“Hand me the big hammer, Artie, will you?” The hammer has a sledge head. There is black tape wrapped around the handle for a grip. Hank is halfway under the hood, chiselling at something, with a chisel that cuts through iron. “The bloody nut is stuck,” he says. “That screw is tight as a witch’s twat.” That’s a bad word, and then Hank laughs at a big joke he just thought of – a joke about a couple that got caught being lovey-dovey and the police and the fire department had to be called to pull them apart. “Pull what apart?” Artie asks. “Their faces?” And Hank roars. And that is the day Hank tells Artie about the difference between men and women. It’s just like this nut and bolt, he says, just like a key and a keyhole!
When a fellow grows up, Hank says, the pecker gets big, and sometimes it swells up, it gets as hard as a goddam hunk of steel, and Hank shakes the chisel in his hand, to show how hard it gets.
Artie has picked up the chisel Hank put down. “What’s the tape on there for?” the boy asks. And Hank says, “For a grip, so the shaft won’t get too slippery from the sweat of the hand.” And then he breaks out into a real roar of dirty laughter. “That’s a good one, but don’t ever tell that to a girl!”
“What?” asks Artie, puzzled.
“That!” says Hank, taking the chisel in his fist, holding it the wrong way, the iron in his hand. “Boy, you could really knock them dead with something like this! Boy, there must be many a little man with a no-good pecker wishes he had one like this!”
And just then Miss Nuisance marches in on them. “Artie! What are you doing here?”
A tool, a rod – “stiff as a rod”, the frat brothers said, hard as steel, knock them over with it – Sure he would go along. He’d show them he was a man. They claimed they’d done it the first time at fifteen, at fourteen, at thirteen. He’d done it lots of times already, he said – hell, he’d done it to his governess; that’s why she had to leave.
And in Mamie’s place the fellows stood around in a circle, close. The raucous laughter… there was his broad all spread out and waiting, and he couldn’t, he couldn’t – hell, many times, when he was alone, it did – but now, “little mousey”, she said, and they all roared, the bastards, the stinking sonsabitches.
Sonofabitch thing. Hard now in jail when you couldn’t – when you wanted it, limp as a rag. With Judd that time with the two broads, that little punk Judd doing it on the other side of the car. And his own broad trying to let him off easy, wagging her finger at it – “You bad little boy, you had too much to drink, didn’t you?” and, giggling, “He just wants to curl up and go to sleep.”
With his agreeable candour, Artie told Dr. Allwin of all the early little things – about swiping money from a lemonade stand he operated with another boy, about taking his big brother’s Liberty Bond, for surely the doc had already been told. Artie told of things with Judd – the Edison electric car, the bricks in windows, the time a cop shot at them, the frat house in Ann Arbour.
“Wasn’t there something else, in between?”
“No -?” How much did the doc know from Judd, from the family?
“And wasn’t there a trip to Oak Park?”
Why, yes, it had slipped his mind. Artie smiled and told of the time he and Judd planned to hijack the cellar of Joe Stahlmeyer’s house, full of Canadian stuff worth twenty dollars a bottle. Artie had a revolver along and also -
He caught himself up.
“Also?” probed Dr. Allwin.
Oh, he had taken along a taped chisel for a billy.
“Was that the first time you fixed one up?”
Yes, but the expedition had been a flop.
“Why the tape around it?”
“Well, that way it made a good handle to grip, for a billy, and solid steel inside,” he ended, with a little gasp, a hiss.
How many questions stood awakened in the mind of Dr. Allwin? The discarded chisels that had been rumoured found in the neighbourhood, the tale of a young man living nearby, drowned, a supposed suicide…
In that little hiss, there was a release of more, much more than some story of playing robbers. It belonged with the suddenly unfocused, evasive look in Artie’s eyes. It belonged to the small raging boy inside, the imprisoned child – to an Artie in this moment almost contacted, almost released to scream out his murderous tantrum: I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you if you say I can’t!
Dr. Allwin said quietly, while closing his notebook, “And there were still other times, with a chisel?”
Artie’s smiling cunning look had returned. “Am I supposed to tell you?”
The doctor screwed on the top of his pen. “We’re only here to help you, Artie.”
“What if you found out something that wouldn’t help me?”
Perhaps they had better stop for the day, the doctor said.
The alienists had come to a deep cleft, and there they halted. Should they let themselves down into every crevice, or would it be best to leap over, perhaps to improvise a bridge of ropes? Storrs and Allwin must have debated long and earnestly over this dilemma, and in Wilk’s apartment the discussions must have gone far into the night.
Can we judge their decision? We may say, from a purely medical viewpoint they were obliged to make every effort to explore the furthest crevice. And yet, taking into account the attitudes of that day, the prejudices and the limited understanding, their hesitation can be comprehended. They had been engaged – and the word was to be their own – in forensic medicine. In legal medicine. As experts. Did not the legal problem therefore remain a foremost factor in their work?
Their task was to study the minds of these two boys in relation to a, specific crime. Would it help to know the details of other crimes? Lawyers and doctors agreed: that this was for the family to determine.
Uncle Gerald came to Artie’s cell.
“All right,” Artie said, inhaling avidly – he had run out of cigarettes and the damn screw had been holding him up a buck for a pack – “all right, there were other things.”
“Judd know about them?”
“He always acted as if he had it on me. Anyway, for one of them.”
Their eyes met. “Big?” his uncle said.
“Big.”
“How many, Artie?”
“You could say – four.”
The deeds hung between them.
“I don’t want to know,” Uncle Gerald said. “Don’t tell me, Artie. They might get me on the stand.”
“What about the docs?”
According to law, Uncle Gerald said, only this case was to be tried, no others.
“Wouldn’t it make a difference if they call me nuts or not?”
His uncle reflected on that point. It could make all the difference. “Maybe you could tell the doctors you did – a certain number of things, without saying what they were.”
What would the family want? Artie asked, with the sudden genuine-sounding throb that could come into his voice. He didn’t wish to hurt Mumsie, the family, any more.
In such moments, you had to believe him.
When next he talked with Dr. Allwin, Artie kept to the line suggested by his uncle. Yes, there had been other things.
“These other – incidents – major outbreaks, shall we say? How many were there?”
“Four.”
“Let’s refer to them as A, B, C, and D.” Carefully the doctor went on to remind Artie that the press attributed certain specific crimes to him, or to him and Judd.
“That’s a lot of hooey!” Artie exclaimed, but then there came over his face his peculiar sidewise smile. “I never had anything to do with that monkey-gland robbery,” he stated. Nor had he had anything to do with the handless stranger. But, significantly, the two unsolved student deaths were not mentioned.
Now, in the night-long meetings in Wilk’s study, the entire defence position had to be re-examined. If Artie were a multiple murderer, wouldn’t he be seen by any jury as demon-ridden, demented? And if Judd were not a participant in the other crimes, was it fair to link him completely to Artie in a joint trial? Judd had, rather, participated as one enslaved, enthralled by a madman.