Steiner’s head was shaking again; he couldn’t understand. “You never blame anyone?”

“Yes. Yes, I do believe there is blame. But I try not to blame right away.” He held his pipe elegantly.

“I don’t understand.” Steiner turned away. “I don’t understand.”

The other men were in a circle, their voices subdued, for there had come up a remaining part of the subject so disagreeable to touch that each had held off from it. Judah Steiner did not know, at first, what they referred to, for he had found himself unable to look at the newspapers. But he caught their words now. Ferdinand Feldscher was saying, “It’s to be expected Horn will try to pin every unsolved crime of the last five years on them.” The newspapers were asking about that horrible crime of a few months ago, the taxi driver who had been found mutilated, the “gland robbery” on the South Side. Two assailants, he had said.

“But he admitted he never got a good look at them; he could never identify his assailants,” one of the others insisted.

“Well, maybe I shouldn’t mention this,” Max put in, his voice quite low and solemn. “But at my engagement party Artie kept talking all the time about the kidnapping, saying he bet the same criminals committed the two crimes. A lot of people heard him. Someone is liable to remember it now.”

James Straus said, with his hasty way of getting rid of something nasty, “In the Examiner they mention that student who left the house to mail a letter and was found drowned. Artie knew him. Perry Rosoff.”

“That poor Rosoff boy was a suicide,” Uncle Gerald stated.

Hesitantly, James suggested, “Wouldn’t it be better if we asked the boys about all this?”

There was a silence, a fear-laden silence. Then Gerald said, “Can’t we wait and deal with these matters when and if any evidence is offered?”

The group began to break up.

“If there is anything like that,” Ferdinand Feldscher said to his brother Edgar, “can there still be a question of sanity?”

We were all, by then, puzzling over the other crimes. Tom recalled that strange stormy letter stolen from Judd’s desk. About betraying Artie to a friend. Couldn’t that have been about the other crimes? And the friend, Willie Weiss, was the same fellow they had lunched with on the day of the murder! None of us had talked to Weiss. True, the police had checked and dismissed him. Still, shouldn’t we try to see Willie?

Tom had to go home; he explained he always had Sunday dinner with his folks. We agreed I should try to see Willie Weiss by myself. This time he proved not difficult to find. I phoned his home and was told he had gone over to do some work at the lab.

Working at the end of the long room was a round-shouldered figure in a smeared lab coat, perched on a high stool. “Weiss?” I said.

He had a long, narrow head, held a trifle cocked to one side; his eyes were keen, but his dark skin was completely pocked and his nose was a caricature. “The Horrible Hebe”, we learned Judd called him, and he was ugly in the grand manner. As he slipped off the stool, I saw that he was dwarfish, the head overlarge.

Willie didn’t seem hostile. Indeed, before I could ask him any questions, he was drawing out from me in extreme detail everything I had done on the story, getting me particularly to tell how Artie had injected himself among the reporters, even among the detectives, with his advice, theories, clues.

“True to form, true to form,” Willie kept saying about Artie’s behaviour, and then, “I would have guessed he’d be the first one to break down and confess.”

I observed to Willie that he probably knew them better than anybody.

“You think I was a third member of the team?” He grinned. “Sure, we had lunch regularly every Wednesday. I was studying them.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. I’m interested in their psychology. You seen them since they confessed?”

“I just came from there,” I said. “The State’s Attorney had a couple of alienists in the office, questioning them.”

“Yes?” He was full of curiosity. “Who?”

“Dr. Ball. And Stauffer.”

“Pretty good men,” he conceded. He wanted to know what they had asked. I said they had only had the boys repeat their story of the crime.”

Hadn’t they asked anything about their life? Their homes? Their families? Their childhood? Hadn’t they advanced any idea about what made the boys do it?

“No,” I said, “they just asked them if they knew right from wrong.”

“Goyishe kep!” Willie snapped. His use of the Yiddish expression, dumbheaded gentiles, came with a sidewise grin to me.

Since he was studying them, I asked, did he have any idea what made the boys do it?

Only the beginning of a theory, Willie said. Those alienists – had they questioned the boys about the weapon, the particular choice of weapon?

“No,” I replied. “Why?”

“Just curious,” Willie said. And he moved to turn back to his work. I stopped him with a direct attack. Had he ever known about other stuff they had done? What about that famous letter of Judd’s?

“What about it?” Willie grew a trifle sharp.

It just sounded, I said, as if Judd had revealed to him some crime that Artie had committed.

“That’s an interesting assumption,” Willie said. “So you connect it with all that junk in today’s paper about additional crimes?” He kept looking at me. “Nah, all Judd did was to hint around to me that he knew things about Artie that I didn’t know.” He mimicked, “‘Artie tells me secrets he doesn’t tell you!’ You know the way girls are with their little whisperings.” Willie shook his head in admiration of his own perceptiveness. “Pure feminine psychology.”

But even if they were perverts, I said, the way the crime now seemed to have been done, that had nothing to do with it.

Did I know anything about the new psychology? Willie asked. About Sigmund Freud?

I knew the catchwords: complexes, suppressed desires.

“It’s my field,” Willie announced.

Did the Freud stuff help him to understand Judd and Artie? I asked.

No, no, he was far from understanding. Weiss was entirely serious with me now. “Only I’ve had a kind of hunch,” he said. It kept sitting on his mind that there was a significance in a couple of things – two things that might turn out to contain the key.

What two things? What were they?

“The implement,” he said, “the implement, and then, the burial place.”

“The implement?”

Yes. The weapon. The chisel wrapped around with tape.

So unused were we, in those days, to thinking in symbols that are today common to every imagination, that even under Willie’s shrewd prodding the meaning of it did not occur to me.

As for the burial place, I thought he meant the swamp, in its entirety. Was he perhaps hinting that other bodies might be found there? I asked him this, point-blank.

Willie must have decided then, that I was after all not too bright. Then, like an exasperated teacher, he gave me one more chance. “Who do you suppose they were really trying to kill?”

This time, as by telepathy, I caught his meaning. “Themselves?”

He gave me the smile of reward to a dense pupil who has at last come through with one correct answer. On the first plane, yes, he agreed, self-destructiveness was clear in both of them. Look at the way Artie drove a car – he had been in any number of accidents – and look at Judd’s dropping his glasses.

“Yes, of course,” I said.

But self-destructiveness wasn’t enough of an answer, Willie declared. Had I read the confessions? The different people they had picked to kill, at one time or another during their planning stage?

“Yes, you were on the list,” I said. “But everybody has a little list.”

He brushed aside my remark. “But whom did those people represent? Whom did they really want to kill?” He stared at me. “It would make a fascinating study. Fascinating. What an opportunity! Now that they’re isolated. What an opportunity for a great study!”