In the Last Analysis (2 page)

“I don’t know,” Kate said, feeling somewhat ashamed of her outburst into sarcasm, “I don’t even know if she went to him. I gave her his name, address, and telephone number. I mentioned the matter to him. From that moment to this I haven’t seen the girl, nor given her a moment’s thought.”

“Surely the analyst would have mentioned the matter to you, if he had taken her as a patient. Particularly,” Captain Stern added, revealing for the first time a certain store of knowledge, “if he were a good friend.”

Kate stared at him. At least, she thought, we are not playing twenty questions. “I can’t make you believe it, of
course, but he did not mention it, nor would a first-rate analyst do so, particularly if I had not asked him. The man in question is a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and it is against their principles ever to discuss a patient. This may seem strange; nonetheless, it is the simple truth.”

“What sort of girl was Janet Harrison?”

Kate leaned back in the chair, trying to gauge the man’s intelligence. She had learned as a college teacher that if one simplified what one wished to say, one falsified it. It was possible only to say what one meant, as clearly as possible. What could this Janet Harrison have done? Were they trying to establish her instability? Really, this laconic policeman was most trying.

“Captain Stern, while the students are attending classes here, their lives are going on; most of these students are not isolated in dormitories, they are not away from family pressure, financial pressures, emotional pressures of all sorts. They are at an age when, if they are not married—and that is a state which brings its own problems—they are suffering from love or the lack of it. They are going to bed with someone they love, which is to be in one emotional state, or they are going to bed with someone they do not love, which is to be in another, or they are going to bed with no one at all, which is to be in still another. Sometimes they are colored, or the unreligious children of religious parents, or the religious children of unreligious parents. Sometimes they are women torn between mind and family. Often they are in trouble, of one sort or another. As teachers, we know little of this, and if we catch a hint of some of it we are—how shall I put it—not the priest, but the church: we are there; we continue. We speak for something that goes on—art, or science, or
history. Of course, we get the occasional student who tells you about himself even as he breathes; for the most part, we get only the most general impression, apart, of course, from the student’s actual work.

“You ask what sort of girl was Janet Harrison? I tell you all this so that you will understand my answer. I have only an impression. If you ask, Was she the sort to hold up a bank? I would say No, she didn’t seem to me the sort, but I’m not sure I could tell you why. She was an intelligent student, well above the average; she gave me the impression of being able to do excellent work, should she put her mind to it, but her whole mind was never put to it. It was as though a part of her was off somewhere, waiting to see what would happen. Yet you know,” Kate added, “till you asked me, I had not thought of it quite that way.”

“Didn’t you have any idea why she would want to go to a psychoanalyst?”

“No, I did not. People today turn to analysis as they used to turn to—what? God, their minister, their families; I don’t pretend to know. I have heard people say, and only half in fun, that parents had better save now for their child’s analysis as they used to save for his college education. A youngster today, moving in intellectual circles, will, in trouble, turn to psychiatry, and his parents will often help him if they can.”

“And a psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst, will accept any patient who comes to him?”

“Of course not,” Kate said. “But surely you haven’t come here to learn about these matters from me. There are many people competent to discuss …”

“You sent this girl to a psychoanalyst, and he took her as a patient. I would like to know why you thought she should
go to an analyst, and why you thought this analyst would take her.”

“This is my office hour,” Kate said. Not that she minded, on this particular April day, missing the students (“I’m a provisional student, Professor Fansler, and if I don’t get a B- in this course …”), but the thought of the students patiently waiting on the bench, perhaps now overflowing it … Captain Stern had no objection, obviously, to displacing them. Perhaps she should send Captain Stern to Emanuel. All at once, the thought of sitting in her office on a spring day, discussing psychiatry with a police detective, struck her as ludicrous. “Look here, Captain Stern,” she said, “what is it you want to know? Before a good analyst will take on a patient, he must be certain that the patient is qualified for analysis. The patient must be of sufficient intelligence, with certain kinds of problems, with a certain possibility for free development. A psychotic, even certain neurotics, are not proper subjects. Most of all, a patient must
want
to go into analysis, must
want
to be helped. On the other hand, most analysts that I have met believe that any intelligent person can be helped, can be given a greater freedom of activity by a good analysis. If I am asked to recommend a good analyst, I recommend a good one, knowing that a good analyst will only take a patient suitable to analysis, and suitable to analysis by this particular analyst. I can’t be any clearer than that on a subject about which I know remarkably little, and any psychiatrist hearing me now would probably scream in horror and say I’d got it all wrong, which I probably have. Now what in the world has Janet Harrison done?”

