“Dr. Ball. And Stauffer.”
“Pretty good men,” he conceded. He wanted to know what they had asked. I said they had only had the boys repeat their story of the crime.”
Hadn’t they asked anything about their life? Their homes? Their families? Their childhood? Hadn’t they advanced any idea about what made the boys do it?
“No,” I said, “they just asked them if they knew right from wrong.”
“Goyishe kep!” Willie snapped. His use of the Yiddish expression, dumbheaded gentiles, came with a sidewise grin to me.
Since he was studying them, I asked, did he have any idea what made the boys do it?
Only the beginning of a theory, Willie said. Those alienists – had they questioned the boys about the weapon, the particular choice of weapon?
“No,” I replied. “Why?”
“Just curious,” Willie said. And he moved to turn back to his work. I stopped him with a direct attack. Had he ever known about other stuff they had done? What about that famous letter of Judd’s?
“What about it?” Willie grew a trifle sharp.
It just sounded, I said, as if Judd had revealed to him some crime that Artie had committed.
“That’s an interesting assumption,” Willie said. “So you connect it with all that junk in today’s paper about additional crimes?” He kept looking at me. “Nah, all Judd did was to hint around to me that he knew things about Artie that I didn’t know.” He mimicked, “‘Artie tells me secrets he doesn’t tell you!’ You know the way girls are with their little whisperings.” Willie shook his head in admiration of his own perceptiveness. “Pure feminine psychology.”
But even if they were perverts, I said, the way the crime now seemed to have been done, that had nothing to do with it.
Did I know anything about the new psychology? Willie asked. About Sigmund Freud?
I knew the catchwords: complexes, suppressed desires.
“It’s my field,” Willie announced.
Did the Freud stuff help him to understand Judd and Artie? I asked.
No, no, he was far from understanding. Weiss was entirely serious with me now. “Only I’ve had a kind of hunch,” he said. It kept sitting on his mind that there was a significance in a couple of things – two things that might turn out to contain the key.
What two things? What were they?
“The implement,” he said, “the implement, and then, the burial place.”
“The implement?”
Yes. The weapon. The chisel wrapped around with tape.
So unused were we, in those days, to thinking in symbols that are today common to every imagination, that even under Willie’s shrewd prodding the meaning of it did not occur to me.
As for the burial place, I thought he meant the swamp, in its entirety. Was he perhaps hinting that other bodies might be found there? I asked him this, point-blank.
Willie must have decided then, that I was after all not too bright. Then, like an exasperated teacher, he gave me one more chance. “Who do you suppose they were really trying to kill?”
This time, as by telepathy, I caught his meaning. “Themselves?”
He gave me the smile of reward to a dense pupil who has at last come through with one correct answer. On the first plane, yes, he agreed, self-destructiveness was clear in both of them. Look at the way Artie drove a car – he had been in any number of accidents – and look at Judd’s dropping his glasses.
“Yes, of course,” I said.
But self-destructiveness wasn’t enough of an answer, Willie declared. Had I read the confessions? The different people they had picked to kill, at one time or another during their planning stage?
“Yes, you were on the list,” I said. “But everybody has a little list.”
He brushed aside my remark. “But whom did those people represent? Whom did they really want to kill?” He stared at me. “It would make a fascinating study. Fascinating. What an opportunity! Now that they’re isolated. What an opportunity for a great study!”
I could get no more out of him that day.
As I walked the half-empty sunny Sunday streets, the conversation lay on my mind. Whom had they really wanted to kill? And the chisel…
I called Tom. Presently he met me, driving up with his brother Will, who was on the police force. They were in Will’s Ford.
“That chisel-” Will ruminated, after I told them of my interview with Willie Weiss. We drove over to the Hyde Park station and Will talked to a friend of his, Sergeant Lacey.
Come to think of it, Lacey believed he had heard of at least one other chisel wrapped in tape picked up in the neighbourhood. Some months before. One of those private watchmen around the rich homes had found it on a lawn. Looked like something a footpad might have used, but it didn’t check with any crime; so as far as he knew it had been chucked away.
But of course! This was what Willie Weiss had meant. The weapon.
We got into the Ford and went to work again, questioning watchmen and gardeners in the neighbourhood. Yes, one or another had seen a chisel something like that, with tape on the blade. Yet we couldn’t track anything down precisely.
When we returned to the Hyde Park station, Will’s friend Lacey told him on the quiet about a search that had just been made in Artie’s room. In an old trunk in the closet, under some toys, they had found a whole lot of men’s wallets and ladies’ purses. No money in any of them.
When I got to my room there was a note under the door to call Miss Seligman. Though it was after ten, I called. Myra implored me to come directly to her room, which could be entered from the hotel corridor.
The room had a studio effect, and Myra was wearing a Chinesey kind of dressing gown; as she took my hand, her palm was hot and moist.
“Sid,” she said, “Sid, they were here! I don’t know if I did the right thing – I talked to them, I told them things about Artie-”
“Who?” I asked.
Two men from Horn’s office had appeared. Of course she wanted to help Artie, they said to her, and she had said, of course. They had been nice men, very considerate, and they had wanted to know all about Artie, since she had known him from childhood. He had always been of exceptional mentality, hadn’t he? And she had said, of course, he was brilliant! And certainly not abnormal.
Now she sucked in her lower lip, in that naughty-child way she had. “Do you think I said the wrong things, Sid?”
I said they were probably taking depositions from everybody.
She looked guiltily at me. They had asked about the last times she had been out with Artie and she had mentioned our date at the Four Deuces with him and Judd. They had wanted to know if Judd had a girl. She had mentioned his taking out my little friend Ruth.
Ruth would surely have been questioned in any case, I reassured her.
Her voice hoarse, Myra told how once she and Artie had made a suicide pact – she supposed all kids did that, but people only thought of Artie as always happy-go-lucky. And now, today… I didn’t move. After a moment she came and slipped to her knees, going limp against me. “Oh, tell me what to do,” she begged. “I would do anything to help him.”
“There’s nothing you can do,” I said. “You’re not mixed up in it.”
“I am, I am. Everybody who knew him is. Everybody who let him come to a thing like that.”
I tried to say that it was surely a sickness, that there was nothing she could have done. “Oh, I’m worse than a whore,” she cried. “Do you think if I had given myself to him… oh, we’re all such frauds – we pretend we’re so emancipated. Sid, if I had, if I had, then maybe he wouldn’t have got all tangled up with that awful Judd. That’s what got him into it. I feel such a complete failure.”
I believe that even at the time I saw that her obsession, her constantly putting everything in terms of sex, was only because it was the only name then given to love.
Sunday evening, the boys were finally brought to the real jail, the heavy, square building with walls of grey stone, almost black with dirt.