In the Last Analysis (11 page)

But Janet Harrison had not persisted with her nursing. Her father had died a year after she began training, and she had gone home to live with her mother. It was apparently at her mother’s death that the girl had come to New York to study English literature. But why come to New York? The damned form raised more questions than it answered. According to the financial statement appended, Janet had been left, on the death of her mother, with some income, but not enough to pay the large fees of the university, unless she also took a job, and the university preferred to lend students money rather than have them try to carry jobs and graduate work at the same time. She had, Kate noticed, got the fellowship, which was not very large.

Kate walked back to the office with questions whirling in her mind. Had Janet Harrison left a will, and if so—or if not—who got her money? Was it possibly worth murdering her for? Reed would have to find that out. Perhaps the police, whom Kate had a regrettable habit of forgetting, had already looked into this. It seemed obvious enough. Why had Janet Harrison come to New York? The University of Michigan had a perfectly good graduate school. Well, perhaps she had wanted to get away from home, but did it have to be so
far
from home? Why had she chosen so varied a program of study? Why, if it came to that, had she never married? Jackie Miller, blast her loquacious imbecility, might think Janet frigid, or “unable to relate to people” (the girl had, of course, used that very phrase to Emanuel); but she was certainly beautiful and had had, so Emanuel thought, a love affair.

At her office Kate found waiting students and, feeling rather like a trapeze artist, plunged once again into academia.

Exhausted, she reached home later in the afternoon to find Jerry camping on the doorstep. He had the gleam in his eye of the prospector who has found gold. She consoled him for his wait with a beer.

“I have been on the job,” he said. “I couldn’t reach you this morning, after handing in my temporary resignation, and since I assumed my pay started today, I honorably determined to get to work. You had not, however, left any directions, so I decided to mosey around on my own. I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I went over to that dormitory where Janet Harrison had lived.”

“Really,” Kate said. “I was there myself. Did you meet Jackie Miller too?”

“I was not concerning myself with females; that, obviously,
is your department. I went down to the basement and talked to the porter. Naturally, I didn’t ask him a lot of questions about Janet Harrison; that is not, in my opinion, the way to elicit information. I was just a nice eager boy who wanted to know how I could get a porter’s job at the university, where I wanted to work, because then I wouldn’t have to pay for the courses I wanted to take. Employees don’t, you know. We mentioned that the Tigers had a good chance for the pennant, we talked about how much money everything costs, and thus, gradually, did I come into possession of the fact that will save Emanuel, if I may call him that.”

“For God’s sake, stop being dramatic and get to the point.”

“The point, my dear Kate, is that the porter’s uniform was stolen on the morning that Janet Harrison’s room was robbed. The porter was very exercised about the whole thing, because the university is being stubborn about buying him another one; you know the sort of uniform they wear—blue shirt and trousers, with ‘Building and Grounds’ stitched on the pocket. All right, all right, don’t get hysterical. Obviously, you see, a man stole that uniform to get into Janet Harrison’s room. A man can’t usually go wandering around female dormitories, as I know to my cost, but no one ever notices a porter; he’s obviously on his way to fix something, and no one gives him a second glance.

“Now, the beautiful part of all this is that the porter came on duty at noon, when he noticed the uniform had been stolen, and the room wasn’t robbed before ten-thirty, because the maid went in then to straighten up. Therefore the uniform was stolen and the room robbed when Emanuel had a beautiful alibi: he was with a patient, and
the patient, ladies and gentlemen, was Janet Harrison, who therefore could not have been in the room either. Therefore the room was
not
robbed by Emanuel, and since I don’t see why we shouldn’t leap to the conclusion that whoever robbed the room murdered the girl, it wasn’t Emanuel.”

“He could have hired someone, the police will say.”

