Michael Gray Novels

by Henry Kuttner

  “You don’t get angry,” Dunne said.

  Gray smiled.

  “You mean I don’t get angry at the things you expect me to.”

  Dunne said, “All right. I went to the bus depot. My father was there. He didn’t see me. I could have given him the letter. But I didn’t. I stayed outside, in the dark, and waited till his bus left. Then I—this isn’t important. I don’t know why I’m talking about it at all.”

  Gray waited.

  Dunne said, “Oh—that’s about all. I tore up the letter and went home again. I told my mother I’d given the letter to Dad, and he’d read it and then got on the bus. She believed me. I don’t know why. If Dad had read the letter, he’d have come right back home. It was—I don’t remember exactly, but she’d said the quarrel was her fault, and she—begged him to come back, not to go to Spain. So … I killed my father.”

  There was a pause. Then Gray said, “Tell me about it.”

  Dunne said desperately, “Eleanor wanted me to take her to La Noche that night. When she was killed. But I had to work late. I couldn’t take her. Only if I had, she’d be alive today.”

  “How did you feel about Eleanor?”

  “I hated her,” Dunne said in a casual voice. Then he stopped short and stared across the desk at Gray. “I didn’t say that. I didn’t mean to say it.”

  “I see. Well—is it true?”

  Dunne said painfully, “You see, I was sleeping with her.”

  “Was that why you hated her?”

  “What?”

  Gray repeated the question, and this time Dunne had to hear.

  “No,” he said. “No, of course not. It was …” His tone changed. “Money. She kept hitting me for money. She was almost blackmailing me, threatening to tell Mary about us unless I gave her money. And she kept losing it gambling. I wasn’t the only one, either.” He paused and gave Gray a hard stare. “Why don’t you ask me if I killed Eleanor?”

  “Do you want me to?” Gray said, almost casually.

  Dunne said, “I did hate her. It was like my father. I hated him, too. But … I feel as though I’d killed them both, and yet I know I didn’t. Could I have killed Eleanor without knowing it? What do you call it? A fugue? Amnesia?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “You’d find out, wouldn’t you? I couldn’t face that. If I did kill her, I don’t want to go on with this analysis.”

  Gray waited.

  Dunne took out his pipe, but didn’t light it.

  “I wish I’d given Dad that letter. But after I burned it, it was too late.”

  “You burned it,” Gray said, without inflection.

  There was a pause.

  “Yes,” Dunne said. “There wasn’t anything else to do. I’d smashed his typewriter. If he’d found out, he’d have half killed me.”

  “Would he?”

  “Maybe not,” Dunne said reluctantly. “There were some things he’d never forgive, though.”

  “What were they?” Gray asked.

  Dunne hesitated.

  “I wish I could tell you,” he said. “But I don’t know myself.”

  “You’re getting to know yourself better,” Gray said. And to himself he thought, “But there’s still some key secret about you I don’t know. Something I must find out.”

  9

  Gray sat behind his desk waiting for Howard Dunne. The office was so silent that the sudden ring of the telephone was startling. Gray picked up the instrument quickly.

  “Hello?”

  “Harry Zucker speaking. Busy, Mike?”

  “I’m between patients right now. How’s everything?”

  “I won’t keep you,” Zucker said. “We can talk later. When will you be free?”

  “Say an hour. Why?”

  “Meet me for a drink. I want to talk to you.”

  “All right,” Gray said. “Glad to. What’s the deal?”

  There was a pause.

  “I’ll tell you when I see you,” Zucker said. “Meet me—got a pencil? Well, write this down.” He dictated an address. “I’ll be in the bar.”

  “But—”

  “In an hour,” Zucker said, with finality in his voice.

  “And twenty minutes,” Gray said. “I’ll need time to get—” He realized he was talking to a dead wire. He hung up as he heard the outer door open.

  Zucker would have to wait.

  “More dreams,” Dunne said, after a while. “I had a piece of paper, rolled up. Like a cylinder. I gave it to you, but you didn’t know it. Funny. I was worried as hell; I knew I had to give it to you, but I had to do it—oh, secretly. The minute I did, I stopped worrying. You turned into somebody else.”

