by Amanda Cross
“Actually, I left at ten-thirty yesterday,” Nicki said.
“Meanwhile, Emanuel was having patients in his office.”
“Yes. In between the nine and ten o’clock patients, he came into the back of the apartment to say hello and to go to the bathroom. Everything was still all right then. I didn’t see him again till …”
“Wait a minute, Nicki. Let’s get this straight now. By ten-thirty, Emanuel was in his office with a patient (the patient, incidentally, whom he wanted to switch to the afternoon—does that possibly matter? I wonder if he knew the girl), Pandora had gone out with the children, and you were leaving for your eleven o’clock appointment and an errand. When you left, there would be no one in the apartment but Emanuel and his patient, who would be shut up in the office?”
“Yes. It sounds a bit dramatic, of course, but that’s perfectly true. The police seemed very interested in all this too.”
“Anyone who had observed the household would know that this is what actually happened, or what inevitably happened, unless someone was sick, or it rained?”
“Yes. But who would observe the apartment? Kate, don’t you see, the whole point is precisely that.”
“Nicki, please. Let’s stick to the chronological report for a minute. At eleven, then, the girl, Janet Harrison, would have come; the previous patient would have left. You would be at your analyst’s, the children and Pandora would be in the park, and for an hour this situation would continue?”
“For fifty minutes, anyway. The fifty-minute hour, you know. The patients leave at ten of, and the hour begins on the hour. But you see the problem the police have. I mean, one can see their point of view, even if one knows oneself that Emanuel could never have stabbed a patient in his own office, on his own couch; the whole idea is insane. There he was, or at least, they think he was, though of course he wasn’t, but I mean, there they think he was, in a soundproof office with a girl, no one else about, and he claims that someone else came in and stabbed her on the couch and that he wasn’t there at all. From their point of view, I suppose it does sound fishy, to say the least. Of course, Emanuel has told them perfectly clearly that …”
“Why is the room soundproofed, by the way?”
“For the patient’s peace of mind, really. If a patient sitting in the waiting room should hear a sound, any sound at all, from the office, he would leap to the conclusion that he could be heard, and this might have dreadful inhibiting effects. So Emanuel decided to have it soundproofed—I think most psychiatrists do—and he sat in every possible place in the waiting room, while I lay on the couch in the office and screamed, ‘I love my mother and hate my father!’ over and over, though of course the patients don’t scream, and they would never say that, but we did have to be sure, and Emanuel didn’t hear a thing.”
“Let’s skip a minute, Nicki. Let’s go on to twelve o’clock, when you found the body. Why you? Do you usually go into Emanuel’s office?”
“Never during the day, really. At night I go in to dust and empty the ashtrays, since Pandora doesn’t really have a chance, and in the summer sometimes, in the evenings before we go away, we sit in there because it’s the only air-conditioned room in the house. But during the day none of us ever goes near it. We try even not to go back and forth too much when there’s a patient in the waiting room, though Emanuel has them trained to shut the hall door behind them, so technically they couldn’t see us anyway, unless they were going in or out. I know a lot of psychiatrists disapprove of an analyst having his office in his house, but they don’t realize how little the patients do see of what goes on. Although Emanuel’s patients probably assume he’s married, only one of them has ever seen me in all these years, and he may have thought I was another patient. None of them has ever seen, I think, even an indication of the children. The office is definitely out of bounds, and I would no more go into it than I would go into Emanuel’s office if it were somewhere else; probably less so.”
“Suppose for some reason you have to talk to him during the day.”
“If it’s important, I wait till he comes back, which he often does between patients. If there is a rush, I telephone him. He has his own office phone, of course.”
“But you went into the office yesterday at twelve o’clock.”
“Not at twelve, no; I’m usually not home before twelve-thirty, though yesterday I was a little early. Some days I meet someone for lunch, or go downtown, and don’t come home in the early afternoon at all. But yesterday, thank God—I suppose, thank God—I came home early. As I walked into the house, the twelve o’clock patient …”
“Did you recognize him?”
“No, of course not; I’d never seen him before. I mean, the man I later learned was the twelve o’clock patient stuck his head out the hall door and asked if the doctor was meeting his patients. It was twenty-five of one, and the doctor hadn’t come to call him in. Well, you know, Kate, that was extremely odd. Emanuel has never in his life stood up a patient. I knew he had had an eleven o’clock patient (Janet Harrison), and he never tries to dash out in the ten minutes between patients. I wondered what could have happened to him. Could he be in his office, feeling, for some reason, unable to meet a patient? I dialed his office phone from the telephone in the kitchen, and after three rings, the service answered, so I knew he wasn’t there, or wasn’t answering, and then I became worried. Meanwhile, I’d coaxed the patient back into the waiting room. Of course, I was having all sorts of fantasies about his having had a heart attack in the office, or having been unable to get rid of the eleven o’clock patient—one does have the oddest fantasies at these times—Pandora was in the kitchen with the boys getting lunch, and I went and knocked on the office door. I knew the patient in the waiting room was aware of what I was doing, though he couldn’t see me, but I had to do something, and naturally, no one answered the knock, so I opened the door a bit and stuck my head in. She was right there on the couch, which is near the door; I couldn’t possibly miss seeing her. At first I thought, She’s fallen asleep, but then I saw the knife sticking out of her chest. And Emanuel nowhere to be found. I did have the presence of mind to close the office door and tell the patient he’d better go. He was curious, and clearly reluctant to leave a scene which he sensed was fraught with drama, but I ushered him out. I was extremely calm, as one often is right after a shock.”
