Judd confronted them. “But I typed on my own machine, on my desk. Don’t you remember? Harry Marks must have brought along the portable.”

Milt Lewis looked right into his eyes for the first time. “That was your machine. You had it right there. You bragged about having two typewriters, one for travelling.”

Horn thanked the boys, and they went out.

They stood with us in the other room.

We waited, as outside a hospital door, for the doctor to emerge. But still it did not happen, and after a time the three boys departed.

Across the street from the hotel, the Steiner chauffeur appeared in the State’s Attorney’s offices, carrying a suitcase of clothing. As he turned it over to Healy, reporters surrounded him for a feature story.

Emil fled. He drove all the way back to the house. Somehow, while on the family’s errand, he had not been able to bring up his own thing. But back in the garage, he could not get out of the automobile. His wife came down. “I won’t be able to sleep,” Emil said.

So he drove back downtown on his own errand.

It was just then that Horn and Padua, still unable to break Judd’s denials, decided to try a little stratagem.

During the evening’s frantic activity about Judd’s typewriter, little attention had been paid to Artie. Hour after hour, he had been sitting in the assistant’s office; Swasey didn’t even ask him any more questions.

Now Padua came in. Artie jumped up. He confronted Padua. “Hey, maybe you can give me a straight answer. Am I supposed to be under arrest, or what?”

Padua smiled.

“You’re holding me, aren’t you?”

“Well, you guessed it,” said Padua.

“What for?” demanded Artie, with a show of petulance. “You haven’t got anything on me. I’ve told you all I know.”

“You said you were with Judd Steiner all that day and evening.”

“Yah, sure.”

“Okay. Things don’t look too good for your friend. Besides the glasses, it turns out that his typewriter was the one the ransom letter was written on. Since you admit you were with him all the time, whatever we’ve got him for, we’ve got you for.”

Artie’s cheek was twitching. “Are you nuts!” he shouted. “I told you we just went to pick up some janes.”

“Yah, I know, that’s what you both said.”

It was then that the chauffeur walked in. He marched past everybody toward the glass-doored offices. It was so unexpected that no one moved to stop him. Opening the door Emil stood rigid, like some converted sinner intensifying his resolve to confess. “I want to talk to the State’s Attorney.”

Startled, Padua said, “The State’s Attorney is busy. What’s it about?”

“I’m the chauffeur for the Steiner family.”

“Yes, I know. I’ve seen you. Bring Judd’s toothbrush?”

“I have some information I must give,” Emil stated.

Padua’s manner changed. “I’m the attorney’s assistant. You can tell me.”

Artie everyone listened. “I saw in the papers that Junior said he was driving the Stutz all day, the day it happened. I have to say that is a mistake. The Stutz was in the garage; he left it for me to put oil on the brakes; they were squeaking.”

Artie seemed to sway. His gaze went from Emil to Padua. Then he moved back, and folded on to a chair. Not the glasses, not even the typewriter had had this effect on him. For both those points, there had been some degree of preparation. But Emil’s testimony fitted into that detective-story nightmare, the insignificant, forgotten detail.

Padua was leaning over him. “All right,” Artie gasped, and ran his tongue over his lips, his eyes still evading, evading. “All right. Can I have a glass of water?”

Padua hurried to the cooler, brought the water. Swasey pushed us away from the doorway, Emil among us, and closed the door.

Emil swallowed, staring at the closed glass door. He had the bewildered look of a man who only gave someone a shove, a tiny push. How could he know the fellow would crumple, collapse? Healy led him into another room before we could ask him any questions.

We waited. The men from the morning papers kept calling their offices, telling them to hold open for the big story.

Presently, Czewicki came hurrying through, from the hotel. He went into the corner office. After a brief interval, he emerged, his expression hovering between a smirk and fright, his wide cheeks seeming to wobble.

We besieged him. “Is he confessing? Did they do it?”

“It’s on the way,” Czewicki said, officiously, happily. “It’s going on right now.” And he rushed back to the hotel to give his details to Horn.

There, the chief came out into the hallway to meet him, and they walked up and down, Horn’s arms already making his choppy courtroom movements. Then the State’s Attorney returned to the room where Judd sat. “Your partner is confessing,” Horn said. Judd didn’t blink.

“All right,” Horn said. “What about the Driv-Ur-Self agency? What about registering at the Morrison Hotel?”

Judd gave him an almost abashed look. He arose, moving about in distress, murmuring, “He can’t be! He would stick till hell freezes over!”

“He says it was all your idea,” Horn continued in a quiet voice, not without sympathy. “And you’re the one that struck the fatal blow.”

If maturity can ever be traced to a single moment, perhaps this was the instant of transition for Judd Steiner. He began to shake his head, slowly. “Oh, the weakling,” he said. Then, with a spurt of anger: “So Mr. Straus imagines he can blame it all on me. You can go back and inform Mr. Straus that I shall tell the truth. The account I give shall be precisely accurate and complete.” Judd drew a full breath, then added, with a kind of satisfaction, as if after all the main results would be as desired, “I shall reveal the true purpose and meaning of the deed.”

We waited half through the night, with the news leaking out to us. The confessions were going well. The time was long because the State’s Attorney was going over each fact, nailing down the evidence so every point could be proven even if later some smart lawyers had the boys withdraw their statements.

Thus we hovered between the two rooms, catching bits of the story, certain it was turning out to be a sex murder, perversion, with the ransom plan tacked on to cover the act. We waited, the hours broken only by a call from Louisville informing the State’s Attorney that the almost forgotten drug clerk, Holmes, had died without talking.

Behind each door the story was pouring forth; each of the culprits seemed bent on getting ahead of the other. And as usual when it came right down to the end, Horn’s assistants let us know, these smarties were like everyone else – they were frantically blaming each other.

Then gradually a new and curious idea came out to us. This different idea was being insisted upon especially by Judd, with a kind of triumphant disdain for the authorities who, even with the murderers in their hands, failed to see the real nature of the crime. Judd vowed that lust really had nothing to do with it. And as for money – would two millionaire boys risk their lives for ten thousand dollars? He had a strange explanation to offer. This was a crime for its own sake. It was a crime in a vacuum, a crime in a perfectly frozen nothingness, where the atmosphere of motive was totally absent.

And as we learned how Artie and Judd thought of their crime, the whole event again became a mystery. For was even their own notion of it the truth?

We could, in that night, only grasp their claim of an experiment, an intellectual experiment, as Judd put it, in creating a perfect crime. Their act sought to isolate the pure essence of murder.

Before, we had thought the boys could only have committed the murder under some sudden dreadful impulse. But now we learned how the deed had been marked by a long design developed in full detail. What was new to us was this entry into the dark, vast area of death as an abstraction. Much later, we were to seek the deeper cause that compelled these two individuals to commit this particular murder under the guise, even the illusion, that it was an experiment.