“But we know he didn’t, and we will prove it. Furthermore, I couldn’t check on any of the others, but I went around to Emanuel’s house for another buddy-buddy chat with the employees—the Tigers really have a good chance of winning the pennant this year—and discovered that the elevator man is off on Friday. Dr. Michael Barrister does not hold office hours on Friday, and if you will give me the names of the ten o’clock and twelve o’clock patients, we will discover shortly what they do on Fridays. I’ll bet you my salary, double or nothing, that whoever robbed that room murdered the girl. And I don’t think whoever it was relegated the task to anyone. My reasons for thinking that are that it would be too damn inconvenient if he, or she, had. Speaking of shes, Mrs. Bauer—may I call her Nicola?—was probably at her analytic hour with an alibi. But of course it was a man who stole the uniform, so that doesn’t get us very much further.”

“Jerry, you’re wonderful.”

“I think perhaps after law school I will join the F.B.I. Do they look for murderers, or only Communists and drug dispensers? I’m rather enjoying this.”

“We shall have to map out a plan,” Kate said, with a certain amount of primness, to control his exuberant spirits.

“That’s simple. Tomorrow morning you return to Thomas Carlyle—if that is the man with whom you were carrying
on an affair in the stacks—and I will follow the trail of the ten o’clock patient in the advertising business. You see before you a young man burning with the desire to go into the advertising business. Will you have a thinking man’s cigarette?”

J
ERRY
arrived at Kate’s apartment the next morning at a quarter to nine. They had decided that he would thus arrive each morning for a conference. Kate assumed, though she did not actually ask him, that his mother, friends, and fiancée still imagined him to be driving the truck.

“One thing’s been worrying me,” Kate said. “Why didn’t the man, whoever he was, return the uniform? If he returned it before twelve the porter would never have known it was gone. Why didn’t the porter tell the police it had been stolen, by the way?”

“To answer the second question first, the porter didn’t tell the police because he doesn’t like the police, and they might have ‘pulled him in’ or thought he was implicated. The theft of the uniform might well make it look like an inside job.”

“How easily you slip into the jargon.”

“To answer the first question,” said Jerry, ignoring this,
“he didn’t return the uniform because it was risky enough stealing it. Why risk returning it, and double the chance of getting caught? Also, I imagine, it made it much easier for him to get out of the place unnoticed. A man in a porter’s uniform isn’t really looked at, but a man in a business suit emerging from a women’s dormitory might very well be noticed. Easier to use the uniform for a quick getaway, and then drop it down an incinerator someplace.”

“What did he do with his own clothes when he put on the uniform?”

“Really, Kate, you don’t seem to have much of a flair for this sort of thing, if you don’t mind my mentioning it. He put it on over his own clothes, naturally; the porter is, unfortunately, on the large side, so it’s no good looking for a tiny murderer. Those uniforms are, of course, handed around, and are not expected to be more than approximate fits.”

“Well,” Kate said, “I have, for the moment, decided to abandon Thomas Carlyle. Delightful enough man, in his way, but not exactly restful, and dreadfully time-consuming. I had better take on Frederick Sparks. He is, after all, in my field—I know several people in his English Department, and if there is a motive there, I am likelier than you to smell it out. That leaves you with the advertising business. Perhaps, by tonight, we shall, one or the other, have a suspect bulging with motive. We may, of course, find that our investigations take several days. Perhaps we should keep notes, and when we are finished we can write a manual of do-it-yourself detection. Are you actually going to apply for a job?”

“I haven’t really decided yet. You know, I think I’ll try to work in Dr. Michael Barrister’s nurse. I got a glimpse of her yesterday—very young, very attractive, and, I would
guess, very eager to talk, if encouraged immediately after work when she has just spent hours listening to the ailments of aging women. We might as well find out all we can about the sinister doctor across the hall.”

“You haven’t met him yet. When you do, you will discover that he is, unfortunately, not sinister at all. However, we must search out every avenue of possibility, if that is the correct phrase. Don’t, by the way, get so involved with the young, attractive nurse that you forget my investigation and your fiancée.”

“I only came to work on the case because all detectives have such a fascinating sex life. Have you read Raymond Chandler?”

“I have read Raymond Chandler, and his detective was not engaged to be married.”

“Nor did he have a nice safe job driving around the countryside with frozen food. Nor, now I think of it, did he spend six months in the Army as a cook.”

“A
cook!
Why on earth?”

