The Analyst

by John Katzenbach

  The detective smiled. “Those are interesting words for a shrink to use.”

  “What words?” Ricky asked, his exasperation reaching deep within him.

  “ ‘Fail to see . . . ,’ ” Detective Riggins said. “Isn’t that pretty close to what you guys like to call a Freudian slip?”

  “No.”

  “So, you just don’t think he committed suicide?”

  “No, I do not. I just . . .”

  “Have you ever lost a patient to suicide in the past?”

  “Yes. Unfortunately. But in that case the signs were clear-cut. My efforts, however, weren’t adequate for the depth of that patient’s depression.”

  “That failure stick with you for a while, doc?”

  “Yes,” Ricky replied coldly.

  “It would be bad for your business and real bad for your reputation if another one of your long-term patients decided to take on the Eighth Avenue express one-on-one, wouldn’t it?”

  Ricky rocked back in the chair, scowling.

  “I don’t appreciate the implication in your question, detective.”

  Riggins smiled, shaking her head slightly. “Well, let’s move on, then. If you don’t think he killed himself, the alternative is that someone pushed him in front of that train. Did Mr. Zimmerman ever speak about anyone who hated him, or who bore a grudge, or who might have a motive for homicide? He spoke to you every day, so presumably if he was being stalked by some unknown killer he might have mentioned it. Did he?”

  “No. He never mentioned anyone who would fit the categories you suggest.”

  “He never said, ‘So and so wants me dead . . . ‘?”

  “No.”

  “And you’d remember if he had?”

  “Of course.”

  “Okay, so no one real obvious was trying to do him in. No business partner? Estranged lover? Cuckolded husband? You think someone might have pushed him in front of the express for what? Kicks? Some other mysterious reason?”

  Ricky hesitated. He realized this was his opportunity to tell the police about the letter demanding he kill himself, the visit from the naked woman Virgil, the game he was being asked to play. All he had to do was to say that a crime had been committed, and that Zimmerman was a victim of an act that had nothing to do with him except his death. Ricky half opened his mouth to blurt out all these details, to let them flow forth unchecked, but what he saw instead was a bored and barely interested detective, seeking to wrap up an altogether unpleasant day with a single typewritten form which wouldn’t contain a category for the information he was about to deliver.

  He decided, in that second, to keep his own counsel. This was his psychoanalyst’s nature. He did not share speculation or opinion easily or publicly. “Perhaps,” he said. “What do you know about this other woman? The woman who gave LuAnne the ten dollars?”

  The detective wrinkled her forehead, as if confused by the question. “Well, what about her?”

  “Isn’t her behavior in the slightest bit suspicious? Didn’t it seem that she was putting words into LuAnne’s mouth?”

  The detective shrugged. “I don’t know that. A woman and a man accompanying her see that one of the less fortunate citizens of our great city might be an important witness to an event, so they make sure that the poor witness gets some compensation to step forward and help the police. This might be less suspicious than it is good citizenship, because LuAnne steps right up and helps us out, at least in part because of the intervention of this couple.”

  Ricky paused, then asked, “You didn’t happen to find out who they were, did you?”

  The detective shook her head. “Sorry. They pointed out LuAnne to one of the first officers on the scene, and then took off after informing the officer that they themselves were positioned poorly to see exactly what took place. And no, he didn’t get a name from either of them because they weren’t witnesses. Why?”

  Ricky did not know whether he wanted to answer this question. A part of him screamed that he should unburden himself of everything. But he had no idea how dangerous this might be. He was trying to calculate, to guess, to assess, and to examine, but it suddenly seemed as if all the events that surrounded him were hazy and impossible to decipher, unclear and elusive. He shook his head, as if that might jog all the emotions into some sort of definition. “I have my sincere doubts that Mr. Zimmerman would kill himself. His condition most definitely didn’t seem that severe,” Ricky said. “Write that down, detective, and put it in your report.”

