Michael Gray Novels

by Henry Kuttner

  “Hello,” he said, smoothing back his yellow hair as he dropped into the chair. “Thanks for taking time to see me.”

  “I had an idea you might be around,” Gray said.

  Farragut’s blue eyes sharpened.

  “Did you? I wonder why.”

  “Just a hunch.”

  “Oh. Well … Bruce Oliver’s left town. Did you know?”

  Gray shook his head.

  “What happened?”

  “Things got a little too hot, even for him. I think Captain Zucker was starting to breathe down his neck. Anyway, Oliver decided the climate might be healthier somewhere else. He caught a plane east.”

  Gray chuckled.

  “Zucker’s a hard man to shake off, in the long run.”

  “Yeah,” Farragut said. “I guess so. But—the main reason I came in was to say thanks.”

  “Oh?”

  “For helping Mary, I mean. You … I don’t know how you handled it, but you saved her neck. I don’t mean only that murder charge. She’d have cracked up if you hadn’t given her a hand. I guess psychoanalysis is—handy, sometimes.”

  Gray laughed.

  “I didn’t psychoanalyze her,” he said. “All she needed was to feel that somebody wanted to help her.”

  Farragut said, “We’re going to get married, you know.”

  Gray nodded.

  “Congratulations,” he said.

  “Thanks,” Farragut said, and there was a silence. He ran his hand nervously through his yellow hair.

  “I’d better tell you,” he said abruptly. “Besides, it doesn’t matter now. I don’t know how I could have got in so deep, but I did—and now I’m getting out. For Mary’s sake.”

  Gray waited.

  Farragut said, “One job’s just like another to me, within reason. And this started so gradually. What the hell am I dodging it for? I was getting a payoff from Bruce Oliver.”

  “From Oliver? What for?”

  “It wasn’t anything regular,” Farragut said uneasily. “It started one night at La Noche. Some fellow from back east had made a killing at the dice table. He was ready to call it a night. Oliver asked me to try to keep the guy playing a while longer.” Farragut shrugged. “So I did. It was easy enough. And why not? Oliver just wanted a chance to get his money back. It’s no crime. Afterwards, he slipped me a hundred bucks. You don’t make that kind of money in commercial art—or on the docks.”

  “That’s true,” Gray said, his tone noncommittal.

  Once started, Farragut found it hard to stop. He said quickly, “Then I did Oliver another favor, and another—little things, never anything really crooked … oh, hell. Who do I think I’m kidding? It was crooked, all right. On the edge. Maybe nothing I could ever be convicted for. But I was in on the racket, Gray. Not far in, but in.”

  The analyst nodded.

  Farragut stared at his hands.

  “I’d handle a payoff. Or I’d be a steerer at La Noche sometimes. I was handy for them to have around. I didn’t have a record…. But there won’t be any more of it. Now this murder case is wound up, Mary and I are going to get married, and I’m—” He laughed. “Okay, I’ll say it. I’m going straight.”

  Gray said, “I’m wondering why you’re telling me about this.”

  “I don’t know,” Farragut said. “I wanted to … oh, I guess I figured you’ve got a lot of influence with Mary. I didn’t want you against me.”

  “I won’t influence her, one way or the other. As far as what you’ve told me, it’s confidential. She’ll never hear about it from me.”

  Farragut seemed dissatisfied.

  “The case is wound up, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “Why are you so interested?” Gray countered.

  “Hell,” Farragut said, “I owe you a favor, don’t I? If I see you running your head up against a blank wall, then I’ll tell you so.”

  “You’re satisfied that Hoyle’s guilty of murder?”

  Farragut said slowly, “Yes, I’m sure of that. Don’t you agree? Or—by God! You think Howard Dunne was the killer!”

  “What makes you think that?” Gray asked.

