In the Last Analysis Page 11

  “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?”

  Kate looked at Emanuel. “She never mentioned him, I take it, or any theories about genes?” Emanuel shook his head. Kate saw that he was becoming depressed, and her heart went out to him, but there was little, except helping Nicola to babble at him, that she could do. Nicola’s mother, Kate learned, had carried the children off to her country home. They had been hearing too much here, and allowing them to go a week after the murder did not seem so much a capitulation before the fates.

  “Dr. Barrister doesn’t have office hours on Fridays, is that right?” Kate asked Nicola.

  “No,” Nicola said. “Why?”

  “I have come to ask questions,” Kate said sententiously, “not to answer them.”

  “Are there any questions left to ask?” Emanuel said.

  “Very many,” Kate said firmly. “But you are not to repeat any of them to the police. Or to anyone else,” she added firmly, looking at Nicola. “Here are some questions: Who stole the porter’s uniform on the morning Janet Harrison’s room was robbed?” Emanuel and Nicola both stared at her in astonishment, but she hurried on. “Why was her room robbed? Was it merely as some idiot suggested, that a frustrated man wanted one of her more intimate garments?”

  “Are you drunk?” Emanuel asked.

  “Don’t interrupt. If that is so, who is this man? Why did Janet Harrison make a will? It’s rather an odd thing for an unmarried young woman to do. Who is Daniel Messenger, that she should will to him, or he to her? Although your erstwhile patient, Emanuel, seems to have led a most circumspect life, to put it mildly, she was seen with a man. Who was he? Who saw her?”

  “If you don’t know who saw her, how do you know she was seen?” Nicola asked.

  “Stop interrupting. You may take notes, or just listen, but let me finish. I am organizing my thoughts. Why did Janet Harrison decide to study English literature when she had started in history, with a bypath into nursing? Why nursing? Why did she come to New York to study English literature?”

  “That’s easy,” Emanuel said. “She knew there was a charming lunatic named Kate Fansler teaching there.”

  Kate ignored him. “What worried Janet Harrison about the present? What worried her about the past? Who is the young man whose picture she cherished and hid? Did the police show you that? You didn’t recognize it. Neither has anyone else. Why? Or rather, why not? What about Richard Horan? What about Frederick Sparks? What about the window cleaner?”

  “Window cleaner?”

  “Well, it just occurred to me, perhaps a window cleaner, who might have some sort of thing about women on couches, who knew her from cleaning the office windows when she was there, or the waiting rooms windows while she was waiting, had observed the routine of your house, and stabbed her one day when he happened to glance in on his way to clean someone else’s windows, and had perhaps by now forgotten the whole thing. Who cleans your windows?”

  If her object had been to distract Emanuel, she had succeeded. He laughed, and went to get them all a drink. “The office windows aren’t ever cleaned when patients are there,” Nicola said. “And anyway, we don’t have a window cleaner. Pandora does them. There’s no danger of falling out, you know, and, in any case, the outside ones are done by the house, because they are a special job owing to the bars across them. But do explain all your other fascinating questions. How do you know Frederick Sparks?”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “Then why are you going to a party with him?”

  “Because I am Kate Fansler, the great detective,” she said. Yet suddenly she thought: It’s all very well, there are a lot of questions and they add up nicely, but shall we ever find the answers? And why did Emanuel’s six o’clock patient cancel? That was, perhaps, the most important question of them all. Having lifted Emanuel from the pit of despair, she was about to tumble into it herself when the telephone rang. “It’s for you, Kate,” Emanuel called from the kitchen.

  “But nobody knows I’m here,” Kate said, taking up the phone.

  “I guessed,” came Reed’s voice, “when there was no answer at home. Can you have dinner?”

  “I’m having dinner here. Then I’m going to a party to meet Frederick Sparks.”

  “Why not take me along? Together, we’ll turn him inside out.”

  “Nonsense, I’ll do better myself. If you’re there, and everybody discovers you’re an Assistant District Attorney, we’ll spend the evening discussing why so many people bribe policemen. You forget, I’ve been to parties with you before.”

  “All right, you ungrateful wretch, then I’ll have to give you my great piece of news over the phone. I hope I can conclude that no one but you can hear the sound of my voice.”

  “Oh, quite.”

  “Good. Dr. Michael Barrister was once sued for malpractice. It had the looks of quite a nasty case, but was apparently settled. Of course, doctors carry malpractice insurance.”

  “What had he done?”

  “Apparently some woman began to grow hair on her chest. Years ago, of course.”

  “Are you trying to be funny?”