  Detective Riggins shrugged and grinned with an ill-disguised fatigue accented by sarcasm. “I will do that, doctor. Your opinion, such as it is and for whatever it’s worth, is noted, for the record.”

  “Were there other witnesses, someone perhaps who saw Zimmerman step away from the crowd on the platform? Someone who saw him move without being pushed?”

  “Just LuAnne, doctor. Everyone else only saw a part of the event. No one actually saw that he wasn’t pushed. But, then, a couple of youths did see that he had been standing alone, separated from the other people waiting on the local. The eyewitness pattern, incidentally, doctor, is fairly typical for these sorts of cases. People have their eyes focused ahead, down the tunnel in the direction the train is expected. Typically jumpers move to the back end of the crowd, not the front. They’re looking to do themselves in for whatever private reasons they might have, not provide a show for every other commuter in the station. So, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they move apart from the crowd, to the back. Or pretty much precisely where Mr. Zimmerman had taken up his position.”

  The detective smiled. “Dollars to doughnuts I’ll find a note in his personal belongings somewhere. Or maybe you’ll get a letter in the mail this week. If you do, make a copy for my report, willya, doc? Of course, with you heading out on vacation, you may not get it before you leave. Still, it would be helpful.” Ricky wanted to reply, but he kept his own anger on a short string.

  “Can I have your card, detective? In case I need to contact you in the future,” he asked as coldly as he could.

  “Of course. Call me any old time.” She clearly said this in a contemptuous tone that implied the precise opposite. Then she reached into a box on her desk and removed one, which she handed over with a small flourish. Without glancing at it, Ricky put this in his pocket and rose to leave. He crossed the detective bureau rapidly, looking back only as he passed through the door, catching a single glimpse of Detective Riggins hunched over an old-fashioned typewriter, starting to peck out the words of her report on the obvious, ordinary, and seemingly inconsequential death of Roger Zimmerman.

  Chapter Six

  Ricky Starks slammed the door to his apartment shut behind him, the noise resounding in his ears, and echoing away through the dimly lit empty building corridor. He frantically twisted the locks that he so infrequently used, double-bolting the entranceway. He pulled on the door handle, to make certain that these functioned properly. Then, still uncertain that the locks alone were sufficient, he grabbed a chair and wedged it up under the doorknob as an old-fashioned secondary barrier. It took some mental energy on his part to prevent himself from piling bureau, boxes, bookshelves—anything he could immediately lay his hands on—up against the door to barricade himself inside. Sweat stung at his eyes, and even though the air conditioner hummed along busily out of sight in the office window, he still felt flashes of sudden heat like so many lightning bolts crease his body. A soldier, a policeman, a pilot, a mountaineer—anyone versed in the various businesses of danger—would have easily recognized these for what they were: strikes of fear. But Ricky had spent so many years living away from any of those edges, that he was unfamiliar with the most obvious of signs.

  He stepped away from the door, turning to survey his apartment. A single, dim overhead light above the doorway that barely overcame the night threw odd weak shadows into the corners of the waiting room. He could hear the air conditioner and beyond that, muffled street noises, but other than that, nothing but an
oppressive silence.

  The door to his office was open, yawning darkly. He was abruptly overcome by the sensation that when he’d left the sanctuary of his home earlier that evening in the minutes after Virgil’s visit, he’d closed that door behind him, as was his usual habit. A rough-edged sense of apprehension scoured about within him, filling him with doubts. He stared at the open door, trying desperately to recall his precise steps in leaving.

  He could picture himself donning his tie and jacket, pausing to double-knot his right shoelace, patting his hip to make certain that he carried his wallet, dropping the apartment key into his front pocket, then jangling it to reassure himself that it was secure. He saw himself stepping across the apartment, exiting the front door, waiting for the elevator to descend from the third floor, finding himself out on the street where the air above the sidewalk was still hot. All this was abundantly clear. It was, he thought, a departure no different from thousands of others over thousands of days. It was the return that resulted in everything seeming skewed or slightly misshapen, like staring at one’s image in a circus fun-house mirror, distorted no matter which way one pivoted and turned. Inwardly he screamed at himself: Did you close that interior door?