“She has been murdered.”

Captain Stern left the words hanging in the air. From
outside came the campus noises of spring. Some fraternity boys were selling raffle tickets on a car. The shadow of someone, probably a student, passed back and forth behind the glass door to Kate’s office.

“Murdered?” Kate said. “But I knew nothing about her. Was she attacked in the street?” Suddenly the girl seemed born again in Kate’s memory, sitting where Captain Stern now sat.
Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio
.

“You said, Miss Fansler, she seemed to be waiting to see what would happen. What did you mean by that?”

“Did I say that? I don’t know what I meant. A way of speaking.”

“Was there
anything
of a personal nature between you and Janet Harrison?”

“No. She was a student.” Suddenly, Kate remembered his first question:
What were you doing yesterday morning?
“Captain Stern, what has this to do with me? Because I gave her the name of an analyst, because she was my student, am I supposed to know who murdered her?”

Captain Stern rose to his feet. “Forgive me for taking the time from your students, Miss Fansler. If I have to see you again, I will try to make it at a more convenient hour. Thank you for answering my questions.” He paused a moment, as though arranging his sentences.

“Janet Harrison was murdered in the office of the psychoanalyst to whom you sent her. Emanuel Bauer is his name. She had been his patient for seven weeks. She was murdered on the couch in his office, the couch on which, as I understand it, patients lie during their analytic hour. She was stabbed with a knife from the Bauer kitchen. We are anxious, of course, to find out all we can about her. There seems to be remarkably little information available. Goodbye for now, Miss Fansler.”

Kate stared after him as he left, closing the door behind him. She had underestimated his flair for the dramatic; that much was clear.
I’ve sent you a patient, Emanuel
. What had she sent him? Where was he now? Surely the police could not imagine that Emanuel had stabbed a patient on his own couch? But how then had the murderer got in? Had Emanuel been there? She picked up the receiver and dialed 9 for an outside line. What was his number? She would not thumb through a phone book. It surprised her to notice, as she dialed 411 for information, that her hand was shaking. “Can you give me the number, please, of Mrs. Nicola Bauer, 879 Fifth Avenue?” Emanuel’s office number was under his name, his home phone under Nicola’s, she remembered that: to prevent patients calling him at home. “Thank you, operator.” She did not write it down, but repeated it over and over to herself. Trafalgar 9. But she had forgotten to dial 9 again for an outside line. Begin again and take it slowly.
Emanuel, what have I done to you?
“Hello.” It was Pandora, the Bauers’ maid. What an amusing name it had once seemed! “Pandora, this is Miss Fansler, Kate Fansler. Please tell Mrs. Bauer that I must speak to her.”

“Just a minute, Miss Fansler, I’ll see.” The phone was laid down. Kate could hear one of the Bauer boys. Then there was Nicola.

“Kate. I suppose you’ve heard.”

“A detective’s been here; I’m in my office. Efficient, laconic, and, I suspect, superficial. Nicki, are they letting you stay there?”

“Oh, yes. Thousands of men have been through the whole place, but they say we can stay. Mother said we should go home with her, but once the policemen cleared out, it seemed better somehow to stay. As though if we left,
we might never come back, Emanuel might never come back. We’ve even kept the boys here. It does seem crazy, I suppose.”

“No, Nicki. I understand. You stay. Can I come and see you? Will you tell me what’s happened? Will they let me come?”

“They’ve only left a policeman outside, to cope with the mobs. There’ve been reporters. We’d like to see you, Kate.”

“You sound exhausted, but I’m coming anyway.”

“I’d like to see you. I don’t know about Emanuel. Kate, I think they think we did it, in Emanuel’s office. Kate, don’t you know an Assistant District Attorney? Maybe you could …”

“Nicki, I’ll be right over. I’ll do anything I can. I’m leaving now.”

