In The Last Analysis Part 2

"All the same," Kate said, "it may be a slip, and a bad one. Let's hope so. When you came home, Emanuel, the curtain, so to speak, had gone up?"

"Chaos had come would be a better way to describe it. If one weren't concerned oneself, it might even have been interesting."

"Dr. Barrister told me I had better call the police," Nicola said. "He even seemed to know the number, Spring something, but I couldn't seem to dial, I just picked up the phone to dial operator, so he took the phone and dialed the number. Then he handed it back to me. A man's voice said *Police Department,' and I thought, This is all a fantasy. I shall tell Dr. Sanders about it tomorrow. I wonder what it indicates. It couldn't have been even a minute later, I suppose, they radioed to one of those cars policemen are always riding around in-do you remember when we were children, policemen used to walk?"

"When we were children," Emanuel put in, "policemen used to be old men. What is it someone said? They're old enough to be your father, and suddenly, one day, they're young enough to be your son."

"Anyway," Nicola continued, "these ordinary policemen just looked at the body, as though to make sure we weren't pulling their leg, though it seems an odd sort of joke to me, and then they called in, and the next thing we knew, the parade had started; men with all kinds of equipment, and detectives, and someone called a deputy inspector, people taking photographs, a funny little man they all greeted with great joy as the *M.E.' I really lost track of all of them. We were sitting here in the living room. I don't remember when Emanuel came back, but it seemed a long time before they carried her out. The only thing I really noticed was that an ambulance came, with some men in white, and one of them said to one of the policemen, *It's D.O.A., all right.' I saw a movie once called D.O.A. It means Dead on Arrival. Whose arrival?"

"They seemed very interested to see me when I returned, needless to say," Emanuel went on. "But I had to sit down and cancel my afternoon patients. I couldn't reach all of them, and one of them was turned away by a policeman, which I didn't care for, but perhaps it was better than if I had come out in the middle of all that and told her to go. At any rate, *chaos' is the word. How efficient the police are, and how little they understand!"

Later that night the words echoed in Kate's mind: How little they understand! Shortly after Emanuel had uttered the words, a detective had come again to talk to them. He had let Kate go, after a long look. Yet, Kate thought, putting herself wearily to bed, the facts, if they were facts, on Emanuel's side were not the sort the police, who must all have stanch lower-middle-cla.s.s backgrounds, could understand: that a psychiatrist, though he might be more driven than other men, would never commit a crime in his office, on the grounds, so to speak, of his profession; that Emanuel would never entangle himself with a woman patient, however beautiful; that Emanuel could never murder anyone, certainly not stab them with a knife; that a man and woman who had been lovers, she and Emanuel, could now be friends. What could the police make of that, the police who knew, probably, only s.e.x on one hand, and marriage on the other. What of Nicola? "She was very beautiful," Nicola had said of Janet. But surely Nicola was at her a.n.a.lysis, the perfect alibi.

As the two sleeping pills which Kate had taken-and she had not taken sleeping pills since a horrible case of poison ivy, seven years ago-began to pull her under, she concentrated her weakening attention on the doctor across the hall. Obviously, the murderer. The fact, and it was a fact, that he was without the smallest connection with anyone in the case, seemed, as consciousness faded, to be of very little importance.

Four.

REED Amhearst was an a.s.sistant District Attorney, though exactly what functions were encompa.s.sed by that t.i.tle, Kate had never understood. Apparently he was frequently in court, and found his work exciting and consuming. He and Kate had stumbled across each other years before, in the short period of political activity in Kate's life, when she had worked for a reform political club. Politics had been for Reed a more continuous affair, but after Kate had retired, exhausted from her first and only primary fight, she and Reed continued to see each other in a friendly sort of way. They had dinner together, or went to the theater from time to time, and laughed together a good deal. When either of them needed a partner for a social evening, and did not wish for some reason to plunge in with any other attachment, Reed or Kate, as the case might be, would go along. Since neither of them had married, since neither of them could have considered, for a single moment, the completely outrageous idea of marrying each other, their casual acquaintance became a constant amid all the variables of their social lives.