  He bit his lip in frustration, trying to recall the sensation of the knob in his hand, the noise of the wood shutting behind his back. The memory eluded him and he felt frozen in his position, stymied by his inability to recollect a single, simple, everyday act. And then he asked himself an even worse question, although he didn’t realize it quite yet: Why can’t you remember?

  He took a deep breath and reassured himself: You must have left it open. By mistake.

  Still he didn’t move. He felt suddenly sapped of strength. Almost as if he’d been through a fight, or, at least, what he suspected he’d feel if he’d fought someone, because he realized abruptly that he never had. At least, not as an adult, and he discounted the occasional wrestlings of adolescent boys which seemed impossibly distant in his past.

  The darkness seemed to mock him. He strained his hearing, trying to penetrate into the darkened room.

  No one is there, he told himself.

  But, as if to underscore the lie, he said out loud: “Hello?”

  The sound of the single word spoken in the small space had a tightening effect upon Ricky. He was overcome by a sense of being ridiculous. A child, he told himself, is frightened of shadows, not an adult. Especially one who has spent the entirety of their adult life dealing with secrets and hidden terrors, as he had.

  He stepped forward, trying to regain his composure. He was home, he told himself. He was safe.

  Still, he reached out quickly for the light switch on the wall, as he hesitated in the gray-black space of the doorway, groping about with his hand until he found the toggle switch, which he flicked instantly.

  Nothing happened. The blackness of the room remained intact.

  Ricky gasped hard, inhaling some of the darkness. He flicked the switch repeatedly, as if refusing to believe that there was no light in the room. He cursed out loud: “Damn it to hell . . .” but did not step inside. Instead, he allowed time for his eyes to adjust to the dark, all the time listening carefully, trying to pick out some telltale noise that might let him know that he wasn’t alone. He reassured himself: When you’ve had as unsettling an experience as he’d had that evening, the mind naturally played all sorts of little tricks. Still, he waited a few more seconds, so that his vision had some purchase on the dark room, and he swept his eyes back and forth a few times. Then he stepped across the small space, angling for his desk and the lamp that occupied one corner. He felt not unlike a blind man, keeping his hands out in front of him, trying to feel his way across an area where there was nothing to feel. He bumped solidly into his desk, misjudging the distance slightly, banging his knee, which prompted a torrent of obscenities from his mouth. Several shits and damns and a single fuck, all of which were out of character for Ricky, who before the events of the past day, had rarely uttered an obscenity.

  He sidled alongside the desk, finally finding the lamp with his hand, and locating its switch. With a relieved sigh, he clicked this, expecting light.

  It, too, failed to function.

  Ricky gripped the side of the desk, steadying himself. He told himself there must be some kind of power outage, caused by the heat and the citywide demand for electricity, but behind his desk he could see through the window that streetlights were burning brightly and the air conditioner continued to hum merrily along. Then he told himself that it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that two different lightbulbs might have burned out simultaneously. Unusual, but possible.

  Keeping one hand on the desk edge, he turned in the direction of the third lamp that he kept in his office. It was a standing light, a black, cast-iron design that his wife had purchased a number of years earlier to take up to the summer place in Wellfleet, but which he’d appropriated for the corner of his office, behind his chair, at the head of the couch. He used it for reading, and on rainy, dark days, to clear some of the city November gloom from the room, so that patients wouldn’t be totally distracted by the weather. The lamp was perhaps fifteen feet away from where he was poised at the desk, but it was a distance that in that moment seemed much farther. He pictured his office, knowing that it was merely a few paces away and that nothing stood between him and his chair, and once there, the lamp would be easily found. He wished, in that moment, that more light from the street filtered through the windows, but what little existed seemed to stop right at the glass, as if impotent and unable to penetrate into the small room. Four strides across, he told himself. Don’t bump your knee on the chair.

