The Interpretation Of Murder (4 page)

    Before anyone else was up, I examined
the Monday morning newspapers in the opulent rotunda of the Hotel Manhattan,
where Clark University was housing Freud, Jung, Ferenczi, and myself for the
week. (Brill, who lived in New York, did not require a room.) Not one of the
papers carried a story about Freud or his upcoming lectures at Clark. Only the
New Yorker Staats-Zeitung
ran anything at all, and this was a notice
announcing the arrival of a 'Dr Freund from Vienna.'

    I never intended to be a doctor. It
was my father's wish, and his wishes were supposed to be our commands. When I was
eighteen and still living in my parents' house in Boston, I told him I was
going to be America's foremost scholar of Shakespeare. I could be America's
hindmost scholar of Shakespeare, he replied, but fore or hind, if I did not
intend to pursue a career in medicine, I would have to find my own means of
paying Harvard's tuition.

    His threat had no effect on me. I
didn't care at all for the family's Harvardiana, and I would be happy, I told
my father, to complete my education elsewhere. This was the last conversation
of any length I ever had with him.

    Ironically, I was to obey my father's
wish only after he no longer had any money to withhold from me. The collapse of
Colonel Winslow's banking house in November 1903 was nothing compared to the panic
in New York four years later, but it was good enough for my father. He lost
everything, including my mother's bit. His face aged ten years in a single
night; deep creases appeared unannounced on his brow. My mother said I must
take pity on him, but I never did. At his funeral - which compassionate Boston
avoided in droves - I knew for the first time I would go on in medicine, if
able to continue my studies at all. Whether it was a newfound practicality that
drove my decision or something else, I hesitate to say.

    It was I, as things fell out, on whom
pity had to be taken, and Harvard that took it. After my father's funeral, I
notified the university that I would be withdrawing at year's end, the
two-hundred-dollar tuition being now far beyond my means. President Eliot,
however, waived the fee. Probably he concluded that Harvard's long-term
interests would be better served not by giving the boot to the third Stratham
Younger to trudge through the Yard, but by forgiving the demi-orphan his
tuition in expectation of future rewards. Whatever the motivation, I will be
forever grateful to Harvard for letting me stay on.

    Only at Harvard could I have attended
Professor Putnam's famous lectures on neurology. I was a medical student by
then, having won a scholarship, but was proving an uninspired doctor-to-be. One
spring morning, in an otherwise dust-dry account of nervous diseases, Putnam
referred to Sigmund Freud's 'sexual theory' as the only interesting work being
done on the subject of the hysterical and obsessional neuroses. After class, I
asked for readings. Putnam pointed me to Havelock Ellis, who accepted Freud's
two most radical discoveries: the existence of what Freud called 'the
unconscious' and the sexual aetiology of neurosis. Putnam also introduced me to
Morton Prince, who was then just starting his journal on abnormal psychology.
Dr Prince had an extensive collection of foreign publications; it turned out he
had known my father. Prince took me on as a proofreader. Through him, I got my
hands on almost everything Freud had published, from
The Interpretation of
Dreams
to the groundbreaking
Three Essays.
My German was good, and I
found myself consuming Freud's work with an avidity I had not felt for years.
Freud's erudition was breathtaking. His writing was like filigree. His ideas,
if correct, would change the world.

    The hook was sunk for good, however,
when I came across Freud's solution to
Hamlet.
It was, for Freud, a
throw- away, a two-hundred-word digression in the middle of his treatise on dreams.
Yet there it was: a brand-new answer to the most famous riddle in Western
literature.

    Shakespeare's
Hamlet
has been
performed thousands upon thousands of times, more than any other play in any
language. It is the most written-about work in all of literature. (I do not
count the Bible, of course.) Yet there is a strange void or vacuum at the core
of the drama: all the action is founded on the inability of its hero to act.
The play consists of a series of evasions and excuses seized on by the melancholy
Hamlet to justify postponing his revenge on his father's murderer (his uncle,
Claudius, now King of Denmark and wed to Hamlet's mother), punctuated by
anguished soliloquies in which he vilifies himself for his own paralysis, the
most famous of them all beginning, of course,
To be.
Only after his
delays and missteps have brought about ruin - Ophelia's suicide; the murder of
his mother, who drinks a poison Claudius prepared for Hamlet; and his own
receipt of a fatal cut from Laertes' envenomed sword - does Hamlet at last, in
the play's final scene, take his uncle's triply forfeited life.

    Why doesn't Hamlet act? Not for lack
of opportunity: Shakespeare gives Hamlet the most propitious possible
circumstances for killing Claudius. Hamlet even acknowledges this (
Now might
I do it),
yet still he turns away. What stops him? And why should this
inexplicable faltering - this seeming weakness, this almost cowardice - be
capable of riveting audiences around the world for three centuries? The
greatest literary minds of our era, Goethe and Coleridge, tried but failed to
pull the sword from this stone, and hundreds of lesser lights have broken their
heads on it.

