going over each fact, nailing down the evidence so every point could be proven even if later some smart lawyers had the boys withdraw their statements.
Thus we hovered between the two rooms, catching bits of the story, certain it was turning out to be a sex murder, perversion, with the ransom plan tacked on to cover the act. We waited, the hours broken only by a call from Louisville informing the State’s Attorney that the almost forgotten drug clerk, Holmes, had died without talking.
Behind each door the story was pouring forth; each of the culprits seemed bent on getting ahead of the other. And as usual when it came right down to the end, Horn’s assistants let us know, these smarties were like everyone else – they were frantically blaming each other.
Then gradually a new and curious idea came out to us. This different idea was being insisted upon especially by Judd, with a kind of triumphant disdain for the authorities who, even with the murderers in their hands, failed to see the real nature of the crime. Judd vowed that lust really had nothing to do with it. And as for money – would two millionaire boys risk their lives for ten thousand dollars? He had a strange explanation to offer. This was a crime for its own sake. It was a crime in a vacuum, a crime in a perfectly frozen nothingness, where the atmosphere of motive was totally absent.
And as we learned how Artie and Judd thought of their crime, the whole event again became a mystery. For was even their own notion of it the truth?
We could, in that night, only grasp their claim of an experiment, an intellectual experiment, as Judd put it, in creating a perfect crime. Their act sought to isolate the pure essence of murder.
Before, we had thought the boys could only have committed the murder under some sudden dreadful impulse. But now we learned how the deed had been marked by a long design developed in full detail. What was new to us was this entry into the dark, vast area of death as an abstraction. Much later, we were to seek the deeper cause that compelled these two individuals to commit this particular murder under the guise, even the illusion, that it was an experiment.
Just as there is no absolute vacuum, there is no absolute abstraction. But one approaches a vacuum by removing atmosphere, and so, in the pretentious excuse offered by Judd, it seemed that by removing the common atmospheres of lust, hatred, greed, one could approach the perfect essence of crime.
Thus one might come down to an isolated killing impulse in humanity. To kill, as we put it in the headlines, for a thrill! I think the boys themselves believed this was what they had done.
At first their recital sounded much like an account of daydreams that all could recognize. They had been playing with the idea of the “perfect murder”. Is not the whole of detective-story literature built on this common fantasy? True, in such stories we always supply a conventional motive. We accept that a man may kill for a legacy or for jealousy or for revenge, though inwardly we may make the reservation – that’s foolish, the butler wouldn’t go so far. We accept that a dictator may unleash a war out of “economic needs” or “lust for power” but inwardly we keep saying, “Why? Why? Why?”
But Judd Steiner and Artie Straus were saying that they had killed the boy, a victim chosen at random, truly for the deed alone, for the fascinating experiment of committing a perfect crime.
Each related how the plan had begun, Artie vaguely saying “a few months ago”, but Judd, with his passion for precision, saying “the first time we thought of a thing like this was on the twenty-eighth of November” and telling us how on that night they had robbed the fraternity house in Ann Arbour, and how they had quarrelled on their weird drive homeward. Quarrelling lovers must break, or bind themselves into deeper intimacy, and so their pact was made to do some great and perfect crime together. That it should be a kidnapping came out in Artie’s thought – perhaps it had been waiting in him.
Then, the step of pure logic: for security, the victim must never be able to identify the kidnappers; therefore he must be killed at the earliest moment. Thus the killing was non-emotionally arrived at; it was incidental to the perfection of an idea.
How needlessly emotional people had always been about death! In the pursuit of an impersonal plan, it was nothing, as Judd was to insist; it was no more meaningful than impaling a beetle, than mounting a bird.
The truly intriguing element of the problem would follow: how to secure the ransom, without risk of contact? Though money was not the actual motivating force, still it was part of the set exercise. After the feat of a perfect murder came the feat of a perfect transfer of ransom. And so came the idea of a transfer in moving space – the train, the rented car, an abstract identity.
“And so you registered at the Morrison Hotel as James Singer?”
“Yes, Artie brought an old valise – we left it there.”
Instantly, McNamara was hurried over to the Morrison. The registration was found: James Singer. In the storeroom, the tagged, abandoned valise. For weight, a few books. So clever, so careless the perfect plan – books from the university library, one of them containing a library card made out to Artie Straus.
By such tangible items the whole nightmarish, incredible tale began to become real even while the recital continued, behind each door. The rented car – and putting up the side curtains so no one could see into the rear. And then the lunch with Willie Weiss, and then hunting the victim, and the boy coming into the car.
“And at that moment it was not too late to stop?”
Was it? You could think it was too late from the moment Judd first met Artie, from the moment when he was born so bright, born a boy though a girl was wanted. Or you could believe that even with an arm upraised, holding the taped chisel, it was not yet too late… How many murders are halted only as a thought in our minds? I could kill that sonofabitch! In how many tales do we have the moment of the pointed gun, the Go ahead and shoot, and instead, the dropping arm? When the first chosen victim, Dickie Weiss, had disappeared on 49th Street, it had seemed the end of their adventure. And yet the arm came to be raised.
“And in that moment you were still able to distinguish between right and wrong?”
“Right and wrong in the conventional sense, yes,” Judd answered.