“And after all that,” Wilk said with melancholy humour, “some totally ignorant layman on the jury will decide on their sanity according to how he likes their faces.”
All looked to Wilk, the swayer of juries. He drew his hand slowly along his cheek. Just then Mrs. Wilk, with a slight groan, passed him a copy of the Sunday Examiner, pointing to an account of Judd’s conversation while retracing the trail of the crime. Wilk read it aloud: “Young Steiner also discussed the possibility of a guilty plea, saying the best thing for him and for Artie might be to avoid a jury and go before a friendly judge. With their family millions-”
“Well,” said Wilk dryly, “if we don’t get at those boys and make them stop talking, they’ll hang themselves for sure, judge or jury.”
“If they haven’t already,” Ferdinand Feldscher muttered.
Meanwhile an item in another column had caught his brother’s eye. It was about a meeting of psychiatrists, opening in Atlantic City. The top men in the country would all be there. Edgar pointed out excitedly.
Gerald spoke decisively. “Somebody better take the night train to Atlantic City.”
Judah Steiner seemed scarcely to have been following the details, but as the group broke up he drew Edgar Feldscher aside. In an almost ashamed voice, he asked, “Could it be that we are doing wrong to try to defend them?” Edgar Feldscher studied him, his large serious eyes seeming to know the full meaning. “I am trying to think,” Judah Steiner said, “if they were not our sons.”
Edgar Feldscher placed his hand on the older man’s shoulder. “Our conception of justice requires a defence. That’s why justice holds the scales blindfolded. So as not to see the monsters.”
Judah Steiner’s head was beginning to shake again. “You feel that anybody has to be defended, no matter what he did?”
“Yes,” Feldscher said with his small, rather worried smile. “Everyone. That is the basis of our law. Everyone is entitled to a defence.”
Steiner’s head steadied. “Then you believe we are not responsible for what we do?” he asked, heavily.
“Yes, we are responsible. But when our behaviour becomes abnormal, there are causes, pressures from outside and from inside, and the individual needs help to overcome such terrible pressures. Besides, there is the whole question of the kind of punishment. Take these boys-” and the way he said it, they could be strangers. “What would be served by their execution? Judd has already shown so much creative power.”
Again, the father’s eyes filmed. He did not try to hide the tears from Feldscher. “If he is allowed to live, even in prison he might repay with some good-”
“Yes. That is what I thought.”
“But what made them do it?” the father asked.
“Who knows?” the lawyer repeated. “I look at all this as human energy we’re dealing with, free energy, a natural force, which we try all our lives to control. Like electricity, which we use and control, even if we don’t understand its nature. What we have in us, this energy, is a flow of force, and sometimes a part of it flashes out, like lightning.” Judah Steiner was staring at him, unhappily. “I know it doesn’t exactly fit, but it seems to me, and the newer psychologists try to explain it this way, we all have this psychic energy, and we have to channelize it, but sometimes, like a baby – a baby doesn’t know good from bad – it lets through every impulse, what it wants it does, what it wants it seizes.”
“But how can they be still like babies? They are grown, brilliant, intelligent boys.”
“Some parts of us can stay ungrown; in some parts of us we are still like babies,” Feldscher said. “We use it in our daily conversation – we say someone is infantile. You can’t blame a baby for what it does.”
Steiner’s head was shaking again; he couldn’t understand. “You never blame anyone?”
“Yes. Yes, I do believe there is blame. But I try not to blame right away.” He held his pipe elegantly.
“I don’t understand.” Steiner turned away. “I don’t understand.”
The other men were in a circle, their voices subdued, for there had come up a remaining part of the subject so disagreeable to touch that each had held off from it. Judah Steiner did not know, at first, what they referred to, for he had found himself unable to look at the newspapers. But he caught their words now. Ferdinand Feldscher was saying, “It’s to be expected Horn will try to pin every unsolved crime of the last five years on them.” The newspapers were asking about that horrible crime of a few months ago, the taxi driver who had been found mutilated, the “gland robbery” on the South Side. Two assailants, he had said.
“But he admitted he never got a good look at them; he could never identify his assailants,” one of the others insisted.
“Well, maybe I shouldn’t mention this,” Max put in, his voice quite low and solemn. “But at my engagement party Artie kept talking all the time about the kidnapping, saying he bet the same criminals committed the two crimes. A lot of people heard him. Someone is liable to remember it now.”
James Straus said, with his hasty way of getting rid of something nasty, “In the Examiner they mention that student who left the house to mail a letter and was found drowned. Artie knew him. Perry Rosoff.”
“That poor Rosoff boy was a suicide,” Uncle Gerald stated.
Hesitantly, James suggested, “Wouldn’t it be better if we asked the boys about all this?”
There was a silence, a fear-laden silence. Then Gerald said, “Can’t we wait and deal with these matters when and if any evidence is offered?”
The group began to break up.
“If there is anything like that,” Ferdinand Feldscher said to his brother Edgar, “can there still be a question of sanity?”
We were all, by then, puzzling over the other crimes. Tom recalled that strange stormy letter stolen from Judd’s desk. About betraying Artie to a friend. Couldn’t that have been about the other crimes? And the friend, Willie Weiss, was the same fellow they had lunched with on the day of the murder! None of us had talked to Weiss. True, the police had checked and dismissed him. Still, shouldn’t we try to see Willie?
Tom had to go home; he explained he always had Sunday dinner with his folks. We agreed I should try to see Willie Weiss by myself. This time he proved not difficult to find. I phoned his home and was told he had gone over to do some work at the lab.
Working at the end of the long room was a round-shouldered figure in a smeared lab coat, perched on a high stool. “Weiss?” I said.
He had a long, narrow head, held a trifle cocked to one side; his eyes were keen, but his dark skin was completely pocked and his nose was a caricature. “The Horrible Hebe”, we learned Judd called him, and he was ugly in the grand manner. As he slipped off the stool, I saw that he was dwarfish, the head overlarge.
Willie didn’t seem hostile. Indeed, before I could ask him any questions, he was drawing out from me in extreme detail everything I had done on the story, getting me particularly to tell how Artie had injected himself among the reporters, even among the detectives, with his advice, theories, clues.
“True to form, true to form,” Willie kept saying about Artie’s behaviour, and then, “I would have guessed he’d be the first one to break down and confess.”
I observed to Willie that he probably knew them better than anybody.
“You think I was a third member of the team?” He grinned. “Sure, we had lunch regularly every Wednesday. I was studying them.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. I’m interested in their psychology. You seen them since they confessed?”
“I just came from there,” I said. “The State’s Attorney had a couple of alienists in the office, questioning them.”
“Yes?” He was full of curiosity. “Who?”