The Interpretation Of Murder (35 page)

    Clara Banwell was cooling herself in
a bath when she heard the front door slam shut. It was a Turkish bath, with
blue inlaid Mudejar tiles from Andalusia, installed in the Banwells' apartment
at Clara's special request. As her husband's voice bellowed her name from the
entry hall, she wrapped herself hastily in two white bath towels, one for her
torso and another around her hair.

    Still dripping, she found her husband
in their forty-five- foot living room, a tumbler in his hands, gazing out at
the Hudson River. He was pouring himself a bourbon over ice. 'Come here,' said
Banwell from across the room, without turning around. 'You saw her?'

    'Yes.' Clara remained where she was.

    'And?'

    'The police believe she did the
injury to herself. They believe she is either mad or pursuing a vendetta
against you.'

    'What did you tell them?' he asked.

    'That you were here at home all
night.'

    Banwell grunted. 'What does she say?'

    'Nora's very fragile, George. I think
-'

    The sound of a whiskey bottle banging
down on a glass- topped table interrupted her. The table didn't crack, but
alcohol splashed from the bottle's mouth. George Banwell turned to face his
wife. 'Come here,' he said again.

    'I don't want to.'

    'Come here.'

    She obeyed. When she was close to
him, he glanced down.

    'No,' she said.

    'Yes.'

    She undid her husband's belt. While
she extracted the belt from the loops of his trousers, he poured himself
another drink. She handed him the black leather strop. Then she lifted up her
hands, palms together. Banwell corded the belt around her wrists, threaded its
buckle, pulled it tight. She winced.

    He jerked her to him and tried to
kiss her lips. She allowed him to kiss only the corners of her mouth, turning
her cheek first one way, then the other. He buried his head in her bare neck;
she took in a mouthful of air. 'No,' she said.

    He forced her to her knees. Though
bound by the belt, she could move her hands well enough to unfasten her
husband's trousers. He tore the white towel from her body.

    Sometime later, George Banwell sat on
the davenport, fully dressed, sipping bourbon, while Clara, naked, knelt on the
floor, her back to her husband.

    'Tell me what she said,' he
instructed her, loosening his tie.

    'George' - Clara turned and looked up
at him - 'couldn't it be over now? She is only a little girl. How can she hurt
you any more?'

    She sensed immediately that her words
had fueled, rather than dampened, her husband's latent anger. He rose to his
feet, buttoning himself. 'Only a little girl,' he repeated.

    The Frenchman must have had a soft
spot for Detective Littlemore. He kissed him on both cheeks.

    'I got to play dead more often,' said
Littlemore. 'This is the nicest you've ever been to me, Louie.'

    Riviere pressed a large folder into
the detective's arms. 'It came out perfectly,' he said. 'I have surprised even
myself, actually. I did not expect such detail in an enlargement. Very
unusual.' With this, the Frenchman withdrew, calling out that it was
au
revoir,
not
adieu.

    I was now alone with the detective.
'You - played dead?' I asked him.

    'It was just a joke. When I came to,
I was in an ambulance, and I got the idea it might be funny.'

    I reflected. 'Was it?'

    Littlemore looked around. 'Pretty
funny,' he said. 'Say, what are
you
doing here?'

    I told the detective I had made a
discovery potentially important to Miss Acton's case. Suddenly, however, I
found I wasn't sure how to put things. Nora had experienced a form of
bilocation - the phenomenon of seeming to be in two places at the same time.
From my Harvard days, I dimly remembered reading about bilocation in connection
with some of the early experiments with the new anaesthetics that had so
altered surgical medicine. My research confirmed it: I was now convinced that
Nora had been given chloroform. By morning, there would have been no odor and
no significant after-effects.

    My problem was that Nora had
confessed to me that she hadn't told Detective Littlemore anything about the
strange way in which she experienced the event. She had been afraid he wouldn't
believe her. I decided to be direct: 'There was something Miss Acton didn't
tell you about last night's assault. She saw it - that is, she experienced her
own participation in it and her own observation of it - as if she were external
to it.' Hearing my own lucid words, I realized I had chosen about the least
accessible, least convincing explanation possible. The look on the detective's
face did nothing to change that impression. I added, 'As if she were floating
above her own bed.'

