“How does that happen?”

“Only the last time I was out there, I recall climbing over the tracks, because I slipped, coming down, and got my feet wet. It’s quite swampy there.” Thus, Judd felt, he had paved the way for discovering he had lost his spectacles, in case they had already been traced to him. They might have fallen out of his pocket when he slipped.

“You ever know of this Kessler kid going out there?”

“He certainly wasn’t in any of my groups, but he might have gone out with a school group. It’s used quite a lot, as you know. It’s the nearest place to the city where you find so much wild life.”

The captain had picked up a file card of some kind, and he tapped it against his desk. He swivelled and faced Judd. “You use glasses?”

Perhaps this was the moment to say, “As a matter of fact, those glasses found out there were mine. I must have lost them last week, but I didn’t notice it until I read about the case, and then – I guess it’s quite natural – I was rather frightened of becoming involved.”

Instead, he heard himself saying, “You mean field glasses?”

“No, I mean regular eyeglasses.”

“Why, yes, I do – or did. For reading, at home. I had them prescribed for headaches last year, but the headaches stopped, and I haven’t used my reading glasses for several months.”

The captain nodded. “Any of those people with you, or anybody you know goes out there, wear eyeglasses?”

Judd gave himself time for reflection. “Well, as a matter of fact, a few of the women wear glasses, and I have an assistant, occasionally – Jerry Harris is his name. He wears glasses. He was with us last week. But I’m sure he would have mentioned it to me, if he had lost his glasses.”

The captain took down the name and address, writing slowly, in a schoolboy hand. He didn’t ask for the phone number, and it occurred to Judd to call up Jerry and warn him.

Then the captain just sat there as though trying to think of more questions. Judd didn’t want to appear anxious to leave. He was indeed beginning to enjoy the situation, beginning to form an account of it in his mind, for Artie. Still, the silence became somewhat tense, and he allowed himself to glance at his watch. “As a matter of fact,” he remarked, “I have a date to take a girl birding this afternoon, but I guess we won’t be going to Hegewisch.” The captain’s flesh wobbled with his chortle. “That’s a new name for it. Birding!”

Judd took a full breath.

“Okay,” the captain said, pushing a sheet of paper toward him. “Tell you what, son. You write me out a little statement, all you just said, the facts you just stated, for the record.”

As he opened his fountain-pen, Judd felt in himself, perhaps a little more faintly but still quite recognizably, that shiver of elation he had experienced when he had first read in the papers of the glasses being found. For he had after all come under suspicion. This had been a mild third degree. He had acquitted himself. He had gone through the sieve.

“I’ll have the boys drive you home, so you won’t be late for your date – birding.” The captain chortled again.

Judd watched himself, so as not to write too much. A paragraph. He wrote fast in a careless hand; one thing was sure, this wouldn’t match his lettering on the envelope of the ransom letter. “This all right?” He passed the sheet to the captain.

The officer read it over slowly; he was a lip-reader, but concealed it by mouthing a cigar. He nodded.

“I’m afraid I haven’t been of much help,” Judd said, rising. A clear, mathematical conviction of superiority had come back to him. Against such people, it was a certainty he and Artie had to succeed.

“Well” – the captain leaned back – “it’s a downtown job now. But we’ve all got to give them all the help we can.”

Judd went to the door, opened it, even enjoying a fluttery feeling that a peremptory voice could still halt him. His two escorts were sitting, idle. They arose as though they had expected him, and led him out to the car.

He thought of asking them to drop him at Artie’s. That was how Artie would have done it – try to scare him by pulling up in a police car. But for himself, Judd reflected, he could enjoy the thought as much as the deed. Artie was excitable; if Artie saw a police car pull up without warning, he might even shoot, or do something equally wild, and give himself away. And anyway, there was just time to keep his date with Ruth.

The two cops dropped him at the house. The maid rushed forward as though she had been waiting at the door. Judd laughed at her. “I’ll bet you were scared I’d never come back.”

“Oh, no.”

“It was just some routine junk about my bird-watching classes.”

He went upstairs. There was an elation in him now over the way he had handled the interrogation. His victory was like a confirmation of his entire code of behaviour. He was right, right, right!

I SEE JUDD then, starting for his date with Ruth, picking up his field glasses to prove he really meant it about going bird-watching. And besides – a weapon? Does he definitely intend…? Let her fate hang on chance. If he spots a warbler. That will be a sign. Do it.

When the bell rings, Ruth goes to the door, while her mother looks out of the window and notices the red Stutz. “My, my! My daughter is getting popular these days,” she comments. “Who is this one?”

“He was out with us last night. Artie’s friend, Judd Steiner.”

“And you’ve got a date already? Fast work,” says her mother. “The Steiners. Is that the millionaire Steiners? Poor Sid, what kind of competition are you giving him?”

“Oh, don’t jump to conclusions, Mother,” Ruth protests. “We just like to talk. He’s very brilliant. He just passed his exam for Harvard Law School, besides being Phi Beta Kappa at seventeen.”

She picks up her scarf and her handbag. “Aren’t you going to ask him up to introduce him?” her mother demands.

“Another time.” And Ruth runs downstairs to where Judd waits in the hallway.

Coming down, she makes a kind of illumination – her reddish hair, her yellow pleated skirt, her bare forearms, the streak of her scarf, giving a passing gladness to the hall. Ruth feels friendly – curious, she would say – toward Judd. Despite his reputation among the co-eds. Some say Judd gives them the creeps.

Ruth hasn’t found him at all repellent. He is somehow a stray person, and her upbringing has been in a house of warmth toward strays. Her mother and father are the kind who, some years back, attended Emma Goldman meetings and collected Yiddish poets visiting from New York, or stray anarchists, or intense-looking men with long hair who were vaguely “studying”.

So what others find odd or even disturbing in Judd rather attracts Ruth. And physically, though Judd is quite short, he is not smaller than she; they danced quite well together. He is something of a change from her gangling reporter.

There is in her, that day, the unworried adventurous confidence of a girl who has a devoted steady and yet is uncommitted, who may tease herself that perhaps there is yet something unknown, something supreme, in romance to be encountered.

With his curious perfection of manners that contains a touch of condescending irony for the custom itself, Judd opens the door of his car for her. Then he walks around to his own side.

As she settles into the fancy car, her skirt rimming her knees, Ruth smiles to Judd. “I almost expected to see you with Artie,” she says. “You’re practically inseparable, aren’t you?”

“Oh, I have a life of my own, too,” he parries. As he drives away with her, he wonders at the unusual feeling of glee that wells up in him. Is this a feeling of happiness? More likely an enjoyment of the power in himself, of his secret imaginings. Can there really be something special about this girl, about having her sitting next to him, and feeling her interest in him? Wryly, Judd permits himself to appreciate the image of the pretty girl and himself, gay youth breezing through the town in his Bearcat!