The Analyst by John Katzenbach Page B

with a flash of heat.
    “What is happening?” he demanded of himself out loud.
    Roger Zimmerman seemed to enter the room at that moment, as irritating and demanding in death as he was in life. As always, he wanted answers to all the wrong questions.
    He dialed the dead man’s apartment number again, hoping to reach someone. Ricky knew he was obliged to speak with someone about Zimmerman’s death, but precisely who, eluded him. The mother was still inexplicably unaccounted for, and Ricky wished he’d had the sense to ask Detective Riggins where the woman was. He guessed with some neighbor, or in a hospital. Zimmerman had a younger brother who lived in California with whom he’d connected infrequently. The brother worked in the film industry in Los Angeles and had wanted nothing to do with taking care of the difficult and partially invalided mother, a reluctance that had caused Zimmerman to complain constantly about him. Zimmerman had been a man who reveled in the awfulness of his life, preferring to whine and complain than to change. It was this quality that made him such a poor candidate for suicide, Ricky thought. What the police and his coworkers had seen as despair, Ricky had recognized as Zimmerman’s true and only joy. He lived for his hates. Ricky’s task as analyst was to empower him with the ability to change. He had expected the time to eventually arrive when Zimmerman would have realized how crippled he actually was, traveling impotently from anger to anger. That moment when change was possible would have been dangerous, because Zimmerman would likely have fallen into a significant depression at the idea that he didn’t need to lead his life in the way that he did. He would have been vulnerable then when the number of wasted days finally occurred to him. That understanding conceivably might have created a real and possibly lethal despair.
    But that moment had been many months, and in greater likelihood, years away.
    Zimmerman still had arrived at his session daily, still considering analysis to be nothing more than a fifty-minute venting opportunity, like a steam whistle on the side of an engine waiting for the conductor’s tug. What little insight he’d gained he mostly used to pave new avenues of anger.
    Complaining was fun for him. He wasn’t boxed in and encircled by despair.
    Ricky shook his head. In twenty-five years, he’d had three patients who killed themselves. Two of those had been referred to him already displaying all the classic warning signs and had been in treatment only briefly before taking their own lives. He had felt helpless on those occasions, but a helplessness that didn’t carry blame. The third death, however, he did not like to think about because the person had been a longtime patient, whose downward spiral Ricky had been unable to arrest, even with prescriptions for mood elevators, a course he rarely took. It had been years since he’d thought of that patient, and he had not liked mentioning him to Detective Riggins, even if he had withheld the details of the case from the rude and only mildly inquisitive detective.
    Shuddering briefly, as if the room had suddenly grown cold, Ricky thought: That was a portrait of suicide. Zimmerman wasn’t.
    But the idea that Zimmerman was pushed in front of a subway train to send Ricky a message was far more horrifying. It struck at his heart. It was the sort of idea that was like a spark landing in a pool of gasoline.
    It was, equally, an impossible idea. He envisioned himself walking back into Detective Riggins’s overbright and modestly filthy office and claiming that some strangers had deliberately murdered a person they didn’t know and didn’t care about in the slightest in order to force Ricky into playing some sort of death game.
    He thought: It’s true, but not believable, especially to some underpaid and overworked Transit Authority detective.
    And, in the same moment, he realized that they knew that.
    The man who called