  “If you don’t believe Hoyle’s guilty, you must feel pretty sure somebody else is. But you can’t have any legal evidence, or you’d use it. So you must have some other kind of evidence. Psychological. I’m guessing, that’s all. But you certainly know more about Dunne than about any of the others who were mixed up in this…. Did Dunne kill Eleanor Pope?”

  “You just said there’s no legal evidence of that.”

  Farragut said, “It could have been. But I don’t believe it.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “You’re trying to prove that a patient you were treating committed murder and suicide?”

  “If you put it that way,” Gray agreed.

  “How do you think it will look if you do prove Dunne was guilty?”

  Gray looked thoughtfully at the other man.

  Farragut said, “Nobody’s infallible. Psychoanalysts aren’t either. But what about the publicity?”

  “There’d be some.”

  “You feel responsible for your patients. You must. Or you wouldn’t worry so much about Howard Dunne, for one thing. You can’t help a patient if he holds out on you—and Howard must have done that. But—will your patients trust you if they believe you couldn’t stop Dunne from killing the Popes and himself? Damn it, some of them might even think your treatment drove Dunne insane!”

  Gray said, “You’re not telling me anything I don’t know. You’re right about one thing. If a patient starts analysis with the deliberate intention of blocking treatment—intending to withhold essential information from the start—then the analyst’s hands are tied.”

  “All right,” Farragut said, with a strange eagerness. “So there it is. If the police think Hoyle’s guilty, what makes you believe you know better? They’re more competent in their own field than you are. And this is their field. You’ll be cutting your own throat!”

  Gray said, “Why do you care?”

  Farragut paused.

  “I owe you a favor,” he said.

  “Do you know why you really came to see me?”

  “Suppose you tell me,” Farragut said, not quite as casually as before.

  “Possibly to prove something to yourself.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know,” Gray said. “All I know is that you’re trying damned hard to prove we’re on the same side. Maybe you feel guilty about having worked with the syndicate. That you’ve been on the wrong side. And that it’ll somehow turn into the right side if I’m there with you.”

  Farragut said, “Basically I think we’re in agreement.”

  “Not basically.”

  “All right. What don’t we agree on?”

  “Hoyle is important,” Gray said.

  Farragut gave the analyst a sharp, blue stare.

  “What about your other patients?” he asked, but stood up without waiting for an answer. “Well, skip it. I wanted to do you a favor. But I probably shouldn’t have wasted your time—and mine.”

  He went out quickly without saying good-by.

  Gray sat motionless, staring at the bronze satyr on his desk.

  Metal, he thought. You can touch it. It’s hard and solid. But the mind … where is it? What is it? It’s as far as a nebula, as invisible as air—and like the nebula, it has the power of exploding suns; like air, it can destroy with hurricane violence.

  Thank God for metal.

  But a mind shaped this bronze, he thought. Without the guiding mind, there would be only a lump of raw ore.

  Yet Farragut may be partly right. Can I save Hoyle? Am I the only one who can save him?

  If I can, it’s my responsibility.

  I’ve got to find the right question to ask. Of the right person.

  “Who?” Zucker had asked.

  Maybe myself.

  All right. Ask the question.

  What’s my responsibi
lity?

  It’s hopeless. If Zucker can’t find anything, if the whole police department can’t, what can I do? I’m not trained in police work. I’m a psychoanalyst, not a detective.

  Howard Dunne committed murder and suicide….

  Who’s responsible?

  I did my best to save him.

  And failed.

  But what if Howard Dunne wasn’t guilty? What if I’m wrong?

  Gray shut his eyes. The far sounds from the street had receded to a foggy distance. He felt very sleepy.

  Don’t dodge it. Why am I sleepy? I can be honest with my patients. What about myself?

  I’ve been psychoanalyzed myself. I know….

  But the training analysis is only the beginning. The self-analysis never stops. It can’t. One important reason I became a psychoanalyst was because of a memory. A memory of my wife standing waiting in the London blackout, while the roar of planes grew louder. And there was no way to help, no way to save her from death.

