In The Last Analysis Part 1

In the Last a.n.a.lysis.

Amanda Cross.

Prologue.

"I DIDN'T say I objected to Freud," Kate said. "I said I objected to what Joyce called freudful errors-all those nonsensical conclusions leaped to by people with no reticence and less mind."

"If you are going to hold psychiatry responsible for s.a.d.i.s.tic parlor games, I see no point in continuing the discussion," Emanuel answered. But they would continue the discussion nonetheless; it had gone on for years, and showed no signs of exhausting itself.

"By the way," Kate said, "I've sent you a patient. At any rate, a student asked me to recommend a psychoa.n.a.lyst, and I gave her your name and address. I have no idea if she'll call, but I rather expect she will. Her name is Janet Harrison." Kate walked to the window and looked out on the raw and bl.u.s.tery weather. It was the sort of January day when even she, who loathed spring, longed for it.

"Considering your opinion of psychiatry," Nicola said, "Emanuel should feel duly honored. Look honored, Emanuel!" Nicola, Emanuel's wife, followed these discussions rather as the spectator at a tennis match follows the ball, her head turning from one to the other. Having managed to place her faith in psychiatry without withdrawing her right to criticize, she applauded the good shots and groaned at the misses. Kate and Emanuel, charmed with Nicola as audience, enjoyed the matches not only for the occasional insights which emerged from them, but also because they shared the knack of irritating without ever offending each other. Nicola smiled on them both.

"It isn't Freud himself one quarrels with," Kate said, "nor even the great body of theory he evolved. It's the dissemination of his ideas in the modern world. I'm always reminded of the story of the j.a.panese gentleman and the Trinity: *Honorable Father, very good; Honorable Son, very good; but Honorable Bird I do not understand at all.' "

"Your quotations," Emanuel said, "always enliven the conversation without in any way advancing the discussion."

"The only quotation I can think of," said Nicola, in her turn walking to the window, "is *If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?' "

Which, as it turned out, was the most significant remark anybody made that afternoon.

One.

SOMEONE had chalked "April is the cruelest month" on the steps of Baldwin Hall. Kate, unimpressed by the erudition, agreed with the sentiment. Spring on an American campus, even as urban a campus as this one, inevitably drove the faculty into a mood compounded of la.s.situde, irritation, and fastidiousness. Perhaps, Kate thought, it is because we are getting old, while the students, like Caesar's crowds on the Appian Way, are always the same age. Gazing at the students who sprawled, or made love, on every available patch of gra.s.s, Kate longed, as she did each spring, for a statelier, less untidy era. "The young in one another's arms," Yeats had complained.

She mentioned this to Professor Anderson, who had stopped too, pondering the chalk inscription. "This time of year," he said, "I always want to shut myself up in a dark room, with the curtains drawn, and play Bach. Really, you know," he said, still regarding Eliot's line, "Millay put it better: *To what purpose, April, do you return again?' " Kate was startled by Professor Anderson, who was an eighteenth-century man with a strong distaste for all female writers since Jane Austen. Together they entered the building and mounted the stairs to the English department on the next floor. That was it, really. However expected, April was always startling.

On the bench outside Kate's office, waiting for her office hours, sat a line of students. This too was a spring symptom. The good students either vanished from the campus altogether, or appeared at odd moments to argue some abstruse point of interpretation. The mediocre, particularly the poor ones, began to worry about marks. April, stirring their dull senses, reminded them that the time of marks was near and the B they had faithfully promised themselves dismally remote. They had come to talk it out. Kate sighed as she unlocked the door to her office, and then stopped, in surprise and annoyance. A man standing at the window turned as she entered.

"Please come in, Miss Fansler. Perhaps I should say Doctor, or Professor; I am Acting Captain Stern, Detective from the Police Department. I've shown my credentials to the secretary in the office, who suggested that I had perhaps better wait in here. She was kind enough to let me in. I haven't disturbed anything. Won't you sit down?"

"I a.s.sure you, Captain," Kate said, sitting down at her desk, "I know very little about the personal lives of my students. Has one of them got into trouble?" She regarded the detective with interest. An avid reader of detective stories, she had always suspected that in real life detectives were desperately ordinary men, the sort who coped well with short-answer exams (corrected by machine) but were annoyed by complex ideas, literary or otherwise; the sort who liked the hardness of facts and found the need for ambivalence distasteful.

