The Interpretation Of Murder (6 page)

    The train was pulling into City Hall
station when I finished. We had to change there for the BRT at Park Row, where
an elevated would take us all the way to Coney. No one commented on Priscilla's
case, and I began to think I must have made a fool of myself. Brill saved me.
He told Freud I deserved to know what 'the Master' thought of my analysis.

    Freud turned to me with, I hardly
dared to believe it, a twinkle in his eyes. He said that, a few minor points
aside, the analysis could not have been improved on. He called it brilliant and
asked my permission to refer to it in subsequent work. Brill clapped me on the
back; Ferenczi, smiling, shook my hand. This was not the most gratifying moment
of my professional life; it was the most gratifying moment of my
entire
life.

    I had never realized how splendid
City Hall station was, with its crystal chandeliers, inlaid murals, and vaulted
arches. Everyone remarked on it - with the exception of Jung, who suddenly
announced that he was not coming with us. Jung had made no comments either
during or after my case history. Now he said he needed to get to bed.

    'Bed?' Brill asked. 'You went to bed
last night at nine.' While the rest of us had retired well past midnight after
dining together in the hotel, Jung had gone to his room as soon as we arrived
and had not come down.

    Freud asked Jung whether he was all
right. When Jung replied that it was only his head again, Freud instructed me
to take him back to the hotel. But Jung declined assistance, insisting he could
easily retrace our steps. Hence Jung took the train back uptown; the rest of us
went on without him.

    When Detective Jimmy Littlemore
returned to the Balmoral Monday evening, one of the doormen had just come on
duty. This man, Clifford, had worked the graveyard shift the night before.
Littlemore asked if he knew the deceased Miss Riverford.

    Apparently Clifford had not received
the order to hold his tongue. 'Sure, I remember her,' he said. 'What a looker.'

    'Talk to her?' asked Littlemore.

    'She didn't talk much - not to me,
anyway.'

    'Anything special you remember about
her?'

    'I opened the door for her some
mornings,' said Clifford.

    'What's special about that?'

    'I'm off at six. The only girls you
see at that hour are working girls, and Miss Riverford didn't look like a
working girl, if you know what I mean. She would have been going out at, I
don't know, maybe five, five-thirty?'

    'Where was she going?' asked
Littlemore.

    'Beats me.'

    'What about last night? Did you
notice anybody or anything unusual?'

    'What do you mean unusual?' asked
Clifford.

    'Anything different, anybody you had
never seen before.'

    'There was this one fella,' said
Clifford. 'Left about midnight. In a big hurry. Did you see that fella, Mac?
Didn't look right, if you ask me.'

    The doorman addressed as Mac shook
his head.

    'Smoke?' said Littlemore to Clifford,
who accepted the cigarette, pocketing it since he wasn't permitted to indulge
on duty. 'Why didn't he look right?'

    'Just didn't. Foreigner, maybe.'
Clifford was unable to articulate his suspicion with any greater specificity,
but he asserted positively that the man did not live in the building.
Littlemore took a description: black hair, tall, lean, well dressed, high
forehead, mid- to late thirties, wearing glasses, carrying a black case of some
kind. The man climbed into a hackney cab outside the Balmoral, heading
downtown. Littlemore questioned the doormen for another ten minutes - none
remembered Clifford's black-haired man entering the building, but he might well
have gone up unremarked with a resident - and then asked where he could find
the Balmoral's chambermaids. They pointed him downstairs.

    In the basement, Littlemore came to a
hot low-ceilinged room with pipes running along its walls and a clutch of maids
folding linen. All knew who Miss Riverford's girl was: Betty Longobardi. In
whispers, they confided to the detective that he wouldn't find Betty anywhere
in the building. She was gone. Betty had left early without saying good-bye to
anyone. They didn't know why. Betty was a handful but such a nice girl. She
didn't take any lip, not even from the wing manager, the women told Littlemore.
Maybe she'd had another fight with him. One of the maids knew where Betty
lived. With this information secured, Littlemore turned to go. It was then that
he noticed the Chinaman.

    Clad in a white undershirt and dark
shorts, the man had come into the room carrying a wicker basket overflowing
with freshly cleaned sheets. Having deposited the contents of this basket onto
a table filled with like items, he was walking out again when he attracted the
detective's attention. Littlemore stared at the retreating man's thick calves
and sandals. These were not in themselves particularly interesting; nor was his
gait, which involved the sliding of one foot after the other. The result,
however, was arresting. Two wet stripes were left on the floor in the man's
wake, and these stripes were flecked with a glistening dark-red clay.

    'Hey - you there!' cried Littlemore.

    The man froze, his back to the
detective, shoulders hunched. But the next moment he started off again at a
run, disappearing around a corner, still carrying his basket. The detective
sprang after him, turning the corner just in time to see the man pushing
through a pair of swinging doors at the end of a long corridor. Littlemore ran
down the corridor, passed through the doors - and gazed out at the Balmoral's
cavernous and noisy laundry, where men were laboring at ironing boards,
washboards, steam presses, and hand-cranked washing machines. There were
Negroes and whites, Italians and Irish, faces of all kinds - but no Chinamen.
An empty wicker basket lay on its side next to an ironing board, rocking gently
as if recently set down. The floor was thoroughly wet, disguising any tracks.
Littlemore pushed up the brim of his boater and shook his head.

