The Interpretation Of Murder Read Online Free Page A

the law. When this admonition failed
appreciably to move Mr Banwell, the coroner added that he knew a reporter for
the Herald who found murder and obstruction of justice highly newsworthy.
Reluctandy, Banwell yielded.
        The coroner had brought his old,
bulky box camera with him. This he now put to use, replacing the exposed plate
with a fresh one after each smoky detonation of his flashlight. Banwell
remarked that if the pictures made their way to the Herald, the coroner
could be sure he would never be employed in New York or anywhere else again.
Hugel did not reply; at that moment a strange whine began to fill the room,
like the quiet cry of a violin stretched to its highest note. It seemed to have
no source, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. It rose louder and
louder, until it became almost a wail. The maid screamed. When she finished,
there was no sound in the room at all.
        Mr Banwell broke the silence. 'What
the devil was that?' he asked the manager.
        'I don't know, sir,' replied the
manager. 'It's not the first time. Perhaps some settling in the walls?'
        'Well, find out,' said Banwell.
        When the coroner finished his
photography, he announced he was leaving and taking the body with him. He had
no intention of questioning the help or the neighboring residents - which was
not his job - or of waiting for Detective Littlemore. In this heat, he
explained, decomposition would rapidly set in if the corpse was not refrigerated
at once. With the assistance of two elevator men, the girl's body was taken
down to the basement in a freight elevator and from there to a back alley,
where the coroner's driver was waiting.
        When, two hours later, Detective
Jimmy Littlemore arrived - not in uniform - he was flummoxed. It had taken some
time for the mayor's messenger boys to find Littlemore; the detective had been
in the basement of the new police headquarters still under construction on
Centre Street, trying out the pistol range. Littlemore's orders were to make a
thorough inspection of the murder scene. Not only did he find no murder scene,
he found no murderee. Mr Banwell would not speak with him. The staff also
proved surprisingly untalkative.
        And there was one person whom
Detective Littlemore did not even get a chance to interview: the maid who had
found the body. After Coroner Hugel left but before the detective arrived, the
manager had called the young woman to his office and handed her an envelope
with her month's pay - minus one day, of course, since it was only August 30.
He informed the girl he was letting her go. 'I'm sorry, Betty,' he said to her.
'I'm really sorry.'

 
        Before anyone else was up, I examined
the Monday morning newspapers in the opulent rotunda of the Hotel Manhattan,
where Clark University was housing Freud, Jung, Ferenczi, and myself for the
week. (Brill, who lived in New York, did not require a room.) Not one of the
papers carried a story about Freud or his upcoming lectures at Clark. Only the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung ran anything at all, and this was a notice
announcing the arrival of a 'Dr Freund from Vienna.'
        I never intended to be a doctor. It
was my father's wish, and his wishes were supposed to be our commands. When I was
eighteen and still living in my parents' house in Boston, I told him I was
going to be America's foremost scholar of Shakespeare. I could be America's
hindmost scholar of Shakespeare, he replied, but fore or hind, if I did not
intend to pursue a career in medicine, I would have to find my own means of
paying Harvard's tuition.
        His threat had no effect on me. I
didn't care at all for the family's Harvardiana, and I would be happy, I told
my father, to complete my education elsewhere. This was the last conversation
of any length I ever had with him.
        Ironically, I was to obey my father's
wish only after he no longer had any money to withhold from me. The collapse of
Colonel Winslow's