In the Last Analysis (4 page)

“But you went into the office yesterday at twelve o’clock.”

“Not at twelve, no; I’m usually not home before twelve-thirty, though yesterday I was a little early. Some days I meet someone for lunch, or go downtown, and don’t come home in the early afternoon at all. But yesterday, thank God—I suppose, thank God—I came home early. As I walked into the house, the twelve o’clock patient …”

“Did you recognize him?”

“No, of course not; I’d never seen him before. I mean, the man I later learned was the twelve o’clock patient stuck his head out the hall door and asked if the doctor was meeting his patients. It was twenty-five of one, and the doctor hadn’t come to call him in. Well, you know, Kate, that was extremely odd. Emanuel has never in his life stood up a patient. I knew he had had an eleven o’clock patient (Janet Harrison), and he never tries to dash out in the ten minutes between patients. I wondered what could have happened to him. Could he be in his office, feeling, for some reason, unable to meet a patient? I dialed his office phone from the telephone in the kitchen, and after three rings, the service answered, so I knew he wasn’t there, or wasn’t answering, and then I became worried. Meanwhile, I’d coaxed the patient back into the waiting
room. Of course, I was having all sorts of fantasies about his having had a heart attack in the office, or having been unable to get rid of the eleven o’clock patient—one does have the oddest fantasies at these times—Pandora was in the kitchen with the boys getting lunch, and I went and knocked on the office door. I knew the patient in the waiting room was aware of what I was doing, though he couldn’t see me, but I had to do something, and naturally, no one answered the knock, so I opened the door a bit and stuck my head in. She was right there on the couch, which is near the door; I couldn’t possibly miss seeing her. At first I thought, She’s fallen asleep, but then I saw the knife sticking out of her chest. And Emanuel nowhere to be found. I did have the presence of mind to close the office door and tell the patient he’d better go. He was curious, and clearly reluctant to leave a scene which he sensed was fraught with drama, but I ushered him out. I was extremely calm, as one often is right after a shock.”

“And then you sent for the police?”

“No. Actually I never thought of the police, not then.”

“What
did
you do?”

“I rushed into the office across the hall and got the doctor. He was very nice and came right away, even though he had an office full of patients. His name is Barrister, Michael Barrister. He told me she was dead.”

“D
INNER
seems to be served,” said Emanuel, coming into the bedroom. “Hello, Kate. Pandora has set a place for you. How that woman carries on like this, I don’t know, but she has never had any use for the police.”

“You carry on fairly well yourself,” Kate said.

“Today, after all, was still a bit of the old life for me. The patients didn’t know yet, at least not till the last one at six o’clock. He had an evening paper.”

“Do the papers mention it?” Nicola asked.

“Mention it! I’m afraid at the moment we
are
the news. Psychiatry, couches, female patients, male doctors, knives—one can scarcely blame them. Let’s say good night to the boys and have some dinner.”

But it was not until dinner was over, and they were in the living room, that they talked again of the murder. Kate had half expected Emanuel to disappear, but he seemed to
want to talk. Usually some inner need to “get something done,” to “make use of time,” either drove him from social occasions, or subjected him, if he remained, to the pressure of a mounting inner tension. Yet tonight, with a real problem looming, as it were, in the external world, Emanuel seemed, almost with thankfulness, to have relaxed in the contemplation of something beyond his control. The very externality of the murder gave him a kind of relief. Kate, recognizing this, knew the police would mistake his calm for some symptom, some indication of guilt, when in fact, if they only knew, it was the assurance of his innocence. Had he murdered the girl, the problem would not, of course, have been outside. Yet what policeman in the world could one convince of all this? Stern? Kate forced her thoughts back to the facts.

“Emanuel,” she asked, “where were you between ten of eleven and twelve-thirty? Don’t tell me you suffered a blow on the head and simply wandered about, uncertain of who you were.”

Emanuel looked at her, and then at Nicola, and said to Kate, “How much has she told you?”

“Only the normal routine of the day, really, plus a word or two on the finding of the body. We had, for the moment, skipped over the magic hour.”

“Magic is the word,” Emanuel said. “It was all done with such cleverness that really, you know, I don’t blame the police for suspecting me; I almost suspect myself. When you add to the quite justified suspicions of police, the mysterious and still, I fear, not quite fully American profession of psychiatry, it’s no wonder they assume that I went mad and stabbed the girl on my couch. I don’t think they have any doubts.”

“Why haven’t they arrested you?”

