In the Last Analysis (7 page)

“Really?”
Kate said. “She didn’t look it.”

“Apparently not. She’s a U.S. citizen, and went to college at some place called Collins. The university noticed that the ‘person to notify in case of emergency’ section was not filled out, and the omission apparently went unnoticed in the rush of registration. That’s about it, I think,” Reed finished up, “except for one little matter I’ve saved, with my well-known flair for the dramatic, till the end: Nicola Bauer wasn’t at her analyst’s the morning of the murder. She called up at the last minute to cancel the appointment. The police have just managed to reach her analyst. She claims to have spent the morning wandering in the park, not around the reservoir, but near something she calls the old castle. People do, of course, spend a remarkable amount of innocent time wandering about, but that
both
of the Bauers should have ambled separately around Central Park while someone was being murdered in their apartment is difficult for the Deputy Inspector wholly to believe. With all the good will in the world, I can’t help seeing his point.”

Reed got up, and very kindly poured Kate another
drink. “Just keep in mind, please, Kate, that they may have done it. I don’t say they did; I don’t say I shan’t sympathize with your conviction that they didn’t; I’ll help you any way I can. But, please, as a favor to me, keep in the back of your mind an awareness of the possibility that they may be guilty. Janet Harrison was a very beautiful girl.”

K
ATE
had met Emanuel at a time when they had both gone stale, when the world seemed to each flat and unprofitable, if not out of joint. They happened, in fact, to meet at that identical point in their lives when each was committed to a career, but had not yet admitted the commitment. Their meeting had been the one romantic (in the movie sense) moment in both their lives, and though Kate may have been what Emanuel was later to call “projecting,” it seemed to her even then that they both realized they had met dramatically, because destined to meet, that they were further destined never to marry, never wholly to part.

They had crashed into each other, literally, on an exit road from the Merritt Parkway. Kate, as she was soon to point out to him, was exiting in the proper fashion, as anyone might be expected to do. Emanuel, quite on the contrary, was backing up the exit road toward the parkway
from which he had just mistakenly emerged. It was dusk; Kate’s mind was on the directions she had to follow, Emanuel’s, still seething, was apparently not functioning at all. It was a very pretty crash.

They ended up, after a certain amount of expostulation which soon turned to laughter, driving to a restaurant in Emanuel’s car, from which they telephoned for aid for Kate’s car. They both forgot that they were expected elsewhere, Emanuel because, as Nicola was later to say, forgetting was his favorite sport, and Kate deliberately because she did not want her hosts to come for her. She had not “fallen in love” with Emanuel; she would never be “in love” with him. But she wanted to stay with him that evening.

Walking now to Emanuel’s home, with Reed’s warning of the night before still ringing in her ears, Kate thought how difficult it would be (might turn out to be) to explain their relationship to a policeman. She was walking from Riverside Drive to Fifth Avenue in the hope that the exercise and air might clear her head, and it occurred to her that even this act might seem, to certain people, inexplicable. Suppose someone were murdered now in her apartment; what sort of alibi would it be, the simple statement that she had decided to walk halfway across the city? True, Emanuel and Nicola, whose alibis were similar to this, had not had a destination, but had been seized with an unaccountable desire to wander; true, it was difficult to get into her apartment and it was impossible to think of anyone capable of being murdered there. The fact still remained that she and the Bauers lived their lives in a way for which nothing in a policeman’s training prepared him.

The support which she and Emanuel had found in each other in the year following their meeting grew from a
relationship for which the English language itself lacked a defining word. Not a friendship, because they were man and woman, not a love affair, because theirs was far more a meeting of minds than of passions, their relationship (an inexact and lifeless term) had given each a vantage point from which to view his life, had given them for a time the gift of laughter and intense discussion whose confidence would be held forever inviolable. They had been lovers for a time—they had no one but themselves to consider—yet this had been far from central to their mutual need. After that first year, they would no more have considered making love than of opening a mink ranch together, yet were there more than a handful of people in the world who could have understood this?

