In the Last Analysis (13 page)

“My brother Tom used to date Sarah,” Horan was saying, as, in a dream, they stepped back into the elevator. “What are you doing these days?”

At lunch, Jerry allowed Horan to buy him a Gibson. He was not used to drinking in the middle of the day, but this,
after all, was in the nature of forcing brandy down the throat of an injured man. Even through an alcoholic haze, it was brilliantly clear that Horan did not resemble the man whose picture was now in the inside pocket of Jerry’s jacket. Furthermore, could anyone from Sarah’s world stab a girl on a couch? Not in a fit of passion, but in a coolly calculated crime?

“You in analysis?” Jerry asked. He heard the words with horror. He had meant, by the most devious circumlocution, to lead up to the subject. He ought not to have had the Gibson. What a detective he was making. Jerry stuffed his mouth with some bread, hoping, not too scientifically, that it would soak up the alcohol.

It was Horan’s turn to look shocked. “My God!” he said, “where did you hear that?”

“Oh, I didn’t,” Jerry said with a wave of his hand. “Just one of these things one says these days, you know, just to throw it on the stoop to see if the cat will sniff it.” He smiled encouragingly.

Horan looked like a man who, stooping to pet a dog, discovers it to be a hyena. The arrival of the food provided a fortunate interlude. Jerry began to eat rather rapidly. “Sorry,” he finally murmured.

Horan waved a forgiving hand. “I
am
in analysis, as a matter of fact. It’s not exactly a secret. Actually, my analyst is the man who just had a girl murdered on his couch.”

“Have you continued with him anyway?” Jerry ingenuously asked.

“Why not? Of course, he didn’t do it; at least, I don’t think he did. My family thinks I should quit, but what the hell, you can’t run out on every sinking ship. To coin a phrase,” he added.

“Did you know the girl?” Having begun with direct questions, Jerry thought it best thus to continue.

“No, I didn’t, more’s the pity. I used to see her in the waiting room when I came out, but I didn’t even know her name. Damn good-looking. I told her once that I just happened to have two tickets to a show that night, and would she like to go—as a matter of fact, I’d bought them that morning from a scalper—but she wasn’t having any. Cold sort of fish. Odd, just the same, that someone should have murdered her.”

It had, hideously, the ring of truth. But surely murderers were good liars.

“Is your analyst a good one?” Jerry asked.

“Highly recommended. He’s perfectly willing to sit there for twenty minutes if I don’t open my mouth. Apparently I’m resenting him, though. Dream I had.” Jerry looked interested. “You’re supposed to tell them your dreams, of course; never thought I dreamt much, but you do, if you make yourself remember them. Well, in this dream I was in Brooks Brothers buying a suit. The suit seemed to be damned expensive, but I got it anyway, and when I tried it on at home it didn’t fit at all. I took it back to the store, and got into a violent argument with the salesman about how I’d been overcharged, and the goddam suit wasn’t worth a nickel. I woke up in a fury, and rushed off to tell Dr. Bauer about it. Well, it seems it was quite a simple dream. I was resenting him, Dr. Bauer, and thought he was cheating me in charging so much for just listening to me talk, but it wasn’t a thought I’d wanted to face, so I dreamt about it in that way. Clever, huh?”

It was undoubtedly magnificent as a lesson in analytic technique, but for Jerry’s purposes it was worthless. Or could one resent an analyst enough to try to frame him for
murder? An interesting thought. Jerry wondered if analysts ever thought of it as one of the risks of their profession. Not a bad motive, now that Jerry came to consider it. He wondered, fleetingly, how Kate was doing with Frederick Sparks.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” Jerry said, “but did you ever feel you’d like to kill Dr. Bauer?”

“Not
kill
him,” Horan answered, apparently unoffended by the question, “though God knows what goes on in one’s murky unconscious. One fantasizes about one’s analyst of course, but mostly it’s picturing oneself running into someone who knows him and finding out all the grisly secrets of his life, or having him drop the professional airs and beg one for help. One of the most maddening things about an analyst is that you tell him a joke, even a damn funny joke, and there’s nothing in back of you but silence. I wonder if, that night, he says to his wife—I assume he’s married—‘Heard a damn funny joke today from one of my patients.’ ”

“Is he helping you with whatever problem you went to him for?”

