rubber-stamp motives took their turns in the forefronts of our minds. Tom came back to the last; it was first again. “You saw the kid. Could you tell—?”
This intimate knowing, seeing, was the reward of our news jobs—this being on the inside, knowing more than might be printed. I said, “It can’t be proved. But Doc Kruger thought so.”
“Sonofabitch pervert,” Tom muttered like the others, and he turned to a theory that it was one of the teachers. Indeed, the entire room seemed to hum with it now. Those private-school teachers were all a bunch of perverts. Besides, look at that ransom letter. It was clearly the letter of an educated man.
We went over to the table, where one of the photographers was copying the letter, carefully laid out on the desk. The buzz of conjecture was still going on around the letter—the way people will repeat to each other a few known facts, as if by the repetition itself something new will be found. The postmark was the Hyde Park station’s, only a few blocks away. I knew the place, on 55th Street—I bought my stamps there. The address, printed in ink. Mailed last night. That meant after the boy was dead.
And there was the use of the word we. Then more than one criminal was involved.
The letter was typed, but not professionally. Here and there, a mistake had been typed over. About the way I typed, I reflected. That, too, fitted the teacher idea. Suppose it were some teacher who had been misusing the boy. And who needed money. Those teachers were paid very little, anyway. Suppose he got the idea of satisfying the two desires at one stroke—sequestering the boy, and at the same time collecting ransom. Since the boy could later expose him, he had to kill the boy. Indeed, the crime might even have started with Paulie Kessler’s threatening to tell on some teacher who had been making advances.
Tom drew me aside. “Sid, why don’t you take a look around the school?”
Just as I was leaving, there was a stir at the door as the chief of detectives appeared. Captain Nolan strode in, a huge man who looked as if he had been picked for size. His lieutenants gathered around him, and we all gathered on the periphery. Captain Nolan expressed his sympathy to Kessler briefly, and then, with an air of getting down to business, went over all the facts we had already shredded to bits.
Charles Kessler had mastered himself so well that one could not have recognized, offhand, that he was the father of the slain boy. All his energy was available; grief had not drained him. Throughout the case this impressed me. It was not that I felt he lacked emotion; it was simply that his remarkable control seemed in some obscure way linked to a pattern that lay beneath the entire crime, a pattern of feelings pushed down so that nothing could show. In him, and in the criminals too.
“I am racking my brain,” the father kept saying to Nolan. “It had to be someone who knew Paulie, or Paulie would never have gone with him. Paulie was not a boy to go with a stranger. If they tried to take him in a car he would have put up a struggle. It had to be someone he knew.”
Tom motioned me to be on my way.
I walked down the block where Paulie had walked perhaps at this same hour just the day before. The body I had seen on that zinc table had walked under these trees, past these hedges, past these fine brick walls, and somewhere along here he had been snatched from life.
I pictured the kid, idling home from his after-school ball game. A man approaches—but it must have been in a car. A boy of thirteen doesn’t respond to an offer of candy. An ice-cream soda, maybe—an offer from a teacher, driving home?
And once in the car? Perhaps a suggestion to go to the teacher’s house? No, that would risk being seen. Just to take a ride, then. Out through the park, and toward Hegewisch.
Somewhere, the perversion had taken place. I tried to imagine in my own body the impulse to do such a thing. I suppose this is a test that everyone makes. I tried to call up in myself such a sick lust, and to watch my own reaction. Could I comprehend such a perverted impulse? Only kid things in back alleys came to me. In today’s popularized Freudian knowledge, I suppose I should say that I stopped myself from homosexual imaginings because of some fear. But at that time, walking on Ellis Avenue, I felt, rather sanctimoniously, that it wasn’t in me.
As I turned the corner, there was the Mark Twain Academy, a square brick structure annexed to a former mansion. And there was the baseball lot where Paulie had played. It was partly cindered, with a screen-wire backstop at the far end. The lot was deserted.
Indeed, the street was deserted. This was ordinarily an hour when children loitered outdoors, but though the murder itself was not yet known, the disappearance of Paulie had by now filled the exclusive neighborhood with rumors. The moment school was over, mothers had appeared in cabs, or chauffeurs had appeared, or governesses had come to walk the children home. The block was now hushed, deserted.
And then the quiet was broken by a newsboy shouting, “Extra!” He came at a half run, a large boy, and he kept on yelling while I was buying my paper. “Extra, all about the kidnaping, murder!” I gulped the banner, MILLIONAIRE BOY SLAIN. And in large type the lead read, “Identified by a Daily Globe reporter today as Paulie Kessler, son of—”
I wanted to tell that newsboy it was I—I, the Daily Globe reporter. But he rushed on. Doors, windows were opening; he was being called from every house.
I read Tom Daly’s story, Tom’s and mine, then folded the paper and approached the school. If the fiend who signed himself “Harold Williams” was indeed one of the teachers, he would have been careful to attend to all his normal duties today, slipping out only to make the ransom phone call mentioned in Tom’s story.
There was still a small group of teachers in the entrance hallway, discussing what was to them, until that moment, only the mysterious disappearance of Paulie Kessler. They didn’t look like the teachers I had had as a kid. More of them were men than in a public school, and these wore tweedy jackets and pullovers.
I tried to sense the building, the teachers, for what impulse to crime might be here. Surely a lot of pampered kids, bossy kids, and teachers having to be especially careful of the way they talked to the children, teachers resentfully watching governesses and chauffeured limousines calling to fetch the brats home.
“Reporters, already?” said one of the young lady teachers, with an air half annoyed, half intrigued, as I introduced myself. “Really, we don’t know a thing. We’ve no idea where he can be.”
“He’s been found. He’s dead,” I said dramatically, and handed them the paper. I was watching their reactions, looking them over with the question in my mind, Is this one a pervert? A murderer?
When the exclamations had died down, I asked if any of them had had Paulie in class, and two men spoke up. The tall, athletic young man in the belted sports jacket had taught Paulie American history. He had that inordinately clean, scrubbed look that certain people achieve; I half imagined a British accent when he spoke. Could this be a degenerate?
Today, an intonation, a movement of a hand in a nightclub is enough to bring a laughing roar of recognition. But I looked for I don’t know what—some indication of nervousness, I suppose.
No teacher had been absent from school that day, they told me, the first young woman taking the lead in answering, a slight asperity in her tone. As for Paulie, the usual things were said, several joining in. He was alert, a likable boy. Not at the head of his class, but a real boy, intelligent and quite popular.
Paulie’s other teacher now dropped a remark of the kind newspapermen seize upon for feature touches. Why, only day before yesterday, Paulie had won a debate