“I wondered that myself, and decided finally that there really isn’t, yet, quite enough evidence. I don’t know much about the ins and outs of this, but I gather the D.A.’s office has to be convinced they’ve got enough evidence to have a good chance for conviction before they’ll allow an arrest and trial. A really clever lawyer (which it is assumed I could afford with ease) would make mincemeat of what they’ve got so far. As I see it, there are two problems: what this will do to me professionally, which I prefer for the moment to ignore, and the fact that as long as they believe I did it they will not really work to find who did. In that case I am doomed, either way.”

Kate felt a great surge of admiration and affection for this deeply intelligent and honest man. No one knew better than she (or, perhaps, did Nicola?) his failure to meet the day-to-day demands of a personal relationship, but at that still center of himself she recognized, as in every crisis she always would, an honor, an identity, that nothing would shatter. She had lived long enough to know that when you find intelligence and integrity in the same individual, you have found a prize.

“I’m surprised they let you go on seeing your patients, even today,” said Nicola, in tones of sarcasm. “Perhaps you might go mad, since we are apparently to consider it a symptom of your profession, and stab another victim. Wouldn’t they look foolish then?”

“On the contrary,” Kate said lightly. “They’d have their case wrapped up. I imagine that partly they are hoping he will do it again, and cast away all doubt, and partly even they, in their dim, methodical way, suspect somewhere in the depths of their beings that Emanuel didn’t do it.” Her
eyes met Emanuel’s and then dropped, but he had seen the faith, and it had strengthened him.

“The irony great enough to make Shakespeare howl,” Emanuel said, “is that the girl had recently become very angry, which means transference. When she canceled today, I assumed it was because of that, and didn’t feel surprised. How clever we like to think we are!”

“Did she call you to cancel the appointment?”

“I didn’t speak to her, but in the normal course of events that is hardly surprising. She and the twelve o’clock patient—who later showed up and catapulted Nicki into finding the body—both of them, I learned at about five of eleven, had canceled their appointments.”

“Isn’t that a bit unusual?”

“Not really. As a rule, of course, two patients don’t cancel in a row, but it’s by no means extraordinary. Sometimes patients hit a patch of difficult material, and just can’t face it for a while. It happens in the course of every analysis. Or they tell themselves they’re too tired, or too busy, or too upset. Freud came to understand this very early. It’s one of the reasons we insist on charging patients for canceled appointments, even where they appear to have, do have, a perfectly legitimate excuse. People who don’t understand psychiatry are always shocked and think we are moneygrubbers, but the whole mechanism of paying, and even sacrificing to pay for an analysis, is an important part of the therapy.”

“How did you learn at five of eleven that they had both canceled?”

“I called the exchange and they told me.”

“The exchange is the answering service? Do you call them every hour?”

“Not unless I know there’s been a call.”

“You mean while you were in there with a patient, the phone rang, and you didn’t answer it?”

“The phone doesn’t ring; it has a yellow light which flashes on and off instead of a ring. The patient can’t see it from the couch. If I don’t answer after three rings, or three flashes, the exchange answers. Of course, I don’t interrupt patients by answering the phone.”

“Did you find out who spoke to the exchange to cancel the appointments? Was it a man and a woman, or a man for both, or what?”

“I thought of that, of course, first thing, but when I got to the exchange someone else was on duty, and they don’t keep any record of the voice they spoke to, merely the message and the time. Doubtless the police will look into it more carefully.”

Nicola, who had been sitting quietly during this exchange, whirled around to face Kate. “Before you ask another question, let me ask you something. This is the part that sticks in the throats of the police; I know it is, but maybe Emanuel has talked to enough people about it so that they’ll find out it’s probably true, and anyway we’ve met other psychiatrists who do the same things because they feel so shut up.”

“Nicki, dear,” Kate said, “not to mention your pronouns, I haven’t an idea in the world what you’re talking about.”

“Of course not; I haven’t asked you the question yet. Here it is: If a patient of Emanuel’s canceled, what would Emanuel do?”

“Go somewhere. No matter where, just go.”

“You see,” Nicola said. “Everyone knows that. I’d guess
you’d go down to Brentano’s to browse among the paper books, and my mother, when I asked her that question, decided he’d think of an errand, somewhere, he simply had to do, but the important point is that the police cannot understand that a psychiatrist, who must sit quietly all day listening, relaxes by moving. They think if he wasn’t harboring nefarious plans, he would have stayed nicely in his office like any other sane person, catching up on his correspondence. At his
most
abandoned, they are convinced he would have called up a friend and had lunch downtown with two vodka cocktails first. It’s no good telling them that Emanuel never eats lunch,
certainly
never eats it with anyone else, and in any case is not geared to calling people up for lunch because he’s never, except for a fluke like this—and now that I think of it, it isn’t a fluke, it was planned—free for lunch.”

