by Amanda Cross
“She has been murdered.”
Captain Stern left the words hanging in the air. From outside came the campus noises of spring. Some fraternity boys were selling raffle tickets on a car. The shadow of someone, probably a student, passed back and forth behind the glass door to Kate’s office.
“Murdered?” Kate said. “But I knew nothing about her. Was she attacked in the street?” Suddenly the girl seemed born again in Kate’s memory, sitting where Captain Stern now sat. Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio.
“You said, Miss Fansler, she seemed to be waiting to see what would happen. What did you mean by that?”
“Did I say that? I don’t know what I meant. A way of speaking.”
“Was there anything of a personal nature between you and Janet Harrison?”
“No. She was a student.” Suddenly, Kate remembered his first question: What were you doing yesterday morning? “Captain Stern, what has this to do with me? Because I gave her the name of an analyst, because she was my student, am I supposed to know who murdered her?”
Captain Stern rose to his feet. “Forgive me for taking the time from your students, Miss Fansler. If I have to see you again, I will try to make it at a more convenient hour. Thank you for answering my questions.” He paused a moment, as though arranging his sentences.
“Janet Harrison was murdered in the office of the psychoanalyst to whom you sent her. Emanuel Bauer is his name. She had been his patient for seven weeks. She was murdered on the couch in his office, the couch on which, as I understand it, patients lie during their analytic hour. She was stabbed with a knife from the Bauer kitchen. We are anxious, of course, to find out all we can about her. There seems to be remarkably little information available. Goodbye for now, Miss Fansler.”
Kate stared after him as he left, closing the door behind him. She had underestimated his flair for the dramatic; that much was clear. I’ve sent you a patient, Emanuel. What had she sent him? Where was he now? Surely the police could not imagine that Emanuel had stabbed a patient on his own couch? But how then had the murderer got in? Had Emanuel been there? She picked up the receiver and dialed 9 for an outside line. What was his number? She would not thumb through a phone book. It surprised her to notice, as she dialed 411 for information, that her hand was shaking. “Can you give me the number, please, of Mrs. Nicola Bauer, 879 Fifth Avenue?” Emanuel’s office number was under his name, his home phone under Nicola’s, she remembered that: to prevent patients calling him at home. “Thank you, operator.” She did not write it down, but repeated it over and over to herself. Trafalgar 9. But she had forgotten to dial 9 again for an outside line. Begin again and take it slowly. Emanuel, what have I done to you? “Hello.” It was Pandora, the Bauers’ maid. What an amusing name it had once seemed! “Pandora, this is Miss Fansler, Kate Fansler. Please tell Mrs. Bauer that I must speak to her.”
“Just a minute, Miss Fansler, I’ll see.” The phone was laid down. Kate could hear one of the Bauer boys. Then there was Nicola.
“Kate. I suppose you’ve heard.”
“A detective’s been here; I’m in my office. Efficient, laconic, and, I suspect, superficial. Nicki, are they letting you stay there?”
“Oh, yes. Thousands of men have been through the whole place, but they say we can stay. Mother said we should go home with her, but once the policemen cleared out, it seemed better somehow to stay. As though if we left, we might never come back, Emanuel might never come back. We’ve even kept the boys here. It does seem crazy, I suppose.”
“No, Nicki. I understand. You stay. Can I come and see you? Will you tell me what’s happened? Will they let me come?”
“They’ve only left a policeman outside, to cope with the mobs. There’ve been reporters. We’d like to see you, Kate.”
“You sound exhausted, but I’m coming anyway.”
“I’d like to see you. I don’t know about Emanuel. Kate, I think they think we did it, in Emanuel’s office. Kate, don’t you know an Assistant District Attorney? Maybe you could …”
“Nicki, I’ll be right over. I’ll do anything I can. I’m leaving now.”
Outside the office a few students still waited. Kate rushed past them down the stairs. On that bench, how many months ago, Janet Harrison had waited. Professor Fansler, could you recommend a good psychiatrist?
