Part 2 (1/2)

”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.”