The Interpretation Of Murder (28 page)

    'Sterilization,' replied Dana
sanguinely, dabbing a napkin to his mouth. 'The meanest farmer knows not to let
his worst stock breed. Men are no more created equal than castle. If cattle
were allowed to breed freely, we should have very poor meat indeed. Every
immigrant to this country without means should be sterilized.'

    'Not involuntarily, Charles, surely?'
asked Mrs Hyslop.

    'No one compels them to come here,
Alva,' he replied. 'No one compels them to stay. How then can it be called
involuntary? If they wish to reproduce, let them leave. What is involuntary is
our being required to bear the charge of their unfit offspring, who end up as
beggars and thieves. I make an exception, of course, for those who can pass an
intelligence test. Splendid soup, Jelliffe, a true turtle, isn't it? Oh, I
know, you will all say I am cruel and heartless. But I am only taking away
their fertility. Dr Freud would take away something far more important.'

    'What is that?' asked Clara.

    'Their morality,' answered Dana.
'What sort of world would it be, Dr Freud, if your views became general? I can
almost picture it. The lower orders come to scorn "civilized
morality." Gratification becomes god. All join in rejecting discipline and
self-denial, without which life has no dignity. The mob will run riot; why
should they not? And this mob, what will they want when the rules of
civilization are lifted? Do you think they will want only sex? They will want
new rules. They will want to obey some new madman. They will want blood - your
blood, probably, Dr Freud, if history is any guide. They will want to prove
themselves superior, as the lowest always do. And they will kill to prove it. I
picture bloodletting, great bloodletting, on a scale never seen before. You
would pipe away civilized morality - the only thing that keeps man's brutality
in check. What do you offer in exchange, Dr Freud? What will you put in its place?'

    'Only the truth,' said Freud.

    'The truth of Oedipus?' said Dana.

    'Among others,' said Freud.

    'A great deal of good it did him.'

    A candle flickered at Nora Acton's
bedside. The lamplight from Gramercy Park played palely at her curtains. The
illumination was insufficient even to give a silhouette to the man whose
presence Nora felt, rather than saw, inside her room. She wanted to cry out,
but her mind would not operate on her body. It had somehow broken free, her
mind, and was wandering off on its own. It or she seemed to float up from her
own bed, rising toward the ceiling, leaving her small nightgowned body on the
bed below.

    Now she saw her assailant distinctly,
but from above. Looking down on herself, she saw him remove the handkerchief
from her face. She saw him dab a woman's red lipstick onto her sleeping,
yielding mouth. Why would he put color on her lips? She liked how it looked;
she had always wondered. What would the man do next? From above, Nora watched
him light a cigarette in the flame of her bedside candle, place a knee against
her supine form, and extinguish the glowing cigarette directly on her skin,
down there, only an inch or two from her most private part.

    Her body flinched against the knee
that held her down. She saw it from above; she saw herself flinch. It was as if
she were in pain. But she wasn't, was she? Observing everything from above, she
felt nothing at all. And if she, watching herself, was not in pain, then there
was no pain - there was no one else to feel it - was there?

    Thursday morning began in uproar at
the Acton house. Nora woke at daybreak, staggered out of bed, threw open her
door, and fell headlong over Mr Biggs, who was asleep in his chair just outside
her bedroom. The news was spread, the alarm sounded: Miss Acton had been
attacked in the night.

    The two patrolmen posted outside
bumbled up the stairs, then down, storming about, accomplishing little. Dr
Higginson was summoned once more. The well- intentioned old doctor, visibly
distressed at Nora's having been victimized yet again and embarrassed by the
location of her burn, gave the girl a soothing ointment she might apply as
needed. He thereupon took his leave, shaking his head, assuring the family that
she had suffered no other hurt. More policemen arrived on the scene. Detective
Littlemore, who had fallen asleep at his desk the night before, got there at
eight.