Two
THERE is no real reason why psychiatrists should confine themselves to the most elegant residential section of the city. Broadway, for example, is accessible by subway, while Fifth, Madison, Park Avenue, and the side streets which connect them can be reached only by taxi, bus, or on foot. But no psychiatrist would dream of moving west, with the exception of a few brave souls on Central Park West, who apparently find sufficient elegance in the sight of Fifth Avenue across the park. Whether this has formed itself as an equation: East Side = style, psychiatry = style, therefore psychiatry = East Side; whether it is that the West Side and success are unthinkable together, whatever the reason, psychiatrists find themselves, and their patients find them, in the sixties, seventies, perhaps the low eighties, between the avenues. The area is known, in certain circles, as psychiatrists’ row.
The Bauers lived in a ground-floor apartment in the sixties, just off Fifth Avenue. The building itself was on Fifth Avenue, but Dr. Emanuel Bauer’s office address was 3 East. This added, for some mysterious reason, a note of elegance, as though, living on Fifth Avenue, it was more couth if one did not say so in so many words. What the Bauers’ rent was, Kate had never dared to imagine. Nicola, of course, had money, and since Emanuel’s office was in the apartment, a percentage of the rent was tax deductible. Kate herself lived in a large four-room apartment overlooking the Hudson River, not, as some of her friends said, because she was a reverse snob, but because the old apartments on the East Side were unavailable, and as for the new ones—Kate would rather have pitched a tent than live with a windowless kitchen, with walls so thin one listened, perforce, to the neighbors’ television, with Muzak in the elevators, and goldfish in the lobby. Her ceilings were high, her walls thick, and her elegance faded.
As Kate’s taxi wove in and out of traffic, carrying her to the Bauers’, she thought, not of their rent, but of the apartment’s layout, its convenience for a murderer. In fact, the apartment, when one came to think of it, was designed for intrusion of any sort. The entrance from the street led one into a short hall, with the Bauer apartment on one side, another doctor’s office (he was not in psychiatry, Kate seemed to remember) on the other. Beyond these two entrances, the hall widened into a small lobby, with a bench, an elevator, and a door beyond it to the garage. Although the main lobby of the building was stiff with attendants, this small one boasted only the elevator man who, in keeping with his kind, spent a good part of his time going up to, or down from, the upper floors. When he was in his elevator, the lobby was empty. Neither the Bauers’ apartment nor the office across the hall was locked during the day. Emanuel’s patients simply walked in and waited in a small waiting room until summoned by Emanuel into his office. Theoretically, if the elevator were up, one could walk in unobserved at any time.
But, of course, there would be other people about. Not to mention the other doctor and his patients and nurse, who seemed to do rather a lot of going and coming, there were Emanuel himself, his patients, possibly one in the office and one waiting, Nicola, the maid, the Bauer boys, Simon and Joshua, friends of Nicola’s, friends of the boys, and of course, Kate realized, anyone living on the upper floors who had entered the building by the side entrance and waited in the small lobby for the elevator. It was becoming increasingly clear to Kate, and probably already clear to the police, that whoever had done this knew the place and the habits of the Bauers. It was a disquieting thought, but Kate refused at this point to give way to its depressing implications. Perhaps, Kate thought, the murderer had been seen. Yet in fact she doubted it. And if he or she had been seen, he or she had probably looked like a quite ordinary tenant, or visitor, or patient, and was t
herefore quite unmemorable, in fact invisible.
Kate found Nicola stretched out on her bed in the back of the apartment. Kate had walked in unnoticed by anyone except the policeman in the hall, a fact which depressed her still further, though whether she was upset by the ease of her intrusion or the presence of the policeman she could not have said. Nicola was usually to be found in the back. The Bauer living room, visible from the foyer through which the patients passed, was not used during the day or the early hours of the evening when Emanuel had patients. Great care, in fact, as all Nicola’s friends knew, was taken to make sure that the patients saw no one in Emanuel’s household. And even the boys had become expert at dodging back and forth between the bedroom part of the apartment and the kitchen without meeting a patient.
“Is Emanuel working?” Kate asked.
