Meyer Levin - Compulsion

She pulled up the window. “Artie, is that nice?” she said, not too reproachfully. “Are you too lazy to get out and ring the bell?”

“Hey, come on down,” he said. “I’ve got something to tell you.”

“Well, you may come up if you wish.”

“Come on down.”

Ruth closed the window, and a moment later came out of the hallway.

She looked good enough to eat. Her round, soft face had a glow, and her reddish hair glowed, drawn back from her forehead under a green velvet band, and fluffed out behind.

“Hey, come on for a ride,” Artie said.

“Artie, you’re cuckoo. I can’t go now.”

“Sure. Come on.” He gave her the boyish grin. “I feel lonesome.”

“What’s happened to all your girls?”

“Oh, I got sick of the whole bunch of them. I thought of you.”

“Well, that’s not very complimentary. The bottom of the list.”

He blew the horn. “Come on.”

“I can’t. I’m helping Mother. Maybe tomorrow.”

“Sure you can. Come on. I’ll buy you a beer.”

“No, really I can’t just now,” she said in that way girls have, when you know damn well they can. He let his face fall, moody, serious. It worked. She asked, “Is anything wrong, Artie?”

It was the shock of that thing in his block, he said, that horrible thing. Right across from his house. It could have been his own kid brother!

“I know,” Ruth sympathized. “It’s ghastly. Such an incredible, fiendish thing.” For a moment, he had her. But then she shook her head and said, “I really do have to go upstairs. But another day, if you like, Artie.”

Hell with her. She was a wet rag. He slammed the car into gear and drove away, glad of the surprised, almost dismayed look on her face as he left her there on the sidewalk.

Artie pulled up at the frat, ran in, told the big news, talking a mile a minute about the crime, his brother, the ransom, then suddenly, in that way he had, shifting his attention to a bridge game.

Leaving Tom Daly, I decided to stop at the frat for supper before I went over to see Ruth; I suppose I wanted to display myself and collect glory for my scoop. A bridge game was in progress in the lounge, and Artie was pulling his usual act of jumping from one side to another, handing out advice.

I tossed the paper on to the bridge table. “Hear about the big story? Kid got murdered.” And to Artie: “Say, he lived right near your house.”

“They’ve got my whole street blocked off!” Artie cried. “You never saw so many cops! I was just telling everybody-”

“Blocked off? I was just there,” I said, irked by his habit of exaggeration. “Didn’t run into any street blocks.”

The fellows were exclaiming over the news. “You on this story, Sid?” Milt Lewis asked with awe.

“… identified by a Globe reporter,” Raphael Goetz read out loud.

I admitted I was the reporter who had identified the boy.

“Say! Some scoop!” Artie stared at me, mouth agape. Then he flung his arm around me, patting my back. “Sonnyboy Silver, the hot-shot reporter! Fellows! We have a star reporter in our midst! The Alpha Beta is really getting there!” He seized the paper, glanced at it, waved it. “Hey! If not for Sid’s identifying him, it says they were just going to pay the ransom! Boy!”

He gazed at me so intently, his expression so strange that I clearly remembered the moment. “I just happened to get sent out-”

Artie was avid with questions. How had the poor kid looked? Any marks on him? Any clues? Sometimes the cops made the papers hold back certain information, to trap the criminals.

His excitement over the case seemed perfectly natural. Artie was a notorious detective-story addict. It was a common wonder around the house that he, who was supposed to be so brilliant, read practically nothing but pulp magazines and all that trash.

Actually, though he now developed a sudden friendship for me Artie and I had never been more than nodding fraternity brothers. He had been on campus only during the last year, having spent the two previous years at the University of Michigan.

Moreover, I had an obscure hostility toward Artie. I suppose it was because everyone tended to bracket us. We were the prodigies, both graduating at eighteen. Indeed, Artie was ahead of me – he already had his bachelor’s – and was loafing along taking a few extra courses.

I resented being paired with him because Artie was, to me, a waster, a playboy. He took snap courses, borrowed everybody’s term-papers. He bragged about his all-A’s at Michigan, but I had heard differently – mostly B’s and C’s. I felt he was just a rich kid who had the carpet laid out for him; he was spoiling what could have been a good mind. And I suppose I was jealous that he had rubbed off the glamour of my being the youngest graduate.

Now Artie pulled me aside, conspiratorially. “Say, Sid, I’ll give you a scoop! I can tell you all about that Kessler kid!” And he rattled on, about Paulie Kessler using his private tennis court, about his being in the same class with his own little brother, at the same school he, Artie, had gone to. That’s where I ought to look for clues – the Twain School!

I told him I had just come from there. I mentioned the arrest of the teacher, a piece of news that was not yet in the papers. Artie became even more excited. So they had pinched that ass-pincher, Steger! He would lay ten to one they had the right guy! Did I want some inside dope about Steger? He could tell me a few things, all right! His own kid brother, Billy, had been approached by that pervert. Sure. A kid doesn’t know what it’s all about, but Billy had come home one day and said there was something funny about Mr. Steger, he was always putting his arm around you. Billy had even asked if it was all right to go in Mr. Steger’s car. God! What a narrow escape that must have been!

There was no doubt, Artie declared – the cops were on the right trail. Steger must have been monkeying around with Paulie, and killed the boy to keep his mouth shut.

“What about the ransom?” Some of the fellows had gathered around.

“All right, what about the ransom?” Artie said. “Why not? That’s exactly what he’d do. Those poor suckers, those teachers, you know how much they get, maybe twenty-five bucks a week; they see all the kids coming to school with limousines – Christ, what a temptation!”

“After killing the kid?”

“I’ll admit that was terrible. But you can see, those teachers need money; it’s an obvious temptation.”

One of the fellows pointed out a flaw: how could the teacher have collected the ransom money if he wasn’t absent from school?

“He must have an accomplice!” Artie said. “Probably another pervert!” That school was full of them. He had gone there himself, and he knew.

“Yah, by experience!” Milt Lewis razzed.

“Nothing like Stratmore Academy,” Artie retorted, referring to Milt’s fashionable military prep school. “There, it’s an order!” Turning back to me, he wanted to know what the cops would do to Steger. Had I ever seen the third degree? Would they get it out of him?

“They’re not supposed to use it,” said Harry Bass, another of our law students. “If they use the third degree, he can repudiate the confession.”

“Crap,” said Artie. “They’ve got a way that leaves no marks.”

“Yah, in cheap detective stories!” Harry laughed.

Artie appealed to me as an expert, about the rubber truncheons that left no marks. Besides, he said, the cops got them in the balls.

Sure, the police had ways, I said knowingly. Could I go talk to his little brother about Steger?

His mother had the kid in hiding, Artie told me. All the mothers were scared out of their pants. But he would fix up an interview for me.