    The detective found Nora and her
distraught parents in the girl's bedroom. Uniformed officers were examining the
carpeted floor and windows. Littlemore handed his dusting equipment to one of
the men and instructed him to see if there were any serviceable fingerprints on
the doorknob, bedposts, or windowsill. Nora was perched on a corner of her bed,
the unmoving center of the whirlwind, still in her nightgown, hair disheveled,
her eyes dazed and uncomprehending. Her statement was taken again and again.

    It was George Banwell, she told them
every time. It was George Banwell with a cigarette and a knife in the
nighttime. Wasn't anyone going to arrest George Banwell? That question provoked
anxious protests from Mr and Mrs Acton. It couldn't have been George, they
said; it couldn't possibly have been. How could Nora be absolutely sure in the
middle of the night?

    Littlemore had a problem. He wished
he had something else on Banwell other than the girl's evidence. After all,
Miss Acton's memory was not exactly rock solid. Worse, even she admitted she
couldn't really see the man in her room last night; it had been too dark. What
she said, and Littlemore wished she hadn't put it this way, was that she 'could
just tell' it was Banwell. If Littlemore had Banwell arrested, the mayor would
not be happy. His Honor wouldn't like it if Banwell were so much as picked up-
for questioning.

    All in all, the detective figured
he'd better wait for the mayor's orders. 'If you wouldn't mind, Miss Acton,' he
said, 'could I ask you a question?'

    'Go ahead,' she said.

    'Do you know a William Leon?'

    'I'm sorry?'

    'William Leon,' said Littlemore.
'Chinaman. Also known as Leon Ling.'

    'I know no Chinamen, Detective.'

    'Maybe this will jog your memory,
miss,' said the detective. From his vest, he withdrew a photograph and handed
it to the girl. It was the picture he had removed from Leon's apartment,
showing the Chinese man with two young women. One of them was Nora Acton.

    'Where did you get this?' the girl
asked.

    'If you could just tell me who he is,
miss,' said Littlemore. 'It's real important. He may be dangerous.'

    'I don't know. I never knew. He
insisted on having his picture taken with Clara and me.'

    'Clara?'

    'Clara Banwell,' said Nora. 'That's
her there, next to him. He was one of Elsie Sigel's Chinamen.'

    Both these names were acutely
interesting to Detective Littlemore. Unless William Leon had a penchant for
Elsies, he had just identified not only the other woman in the photograph, but
the author of the letters found in the trunk - and, quite possibly, the dead
girl found along with them.

    'Elsie Sigel,' Littlemore repeated.'
Could you tell me about her, miss? A Jewish girl?'

    'Good heavens, no,' said Nora. 'Elsie
did missionary work. You must have heard of the Sigels. Her grandfather was quite
famous. There is a statue of him in Riverside Park.'

    Littlemore whistled inwardly. General
Franz Sigel was indeed famous, a Civil War hero who became a popular New York
politician. At his funeral in 1902, more than ten thousand New Yorkers came to
pay their respects to the old man, laid out in full-dress uniform. The
granddaughters of Civil War generals were not supposed to write amorous letters
to the managers of Chinatown restaurants. They were not supposed to write
letters to Chinamen at all. He asked how Miss Sigel was connected to William
Leon.

    Nora told him what little she knew.
Last spring, she and Clara had volunteered their services to one of Mr Riis's
charitable associations. They had visited tenement families all over the Lower
East Side, offering what help they could. One Sunday, in Chinatown, they had
come across Elsie Sigel teaching a Bible class. A pupil of hers had a camera.
Nora remembered him well, because he was so different from the others - much
better dressed and better spoken. Nora had never learned his name, but Elsie
seemed to know him well. It was because of his apparent friendship with Elsie
that Clara and she felt they could not refuse his persistent requests for a
photograph.

    'Do you know where Miss Sigel lives,
Miss Acton?' asked Littlemore.

    'No, but I doubt you would find her
at home anyway, Detective,' said Nora. 'Elsie ran away with a young man in
July. To Washington, everyone says.'

    Littlemore nodded. He thanked Nora;
then he asked Mr Acton if there was a telephone he could use. When he got
through to headquarters, he left instructions to track down the parents of one
Elsie Sigel, granddaughter of General Franz Sigel. If the Sigels confirmed that
they had not seen their daughter since July, they were to be taken down to the
morgue.

