Meyer Levin - Compulsion

My heart hurt for her. It seems that I can still feel the ache of it, today. “You poor kid,” I said. I held her close, to comfort her.

“Sid.” She controlled herself enough to talk to me. “I don’t know what it is. But – things happened between us. I feel he is somebody, somebody who – you can’t explain.” I stroked her hair.

The man at the counter had finished; there was a pharmacist on duty, who came from behind the drug counter to take his money. Still holding Ruth, I watched them as though there were some importance in the transaction. I kept saying to myself with murderous irony, Now you can get a scoop, the girl angle, Judd Steiner’s girl, exclusive story. Or would I now become one of those people trying to keep a girl’s name out of the papers? My own girl, who happened to have had a few dates with Judd Steiner while I was busy on the story.

Was she still my girl? If Judd proved really to have done the crime, and got convicted and executed, would I not always feel that but for the crime, Ruth’s love for him would have developed?

“Ruth, can’t you tell me?” I begged. “Not for the paper. For us.”

“Oh, Sid. I don’t know what I feel. Only, last night, he was so terribly, terribly unhappy about something.” She gasped.

I thought that perhaps we were both being melodramatic. Judd might simply have been frightened, all this week, knowing that the glasses could be identified. His whole story could be true.

I tried to tell this to Ruth, sitting her on a stool by the prescription bench. She became calmer. But now we couldn’t meet each other’s eyes at all. We both knew the dreadful truth of her first intuitive reaction. It could be Judd. Knowing him closely now, she had admitted it was not impossible.

Presently I left. A bitterness and a grief for Ruth kept mounting in me. I grappled with the image of Judd Steiner, someone like myself, my own age, a prodigy like myself, graduating at eighteen, in the same school, reading the same books, and attracted to the same girl.

If we were in so many ways alike, surely I would come to understand him. And yet he had done that most incomprehensible, that most horrible murder. Yes, he had done it. Ruth had known it instantly, and now I knew it. And I would somehow find the means to prove it.

It was a fury that seized me then. A fury that there were so many things in Judd like those in myself. I would find what else there was in him, to prove that he was far, far different from myself.

I had walked to the Fairfax. I remembered that last Friday, Artie’s girl Myra had told me I must call her, at the Fairfax. And I marvelled ruefully at the symmetry, the reporter’s rote, that had led me from Judd’s girl – for so I must now think of Ruth – to Artie’s girl.

Myra was home. Her voice had that combination of surprise and knowingness that girls have for young men who they were sure would one day phone. I said I was downstairs; could I come up? Myra was heartbroken, but she was going out – why hadn’t I given her more warning? I told her I was there in my working capacity and she became quite intrigued. Her date hadn’t yet arrived, so would I please come up?

I entered the huge living room and Myra settled me beside her on a huge custom-built sofa. I told her the news.

Her thin cigarette-stained fingers clutched my sleeve. Could anything happen to Artie? Myra’s voice, in excitement, had a hoarse quality.

I said I was sure Artie was only being questioned as to whether he had been with Judd on Wednesday. Judd had to be checked in every detail, because of the glasses.

“That little worm. That devil. Oh, Sid!” Her eyes glowing darkly, she became solemn. “Do you think Judd could have done it?” Myra sucked in her lower lip. I didn’t answer.

“I always told Artie Judd would get him into real trouble. You know, Artie likes to have fun, and he’ll do wild things, but he’d never hurt anybody. But Judd-” Then she said no, this was beyond Judd. How could the police even imagine, even of someone like Judd..?

And yet she was imagining it, with me.

“Did Artie say he was with him?”

“I don’t think so.”

Oh, Artie had probably been out chasing girls that night. Didn’t I know Artie! But he had his serious side, too, she said. All his playboy act was a cover-up. He could be extremely sensitive. Whereas Judd really gave her the creeps. She had nearly broken up with Artie over his constant companion. And did I know that Judd had been taking out my little friend, that attractive, lovely girl, Ruth? Judd had taken her last night to his brother’s engagement party.

“Yes. I know. In fact-” I stopped.

Myra ’s huge burning-coal eyes examined me. She moved a trifle closer, and lowered her voice.

“You know, Judd’s never really had a girl,” she said. “I mean – if there is really something serious between you and Ruth – he’s probably just experimenting. He likes to experiment.”

I shrugged, to show I wasn’t worried about Ruth, and she hurried on, “I don’t mean there’s anything wrong with him; it’s just he’s such a conceited intellectual. He thinks women are inferior.” She was babbling as though to distract herself from the real, the dreadful question. “You know what he sometimes called Artie? Dorian.” Myra sucked in her lip again. We looked at each other.

Then I asked if she could remember about Judd’s glasses. Had she seen him wearing his glasses early last week?

She shook her head. “I’m almost ashamed to try,” she began. Then, again, intimately: “Sid, you don’t really think he could have-” Soon she went on: of course, this wouldn’t be for the paper, I must swear. But we were friends, weren’t we? Well, from what she had heard was done to that poor little boy, and Judd was obsessed with pornography, we had to be ready to face the ugliest truths in the world. Didn’t I remember the other night how he kept bringing perversions into the conversation? In fact he had translated some especially pornographic thing from Aretino, the thirty-two perversities. And he was always talking about the decadents, Oscar Wilde and Sade. “I used to think it was a pose.”

I said maybe it was. Nothing had as yet been proven.

Myra clutched my arm again. “Oh God, Sid!” And then, determinedly: “I’ll say I was with Artie on Wednesday.” But it was with a feeble laugh, at the pathetic preposterousness of anyone like herself taking part in an alibi.

Her mother came in, and Myra jumped up. “Sid is taking me downtown,” she told her mother. “Artie arranged to meet us at the Sherman.”

“Oh?” her mother said, and smiled. “You youngsters all went out together last week, didn’t you? That’s nice, I like it better when you go in a group. Have a good time, dear, and don’t stay out too late.”

All the way downtown, Myra talked incessantly, a flood of coquetry, of sophistication, shot through with sudden worried remarks about Artie, but simply as though he were in a scrape, and quite confidentially she told me now, Artie was always in scrapes – there was the time he had nearly killed someone, in Charlevoix, and nearly killed himself too in the accident, his car overturning, and the worst was, he had stolen out of the back window to drive to a dance. She giggled. But it was only things like that he did, madcap things; Artie would never hurt anybody deliberately. Then came gasping questions about law, as though at moments the possible reality struck her. Then she would tell me all about Artie’s girls – of course every flapper on campus was chasing him, but for all his flamboyance, for all his clowning, she said, Artie was really very unsure of himself.

We got out by the County Building, and I showed her the lighted windows on the eighth floor, where Artie was; and I walked her over to the College Inn. She begged me to go and see how things were, so I left her while I hurried over and talked to Tom. I had Artie’s girl at the Inn, I told him, but I didn’t want to use her name, and as for Judd, she couldn’t remember seeing him with his glasses.