“Well, not yet of course, but it’s still early. We’ve uncovered a lot of interesting material. For one thing, even though I don’t remember it, it turns out I knew all the time that my mother was pregnant with my brother. Analysis has already helped me with my work.”

“Did you have a block of some sort?”

“Not that way. One of our clients makes elegant furniture, and I thought up an ad of a room with just two pieces of furniture in it, the couch and the chair behind it, each of them perfect pieces of furniture, of course. Got quite a nice pat on the head for that.”

Horan went on to talk about nonanalytic matters, and it
was beyond Jerry’s powers even to try to bring him back to the subject for which he had sought him out. He seemed, in any case, most unlikely as a murderer. Perhaps he had hired someone to do the job; but, the world of organized crime apart, was that really possible? And did Horan know anything about the way Emanuel’s complicated domestic arrangements worked out? That uncertainty about whether or not Emanuel had a wife might have been a clever blind. Still, could anyone seem, like Horan, so exactly what he was, and not be?

Jerry parted from Horan, who had paid for the lunch, with a feeling of depression and a splitting headache. What could he do between now and the off-duty time of Dr. Barrister’s pretty nurse? After a few moments’ fruitless contemplation, Jerry went to a double feature.

J
ERRY
emerged, like a groundhog, from his place of hibernation into the sunlight. He had seen halves of two movies, and had only the haziest idea of what either was about, but he suspected that the two halves combined made a more interesting movie than either of them whole would have done. His mind, in any case, had been on other things. Why, for example, had he not asked Richard Horan about telephone calls to Emanuel’s office? If Horan had arranged for those phone calls canceling the appointments, he might, in his confusion at Jerry’s question, have indicated it. On the other hand, if Horan had paid someone to make the calls, Jerry’s mentioning them would have put Horan, who seemed at any rate to have no suspicions about Jerry—apart from those about his sanity—on his guard. It seemed to Jerry that being a detective involved, more than any other profession, the constant traveling up dead-end
roads. And no one, of course, ever bothered to put up signs on the roads saying Dead End.

Jerry, worried lest he miss Dr. Barrister’s nurse, took a taxi from the movie theater to the office where, all unknowingly, she awaited (he hoped) his arrival. He had spent none of Kate’s money and an uncomfortably large chunk of his own. He could not, in decency, charge Kate for the chamois, or the movie, or the taxi the movie had necessitated. Well, perhaps he could charge her for the chamois—after all, without that previous glimpse of Horan he would not have recognized him in the advertising office—which would have made, of course, no difference whatever. In the movie, however—and with this Jerry consoled himself—he had worked out a plan for approaching the nurse. That the plan would, had she known of it, have given Kate the screaming heebie-jeebies, could not, in this moment of desperation, deter Jerry for an instant.

The sign outside Dr. Barrister’s office read:
RING AND WALK IN
. Jerry did so. The nurse was there, working at a typewriter, alone. “Yes?” she said to Jerry, obviously mystified at his presence, his sex, and his errand. Seen this close, she was neither as young nor as pretty as Jerry had thought.

“It’s about my wife,” Jerry said. He sounded, to himself, extremely unconvincing, but hoped the nurse would put it down to uxorial nervousness. The nurse seemed undecided whether to laugh or call the police. “She, that is, we, that is—we wanted to have a baby. Is it all right if I sit down?” he added, doing so.

“The doctor isn’t here,” the nurse said, and then immediately regretted, it was clear from her expression, having admitted the fact to this lunatic. She barricaded herself behind an official attitude. “If your wife cares to call and
make an appointment, or if you wish to make one now …” She took an appointment book from her desk and hovered over it, pen in hand. “Who recommended you to Dr. Barrister?” she horribly asked.

It was then that Jerry marshaled his by no means negligible reserve of charm. That he looked harried from his afternoon’s experiences, he did not doubt. Omitting his usual restraining gesture, he allowed the forelock of his hair to drop forlornly over his forehead. He smiled at her with the smile that no female, since he was four, had been able to resist. The desolate slump of his body, the sorrow in his eyes, the smile, all indicated that here, all un-hoped for, was a woman who could understand him. He became, all of him, an appeal from the depths of masculine helplessness to the heights of female competence and comfort. The nurse, though she did not know it, dropped her weapons and retired, joyfully defeated, from the field. She was far from insensitive to masculine attentions, and competent only in dealing with troubled women, whom she cowed. For the first time that day, Jerry was in control of a situation.