"Would you be good enough to tell me, Miss Fansler, what you were doing yesterday morning until noon?"

"What I was doing? Really, Captain Stern, I do a.s.sure you that ..."

"If you will just be good enough to answer my questions, Miss Fansler, I will explain the reasons for them very shortly. Yesterday morning?"

Kate stared at him, and then shrugged. As is the unfortunate habit of the literary person, she already imagined herself retelling this extraordinary event. She caught the detective's eye, and reached for a cigarette. He lit it for her, waiting patiently. "I don't teach on Tuesdays," she said. "I am writing a book, and I spent all yesterday morning in the stacks of the library, looking up articles in nineteenth-century periodicals. I was there until a little before one, when I went to wash, and then to meet Professor Popper for lunch. We ate in the faculty club."

"Do you live alone, Miss Fansler?"

"Yes."

"What time did you arrive in the *stacks'?"

"The stacks, Captain Stern, are the inner floors of the library, on which the books are kept." Why is it, she wondered, that women are always annoyed at being asked if they live alone? "I got to the library at about nine-thirty."

"Did anyone see you in the stacks?"

"Anyone who could give me an *alibi'? No. I found the volumes I wanted, and worked with them at the small tables along the wall provided for that purpose. Several people must have seen me there, but whether they recognized me, or remembered me, I couldn't say."

"Do you have a student named Janet Harrison?"

In books, Kate thought, detectives were always enthusiastically interested in their work, rather like knights on a quest. It had never really occurred to her before with what fervor they attacked their work. Some of the time, of course, they were related to, or in love with, the accused or murdered, but whether being a detective was their job or avocation, they seemed vehemently to care. She wondered what, if anything, Acting Captain Stern cared about. Could she ask him if he lived alone? Certainly not. "Janet Harrison? She used to be a student of mine; that is, she took one of my cla.s.ses, on the nineteenth-century novel. That was last semester; I haven't seen her since." Kate thought longingly of Lord Peter Wimsey; at this point, surely, he would have paused to discuss the nineteenth-century novel. Captain Stern seemed never to have heard of it.

"Did you recommend that she attend a psychoa.n.a.lyst?"

"Good G.o.d," Kate said, "is that what this has to do with? Surely the police are not checking up on all people who attend a.n.a.lysts. I didn't *recommend' that she attend an a.n.a.lyst; I would consider it improper to do any such thing. She came to me having already decided, or been advised, to go to an a.n.a.lyst. She asked me if I could recommend a good one, since she had heard of the importance of finding a properly qualified man. Now that you mention it, I don't quite know why she came to me; I suppose we are all too willing to a.s.sume that others recognize us as monuments of good sense and natural authorities on most things."

There was no answering smile from Captain Stern. "Did you in fact recommend a psychoa.n.a.lyst?"

"Yes, in fact, I did!"

"What was the name of the a.n.a.lyst you recommended?"

Kate was suddenly angry. Glancing out of the window, where April was breeding desire all over the place, did nothing to improve her mood. She averted her eyes from the campus and looked at the detective, who appeared unmoved by April. Undoubtedly he found all months equally cruel. Whatever this was about-and her curiosity had been greatly diluted by annoyance-was there any purpose in dragging Emanuel into it? "Captain Stern," she asked, "am I required to answer that question? I'm not at all certain of the legal rights in this matter, but wouldn't I be *booked,' or told what this is all about, if I'm to answer questions? Would it suffice for now if I were to a.s.sure you (though I cannot prove it) that yesterday morning until one o'clock I was involved in no way whatever with any human being other than Thomas Carlyle, whose death well over half a century ago precludes the possibility of my having been in any way involved in it?"

Captain Stern ignored this. "You say you did recommend a psychoa.n.a.lyst to Janet Harrison. Did she find him satisfactory; did she plan to continue with him for very long?"

"I don't know," Kate said, feeling somewhat ashamed of her outburst into sarcasm, "I don't even know if she went to him. I gave her his name, address, and telephone number. I mentioned the matter to him. From that moment to this I haven't seen the girl, nor given her a moment's thought."

"Surely the a.n.a.lyst would have mentioned the matter to you, if he had taken her as a patient. Particularly," Captain Stern added, revealing for the first time a certain store of knowledge, "if he were a good friend."

