In the Last Analysis (21 page)

“You
were
literary,” she said.

“Weren’t we, though? Do you recognize that thing from Lawrence he was gabbing on about?”

“Oh, yes, I think so. It must have made quite an impression on Barrister. It’s from the beginning of
The Rainbow—
nobody ever did children better than Lawrence, which is probably because he didn’t have any. I take it Messenger was a man you would have felt inclined to trust.”

“Yes, he was, if that’s worth anything. I’m sure it isn’t. In fact, if you want to know, he reminded me of you.”

“Of me? Do my ears stick out?”

Jerry flushed. “I didn’t mean physically. The impression I have of him was like the impression I have of you. Don’t ask me what I mean—it’s just that, both of you might be dishonest, but you’d know you were doing it.”

“That’s a nice compliment, Jerry.”

“Is it? It’s probably pure, unadulterated crap. What do I do now?”

“He didn’t give the impression that he was being dishonest and knowing it?”

“No, he didn’t. I’d swear he was honest. Yet people will swear that confident men are honest.”

“I think,” Kate said, “that we’ll assume he’s honest. At least until we have any reason to doubt it. There has to be a constant in every equation—up to now we’ve had only variables. I think we’ll put Messenger in as the constant, and then see what
X
turns out to equal. Jerry, would you mind awfully much just hanging around? I
think
I may send you to Michigan. The trouble is, if you want to know, we have been approaching this whole problem with fettered imaginations.”

She began to pace up and down the room. Jerry groaned.

I
T
had been Thursday morning when Kate had spoken to Jerry. It was now Friday evening. Kate had that day again asked someone to take her lectures. She faced Reed, who sat on her couch, his legs stretched out before him.

“I don’t know if I can tell you what happened, properly, from the beginning,” she said, “but I can tell you where I began yesterday morning. I began with an idle joke, from one doctor to another, months ago. I began with a dated photograph. I began with one of the great modern novels, and a scene in it, indelibly impressed on the mind of a man because it recalled to him a vital moment of his childhood. I began with a punning association in a dream, an association not of love or infatuation, but hate or fear. I began also with an old lady, and the wilds of Canada.

“I had decided to believe Messenger—you read Jerry’s report just now. Messenger said Barrister wasn’t capable
of murder, and while that statement might be doubted, I decided not, for the moment, to doubt it.

“There were a few other facts whirling around also. A suit for malpractice. Sparks, who never forgets a face. Nicola, and her willingness to tell a sympathetic listener, or even an unsympathetic one, almost anything he may want to know about her life. A window cleaner, who turned out never to exist, but who suggested to me the ease with which anyone, with access to the court outside Emanuel’s office and kitchen, could study those rooms. My visits to see Emanuel and Nicola, in the good old days before the crime. A question put to me, ‘Professor Fansler, do you know a good psychiatrist?’

“These were all whirling around, as I say, but suddenly on Thursday morning they seemed to fall into place. I then did, or caused to be done, three things.

“The first involved Nicola. I called her up, and urged her to get herself, as subtly as possible, into a conversation with Barrister. This wasn’t hard for Nicola. She simply appeared at his office door after his patients had departed, reminded him that he had said he was eager to do what he could to help, and announced that what she needed was someone to talk to. When I was a kid, we used to play a game I thought rather silly. One person would be given, on a slip of paper, a ridiculous phrase, such as ‘My father plays piano with his toes.’ The point was to tell a story to your opponent, who, of course, had not seen the slip of paper, and to work your ridiculous sentence into it. Naturally, what you did was to tell a story full of outrageous statements, since your opponent had three challenges to discover which was the one on the slip of paper. Of course, the opponent almost never got it, because all the statements you made were as outrageous as ‘My father plays piano
with his toes.’ This, in effect, was what Nicola had to do. I wanted to know Barrister’s opinion of D. H. Lawrence, particularly of
The Rainbow
, and particularly of one incident in
The Rainbow
. Nicola had reread the appropriate section of the novel—fortunately, it came in the first seventy-five pages. She had to introduce this, however, along with lots of other literary discussion, so that it would not stand out from the surrounding material.

