Read The Interpretation Of Murder Online
Authors: Jed Rubenfeld
The Interpretation Of Murder (32 page)
I made the obvious point: 'You are
wearing makeup now.' There was the lightest hint of gloss on her lips, and the
faintest blush on her cheeks.
'But this is Clara's!' she cried.
'She put it on me. She said it would suit me.'
We sat in silence for a time.
At last, she spoke. 'You don't
believe a word I've said.'
'I don't believe you would lie to
me.'
'But I would,' she answered. 'I
have.'
'When?'
'When I said I hated you,' she
replied, after a long pause.
'Tell me what you're keeping back.'
'What do you mean?' she asked.
'There is something else about last
night - something that makes you doubt yourself.'
'How do you know?' she demanded.
'Just tell me.'
Reluctantly, she confessed that there
was one inexplicable piece of the episode. Her vantage point, as she saw the
awful event unfold, was not from her own eye level but from a place above both
herself and the intruder. She actually saw herself lying on the bed as if she
were an observer of the scene, not the victim. 'How is that possible, Doctor?'
she cried softly. 'It's not possible, is it?'
I wanted to console her, but what I
had to say was not likely to be comforting. 'What you are describing is how we
see things sometimes in dreams.'
'But if I dreamt it, how did I get
burned?' she whispered. 'I didn't burn myself, did I? Did I?'
I could not answer. I was picturing
an even worse scenario. Could she also have inflicted those terrible wounds -
the first set of wounds - on herself? I tried to imagine her drawing a knife or
razor along her own soft skin, making it bleed. It was impossible for me to
believe.
From far downtown, a roar of human
voices suddenly erupted in a great distant cheer. Nora asked what it could be.
I said it was probably the strikers. A march had been promised by union leaders
in the aftermath of some labor trouble downtown yesterday. A notorious
firebrand called Gompers vowed a strike that would bring the city's industry to
a halt.
'They have every right to strike,'
said Nora, clearly eager to be distracted. 'The capitalists should be ashamed
of themselves, employing those people without paying them enough to feed their
families. Have you seen the homes in which they live?'
She described to me how, all last
spring, Clara Banwell and she had visited families in the tenements of the
Lower East Side. It had been Clara's idea. That was how, said Nora, she had met
Elsie Sigel with the Chinaman whom Detective Littlemore had been asking about.
'Elsie Sigel?' I repeated. Aunt Mamie
had mentioned Miss Sigel to me at her gala. 'Who has run off to Washington?'
'Yes,' said Nora. 'I thought her very
foolish to be doing missionary work when people are dying for want of food and
shelter. And Elsie was working only with men, when it is the women and children
who are really suffering.' Clara, Nora explained to me, had made a special
point of calling on those families where the men had run off or been killed in
work accidents. Clara and Nora got to know many such families on their visits,
spending hours in their homes. Nora would care for the little ones while Clara
befriended the women and the more grown-up children. They started visiting
these families once a week, bringing them food and necessaries. Twice they had
taken babies to the hospital, saving them from serious disease or even death.
Once, Nora told me more darkly, a girl had gone missing; Clara and she visited
every police station and hospital downtown, finally finding the girl in the
morgue. The medical examiner said the girl had been raped. The girl's mother
had no one to comfort or support her; Clara did both. Nora had seen unthinkable
squalor that summer, but also - or so I guessed - a warmth of familial love
previously unknown to her.
When she concluded, Nora and I sat
looking at each other. Without warning, she said, 'Would you kiss me if I asked
you?'
'Don't ask me, Miss Acton,' I said.
She took my hand and drew it toward
her, touching the back of my fingers to her cheek.
'No,'
I said sharply. She let
go at once. Everything was my fault. I had given her every reason to believe
she could take the liberty she had just taken. Now I had pulled the rug out
from under her. 'You must believe me,' I told her. 'There is nothing I would
like more. But I can't. I would be taking advantage of you.'
'I want you to take advantage of me,'
she said.
'No.'
'Because I am seventeen?'
'Because you are my patient. Listen
to me. The feelings you may think you have for me - you must not believe in
them. They aren't real. They are an artifact of your analysis. It happens to
every single patient who is psychoanalyzed.'
She looked at me as if I must be
joking. 'You think your stupid questions have made me
favor
you?'
'Think of it. One moment you feel
indifference toward me. Then rage. Then jealousy. Then - something else. But
it's not me. It's nothing I have done. It's nothing I am. How could it be? You
don't know me. You don't know the first thing about me. All these feelings come
from elsewhere in your life. They surface because of these stupid questions I
ask you. But they belong elsewhere. They are feelings you have for someone
else, not me.'