    I didn't like Freud's Oedipal answer.
In fact, I was disgusted by it. I didn't want to believe it, any more than I
wanted to believe in the Oedipus complex itself. I needed to disprove Freud's
shocking theories, I needed to find their flaw, but I could not. My back
against a tree, I sat in the Yard day after day for hours at a time, poring
over Freud and Shakespeare. Freud's diagnosis of
Hamlet
came to seem
increasingly irresistible to me, not only yielding the first complete solution
to the riddle of the play, but explaining why no one else had been able to
solve it, and at the same time making lucid the tragedy's mesmerizing,
universal grip. Here was a scientist applying his discoveries to Shakespeare.
Here was medicine making contact with the soul. When I read those two pages of
Dr Freud's
The Interpretation of Dreams,
my future was determined.

    If I could not refute Freud's
psychology, I would devote my life to it.

    Coroner Charles Hugel had not liked
the peculiar noise that came from the walls of Miss Riverford's bedroom, like
an immured spirit wailing for its life. The coroner could not get that sound
out of his head. Moreover, something had been missing from the room; he was
sure of it. Back downtown, Hugel rang for a messenger boy and sent him running
up the street for Detective Littlemore.

    Yet another thing Hugel did not like
was the location of his own office. The coroner had not been invited to move
into the resplendent new police headquarters or the new First Precinct house
being built on Old Slip, both of which would be equipped with telephones. The
judges had got their Parthenon not long ago. Yet he, not only the city's chief
medical examiner but a magistrate by law, and far more in need of modern
utilities, had been left behind in the crumbling Van den Heuvel building, with
its chipping plaster, its mold, and, worst of all, its water-stained ceilings.
He abhorred the sight of those stains, with their brownish- yellow jagged
edges. He particularly abhorred them today; he felt the stains were larger, and
he wondered if the ceiling might crack open and fall down on him. Of course a
coroner had to be attached to a morgue; he understood that. But he emphatically
did not understand why a new and modern morgue could not have been built into
the new police headquarters.

    Littlemore ambled into the coroner's
office. The detective was twenty-five. Neither tall nor short Jimmy Littlemore
wasn't bad-looking, but he wasn't quite good-looking either. His close-cropped
hair was neither dark nor fair; if anything, it was closer to red. He had a
distinctly American face, open and friendly, which, apart from a few freckles,
was not particularly memorable. If you passed him in the street, you were not
likely to recall him later. You might, however, remember the ready smile or the
red bow tie he liked to sport below his straw boater.

    The coroner ordered Littlemore to
tell him what he had found out about the Riverford case, trying his best to
sound commanding and peremptory. Only in the most exceptional matters was the
coroner placed directly in charge of an investigation. He meant Littlemore to
understand that serious consequences would follow if the detective did not
produce results.

    The coroner's magisterial tone
evidently failed to impress the detective. Although Littlemore had never worked
on a case with the coroner, he doubtless knew, as did everyone else on the
force, that Hugel was disliked by the new commissioner, that his nickname was
'the ghoul' because of the eagerness with which he performed his postmortems,
and that he had no real power in the department. But Littlemore, being a fellow
of excellent good nature, conveyed no disrespect to the coroner.

    'What do I know about the Riverford
case?' he answered. 'Why, nothing at all, Mr Hugel, except that the killer is
over fifty, five-foot-nine, unmarried, familiar with the sight of blood, lives
below Canal Street, and visited the harbor within the last two days.'

    Hugel's jaw dropped. 'How do you know
all that?'

    'I'm joking, Mr Hugel. I don't know
Shinola about the murderer. I don't even know why they bothered sending me
over. You didn't happen to lift any prints, did you, sir?'

    'Fingerprints?' asked the coroner.
'Certainly not. The courts will never admit fingerprint evidence.'

    'Well, it was too late by the time I
got there. The whole place was already cleaned out. All the girl's things were
gone.'

    Hugel was incensed. He called it
tampering with evidence. 'But you must have learned something about the
Riverford girl,' he added.

    'She was new,' said Littlemore. 'She
only lived there a month or two.'

    'They opened in June, Littlemore.
Everyone
has lived there only a month or two.'

    'Oh. Well she was a real quiet type.
Kept to herself.'

    'Is that all? Was anyone seen with
her yesterday?' asked the coroner.

    'She came in around eight o'clock.
Nobody with her. No guests later. Went to her apartment and never came out, as
far as anybody knows.'

    'Did she have any regular visitors?'

    'Nope. Nobody remembers anybody ever
visiting her.'

    'Why was she living alone in New York
City - at her age and in so large an apartment?'