  “Who?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to remember,” Dunne said nervously. “My C.O., I think. But I’m not sure. The man who got me shipped out. I told you.”

  Gray nodded.

  “I remember,” he said. “And?”

  Dunne shook his head.

  “I don’t know. But somehow it was all right, after I gave you the paper.”

  “The paper?”

  “Sometimes I feel like I’m in an echo chamber,” Dunne said irritably. “You keep repeating my words.”

  “Do you dislike that?”

  “I … feel you’re blaming me.”

  “Well, isn’t that what you want?”

  Dunne laughed.

  “I guess so,” he said. “It’s a relief. It’s better than waiting. Only … I’m never sure when I’ve told you—the truth. It’s this feeling of helplessness. And yet if I make any move—”

  “What will happen?”

  “The warhead. The proximity fuse. It’ll go off.” Suddenly Dunne began to talk more freely. “I don’t mean anything violent. Not like a scrap. That—maybe that’s just a cover-up. There’s something else I’m afraid of. If it happens … it’s the end. It’s a nightmare. Not even violence. Just the opposite. That’s when I wake up sweating. I’ve been dreaming, and I can’t remember what the dream was. But it’s that—thing I can’t face. A nameless thing—buried.”

  “Yes?”

  “That’s why I can’t move,” Dunne said. “I’m safe if I don’t move. But not really. There’s the target and there’s the proximity fuse—me. I can stop moving, but the target won’t stop. It moves toward me. But when I gave you that paper, it was all right, somehow.”

  “What’s the opposite of violence?” Gray asked.

  “Death,” Dunne said immediately, and stopped moving. He looked for an instant into something in his own mind.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “My mother … invalid … death. Not moving. Killing … me, because … you’re going to kill me. Christ, that’s crazy. These thoughts don’t mean anything. I don’t mean you. I mean….”

  “Who do you feel I am?” Gray asked.

  “Eleanor,” Dunne said. “Sam. All the people I’ve known … I don’t want to hate you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because—then you won’t help me.”

  Gray said, “You have been hating me sometimes. That’s part of therapy.”

  Dunne said unwillingly, “I don’t … yes. Yes, I have.”

  “You should express these feelings,” Gray said. “That’s how to open the way to the feelings that are buried more deeply. And they’re the ones that cause the strongest conflict, because they’re hidden even from yourself. But they’re there. What was that thought?”

  With a painful effort, Dunne said, “I was wondering what would happen if—”

  “If?”

  “If you swear at a man, he gets mad.”

  “If you feel like swearing at me, you ought to do it,” Gray said.

  Dunne opened his mouth, hesitated, and shook his head.

  “I don’t really feel like it. I was just wondering.”

  “Why should you want to swear at me?”

  “I said it doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Yes, that’s so. Or it might mean you want to test me
out, to find out if I’ll get mad if you show hostility to me.”

  Dunne moved uneasily in his chair.

  “What are you thinking about?” Gray asked.

  Dunne said, “That typewriter. My father’s—” His face flushed. And suddenly the dam cracked. “Leave me alone!” he snarled. “You bastard! I can’t trust you, I can’t trust anybody—you say I can talk to you, but if I really do, you’ll—you’ll—”

  Gray waited. Dunne called him a son of a bitch and stopped, breathing hard.

  Before the silence became uncomfortable, the analyst said quietly, “You can say anything else you want to.”

  Dunne said blankly, “There isn’t anything else.”

  “Sure?”

  Dunne thought of something, but drew back from the thought.

  “No,” he said. “I … I’m all mixed up.”

  “These feelings are painful,” Gray told him. “It isn’t easy to deal with them. But I think you’re making good progress.”

  The rhythm of Dunne’s breathing changed. He was suddenly more relaxed.

  “I feel better,” he said. “That’s funny. I feel a lot better.”

