In the Last Analysis by Amanda Cross Read Free Book Online Page A

wanted—the complete dossier (if they used that word) on the case—he was absolutely silent for perhaps twenty seconds; it seemed an hour. “Good friend of yours?” he asked.
    “Yes,” Kate answered, “and in a hell of an unfair mess,” and then cursed herself for appearing to be reminding him. But what the hell, she thought, I am reminding him; it does no good to pussyfoot around it.
    “I’ll do what I can,” he said. (Obviously he was not alone.) “It looks like a bad day, but I’ll look into the matter for you and report to your apartment about seven-thirty tonight. Will that do?” Well, after all, Kate thought, he works for a living. Did you expect him to come dashing up the minute he replaced the receiver? He’s probably making a huge effort as it is.
    “I’ll be waiting for you, Reed; thanks a lot.” She hung up the phone.
    For the first time in years, Kate found herself at loose ends, not delightful loose ends, at which one says: If I look at another student theme I shall be ill, and sneaks off, surreptitiously, to a movie; this rather was the horrible kind of loose ends, to which Kate had heard applied (always with a shudder) the cure of “killing time.” Her life was full enough of varied activity to make leisure seem a blessing, not a burden, but now she found herself wondering what in the world to do until seven-thirty. She nobly fought the urge to call Emanuel and Nicola; it seemed best to waituntil she had something constructive to say. Work was impossible—she found she could neither prepare a class nor correct papers. After a certain amount of aimless wandering about the apartment—and she felt, irrationally, that it was a fort she was holding, which she must not on any account leave—she applied the remedy her mother had used under stress, when Kate was a child: she cleaned closets.
    This task, combining as it did dirt, hard work, and amazed discovery, lasted her nicely until two o’clock. Exhausted, she then abandoned the hall closet to dust and unaccountable accumulation, and collapsed in a chair with Freud’s
Studies in Hysteria
, a Christmas present from Nicola several years back. She could not concentrate, but one sentence caught her eye, a comment of Freud’s to a patient: “Much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.” She wished she had had it to quote to Emanuel when they had still been free to argue, aimlessly, about Freud. No wonder they had such a hard row to hoe, these modern psychoanalysts: they saw little enough hysterical misery, and were left to cope with common unhappiness, for which, as Freud clearly knew, there is no clinical cure. It occurred to her that her aim now was to assist, if she could, in restoring Emanuel to common unhappiness from the catastrophic fate which seemed to face him. A disquieting thought, from which she passed into idle daydreams.
    How the rest of the afternoon passed she never, afterward, could tell. She straightened up the house, took a shower—guiltily lifting the phone off the hook first so that a possible caller (Nicola, Reed, the police?) would get a busy signal and try again—ordered some groceries in case Reed should be hungry, and paced back and forth. Severaltelephone conversations with people who never mentioned murders or had anything to do with them helped considerably.
    At twenty-five of eight Reed came. Kate had to restrain herself from greeting him like the long-lost heir from overseas. He collapsed into a chair and gladly accepted Scotch and water.
    “I suppose your idea is that the psychiatrist didn’t do it?”
    “Of course he didn’t do it,” Kate said. “The idea is preposterous.”
    “My dear, the idea that a friend of yours could commit murder may be preposterous; I’ll be the first to admit that it is, or to take your word for it in any case. But to the minds of the police, beautifully unsullied with any personal preconceptions, he looks as guilty as a