Kate stared at him. At least, she thought, we are not playing twenty questions. "I can't make you believe it, of course, but he did not mention it, nor would a first-rate a.n.a.lyst do so, particularly if I had not asked him. The man in question is a member of the New York Psychoa.n.a.lytic Inst.i.tute, and it is against their principles ever to discuss a patient. This may seem strange; nonetheless, it is the simple truth."

"What sort of girl was Janet Harrison?"

Kate leaned back in the chair, trying to gauge the man's intelligence. She had learned as a college teacher that if one simplified what one wished to say, one falsified it. It was possible only to say what one meant, as clearly as possible. What could this Janet Harrison have done? Were they trying to establish her instability? Really, this laconic policeman was most trying.

"Captain Stern, while the students are attending cla.s.ses here, their lives are going on; most of these students are not isolated in dormitories, they are not away from family pressure, financial pressures, emotional pressures of all sorts. They are at an age when, if they are not married-and that is a state which brings its own problems-they are suffering from love or the lack of it. They are going to bed with someone they love, which is to be in one emotional state, or they are going to bed with someone they do not love, which is to be in another, or they are going to bed with no one at all, which is to be in still another. Sometimes they are colored, or the unreligious children of religious parents, or the religious children of unreligious parents. Sometimes they are women torn between mind and family. Often they are in trouble, of one sort or another. As teachers, we know little of this, and if we catch a hint of some of it we are-how shall I put it-not the priest, but the church: we are there; we continue. We speak for something that goes on-art, or science, or history. Of course, we get the occasional student who tells you about himself even as he breathes; for the most part, we get only the most general impression, apart, of course, from the student's actual work.

"You ask what sort of girl was Janet Harrison? I tell you all this so that you will understand my answer. I have only an impression. If you ask, Was she the sort to hold up a bank? I would say No, she didn't seem to me the sort, but I'm not sure I could tell you why. She was an intelligent student, well above the average; she gave me the impression of being able to do excellent work, should she put her mind to it, but her whole mind was never put to it. It was as though a part of her was off somewhere, waiting to see what would happen. Yet you know," Kate added, "till you asked me, I had not thought of it quite that way."

"Didn't you have any idea why she would want to go to a psychoa.n.a.lyst?"

"No, I did not. People today turn to a.n.a.lysis as they used to turn to-what? G.o.d, their minister, their families; I don't pretend to know. I have heard people say, and only half in fun, that parents had better save now for their child's a.n.a.lysis as they used to save for his college education. A youngster today, moving in intellectual circles, will, in trouble, turn to psychiatry, and his parents will often help him if they can."

"And a psychiatrist, a psychoa.n.a.lyst, will accept any patient who comes to him?"

"Of course not," Kate said. "But surely you haven't come here to learn about these matters from me. There are many people competent to discuss ..."

"You sent this girl to a psychoa.n.a.lyst, and he took her as a patient. I would like to know why you thought she should go to an a.n.a.lyst, and why you thought this a.n.a.lyst would take her."

"This is my office hour," Kate said. Not that she minded, on this particular April day, missing the students ("I'm a provisional student, Professor Fansler, and if I don't get a B- in this course ..."), but the thought of the students patiently waiting on the bench, perhaps now overflowing it ... Captain Stern had no objection, obviously, to displacing them. Perhaps she should send Captain Stern to Emanuel. All at once, the thought of sitting in her office on a spring day, discussing psychiatry with a police detective, struck her as ludicrous. "Look here, Captain Stern," she said, "what is it you want to know? Before a good a.n.a.lyst will take on a patient, he must be certain that the patient is qualified for a.n.a.lysis. The patient must be of sufficient intelligence, with certain kinds of problems, with a certain possibility for free development. A psychotic, even certain neurotics, are not proper subjects. Most of all, a patient must want to go into a.n.a.lysis, must want to be helped. On the other hand, most a.n.a.lysts that I have met believe that any intelligent person can be helped, can be given a greater freedom of activity by a good a.n.a.lysis. If I am asked to recommend a good a.n.a.lyst, I recommend a good one, knowing that a good a.n.a.lyst will only take a patient suitable to a.n.a.lysis, and suitable to a.n.a.lysis by this particular a.n.a.lyst. I can't be any clearer than that on a subject about which I know remarkably little, and any psychiatrist hearing me now would probably scream in horror and say I'd got it all wrong, which I probably have. Now what in the world has Janet Harrison done?"

"She has been murdered."

