In the Last Analysis (10 page)

“Can I have their home addresses?”

“You can have anything it is in my power to give you. Just let me know what you’re doing, will you, in a general sort of way? And if you get a note to meet a mysterious man with interesting information on some dark street, don’t go.”

“Flippancy,” Kate said flippantly, “will get you nowhere. May I have another cup of coffee?”

B
Y
Monday morning life had become, not normal certainly, but with the appearance of being normal. Emanuel returned—minus his eleven o’clock patient—to the practice of psychiatry. Nicola attended her own psychoanalytic hour. Kate, who had disciplined herself to the preparation of work over the weekend, returned to teaching. Saturday evening she had spent with a painter who read only French newspapers, was interested in murder, and had theories about nothing but art. This helped considerably.

But the chief factor in removing the Bauers from the center of attention and the glare of publicity was a horrible crime in Chelsea: some madman had enticed away, raped and murdered a four-year-old girl. The police and newspapers, for the time being at least, switched their main forces elsewhere. (The madman was captured, quite easily, a week later, which brought some comfort to Kate. Madmen,
she reasoned, were usually caught. Therefore Janet Harrison could not have been killed by a madman. She found this magnificent piece of illogic quite consoling.)

At ten o’clock on Monday morning Kate lectured on
Middlemarch
. Did anything, after all, matter beside the fact that imagination might create worlds like
Middlemarch
, that one might learn to perceive these worlds and the structures that sustained them? Looking through the novel the night before, Kate had come upon a sentence which seemed oddly applicable: “Strange that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.” Really, the sentence had nothing to do with the present case: a murder was not an infatuation. Yet, after the lecture, Kate realized that while she had discussed
Middlemarch
, she had been incapable of thinking of anything else. The persistent self lived, she thought, in that work where one’s attention was wholly caught. Emanuel, listening behind the couch, knew perhaps the same thing. It occurred to Kate that few people possessed “persistent selves,” and that Emanuel, as one of them, had to be saved.

She therefore turned her steps, after the lecture, to the Graduate Women’s Dormitory, where Janet Harrison had lived. Not many of the students, as Kate had told Detective Stern, lived on the campus, but the university maintained a dormitory for women who wanted to live, or whose parents insisted that they live, under more proper and controlled circumstances. The dormitory was a benefit also to students who did not want to be burdened with any domestic concerns, and it seemed likely that Janet Harrison had chosen to live there for that reason.

Kate had worked out an extremely complicated plan of attack upon the dormitory, which involved a certain amount of strolling around corridors, conferences with porters and maids, perhaps the exchange of muted confidences with the woman in charge of the dormitory; but the need for all this was obviated by Kate’s colliding, on the doorstep, with Miss Lindsay. Last year Miss Lindsay had been a student of Kate’s in a course in advanced writing which Kate had taken over for a professor on leave and abandoned upon his return with greater relief than she had ever felt before. The course, nonetheless, had had its moments, and Miss Lindasy, whose main subjects were Latin and Greek, had provided most of them. Kate still cherished, in fact, a Latin translation of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” beginning
Mica, mica, parva Stella, Micor quae nam sis, tam bella
, with which Miss Lindsay had presented her on some now quite forgotten occasion. Kate’s own Latin, despite a fascinated reading, some years ago, of Virgil’s
Aeneid
, was still of the
hic, haec, hoc
variety.

Miss Lindsay was that rare student who can talk informally with a professor without ever crossing the line into familiarity. She followed Kate now, willingly enough, into the lounge, abandoning her destination without a pang. Kate, who needed her, did not argue very strenuously. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that in the solution of a murder Kant’s categorical imperative had continually to be ignored. Kate asked Miss Lindsay if she had known Janet Harrison.

“Slightly,” Miss Lindsay said. If she was surprised at the question she did not show it. “We have, of course, been talking of nothing else for days. As a matter of fact, the only time I spoke to her, we spoke of you. You are the only
teacher who seemed to arouse her out of her usual academic lassitude. Something to do with moral obligations struck her particularly, as I remember.”

