by Amanda Cross
“But you didn’t have any personal connection with her, did you?” Nicola asked.
“Of course I didn’t. But neither, I assume, did Emanuel. Yet the police must suppose there was some connection, a mad passion or something of the sort, if he was going to kill her in his office. I don’t imagine they suppose he went off his head all of a sudden, and stabbed her in the middle of one of her more interesting free associations.”
“She was very beautiful,” Nicola said. She dropped the sentence, like an awkward gift from a child, into their laps. Both Emanuel and Kate started to say “How do you know?” Neither of them said it. Could Nicki have noticed the girl was beautiful in the moment when she saw her dead? With a shock, Kate remembered the girl’s beauty. It had not been of the flamboyant sort toward which men turned their heads on the street, around which they clustered at a party. That sort of beauty, as like as not, is the result of startling coloring, and a certain pleasing symmetry of the face. Janet Harrison had had what Kate called beauty in the bones. The finely chiseled features, the planes of the face, the deep-set eyes, the broad, clear forehead—these made her beauty which, at the second or third look, suddenly presented itself as though it had been in hiding. My God, Kate thought, remembering, it needed only that. “The point I was going to make,” she went on after a moment, “is that I feel a responsibility for all this, a guilt if you will, and if nothing else you will certainly be helping me if you allow me to get everything that happened, as far as you know it, straight in my mind. I see fairly clearly how the day went. At ten-thirty Nicola had left, and Emanuel was in his office with the ten o’clock patient when the phone light flashed to indicate a call. Did it flash once, I mean for just one call, or twice?”
“Twice. Obviously, even if it was the same person—shall we say the murderer—calling to cancel, falsely, for both of them, he would take the trouble to call twice. It would immediately be suspicious if one person called to cancel two patients. The patients don’t even know each other.”
“Do you know that they don’t?”
“Let me put it this way. They may have met casually in the waiting room; it does sometimes happen. But if they knew each other at all well, I would probably know it.”
“It would come up in the analysis?” Emanuel nodded, obviously unwilling to discuss this in detail. “But,” Kate asked, “if the twelve o’clock patient, who was a man, wanted, for some reason, to keep her attraction for him, her connection with him secret, wouldn’t he do so?”
“It would be unexpected.”
“And,” Kate added, “might indicate that he had been planning to murder her.” No one had any answer to that. “Well, to continue, at ten to eleven you called the service, and they told you of the two cancellations. So you immediately left the office and went to run around the reservoir.”
“You see,” Nicola interrupted, “you believe that’s what he did, and yet it sounds crazy even when you say it.”
Emanuel smiled, that half-smile of his which indicated his acceptance of the inevitable. It occurred to Kate that Emanuel was able, more than anyone she knew, to accept the inevitable. It was something, perhaps, for which psychiatry trained you, a profession of few surprises to one well and long trained in it. Could Janet Harrison’s murder possibly be considered a professional surprise? Kate tucked that bone away, to be gnawed on later. “I didn’t leap from the chair out to the reservoir,” Emanuel said. “I may want exercise, but not that impetuously. I went to the back of the apartment and changed my clothes. Then I wandered out in what I think could be called a leisurely fashion.”
“Did anyone see you go? Did you meet anyone?”
“No one who can swear to it. The hall was empty.”
Nicola sat up. “Perhaps one of Dr. Barrister’s patients saw him go by the window, toward Fifth Avenue. I’m sure if we asked him, he’d be willing to ask them, in a matter of this importance. Or he might have seen you from his office.”
“It’s unlikely; anyway, even if they had, or he had, there’s no reason, from the police’s point of view, why I couldn’t have doubled back. And I didn’t meet anyone going around the reservoir. At least, I passed some people, but I can’t remember them. How could they identify a man in dirty pants and an old jacket, walking fast?”
“You were wearing those clothes when you came back,” Nicola said. “Surely you wouldn’t have been wearing them during her analysis. Doesn’t that prove you didn’t murder her?”
“He could have changed them after he stabbed her,” Kate said. “But wait a minute. If you’re supposed to have planned your own alibi, if you can call trotting around the reservoir an alibi, who is supposed to have made the two calls canceling the patients? You said the answering service records the time. If you were with a patient, and you were, you couldn’t have made the calls. Even if the patient didn’t see the flashing lights—and the murderer may have known that—the answering service would know when the calls were received.”
“I’ve thought of that,” Emanuel said. “I even went so far as to point it out to the police, though that may not have been very wise of me. They made no comment, but undoubtedly their point will be that I could have paid someone to make the calls for me, or got Nicki to, or you.”
“It’s still a weak point in their case. Personally, I intend to clasp it firmly to my bosom. Why, by the way, do you suppose the murderer made the calls then, and not while you were in your office alone? Then there really would be no one’s word for it but yours.”
“Perhaps he was unable to make them at another time. More likely, though, he wanted to be sure that I would not answer the phone and take the messages. I might recognize that these were not my patients’ voices, or—though this seems unlikely—I might have recognized the voice on the phone.”
“There’s another possibility too,” Nicola said. “If he called earlier, even you, with your great drive to go run around, might have had time to plan something else. You might, for instance, have mentioned it to me, and I might have said: Goody, now we can both sit down and figure out the budget, or make love—that is, of course, if I canceled my analytic hour, I know it’s unlikely, but anyone who knows us as well as this murderer does might know I was just the sort to do something like that. With Pandora out, I might have decided how nice, for a change, to go to bed together in the morning—I don’t think he or she wanted to give Emanuel time to think, and he wanted to make sure I was gone.”
“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-class 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 sex 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 analysis, 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 Assistant District Attorney, though exactly what functions were encompassed by that title, 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 friendship, 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 classless 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 hell of an unfair mess,” and then cursed herself for appearing to be reminding him. But what the hell, she thought, I am reminding him; it does no good to pussyfoot 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 dashing 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, surreptitiously, 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 nobly 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 class 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 accumulation, 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 psychoanalysts: 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 assist, if she could, in restoring Emanuel to common unhappiness from the catastrophic fate which seemed to face him. A disquieting thought, from which she passed into idle daydreams.
How the rest of the afternoon passed 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-fi
ve 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 hell. 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.