    'Floating above her own bed?'
Littlemore repeated.

    'That's right.'

    'Chloroform!' he said.

    I was dumbfounded. 'How on earth did
you know that?'

    'H. G.Wells. He's my favorite. He's
got this story where that exact same thing happens to a guy getting operated on
after they put him under with chloroform.'

    'I've just wasted an afternoon in the
library.'

    'No, you didn't,' said the detective.
'You can back it up - scientifically, I mean? The chloroform-floating thing?'

    'Yes. Why?'

    'Listen, file this for one second,
okay? I got to check something while we're here. Can you come with me?'
Littlemore set off along the corridor and down the stairs, limping badly. Over
his shoulder, he explained. 'Hugel's got some real good microscopes down here.'

    In the basement, we came to a small
forensic laboratory, with four marble slab tables and medical equipment of
excellent quality. From his pockets, the detective took out three small
envelopes, each containing bits of a ruddy earth or clay. One of the samples,
he explained to me, came from Elizabeth Riverford's apartment, another from the
basement of the Balmoral, and the third from the Manhattan Bridge - on a pier
belonging to George Banwell. These three samples he pressed onto separate glass
slides, which he then placed under separate microscopes. He moved from one to
the other rapidly. 'They match,' he said, 'all three of them. I knew it.'

    Then he opened up Riviere's folder.
The photograph, I could now see, showed a girl's neck marked with a dark,
grainy round spot. It was, if I understood the detective correctly, which I may
not have done, a reversed image of the picture of an imprint they had found on
the neck of the murdered Miss Riverford. Littlemore examined this photograph
carefully, comparing it to a man's gold tiepin that he withdrew from another
pocket. He showed the pin to me - it bore the monogram
GB
- and invited
me to compare the pin and the photograph.

    I did so. With the tiepin in hand, I
could see the outline of an unmistakably similar ligature insignia in the dark
round spot in the photograph. 'They're alike,' I said.

    'Yup,' said Littlemore, 'almost
identical. Only problem is, according to Riviere, they shouldn't be alike. They
should be opposites. I don't get that. Know where we found that tiepin? In the
Actons' backyard. To me, that pin proves Banwell was at the Actons', climbing a
tree, maybe, to get in Miss Acton's window.' He sat down on a chair, his right
leg evidently too sore for him to stand on. 'You still think it was Banwell,
right, Doc?'

    'I do.'

    'You got to come with me to the
mayor's office,' said the detective.

    Smith Ely Jelliffe, lodged
comfortably in a front-row seat at the Hippodrome, the world's largest indoor theater,
wept quietly. So did most of his fellow playgoers. The spectacle so moving to
them was the solemn march of the diving girls, sixty-four in all, into the
seventeen-foot-deep lake that was part of the Hippodrome's gigantic stage. (The
water in the lake was real; underwater air receptacles and subterranean
corridors provided an escape route backstage.) Who could keep tears away as the
lovely, dignified, bathing- suited girls disappeared into the rippling water,
never to see Earth again, doomed to perform forever for the Martian king in his
circus so far away from home?

    Jelliffe's bereavement was alleviated
by the knowledge that he would be seeing two of the girls again - and shortly.
A half hour later, with a high-heeled diving girl on each arm, Jelliffe strode
with considerable satisfaction into the colonnaded dining room of Murray's
Roman Gardens on Forty- second Street. Behind Jelliffe trailed two long pink
boas, one from each of his girls. Before him stood the Gardens' massive, leafy
plaster columns, rising up to the ceiling a hundred feet overhead, where
electric stars twinkled and a gibbous moon crossed the firmament at an
unnaturally advanced clip. A triple-decker Pompeiian fountain discoursed in the
center of the restaurant, while nude maidenly figures frolicked in the
trompe-l'oeil distance on every wall.