“Doesn’t she seem to you an odd sort of person to have been murdered? Not, of course, that one exactly expects anyone to be murdered, but she seemed so, I think ‘uninvolved’ is the word I want, so unlikely, despite her beauty, to inspire passion.”

“I don’t agree. In the town I came from there was a girl like that, distant, you know, and rather above it all; but it came out finally that she had been living, ever since she was fifteen, with a grocer whom everyone thought to be happily married. Not so much still waters, but calm waters with a lethal current underneath. Of course, I could be quite wrong about Janet Harrison. The person you want to talk to is Jackie Miller. She has a room near Janet’s. Jackie is the sort who talks all the time and never seems to listen, yet she punctuates the flow with pointed questions one somehow can’t avoid answering. She knows more about everyone than anybody else. Perhaps you know the type?” Kate merely groaned. She knew the type all too well. “Why not come up and see her now? She’s probably just getting up, and if you can once start her talking, she’ll tell you everything anyone could know. I believe,” Miss Lindsay added, leading the way upstairs, “that it was she who told the detective that Janet had always carried a notebook. No one else had noticed.”

Jackie responded to their knock by flinging open the door and waving them gleefully into the messiest room Kate had seen since her college days. Jackie, dressed in a sleeping outfit of very short pants and a lacy, sleeveless top that seemed quite wasted in a woman’s dormitory, was making herself a cup of instant coffee with water from the
tap. She offered them some; Miss Lindsay refused with commendable firmness, but Kate meekly accepted hers in the hope that this would lead them sooner to the point. She might, however, have saved herself from the agony of drinking the concoction.

“So you’re Professor Fansler,” Jackie began. She was clearly the sort who a hundred years ago would have tossed aside her parasol and said, “So you’re President Lincoln.”

“I keep hearing about you from all the students, but I just can’t seem to work one of your courses into my schedule. All my credits from Boston University were in literature—I just love reading novels—so I have to spend all my time here taking courses in other ghastly things. But I must fit in one of your courses because they all say you’re one of the few professors who manage to be entertaining and profound; and let’s admit it, most women professors are dreadfully dull old maids.” It did not apparently occur to Jackie that there was anything infelicitous about this statement. Kate fought down the outrage which such a generalization always aroused in her.

“Janet Harrison was a student of mine,” she said, without too much finesse. But finesse would undoubtedly be wasted on Jackie.

“Yes, I know. She mentioned it once at lunch, and usually you know she never so much as uttered—the strong silent type, not at all attractive, I think, in a woman. Anyway, this day at lunch (you must have had your mouth full, Kate thought maliciously) she said that you said that Henry James had said that morality depended—the morality of one’s actions, that is—depended, or should depend, on the moral quality of the person who was going to do the action and not on the moral quality of the person one was doing the action to. Of course,” Jackie added,
with the first sign of insight Kate had seen in her, “she put it better. But the point was, she didn’t agree. She thought if someone was morally bad, you should do something about it because of their morality, not because of yours.” Kate, gallantly allowing herself and Henry James to be so traduced, wondered if Janet Harrison had indeed said something of the sort.
Could
she have gotten wind of a drug ring?

“Of course,” Jackie continued, “she was frigid, poor thing, and completely unable to relate to people. I told her so and she practically admitted it. I guessed, of course, that she was being analyzed. She used to leave here promptly every morning at the same time, and I found out she wasn’t going to a class, and a very good thing for her. If you want to know, I think the analyst stabbed her out of sheer frustration. She probably lay there hour after hour not opening her mouth. Have you been analyzed?”

It was nearly a quarter of a century since Kate had felt the impulse to stick out her tongue at someone. “Were any other rooms robbed except hers?” she asked.

