In the Last Analysis Read Free Page A

the stairs. On that bench, how many months ago, Janet Harrison had waited.
Professor Fansler, could you recommend a good psychiatrist?

Two
    T HERE 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 snob, 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 unobserved 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