Outside the office a few students still waited. Kate rushed past them down the stairs. On that bench, how many months ago, Janet Harrison had waited.
Professor Fansler, could you recommend a good psychiatrist?

T
HERE
is no real reason why psychiatrists should confine themselves to the most elegant residential section of the city. Broadway, for example, is accessible by subway, while Fifth, Madison, Park Avenue, and the side streets which connect them can be reached only by taxi, bus, or on foot. But no psychiatrist would dream of moving west, with the exception of a few brave souls on Central Park West, who apparently find sufficient elegance in the sight of Fifth Avenue across the park. Whether this has formed itself as an equation: East Side = style, psychiatry = style, therefore psychiatry = East Side; whether it is that the West Side and success are unthinkable together, whatever the reason, psychiatrists find themselves, and their patients find them, in the sixties, seventies, perhaps the low eighties, between the avenues. The area is known, in certain circles, as psychiatrists’ row.

The Bauers lived in a ground-floor apartment in the sixties,
just off Fifth Avenue. The building itself was on Fifth Avenue, but Dr. Emanuel Bauer’s office address was 3 East. This added, for some mysterious reason, a note of elegance, as though, living on Fifth Avenue, it was more couth if one did not say so in so many words. What the Bauers’ rent was, Kate had never dared to imagine. Nicola, of course, had money, and since Emanuel’s office was in the apartment, a percentage of the rent was tax deductible. Kate herself lived in a large four-room apartment overlooking the Hudson River, not, as some of her friends said, because she was a reverse snob, but because the old apartments on the East Side were unavailable, and as for the new ones—Kate would rather have pitched a tent than live with a windowless kitchen, with walls so thin one listened, perforce, to the neighbors’ television, with Muzak in the elevators, and goldfish in the lobby. Her ceilings were high, her walls thick, and her elegance faded.

As Kate’s taxi wove in and out of traffic, carrying her to the Bauers’, she thought, not of their rent, but of the apartment’s layout, its convenience for a murderer. In fact, the apartment, when one came to think of it, was designed for intrusion of any sort. The entrance from the street led one into a short hall, with the Bauer apartment on one side, another doctor’s office (he was not in psychiatry, Kate seemed to remember) on the other. Beyond these two entrances, the hall widened into a small lobby, with a bench, an elevator, and a door beyond it to the garage. Although the main lobby of the building was stiff with attendants, this small one boasted only the elevator man who, in keeping with his kind, spent a good part of his time going up to, or down from, the upper floors. When he was in his elevator, the lobby was empty. Neither the Bauers’ apartment nor the office across the hall was locked during the day.
Emanuel’s patients simply walked in and waited in a small waiting room until summoned by Emanuel into his office. Theoretically, if the elevator were up, one could walk in unobserved at any time.

But, of course, there would be other people about. Not to mention the other doctor and his patients and nurse, who seemed to do rather a lot of going and coming, there were Emanuel himself, his patients, possibly one in the office and one waiting, Nicola, the maid, the Bauer boys, Simon and Joshua, friends of Nicola’s, friends of the boys, and of course, Kate realized, anyone living on the upper floors who had entered the building by the side entrance and waited in the small lobby for the elevator. It was becoming increasingly clear to Kate, and probably already clear to the police, that whoever had done this knew the place and the habits of the Bauers. It was a disquieting thought, but Kate refused at this point to give way to its depressing implications. Perhaps, Kate thought, the murderer had been seen. Yet in fact she doubted it. And if he or she had been seen, he or she had probably looked like a quite ordinary tenant, or visitor, or patient, and was therefore quite unmemorable, in fact invisible.

Kate found Nicola stretched out on her bed in the back of the apartment. Kate had walked in unnoticed by anyone except the policeman in the hall, a fact which depressed her still further, though whether she was upset by the ease of her intrusion or the presence of the policeman she could not have said. Nicola was usually to be found in the back. The Bauer living room, visible from the foyer through which the patients passed, was not used during the day or the early hours of the evening when Emanuel had patients. Great care, in fact, as all Nicola’s friends knew, was taken to make sure that the patients saw no one in
Emanuel’s household. And even the boys had become expert at dodging back and forth between the bedroom part of the apartment and the kitchen without meeting a patient.