“And then you sent for the police?”
“No. Actually I never thought of the police, not then.”
“What did you do?”
“I rushed into the office across the hall and got the doctor. He was very nice and came right away, even though he had an office full of patients. His name is Barrister, Michael Barrister. He told me she was dead.”
Three
“DINNER seems to be served,” said Emanuel, coming into the bedroom. “Hello, Kate. Pandora has set a place for you. How that woman carries on like this, I don’t know, but she has never had any use for the police.”
“You carry on fairly well yourself,” Kate said.
“Today, after all, was still a bit of the old life for me. The patients didn’t know yet, at least not till the last one at six o’clock. He had an evening paper.”
“Do the papers mention it?” Nicola asked.
“Mention it! I’m afraid at the moment we are the news. Psychiatry, couches, female patients, male doctors, knives—one can scarcely blame them. Let’s say good night to the boys and have some dinner.”
But it was not until dinner was over, and they were in the living room, that they talked again of the murder. Kate had half expected Emanuel to disappear, but he seemed to want to talk. Usually some inner need to “get something done,” to “make use of time,” either drove him from social occasions, or subjected him, if he remained, to the pressure of a mounting inner tension. Yet tonight, with a real problem looming, as it were, in the external world, Emanuel seemed, almost with thankfulness, to have relaxed in the contemplation of something beyond his control. The very externality of
the murder gave him a kind of relief. Kate, recognizing this, knew the police would mistake his calm for some symptom, some indication of guilt, when in fact, if they only knew, it was the assurance of his innocence. Had he murdered the girl, the problem would not, of course, have been outside. Yet what policeman in the world could one convince of all this? Stern? Kate forced her thoughts back to the facts.
“Emanuel,” she asked, “where were you between ten of eleven and twelve-thirty? Don’t tell me you suffered a blow on the head and simply wandered about, uncertain of who you were.”
Emanuel looked at her, and then at Nicola, and said to Kate, “How much has she told you?”
“Only the normal routine of the day, really, plus a word or two on the finding of the body. We had, for the moment, skipped over the magic hour.”
“Magic is the word,” Emanuel said. “It was all done with such cleverness that really, you know, I don’t blame the police for suspecting me; I almost suspect myself. When you add to the quite justified suspicions of police, the mysterious and still, I fear, not quite fully American profession of psychiatry, it’s no wonder they assume that I went mad and stabbed the girl on my couch. I don’t think they have any doubts.”
“Why haven’t they arrested you?”
“I wondered that myself, and decided finally that there really isn’t, yet, quite enough evidence. I don’t know much about the ins and outs of this, but I gather the D.A.’s office has to be convinced they’ve got enough evidence to have a good chance for conviction before they’ll allow an arrest and trial. A really clever lawyer (which it is assumed I could afford with ease) would make mincemeat of what they’ve got so far. As I see it, there are two problems: what this will do to me professionally, which I prefer for the moment to ignore, and the fact that as long as they believe I did it they will not really work to find who did. In that case I am doomed, either way.”
Kate felt a great surge of admiration and affection for this deeply intelligent and honest man. No one knew better than she (or, perhaps, did Nicola?) his failure to meet the day-to-day demands of a personal relationship, but at that still center of himself she recognized, as in every crisis she always would, an honor, an identity, that nothing would shatter. She had lived long enough to know that when you find intelligence and integrity in the same individual, you have found a prize.
“I’m surprised they let you go on seeing your patients, even today,” said Nicola, in tones of sarcasm. “Perhaps you might go mad, since we are apparently to consider it a symptom of your profession, and stab another victim. Wouldn’t they look foolish then?”
“On the contrary,” Kate said lightly. “They’d have their case wrapped up. I imagine that partly they are hoping he will do it again, and cast away all doubt, and partly even they, in their dim, methodical way, suspect somewhere in the depths of their beings that Emanuel didn’t do it.” Her eyes met Emanuel’s and then dropped, but he had seen the faith, and it had strengthened him.
“The irony great enough to make Shakespeare howl,” Emanuel said, “is that the girl had recently become very angry, which means transference. When she canceled today, I assumed it was because of that, and didn’t feel surprised. How clever we like to think we are!”
“Did she call you to cancel the appointment?”
“I didn’t speak to her, but in the normal course of events that is hardly surprising. She and the twelve o’clock patient—who later showed up and catapulted Nicki into finding the body—both of them, I learned at about five of eleven, had canceled their appointments.”
“Isn’t that a bit unusual?”