Captain Stern left the words hanging in the air. From outside came the campus noises of spring. Some fraternity boys were selling raffle tickets on a car. The shadow of someone, probably a student, pa.s.sed back and forth behind the gla.s.s door to Kate's office.

"Murdered?" Kate said. "But I knew nothing about her. Was she attacked in the street?" Suddenly the girl seemed born again in Kate's memory, sitting where Captain Stern now sat. Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio.

"You said, Miss Fansler, she seemed to be waiting to see what would happen. What did you mean by that?"

"Did I say that? I don't know what I meant. A way of speaking."

"Was there anything of a personal nature between you and Janet Harrison?"

"No. She was a student." Suddenly, Kate remembered his first question: What were you doing yesterday morning? "Captain Stern, what has this to do with me? Because I gave her the name of an a.n.a.lyst, because she was my student, am I supposed to know who murdered her?"

Captain Stern rose to his feet. "Forgive me for taking the time from your students, Miss Fansler. If I have to see you again, I will try to make it at a more convenient hour. Thank you for answering my questions." He paused a moment, as though arranging his sentences.

"Janet Harrison was murdered in the office of the psychoa.n.a.lyst to whom you sent her. Emanuel Bauer is his name. She had been his patient for seven weeks. She was murdered on the couch in his office, the couch on which, as I understand it, patients lie during their a.n.a.lytic hour. She was stabbed with a knife from the Bauer kitchen. We are anxious, of course, to find out all we can about her. There seems to be remarkably little information available. Goodbye for now, Miss Fansler."

Kate stared after him as he left, closing the door behind him. She had underestimated his flair for the dramatic; that much was clear. I've sent you a patient, Emanuel. What had she sent him? Where was he now? Surely the police could not imagine that Emanuel had stabbed a patient on his own couch? But how then had the murderer got in? Had Emanuel been there? She picked up the receiver and dialed 9 for an outside line. What was his number? She would not thumb through a phone book. It surprised her to notice, as she dialed 411 for information, that her hand was shaking. "Can you give me the number, please, of Mrs. Nicola Bauer, 879 Fifth Avenue?" Emanuel's office number was under his name, his home phone under Nicola's, she remembered that: to prevent patients calling him at home. "Thank you, operator." She did not write it down, but repeated it over and over to herself. Trafalgar 9. But she had forgotten to dial 9 again for an outside line. Begin again and take it slowly. Emanuel, what have I done to you? "h.e.l.lo." It was Pandora, the Bauers' maid. What an amusing name it had once seemed! "Pandora, this is Miss Fansler, Kate Fansler. Please tell Mrs. Bauer that I must speak to her."

"Just a minute, Miss Fansler, I'll see." The phone was laid down. Kate could hear one of the Bauer boys. Then there was Nicola.

"Kate. I suppose you've heard."

"A detective's been here; I'm in my office. Efficient, laconic, and, I suspect, superficial. Nicki, are they letting you stay there?"

"Oh, yes. Thousands of men have been through the whole place, but they say we can stay. Mother said we should go home with her, but once the policemen cleared out, it seemed better somehow to stay. As though if we left, we might never come back, Emanuel might never come back. We've even kept the boys here. It does seem crazy, I suppose."

"No, Nicki. I understand. You stay. Can I come and see you? Will you tell me what's happened? Will they let me come?"

"They've only left a policeman outside, to cope with the mobs. There've been reporters. We'd like to see you, Kate."

"You sound exhausted, but I'm coming anyway."

"I'd like to see you. I don't know about Emanuel. Kate, I think they think we did it, in Emanuel's office. Kate, don't you know an a.s.sistant District Attorney? Maybe you could ..."

"Nicki, I'll be right over. I'll do anything I can. I'm leaving now."

Outside the office a few students still waited. Kate rushed past them down the stairs. On that bench, how many months ago, Janet Harrison had waited. Professor Fansler, could you recommend a good psychiatrist?

Two.

THERE is no real reason why psychiatrists should confine themselves to the most elegant residential section of the city. Broadway, for example, is accessible by subway, while Fifth, Madison, Park Avenue, and the side streets which connect them can be reached only by taxi, bus, or on foot. But no psychiatrist would dream of moving west, with the exception of a few brave souls on Central Park West, who apparently find sufficient elegance in the sight of Fifth Avenue across the park. Whether this has formed itself as an equation: East Side = style, psychiatry = style, therefore psychiatry = East Side; whether it is that the West Side and success are unthinkable together, whatever the reason, psychiatrists find themselves, and their patients find them, in the sixties, seventies, perhaps the low eighties, between the avenues. The area is known, in certain circles, as psychiatrists' row.

