In other things before, without Judd, nothing had ever gone wrong, nobody had ever found out. And Artie was engulfed by a wave of negation, a commanding need to wipe out all that had gone wrong, to wipe out Judd. As though he could will the dissolution of Judd, will him not to exist, by a pointing finger. You’re dead! You’re gone! That’s what you get for lousing everything up! And Artie turned, half anticipating that Judd would have vanished out of existence by his punishing wish. But through the glass of the phone-booth door, he could see the back of his partner’s sleek, small head, dark, tilted.

As Judd phoned, a different voice answered. “ Jackson 2502.”

Judd felt triumphant. “Mr. Kessler?” he asked.

“Who? This is Hartmann’s Pharmacy.”

He got the druggist to call out, “Anybody named Kessler been asking for a message?” But: “No, nobody of that name.”

“Thank you,” Judd said. Then it was clear. Kessler had not taken the cab. In the last half-hour, the body must have been identified.

The way Artie looked at him as he emerged was murderous. “Granted that we lost out on the ransom part of it,” Judd said, still feeling his mind working concisely, clearly, in the crisis – “the fact that they may have identified the body still does not mean they can identify us.”

Artie cursed and turned to the I.C. tracks. Judd, too, looked at the train, still standing there, as though waiting for Kessler to get aboard. Then the train pulled away. They turned back to their rented car. “Let’s just ditch it,” Artie said.

That would be the worst thing to do, Judd pointed out. The rental man would be bound to start a hunt, and by some freak, even though they had used fake names, a trail might be found leading to them. No, they had best return it at once and check out.

Now that the dead boy was known to be a millionaire’s son police cars swarmed the street in front of Swaboda’s, and cab doors slammed as reporters arrived. Some looked at me with the hostility and respect owed a man for a clean beat; others disregarded me – I was just a kid who had broken this big story by some fluke. And now that the real newspapermen were here, I began to feel inadequate.

There was Mike Prager from the Hearst afternoon paper, our direct rival. He was the inside-contact type, who would immediately take aside the most important official present and indulge in whispers. And then the Tribune’s star crime reporter arrived, a middle-aged man, or so he appeared to me then, though I suppose he was only in his thirties. Richard Lyman, like all Tribune men, seemed to take charge, not so much asking questions as demanding explanations. For a few details he had to come to me, and I gave him what I had, the spelling of the names of the men who found the body, things like that.

It was then, as the plain-clothes men and reporters and police piled into the back room, that the pervert talk was heard. It seemed to arise of itself, as the natural, obvious explanation, and indeed I pretended that I too had thought of it at first glance. The men would look at the corpse saying, “Some goddam sonofabitch pervert,” and look again, as though a mark were there, for those who knew.

I felt it was shamefully naïve of me not to know. And yet I wonder now how much the others really knew? All were ready to use the horror-word as a stamp to explain everything, and in the rage and disgust and fear that followed and pervaded the city for months to come, and indeed attached itself permanently to the Steiner-Straus case, there was a blanketing of homosexuality with every form of depravity, and despite all the “expertizing” that was to come into the case, there was little attempt to learn from it, to understand.

For myself the subject was vaguely covered by the word degenerate, which we used often enough in the paper. I had even been sent out one Saturday to interview a woman on the west side whose little four-year-old girl had been attacked. For such matters, the word degenerate was used, and that explained everything. Chicago still reverberated with the horrors of the Fitzgerald case – the sex fiend who had been dragged half conscious to the gallows for attacking and killing a little girl.

But with a boy, I was in my own mind perplexed. For in that time, among those of us who carried around the purple-morocco-bound volumes of Oscar Wilde, there was more knowingness than knowing. Love between men or love of boys scarcely seemed to suggest a physical act. I associated such love rather with purity, love of beauty, and high-mindedness. Lines from Keats, fantasies of an elderly philosopher, a Socrates, walking with his hand on the shoulder of a stripling youth, images of an elegant Oscar Wilde exchanging epigrams with an elegant young lord, seemed to make such love simply an avoidance of the clumsy, sometimes disgusting physical part of the act that took place with women.

For at eighteen, and already a newspaper reporter in Chicago, the wicked city, I was innocent. At the frat house, I had taken part in the smut sessions, and in the gym I had taken part in the horseplay, and I could use the sex swear words as freely as the rest-so freely precisely because the words had for me no meaning in experience.

Perhaps half, perhaps more, of my classmates, I think, were as innocent as I. At the frat there were those who bragged about their prowess at the cat houses, and those who loudly acclaimed that every girl they took out “went the whole way”. There were those who solemnly warned you against catching a disease, and those, like Artie Straus, who bragged about the “dose” caught at the earliest opportunity.

The fear of disease, and an idealistic notion of “being fair” to the girl you would one day marry, perhaps a kind of magical sense that by keeping yourself pure you would insure her purity, had kept many of us innocent. And we did not even have, then, the common words that today denote the homosexual; pansy and fairy and nance were unknown because the whole subject was somehow legendary.

So I stood in the circle of police and reporters, and we stared at the boy’s body as if it could reveal unspeakable last events and thereby show us the assailant. But there were to be seen only the few scratches that might have come from the concrete culvert, and the two small marks on the head. The face, around the mouth, had a yellowish discoloration; we did not yet know this was the only result of an attempt at obliteration with acid, and we speculated that this might have come from some chemical in the water where the body had lain all night.

But if it were a deed of perversion, what did the kidnapping and the ransom have to do with it? And we speculated even upon the mystery of the actual cause of death, for the blows were not enough to have killed the boy, and he did not seem to have drowned.

Then the coroner’s physician arrived, a paunchy man with dark eye pouches that gave him a constant look of irritation. In a shrill, authoritative voice, he cried, “One side, one side!” Even while Dr. Kruger was taking off his coat, Mike Prager’s huge, sequestering hulk was around him, Mike was enveloping him in whispers, and all the others were demanding, “Was it a pervert, Doc?”

In vest and shirt sleeves, the physician leaned over the body. Death had taken place some time in the evening, he said. It didn’t appear to be from drowning. Probably suffocation. Look at the throat muscles, swollen.

“Was he mistreated?” the Tribune man insisted.

The coroner’s physician turned over the body. A cop kept saying, “Imagine the kind of sonofabitch fiend.”

“It certainly looks like it to me,” the physician said.

A growl, almost of satisfaction, went through the room. Richard Lyman asked if it could be positively stated that there had been an act of degeneracy, and Dr. Kruger shrugged – hell, they could see as well as he, but as for proof, it would take an autopsy, and then maybe nothing would show up. The body had been in the water all night; anything would have been washed out.