In the Last Analysis (3 page)

“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. Pandora 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.

“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.”