So they might have continued indefinitely, eventually tottering, occasionally together, into benign old age, if Reed, through a series of impulses and bad judgments, had not landed himself in a most magnificent muddle. The details of this Kate had long since forgotten, believing that the ability to forget was one of the most important requirements of a friends.h.i.+p, but neither of them could ever forget that it was Kate who had got him out of the muddle, rescued him on the brink of disaster. By doing so, she had put him forever in her debt, but Reed was a nice enough person to accept a service without holding it against the giver. To ask for a repayment of the debt was an abhorrent idea, to Kate, and to call on him now would, she could not but realize, put her in the position of seeming to do exactly that. For this reason, despite her resolutions of the day before, she brooded a full two hours the next morning before calling him.

On the other hand, however, and equally imperious, was the need to help Emanuel. No one, Kate was convinced, could help Emanuel, unless he combined her belief in Emanuel's innocence with the knowledge of the police. The only possible way to get that knowledge seemed to be through Reed. Cursing her mind, too finely tuned to moral dilemmas which more sensible people happily ignored, cursing Reed for having ever needed her help, she decided, after two aspirins, eight cups of coffee and much pacing of the living room, to ask his help. It was, at least, a Thursday, thus a cla.s.sless day. With a lingering thought for her innocent Tuesday morning in the stacks-would she ever return to Thomas Carlyle, abandoned in the midst of one of his older perorations?-she picked up the phone.

She caught Reed just as he was leaving on some pressing mission. He had, of course, heard of the "body on the couch," as they appeared to be calling it (Kate suppressed a groan). When he gathered what she wanted-the complete dossier (if they used that word) on the case-he was absolutely silent for perhaps twenty seconds; it seemed an hour. "Good friend of yours?" he asked.

"Yes," Kate answered, "and in a h.e.l.l of an unfair mess," and then cursed herself for appearing to be reminding him. But what the h.e.l.l, she thought, I am reminding him; it does no good to p.u.s.s.yfoot around it.

"I'll do what I can," he said. (Obviously he was not alone.) "It looks like a bad day, but I'll look into the matter for you and report to your apartment about seven-thirty tonight. Will that do?" Well, after all, Kate thought, he works for a living. Did you expect him to come das.h.i.+ng up the minute he replaced the receiver? He's probably making a huge effort as it is.

"I'll be waiting for you, Reed; thanks a lot." She hung up the phone.

For the first time in years, Kate found herself at loose ends, not delightful loose ends, at which one says: If I look at another student theme I shall be ill, and sneaks off, surrept.i.tiously, to a movie; this rather was the horrible kind of loose ends, to which Kate had heard applied (always with a shudder) the cure of "killing time." Her life was full enough of varied activity to make leisure seem a blessing, not a burden, but now she found herself wondering what in the world to do until seven-thirty. She n.o.bly fought the urge to call Emanuel and Nicola; it seemed best to wait until she had something constructive to say. Work was impossible-she found she could neither prepare a cla.s.s nor correct papers. After a certain amount of aimless wandering about the apartment-and she felt, irrationally, that it was a fort she was holding, which she must not on any account leave-she applied the remedy her mother had used under stress, when Kate was a child: she cleaned closets.

This task, combining as it did dirt, hard work, and amazed discovery, lasted her nicely until two o'clock. Exhausted, she then abandoned the hall closet to dust and unaccountable acc.u.mulation, and collapsed in a chair with Freud's Studies in Hysteria, a Christmas present from Nicola several years back. She could not concentrate, but one sentence caught her eye, a comment of Freud's to a patient: "Much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness." She wished she had had it to quote to Emanuel when they had still been free to argue, aimlessly, about Freud. No wonder they had such a hard row to hoe, these modern psychoa.n.a.lysts: they saw little enough hysterical misery, and were left to cope with common unhappiness, for which, as Freud clearly knew, there is no clinical cure. It occurred to her that her aim now was to a.s.sist, if she could, in restoring Emanuel to common unhappiness from the catastrophic fate which seemed to face him. A disquieting thought, from which she pa.s.sed into idle daydreams.

How the rest of the afternoon pa.s.sed she never, afterward, could tell. She straightened up the house, took a shower-guiltily lifting the phone off the hook first so that a possible caller (Nicola, Reed, the police?) would get a busy signal and try again-ordered some groceries in case Reed should be hungry, and paced back and forth. Several telephone conversations with people who never mentioned murders or had anything to do with them helped considerably.