  Every time I save a patient, I save Rosalind, in some strange way.

  I knew that. I found that out during my own analysis. And I turned it to a useful purpose. Over and over, I save Rosalind.

  But sometimes the nightmare will become real again.

  Sometimes I won’t be able to save her.

  Suppose I can prove that Dunne was a murderer and a suicide? It will mean I couldn’t save him. Or Rosalind.

  Something, buried in my mind, knows how to find that proof. But part of me doesn’t want to find it. Yet, if I don’t find it, if I can’t understand myself, how can I understand my own patients?

  It never stops, Gray thought wearily. I’ll go on till I die, trying to understand myself, always on guard. Because it’s the only way. It’s the only way I can do my job at all—and I know that I’ll fail sometimes.

  Each time I fail, Rosalind will die again.

  All right, he thought. Unconsciously, I haven’t wanted to prove that Dunne committed murder and suicide.

  I’ll face it now.

  What’s the right question to ask myself? I can answer it now. I can accept the success that means faliure too.

  I haven’t been able to ask myself the right question, because, unconsciously, I knew that I could answer it.

  I knew, somehow, that I could prove my patient killed Eleanor and Sam Pope, and killed himself too.

  The key. The dreams.

  The night Howard Dunne died, he tried to telephone me. But Sam Pope interrupted him. What did Pope say Dunne had told him then?

  “He said he had to make an important phone call…. He did say he’d already given the man a message.”

  Dunne had been trying to telephone Gray that night. And, somehow, he felt that he had already given the analyst a message. What message?

  Confession.

  The word started into Gray’s mind. It fitted. All through Howard Dunne’s life had run the twin pattern of a need to confess and a need for punishment. Somehow, he must have felt that he had confessed to Gray, and was being punished by Sam Pope, the symbol of his own menacing father, the father he felt he had killed. Because, long ago, he had not delivered his mother’s letter to the father. Instead, Dunne had….

  What?

  Not destroyed it. During the analysis, Dunne had admitted hiding the letter, but he had forgotten where. For some reason, he had suppressed that knowledge. Why?

  Gray remembered the sexual significance keys had for Dunne. A confession was a key. It was also a sexual symbol. And Dunne, the night he died, had returned from Pope’s apartment to find his brother-in-law waiting for him. He had in his pocket the key to Pope’s apartment. When he tried to telephone Gray, he must have hidden the key in the flowerpot by the telephone.

  Gray remembered his last interview with Durine. The man’s attitude had changed suddenly during the session. At first he had been tense and anxious. Then, abruptly, he had changed. He had seemed relaxed….

  It was the same relaxation Dunne always showed after the catharsis of confession.

  Gray remembered that he had gone out of his office during that last interview—to close the outer door. And when he returned, Dunne had looked at him with relief and triumph.

  What had Dunne said just before Gray left the office?

  He had asked for his pipe back. And he had mentioned his father’s pipe and key ring. Again, the symbols of sexuality and confession.

  Then was confession itself a sexual symbol to Dunne?

  During that last interview, Dunne believed that Pope intended to move in with him and Mary. So he had probably already made his plans for murder and suicide. But punishment without confession would have been incomplete. The confession would have to be given to the father … secretly.

  The key in the flowerpot.

  The hidden letter.

  Somewhere in this office was a hidden message that was a key. And like a key, it was thrust into….

  Like a flash of blinding light, Gray saw a picture in his mind. He saw himself sitting behind the desk, and Howard Dunne standing over him, furious with panic and rage. Then, strangely, he felt that terror and hate rush into him, into every part of his mind except where a cool, watchful intelligence stood far back, watching and waiting.

  He was Howard Dunne. His strong fingers closed on the bronze satyr on Gray’s desk. It was a rock, it had crushed Eleanor’s skull, and there was no escape from the terrible, threatening figure watching him, reading his mind, ripping away the secret veils…. kill him, smash him, stop him!