“No, it was really very peculiar. I told her she had probably aroused some sort of fetishism in some poor frustrated man. If you ask me, he took the camera as a cover, but he was really looking for something personal; but there really wasn’t anything in her room worth looking for”—Jackie slid rather hastily over the unfortunate implications of this remark—“and, of course, she dressed like the matron of a girls’ school. I used to tell her she was really very good-looking, if she would only cut her hair instead of just wearing it pulled back, and you know—showed herself off a little. I was fascinated by that picture the detective was showing around here, apparently of someone connected with Janet. Perhaps she did go out to meet a
man, after all, though it seems unlikely. If so, she certainly kept him well hidden.”

“Did she go out often?”

“Well, not often, but fairly regularly. She went out to dinner, or she would just disappear, and obviously she wasn’t going to the library. I think someone saw her with a man once.”

“Who?” Kate asked. “Was it someone who saw the picture?”

“The detective asked me that,” Jackie said in her maddening way, “and, you know, I can’t remember. It was someone I was talking to by the fountain, because I remember that someone had put soap in the fountain, and this girl and I were commenting on that; but I can’t remember how the question came up—something like my saying one doesn’t expect to find soap in a fountain, and she said, speaking of the unexpected, etcetera. But, you know, I just can’t remember who it was. Perhaps I dreamed it all. Of course, she—Janet, I mean—was an only child, and I always think that the reciprocal rivalry of the sibling relationship does a great deal to develop the personality, don’t you?”

It was likely that she did not expect an answer, but Kate rose to her feet, with a frank look at her watch. Even for the solution of a murder, there was a point beyond which she would not go. Miss Lindsay joined her in a movement toward the door. “You will let me know, won’t you,” Kate said, striving for a casual tone, “if you remember who the person was who saw Janet and the man?”

“Why are you so interested?” Jackie asked.

“Thank you for the coffee,” Kate flung back, and, closing the door, sped down the corridor with Miss Lindsay.

“It’s a pity no one murdered
her,”
said Miss Lindsay,
echoing Kate’s thoughts. “I think even the police would gladly leave it as one of the unsolved cases.”

With an intense feeling of frustration, Kate made her way to the office of university records. Here, with a certain amount of what Jerry would probably have called “throwing her weight around,” she managed to obtain Janet Harrison’s records. For the first and undoubtedly the last time in her life, Kate was grateful to the modern mania for forms. She began with Janet’s record at the university; her marks had been B minuses, with an occasional B. To Kate’s professional eye, this indicated that her instructors had found her clearly capable of A work, but performing, probably, on the C level. There was a strong tendency among professors, including herself, to save C’s for the strictly C students, of whom, God knows, there were enough.

Janet Harrison’s college credits were all in order; she had majored in history, with a minor in economics. Then why had she chosen to come to graduate school to study English literature? Well, the fields were not, of course, precisely unrelated. She had apparently applied for, and received, several college loans, and she had also applied for a fellowship. For the details of this application one had to consult the fellowship office.

Cursing, Kate went to consult the fellowship office. Janet had probably gotten the fellowship, but it would be interesting to know. Her marks in college had been almost all A’s, though the college, supposedly near her home (Kate was somewhat shaky on the geography of the Midwest) had been too undistinguished to have Phi Beta Kappa. Yet why had a girl who had got A’s in her college, however small, fallen to the B-minus level in graduate school? It was almost always the other way around. Probably she had
had something else on her mind. In fact, everyone seemed impressed with the fact—now that Kate thought of it—that Janet Harrison had had something on her mind. But what? What?

The fellowship forms were even more demanding than the university forms has been. Where, the fellowship forms wanted to know, had she spent every year of her life? (Leave no gaps! the form stated sternly.) After college, Janet Harrison had gone to the nursing school at the University of Michigan. Nursing school! Now that was certainly odd. History, Nursing school, English literature. Well, young American females did have a way, if they were not early married, of searching about for possible professions, but surely this search was a trifle wide in scope. Perhaps her parents had been of the old-fashioned sort who might send a girl to college, but insisted that she be trained to earn a living. To such people, Kate knew, there were only three ways a girl could be trained to earn a living: by becoming a secretary, a nurse, or a schoolteacher.