It was on their way to the jail that the disturbing thought came up. Should Artie really be advised to tell the doctors everything? The papers were still full of all those other crimes the police were trying to put on the boys. That awful taxi-driver thing. And the drowning and the shooting. All young men, all in the last year on the South Side. Who knew, with Artie? What couldn’t he have done, if he had done this thing! And if he now revealed, to his own doctors – James eyed Uncle Gerald, with the dreaded question.
“Well, how’s it look?” Artie said to them, coming jauntily into the visitor’s room.
Uncle Gerald suddenly noticed the torn sleeve on the prison coat Artie was wearing. “What happened to your clothes?”
“They got lousy,” Artie said cheerily. “So the screws gave me this.”
How did things look? Artie repeated. Any chances? And before they could answer, “Say, James-” Would James tell Dorothea Lengel to stand opposite his window at 10 A.M., he’d wave to her.
Now seriously, Uncle Gerald said, Artie was going to have to snap out of this silly attitude. He had to work with the alienists. Everything depended on the report of the alienists.
“Oh, a battle of experts!” Artie exclaimed. “I guess you can’t claim that I was temporarily insane, that’s out, but how about heredity, maybe we ought to say it’s in the family – how about Cousin Richard?”
“Don’t try to put on an act, Artie,” his brother advised. “Just co-operate with these doctors. Just tell them everything they want to know.”
“Everything?”
His brother met his eyes. “Even the things people never tell anybody, kid. Things you’d never tell – well, me.”
“Things I did? Everything?”
That peculiar look came into Artie’s eyes, conspiratorial, cunning, and yet cute.
“Artie,” his uncle said, “are there important things we don’t know?”
“Well, do you want to know?” Was he teasing? Kidding? Now he laughed. “You believe all that crap in the papers?”
“Well, let’s say this,” his uncle stipulated reflectively. “If there is anything you run into that you’re in doubt about, Artie, maybe you’d better ask James first whether you should tell it.”
A snort escaped from Artie. “Maybe it would be easier to tell the docs.”
James said, “This may be your life, kid.”
“The hell you care!” Artie snapped.
James gasped. Artie’s voice had suddenly sounded quavering, the cry of some six-year-old kid wanting something from his big brother. “We all care, kid. We want to help you.”
Artie had changed back. “How’s Mumsie bearing up?” he asked contritely.
“She’s a little better. The doctors said for her to stay in Charlevoix,” James said. Was there anything else Artie wanted?
Sure. They could send in a couple of broads, he said with his old grin.
With Judd, it was Max who explained about co-operation with the psychiatrists. As usual, Judd’s response was to show he knew more than the experts. “According to the legal definition, I’m sane.”
“You wouldn’t think it,” Max let slip, and the old hostility was there between them. “For Christ’s sake, if you’re not crazy, what made you do it?” Max cried. “You must have been all ginned up!”
“I’m afraid drunkenness would not be a defence,” Judd remarked with cool superiority, “and although we did have a bottle in the car, I don’t think we took more than a swallow. Perhaps when we were waiting.”
“Waiting?”
“For school to let out.”
Max groaned. “Judd, kid, for crissake, why didn’t you stop? All right, Artie is wild, but why didn’t you call it off?”
“Back out? You want me to be a coward?” And there it stood naked between them, an accusation, a sneer with some kind of bitter laugh behind it, pointed at Max himself: You taught me, you taught your own little brother – be a man, never be a coward, never back out – that’s your own goddam code!
Then for a time things became relatively quiet. Dr. Storrs and Dr. Allwin proceeded with their work. It was to prove the most extensive psychiatric study made for a court case, certainly up to that time, and I believe perhaps even to this day. While Dr. Allwin gathered family material, Storrs began the psychological tests.
The prisoners were conducted each day to a large unused cell on the ninth floor. The room seemed almost an office, with its desk and chairs, its sunlit warmth. Along one wall was a bench, and between tests Artie would stretch out, dozing, while Judd engaged Storrs in a kind of reverse quiz, usually trying to prove the worthlessness of the test he was taking.
Psychological testing had not yet been developed in the specialized ways in which it is used today. Knowledge tests, tests of mental agility, were already in wide use. But testing of emotional responses had only begun. The Rorschach, now indispensable, was not used on Judd and Artie. The thematic apperception test had only just been invented by a young psychologist at Harvard; Dr. Storrs experimented with it and found curious results.
Of the other tests, the standard intelligence forms, the results were predictable. Judd completed the Stanford-Binet so rapidly that the scale was not high enough to rate him. Artie’s results were almost as phenomenal. The vocabulary tests and the problem-solution tests were child’s play for them. In a word test for which five minutes was considered a minimum, Judd completed his paper in three minutes and fifteen seconds. Artie, too, was rapid.
For emotional reactions, Storrs began with word association. Through an entire list, each boy reacted quickly and with a virtual absence of emotional tone. Only the word chisel, inserted between neutral words, suddenly brought Artie to a halt. He waited a full minute before saying, “trouble.”
It was then that Storrs tried the set of pictures used in the thematic apperception experiment. For example, there was a picture of a boy with one shoe on. Near him lay the matching shoe, an overshoe, a slipper. What did the picture suggest?
A simple response might have been that the boy would next put on his other shoe, and then the overshoes, and go to school. Or he might have been undressing – he would take off his shoe, put on the slippers.
With this and other pictures in the set, Artie and Judd produced stories hardly to be expected from young men of their age and seeming mental development. Artie at once decided that the boy might be putting on someone else’s shoes, so as to leave false footprints. And on he went, in a childlike fantasy of crime. Judd ignored the little situation in the picture – the incompleted act of dressing or undressing. The boy was waiting for someone, he ventured. Something important was happening. A big decision was being made, and the boy was waiting, perhaps for his mother. It could be that there was an argument about him going on in the house. About where he should go to school… Then Judd looked at Storrs, cunningly, with the caught-on look of the test sophisticate.
In another week, it is Dr. Allwin who conducts the examination, aided by medical specialists for the new-fangled metabolism tests and cardiograms.
On one of these mornings, there is Judd coming in alone, finding Dr. Allwin in a white jacket, laying out a few instruments on a clean towel.
Allwin greets Judd as one might greet a colleague, collaborating in pure scientific inquiry. But this morning Judd notices several hypodermic needles laid out, and turns pale.
“Anything wrong?” asks the doctor.
“What’s all this for?”
“We’re only going to take a few blood samples.” Picking up a syringe, the doctor turns to him, but now Judd is absolutely white.