A half-dozen limousines were lined up in the street, but they were already insufficient for all the newsmen, the sob sisters, the photographers, the out-of-town press people who were arriving in droves.
With Sergeant McNamara behind him, Judd came over to where I stood with Tom. “I understand that we owe our predicament in good measure to you gentlemen,” Judd said, “but I want to state that I don’t regard it as anything personal. In fact, I must congratulate you on your accomplishment.”
I looked at him, trying to erase in myself the knowledge that he was a murderer. There had to be something human, something worthy, to draw a girl like Ruth – or was all love a delusion? Or was this worthier quality buried so deeply that only an occasional rare person like Ruth could sense it?
We were herded into the cars. I managed to crowd into Artie’s car with Padua, Mike Prager, and a sob sister from the Herald, a stringy blonde named Rea Knowles.
He was now being serious and penitent. “I don’t see how that cold-blooded fish can sit in that other car and laugh over this thing,” Artie told us. Rea asked if he felt the meaning of what he had done, and Artie said, “The first few days I didn’t feel it; it seemed to me that I could have carried this secret the rest of my life. But now I feel it.”
She immediately got after the girl story. “You went out on dates, during this last week, didn’t you, Artie? Didn’t it bother you when you were out with a girl?”
With his boyish candour, Artie said, “No, just a thought or two at times. But I’m appreciative of the thing now. Every once in a while the whole thing comes up and a realization of the thing we have done comes over my mind.”
He paused, as if it had come just then. “This thing will be the making of me,” Artie declared. “I’ll spend some years in jail, I suppose, and then I’ll be released. I’ll come out to a new life, I’ll go to work and have a career.” We all stared at him. Could it be that it hadn’t really hit him yet? Or did he feel so sure his people could get him off?
Artie turned the questioning on us. Did we think any lawyer could save his life? Inevitably, the name of Jonathan Wilk was mentioned. Artie had already been thinking of him. “But he only defends the poor,” he said. “Do you believe he would take our case?”
There was a silence. Padua, sitting up front, turned his head with a curious smile, and Rea resumed her attack. If he went to jail, did he have any girl in mind who might wait for him? And Artie said remorsefully that he didn’t know if any woman could ever marry him after the thing he had done. Though sometimes he felt as though it were another person who had done it -
Mike Prager leaped on this. Did Artie believe he had been dominated by Judd Steiner, in the crime?
Artie looked at us candidly, including Padua in his open gaze. “What do you think?” As one thought of the swarthy Judd, with his intense dark eyes, there could be only one answer to the boyish Artie: Judd, the master mind.
Was it true that Judd was unpopular, that he didn’t go out with girls? Rea asked Artie.
“Oh, we’ve been on double dates.” Artie eyed me confidentially.
“Well, you know what I mean. Has he ever been in love?”
“Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Artie said.
“Have you ever been in love?”
He smiled winningly for her. “Lots of times.”
“Yes, but I mean just once. The real thing.”
Artie winked. “Now, kid-” I revelled in my private knowledge, in having it all over Rea and Mike Prager.
The cavalcade had halted in front of the Driv-Ur-Self place. The manager, confronted with Judd, gasped, “Yes, I remember him – James Singer. Rented a Willys a couple of times. We made our usual full check-” he started to say, but Horn reassured him, “That’s all right.”
At the next stop an incident occurred. It was the lunch counter where Artie, as the reference for Mr. Singer, had waited for a telephone call.
When the crowd started into the place, a round-faced woman behind the cash register pointed at once to Artie. “That’s him!” Artie half pitched against the wall, fainting. A detective caught him, propping him up.
“The poor weakling.” We all turned our eyes to Judd. His voice had had neither contempt nor pity; there was merely the effect of a statement.
Artie was revived; he made an effort to joke it off, saying he usually required a pint before he passed out. The cavalcade was resumed.
We were following the death ride. From the turnoff lane to Hegewisch, briskly Judd led the group across the prairie, indicating where the body was carried and how he had pushed it into the concrete tube. “A few inches farther and it would never have shown,” he remarked, and his voice had that odd, clacky classroom tone.
Someone in the crowd asked, “Why, particularly, in this place?” And at this, Artie burst out, “This was all Mr. Steiner’s idea. I’m not even familiar with this place. I couldn’t even find it again!”
And vaguely, I think I felt then what Judd may have felt: the cistern, the close snug fit, as when little kids, finding a packing box or a barrel, feel impelled to crawl in and hide.
“Why here?” someone repeated, and Judd looked confused. He turned away. He was in conversation with McNamara about his chances. The big cop had become familiar. “I don’t think I’ve got a chance before a jury, do you?” Judd said. “They’d hang us.” McNamara agreed, professionally, that a jury would be a big risk. Sometimes a judge could be friendlier.
“I suppose our families will secure the best legal talent for us,” Judd said. “Maybe with a smart lawyer before a judge, our lives could be saved. What do you think?” That speculation was to provide a fantastic climax to the trial.
Down the lane, Judd showed where the belt buckle could be dug out, and it was found, and then the shoes. We drove to the beach, where the half-cindered remnants of the lap robe were located, and finally to the lagoon in Jackson Park, where divers sought the remains of the typewriter. Thus it was all proven, exactly, exactly.
When we came downtown again and struck Michigan Boulevard, we encountered a parade, and Judd cried, “Oh, yes, Memorial Day!” And he added, “The annual parade for legalized murder.”
Then it was dinnertime and Horn expansively ordered the entire cavalcade to proceed to Crown’s, near Lincoln Park. Several huge round tables were commandeered. Judd again became discursive, like an instructor following up his laboratory demonstration with a lecture.
And it was then that he made his second irreparable remark. When someone asked if Nietzsche’s superman philosophy justified murder, Judd perversely replied, “It is easy to justify such a death, as easy as to justify an entomologist impaling a butterfly on a pin.”
The room became quiet. Danny Mines of the News said, “We all had a little Nietzsche in college, Steiner, but that doesn’t mean you have to live by it.”
“Why not?” Judd demanded. “A philosophy, if you are convinced it is correct, is something you live by.”
We all studied our menus. “The herring is excellent here,” Judd announced to McNamara, “but I suppose you don’t like herring – you aren’t Jewish.”
Throughout the meal he continued to flash his erudition, and against my will, I was being pushed by the others, set up as the antipode – for I too was a university graduate at eighteen. Repeatedly, Judd seemed to challenge me, with a reference to Anatole France, a reference to Voltaire. On these I could keep up with him, but I had not read Sappho, even in translation. “The Medicis!” he cried. “We all have a time to be born in. I should have lived in the time of Cellini or Aretino, don’t you think? You’ve read Aretino, surely?”
How much Judd was a part of his own century we could not then know.