Then, holding the Storrs-Allwin report in his hand like a Bible, the prosecutor attacked.
“Couldn’t the boys have cheated on some of these tests, since they are so smart, such good liars, as your report observes?”
“No,” said Dr. Allwin.
“And why not?”
“Because I am smarter than they are,” he said softly.
Because of the very abundance of the material he had received from them, consistent lying would have been most difficult, he explained. Judd, he felt, had been on the whole fairly truthful, decidedly more so than Artie. But Artie had lost the normal person’s ability to distinguish between truth and fantasy.
“Well, what constitutes normality?”
“A proper balance between the intellect and emotion.”
“And these boys are abnormal?”
“Yes, but in different ways.”
Horn snorted. In what he understood by abnormality, they were the same, he said. In fact, to the State they were plain perverts. Didn’t their compact provide that Artie should consent to certain acts, in exchange for Judd’s help in his criminal adventures? What were those acts?
“They were sexual acts,” Dr. Allwin said.
“How often?” Horn demanded.
Several women pressed their way down the aisles, to get closer. Angrily, the judge ordered, “I want every woman to leave this room!”
Finally, the courtroom was partly cleared. The judge had the testimony continued. In a voice refined and regretful, Dr. Allwin described the acts, calling Judd the aggressor. But this was the only such relationship, apparently, that Judd had ever developed. On Artie’s part, the incidents had been passive. They had occurred a few times a month.
Judd’s eyes were cast down. His father’s head was bent low, the eyes closed.
There lay the sickness, finally frankly exposed before us. Was it so dreadful a thing? In all the history of human behaviour, of the sick and ugly and distorted and careless and sportive and mistaken things that humans did, was this so much more?
But there was something more connected with the sexual act, Horn insisted, when the open trial resumed. Wasn’t it a part of the compact, that each act was linked to a crime? What, then, were the other crimes?
No, no! Ferdinand Feldscher protested.
Forcefully, Horn read from the Storrs-Allwin report the section about crimes withheld. Of Artie, it said, “Without any indication, facial or otherwise, he would lie or repress certain instances.” He turned on the alienist. “So there were gaps in Artie’s story of his crimes?”
“Yes. I said that.”
“And he might have been advised not to tell you these things?”
“He might have been.”
Horn read on: “‘His older brother does not know of these untold stories, but the patient says he will not tell him unless the family advises him to.’ You wrote this?”
“Yes, that is just what I wrote.”
“So just how important these matters are that he has been advised not to tell you, you don’t know?”
“I don’t know,” Allwin replied, unruffled.
With heavy emphasis, Horn read, “‘On the other hand there is a certain legal advantage in minimizing the broadcasting of these episodes.’ In other words, it is to the advantage of the defendants to have withheld certain information from you so that the conclusions you have arrived at won’t be disturbed, is that true?”
“I was interested in the one crime, the Kessler crime,” the doctor said.
Horn read on, arriving at the crucial mystery. “‘Though Artie denied the so-called “gland robbery” and the “ragged stranger” murder, he referred to four other episodes where the letters A, B, C, D were suggested. It was found forensically inadvisable to question him about these.’ By ‘forensically’ you mean legally, don’t you?”
Allwin hedged. “Just a pressure of time. We were concentrating on this case and to get our report in before the doctors came from the East.”
Horn shook his head. “What does ‘forensic’ mean?”
“Form the forum.”
“It means legal?”
“Yes, legal, or pulpit.”
“So this might have said, ‘It was found legally inadvisable to question him about these’?”
“Yes.”
“Get this, ‘It was found forensically -’”
“Yes, that was the reason,” the doctor persisted. “That is the forensic reason.”
There was laughter.
Horn kept after him. “Yes, but legally it was found inadvisable – now what do you mean by that? That it would not help his case if you went into these other episodes?”
“No – to get the report through by the twenty-first if we could possibly do it.”
“Why didn’t you say that? That you didn’t have time?”
“That is the way I felt about it,” the doctor snapped.
“And you thought the court and the rest of us would understand by that sentence that you did not have time to go into these other matters?”
The sarcasm was the final jolt to the doctor. “Absolutely not,” he said, testily, “and for this reason. This report was not prepared for you, it was prepared for other physicians who were coming on from the East. I had no idea this report would be submitted to the public or to you.”
Horn breathed a loud “Aha! So we weren’t supposed to know even this much.” Then he said, “But there is someone who knows. In your report, Artie Straus is speaking here of his associate, Judd Steiner. He says, ‘I have always been afraid of him, he knew too much about me’. And you, Dr. Allwin, wrote here, ‘He was somewhat afraid his associate might betray him. He had thought of pointing a revolver at his associate and shooting him.’ You say Artie Straus said, ‘The idea of murdering a fellow – especially alone – I don’t think I could have done it. But if I could have snapped my fingers and made him pass away of a heart attack, I would have done it.’”
The boys were looking at each other with pale, self-conscious grins. Horn went on. “‘He wanted to kill his associate, because he knew too much!’ What did he know?” He stared at Judd, then at Artie. If only he could have dragged them on to the stand! It was utterly clear now that the defence would never risk putting the boys in the witness chair.
Judd stared back at Horn. It was a bold look, a look that contained inner pride. He had not betrayed, he had kept the code.
That strange, brooding, perversely obstinate look of Judd’s remained with me as one of the fixed moments of the trial. Could it not have occurred to Judd that if a succession of crimes proved Artie demented, their fates might have been separated? Artie’s to an asylum, and his own, perhaps, for less than life in jail.
Had Judd actually taken part in the other crimes? Or had he only known of them? Artie’s words in the report suggested that he had always used an accomplice. But Artie was the less believable of the two.
Horn blunted himself against the stone wall of the unknown, but the episodes were to remain for ever a mystery, and in them, it has always seemed to me, lay the mystery of Artie, of his true mental state.
When Dr. Allwin stepped down from the stand, it was as though, for Judd, the most dangerous moment of the trial had passed. His eyes turned again to Artie, and there was a subtle smile between them, an instant of their old, intimate sharing.
Those were Horn’s days, and the defence seemed to recover only slight ground with a Sing Sing alienist who had specialized in juvenile delinquency. Dr. Holliday pointed out that Judd’s mania for collecting things, his mania for perfection, fitted in with the “compulsive behaviour” of manic patients, and that his thinking was “autistic”, a new word to us then. As I understood the explanation he made, it is the belief that things really are the way we imagine they are – a kind of self-contained magical thinking, without reference to the outside realities. Both boys had this characteristic to some extent, Holliday said, for it was a splitting off from reality. He showed how Judd’s planning even manifested itself in anticipation of his execution. He would make a great speech from the platform. He would convey his philosophy to the world; he would be “consistent” to the end.