A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion by Ron Hansen

would kill her in September 1927.
    “We aren’t eating,” Ruth said. “We have to go.”
    Dr. Syd filled his own highball glass of ginger ale and ice with bourbon from his flask and slid the hooch across to Judd as Ethel instructed him on their scheme for the night. She said she was in love with Syd and was separated from her husband, Eddie. She had no grounds for divorce yet because New York courts required proof of either extreme physical brutality or sexual infidelity. Eddie was not a smack-a-woman kind of guy, but Ethel guessed he was like a lot of bimbos on the force, extracting sex from whores insteadof cuffing them, only she’d never caught him at it. She wanted to nail Eddie for alimony, so she needed a camera shot of her ex as he was entangled with some doll.
    Dr. Syd translated, “In the very act of committing the offense.”
    “And that’s where you come in,” Ruth said.
    Ethel reached under her chair and hauled up a rectangular leather holster containing an Autographic Kodak camera that she handed across to Judd. “We’ll get in Syd’s car, you’ll hire a prostitute—”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    Syd inserted, “I can’t risk losing my medical license.”
    “But what about
my
reputation?”
    Ethel screamed, “You’re a corset salesman!”
    Ruth laid a hand of solace atop his. “We get some hotsy-totsy girl and take her to Eddie’s apartment. She’ll knock on his door and say she got stood up or something and it’s freezing outside.”
    Judd felt offended but oddly excited. “Have you any idea how
insane
this is?” And yet he stayed there with Syd’s bourbon.
    Ethel said, “Eddie will let her in, maybe give her a highball, and we’ll have her say how grateful she is, how can she ever repay him? Eddie’s easily tempted. And when things get hot and heavy, you’ll burst in and snap a picture.”
    “Et voilà,”
Syd said.
    “Easy as pie,” Ethel said.
    Six drinks later and Judd was drunk enough to do it, strolling up to a chilly girl in a raccoon coat in what was called “the Circus” around 42nd Street. Weaving a little, he too loudly inquired, “Say there, are you a harlot?”
    She gave him a
You have got to be kidding me—harlot?
look, but flashed open her raccoon coat to show she wore nothing underneath it. Judd escorted her to Syd’s Packard and the five of them headed across the East River to Eddie’s apartment in the Bronx.
    But Eddie wasn’t there. Syd and Ethel and the girl waited in the heated Packard as Ruth and Judd hung out inside the building and were so publicly affectionate in the hallway that renters were able to identify them a full year later. And when Ethel went inside again she threatened to take a Kodak picture of Judd’s “hands on the prowl.” They were still all over each other when Ethel kidded her older cousin, “Have you heard the saying that a man’s kiss is his signature?”
    Ruth unclenched and shifted her dress as she answered, “Mae West, right?”
    “How’s Judd sign his name?”
    She smiled at him. “Legibly.”
    At ten Eddie still hadn’t shown and the harlot reminded them that her meter was still running, so Syd ferried them back to 42nd Street and paid the girl for her time. Judd found a tailor shop with a backroom speakeasy where they sold him a 1911 quart bottle of Old Overholt Straight Rye Whiskey, and he swallowed a third of it as Ethel snuggled into Syd in the front seat and Syd drove Ruth and Judd to the Waldorf-Astoria. Looking into the rearview mirror at Judd, the physician said, “Every man has his own code of sexual morality, his own instincts of right and wrong toward womanhood. I happened to meet Ethel at the right psychological moment and our souls and beings were thrown into a turmoil of love. Those passions demand reciprocation. And so, like you, we have lavished affections upon each other despite commitments elsewhere. There is no possible weighing of responsibility to others in such a thrall as ours, and no way