    'That's what I wanted to know,' said
Littlemore. 'But they clammed up on me pretty good at the Balmoral, every one
of them. I was serious about the harbor though, Mr Hugel. I found some clay on the
floor of Miss Riverford's bedroom. Pretty fresh too. I think it came from the
harbor.'

    'Clay? What color clay?' asked Hugel.

    'Red. Cakey, kind of.'

    'That wasn't clay, Littlemore,' said
the coroner, rolling his eyes, 'that was my chalk.'

    The detective frowned. 'I wondered
why there was a whole circle of it.'

    'To keep people away from the body,
you nitwit!'

    'I'm just joking, Mr Hugel. It wasn't
your chalk. I saw your chalk. The clay was by the fireplace. A couple of small
traces. Needed my magnifying glass before I saw it. I took it home to compare
with my samples; I got a whole collection. It's a lot like the red clay all
over the piers at the harbor.'

    Hugel took this in. He was
considering whether to be impressed. 'Is the clay in the harbor unique? Could
it come from somewhere else - the Central Park, for example?'

    'Not the park,' said the detective.
'This is river clay, Mr Hugel. No rivers in the park.'

    'What about the Hudson Valley?'

    'Could be.'

    'Or Fort Tryon, uptown, where
Billings has just turned over so much earth?'

    'You think there's clay up there?'

    'I congratulate you, Littlemore, on
your outstanding detective work.'

    'Thanks, Mr Hugel.'

    'Would you be interested in a
description of the murderer, by any chance?'

    'I sure would.'

    'He is middle-aged, wealthy, and
right-handed. His hair: graying, but formerly dark brown. His height: six foot
to six-foot-one. And I believe he was acquainted with his victim - well
acquainted.'

    Littlemore looked amazed. 'How -?'

    'Here are three hairs I collected
from the girl's person.' The coroner pointed to a small double-paned rectangle
of glass on his desk, next to a microscope: sandwiched between the panes of
glass were three hairs. 'They are dark but striated with gray, indicating a man
of middle age. On the girl's neck were threads of white silk - most probably a
man's tie, evidently used to strangle her. The silk was of the highest quality.
Thus our man has money. Of his dexterity, there can be no doubt; the wounds all
proceed from right to left.'

    'His dexterity?'

    'His right-handedness, Detective.'

    'But how do you know he knew her?'

    'I do not
know.
I suspect.
Answer me this: in what posture was Miss Riverford when she was whipped?'

    'I never saw her,' the detective
complained. 'I don't even know cause of death.'

    'Ligature strangulation, confirmed by
the fracture of the hyoid bone, as I saw when I opened her chest. A lovely
break, if I may say, like a perfectly split wishbone. Indeed, a lovely female
chest altogether: the ribs perfectly formed, the lungs and heart, once removed,
the very picture of healthy asphyxiated tissue. It was a pleasure to hold them
in one's hands. But to the point: Miss Riverford was standing when she was
whipped. This we know from the simple fact that the blood dripped straight down
from her lacerations. Her hands were undoubtedly tied above her head by a
heavy- gauge rope of some kind, almost certainly attached to the fixture in the
ceiling. I saw rope threads on that fixture. Did you? No? Well, go back and
look for them. Question: why would a man who has a good sturdy rope strangle
his victim with a delicate silk? Inference, Mr Littlemore: he did not want to
put something so coarse around the girl's neck. And why was that? Hypothesis,
Mr Littlemore: because he had feelings for her. Now, as to the man's height, we
are back to certainties. Miss Riverford was five-foot-five. Judging from her
wounds, the whipping was administered by someone seven to eight inches above
her. Thus the murderer's height was between six foot and six-foot-one.'

    'Unless he was standing on
something,' said Littlemore.

    'What?'

    'On a stool or something.'

    'On a stool?' repeated the coroner.

    'It's possible,' said Littlemore.

    'A man does not stand on a stool
while whipping a girl, Detective.'

    'Why not?'

    'Because it's ridiculous. He would
fall off.'

    'Not if he had something to hold on
to,' said the detective. 'A lamp, maybe, or a hat rack.'

    'A hat rack?' said Hugel. 'Why would
he do that, Detective?'

    'To make us think he was taller.'

    'How many homicide cases have you
investigated?' asked the coroner.

    'This is my first,' said Littlemore,
with undisguised excitement, 'as a detective.'

    Hugel nodded. 'You spoke with the
maid at least, I suppose?'

    'The maid?'

    'Yes, the maid. Miss Riverford's
maid. Did you ask her if she noticed anything unusual?'

    'I don't think I -'

    'I don't want you to think,' snapped
the coroner. 'I want you to detect. Go back to the Balmoral and talk to that
maid again. She was the first one in the room. Ask her to describe to you
exactly what she saw when she went in. Get the details, do you hear me?'