“Yes. They’ve let him have the office again, though of course it will be in the papers, and whether the patients will come back, or what they will think if they do, I can’t imagine. I suppose actually it will bring up all sorts of fascinating material, if they care to talk about it; but it is not the best thing for transference during an analysis, at least not for positive transference, to have one’s analyst’s office the scene of a murder, with the analyst himself as the chief suspect. I mean, patients may have fantasies about being attacked on an analyst’s couch—I’m sure most of them do—but it is best not to have someone actually stabbed there.”
Nothing, Kate noticed thankfully, nothing could stop the flow of Nicola’s talk. Except when she talked about her children (and the only way to keep from being boring on that subject, Kate believed, was to avoid it), Nicola was never dull, partly because her talk came from a joy in life that was more than egocentricity, and partly because she not only talked, she listened, listened and cared. Kate often thought that Emanuel had married Nicki largely because her language, flowing over him in waves, catching up every imaginable, every unprofound subject, buoyed him up despite the heaviness of his own mind. For the only thing which drove Emanuel eagerly to talk was an abstract idea, and, oddly, this anomaly suited them. Like most male followers of Freud, like Freud himself, if it came to that, Emanual needed and sought the company of intellectual women but avoided any contractual alliance with them.
“And, of course,” Nicki went on, “patients shouldn’t know anything about their analyst, personally, and even if the police do their best—as they have promised—the papers are bound to print that he has a wife and two children, let alone is suspected of stabbing a patient on the couch, and I can’t imagine how we shall ever recover from this, even if Emanuel isn’t sent to jail, though they could doubtless use a brilliant psychoanalyst in jail, but if Emanuel had wanted to study the criminal mind he would have gone in for that in the first place. Perhaps if he had, he could figure out who did it. I keep telling him it must have been one of his patients, and he keeps saying, ‘Let’s not discuss it, Nicola,’ and I’m not supposed to talk to anyone really, except perhaps Mother, who wants to rally round, but insists on looking so brave. Emanuel has said I can talk to you because you know how to keep your mouth shut, and you’ll be a good outlet. For me, I mean.”
“Let me get you some sherry,” Kate said.
“Now, don’t start being sensible, or I shall scream. Pandora is being sensible with the boys; of course I am too, but I just want someone who will sit down with me and wail.”
“I am not being sensible, merely selfish. I could use a drink myself. In the kitchen? All right, stay there, I’ll get it; you plan how you can tell me all this starting right at the beginning …”
“I know, go on till I get to the end, and then stop. We do need the Red King, don’t we? It is rather like that.”
As Kate walked to the kitchen and back with the drinks, peeking first through the doors to make sure the path was clear (it would not do to meet a patient with a glass of liquor firmly grasped in each hand), Kate clarified in her own mind the sort of fact she would have to elicit from Nicki if she were to make any sense of the entire affair. She had already determined to call Reed at the D.A.’s office and blackmail him (if it should come to that) into telling her what the police knew, but meanwhile the sensible thing was to get the facts. With that odd ability to see herself from the outside, Kate noticed with interest that she had already accepted the murder as fact, that the shock had passed, that she had now reached the state where coherent action was possible.
“Well,” Nicki said, sipping her sherry automatically, “it began like any other day.” (Days always do, Kate thought, but we notice it only when they don’t end like any other day.) “Emanuel got up with the boys. It’s the only time he really gets to see them, except for odd moments during the day, and they all had breakfast together in the kitchen. Because he had an eight o’clock patient, at ten minutes of he shoved the boys into their room, where they played, though quiet play is clearly beyond them, and I continued to sleep my fitful sleep until nine …”
“Do you mean Emanuel has a patient at eight o’clock in the morning?”
“Of course, it’s the most popular hour of all. People who work have to come either before they go to work, or in their lunch hour, or just after work at night, which is why Emanuel’s day, and I suppose every psychiatrist’s, stretches out so at both ends. Of course, at the moment Emanuel’s got five patients in the morning, but that’s a very bad arrangement, and he’s planning—well, he was planning—to move the ten o’clock patient over to the afternoon as soon as he, the patient, could arrange his schedule to come in the afternoon. Now the eleven o’clock patient is gone, possibly to be followed by all the others.”
“The eleven o’clock patient was Janet Harrison?”