    Returning to Nora's bedroom,
Littlemore found only Nora and Mrs Biggs within. The last policeman was just
leaving the room: he told Littlemore that he hadn't found any prints at all on
the windows or bedposts. As for the doorknobs, too many people had been in and
out. Mrs Biggs was attempting to restore order to the mess the patrolmen had
left; Nora remained exactly as she was when he had left. Littlemore studied the
bedroom. 'Miss Acton,' he said, 'how do you think the man got in here last
night?'

    'Well, he must have - why, I don't
know.'

    It was, Littlemore reflected,
certainly a puzzle. There were only two doors to the Acton house, the front and
the back. These had been manned all night long by two sturdy patrolmen, who
swore that no one had passed through either one. To be sure, old Biggs had
fallen asleep at the switch. This was acknowledged by all parties. But Biggs
had smartly positioned his chair right up against the girl's bedroom door; that
was why she had fallen over him in the morning. It would have been very
difficult for anybody to get past Biggs without disturbing him.

    Could the intruder have climbed in
through a window? Nora's bedroom was on the second floor. There was no obvious
way the man could have scaled the house, and, because her bedroom faced the
park, anyone attempting such a feat would have been in plain view of the
officer stationed out front. Could he have lowered himself from the roof? It
was conceivable. The roof was accessible from the adjacent buildings. But the
neighbors swore that
their
houses had not been broken into last night.
Also, it seemed to Littlemore that a large man would have had a pretty hard
time squeezing through one of Nora's windows.

    It was during Detective Littlemore's
inspection of these windows - which showed no sign of human ingress or egress -
that cracks began to appear in Nora's story. The first was the discovery, by
Mrs Biggs, of an extinguished cigarette buried in Nora's wastepaper basket. The
cigarette had lipstick on it. Mrs Biggs seemed very surprised. The detective
was too.

    'This yours, miss?' he asked.

    'Of course not,' said Nora. 'I don't
smoke. I don't even own any lipstick.'

    'What's that on your lips now?' asked
Littlemore.

    Nora clapped her hands to her mouth.
Only then did she remember seeing Banwell put lipstick on her. Somehow she had
forgotten this peculiar fact before. The whole episode was so blurred, so
strangely cloudy in her mind. She told the detective what Banwell had done. She
said he must have put lipstick on the cigarette too and thrown it into the
basket before he left. She did not mention the most peculiar feature of her
memory: that she saw Banwell from above rather than below. But she did insist
that she owned no makeup at all.

    'Mind if I have a look around your
room, Miss Acton?' asked Littlemore.

    'Your men have been examining my room
for the last hour,' she answered.

    'Would you mind, miss?'

    'All right.'

    None of the patrolmen thus far had
searched Nora's own belongings. Littlemore did so now. In the lowest drawer of
her vanity, he found several cosmetic items, including face powder, a vial of
perfume, and a lipstick. There was also a pack of cigarettes.

    'Those aren't mine,' said Nora. 'I
don't know where they came from.'

    Littlemore brought his officers back
to the room to conduct a more thorough examination. A few minutes later, on an
upper shelf of the girl's closet, hidden under a pile of winter sweaters, a
policeman found something unexpected. It was a short, bent-handled whip.
Littlemore was unfamiliar with medieval practices of scourging, but even he
could see that this particular kind of whip would allow a flogging in
hard-to-reach places - such as the back of the flogger.

    Good thing we didn't arrest Banwell,
thought Jimmy Littlemore.

    The detective didn't know what to
think, however, when another officer presented him with a discovery from the
backyard. The patrolman had climbed the tree to see if it was possible to get
from there to the roof. It wasn't possible, but on his way down, the patrolman
saw what he thought was a coin: a small, shiny metal circle, glinting deep in a
notch of the tree trunk about a foot off the ground. He handed the item to
Littlemore: a man's round gold tiepin, monogrammed, with a thread of white silk
clinging to its catch. The initials on that tiepin were
GB.