  “I couldn’t be that funny, even if I tried. Remember, Kate, it probably doesn’t mean a thing. The patient in the case had no connection with Janet Harrison. But I thought it might encourage you to know that at least someone in this benighted case has a blot on his escutcheon.”

  “Reed! Does this mean they’re really starting to look elsewhere?”

  “Let’s say I’m encouraging them. But don’t get your hopes up. It’s a big step from hormones to a knife plunged home.”

  “Thanks, Reed. I’m sorry about tonight.”

  “I should hope so,” said Reed, and hung up.

  When they sat down to dinner, Kate asked Emanuel to explain to her about h
ormones. He began by saying he knew very little about it, he hadn’t followed developments in the field since his days at medical school, and then he began, as only Emanuel could, to discourse on the subject. At first Kate understood every third word, and then she understood every sixth, and then she caught only a familiar conjunction every dozen words or so, and then she stopped listening. If this case is going to require a detailed knowledge of endocrinology, she thought, I’d better give up right now. Yet, even at that moment, the telephone was ringing in her apartment, peal after unanswered peal, only mildly frustrating to one with a message which was to mark, for the three of them at the dinner table, and for one other, the beginning of the end.

  Eleven

  FROM the moment when Kate, bottle in hand, arrived at the party, she felt like someone at an amusement park being thrust on one dizzy ride after another. She met her host for only a moment when he seized the bottle, thanked her, and introduced, inaudibly, four or five people standing about. These glanced at Kate, decided she was a specimen of which they already had a sufficient number in their collection, and went on discussing some intramural college fight the central issue of which, if there was one, Kate did not manage to grasp. Lillian had warned her that when members of this department got together, they never discussed anything but department politics, the exigencies of the teaching schedule, the insufficiencies of the administration and the peculiarities—moral, physical, psychological, and sexual—of certain absent members. What Kate was not prepared for was the violence with which all these things were discussed, the enthusiasm with which points were made which must certainly, it seemed, have been made before.

  Several aspects of the gathering surprised Kate not at all. One was the amount of alcoholic stimulation which members of the academic profession could withstand. They were by no means constant drinkers, but as members of an underpaid profession, they drank whenever they got the chance. This had long since been discovered by textbook publishers, whose habit it was, at any official academic convention, to rent a room and hand round the drinks with a free hand. Nor was Kate surprised that literature was nowhere being discussed. People whose profession was the study of literature did not discuss it when they foregathered, unless the question concerned the constitution of courses or the assignment of them. The reasons for this were obscure and complex, and Kate had never thoroughly analyzed them. She had been present with enough groups of doctors, lawyers, economists, sociologists, and others to know that it took the talents of a Svengali to get them to talk about anything at all besides their subjects.

  Yet the people here suffered, apparently, from the fact that they were employed not by an educational institution, but by a bureaucratic system. They were all, to a large extent, clerks, neatly bound up in red tape, and, like clerks, they gave themselves the illusion of freedom by discussing and ridiculing the strictures that bound them. Kate thought lovingly of her own university, where one struggled, God knew, against the ancient sins of favoritism, flattery, and simony, but where the modern horrors of bureaucracy had not yet strangled her colleagues or herself.

  “My final exam in 3.5,” one young man was saying, “was scheduled for the last day of the exam period, and they wanted the marks in within twenty-four hours. I pointed out that I could not possibly read thirty-five examinations with anything approaching fairness, let alone intelligence, and why couldn’t I get the grades in three days later? Do you know what the dean of Utter Confusion said—actually said—sitting there in his huge office, while the faculty, of course, far from having an office, can’t even find a drawer in which to place their private belongings? He said, ‘But the IBM machines must begin to operate twenty-four hours after the exam period is over.’ The IBM machines. Why? I ask you, why? But at least I discovered whom the college is run for. One knew, of course, that it wasn’t run for the students or the faculty; after all, this isn’t Oxford or Cambridge. I had thought it was run for the administration, or the building and grounds committee. But no! It’s run for the IBM machines. Do you know, when I was filling out all those atrocious little grade cards for the IBM machine, with that revolting little pencil one has to use, I wanted to write F——— Y—— right across the damn thing, and see what the IBM machine would make of that, the cybernetic little bastard!”

  “That’s nothing. The other day I got one of those aptitude exam results, all figured out by machine, and that idiotic student counselor …” Kate moved off in the direction of Frederick Sparks, slowly, for she didn’t want to appear to have been stalking him. Lillian had pointed him out to her. He sat back in his chair, glass in hand, observing the room with the pleasant superiority of one who has emerged successful from the struggle for tenure, and has not yet dropped, screaming, into the pit where promotion is fought for.

