And we did not even have, then, the common words that today denote the homosexual; pansy and fairy and nance were unknown because the whole subject was somehow legendary.
So I stood in the circle of police and reporters, and we stared at the boy’s body as if it could reveal unspeakable last events and thereby show us the assailant. But there were to be seen only the few scratches that might have come from the concrete culvert, and the two small marks on the head. The face, around the mouth, had a yellowish discoloration; we did not yet know this was the only result of an attempt at obliteration with acid, and we speculated that this might have come from some chemical in the water where the body had lain all night.
But if it were a deed of perversion, what did the kidnaping and the ransom have to do with it? And we speculated even upon the mystery of the actual cause of death, for the blows were not enough to have killed the boy, and he did not seem to have drowned.
Then the coroner’s physician arrived, a paunchy man with dark eye pouches that gave him a constant look of irritation. In a shrill, authoritative voice, he cried, “One side, one side!” Even while Dr. Kruger was taking off his coat, Mike Prager’s huge, sequestering hulk was around him, Mike was enveloping him in whispers, and all the others were demanding, “Was it a pervert, Doc?”
In vest and shirt sleeves, the physician leaned over the body. Death had taken place some time in the evening, he said. It didn’t appear to be from drowning. Probably suffocation. Look at the throat muscles, swollen.
“Was he mistreated?” the Tribune man insisted.
The coroner’s physician turned over the body. A cop kept saying, “Imagine the kind of sonofabitch fiend.”
“It certainly looks like it to me,” the physician said.
A growl, almost of satisfaction, went through the room. Richard Lyman asked if it could be positively stated that there had been an act of degeneracy, and Dr. Kruger shrugged—hell, they could see as well as he, but as for proof, it would take an autopsy, and then maybe nothing would show up. The body had been in the water all night; anything would have been washed out.
I looked, with the others, feeling as though everything were being dirtied—the dead boy too—feeling I was truly in the midst of it now, the real bottom muck of the city, of humanity. I could see no sign of what they talked about, but was sure that the others saw.
The Tribune man pre-empted the phone, and we all hurried out to look for nearby booths. I had only the words of Dr. Kruger to phone in, but seeing Jonas Kessler leaving, I walked quickly after him, asking if I could ride along. He gave a little nod, as if to acknowledge my feat in identifying the boy. A few of the reporters stared after me as I got into the car, and again there came the little sense of triumph, within my respectful sympathy.
The uncle said, “We have to tell them he didn’t suffer, you understand? Death was instantaneous. The papers too ought to say it.”
I promised my paper would handle it that way.
For a few blocks we were silent, though I felt burningly that I was losing an opportunity. But this sense of intrusion has always remained with me; I suppose it is a defect in a newspaperman.
Again it was Kessler who spoke. Why, why should it come on Paulie?
I tried, “Did his father have any enemies?”
He shook his head. Who would do a thing like that, even to his worst enemy? And his brother was a respectable businessman, a real-estate man, practically retired. He had no enemies.
The car swept across the Midway, past the university. “Paulie was going to go there in a few years,” the uncle said.
“I go there; I’m just graduating,” I remarked, and I thought of the sensation I would make about this, with my campus crowd, with Ruth. We crossed Hyde Park Boulevard. The area of red-brick apartment houses ended, and there began the enclave of tree-shaded streets, with mansions set far back on their lawns.
It was odd that I had never penetrated this section, though it was only fifteen minutes’ walk from the university and a few minutes from where Ruth lived. Indeed, this was where some of my rich fraternity brothers came from. And it struck me, only just then, that none of them had asked me to visit their homes here. I recalled that the Straus mansion was supposed to be a palace.
It might even be that this was a hostility that entered into the case and caused me to become so persistent, so obsessed, when suspicion began to fall on Artie Straus and Judd Steiner. It may be that I was driven by envy, and the sense of not really belonging that I had experienced at the frat. For soon after being pledged and finding myself among the rich boys from Hyde Park and the North Shore, I had concluded that I had been let in simply because I was a sort of freak all-A prodigy, expected to bring glory to Alpha Beta.
The last year, I had moved out of the house on the pretext that my newspaper work demanded another kind of setup, my own phone and all. But whenever I appeared they would slap me on the back and demand how the hot-shot reporter was doing, so they could say an Alpha Bete was a big newspaperman.
The Pierce-Arrow halted in front of an imitation English brick-and-beam mansion. Two police cars were parked in the driveway. An officer stood inside the portico. He deferred to the Pierce-Arrow, but gave me a questioning look. I said, “Globe,” and the uncle said, “He’s all right, officer. He’s with me.”
We entered a large room, with heavy dark furniture. It was filled with men, more reporters and photographers, and important-looking plainclothes men. Tom Daly was in the midst of them all, his note-taking yellow copy paper in his hand, and the sight of him was both a disappointment and a relief to me. Let Tom take over; I didn’t want to make any mistakes on such a big story.
At the same time I saw the father of the boy, getting up from the high-backed, carved chair and coming toward his brother. Everyone stayed off, to give them their moment together. The two men walked to an alcove. The father’s face was like the brother’s, contained, clueless; it seemed to me to grow a shade darker as they stood there talking.
Tom came over to me, putting his hand on my shoulder. “We got a clean beat!” He looked at his watch. “We’re on the stands. Know any more?”
“His brother says he’s got no enemies.” We looked at the two men. In a peculiar way they were now our adversaries; if they wanted to keep anything of their lives private and secret, we would nevertheless have to pry and prod and find out. Impeding me was still my sense of awe before a bereaved person, and my sense of awe before a millionaire.
But even the bereaved may be suspect. Tom said, “Sure, nobody has enemies.” And we wondered what secrets of the past they might be combing. For in all of us I suppose there remains a belief in retribution. If a man is struck by misfortune, surely he must have committed some sin. And thus the victim immediately becomes the accused.
“Show me a pawnbroker that hasn’t got an enemy in the world,” Tom went on.
I was startled. “His brother said he was a real-estate man.”
“Years ago he ran a fancy hock shop,” Tom informed me.
I looked around the room. Here was this imposing house, with its beamed ceilings, in this solid millionaires’ neighborhood; thirty years of respectable business dealings had accumulated to cover the early days, but the sting of the pawnbroker stigma was still strong enough for the brother to have kept silent, to me, about the shop.