“What did you do, Emanuel?” Kate asked.

“I walked around the reservoir; round and round and round, at a kind of trot.”

“I know; I’ve seen you; I’ve trotted too.” It had been long ago, before Nicola, when she was still young enough to run just for the hell of it.

“It was spring; the spring was in my blood.” Kate thought of the chalk inscription. She seemed to have viewed it in another lifetime. She was suddenly dog tired, and felt herself collapse, like one of those cartoon figures she remembered from her childhood who discovered they were sitting on nothing, and then fell to the floor. From the first emotional shock of Detective Stern’s announcement—
She has been murdered
—until this moment, she had allowed no feeling to cluster about the idea of Emanuel’s situation. Particularly, she had excluded from her attention the question of responsibility for this situation. She
was sufficiently logical, even in this state of emotional and physical exhaustion, not to hold herself wholly to blame. She could not have known the girl would be murdered, could not have guessed—indeed, could not have imagined—that she would be murdered in Emanuel’s office. Had such an idea crossed her mind, Kate would have decided that, in Nicola’s language, she was “hallucinating.”

Yet if Kate was no more than a single link in the chain of events which had led to this disaster, she had, nonetheless, a responsibility, not only to Emanuel and Nicola, but to herself, perhaps also to Janet Harrison.

“Do you remember that joke of a few years ago?” she said to them, “the one about the two psychiatrists on the stairs, and one of them gooses the other. The goosed one is at first rather angry, and then, shrugging his shoulders, dismisses the incident. ‘After all,’ he is supposed to have said, ‘it’s
his
problem.’ Well, I can’t do the same; it’s my problem too, even if you were not my friends.”

From the way in which Emanuel and Nicola avoided looking at each other, or at her, she knew this point had been at least mentioned between them. “In fact,” she continued, “regarded in a certain light, shall we say the light of the police, I’m a rather nice suspect myself. The detective who came to see me asked what I was doing yesterday morning. It may have been what they call ‘routine’; it may not.”

Emanuel and Nicola stared at her. “That’s absolute nonsense,” Emanuel said.

“No more nonsense, really, than that you should have murdered her in your own office, or that Nicola might have. Look at it from Detective Stern’s point of view: I know the routine, more or less, of your household and office. As it happens, I didn’t know about your telephone,
about its lighting up instead of ringing, or about your not answering when a patient is there, but there’s only my word for that. I sent the girl to Emanuel. Perhaps I was madly jealous of her, or had stolen her money, or one of her literary ideas, and seized the chance to kill her.”

“But you didn’t have any personal connection with her, did you?” Nicola asked.

“Of course I didn’t. But neither, I assume, did Emanuel. Yet the police must suppose there was some connection, a mad passion or something of the sort, if he was going to kill her in his office. I don’t imagine they suppose he went off his head all of a sudden, and stabbed her in the middle of one of her more interesting free associations.”

“She was very beautiful,” Nicola said. She dropped the sentence, like an awkward gift from a child, into their laps. Both Emanuel and Kate started to say “How do you know?” Neither of them said it. Could Nicki have noticed the girl was beautiful in the moment when she saw her dead? With a shock, Kate remembered the girl’s beauty. It had not been of the flamboyant sort toward which men turned their heads on the street, around which they clustered at a party. That sort of beauty, as like as not, is the result of startling coloring, and a certain pleasing symmetry of the face. Janet Harrison had had what Kate called beauty in the bones. The finely chiseled features, the planes of the face, the deep-set eyes, the broad, clear forehead—these made her beauty which, at the second or third look, suddenly presented itself as though it had been in hiding.
My God
, Kate thought, remembering,
it needed only that
. “The point I was going to make,” she went on after a moment, “is that I feel a responsibility for all this, a guilt if you will, and if nothing else you will certainly be helping
me if you allow me to get everything that happened, as far as you know it, straight in my mind. I see fairly clearly how the day went. At ten-thirty Nicola had left, and Emanuel was in his office with the ten o’clock patient when the phone light flashed to indicate a call. Did it flash once, I mean for just one call, or twice?”