“Not really. As a rule, of course, two patients don’t cancel in a row, but it’s by no means extraordinary. Sometimes patients hit a patch of difficult material, and just can’t face it for a while. It happens in the course of every analysis. Or they tell themselves they’re too tired, or too busy, or too upset. Freud came to understand this very early. It’s one of the reasons we insist on charging patients for canceled appointments, even where they appear to have, do have, a perfectly legitimate excuse. People who don’t understand psychiatry are always shocked and think we are moneygrubbers, but the whole mechanism of paying, and even sacrificing to pay for an analysis, is an important part of the therapy.”
“How did you learn at five of eleven that they had both canceled?”
“I called the exchange and they told me.”
“The exchange is the answering service? Do you call them every hour?”
“Not unless I know there’s been a call.”
“You mean while you were in there with a patient, the phone rang, and you didn’t answer it?”
“The phone doesn’t ring; it has a yellow light which flashes on and off instead of a ring. The patient can’t see it from the couch. If I don’t answer after three rings, or three flashes, the exchange answers. Of course, I don’t interrupt patients by answering the phone.”
“Did you find out who spoke to the exchange to cancel the appointments? Was it a man and a woman, or a man for both, or what?”
“I thought of that, of course, first thing, but when I got to the exchange someone else was on duty, and they don’t keep any record of the voice they spoke to, merely the message and the time. Doubtless the police will look into it more carefully.”
Nicola, who had been sitting quietly during this exchange, whirled around to face Kate. “Before you ask another question, let me ask you something. This is the part that sticks in the throats of the police; I know it is, but maybe Emanuel has talked to enough people about it so that they’ll find out it’s probably true, and anyway we’ve met other psychiatrists who do the same things because they feel so shut up.”
“Nicki, dear,” Kate said, “not to mention your pronouns, I haven’t an idea in the world what you’re talking about.”
“Of course not; I haven’t asked you the question yet. Here it is: If a patient of Emanuel’s canceled, what would Emanuel do?”
“Go somewhere. No matter where, just go.”
“You see,” Nicola said. “Everyone knows that. I’d guess you’d go down to Brentano’s to browse among the paper books, and my mother, when I asked her that question, decided he’d think of an errand, somewhere, he simply had to do, but the important point is that the police cannot understand that a psychiatrist, who must sit quietly all day listening, relaxes by moving. They think if he wasn’t harboring nefarious plans, he would have stayed nicely in his office like any other sane person, catching up on his correspondence. At his most abandoned, they are convinced he would have called up a friend and had lunch downtown with two vodka cocktails first. It’s no good telling them that Emanuel never eats lunch, certainly never eats it with anyone else, and in any case is not geared to calling people up for lunch because he’s never, except for a fluke like this—and now that I think of it, it isn’t a fluke, it was planned—free for lunch.”
“What did you do, Emanuel?” Kate asked.
“I walked around the reservoir; round and round and round, at a kind of trot.”
“I know; I’ve seen you; I’ve trotted too.” It had been long ago, before Nicola, when she was still young enough to run just for the hell of it.
“It was spring; the spring was in my blood.” Kate thought of the chalk inscription. She seemed to have viewed it in another lifetime. She was suddenly dog tired, and felt herself collapse, like one of those cartoon figures she remembered from her childhood who discovered they were sitting on nothing, and then fell to the floor. From the first emotional shock of Detective Stern’s announcement—She has been murdered—until this moment, she had allowed no feeling to cluster about the idea of Emanuel’s situation. Particularly, she had excluded from her attention the question of responsibility for this situation. She was sufficiently logical, even in this state of emotional and physical exhaustion, not to hold herself wholly to blame. She could not have known the girl would be murdered, could not have guessed—indeed, could not have imagined—that she would be mur
dered in Emanuel’s office. Had such an idea crossed her mind, Kate would have decided that, in Nicola’s language, she was “hallucinating.”
Yet if Kate was no more than a single link in the chain of events which had led to this disaster, she had, nonetheless, a responsibility, not only to Emanuel and Nicola, but to herself, perhaps also to Janet Harrison.
“Do you remember that joke of a few years ago?” she said to them, “the one about the two psychiatrists on the stairs, and one of them gooses the other. The goosed one is at first rather angry, and then, shrugging his shoulders, dismisses the incident. ‘After all,’ he is supposed to have said, ‘it’s his problem.’ Well, I can’t do the same; it’s my problem too, even if you were not my friends.”
From the way in which Emanuel and Nicola avoided looking at each other, or at her, she knew this point had been at least mentioned between them. “In fact,” she continued, “regarded in a certain light, shall we say the light of the police, I’m a rather nice suspect myself. The detective who came to see me asked what I was doing yesterday morning. It may have been what they call ‘routine’; it may not.”
Emanuel and Nicola stared at her. “That’s absolute nonsense,” Emanuel said.
“No more nonsense, really, than that you should have murdered her in your own office, or that Nicola might have. Look at it from Detective Stern’s point of view: I know the routine, more or less, of your household and office. As it happens, I didn’t know about your telephone, about its lighting up instead of ringing, or about your not answering when a patient is there, but there’s only my word for that. I sent the girl to Emanuel. Perhaps I was madly jealous of her, or had stolen her money, or one of her literary ideas, and seized the chance to kill her.”