    Gramercy Park, at the foot of
Lexington Avenue, was Manhattan's sole private park. Only the owners of the
houses opposite the park's delicate wrought-iron fence had the right to enter.
Each house came with a key to the park gates, offering access to the small
paradise of flower and greenery within.

    To the girl emerging from one of
those houses early Monday evening, August 30, that key had always been a
magical object, gold and black, delicate yet unbreakable. When she was a little
girl, old Mrs Biggs, their servant, used to let her carry the key in her tiny
white purse on their way across the street. She was too small to turn the key
by herself, but Mrs Biggs would guide her hand and help her do it. When the iron
gate released, it was as if the world itself were opening up before her.

    The park had grown much smaller as
she grew up. Now, at seventeen, she could of course turn the key without
assistance - and did so this evening, letting herself in and walking slowly to
her bench, the one she always sat on. She was carrying an armload of textbooks
and her secret copy of
The House of Mirth.
She still loved her bench,
even though the park had somehow become, as she got older, more an attachment
to her parents' house than a refuge from it. Her mother and father were away.
They had repaired to the country five weeks earlier, leaving the girl behind
with Mrs Biggs and her husband. She had been delighted to see them go.

    The day was still oppressively hot,
but her bench lay in the cool shade of a willow and chestnut canopy. The books
sat unopened beside her. The day after tomorrow, it would be September, a month
she had been looking forward to for what seemed an eternity. Next weekend, she
would turn eighteen. Three weeks after that, she would matriculate at Barnard
College. She was one of those girls who, despite a fervent wish to be living
another life, had staved off womanhood as long as she could, through the ages
of thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen, clinging to her stuffed animals even while
school friends were already discussing stockings, lipstick, and invitations. At
sixteen, the stuffed animals had finally been relegated to the upper reaches of
a closet. At seventeen, she was lithe, blue-eyed, and heart-stoppingly
beautiful. She wore her long blond hair tied with a ribbon in the back.

    When the bells of Calvary Church
struck six, she saw Mr and Mrs Biggs hurrying down the front stoop, rushing off
to the shops before they closed. They waved to the girl, and she to them. A few
minutes later, brushing tears from her eyes, she set off slowly toward home,
clutching her textbooks to her chest, looking at the grass and the clover and
the hovering bees. Had she turned to her left, she might have seen, on the far
side of the park, a man watching her from outside the wrought-iron fence.

    This man had been watching her a long
time. He carried a black case in his right hand and was dressed in black -
overdressed, in fact, given the heat. He never took his eyes from the girl as
she crossed the street and climbed the stairs to her townhouse, a handsome
limestone affair with two miniature stone lions mounting an ineffectual guard
on either side of the front door. He saw the girl open the door without having
to unlock it.

    The man had observed the two old
servants leaving the house. Glancing left, right, and over his shoulder, he
started off. Quickly he approached the house, ascended the steps, tried the
door, and found it still unlocked.

    A half hour later, the summer-evening
silence of Gramercy Park was ruptured by a scream, a girl's scream. It carried
from one end of the street to the other, hanging in the air, persisting longer
than one would have thought physically possible. Shortly thereafter, the man
burst out the back door of the girl's house. A metal object no larger than a
small coin flew from his hands as he stumbled down the rear steps. It hit a
slate flagstone and bounced surprisingly high into the air. The man nearly fell
to the ground himself, but he recovered, fled past the garden potting shed, and
escaped from the garden down the back alley.

    Mr and Mrs Biggs heard the scream.
They were just returning, laden with bags of groceries and flowers. Horrified,
they trundled into the house and up the stairs as quickly as they were able. On
the second floor, the master bedroom door was open, which it should not have
been. Inside that room, they found her. The shopping bags fell from Mr Biggs's
hands. A pound of flour spread out around his old black shoes, raising a little
cloud of white dust, and a yellow onion rolled all the way to the girl's bare
feet.

    She stood in the center of her
parents' bedroom, clad only in a slip and other undergarments not meant for
servants' eyes. Her legs were naked. Her long slender arms were outstretched
above her head, the wrists bound by a thick rope, which was secured in turn to
a ceiling fixture from which a small chandelier depended. The girl's fingers
nearly touched its crystal prisms. Her slip was torn, both front and back, as
if rent by the lashes of a whip or cane. A man's long white tie or scarf was
wound tightly around her neck and between her lips.

    She was not, however, dead. Her eyes
were wild, staring, unseeing. She looked on the familiar old servants not with relief
but with a kind of terror, as if they might be murderers or demons. Her whole
frame shivered, despite the heat. She made to scream again, but no sound came
out, as if she had expended all her voice.

    Mrs Biggs came to her senses first
and ordered her husband out of the room, telling him to fetch the doctor and a
policeman. Gingerly she went to the girl, trying to calm her, unwinding the
tie. When her mouth was freed, the girl made all the motions that normally
accompany speech, but still no sound came out, no words at all, not even a
whisper. When the police arrived, they were dismayed to learn that she could
not speak. A still greater surprise lay in store for them as well. Paper and
pencil were brought to the girl; the police asked her to tell them in writing
what happened.
I can't,
she wrote. Why not? they asked. Her reply:
I
can't remember.