'You think I am in love with someone
else? Who? Not George Banwell?'
'You might have been.'
'Never.' She made a genuinely
disgusted face. 'I detest him.'
I took the plunge. I hated taking it
- because I expected she would henceforth regard me with revulsion - and my
timing was all wrong, but it was still my obligation. 'Dr Freud has a theory,
Miss Acton. It may apply to you.'
'What theory?' She was growing
increasingly vexed.
'I warn you, it is distasteful in the
extreme. He believes that all of us, from a very early age, harbor - that we
secretly wish - well, in your case, he believes that when you saw Mrs Banwell
with your father, when you saw her kneeling before your father and - a -
engaging with him in -'
'You don't have to say it,' she broke
in.
'He believes you felt jealous.'
She stared at me blankly.
I was having trouble making myself
clear. 'Directly, physically jealous. What I mean is, Dr Freud believes that
when you saw what Mrs Banwell was doing to your father, you wished you were the
one who - that you had fantasies of being the one who -'
'Stop!' she cried out. She put her
hands over her ears.
'I'm sorry.'
'How can he know that?' She was
aghast. Her hands now covered her mouth.
I registered this reaction. I heard
her words. But I tried to believe I hadn't. I wanted to say,
I must be
hearing things; I actually thought for a moment you asked how Freud knew.
'I never told anyone that,' she
whispered, turning scarlet all over. 'Not anyone. How could he possibly know?'
I could only stare at her blankly, as
she had stared at me a moment before.
'Oh, I am
vile!
' she cried.
She ran away, back toward her house.
After leaving Child's, Littlemore
hoofed it over to the Forty-seventh Street police station, to see if either Chong
Sing or William Leon had been collared. Both men had indeed been arrested - a
hundred times, Captain Post told the detective irritably. Within hours of the
perpetrators' descriptions going out, dozens of calls had come in, from all
over the city and even from Jersey, from people claiming to have spotted Chong.
With Leon it was even worse. Every Chinaman in a suit and tie was William Leon.
'Jack Reardon's been running around
town all day like his head was chopped off,' said Captain Post, referring to
the officer who, having been present with Littlemore when Miss Sigel's body was
discovered, was the only man Post had who had actually seen the elusive Chong
Sing. Reardon had been dispatched to police stations all over town, wherever
another 'Mr Chong' had been picked up, and everywhere he went, Reardon
discovered another false arrest. 'It's no good. We locked up half of Chinatown,
and we still didn't get 'em. I had to tell the boys to lay off any more
arrests. Here. You want to run any of these down?'
Post threw Littlemore a record of
reported but not yet acted-upon Chong Sing and William Leon sightings. The
detective perused the list, running his finger down the handwritten notes. He
stopped halfway down the page, where a one-line description caught his eye. It
read:
Canal at River. Chinaman seen working docks. Said to meet description
of suspect Chong Sing.
'Got a car?' asked Littlemore. 'I
want to have a look at this one.'
'Why?'
'Because there's red clay at those
docks,' answered the detective.
Littlemore drove Captain Post's one
and only police car downtown, accompanied by a uniformed man. They turned on
Canal Street and followed it all the way to the eastern edge of the city, where
the immense, newly erected Manhattan Bridge rose up over the East River.
Littlemore stopped at the entry to the construction site and cast his eyes over
the laborers.
'There he is,' said the detective,
pointing. 'That's him.'
It would have been hard to miss Chong
Sing: a lone, conspicuous Chinese among a throng of white and black workingmen.
He was wheeling a barrow filled with cinder blocks.
'Walk right at him,' Littlemore
instructed the officer. 'If he runs, I'll take him.'
Chong Sing didn't run. At the sight
of a police officer, he merely put his head down and kept pushing his
wheelbarrow. When the officer put the arm on him, Chong submitted without a
fight. Other workmen stopped and watched the uneventful arrest unfold, but no
one interfered. By the time the officer returned to the police car where
Detective Littlemore was waiting, the men were back at work as if nothing had
happened.
'Why'd you run away yesterday, Mr
Chong?'
'I no run,' said Chong. 'I go to
work. See? I go to work.'
'I'm going to have to charge you as
an accessory to murder. You understand what that means? You could hang.'
Littlemore made a gesture conveying the meaning of the last word he had spoken.
'I don't know anything,' the Chinese
man pleaded. 'Leon go away. Then smell come from Leon room. That's all.'
'Sure,' said the detective.