At twenty-five of eight Reed came. Kate had to restrain herself from greeting him like the long-lost heir from overseas. He collapsed into a chair and gladly accepted Scotch and water.

"I suppose your idea is that the psychiatrist didn't do it?"

"Of course he didn't do it," Kate said. "The idea is preposterous."

"My dear, the idea that a friend of yours could commit murder may be preposterous; I'll be the first to admit that it is, or to take your word for it in any case. But to the minds of the police, beautifully unsullied with any personal preconceptions, he looks as guilty as a sinner in h.e.l.l. All right, all right, don't argue with me yet; I'll give you the facts, and then you can tell me what a lovely soul he has, and who the real criminal is, if any."

"Reed! Is there a chance she could have done it herself?"

"Not a chance, really, though I'll admit a good defense lawyer might make something of the idea in court, just to confuse the minds of the jury. People who thrust a knife deep into their innards don't thrust upward, and certainly don't do it on their backs; they throw themselves on the blade, like Dido. If they do thrust a knife into themselves, they bare that portion of their body-don't ask me why, they always do, or so it says in the textbook-and, a less debatable point, they inevitably leave fingerprints on the knife."

"Perhaps she was wearing gloves."

"Then she removed them after death."

"Maybe someone else removed them."

"Kate, dear, I think I had better make you a drink; possibly you should take it with several tranquilizers. They are said, together with alcohol, to have a stultifying effect on one's reactions. Shall we stick for the moment to the facts?" Kate, fetching herself the drink and a cigarette, but not the tranquilizers, nodded obediently. "Good. She was killed between ten of eleven, when the ten o'clock patient left, and twelve thirty-five, when she was discovered by Mrs. Bauer, and the discovery noted, more or less, by Dr. Michael Barrister, Pandora Jackson, and Frederick Sparks, the twelve o'clock patient. The Medical Examiner won't estimate the death any closer than that-they never estimate closer than within two hours-but he has said, strictly unofficially, which means he won't testify to it in court, that she was probably killed almost an hour before she was found. There was no external bleeding, because the hilt of the knife, where it joins the blade, pressed her clothing into the wound, preventing the escape of any blood. This is unfortunate, since a bloodstained criminal, with bloodstained clothes, is that much easier to find." Reed's voice was colorless and totally without emotion, like the voice of a stenographer reading back from notes. Kate was grateful to him.

"She was killed," he continued, "with a long, thin carving knife from the Bauer kitchen, one of a set that hangs in a wooden holder on the wall. The Bauers do not deny their owners.h.i.+p of the knife, which is just as well, since it bears both their fingerprints." Involuntarily, Kate gasped. Reed paused to look at her. "I can see," he said wryly, "that your ability to differentiate between sorts of evidence is not very developed. That's the chief evidence on their side. Since every tot today knows about fingerprints, the chances are that, using the knife as a weapon, they would have had the brains to remove them. Of course, a trained psychiatrist of admitted brilliance might have been smart enough to figure that the police would figure that way. Don't interrupt. Dr. and Mrs. Bauer say their prints got on the knife the previous night when they had a small argument about how to carve a silver-tip roast, and both gave it a try. Being sensible people, they don't submerge knives in water, but wipe off the blade with a damp cloth and then a dry one. The prints, if anything, are evidence in their favor, since they have been partially obliterated, as they might have been if someone had held the knife with gloves. This, however, is inconclusive.

