The fountain man and Mr. Hartmann told how they had answered the calls, about ten minutes apart, from a man asking for a Mr. Kessler. “He said look around and make sure,” the Negro recalled, “so I even yelled out in the store. Then I told him there was nobody of that name.”

“The nearest booth to the door,” the ransom letter instructed; now Artie went and stood in the booth, as though it might contain the presence of the criminal. “He must have come in here at some time, to copy down the number of this phone,” Mr. Hartmann said.

Artie even lifted the receiver and tried on a wild chance to trace yesterday’s calls. What was the man’s voice like? he demanded of Hartmann. “Any accent? Did he use good English?”

“You’d make a better reporter than I am!” I told him.

“Aren’t you going to call your paper?” he urged. “See! I told you I’d get you a scoop!”

I said Tom should make the call, and Artie ran ahead of me to Tom, waving his arms, yelling, “We found it!”

Our paper made much of the feat, crowing that the first tangible scent of the criminal had been picked up by the same Globe reporter who had identified the victim. It was a small thing to hail as a triumph, but there was no real news. The city seemed to stand transfixed by the murder. The case had seized the public imagination as a crime beyond other crimes. Perhaps it was because of the wealth of the boy’s family. But perhaps, I was to think as the story developed, because by some uncanny process people sensed from the beginning that this crime had meanings that would project far into our time.

We drove back to the campus. We ought to have him stick with us on the story, Artie insisted. He’d get us scoop after scoop!

On Woodlawn, spotting the red Stutz, he began to honk madly. “It’s Judd Steiner. You must know him,” he said to me. “Those clucks just had their Harvard Law entrance exam.” Artie pulled alongside. “Hey, Jock! I just got a scoop for the Globe! I found the kidnapper’s drugstore. How’d you come out?”

Judd quietly said he came out okay, it wasn’t a tough exam at all, and asked, “What was that? What drugstore?”

Artie explained how he was on the trail of the Kessler kidnappers, and in the same breath said, “Hey, Judd, you ought to celebrate. How about going out tonight?” He and a hot date were going to the Four Deuces, Artie said, and Judd should come along. Then turning to me: “Hey, drag a frail, we’ll make it a real party! Bring that babe of yours, Ruthie.”

Judd was trying to say something, but Artie called out, “I’m driving them to the inquest!” and zoomed off with us.

Paulie’s body had been moved to an undertaking parlour on Cottage Grove, a refined place with electric candelabra spaced along the walls. “This beats Balaban and Katz,” Artie whispered, yet with a proper note of commiseration under his remark. In a few moments he had crowded in among the police, among the reporters; he had gathered the arguments of the chief of detectives, who swore he would round up every known pervert in town, and he had caught the remarks of the chief of police, who maintained it was obviously a straight ransom job – there was no proof of perversion at all.

I was getting a little tired of Artie, his pitch of excitement was exhausting, and I felt relieved when his friend Judd suddenly appeared, pulling Artie aside. Presently Artie called to me, “See you tonight,” and they were gone.

The inquest itself only added to the uncertainty and hysteria. There were the identifications of the corpse by the uncle and the father, both of them controlled, unexpressive. There was the Polish workman who had found the body; he told nothing new. Then, importantly, his lips pursed over each statement, came Dr. Kruger to give the cause of death. Not the blows on the head, he declared, but suffocation. The tongue was swollen, and the throat. No marks of strangling. Suffocation. Perhaps from a gag. Death had occurred before nine o’clock. Previously, the victim had been subjected to an attack.

The word resounded. It was official now. A degenerate!

But immediately after Dr. Kruger, walking up hurriedly as if to correct a mistake, blurting his words before the questions could be asked, came a chemist, Dr. Haroutian, who had analysed the organs. There was no evidence of an attack, none at all, he declared.

Dr. Kruger leaped up, shouting. He had seen the body and if that wasn’t an attack -!

They began arguing about sphincters and muscle tension; it was too sad, too gruesome, and yet it seemed bitterly necessary to know just how, exactly how bestially some human had behaved. And as the argument grew, those who believed in the perversion became violently insistent, as though to exclude the evil of degeneracy would be virtually to condone the crime.

Both opinions had finally to be left in the record. Presently the inquest was over, and all of us, the reporters, were surging around the public officials, as though some extra word could settle what had happened to that poor boy on his way to his death.

With Harry Dawes of the Post, Tom and I traded details of our drugstore scoop in exchange for his story of a kid on Ellis Avenue who claimed he had seen Paulie get into a Winton car, a grey Winton.

But after we had phoned in and were sitting at a sandwich counter, Tom said it was clear that nobody knew a damn thing – we had done pretty well by ourselves so far; we would go off and work on our own. He kept speculating about the place itself, Hegewisch. All the kids who went to Twain had some time been out to that place. True, the science teachers who conducted the excursions had been cleared; they had airtight alibis. Still, by going out there we might get an idea.

It was a dreary nothing of an area, half swamp, half prairie, stretching from where the city left off, from streets of scattered frame cottages, out a few miles to where factory buildings began – steel mills and oil refineries. In walking over the ground, we first fully realized how far it was from where a car could park to where the body had been found. Had the boy walked? Willingly? Was it with someone he knew, who promised to show him something? Or had he been carried, already dead? Carried all this distance? And why, particularly, to be hidden in that culvert? We stood staring at the open cement pipe.

It seemed a haphazard choice, a wild, crazed choice, and yet there arose in me the tantalizing feeling of something unresolved that one experiences sometimes in the presence of the seemingly irrational. We speculated. Could the criminal be some poor local inhabitant who had picked up an acquaintance with the rich kids coming for their nature studies? Did people hang out here for anything? Fishing?

Strange how naked the area was only two days after the murder. Not even a policeman. But what would a cop be watching for, we kidded each other – the murderer’s return?

We decided to go back to the local police station. The captain himself, named Cleary, talked to us.

Well, he said, in summer kids went swimming there, and some guys went fishing, some of the Polacks, just for bluefish, and there was even a little rabbit hunting, but these Polacks around here were hard-working mill hands. Hell, in the first place none of them could even write a letter like that ransom letter.

Tom asked if there were any other teachers, besides those from the Twain School, who brought classes out there. Cleary said he didn’t know much about that; in fact, the prairie was officially outside his territory – it was state land, and the Forest Preserves had charge of it.

After we left, as it turned out, Captain Cleary telephoned a Forest Preserve guardian. He only wanted to protect himself. Captain Cleary asked the Forest Preserve man if he knew of any natural-history teachers, or specimen collectors, or anything like that, hanging around the Hegewisch wilds. And he got an answer. There was some bunch went out there on Sundays sometimes, Warden Gastony said; some lad brought them out there – he had his name down because the lad had a gun permit for shooting specimens. A millionaire’s kid by the name of Steiner – Judah Steiner, Jr., a real studious boy. Young Steiner would know what classes went out there.