The Interpretation of Murder

Chapter Eighteen

Clara Banwell didn't show any of the discomfort I felt under Nora's frozen gaze. Filling the air with an easy flow of words, she said her good-byes, acting for all the world as if she and I had not been caught standing several inches too close together. She extended her hand to me, kissed Nora on the cheek, and thoughtfully added that we need not see her to the door; she didn't want to delay Nora's treatment a moment longer. Seconds later, I heard the front door close behind her.

Nora stood in the same spot Mrs Banwell had occupied minutes before. I had no business noticing her looks, given the harrowing events of the night before, but I couldn't help myself. It was absurd. One could walk for miles in New York City — as I had that morning — or spend a month at the Grand Central Station, and never see a single woman of surpassing physical grace. Yet in the space of five minutes, two had stood before me in the Actons' sitting room. But what a contrast between them.

Nora wore no adornments, no jewelry, no embroidered fabric. She carried no parasol; she had no veil. She wore a simple white blouse, its sleeves ending at the elbow, tucked at her impossibly narrow waist into a sky-blue pleated skirt. The top of her shirt was gently scooped, revealing the delicate structure of her collarbone and her long, lovely neck. This neck was now almost unblemished, the bruises faded. Her blond hair was pulled back as always into a braid reaching almost to her waist. She was only, as Mrs Banwell had said, a girl. Her youth cried out from every plane and curve of her, especially in the high color of her cheeks and eyes, which radiated with youth's hope, its freshness, and, I should add, its fury.

'I hate you more than anyone else I have ever known,' she said to me.

So: I was now, more than ever, hoisted into the position of her father. As if led by some inexorable fate, she had come upon me and Clara Banwell closeted in a study just as she had come upon her father and Clara Banwell consorting in another study three years ago. The signal difference — that there was nothing between Mrs Banwell and myself — was evidently lost on her. That was unsurprising. It was not I she was staring angrily at now. It was her father, dressed in my clothes. Had I been seeking to cement the analytic transference, I could not have devised a better stratagem. Had I been hoping to bring her analysis to a climax, I could not have asked for a luckier conspiracy of events. I now had the opportunity — and the duty — to try to show Nora the erroneous transposition occurring in her mind, so that she could recognize how the rage she imagined she felt toward me was actually the misdirected anger she harbored for her father.

In other words, I was obliged to bury my own emotion. I had to conceal the least shred of feeling I had for her, no matter how genuine, no matter how overpowering. 'Then I am at a disadvantage, Miss Acton,' I replied, 'because I love you more than anyone else I have ever known.'

A perfect silence enveloped us for several heartbeats.

'You do?' she asked.

'Yes.'

'But you and Clara were — '

'We weren't. I swear it.'

'You weren't?' No."

Nora began to breathe hard. Too hard: her outer clothes were not tight, but she seemed to be wearing something underneath that was. Her respiration was entirely concentrated in the upper part of her torso. Concerned she might faint, I guided her to the front door and opened it. She needed air. Across the street was the dappled grove of Gramercy Park. Nora stepped outside. I suggested that her parents ought to know if she was going out.

'Why?' she asked me. 'We could just go to the park.'

We crossed the street and, at one of the wrought-iron gates, Nora produced from her purse a gold and black key. There was an awkward moment when I helped her through the gate: a decision had to be made about whether I would offer her my arm as we walked. I managed not to.

Therapeutically speaking, I was in a great deal of trouble. I did not fear for myself, although it was remarkable that my feelings for this girl seemed impervious to the fact that she might well be unstable or even mentally ill. If Nora had actually burned herself, there were two possibilities. Either she did it with full conscious deliberation and was lying to the world, or she did it in a dissociated state, hypnoid or somnambulistic, which was shut off from the rest of her consciousness. On the whole, I think I preferred the former alternative, but neither one was attractive.

I did not regret having confessed my feelings to her. The circumstances forced my hand. But while declaring my love for her might have been honorable, acting on it would be the opposite. The lowest-bred cur would not take advantage of a girl in her condition. I had to find a way to let her know this. I had to extricate myself from the role of lover into which I had just stumbled and try to become her physician again.

'Miss Acton,' I said.

'Won't you call me Nora, Doctor?'

'No.'

'Why?'

'Because I am still your doctor. You can't be Nora to me. You are my patient.' I wasn't sure how she would take that, but I went on. 'Tell me what happened last night. No, wait: you said in the hotel yesterday that your memory of Monday's attack had come back to you. Tell me first what you remember about that.'

'Must I?'

'Yes.'

She asked if we could sit, and we found a bench in a secluded corner. She still did not know, she said, how it all began or how she got there. That part of her memory remained missing. What she remembered was being tied up in the dark in her parents' bedroom. She was standing, bound by the wrists to something overhead. She was wearing only her slip. All the curtains and blinds were drawn.

The man was behind her. He had tied a soft piece of fabric — perhaps silk — around her throat and was pulling it so tight she couldn't breathe, much less call out. He was also hitting her with a strap or crop of some kind. It stung but it was not unbearable — more like a spanking. It was the silk around her throat that scared her; she thought he meant to kill her. But every time she was on the verge of passing out, he would relax the stranglehold ever so slightly, just enough to let her catch her breath.

He began to strike her much harder. It became so painful she thought she couldn't stand it. Then he dropped the whip, stepped behind her, so close she could feel his harsh breath on her shoulders, and put a hand on her. She didn't say where; I didn't ask. At the same time, a part of his body — 'a hard part,' she said — came into contact with her hip. The man made an ugly sound, and then he made a mistake; the tie around her throat suddenly went slack. She took a deep breath and screamed — screamed as hard and as long as she could. She must have passed out. The next thing she knew, Mrs Biggs was by her side.

Nora maintained her composure while recounting all this, her hands folded in her lap. Without changing attitude, she asked, 'Are you disgusted by me?'

'No,' I said. 'In your memory of the attack, was the man Banwell?'

'I thought so. But the mayor said — '

'The mayor said Banwell was with him Sunday night, when the other girl was murdered. If you remember Banwell being your attacker, you must say so.'

'I don't know,' said Nora plaintively. 'I think so. I don't know. He was behind me the whole time.'

'Tell me about last night,' I said.

She poured out the story of the intruder in her bedroom. This time, she said, she was certain it was Banwell. Toward the end, however, she turned away from me once more. Was there something she wasn't saying? 'I don't even own any lipstick,' she concluded earnestly. 'And that horrible thing they found in my closet. Where am I supposed to have gotten that?'

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.