“Kate, do you think she had a past? She must have had a past, mustn’t she, if someone tracked her down and killed her in Emanuel’s office? I keep pointing out that someone in analysis is very likely to mention her past, and why in hell doesn’t Emanuel tell the police about her, but of course it’s like the secrets of the confessional; still, the girl is dead, and Emanuel in danger …”
“Nicki, dear, she doesn’t have to have had a past; a present will do, even a future someone wanted to avoid. I only hope whoever did it wanted to murder her. I mean, if the police have to find a homicidal maniac who was overcome at the sight of a girl on a couch, and who just happened to wander in, who never knew who she was—well, of course, that idea is preposterous. Let’s get back to yesterday. Emanuel had patients at eight, nine, ten, eleven and twelve?”
“He expected to have; as it turned out the eleven and twelve o’clock patients canceled, or Emanuel thought they canceled, though of course they came, that was how I happened to find the body, because the twelve o’clock patient …”
“Nicki, please, let’s stick to the proper order. The point is, don’t leave out anything, however ordinary, however insignificant. How many patients does Emanuel have altogether, by the way; I mean, how many did he have, as of yesterday morning?”
“I don’t know, exactly. Emanuel never talks about his work. I know he never has more than eight a day, but of course they can’t all afford to come every day, so the total probably comes to ten or twelve; I don’t know, you’ll have to ask Emanuel.”
“All right, we’re up to nine o’clock yesterday morning, when you arose from your fitful sleep.”
“Nine-fifteenish, really. Then the children and I make a dash for the kitchen, where I have a first breakfast, and they have a second. We tend to dawdle, actually, and usually I make lists, either of marketing I have to do, or errands of some other sort, and I telephone the butcher, and sometimes Mother, and so on. You know what mornings are like.”
“When does Pandora come?”
“Oh, Pandora’s come already. Sorry, I keep forgetting things. Pandora comes at nine; she’s usually in the kitchen when I get there with the boys. After they’ve sampled most of my breakfast, she’s stacked the dishes, and so on, she dresses the boys and they go out, unless of course it’s raining. Pan
dora has a kind of colony she meets in the park; I’ve no idea what age, or sex, or nationality the other children are, but the boys seem to like it, and Pandora, of course, is a positive monument of good sense, particularly now she’s been …”
“It is about ten o’clock in the morning, and the children have just gone out with Pandora.”
“A little after ten, actually, as a general rule. Then I begin throwing on my clothes, and so on, since I have to leave at least by twenty of eleven to get to my analytic hour, though usually I leave a bit earlier to do an errand or two on the way.” Nicki, too, was in analysis, though exactly why Kate had never been able to determine. It had something to do with understanding and sympathizing with her husband, but apparently Nicki had felt also a great need to work out certain problems, the chief of which seemed to be what Nicki referred to as “anxiety attacks.” Kate could never discover precisely what an anxiety attack was, though she gathered that it was terrifying, and that its chief characteristic seemed to be the fact that there was nothing, at the time, to be anxious about. Nothing rational, that is. For example, Nicki had explained, a person might get an anxiety attack in an elevator; he would become violently anxious about the elevator’s falling, but if you could prove to him absolutely that the elevator couldn’t fall, and he might know perfectly well that it can’t, none of that would prevent the anxiety attack. Nor, Kate had further gathered, did it mean that he (the victim of the anxiety attack) had ever been in a falling elevator, had ever known anyone who had been in a falling elevator, had ever, in fact, had anything superficially to do with elevators at all. Nicki’s anxiety attacks were not associated with elevators—a pity, really, since she lived on the ground floor—but were connected, apparently, with public transportation. Not for the first time, Kate reflected that while she was impressed profoundly with the genius of Freud, the ineffectual groping, the combination of muddle and doctrine which marked clinical analysis today left her unimpressed in the extreme. The trouble was, among other things, that if Freud were to return to earth today, he would still be a better psychiatrist than anybody else; Einstein, before he died, could not understand the work then being done in physics, and this, Kate thought, was proper, and as it should be. Psychiatry, which had begun with Freud, seemed largely to have ended there; but perhaps it was too early to tell.