“Alice, my wife, was very nervous about coming here. But, of course, she ought to see a doctor. So I had to promise”—his look included the nurse in some all-encompassing understanding of women—“that I would come first and see that the doctor was a sympathetic sort of person. Alice is shy. But I’m sure if I tell her how very nice you are, and that you will of course treat her gently, I’ll be able to persuade her to come. I’m sure you must have lots of women with her problem here. That must be mainly what you do, isn’t it?”

“Well, we
do
do that, of course. And then there are older women with various—um—problems.… ” The nurse
seemed to search her mind for the most presentable of these. “Problems of—well—change of life, and that sort of thing.”

“Of course,” Jerry said, with a great air of comprehension, though his ignorance of this subject could scarcely have been purer. “Is there something you can do for that?” This question was most unnatural for a young husband, a reluctant nonfather, to ask, but Jerry hoped it would go down. The nurse, her attention not on the subject of the conversation, but on its quality, swallowed the question easily. “Oh, there’s a great deal you can do,” she said, twiddling her pen prettily, “there are hormone injections, and pills, and, of course, the attentions of a competent physician.” She smiled. “And then, women have other silly feminine complications.”

Jerry tucked this information neatly away for future reference. “But you do,” he earnestly asked, “treat women who want to have babies?”

“Oh, yes, of course. There are many treatments that help a great deal. And Dr. Barrister is very understanding.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Jerry said. “Because Alice would require an understanding sort of person. Would you call Dr. Barrister ‘fatherly’?”

The nurse seemed disconcerted by the word. “Well, no, not exactly
fatherly
. But he’s very competent, and calm and helpful. I’m sure your wife will like him. But you know,” she mischievously added, “you’ll have to go somewhere to be tested too. I mean, it isn’t
always
the woman’s fault, you know.”

Jerry decided to allow this to embarrass him. He looked down, ordered the forelock to fall, and coughed. “Perhaps Alice could come Friday?” he asked nervously.

“The doctor isn’t here on Friday,” the nurse said. “Some
other day?” To Jerry, thinking of the porter’s stolen uniform, this confirmation was satisfying, but less so than it might have been had it not reminded him that he had forgotten to ask Horan where
he
was last Friday. “Perhaps I’d better have Alice call,” he said, rising to his feet. “You’ve been very nice. Is—er—I was wondering—is Dr. Barrister very—are his fees very high?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so,” the nurse said. “You can’t have been married very long,” the nurse kindly added. “Perhaps you oughtn’t to worry yet.”

“You know how women are,” Jerry said. “Thank you again.”

“Not at all,” the nurse said, as he closed the door. Jerry rushed to Fifth Avenue and grabbed another taxi, which he would definitely charge to Kate. Sarah expected him. He felt that the interview with the nurse had gone extremely well, but what, in the name of all gynecologic mysteries, had he found out?

As Jerry sped Sarah -ward in his taxi, Kate, having seen Daniel Deronda off on his Zionist dream, was also in a taxi, moving toward the building Jerry had just left. She had telephoned Emanuel and Nicola and discovered that the six o’clock patient had canceled, whether because he was retreating from the field or having the usual psychoanalytic misgivings was not altogether clear. “You had better come over,” Nicola had said on the phone, “and we will all sit on Emanuel’s couch to make sure no one else leaves a body there.” Nicola had also, after a good deal of broad hinting from Kate, extended an invitation to dinner.

Kate found them in the living room, where, they had decided, they could watch the entrance to the office and prevent the intrusion of any bodies. Kate put her package,
obviously a bottle, down on the table. “Not for you,” she said to Nicola. “It’s for a party where I am going later to meet Frederick Sparks.” She caught Emanuel’s eye. “Did Janet Harrison, in her hours with you, ever mention Daniel Messenger?” Kate asked.

“The police have already asked me that,” Emanuel said.

“Oh, dear, I keep forgetting about the police. Are they getting restive?”

“Well,” Nicola said, “this Daniel Messenger is a help, whoever he is. I got out of one of those detectives that he’s a geneticist, at least that’s what Emanuel says he sounds like from my rather garbled description; but apparently he’s involved in studying some mysterious disease that only Jews get, or that only Jews don’t get, in some Italian (I think) places, and apparently if they can find the clue to this evasive tolerance or intolerance they’ll know something more about heredity. As to whether they, the police, believe that Emanuel and I never heard of him, who, including the police, can tell?”