“Because I’ve never cooked a thing in my life, and had a great deal of experience driving trucks. But they didn’t have any room in the transport section because it was all full up with cooks. Do not, in any case, worry about my morals, which, to the extent they are not already corrupted, are incorruptible. I knew a guy who got involved with a redhead after he was engaged to a fetching brunette. He met the redhead in a village nightclub where he had a temporary job playing the bass fiddle. The two women, between them, wore him down to such a state that he joined a ship’s orchestra, even though he once got seasick on the boat ride to the Statue of Liberty, and was last heard of in ragged clothes, playing the violin under a balcony in
Rome, waiting for Tennessee Williams to work him into his latest play.”

He departed, having acquired from Kate a copy of the picture found in Janet Harrison’s purse, money, and a key to Kate’s apartment, should he require to return to home base when she was gone.

About Frederick Sparks, whose appointment came after Janet Harrison’s, and who had been present at the finding of the body, Kate was prepared to indulge the profoundest suspicions. For a few minutes after Jerry’s departure she considered calling Emanuel to beg a few minutes in which to discuss Mr. Sparks. It might be Emanuel whose whole professional career—indeed, whose life was in danger—but in Kate’s eyes his professional stature had not diminished by one millimeter, and she found this extraordinarily encouraging, even though it meant she begged for, rather than demanded, time. Kate felt certain that Emanuel’s patients would think of him in the same way. She would wait till she had met Frederick Sparks, or at least had garnered some impressions of him, before attempting to extricate something from Emanuel.

She was interrupted in these ruminations by a telephone call from Reed, who sounded exactly as Jerry had the night before.

“We have finally discovered something,” Reed said, “that, I have a hunch, will break the case, one way or another.”

“I know all about the uniform,” Kate said primly.

“What uniform?”

“Sorry, I must have been thinking of one of my other cases. What have you found?”

“Janet Harrison left a will.”

“Did she indeed? I hope she was murdered for her money; what we badly need in this case is a motive.”

“She had $25,000 invested in some family business which paid her 6 percent (preferred stock) or, to save you the embarrassment of higher mathematics, $1,500 dollars a year.”

“Perhaps the family in the business murdered her for her stock.”

“Scarcely. I’m trying to tell you that she left a will. She didn’t leave the stock to the family. Who do you think she left it to? Forgive me, whom?”

“If she left it to Emanuel, I shall shoot myself.”

“Messy. And people unacquainted with guns usually miss, shatter the walls and frighten the neighbors. She left it to a Daniel Messenger, M.D.”

“Who’s he? Reed! Could he be the youngish man in the picture?”

“Two minds with but a single thought. Or rather, twenty minds. We have already acquired a description of Dr. Daniel Messenger, who practices medical research—does one practice research? I’m sure not—in Chicago. It’s obvious he’s older than our man, and couldn’t be more unlike the picture if he’d planned it that way, the unspeakable blackguard.”

“Perhaps he’s disguised—dyed his hair or had plastic surgery.”

“Kate, my girl, I get more worried about you every time we have a conversation. We are about to receive a picture of the chap, and I think it will convince even you. I gather no one could mistake him for a young Cary Grant; a young Lon Chaney, in full makeup, would apparently be nearer the mark. His hair grows low on his forehead, he has a long, rather fleshy nose, and his ears stick out. Undoubtedly
he has a beautiful personality; he certainly must have character, to go into research, with the money lying around for doctors these days.”

“What was he to Janet Harrison, and where did you find the will?”

“What he was to Janet Harrison is the question of the hour. He was interrogated by a Chicago detective who swears that the good doctor had never heard the name, and certainly didn’t recognize her picture. There is something about that girl which is beginning to fascinate me. How we got the will is a demonstration of the benefits of publicity. The lawyer with whom she had left it called us, and turned over the will. No, you need not ask: the lawyer did not know her. She apparently picked his name out of the phone book. He wrote out the will, a perfectly simple one, and charged her fifty dollars. He had been away on some beastly business trip, and the name registered only when his wife talked on about the case after he got home. He seems perfectly genuine. But there
must
be a connection with this Daniel Messenger, though as far as we can figure out he and Janet Harrison have never even been in the same place at the same time.”