  A voice said, “It’s all right, son.”

  … It’s all right. He knows. He knows, and he still loves me. I’m … safe….

  The rough rock that had killed Eleanor changed to the bronze satyr, and the hate drained from it, and the hollow bronze was the father, the forgiving father, who had, somehow, at last found the lost letter, hidden long ago….

  Gray put out his hand and picked up the bronze satyr. It was hollow, and as he turned it upside down, he saw the hole in its base.

  He put in two fingers and pulled out a rolled sheet of paper. It was in Dunne’s handwriting.

  It began, “My father….”

  Gray skimmed the confession quickly.

  “I killed Eleanor. She told me I had made her pregnant I’d refused to give her any more money. Sam was sterile. He’d have known I was the guilty boy. I never told you I killed Eleanor. I think I would have, though, if Sam hadn’t decided to move in with us. So I had to kill him too. Because with the three of us locked up together, time would have gone back, and my father would have known I killed him, and about Eleanor and Mary and my mother, and known too much. So he would have killed me. Because love is death.

  “I stole the key to Sam’s apartment a long time ago. I suppose he thought he had lost it, and got another one made. But it was more than a key. But he mustn’t find out. So I had to kill him.

  “I got the cyanide in Sausalito. I said I wanted it for cleaning silver and that I was an antique dealer. I shall put the cyanide in gin and somehow get Sam to give it to me. Because he must kill me. I think I will put cyanide in Sam’s medicine, the stuff he takes for his stomach. I have the key to his apartment.

  “I thought it would be all right. But you see this is the only thing I can do now. If it were not for Sam, I could tell you this instead of writing it. But even when I started with you, I knew there was something I must never tell. I thought it was killing Eleanor. It isn’t. I don’t know what it is. I think I might find out, but not now, because Sam must not know. He is the wrong father.

  “HOWARD DUNNE.”

  Gray drew a long breath.

  You’ve told me now, Howard, he thought. But it’s too late.

  You should have told me a little sooner.

  He picked up the telephone.

  28

  A week later Gray sat in his office with Mary Dunne.

  “Oh, yes,” he said, his voice rather flat. “Maurice Hoyle’s free now. That is, he still has to face embezzlement c
harges. Since you’ve inherited the business, you’ll be making the charge, in fact.”

  Mary said, “I … don’t think I will.”

  “That’s up to you,” Gray said, once more withdrawn and professional.

  “That druggist in Sausalito did identify Howard?”

  Gray nodded.

  “Yes, he remembered him. And Howard had signed the poison book. He’d given a false name but put down his own address. And the handwriting’s been identified as Howard’s. So—with the confession—there’s evidence enough even for Captain Zucker.”

  Mary said, “Howard killed Sam. And Eleanor—and himself. I thought it would make a difference in the way I felt about him. But it doesn’t somehow. He’s still Howard. Only I think I understand him a little better now.”

  “That’s all anyone can do,” Gray said.

  Mary stood up.

  “I wanted to thank you,” she said, as Gray rose. “That’s really why I came. And I guess … well, that’s all there is.”

  “Good luck,” Gray said.

  She opened the door, and then suddenly turned back.

  “There is something else,” she said. “I’m not going to marry Arnold.”

  “Oh?”

  “You see—it was something you said. That Maurice Hoyle was important. In himself. And I know I’m not important to Arnold that way. Somehow, I know he wouldn’t want me to change if—if he didn’t like the way I was changing. I don’t suppose that makes a lot of sense. But … I can’t marry Arnold.”

  Gray didn’t answer.

  “I’ll marry again some day,” she said. “I did love Howard. I still love him. And, some day, I’ll love somebody else. But first….”

  “First?”

  Mary Dunne looked steadily at the psychoanalyst.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But I’ll have to find out.”

  Gray nodded.

  “It’s your life,” he said.

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com