"Now we come to the more d.a.m.ning part. She was stabbed while she was lying down, according to the medical evidence, by someone who leaned over the end of the couch and over her head, and thrust the knife upward between her ribs. This seems, incidentally, to have been done by someone with a fairly developed knowledge of anatomy, id est, a doctor, but here again we are on shaky ground. This particular upward thrust of the knife from behind (though not with the victim lying down) was commonly taught to all resistance units during World War II in France and elsewhere. The important question is, Who could have got the girl to lie down, Who could have got behind her, Who could have finally stabbed her without at any point inspiring any resistance whatever? You can see that the police are saying to themselves: *Where does a psychoa.n.a.lyst sit? In a chair behind the head of a patient.' Detective: *Why does the psychoa.n.a.lyst sit there, Dr. Bauer?' Dr. Bauer: *So that the patient cannot see the doctor.' Detective: *Why shouldn't the patient see the doctor?' Dr. Bauer: *That's a very interesting question; there are many possible explanations, such as helping the patient to maintain the anonymity of the doctor, thus increasing the possibilities for transference; but the real reason seems to be that Freud invented the position because he could not bear to have the patients looking at him all day long.' Detective: *Do all your patients lie on the couch?' Dr. Bauer: *Only those in a.n.a.lysis; patients in therapy sit in a chair on the other side of the desk.' Detective: *Do you sit behind them?' Dr. Bauer: *No.' Shrug of detective's shoulders not reported here."

"Reed, do you mean the police are basing their whole case on the fact that no one else could have got behind her while she was lying on the couch?"

"Not quite, but it is a sticky point, all the same. If Dr. Bauer wasn't there, why was she lying down on the couch in the first place? And, a.s.suming for the moment that she wandered into the room and lay down when there was no one there-and Dr. Bauer has a.s.sured the detective that no patient would do any such thing, they wait until they are summoned into the office by the a.n.a.lyst-would she continue to lie there if someone other than the a.n.a.lyst walked in, sat down behind her, and then leaned over her with a knife?"

"Supposedly she didn't see the knife when he leaned over?"

"Even so. And if the a.n.a.lyst wasn't there, why did she lie down on the couch? Why do women lie down on couches? All right, you needn't answer that."

"Wait a minute, Reed. Perhaps she wanted to take a nap."

"Come off it, Kate."

"All right, but suppose she was in love with one of the patients before or after her-we don't really know anything about them-and she, or one of them, let's say one of them, got rid of Emanuel so that he and the girl could make love on the couch. After all, the ten o'clock patient would simply stay, and the twelve o'clock patient did come rather early ..."

"Those two cancellations were made during the ten o'clock patient's hour, so he could hardly have made them himself."

"Exactly. He got someone else to do it. It gave him an alibi, and since he was there at the time himself, he could make sure that the calls came through, or at least that some calls came through."

"Then why cancel for the twelve o'clock patient, and not cancel the twelve o'clock patient as well? All right, perhaps he didn't know his phone number. But then why try to get rid of Dr. Bauer, when you will have the twelve o'clock patient walking in on you anyway?"

"To lovers an hour alone together is an eternity," said Kate in sepulchral tones. "Besides, he really didn't want to make love; he wanted to murder her."

"I'll say this, you have an answer for everything. Might I point out, however, that you have created this whole plot out of thin air? There isn't the smallest evidence for anything you've said, though the police will, I'm sure, try to collect the evidence wherever possible."

"If only I were as sure of that as you are. There isn't a shred of evidence against Emanuel either."

"Kate, my dear, I admire your loyalty to Emanuel, but do exercise your extraordinary ability to face the facts: the girl was murdered in Emanuel's office, with Emanuel's knife, in a position that would have given Emanuel every opportunity to commit the crime. He can provide no alibi; while the phone calls canceling the patients were undoubtedly made, he as well as anyone else could have paid someone to make them. The murder was done when no one else was in the apartment, but who except Emanuel and his wife knew that no one else would be in the apartment? Despite your delightful flights of fancy, we don't know that the girl knew a single other person connected with that office. In fact, one of the strangest things about this case is how little they seem able to find out about that girl."

"Was she a virgin?"

"No idea; she never had a child, at any rate."

"Reed! Do you mean to tell me that when they do one of these autopsies they can't tell whether or not a girl's a virgin? I thought that was one of the first things they reported on."

"It is remarkable, the old wives' tales that continue to be believed by otherwise quite intelligent people. The point of this tale, I suppose, is to keep girls good. How did you suppose one could tell? If you are thinking of what the Elizabethans alluded to so feelingly as *maidenhead,' I am sad to report that the number of modern girls who survive their athletic girlhoods with that intact is tiny enough to make your grandmother blush. Otherwise, what evidence did you suppose there was? If s.e.m.e.n is present, we know a woman has had s.e.xual relations; if she is bruised or torn, we suspect rape, or attempted rape. Nothing like this, of course, was in evidence here. But, as to whether or not she was a virgin, you would do better asking the people who knew her, if you can find them."