The Bauers lived in a ground-floor apartment in the sixties, just off Fifth Avenue. The building itself was on Fifth Avenue, but Dr. Emanuel Bauer's office address was 3 East. This added, for some mysterious reason, a note of elegance, as though, living on Fifth Avenue, it was more couth if one did not say so in so many words. What the Bauers' rent was, Kate had never dared to imagine. Nicola, of course, had money, and since Emanuel's office was in the apartment, a percentage of the rent was tax deductible. Kate herself lived in a large four-room apartment overlooking the Hudson River, not, as some of her friends said, because she was a reverse sn.o.b, but because the old apartments on the East Side were unavailable, and as for the new ones-Kate would rather have pitched a tent than live with a windowless kitchen, with walls so thin one listened, perforce, to the neighbors' television, with Muzak in the elevators, and goldfish in the lobby. Her ceilings were high, her walls thick, and her elegance faded.

As Kate's taxi wove in and out of traffic, carrying her to the Bauers', she thought, not of their rent, but of the apartment's layout, its convenience for a murderer. In fact, the apartment, when one came to think of it, was designed for intrusion of any sort. The entrance from the street led one into a short hall, with the Bauer apartment on one side, another doctor's office (he was not in psychiatry, Kate seemed to remember) on the other. Beyond these two entrances, the hall widened into a small lobby, with a bench, an elevator, and a door beyond it to the garage. Although the main lobby of the building was stiff with attendants, this small one boasted only the elevator man who, in keeping with his kind, spent a good part of his time going up to, or down from, the upper floors. When he was in his elevator, the lobby was empty. Neither the Bauers' apartment nor the office across the hall was locked during the day. Emanuel's patients simply walked in and waited in a small waiting room until summoned by Emanuel into his office. Theoretically, if the elevator were up, one could walk in un.o.bserved at any time.

But, of course, there would be other people about. Not to mention the other doctor and his patients and nurse, who seemed to do rather a lot of going and coming, there were Emanuel himself, his patients, possibly one in the office and one waiting, Nicola, the maid, the Bauer boys, Simon and Joshua, friends of Nicola's, friends of the boys, and of course, Kate realized, anyone living on the upper floors who had entered the building by the side entrance and waited in the small lobby for the elevator. It was becoming increasingly clear to Kate, and probably already clear to the police, that whoever had done this knew the place and the habits of the Bauers. It was a disquieting thought, but Kate refused at this point to give way to its depressing implications. Perhaps, Kate thought, the murderer had been seen. Yet in fact she doubted it. And if he or she had been seen, he or she had probably looked like a quite ordinary tenant, or visitor, or patient, and was therefore quite unmemorable, in fact invisible.

Kate found Nicola stretched out on her bed in the back of the apartment. Kate had walked in unnoticed by anyone except the policeman in the hall, a fact which depressed her still further, though whether she was upset by the ease of her intrusion or the presence of the policeman she could not have said. Nicola was usually to be found in the back. The Bauer living room, visible from the foyer through which the patients pa.s.sed, was not used during the day or the early hours of the evening when Emanuel had patients. Great care, in fact, as all Nicola's friends knew, was taken to make sure that the patients saw no one in Emanuel's household. And even the boys had become expert at dodging back and forth between the bedroom part of the apartment and the kitchen without meeting a patient.

"Is Emanuel working?" Kate asked.

"Yes. They've let him have the office again, though of course it will be in the papers, and whether the patients will come back, or what they will think if they do, I can't imagine. I suppose actually it will bring up all sorts of fascinating material, if they care to talk about it; but it is not the best thing for transference during an a.n.a.lysis, at least not for positive transference, to have one's a.n.a.lyst's office the scene of a murder, with the a.n.a.lyst himself as the chief suspect. I mean, patients may have fantasies about being attacked on an a.n.a.lyst's couch-I'm sure most of them do-but it is best not to have someone actually stabbed there."