“Nicola did it beautifully.

“The second thing I ‘did’ was done by Nicola also. She fluttered, in her delightful way, around Barrister’s office, and managed to discover, partly by asking him, but mostly by telling him—you miss a lot by not knowing Nicola’s style—a bit of his routine.

“The third thing cost money. I sent Jerry out to a little town called Bangor, Michigan. He’s on his way back now, but I spoke to him on the phone last night. Jerry had quite a time. He was looking for an old lady, but she was dead. Fortunately, it’s a small town, and he managed to find the people the old lady had lived with before she died. They weren’t related to her; she paid them for her room and meals, and for her care. This arrangement had been made by Michael Barrister, who, of course, comes from Bangor, Michigan.

“It was Michael Barrister who supported the old lady; it was not a great amount of money he paid to the couple in whose house she lived, and as she grew older, and needed more care, he increased the amount. When she died, Michael Barrister made a quite suitable gift of money to the people who had cared for her over the years, and had given her, I suppose, the kind of affection that can’t be bought.

“All this was straightforward enough, but I was after something else, and Jerry, with his boyish charm, managed
to get it. He asked if the checks had ever stopped. After this build-up, you may perhaps not be overcome with astonishment to hear that they had. Barrister had sent a check every month, all through college, medical school, his internship, and his residency. Then they stopped.

“The couple were decent people. They went on caring for her, but finally the financial burden became too great, and the man of the couple made a trip to Chicago. He managed to find that Barrister had gone to New York, and by going to the library and consulting a New York phone book, found his address. The man wrote to Barrister, and received back a letter of apology which explained that Barrister had been in financial difficulties, but was now all right. With the letter was enclosed a check for all the money due for the past months, and for the month to come. The monthly checks never stopped after that, until the old lady’s death. But during those checkless months which had elapsed, the old lady had had a birthday, for which Michael Barrister had always sent her a letter and a present. The present was always the same: a small china dog, to add to her collection of china dogs. When the checks didn’t come and the birthday was skipped, the old lady refused ever to hear Barrister’s name again. She had called him Mickey, which no one else had done, but now she refused to refer to him, or to take anything from him again. The couple with whom she lived had to pretend to be supporting her, while taking Barrister’s money, without which, of course, they couldn’t get on. They didn’t communicate with him anymore, and the old lady never received another china dog.”

“Touching story,” Reed said. “Who was the old lady?”

“Sorry. I shouldn’t have left that out. She had lived with Barrister’s grandparents, and had cared for him when he
was a boy. In the grandparents’ will, all they had was left to their grandson, with a note added saying they were certain he would always care for the old lady. He always did.

“We return now to Nicola’s conversation. She reported it to me word by word—in the event of all court stenographers being wiped out in a plague, together with all recording machines, I think Nicola would do nicely—but I will give you only the substance. Barrister has read
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. Otherwise, he has read nothing by D. H. Lawrence, whom he seemed, by the way, inclined to confuse with T. E. Lawrence, and gave it as his opinion, furthermore, that modern literature was off on the wrong track. It might be all very fine for professors and critics, but if a man read a book, what he wanted was a good story, not a lot of symbolism and slices of life.

“What Nicola discovered about Barrister’s office had, I imagine, already been discovered by the police. He has a waiting room, several examining rooms, and an office. Women, in varying stages of readiness, are treated in the examining rooms and talked to in the office. Barrister moves from one room to the other, as does the nurse. If he is not in one, it is assumed he is in another. The ladies often have to wait quite a while, and are used to it—a fact, incidentally, which can be confirmed by anyone who has ever consulted a successful gynecologist. In other words, as you have already told me, Barrister did not have an alibi, though that good defense lawyer to whom you are always referring could make a great deal out of the fact that he was certainly having office hours at the time of the murder. Probably all the women who were there that day will have to be questioned closely, though not, thank God, by me.