"I cannot remember when I have been so shocked. The world as I knew it is fast pa.s.sing away."

"Your friend Emanuel can probably tell you if she has had s.e.xual relations, that is, if you can get him to tell you anything."

"Since the police, completely ignoring Emanuel's character, are convinced he did it, what do they suppose was his motive?"

"The police are not so interested in motive; good sound circ.u.mstantial evidence is much more their cup of tea. They pay it due attention, of course, and if one of those two patients turns out to inherit a million dollars under Janet Harrison's will, they'll p.r.i.c.k up their ears. But a doctor who has become entangled with a beautiful patient and decided in a rash moment to get rid of her is motive enough for them."

"But they have no evidence that he was *entangled' with her; that's probably why they haven't arrested him yet. Whereas I have loads of evidence that he couldn't have become entangled with her, couldn't have murdered her, and certainly not on his couch."

"All right, I want to hear it all. First, let me give you the rest. The thrust of the knife which killed her was delivered with a good deal of strength, but not with more than a strongish woman might have mustered-you for instance, or Mrs. Bauer. Let me finish. The body was not moved after being stabbed, but I've already told you that. No signs of a struggle. No fingerprints, other than those one would expect. The rest is a lot of technical jargon, including photographs of a particularly sickening nature. We come now to the only real point of interest.

"The murderer-we a.s.sume it was the murderer-went through her purse, presumably after she was dead. He was wearing rubber gloves, which leave their own peculiar sort of print, in this case on the gold-colored clasp of her pocketbook. The supposition is that if he found something, he took it out. The girl was not very well known to those who lived near her in the Graduate Women's Dormitory at the university, but one of them, questioned by the police, had noticed that Janet Harrison always carried a notebook in her purse; no notebook was found there. Also, she appeared to have no photographs in her purse or wallet, though almost every woman does carry photographs of someone or other. That is all conjecture. But there was a picture which the murderer apparently missed. In her wallet she had a New York driver's license, not the new card sort, but the old paper kind which folded, and folded inside it was a small picture of a young man. The police are of course going to try to discover who he was; I'll get a copy of it shortly and let you see it, just in case it rings a bell. The important point is that she had carefully concealed the picture. Why?"

"It sounds as though she thought someone might go through her pocketbook, and she didn't want the picture found. Some people, of course, are naturally secretive."

"Apparently Miss Harrison was unnaturally secretive. n.o.body seems to have known her very well. There is some information from the university, but it's pretty thin. Oddly enough, her room in the Graduate Women's Hall was robbed the night before her death, though whether this is a coincidence or not we may never know. Someone apparently had a key, rifled through everything, and departed with a 35-millimeter camera worth about seventy dollars. A brand new Royal portable typewriter, worth more, was left, whether because it was too conspicuous to carry out, or the robber was collecting only cameras, it is impossible to determine. All her drawers, and her desk, were thoroughly rifled, but apparently nothing else was taken. It was reported to the local precinct, but, though they conscientiously made out a report, this sort of thing is pretty hopeless. By the time she had been murdered, the room had been straightened out, so any evidence that may have been left is gone.

"The information on Janet Harrison is surprisingly meager, though we haven't traced her back home yet; the police in North Dakota, where she turns out, surprisingly enough, to come from, are finding what they can. All the university can tell us is that she is thirty years of age ..."

"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 a.n.a.lyst'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 a.n.a.lyst. 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."

Five.

KATE 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 relations.h.i.+p for which the English language itself lacked a defining word. Not a friends.h.i.+p, because they were man and woman, not a love affair, because theirs was far more a meeting of minds than of pa.s.sions, their relations.h.i.+p (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 n.o.ble, 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 cla.s.ses," 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 rect.i.tude. 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 h.e.l.l didn't you mention that you hadn't been to your a.n.a.lyst'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 j.a.panese 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?"

"n.o.body 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 a.n.a.lyst, 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 inst.i.tute."

"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."