Littlemore had the officer take Chong Sing to the Tombs. The detective stayed
behind. He wanted a closer look at the docks. The puzzle pieces were
reconfiguring themselves in the detective's mind - and beginning to fit
together. Littlemore knew he was going to find clay at the foot of the
Manhattan Bridge, and he had a hunch that George Banwell might have stepped in
that clay.
Everyone knew Banwell was building
the Manhattan Bridge towers. When Mayor McClellan awarded the contract to
Banwell's American Steel Company, the Hearst papers had cried corruption,
condemning the mayor for favoring an old friend and gleefully predicting
delays, breakdowns, and overcharges. In fact, Banwell got those towers up not
only within budget but in record time. He had personally supervised the
construction - which gave Littlemore his idea.
Littlemore walked toward the river,
blending into the mass of men. He could mix with pretty much anyone, if he
wanted. Littlemore was good at seeming easy because he
was
easy,
especially when things were falling into place. Chong Sing had two jobs working
for Mr George Banwell. Wasn't that interesting?
The detective arrived at the crowded
central pier just in time for a change of shifts. Hundreds of dirty, booted men
were trudging off the pier, while a long line of others waited to take the
elevator down to the caisson. The din of the turbines, a constant mechanical
throbbing, filled the air with a furious rhythm.
If you had asked Littlemore how he
knew there was some trouble, some unhappiness, in the air as well, he could not
have told you. Engaging a few of the men in conversation, he quickly learned of
Seamus Malley's bad end. Poor Malley was, the men said, yet another victim of
caisson disease. When they opened the elevator door a couple of mornings ago,
they found him lying dead, dried blood trailing from his ears and mouth.
The men complained bitterly of the
caisson, which they called 'the box' or 'the coffin.' Some thought it cursed.
Almost all had ailments they ascribed to it. Most said they were glad their
work was almost finished, but the older heads clucked and replied that they'd
all be missing their sandhog days soon enough -
sandhog
being the word
for a caisson worker - when their pay stopped coming in. What pay? one of the
boys replied. Was three dollars for twelve hours of work supposed to be called
pay? 'Look at Malley,' this one said. 'He couldn't even afford a roof over his
head with our "pay." That's why he's dead. They killed him. They're
killing all of us.' But another replied that Malley had a roof, all right; he
just also had a wife -
that
was why he was spending nights down in the
box.
Littlemore, observing tracks of red
clay all over the pier, knelt to tie his shoes and surreptitiously collected
samples. He inquired if Mr Banwell ever came down to the pier. The answer was
yes. In fact, he was told, Mr Banwell took at least one trip down to the coffin
every day to inspect the work. Sometimes even His Honor, the mayor himself,
would go with him.
The detective asked what Banwell was
like to work for. Hell, was the answer. The men agreed that Banwell didn't care
how many of them died in the caisson, if the job got done faster that way.
Yesterday was the first time they could remember when Banwell had ever shown
any concern for their lives.
'How's that?' asked Littlemore.
'He told us to forget about Window
Five.'
The 'windows,' the men told
Littlemore, were the caisson's debris chutes. Each one had a number, and Window
Five had jammed up earlier this week. Normally the boss - Banwell - would have
immediately ordered them to clear the blockage, a job the sandhogs hated,
because it required a difficult, dangerous maneuver with at least one man
inside the window when it was inundated with water. But yesterday, for the
first time, Banwell told them not to bother. One man suggested the boss might
be getting soft. The others denied it; they said Banwell didn't see any point
taking chances with the bridge so near completion.
Littlemore chewed this information
over. Then he went to the elevator.
The elevator man - a wrinkly codger
with not a hair on his head - was perched on a wooden stool inside the car. The
detective asked him who locked the elevator door two nights ago, the night
Malley died.
'I did,' said the old man, with a
proprietary air.
'Was the car up here at the pier when
you locked up that night, or was it down below?'
'Up here, o'course. You ain't too
quick, are you, young fella? How can my elevator be down there if I'm up here?'
The question was a good one. The
elevator was manually operated. Only a man inside the car could take her up or
bring her down. Hence when the elevator man completed his last run of the
night, the car was necessarily up at the pier. But if the elevator man had
asked Littlemore a good question, the detective replied with a better one. 'So
how did he get up here?'
'What?'
'The dead guy,' said Littlemore.
'Malley. He stayed below Tuesday night, when everybody else came up?'
'That's right.' The old man shook his
head. 'Blamed fool. Not the first time, neither. I told him he oughtn'ta. I
told him.'
'And they found him right here in
your car, at the pier, the next morning?'
'That's right. Dead as a dead fish.
You can still see his blood. I been trying to clean it off two whole days now,
and I can't. Washed it with soap, washed it with soda. See it?'
'So how did he get up here?' asked
the detective again.