We All Killed Grandma by Fredric Brown Read Free Book Online Page B

I said. “That’s the most sensible way anybody’s introduced himself to me yet, Pete. I’ve got a hunch we’ll be friends again—even if I never remember the first time. What did Arch tell you on the phone? That you’re to talk me into going to a psychiatrist?”
    “He kind of hinted at it. Why don’t you want to?”
    “Well—there’s only one way he’d treat me, isn’t there? Hypnosis.”
    “Probably the quickest, if it works. It doesn’t work in all cases, and you’d have to get a man who was good at it.”
    “What the hell else would he try? There’s no other angle of attack that I can think of. I mean, he can’t put me on his couch and make me go over my early life. I don’t remember it. I’m a little less than four days old. Those four days wouldn’t give him much to analyze—and anything before that would be hearsay evidence.”
    “He still might be able to do it. You say there’s no other angle of attack. There are several. One is your current aversion to psychoanalysis in general and hypnosis in particular. He could make you realize the reason for them.”
    “Which is?”
    “Which might be that you’re afraid that you killed Grandma Turtle.”
    “I—don’t think so. And the police are sure I didn’t.”
    “More sure than you are. I’d say you know yourself well enough, even after this short an acquaintance, to feel sure that you didn’t kill her sanely, deliberately. But you’re probably afraid—consciously or subconsciously—that you were insane. You’re afraid that you’d give yourself away under hypnosis—give yourself away to yourself, that is. The fact of your giving yourself away to someone else, to the psychiatrist, wouldn’t be a factor because if you knew that you killed Grandma Tuttle, you’d give yourself up.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “I know you. I know damned well you wouldn’t commit a murder, drunk or sober, sane. And that if you found out that you’d gone insane and committed one, youwouldn’t let yourself run loose for fear it would happen again.”
    “I—I guess I wouldn’t. But, damn it, I still don’t want to be psychoanalyzed or hypnotized. Doesn’t amnesia always either wear off or end suddenly of its own accord?”
    “Almost always, especially when and if the causes for it are removed. Listen, Rod, let me tell you one thing. You didn’t kill her. I’m sure.”
    “How can you be sure?”
    “The same reasons the police have—plus knowing you, plus a plain knowledge of psychology. You as a conscious, sane murderer I can’t picture at all. And you as a psychopathic murderer doesn’t fit the picture.”
    “Why not?”
    He dug a pipe and a pouch of tobacco out of his pockets, arching himself in the chair to get at them. He said, “You were drunk. You were drunk because Robin was getting her divorce the next day. Damn good reason, and you wouldn’t have got pie-eyed for a lesser one. Now out of that drunk—which concerned Robin and not Grandma—nobody could convince me that you suddenly got the idea to kill your grandmother, sanely or psychopathically. There’d be no reason for it, and even a psychopath operates on what looks to him like reason.”
    “Suppose I thought I had a reason. Suppose I got the sudden hunch—right or wrong—that Grandma had something to do with Robin’s divorcing me. Maybe that she engineered it. Paranoia gives people wilder ideas than that.”
    “But you weren’t paranoiac. That’s nothing that hits people suddenly and I’d have noticed the signs. You were always nervous, mildly neurotic in a few ways, but damn it you weren’t even incipiently paranoiac. Besides—all right, suppose you’re drunk and get that sudden wild idea. I’ll buy that, as a remote possibility. I’ll say there’s a chance in a million you might have gone there and shot her. But not even that much chance that you’d have worked out all the details that make it look like a burglary. Cut through the screen—from the