  But Gray didn’t. He knew that from now on, Dunne’s behavior would begin to change, and his friends and relatives would react to that. They would feel threatened by the new attitudes in Dunne. Driven by their own unconscious needs, they would protect themselves by trying to force Dunne back into his neurotic pattern.

  Almost invariably that was the way it worked out.

  He could not wait too long, Gray knew. There would be a time when, for a while, Dunne would become unpredictably unstable. In that case, Gray had three cards to play.

  He could bring Dunne back to stability temporarily, even though it meant temporary regression to the old neurotic habits. Provided he could.

  He could influence Dunne to go to a sanitarium for a time, and continue to treat him there. Provided the patient would agree.

  Or he could talk to Mary Dunne, Sam Pope, and others, in an attempt to gain information that would lead him most quickly to the information he needed when Dunne finally faced the buried terrors of his own mind.

  The analyst could not delay unnecessarily. Dunne should have begun treatment years ago. Now there was only one way to proceed.

  The proximity fuse must reach its target.

  Gray was the target.

  Dunne seemed placid when he left, however. Gray waited a few minutes before he left his office. In the street, he found a taxi and told the driver the address Harry Zucker had given him on the telephone an hour ago.

  “Oh, sure,” the man said. “That’s La Noche, isn’t it?”

  10

  La Noche looked out over the Golden Gate toward Marin County. It was one of the big, old-fashioned mansions that still survive in San Francisco, and it stood sedately in well-kept grounds surrounded by an iron fence. Downstairs, there was an excellent restaurant opening off the bar. Upstairs was the casino.

  Gray went into the bar. Even this early, it was beginning to be crowded. Gray wandered back between the booths and the bar until he saw Zucker, down at the end, perched bulkily on a bar-stool, a highball glass almost lost in one big hand.

  “Not in uniform, I see,” Gray said, sliding in beside the detective.

  “Off duty,” Zucker grunted. “What took you so long?”

  “That’s what you get for hanging up on me.” Gray ordered Haig & Haig and soda. Zucker shook his head and nursed his drink. The hum of voices and the soft clinking of glasses seemed to muffle sounds in the long, dim-lit bar, but Zucker lowered his own voice when he spoke again.

  “You’re a cagey bastard, Mike,” he said.

  “Sure I am. What have I done now?”

  “That woman we were talking about at lunch. Eleanor Pope, the one who got mugged a couple of blocks from here. Remember?”

  Gray took a drink and looked thoughtfully across the bar at the rows of bottles.

  “So?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me her brother-in-law was a patient of yours?”

  Gray said nothing. Zucker turned on the stool to face the analyst.

  “I’m talking about Howard Dunne. How about it?”

  Gray said slowly, “I’m not on the witness stand, Harry. Even if I were, there are things I can’t talk about.”

  Zucker swore under his breath.

  “Then listen to this,” he said. “We’ve just found Eleanor Pope’s purse. You know that little park where she was killed? The purse was buried in a flower bed there. A gardener found it when he was doing some planting yesterday. Well—as near as we can tell, nothing was stolen from the purse.”

  “Was there anything worth stealing?” Gray asked. “I thought she went broke at the casino that night.”

  “She had about twenty bucks in bills and change in her purse,” Zucker said. “It’s still there. And a cigarette lighter worth about fifty, and a cigarette case that cost three times that.”

  “Then the motive wasn’t robbery.”

  “No. It was just meant to look like robbery. So it’s a new lead. That’s why I ordered another check on the people who’d been involved. Including Sam Pope. He’s the one who told me Howard Dunne’s one of your patients. All I want is for you to pass along to me anything that ties in with Eleanor Pope’s killing. Now wait a minute. I know all about the professional confidence angle. But this is murder. If Dunne tells you anything that can help clear up this case, I want you to report it to me.”

  “Oh, you do, do you?” Gray said.

  Zucker flushed.

  “You’re a citizen as well as a psychoanalyst,” he said. “Don’t forget that.”

  Gray waited a moment.

  “Listen, Harry,” he said. “Anything a patient tells me during analysis stays confidential. That’s one rule that can’t be broken. Because if it is—how can the patient trust the analyst?”

