Meyer Levin - Compulsion

The captain took down the name and address, writing slowly, in a schoolboy hand. He didn’t ask for the phone number, and it occurred to Judd to call up Jerry and warn him.

Then the captain just sat there as though trying to think of more questions. Judd didn’t want to appear anxious to leave. He was indeed beginning to enjoy the situation, beginning to form an account of it in his mind, for Artie. Still, the silence became somewhat tense, and he allowed himself to glance at his watch. “As a matter of fact,” he remarked, “I have a date to take a girl birding this afternoon, but I guess we won’t be going to Hegewisch.” The captain’s flesh wobbled with his chortle. “That’s a new name for it. Birding!”

Judd took a full breath.

“Okay,” the captain said, pushing a sheet of paper toward him. “Tell you what, son. You write me out a little statement, all you just said, the facts you just stated, for the record.”

As he opened his fountain-pen, Judd felt in himself, perhaps a little more faintly but still quite recognizably, that shiver of elation he had experienced when he had first read in the papers of the glasses being found. For he had after all come under suspicion. This had been a mild third degree. He had acquitted himself. He had gone through the sieve.

“I’ll have the boys drive you home, so you won’t be late for your date – birding.” The captain chortled again.

Judd watched himself, so as not to write too much. A paragraph. He wrote fast in a careless hand; one thing was sure, this wouldn’t match his lettering on the envelope of the ransom letter. “This all right?” He passed the sheet to the captain.

The officer read it over slowly; he was a lip-reader, but concealed it by mouthing a cigar. He nodded.

“I’m afraid I haven’t been of much help,” Judd said, rising. A clear, mathematical conviction of superiority had come back to him. Against such people, it was a certainty he and Artie had to succeed.

“Well” – the captain leaned back – “it’s a downtown job now. But we’ve all got to give them all the help we can.”

Judd went to the door, opened it, even enjoying a fluttery feeling that a peremptory voice could still halt him. His two escorts were sitting, idle. They arose as though they had expected him, and led him out to the car.

He thought of asking them to drop him at Artie’s. That was how Artie would have done it – try to scare him by pulling up in a police car. But for himself, Judd reflected, he could enjoy the thought as much as the deed. Artie was excitable; if Artie saw a police car pull up without warning, he might even shoot, or do something equally wild, and give himself away. And anyway, there was just time to keep his date with Ruth.

The two cops dropped him at the house. The maid rushed forward as though she had been waiting at the door. Judd laughed at her. “I’ll bet you were scared I’d never come back.”

“Oh, no.”

“It was just some routine junk about my bird-watching classes.”

He went upstairs. There was an elation in him now over the way he had handled the interrogation. His victory was like a confirmation of his entire code of behaviour. He was right, right, right!

I SEE JUDD then, starting for his date with Ruth, picking up his field glasses to prove he really meant it about going bird-watching. And besides – a weapon? Does he definitely intend…? Let her fate hang on chance. If he spots a warbler. That will be a sign. Do it.

When the bell rings, Ruth goes to the door, while her mother looks out of the window and notices the red Stutz. “My, my! My daughter is getting popular these days,” she comments. “Who is this one?”

“He was out with us last night. Artie’s friend, Judd Steiner.”

“And you’ve got a date already? Fast work,” says her mother. “The Steiners. Is that the millionaire Steiners? Poor Sid, what kind of competition are you giving him?”

“Oh, don’t jump to conclusions, Mother,” Ruth protests. “We just like to talk. He’s very brilliant. He just passed his exam for Harvard Law School, besides being Phi Beta Kappa at seventeen.”

She picks up her scarf and her handbag. “Aren’t you going to ask him up to introduce him?” her mother demands.

“Another time.” And Ruth runs downstairs to where Judd waits in the hallway.

Coming down, she makes a kind of illumination – her reddish hair, her yellow pleated skirt, her bare forearms, the streak of her scarf, giving a passing gladness to the hall. Ruth feels friendly – curious, she would say – toward Judd. Despite his reputation among the co-eds. Some say Judd gives them the creeps.

Ruth hasn’t found him at all repellent. He is somehow a stray person, and her upbringing has been in a house of warmth toward strays. Her mother and father are the kind who, some years back, attended Emma Goldman meetings and collected Yiddish poets visiting from New York, or stray anarchists, or intense-looking men with long hair who were vaguely “studying”.

So what others find odd or even disturbing in Judd rather attracts Ruth. And physically, though Judd is quite short, he is not smaller than she; they danced quite well together. He is something of a change from her gangling reporter.

There is in her, that day, the unworried adventurous confidence of a girl who has a devoted steady and yet is uncommitted, who may tease herself that perhaps there is yet something unknown, something supreme, in romance to be encountered.

With his curious perfection of manners that contains a touch of condescending irony for the custom itself, Judd opens the door of his car for her. Then he walks around to his own side.

As she settles into the fancy car, her skirt rimming her knees, Ruth smiles to Judd. “I almost expected to see you with Artie,” she says. “You’re practically inseparable, aren’t you?”

“Oh, I have a life of my own, too,” he parries. As he drives away with her, he wonders at the unusual feeling of glee that wells up in him. Is this a feeling of happiness? More likely an enjoyment of the power in himself, of his secret imaginings. Can there really be something special about this girl, about having her sitting next to him, and feeling her interest in him? Wryly, Judd permits himself to appreciate the image of the pretty girl and himself, gay youth breezing through the town in his Bearcat!

She too must be feeling the image, for she leans back with a delighted sigh, saying how perfect the day is for a ride. Then Judd has a suggestion: “Instead of going to a restaurant for lunch, why not pick up some hot dogs on the road?”

And Ruth says, “Oh, that sounds scrumptious.”

He heads through the park and along the lake. A hackneyed refrain comes into his mind. “A pretty girl is like a melody.” He drops one hand from the wheel and catches her knowing smile. Ruth lets her hand lie in his, against her thigh, so warmly firm through the short pleated skirt.

She remarks that she has been wondering about his friendship with Artie, because they really are so different. Artie acts like a college sheikh, while he is so quiet and even shy. Of course, as everyone says, Artie is very brilliant, and she supposes there aren’t many people around who-”

“-can meet my lofty requirements?” Judd says. “There is no sense in false modesty.”

That’s true, she agrees. The average man at the university is interested only in football and his frat. “You’re not a frat man, are you?”

“No,” he says.

“Sid practically dropped out,” Ruth remarks.

“Is Sid your lover?” Judd asks.

“Oh” – she gives him a candid glance – “it’s not that I believe strictly in the conventions. But I don’t believe in rushing things either. I mean, if I were really certain I was in love and we wanted each other, and for some reason we couldn’t get married, then I should give myself.” There is something almost prim in the way she makes this announcement. It excites him.