“I now added to this information something Nicola had suggested the day after the murder, and something Jerry
had discovered in an interlude with the nurse which I would, on the whole, rather ignore: that Barrister specialized in women unable to conceive, in women suffering from various ‘female’ problems, and in women wretched in their change of life. Incidentally, I called up my doctor, a conservative type on the staff of a teaching hospital, who was finally induced to tell me—all doctors, I’ve discovered, dislike the suggestion that medicine is ever badly practiced—that while many doctors treat women in menopause with weekly injections of hormones, he personally feels that too little is known about the effects of hormones and that they ought to be used only in cases of extreme need. Women, however, like the effects and are given hormones by many doctors. Do you want a drink?”

“Go on,” Reed said.

“I’m now going to tell you a story, a story suggested to me by all these facts. Once upon a time there was a young doctor named Michael Barrister. He had passed his boards, and served his year of residency. He liked to camp and hike, particularly in what we seem to be calling the wilds of Canada, where you sleep out, or rent a room from a forester, or stay in an occasional hostel. Mike, if we call him that, went camping and met, in the wilds of Canada, a girl named Janet Harrison. They fell in love …”

“But her father was the mightiest man in the whole kingdom, and his but a poor woodsman.”

“If you interrupt, Mommy isn’t going to finish the story, and you’ll have to go right to sleep. After a time the girl had to go home and so, pledging eternal love, they parted. Michael Barrister then met another man, a man who resembled him closely. They went off together on a hike. Mike spoke freely to the man, as one does with strangers; he told him a great deal about himself, but he did not tell
him about the girl. One night the stranger killed Mike, and buried his body in the wilds of Canada.”

“Kate, for the love of heaven …”

“Perhaps it was an accident. Perhaps it was only after Mike died in an accident that the stranger saw the situation he was in—perhaps he thought he would not be too readily believed—in any event, the idea came to him to take over Mike’s identity.

“It was an enormous risk; a million things might have gone wrong, but none of them did. Or none of them seemed to. The bit about the old lady was a problem, but that seemed to resolve itself. The difficulty, of course, was that friends of Mike’s would show up, but he could snub them—so that they would think that Mike had changed. It seemed as though the angels were on his side. The body was never discovered. When he got letters, he answered them. The real Mike had a first-rate record, and the stranger had no difficulty setting up a practice. The malpractice suit was certainly a storm, but he weathered it.

“And then came the first huge problem: Janet Harrison. Her actual arrival was delayed many years. She had gone to nursing school, with the plan of joining Mike eventually in New York, and her letters spoke of this often. He wrote back trying, without harshness, to let the affair die down. He took longer and longer to answer her letters. When her father died, she had to go home. But eventually, despite the delay, Janet Harrison, Nemesis, came to New York. She had never stopped loving him, and did not, or could not, believe that he had stopped loving her.

“He could not very well refuse to see her. He considered this, but she might talk, and it seemed better on the whole to know what she was up to. She soon discovered, of course, that he wasn’t Mike. With a close-enough resemblance, it
is remarkably easy, I imagine, to fool people. It does not occur to people that you are not who you say you are—simply that you have changed. But it is quite another matter to fool a woman who has loved a man and been to bed with him. She was a secretive type—that was a break for him—but she was determined to prove this Michael Barrister an imposter, and to avenge the murder of the man she had loved. She knew she was in danger—and she made a will, leaving her money to the man her Mike had admired, to the man who seemed like Mike. Unfortunately, if she collected any evidence, she didn’t place it with the lawyer who made her will. She kept it in her room, or perhaps in a notebook she carried around with her. That is why he had to rob her room, even at tremendous risk, and go through her pocketbook after he killed her.

“She used to stand across the street and watch his office. She wanted to unnerve him, and undoubtedly she succeeded. But eventually she needed an excuse for the daily visits she wanted, and the presence of Emanuel gave it to her. Once, perhaps twice, she saw me emerge after a visit to Emanuel and Nicola. If she went to me, would I suggest Emanuel? She came to me, and I did. Had I not suggested him—well, why should we worry about what might have happened?