When she reached Nicola’s room, Kate, physically exhausted and proportionately less perturbed, found that Nicola’s thoughts had been running along the same lines. She had been thinking, that is, not about Emanuel and Kate, but of how few people there were who understood morality apart from convention.

“We have spent this morning and the greater part of yesterday with the police,” Nicola said, “being questioned separately, and a bit together, and though they are not actually offensive, as a Berlitz teacher will not actually speak English in teaching you French, they indicate in a thousand little ways that we are both liars, or at least one of us is, and if we would just break down and admit it we would be saving the state and them endless amounts of trouble. Of course, Emanuel has gone stubborn, and won’t tell them anything about Janet Harrison. He claims he’s not just being noble, guarding the secrets of the confessional and all that; he simply doesn’t see what good it would do, for it would probably just get us in deeper. Don’t
you
know anything devastating about her, from that college of yours? Why, by the way, aren’t you there? It’s Friday, isn’t it?” Nicola’s ability to remember the details of everyone’s schedule (“I called because I knew you’d just have gotten in from walking the dog,” she had said once to an astonished and recent acquaintance) was one of the most notable things about her.

“I got someone else to take my classes,” Kate said. “I didn’t feel up to it.” She was, in fact, extremely guilty about this, remembering someone’s definition of the professional as the man who could perform even when he didn’t feel like it.

“The horrible thing is,” Nicola continued, “none of them understands in the least what we’re like; they all think we’re some special species of madmen who have taken to psychiatry because all sane pursuits are beyond us. I don’t mean that they don’t know all about psychiatry in a theoretical sort of way—I suppose they are used to the testimony of psychiatrists and all that—but people like us who take unscheduled walks, and talk frankly about jealousy and feelings of aggression, and yet insist that because we talk about them we are not likely to act them out, well, the only thing about me that seemed to make sense to one detective was that my father had gone to Yale Law School. They got out of me that you and Emanuel had once been lovers, by the way, and then concluded, I am certain, that we must all be living in some fantastic Noel Cowardish sort of way because we are all friends now and I allow you into my house. You know, Kate, they could understand a man’s cheating on his expense account, or going out with call girls when his wife thinks he’s on a business trip, but I think we frighten them because we claim to be honest underneath, though a bit casual on the
surface, whereas they understand dishonesty, but not the abandonment of surface rectitude. Probably they are convinced there’s something indecent about a man’s taking twenty dollars from a woman so that she can lie on a couch and talk to him.”

“I think,” Kate said, “that the police are rather like the English as Mrs. Patrick Campbell saw them. She said the English didn’t care what people did as long as they didn’t do it in the street and frighten the horses. I don’t suppose the police are actively opposed to anything about Emanuel or you or me or psychiatry. It’s just that all this has frightened the horses, and unfortunately the police do not sufficiently understand the integrity of psychiatry—where it is practiced with integrity, and we might as well admit it isn’t always—to know that Emanuel is the last person who could have murdered the girl. Where
were
you, yesterday morning, by the way, and why the hell didn’t you mention that you hadn’t been to your analyst’s when you were outlining the day?”

“How did you learn I hadn’t been there?”

“I have my methods; answer the questions.”

“I don’t know why I didn’t tell you, Kate. I meant to, every time it came up, but one dislikes behaving like a coward, and dislikes even more talking about it. Believe it or not—and the police don’t—I was walking around in the park, by the castle and the lake there, where the Japanese cherry blossoms are. It’s always been my favorite place, ever since I was very little and held my breath and turned blue if the nurse tried to go somewhere else.”

“But
why
,
why
did you have to pick this one morning to revive childhood memories, when you could have been doing it on Dr. Sanders’s couch, and giving yourself a magnificent alibi at the same time?”

“Nobody told me Janet Harrison was going to be murdered on Emanuel’s couch. At any rate, I think it’s better this way; if I had an alibi, that would leave Emanuel the chief and only suspect. This way, the police aren’t quite ready to arrest him. After all, they’ve got just as much against me as against Emanuel.”

