The Interpretation of Murder

If I could not refute Freud's psychology, I would devote my life to it.

Coroner Charles Hugel had not liked the peculiar noise that came from the walls of Miss Riverford's bedroom, like an immured spirit wailing for its life. The coroner could not get that sound out of his head. Moreover, something had been missing from the room; he was sure of it. Back downtown, Hugel rang for a messenger boy and sent him running up the street for Detective Littlemore.

Yet another thing Hugel did not like was the location of his own office. The coroner had not been invited to move into the resplendent new police headquarters or the new First Precinct house being built on Old Slip, both of which would be equipped with telephones. The judges had got their Parthenon not long ago. Yet he, not only the city's chief medical examiner but a magistrate by law, and far more in need of modern utilities, had been left behind in the crumbling Van den Heuvel building, with its chipping plaster, its mold, and, worst of all, its water-stained ceilings. He abhorred the sight of those stains, with their brownish- yellow jagged edges. He particularly abhorred them today; he felt the stains were larger, and he wondered if the ceiling might crack open and fall down on him. Of course a coroner had to be attached to a morgue; he understood that. But he emphatically did not understand why a new and modern morgue could not have been built into the new police headquarters.

Littlemore ambled into the coroner's office. The detective was twenty-five. Neither tall nor short Jimmy Littlemore wasn't bad-looking, but he wasn't quite good-looking either. His close-cropped hair was neither dark nor fair; if anything, it was closer to red. He had a distinctly American face, open and friendly, which, apart from a few freckles, was not particularly memorable. If you passed him in the street, you were not likely to recall him later. You might, however, remember the ready smile or the red bow tie he liked to sport below his straw boater.

The coroner ordered Littlemore to tell him what he had found out about the Riverford case, trying his best to sound commanding and peremptory. Only in the most exceptional matters was the coroner placed directly in charge of an investigation. He meant Littlemore to understand that serious consequences would follow if the detective did not produce results.

The coroner's magisterial tone evidently failed to impress the detective. Although Littlemore had never worked on a case with the coroner, he doubtless knew, as did everyone else on the force, that Hugel was disliked by the new commissioner, that his nickname was 'the ghoul' because of the eagerness with which he performed his postmortems, and that he had no real power in the department. But Littlemore, being a fellow of excellent good nature, conveyed no disrespect to the coroner.

'What do I know about the Riverford case?' he answered. 'Why, nothing at all, Mr Hugel, except that the killer is over fifty, five-foot-nine, unmarried, familiar with the sight of blood, lives below Canal Street, and visited the harbor within the last two days.'

Hugel's jaw dropped. 'How do you know all that?'

'I'm joking, Mr Hugel. I don't know Shinola about the murderer. I don't even know why they bothered sending me over. You didn't happen to lift any prints, did you, sir?'

'Fingerprints?' asked the coroner. 'Certainly not. The courts will never admit fingerprint evidence.'

'Well, it was too late by the time I got there. The whole place was already cleaned out. All the girl's things were gone.'

Hugel was incensed. He called it tampering with evidence. 'But you must have learned something about the Riverford girl,' he added.

'She was new,' said Littlemore. 'She only lived there a month or two.'

'They opened in June, Littlemore. Everyone has lived there only a month or two.'

'Oh. Well she was a real quiet type. Kept to herself.'

'Is that all? Was anyone seen with her yesterday?' asked the coroner.

'She came in around eight o'clock. Nobody with her. No guests later. Went to her apartment and never came out, as far as anybody knows.'

'Did she have any regular visitors?'

'Nope. Nobody remembers anybody ever visiting her.'

'Why was she living alone in New York City — at her age and in so large an apartment?'

'That's what I wanted to know,' said Littlemore. 'But they clammed up on me pretty good at the Balmoral, every one of them. I was serious about the harbor though, Mr Hugel. I found some clay on the floor of Miss Riverford's bedroom. Pretty fresh too. I think it came from the harbor.'

'Clay? What color clay?' asked Hugel.

'Red. Cakey, kind of.'

'That wasn't clay, Littlemore,' said the coroner, rolling his eyes, 'that was my chalk.'

The detective frowned. 'I wondered why there was a whole circle of it.'

'To keep people away from the body, you nitwit!'

'I'm just joking, Mr Hugel. It wasn't your chalk. I saw your chalk. The clay was by the fireplace. A couple of small traces. Needed my magnifying glass before I saw it. I took it home to compare with my samples; I got a whole collection. It's a lot like the red clay all over the piers at the harbor.'

Hugel took this in. He was considering whether to be impressed. 'Is the clay in the harbor unique? Could it come from somewhere else — the Central Park, for example?'

'Not the park,' said the detective. 'This is river clay, Mr Hugel. No rivers in the park.'

'What about the Hudson Valley?'

'Could be.'

'Or Fort Tryon, uptown, where Billings has just turned over so much earth?'

'You think there's clay up there?'

'I congratulate you, Littlemore, on your outstanding detective work.'

'Thanks, Mr Hugel.'

'Would you be interested in a description of the murderer, by any chance?'

'I sure would.'

'He is middle-aged, wealthy, and right-handed. His hair: graying, but formerly dark brown. His height: six foot to six-foot-one. And I believe he was acquainted with his victim — well acquainted.'

Littlemore looked amazed. 'How — ?'

'Here are three hairs I collected from the girl's person.' The coroner pointed to a small double-paned rectangle of glass on his desk, next to a microscope: sandwiched between the panes of glass were three hairs. 'They are dark but striated with gray, indicating a man of middle age. On the girl's neck were threads of white silk — most probably a man's tie, evidently used to strangle her. The silk was of the highest quality. Thus our man has money. Of his dexterity, there can be no doubt; the wounds all proceed from right to left.'

'His dexterity?'

'His right-handedness, Detective.'

'But how do you know he knew her?'

'I do not know. I suspect. Answer me this: in what posture was Miss Riverford when she was whipped?'

'I never saw her,' the detective complained. 'I don't even know cause of death.'

'Ligature strangulation, confirmed by the fracture of the hyoid bone, as I saw when I opened her chest. A lovely break, if I may say, like a perfectly split wishbone. Indeed, a lovely female chest altogether: the ribs perfectly formed, the lungs and heart, once removed, the very picture of healthy asphyxiated tissue. It was a pleasure to hold them in one's hands. But to the point: Miss Riverford was standing when she was whipped. This we know from the simple fact that the blood dripped straight down from her lacerations. Her hands were undoubtedly tied above her head by a heavy- gauge rope of some kind, almost certainly attached to the fixture in the ceiling. I saw rope threads on that fixture. Did you? No? Well, go back and look for them. Question: why would a man who has a good sturdy rope strangle his victim with a delicate silk? Inference, Mr Littlemore: he did not want to put something so coarse around the girl's neck. And why was that? Hypothesis, Mr Littlemore: because he had feelings for her. Now, as to the man's height, we are back to certainties. Miss Riverford was five-foot-five. Judging from her wounds, the whipping was administered by someone seven to eight inches above her. Thus the murderer's height was between six foot and six-foot-one.'