    By weight, Jelliffe was worth both
his diving girls put together. He believed this middle-aged girth made him a
most impressive man - to the female sex, that is. He took special pleasure in
his diving girls because he was anxious to make an impression tonight. He was
dining with the Triumvirate. They had never asked him to dinner before. The
closest he had come to their inner circle was the occasional luncheon at their
club. But his stock had plainly risen with his connections to the new
psychotherapeutics.

    Jelliffe did not need money. What he
wanted was renown, esteem, standing, prestige - all of which the Triumvirate
could give him. It was they, for example, who directed Harry Thaw's lawyers to
him, giving Jelliffe his first taste of fame. The grandest day of his life was
the day his portrait appeared in the Sunday papers, naming him 'one of the most
distinguished alienists in the state.'

    The Triumvirate had also taken a
surprisingly close interest in his publishing house. They were obviously
progressive men. At first they had barred him from accepting any articles
mentioning psychoanalysis, but their attitude had changed. Roughly a year ago,
they instructed Jelliffe to send them the abstracts of all submissions touching
on Freud, notifying him afterward of the ones they sanctioned. It was the
Triumvirate who advised him to publish Jung. It was they who encouraged him to
take on Brill's translation of Freud's book when it looked like Morton Prince
in Boston might publish it instead. Indeed, they had hired Jelliffe an editor
to help smooth Brill's translation.

    Jelliffe had considered carefully the
number of girls to bring to dinner. Girls were his specialty. He had cemented
more than a few social and professional connections with such mortar. He knew
all the best gentlemen's establishments. When asked, he invariably recommended
the Players Club in Gramercy Park. With the Triumvirate, Jelliffe had never
been asked. When, however, they invited him to join them at the Roman Gardens,
Jelliffe sensed the occasion was propitious. As every man-about-town knew,
upstairs at the Gardens were twenty-four luxuriously appointed bachelor's
apartments, each of which contained a double-sized bed, separate bath, and a
bottle of champagne on ice. At first, Jelliffe had pictured four girls and four
rooms, but on reflection this seemed insufficiently collegial. So he had
secured two of each: the business of taking turns, he felt, would add sauce to
the geese.

    Jelliffe did make an impression, but
not the one he intended. Shown to the private alcove where the Triumvirate had
their table, the bon vivant and his ladies met with an
unequivocal froideur
from the three gentlemen seated there. None of them even stood. Jelliffe,
failing to detect the cause, manfully greeted his hosts, called out to the ma
î
tre d' for
extra chairs, and announced that two bachelor's suites awaited them all after
dinner. With a wave of an elegant hand, Dr Charles Dana belayed the order for
extra chairs. Jelliffe finally grasped the nettle and mumbled to his girls that
they had better wait for him upstairs.

    Shortly thereafter, the Triumvirate
procured from Jelliffe the information that Abraham Brill had, without warning,
indefinitely postponed publication of Freud's book. Pity, said Dana. And what
of Dr Jung's lectures at Fordham? Jelliffe reported that his plans for the
Fordham lectures were proceeding apace - and that the
New York Times
had
contacted him to arrange an interview with Jung.

    Dana turned to the portly fellow with
the muttonchop sideburns. 'Starr, weren't you interviewed by the
Times
as well?'

    Draining an oyster into his mouth,
Starr said he bloody well had been interviewed and that he had been blunt about
it too. The conversation then turned to Harry Thaw, concerning whom Jelliffe
was advised in no uncertain terms that there should be no further experiments.

    As the dinner drew to a close,
Jelliffe feared he had not advanced his cause. Dana and Sachs did not even
shake his hand as they left. But his flagging spirits improved when Starr, who
had lingered behind the others, asked whether he had correctly heard Jelliffe
to say that he had booked two rooms upstairs. Jelliffe confirmed it. The brace
of corpulent gentlemen regarded each other, both picturing a boa-clad showgirl
reclining next to an iced, unopened bottle of champagne. Starr expressed the
opinion that things paid for ought not to be wasted.