  “But I’m not asking for any confidential—”

  “I’ve never double-crossed a patient yet,” Gray said, his voice tightly controlled. “And I’m not going to start now. Or ever.”

  “Damn it, Mike! Suppose Dunne gives you a lead to who the killer was? Are you going to hold out on me then?”

  Gray said, “Let’s keep it hypothetical. In a case like that, I’d certainly advise my patient to go to you and pass along the information. But my patient’s health comes first That’s the way it has to be.”

  “Wait a minute,” Zucker said, and moved his head slightly. “Take a look up front.”

  Gray did. A man and woman were entering the bar. The woman was young and slim, with a small hat perched on loosely curling dark hair. Her lips were parted slightly. Gray recognized Mary Dunne.

  The tall, lean man with her had smooth yellow hair and moved with easy assurance. His hand was under Mary Dunne’s arm. He guided her around the corner of the bar toward a booth.

  “Arnold Farragut,” Zucker said softly. “The oddball. Remember?”

  “The one you said spends more than he makes?”

  “Yeah. And he was here the night Eleanor Pope was killed.”

  “Is this why you wanted me to meet you here?”

  “One reason,” Zucker said. “We found out he’s been coming here with Mary Dunne a lot. I thought you might like to know. It might help, with that hypothetical patient of yours that I know God damned well is Howard Dunne. Listen.” Zucker finished his drink. “Farragut knew Eleanor Pope. Now he’s pretty thick with Mary Dunne. I don’t know what you may have found out, but I’m wondering about a blackmail angle.”

  “That’s news to me,” Gray said.

  “Maybe. Okay? Let’s go. Out this way.”

  They left the bar by another door, to avoid Mary Dunne and Arnold Farragut. As they crossed a lobby, a man came quickly through the outer door and almost bumped into Zucker. The big detective moved aside, and only Gray saw his sudden alertness, the quick readiness of a matador in the arena.

  Then Gray knew why that thought had come to
him He knew, as he recognized the cold, lined face, the heavy eyes, and the bull shoulders with their unpleasant suggestion of deformity. He recognized the man. He had already seen him, beyond a closing door, in Maurice Hoyle’s office.

  “Hello, Oliver,” Zucker said, his eyes steady on the other man.

  The sluggish voice was familiar, too.

  “You’re out of your class, Zucker. You can’t afford to buy drinks around here—unless you’ve started to get smart.”

  This must be Bruce Oliver, the man Zucker had called an errand boy—and a killer.

  Zucker said, “I’ll see you around. Come on, Mike.”

  The cold eyes slid toward Gray.

  “Yeah,” Oliver said. “Maybe. Maybe I’ll be seeing you around.”

  Gray knew that the man was talking to him.

  11

  “I’ll do what I God damn please,” Dunne said.

  Gray waited.

  “I’m not going to be turned into a robot.”

  Dunne’s anger rose as his fear dwindled.

  “One thing you psychoanalysts forget is that people are individuals. You can’t cut ’em all down to one size. I was better off before I started with you. Conform—that’s all you people think about. Maybe I’m not the only one out of step. Hell, why don’t you tell Farragut to conform? He knows Mary’s my wife.”

  Gray waited.

  “I go to bed with her. I … chase around a lot, sure. But afterwards—” Dunne clenched his fists. “Afterwards—oh, God damn!”

  He glared at the psychoanalyst.

  “It’s what you want me to do. But then you’ll—”

  He was breathing hard. Suddenly he stood up and took a step toward the desk. Dunne was a big man, and his physical presence, coupled with the violence of his anger, made the office seem small and constricted. Gray forced himself to wait. He knew that he faced a genuine danger.

  He was overwhelmingly conscious of the big, angry man on the other side of the desk.

  “You son of a bitch,” Dunne said breathlessly.

  Gray waited.

  “Look at me!” Dunne cried, in a hoarse, shaking voice.

  Gray turned his head and met Dunne’s stare. The man’s eyes were glazed. His pupils were dilated, and his face had a purplish, swollen look.