  He stepped forward carefully, feeling the emptiness in front of him with his outstretched arms. He bent slightly at the waist, reaching for the reassuring feel of his old leather chair. It seemed to take him longer to cross the space than he would have guessed, but the chair was where it always was, and he found the arm, the back, and he lurched into the seat with a grateful welcoming squeak of leather. His hands located the small table where he kept his daybook and clock, then reached behind it for the lamp. The knob was up just beneath the bulb, and with a little twisting and fumbling, he found it. Without hesitation, he turned it with a decisive click.

  The darkness remained intact.

  He twisted the knob back and forth a dozen times, filling the room with clicks.

  Nothing.

  Ricky sat frozen in his seat, trying to arrive at some obvious and benign explanation for why none of the lights in his office functioned. This eluded him.

  Breathing in deeply, he listened to the nighttime, trying to sort through the ancillary sounds of the city. His nerve ends were on edge, his hearing sharpened, every other sense gathered in an effort to determine whether he was truly alone. A part of him wanted to bolt for the front door, to escape to the corridor, and then to find someone to accompany him back into the apartment. He fought against this desire, recognizing it for the panic that it implied. He tried to force himself to remain calm.

  He could hear nothing, but this did not reassure him that no one was with him in the apartment. He tried to imagine where someone might hide, which closet, which corner, beneath which table. Then he tried to concentrate on those locations, as if from the seat behind his analyst’s couch, he could see into those hidden regions. But this effort, too, was unsuccessful, or, at least, he realized, unsatisfactory. He tried to remember where he might have kept a flashlight or candlesticks, guessing that if he had any, they would be in the kitchen on a shelf, probably right next to the spare lightbulbs. He stayed seated for another minute, reluctant to leave his familiar seat, managing to force himself upward only by recognizing that pursuing some sort of light was the only reasonable response.

  He stepped gingerly into the center of the room, keeping his hands out in front of him again, mimicking a blind man. He was halfway across the room when the telephone on the desk rang.

  The sound seared through him.
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  He stumbled as he pivoted toward the noise, reaching out for the sound. His hand knocked into a jar of pens and pencils he kept on his desktop, scattering them. He seized the telephone just before the sixth ring, which would have triggered his answering machine. “Hello? Hello?”

  There was no response.

  “Hello? Is someone there?”

  The phone went dead abruptly.

  Ricky held the receiver in his hand in the darkness, cursing silently to himself, then not so silently, “Goddamn it to hell!” he said loudly. “Goddamn it, Goddamn it, Goddamn it . . .”

  He hung up the receiver, and placed both hands on the desk surface, as if exhausted and needing to catch his breath again. He cursed again, though more softly.

  The phone rang again.

  He lurched back in surprise, then reached out and fumbling slightly, banging the receiver against the desktop, he grabbed the receiver and thrust it to his ear. “This isn’t funny,” he said.

  “Doctor Ricky,” cooed Virgil’s deep, yet kittenish voice. “No one has ever suggested this was a joke. In fact, Mr. R. is fairly humorless, or so I’m told.”

  Ricky bit back on the every angry word that leapt forward to the brink of his lips. Instead, he let some silence speak for him.

  After a few seconds, Virgil laughed. The sound was awful over the phone line.

  “You’re still in the dark, aren’t you, Ricky?”

  “Yes,” he said. “You’ve been here, haven’t you. You or someone like you broke in here while I was out and . . .”

  “Ricky,” Virgil suddenly cooed, almost seductively, “you’re the analyst. When you’re in the dark about something, especially something simple, what do you do?”

  He didn’t reply. She laughed again.

  “Come on, Ricky. And you think yourself to be a master of symbolism and interpreting all sorts of mysteries? How do you shed light where there is only darkness? Why, that’s your job, isn’t it?”

  She didn’t allow him a response.

  “Follow the simplest trail for an answer.”