Jed Rubenfeld - The Interpretation of Murder

'But you cannot say nothing,' Ferenczi protested, 'as if you are guilty party.'

Freud considered. 'We will deny the charges — but that is all we will do. I will send Hall a short letter stating the facts: I am married, I have never been dismissed from employment at any hospital, I have never been shot at, and so on. Younger, will that put you in an awkward position?'

I understood his question. He wanted to know if I would feel bound to inform Hall that while Freud was innocent of the charges, Jones and Jung were not. Naturally, I would do no such thing. 'Not at all, sir,' I answered.

'Good,' Freud concluded. 'After that, we leave it to Hall. If, for the sake of this "handsome donation," Hall is prepared to keep the truths of psychoanalysis from being taught at his university, then — you will forgive me, Younger — he is not an ally worth having, and America can go to the dogs.'

'President Hall will never agree to their terms,' I said, with greater conviction than I felt.

Outside the Jefferson Market jail, Betty Longobardi had five words for Jimmy Littlemore. 'Let's get out of here.'

Littlemore was not so eager to leave. He led Betty toward Sixth Avenue, with its river of men and women streaming north on their way home from work. At the corner, a few steps from the ornate courthouse entrance, Littlemore stopped and wouldn't budge. Over the earthshaking roar of an elevated train, he told Betty excitedly about his eventful day.

'She said you were going to get killed, Jimmy,' was Betty's reply, which struck Littlemore as less appreciative of his achievements than he had hoped.

'She also said we should ask next door,' he answered. 'It's got to be the courthouse. Come on; we're right here.'

'I don't want to.'

'It's a courthouse, Betty. Nothing can happen in a courthouse.'

Back inside, Littlemore showed his badge to the clerk, who told them where the records office was but expressed the opinion that nobody was likely to be there at this hour. After climbing up two flights of stairs and working their way through an empty maze of corridors, Littlemore and Betty came upon a door marked records. The door was locked, the room behind it dark. Breaking and entering was not the detective's ordinary modus operandi, but under the circumstances he felt justified. Betty glanced around nervously.

Littlemore jimmied the lock. Shutting the door behind them, he switched on an electric lamp. They were in a small office with one large desk. There was a rear exit. This was unlocked; it opened onto a more capacious storeroom. Here they saw cabinet after cabinet of labeled drawers. 'There are no dates,' said Betty. 'Only letters.'

'There'll be a calendar,' said Littlemore. 'There's always a calendar. Wait till I find it.'

It did not take him long. He returned to the desk, where there were two typewriters, blotters, inkwells — and a stack of leather-bound ledgers, each more than two feet in width. Littlemore opened the first one. Every page within represented a day in the life of the New York Supreme Court, Trial Term, Parts I through III. The pages that Littlemore flipped through all indicated dates in 1909. He opened the second ledger, which proved to be the calendar of 1908, and then the third. Leafing through its pages, he quickly came to March 18, 1907. He saw dozens of lines of case names and numbers, set down by a practiced hand in pen and ink, often crossed out or overwritten. He read aloud:

'Ten-fifteen a.m., day calendar, Part III: Wells v. Interborough R. T. Co. Truax, J. Okay, Wells. We've got to find Wells.' He rushed past Betty back to the storeroom, where in a drawer marked w he found the case of Wells v. IRT: a paper-clipped set of three pages. He looked through them. 'This is nothing,' he said. 'Maybe some subway accident. They never even got to court.'

He went back to the ledger. 'Bernstein v. same,' he read. 'Mensinub v. same. Selxas v. same. Boy, there's at least twenty of these IRT cases. I guess we have to look through them all:

'Maybe those aren't what we're looking for, Jimmy. Isn't there anything else?'

'Ten-fifteen a.m., Trial Term: Tarbles v. Tarbles. A divorce?'

'Is that all?' asked Betty.

'Ten-thirty a.m., Trial Term, Part I, Criminal Term (January Term continued). Fitzgerald, J. People v. Harry K. Thaw.'

They stared at each other. Betty and Littlemore recognized the name at once, as would anyone else in New York and nearly anyone in the country at that time. 'He's the one — ' said Betty.

' — who murdered the architect at Madison Square Garden,' Littlemore finished. Then he realized why Betty had stopped: heavy treading could be heard down the hall.

'Who is that?' she whispered.

'Turn off the light,' Littlemore instructed Betty, who was standing next to the lamp. She reached under the shade and fiddled nervously with the buttons, but the result of her efforts was to switch on another bulb. The footsteps stopped. Then they resumed; they were now undoubtedly approaching the records office.

'Oh, no,' said Betty. 'Let's hide in the storeroom.'

'I don't think so,' said Littlemore.

The footsteps grew close, halting just outside their door. The knob turned, and the door swung open. It was a short man in a fedora and a cheap-looking three-piece suit, the inner breast pocket of which bulged as if he were carrying a gun. 'Ain't there no men's room?' he asked.

'Second floor,' said Littlemore.

'Thanks,' said the man, slamming the door behind him.

'Come on,' said Littlemore, heading back into the filing room. The case of People v. Thaw occupied a good two dozen drawers. Littlemore found the trial transcript: there were thousands of pages in four-inch sheafs, bound by rubber bands. The transcript was illegible in places, with uneven letters, no punctuation, and whole sentences of garbled words. For the date of March 18, 1907, there were only fifty or sixty pages. Littlemore, flipping through them, quickly came upon several sheets of paper that looked different from the others: cleanly typed, organized into separate paragraphs, well punctuated. 'An affidavit,' he said.

'Oh, my gosh,' Betty replied. 'Look!' She was pointing to the words grasped me by the throat and whip.

Littlemore hurriedly turned back to the affidavit's first page. It was dated October 27, 1903, and began, Evelyn Nesbit, being duly sworn, says -

'That's Thaw's wife, the showgirl,' said Betty. Evelyn Nesbit had been described by more than one infatuated author of the time as the most beautiful girl that ever lived. She married Harry Thaw in 1905, a year before Thaw killed Stanford White.

'Before she was his wife,' said Littlemore. They kept reading:

I reside at the Savoy Hotel, Fifth Avenue and Fifty- ninth Street, in the City of New York. I am 18 years of age, having been born on Christmas Day, in the year 1884.

For several months prior to June 1903,1 had been at Dr Bell's Hospital at West Thirty-third Street, where

I had an operation performed on me for appendicitis, and during the month of June went to Europe at the request of Henry Kendall Thaw. Mr Thaw and I traveled throughout Holland, stopping at various places to catch connecting trains, and then we went to Munich, Germany. We then traveled through the Bavarian Highlands, finally going to the Austrian Tyrol. During all this time the said Thaw and myself were known as husband and wife, and were represented by the said Thaw, and known, under the name of Mr and Mrs Dellis.

'The snake,' said Betty.

'Well, at least he married her later,' said Littlemore.

After traveling together about five or six weeks, the said Thaw rented a castle in the Austrian Tyrol, situated about halfway up a very isolated mountain. This castle must have been built centuries ago, as the rooms and windows are all old-fashioned. I was assigned a bedroom for my personal use.