  Kate sat down on the chair next to him, for most people, the better to make their points, were standing; she asked him, with a regrettable lapse of originality, for a match. He produced an elegant lighter and lit her cigarette with a flourish.

  “Are you a friend of Harold’s?” he asked. But apparently he accepted the fact that she must be, for he went on to ask if she taught, and where. Kate told him. He expressed envy. Kate, with some dishonesty, asked why she was to be envied. “I’ll give you an example,” he said, swinging around in his chair to face her. “How many mimeographed communications have you received so far this semester?”

  “Mimeographed communications? Oh, I don’t know. Four or five, I guess, perhaps more. Announcements of department meetings, and that sort of thing. Why do you ask?”

  “Because I have had hundreds, hundreds, thousands, perhaps, by now, and so has everyone else. Not only announcements of committee meetings to discuss every conceivable and inconceivable subject upon the face of the earth, but announcements from the administration: all students wearing shorts or blue jeans must be reported; the faculty is reminded that smoking is not permitted on the stairs (this of course is a cozy one, because if a man and woman faculty member want to have five minutes’ conversation, and happen to be smokers, they must either retire to the faculty lounge, which is a nest of political intrigue, and in any case is usually given over to some student function, or they can one or the other indulge in transvestism and retire to the men’s or ladies’ room, as the case might be, because smoking is allowed there, or they can smoke on the stairs, which is what they do). Or, there may be an announcement that the pencil sharpener has been moved to Room 804 (if not out of the building altogether). Or, there may be an announcement the garbage will now be collected from the courtyard immediately outside the classroom windows every afternoon from one to five. The administration realizes that this will make teaching practically impossible (have you ever heard the noise of a garbage truck close up?), but the faculty must learn which are the important problems in the running of a college. I once got a mimeographed atrocity asking me to come and discuss methods of giving the faculty more time for original work. I wrote back that the best way I could think of was not to hold meetings discussing it. As I say, I envy you.”

  “I hear you’re to be congratulated on getting tenure.”

  “Where did you hear that? I’m not to be congratulated; I’m to be pitied. Gustave is pleased because we now know we shall eat regularly, and retire on a pension; but if I had an ounce of guts I would say: ‘You idiots, don’t give me tenure; I am already dreadfully inclined to indolence, lassitude, self-indulgence, and procrastination. You have enough deadwood in this benighted institution, enough minds which have not been penetrated by a new thought since the possibility of nuclear fission filtered through; but, no, you are a political institution; you must offer me what the masses crave: security.’ Of course, it is possible that I shall succeed. That I shall break out from the bounds of faculty life.”

  “Write a great book?”

  “No. Become a member of the administration. Then I shall have a carpet, a whole desk to myself, and perhaps one for my secretary, a larger salary and the right to be nostalgic about teac
hing. Will you have another drink?”

  “That, at least, is the same at my institution,” said Kate, declining the drink with a shake of her head. “As somebody said, the reward for teaching well is to stop teaching.” Kate was not really fooled by his manner. Beneath the gabble of exaggeration, and the chi-chi reference to his dog (she should really have asked, “But who is Gustave?”), Kate suspected a first-rate brain and a daunted personality. She had no doubt he possessed the guts, the brains and the egoism essential to the stabbing of anyone, but had he done it? Ardent lovers of dogs are frequently those who cannot bear any less than an unquestioning love. He would certainly have had the nerve to make those phone calls. Could he have been attracted to Janet Harrison, largely because she was noncommunicative and withdrawn, and then have offered love, to have it rejected? “How many days a week do you teach?” she asked.

  “Four, God help me. And next semester it may well be five. This semester I happen, through the queerest chance of fate, to have Monday off.”

  “Do you teach in the mornings on all the other days?” Kate hoped the question did not sound as pointed to him as it did to her.

  “I will show you my schedule,” he said, reaching into an inner pocket. “You might think that this late in the year I would know my schedule. But, in fact, our schedules are so complicated that if I were to commit this to memory it would take up so much space in my meager brain that I would forget something else, like Anglo-Saxon.” He handed her the schedule.

  It was indeed extraordinary. He taught a course labeled 9.1 at nine on Tuesday, three on Wednesday, ten on Thursday, and ten (!) on Friday. Kate asked the reason for this oddity, while thinking, Here is an alibi, clear and straightforward.

  “Oh, but it’s very simple, really, provided you have the peculiarly inchoate mind of the man arranging these things. Some students are on P schedules, or Q, or S or W. This means they must swim at a certain time one day, and eat at a certain time on another, and on no condition be on the stairs at a certain time on the third. All this gets whirred around, and here we are. Sometimes it works out that a class will meet at one, and then again at three on the same afternoon. There’s a pedagogical challenge, if you want one.”