In the Last Analysis by Amanda Cross Read Free Book Online

profession; that Emanuel would never entangle himself with a woman patient, however beautiful; that Emanuel could never murder anyone, certainly not stab them with a knife; that a man and woman who had been lovers, she and Emanuel, could now be friends. What could the police make of that, the police who knew, probably, only sex on one hand, and marriage on the other. What of Nicola? “She was very beautiful,” Nicola had said of Janet. But surely Nicola was at her analysis, the perfect alibi.
    As the two sleeping pills which Kate had taken—and she had not taken sleeping pills since a horrible case of poison ivy, seven years ago—began to pull her under, sheconcentrated her weakening attention on the doctor across the hall. Obviously, the murderer. The fact, and it was a fact, that he was without the smallest connection with anyone in the case, seemed, as consciousness faded, to be of very little importance.

Four
    R EED Amhearst was an Assistant District Attorney, though exactly what functions were encompassed by that title, Kate had never understood. Apparently he was frequently in court, and found his work exciting and consuming. He and Kate had stumbled across each other years before, in the short period of political activity in Kate’s life, when she had worked for a reform political club. Politics had been for Reed a more continuous affair, but after Kate had retired, exhausted from her first and only primary fight, she and Reed continued to see each other in a friendly sort of way. They had dinner together, or went to the theater from time to time, and laughed together a good deal. When either of them needed a partner for a social evening, and did not wish for some reason to plunge in with any other attachment, Reed or Kate, as the case might be, would go along. Since neither of them had married, since neither of them could have considered, for asingle moment, the completely outrageous idea of marrying each other, their casual acquaintance became a constant amid all the variables of their social lives.
    So they might have continued indefinitely, eventually tottering, occasionally together, into benign old age, if Reed, through a series of impulses and bad judgments, had not landed himself in a most magnificent muddle. The details of this Kate had long since forgotten, believing that the ability to forget was one of the most important requirements of a friendship, but neither of them could ever forget that it was Kate who had got him out of the muddle, rescued him on the brink of disaster. By doing so, she had put him forever in her debt, but Reed was a nice enough person to accept a service without holding it against the giver. To ask for a repayment of the debt was an abhorrent idea, to Kate, and to call on him now would, she could not but realize, put her in the position of seeming to do exactly that. For this reason, despite her resolutions of the day before, she brooded a full two hours the next morning before calling him.
    On the other hand, however, and equally imperious, was the need to help Emanuel. No one, Kate was convinced, could help Emanuel, unless he combined her belief in Emanuel’s innocence with the knowledge of the police. The only possible way to get that knowledge seemed to be through Reed. Cursing her mind, too finely tuned to moral dilemmas which more sensible people happily ignored, cursing Reed for having ever needed her help, she decided, after two aspirins, eight cups of coffee and much pacing of the living room, to ask his help. It was, at least, a Thursday, thus a classless day. With a lingering thought for her innocent Tuesday morning in the stacks—would sheever return to Thomas Carlyle, abandoned in the midst of one of his older perorations?—she picked up the phone.
    She caught Reed just as he was leaving on some pressing mission. He had, of course, heard of the “body on the couch,” as they appeared to be calling it (Kate suppressed a groan). When he gathered what she