Meyer Levin - Compulsion

“Arthur! Fun is fun, but do you have to be so vulgar?”

Putting on a record, Artie snapped his fingers to the music. He seized her and danced her around for a moment. Then, all through dinner, he was subdued. Mumsie even remarked on it. He was thinking of his future, Artie said, and everyone laughed. His father remarked, “Well, in fact it’s about time.” But Mumsie said he was still only a baby.

After dinner he watched from an upstairs window. And he saw the Marmon drive up. That goddam little bastard, could he have confessed! Artie rushed into his room, seized his automatic. Should he shoot it out?

His mother approached, calling from the stairs in a puzzled voice that there were some gentlemen to see him. Artie threw the pistol into the drawer. Carrying a gun might spoil things. Coming down with Mumsie, he recognized McNamara and the other guy. “Hi!” he said. And to his mother: “It’s some friends of mine from the detective force. I’ve been helping them on the Kessler case. There’s an important new clue.”

“Oh God, I hope they’ve found the culprit,” she said.

As he went out of the door with them, Artie said, “I’ve always wanted a ride in one of your Marmons.”

“You’ve got it,” said McNamara.

With a dozen other reporters, I was on watch in the State’s Attorney’s office. We had been there for hours. Somewhere, we knew, Horn was questioning the possible owners of the glasses.

All we could do was wait. A couple of squad men were on duty, and whenever one of them left the room, several reporters jumped up and followed, hoping to be led to Horn. Most often, it would be to the toilet, and we’d all guffaw. Whenever the phone rang, to be answered by Olin Swasey, an assistant on duty, we pleaded to talk to his chief, if that was Horn on the wire. But he only smiled, shaking his head.

It was then that Artie Strauss came in with McNamara. We all stirred. But Artie was not an unfamiliar figure, and it actually did not occur to us that he was brought in for questioning.

“Well for crissake! Are you on the force now?” I joked.

“The boy reporter!” he greeted me. “You seen Judd? Say, Sid, were those really his glasses?”

Before I could fully grasp the immensity of his remark, the whole crowd converged on him. Judd? Judd who? Startled, Artie turned silent. The pack wheeled on me, on McNamara. Meanwhile Swasey rushed Artie into a private office.

The morning-paper men beat angrily on the door. Why should the Globe get all the breaks? they complained.

Swasey said he would telephone for instructions. A moment later he emerged and said all right, the glasses belonged to Judah Steiner, Jr., a law student at the University of Chicago. Artie Straus was a friend of his. That was all.

Everyone knew the Straus family. And the Steiners? The word spread that they too were multimillionaires. Instantly, we were all on the phones, trying to contact the two families. At the Steiners, no one was home.

I saw Mike Prager hang up his phone and go out. He was probably rushing out there to see if he could find someone.

At the Straus mansion, a brother, James, made a statement. Artie had been trying to help from the beginning, he said, and would surely do all he could to aid the police now. As for Judd Steiner and his spectacles, he was confident some reasonable explanation would be forthcoming.

Meanwhile Olin Swasey had begun to question Artie. The interrogation was matter of fact, and had Artie then given the same story as Judd, about the two girls, suspicion might have been turned away from them for a time, perhaps altogether. But the week of their alibi compact was over, and so Artie utilized their agreement that after one week it was “each man for himself”. He was the master criminal making his own getaway.

Wednesday? he repeated. He’d hung around the frat, maybe played cards. No, he hadn’t been with Judd Steiner.

Swasey didn’t press his questions. Indeed, after going over the story a few times, he left Artie sitting with McNamara, and slipped out through a side door. But as it happened, an extra man from the Examiner , just arriving, recognized Swasey coming out of the building and followed him across to the hotel and up to the mysterious suite. Thus, the hiding place of the State’s Attorney was uncovered. Soon we were all there.

We couldn’t get to see Judd Steiner. But from Sergeant Fleury we learned that Steiner had definitely taken a bird-lore class out there to Hegewisch the Sunday before, when he must have dropped his glasses. That seemed the end of all the excitement. A false alarm again.

Tom and I went into a Raklios for coffee. I started to speculate on whether it was even remotely possible that Judd could have committed such a crime. Why, I had been out with him last Friday. Ruth had been going out with him since then. And suddenly my sense of a fated personal involvement, whose meaning had not yet been disclosed, came over me again, and I believed it was possible.

Tom brushed speculation aside. The hell with the psychology, he said; that comes later. “Isn’t Judd the fellow we saw Artie talking to, coming out of that law exam, the day Artie helped us locate the drugstore?” Tom recalled. “Maybe some of the boys in his law class would remember when he wore his glasses the last time.”

Then the whole drugstore incident stood in a new light. Artie’s weird insistence on our going out with him in the rain, to search for it. And another recollection struck me. How Artie had said, about Paulie, “If you were looking for a kid to kidnap, that’s just the kind of a cocky little sonofabitch you would pick…” There came again to me the whole perverted side of the story, and I found myself matching Judd to it. That night at the Four Deuces, his ceaseless sex talk, his lustrous eyes. I began to visualize him with the murdered boy. And then a shuddering anger took hold of me. All week, what he might have done, going out with Ruth!

She was downstairs in the drugstore, taking care of the soda fountain, as she usually did when her parents went out. Ruth was wearing one of those white waitress coats that I loved to see her in. A middle-aged man was eating a sandwich. I went to the other end of the counter.

Ruth drew coffee, and as she leaned to give it to me, I wanted to take her face in my two hands. She had put on a provocative smile, and was going to inquire about my big activities, but changed as she saw my own expression. “Is anything wrong, Sid?” Then: “You look so tired.”

I told her quietly, “Listen, Ruth, the glasses in the Kessler case, they’ve found out they belong to Judd Steiner.”

She kept staring at me, her pupils getting dark.

“He says he dropped them out there, the Sunday before, when he was birding.” I had meant to be roundabout; perhaps I had even intended to try to find things out about Judd from her. But under her gaze I had to say it all at once, so as not to seem to be personally accusing him.

Without taking her eyes from me, Ruth came around the counter. This was an old signal; we would go to the back of the store, to the prescription cubicle. We had used to go there, and swiftly kiss. Through a slot that showed the store proper, you could see if anyone was coming.

Ruth seized both my hands. “Sid. You want to prove he did it.”

“I want to find out,” I said.

Her mouth had remained slightly open. Now the tears came slowly, on her cheeks. I could not know, then, about the night before at his brother’s engagement party, and about the ride she had taken with Judd, and the misery in him she had felt, against her breast. I could not know about the strange time on the beach. Yet it was all conveyed, somehow. I knew something had happened in Ruth. And if I had not seen her in these last days, it had not been only because I was so busy; surely I had remained aside, with the instinct of a man who knows he must give a rival emotion a chance to prove itself, or to run itself out.