As to Judd, he, too, was “the host of a relatively infantile aspect of his personality, but he has reacted to a defence mechanism, which has produced the final picture of a markedly disordered personality make-up in the direction of developing feelings of superiority which place him very largely out of contact with an adequate appreciation of his relation to others or to society.”
We had almost forgotten that it was a trial, a contest, until Horn came forward for the cross-examination. He turned to Artie’s “criminalistic tendencies”, and Judd’s lack of them. Did the doctor, for example, know who struck the fatal blows on Paulie Kessler’s skull?
There was a moment of hesitation as Dr. McNarry glanced toward the defence table. Wilk arose.
It would make no difference in the conduct of the defence if this point could be clarified, he said. The boys, by their own desire and that of their families, were being tried jointly, as they were inextricably bound in their act.
Horn repeated his question.
“Yes,” said Dr. McNarry. He spoke as though the detail were of little significance. “It was Artie.”
A woman’s shriek sounded over the courtroom hubbub. I noticed Myra, sudden tears on her face. Up to that moment she must still have been clinging to the idea of Judd as the devil.
Horn was asking how the doctor knew it was Artie.
“During one of our talks, there came a point where it was quite clear to me. I asked, ‘It was you who struck the blows, wasn’t it?’ and Artie nodded; he said, ‘You knew it’.”
I had a glimpse over my shoulder of Judd, staring at Artie with almost a reproving look.
The sensation had come late in the afternoon; court adjourned before I finished my call. The corridors were flooded with excited women; there seemed, indeed, to be a particularly sharp scent rising in the warm corridors from their inordinate agitation. In that moment, I saw Myra, slipping between the clots of women. I called her name. She clutched my arm, in that way she had. “Oh, Sid.”
“Sid,” she gasped, “they’re putting me on the stand tomorrow.”
How could that be? What of all the other psychiatrists?
“I don’t know, I don’t know. The lawyers just told me. Sid, I’m scared of that awful man.”
I reassured her. Horn was nobody to be afraid of; it was nothing to be on the stand. She had Wilk to protect her.
I waited in the park. Myra wanted me to walk her to Wilk’s apartment. The heat had not lifted, and the park was teeming. All at once she was there with me, wispy in the twilight. We stood a moment, listening to a middle-aged woman talking to her husband. “I thought all the time it was the dark one did it, that Judd Steiner, but if it was that boy Artie, I don’t understand how he could hit a kid – he looks such a nice boy. He must be insane.”
“It’s the way they were brought up,” the husband said. “Kids nowadays, they have everything too easy.”
We started walking. “Perhaps we’re all like that,” Myra said in her low breathy voice, “the generation that refused to grow up. We’re all babies emotionally.”
And as we walked: “Oh, Sid, should I say he was crazy, that he always acted crazy?” When Dr. McNarry had been describing Artie on the stand, Myra said, she had suddenly seen it so clearly, she had remembered so many scenes all tumbling together. The time he put on dark glasses and sat on the curb at Cottage Grove and 63rd, pretending to be a blind beggar, that was infantile – she had always said he was infantile, even to her mother… “Oh, the poor kid, if they do save his life, if he’s sent to an asylum, and some day becomes cured, will they ever let him out?”
And, leaning against me, she expressed her terror again. What was it like on the stand? That Sunday, when Horn’s men had come to see her, she hardly remembered what she had said. Could they hold her to what she had said?
As we entered Wilk’s apartment, Myra was taken over at once by Ferdinand Feldscher, who disappeared with her into a side room. There were conferences everywhere. In a corner of Wilk’s library, several of our fraternity brothers were being prepared to go on the stand. In the dining-room, there were members of Judd’s birding class, and a few campus intellectuals with whom he had argued philosophy.
I began to understand this sudden break in strategy. Dr. McNarry’s testimony had proved too strong; to follow him directly with other psychiatrists was to risk playing into Horn’s hands, to cause the case to go to a jury. Instead, there would be an interlude, with character witnesses, friends, girls, who would restore the image of Judd and Artie as college boys, active, bright, even attractive to perfectly normal young girls.
A hall door opened, and I could hear an entire segment of argument about whether to call the girls at all and expose them to cross-examination. Horn would stop at nothing; he would surely confront even the girls with the homosexual thing.
Suddenly a question stood clear in my mind. If Artie was the actual murderer, and Judd was involved only because of his homosexual love, what would Judd be if released from that love? Hadn’t some such release been taking place, through Ruth? Hadn’t he shown himself on the way to normal emotions?
As if my thoughts had summoned him, Willie Weiss stopped at my side. And with his uncanny penetration, he asked, “Worried about your girl going on the stand?”
It didn’t strike me then that he could have meant Myra, since I had brought her. I needed help, and in some stumbling way I made it clear to him, telling him all I knew about Judd and Ruth. He perched on the edge of a telephone table, immensely intrigued.
“You mean you think Judd was about to come out of it?” he asked.
“That’s what I want to know,” I said. And just then, as Dr. McNarry passed through the hall, Willie caught his arm. “This is quite interesting,” he told the alienist. And looking around: “Let’s go where we can talk.”
We tried the dining room, but it was in use. Mrs. Wilk, sighing, offered us the maid’s room behind the kitchen.
So we sat on the cot in the tiny room. There was an unshaded overhead bulb, and I felt Dr. McNarry studying me.
Wasn’t I the reporter, he inquired, who was so much involved in the case? Unfortunately he hadn’t been present during my testimony.
“I’m perhaps even more involved,” I said, and told about my friend, Ruth Goldenberg.
“Your girl?”
“Well, not exactly. Not any more, I’m afraid.”
“Judd’s?” He identified her then as the girl Judd had not wanted to name during all the examinations. Yes, Judd had even talked about leaving home and marrying this girl. But – McNarry touched his fingers together – it had all seemed rather a fantasy.
Willie stated the problem that was troubling me. “Sid has been wondering if this sudden attachment to a girl could be a sign that Judd was overcoming his pathology? I think it’s an interesting question.”
Dr. McNarry studied his fingertips. “Of course it happens. Homosexuals can behave simultaneously as heterosexuals – that seems to have been true in both these boys – but they can also go over, as we sometimes see, to normal relationships. In fact, in late adolescence that’s a common pattern, isn’t it?” He gazed at me. “Judd’s nineteen.”
“Doctor,” Willie broke in, “couldn’t the murder have acted as a kind of catharsis, freeing Judd from his homosexual bond?”
An appreciative smile came over the alienist’s face. “But then the bond has apparently reasserted itself,” Dr. McNarry said.
“Because now, in jail, he has no alternative,” Willie argued. “But in the week after the crime, in fact virtually the day after, for the first time in his life he had what seems to be a true emotional reaction to a girl.”
Dr. McNarry asked, “The young lady was affected by him?”