by Amanda Cross
But Emanuel stopped. “Can I help you?” he asked the woman. Jerry dropped, unnoticed, onto a bench behind Emanuel. The woman eyed her interlocutor with suspicion.
“I’ve lost him,” she whimpered, “I just dozed off, and he’s gone away. I don’t sleep well at night.”
“Your little boy?” Emanuel asked.
She nodded. “I tied his leash to the bench, but he must have pulled it loose. Cyril darling, come to Mama,” she began to call. “Don’t you hurt him,” she said to Emanuel.
“How big was he?” Emanuel asked. “What color?” The scene, to Jerry, was grotesque. But Emanuel put his hand on the woman’s arm. “What color was he?” he asked again. The gesture seemed to calm her.
“Brown,” she said. “This big,” and she made a movement, as of one who holds a small dog under one arm. She looked at the empty arm with love.
“He won’t have gone far,” Emanuel said. By this time they had collected a small and interested crowd. Emanuel began to search in the nearby bushes, and a few other men, with a shrug to show they thought this all nonsense, joined him. Jerry forced himself to keep his seat. It was one of the other men who, perhaps five minutes later, found the dog, not far off, rolling in some indescribable, to him delightful, mess. A pleasant change after that woman, Jerry thought.
The woman retrieved the dog, scolding him, calling him a naughty, naughty boy, and walking away from Emanuel as though he were a tramp who had accosted her. The man who had found the dog pointed to his forehead meaningfully. Emanuel nodded, and looked at his watch. No time now for even the quickest run. He has a patient at twelve, Jerry thought, and he has to change his clothes. Emanuel began walking slowly back toward the avenue. Jerry did not follow; he remained on the bench, thinking about Richard Horan. The need to speak to Emanuel had evaporated, somehow, in the morning air.
After sitting for half an hour longer in the park, Jerry found himself viewing the profession of detective with somewhat less insouciance than he had felt that morning. In fact, he thought himself rather a fool. It was all very well to tell Kate, in his most debonair manner, that he was going down to apply for a job at the advertising agency where Richard Horan worked, but as an idea, this was several light-years away from being brilliant. Well, he might not apply for a job, but obviously the thing to do was to go down to the agency’s offices and look around. It might work out that the best plan would be to follow Mr. Horan home—Jerry did not linger too long over the question of where, if anywhere, this would lead—but he might just as well move now in the general direction of Horan.
Going downtown in the Madison Avenue bus, Jerry pulled out the picture of the young man and studied it. Could it possibly be a picture of Horan? Viewing his victim from behind the car fender, Jerry had had only a general impression; a detailed description of the man’s face had not remained with him. Surely a detective who has had one look at a man should never again forget the face; Jerry, far from forgetting it, had really nothing to remember. Still, he felt, swallowing his humility, it was fairly certain that Horan had not looked like this. Well, one could but make sure.
It is one of the odd tricks of fate that, when we have admitted ourselves to be foolish, fully to blame for our own mistakes, she will hand us a piece of good fortune on a platter. The Greeks, of course, understood all about this, but Jerry had yet to learn it. Years later, Jerry was to look back on this as the time when he had learned that though one must do all one can, success is never entirely the result of one’s own efforts. Yet now, emerging from the bus, he knew only his own inadequacy.
All advertising agencies were named, by Jerry, Bing, Bang, Bilge, and Oblivion. This particular Bing, Bang, etcetera, had its offices on the eighteenth floor. Jerry stepped from the elevator feeling rather as though he were going into orbit. Surely there would be a receptionist. But Jerry was never to know whether there was or not. A hand was placed on his shoulder; in that moment, Jerry was certain, his hair began to go gray.
“What are you doing here? Don’t tell me Sarah’s talked you into going into the advertising racket. Take my advice; stick to the law.”
It was Horan. Jerry stared at him open-mouthed, as though he were an alligator who had appeared suddenly in a suburban bathtub.
“You are the Jerry who’s engaged to Sarah Fansler, no? I met you at a party.… Anything wrong?” Jerry looked, in fact, as though he were going to faint.
“Small world,” he managed to say. “To coin a phrase,” he added, trying to save himself from the monstrous ineptitude of the first cliché.
“I think it is, literally. In my opinion, there are only fifty people in the world, and they keep moving about. Have you had lunch?”
Dear, wonderful, blessed Sarah, who really did know everybody. Jerry had realized, in a vague sort of way, that this might be useful—he was thinking years ahead to his practice of law—but now he began to view Sarah’s connections in an even brighter light. He had often remarked to Sarah, jokingly, that he thought they read different editions of the Times each morning. She never glanced at the sports page; Africa, the Near East, Russia, the acts of Congress whirled about somewhere in the outer reaches of her consciousness; if, to save her life, she had to name the nine justices of the Supreme Court, she would mention Warren, and die. But for her the Times was filled with small news items of people changing jobs, marrying, divorcing, supporting causes, and none of these items was ever forgotten. She not only “knew everybody” through the vast connections of family, school, college, dates—her social world generally—she also knew all about them.
“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 go
od 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.
Ten
JERRY 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 husban
d, 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?”