Nothing, Kate noticed thankfully, nothing could stop the flow of Nicola's talk. Except when she talked about her children (and the only way to keep from being boring on that subject, Kate believed, was to avoid it), Nicola was never dull, partly because her talk came from a joy in life that was more than egocentricity, and partly because she not only talked, she listened, listened and cared. Kate often thought that Emanuel had married Nicki largely because her language, flowing over him in waves, catching up every imaginable, every unprofound subject, buoyed him up despite the heaviness of his own mind. For the only thing which drove Emanuel eagerly to talk was an abstract idea, and, oddly, this anomaly suited them. Like most male followers of Freud, like Freud himself, if it came to that, Emanual needed and sought the company of intellectual women but avoided any contractual alliance with them.

"And, of course," Nicki went on, "patients shouldn't know anything about their a.n.a.lyst, personally, and even if the police do their best-as they have promised-the papers are bound to print that he has a wife and two children, let alone is suspected of stabbing a patient on the couch, and I can't imagine how we shall ever recover from this, even if Emanuel isn't sent to jail, though they could doubtless use a brilliant psychoa.n.a.lyst in jail, but if Emanuel had wanted to study the criminal mind he would have gone in for that in the first place. Perhaps if he had, he could figure out who did it. I keep telling him it must have been one of his patients, and he keeps saying, *Let's not discuss it, Nicola,' and I'm not supposed to talk to anyone really, except perhaps Mother, who wants to rally round, but insists on looking so brave. Emanuel has said I can talk to you because you know how to keep your mouth shut, and you'll be a good outlet. For me, I mean."

"Let me get you some sherry," Kate said.

"Now, don't start being sensible, or I shall scream. Pandora is being sensible with the boys; of course I am too, but I just want someone who will sit down with me and wail."

"I am not being sensible, merely selfish. I could use a drink myself. In the kitchen? All right, stay there, I'll get it; you plan how you can tell me all this starting right at the beginning ..."

"I know, go on till I get to the end, and then stop. We do need the Red King, don't we? It is rather like that."

As Kate walked to the kitchen and back with the drinks, peeking first through the doors to make sure the path was clear (it would not do to meet a patient with a gla.s.s of liquor firmly grasped in each hand), Kate clarified in her own mind the sort of fact she would have to elicit from Nicki if she were to make any sense of the entire affair. She had already determined to call Reed at the D.A.'s office and blackmail him (if it should come to that) into telling her what the police knew, but meanwhile the sensible thing was to get the facts. With that odd ability to see herself from the outside, Kate noticed with interest that she had already accepted the murder as fact, that the shock had pa.s.sed, that she had now reached the state where coherent action was possible.

"Well," Nicki said, sipping her sherry automatically, "it began like any other day." (Days always do, Kate thought, but we notice it only when they don't end like any other day.) "Emanuel got up with the boys. It's the only time he really gets to see them, except for odd moments during the day, and they all had breakfast together in the kitchen. Because he had an eight o'clock patient, at ten minutes of he shoved the boys into their room, where they played, though quiet play is clearly beyond them, and I continued to sleep my fitful sleep until nine ..."

"Do you mean Emanuel has a patient at eight o'clock in the morning?"

"Of course, it's the most popular hour of all. People who work have to come either before they go to work, or in their lunch hour, or just after work at night, which is why Emanuel's day, and I suppose every psychiatrist's, stretches out so at both ends. Of course, at the moment Emanuel's got five patients in the morning, but that's a very bad arrangement, and he's planning-well, he was planning-to move the ten o'clock patient over to the afternoon as soon as he, the patient, could arrange his schedule to come in the afternoon. Now the eleven o'clock patient is gone, possibly to be followed by all the others."

"The eleven o'clock patient was Janet Harrison?"

"Kate, do you think she had a past? She must have had a past, mustn't she, if someone tracked her down and killed her in Emanuel's office? I keep pointing out that someone in a.n.a.lysis is very likely to mention her past, and why in h.e.l.l doesn't Emanuel tell the police about her, but of course it's like the secrets of the confessional; still, the girl is dead, and Emanuel in danger ..."

"Nicki, dear, she doesn't have to have had a past; a present will do, even a future someone wanted to avoid. I only hope whoever did it wanted to murder her. I mean, if the police have to find a homicidal maniac who was overcome at the sight of a girl on a couch, and who just happened to wander in, who never knew who she was-well, of course, that idea is preposterous. Let's get back to yesterday. Emanuel had patients at eight, nine, ten, eleven and twelve?"