“Does the psychiatrist’s wife usually come in, in a natural sort of way, and sit down behind the patient? Never mind; I still want to know why you didn’t go to your appointment with Dr. Sanders.”

“Kate, you’re getting like the police, wanting neat, reasonable answers to everything. There are some people who keep every appointment with their analyst, and always arrive promptly—I’m sure there are—but more people like me turn cowardly. There are several common defenses: arriving late, saying nothing, talking about other matters and avoiding the troublesome problem—in which case, of course, one just keeps coming back to it until one does face it. Mostly I use the system of intellectualizing, but on
the
day I just felt it was spring and I couldn’t manage it. I got as far as Madison Avenue and decided, so I went to the park instead. Needless to say, I had no idea Emanuel would be wandering around the park at the same time.”

“Did you call Dr. Sanders and say you weren’t coming?”

“Of course; it would be most unfair to keep him sitting there, instead of letting him have the hour free. Possibly
he
likes to run around the reservoir; it’s a pity he didn’t; he might have met Emanuel.”

“Would Emanuel know him?”

“Well, they’re both at the institute.”

“Nicki, did anybody see you leave for what you thought
would be an appointment with your psychiatrist? Did anyone see you make the telephone call at Madison Avenue?”

“No one saw me make the phone call. But Dr. Barrister saw me leave. Almost always he’s busy with patients at that time, but today, for some reason, he was at the door, showing a patient out or something.
He
saw me leave, but what does that prove? I could easily have come back and stabbed the girl.”

“What sort of doctor is he?”

“Woman. I mean, he treats women.”

“Gynecology? Obstetrics?”

“No, he doesn’t seem to operate very much, and he certainly doesn’t do obstetrics; he doesn’t strike me as the sort who would want to be dragged out of the theater or out of bed to deliver babies. Emanuel looked him up, actually, on my insistence, and he’s got excellent credentials. Emanuel doesn’t like him.”

“Why not?”

“Well, partly because Emanuel doesn’t
like
most people, particularly not people who are smooth, but mostly, I gather, because Barrister and he met once in the hall, and Barrister mentioned something to the effect that they were both doing the same sort of work, and at least neither of them ever buried any patients. A turn, I guess, on the old joke about the dermatologist who never cures anyone and never kills anyone, but it annoyed Emanuel, who said Barrister sounded like a doctor in the movies.”

“Well, nature does imitate art; Oscar Wilde was quite right.”

“I told Emanuel it was plain envy. Dr. Barrister is very good-looking.”

“He sounds more suspicious by the minute; I just about decided, the other night, that he must have done it.”

“I know. I’ve been searching madly for suspects myself and one of the problems is that we aren’t exactly seething with suspects. Apart from you and me, and Emanuel, who are innocent by definition, so to speak, we have only the elevator man, Dr. Barrister or his patients or nurse, the patients on either side of Janet Harrison or the homicidal maniac. Not very encouraging. Actually, this whole thing is horrible for Dr. Barrister, though he’s been quite nice about it. Police questioning him, and a policeman in the hall outside his office—his patients may not care for that—and then being dragged in by me to look at a body. The fact is, if he were going to murder someone he’d want to murder her as far from himself as possible.”

“We’ve left out one other possible suspect: someone Janet Harrison met here by arrangement. He canceled the patients, saw that everyone had left, enticed her into the office and killed her.”

“Kate, you’re a genius! That’s exactly how it must have happened.”

“No doubt. All we’ve got to do is find this man,
if
he exists.”

It was, however, with this probably nonexistent man in mind, that Kate tracked Emanuel down in his office some time later. She had, of course, determined that he was free, and, knocking first, had gone in and shut the door behind her.

“Emanuel, I am sorry, or have I said that already? I keep thinking of all this as like Greek drama; that from the moment of that collision off the Merritt Parkway, we have been heading for this crisis. I suppose there is some comfort in thinking, however literarily, that fate concerns itself with our destinies.”