Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 5, No. 3, August 1959

The young doctor was arrogant at times and difficult to get along with. And everyone on the hospital staff knew that he was unhappily married. But that hardly explained why a butcher knife should have been found protruding from his back... in an institution which sternly stood guard over all sharp instruments.

I

The police captain’s voice was grim. “Fine place for a murder — a mental hospital,” he said. He stood up, wiped his hands and looked at the doctor inquiringly.

Dr. Craig inclined his head, not trusting himself to speak. Dr. Cox’s body lay on the floor of the dimly-lit corridor connecting the two sections of the big hospital. A butcher knife, brand new to judge by its shining handle, protruded several inches from the dead man’s back. The body was sprawled out at full length, the fists clenched, the white coat rusty with blood.

“How many suspects do you suppose this gives us, counting all the homicidal impulses you have garrisoned here?”

“Oh, come on now, Captain,” Craig said testily, “This is bad enough without your putting such emphasis on the mental angle. The boy was a resident — one of my students. It’s a blow to me, and a bad thing for the hospital. But I don’t think it helps a bit to pretend that homicidal impulses are confined to mental hospitals. A lot of our patients are better able to control themselves than a good many uncertified citizens walking around outside.”

“We’ll see, Doctor, we’ll see.” Captain Stevenson grunted, and turned to walk upstairs to the offices. Then he turned and asked Craig, “Care to come along? If this kid was a student of yours you may be able to give us some helpful information.”

Craig looked past him to Harold Amundsen, the superintendent who was signaling wildly with his eyes. A mountain of work lay on Craig’s desk. It was past ten o’clock and he suddenly remembered that he should have called home long ago.

“I’ll be glad to answer any questions I can,” he said courteously, and the Captain’s leathery face relaxed a little. But he still wore a troubled frown and his manner remained slightly brusque.

“We’re not actually trying to pin anything on your hospital, or on your patients, Doctor,” he told the younger man as they ascended the stairs. “It’s natural enough for you, I suppose, to think otherwise. But it’s just a job to us. Only... we can’t afford to overlook any possibility. And when you get a bunch of disturbed people all in one place... well, it’s almost too easy to see how one of the more disturbed ones could pick up a butcher knife and commit murder. Outside, now, you look for motive. In here...” He stopped, letting the words trail off.

Craig held the door of Amundsen’s office open and followed him in. Then, keeping his voice level, he replied, “You’d need motive here, too — though you might have to look for it in ways the police aren’t used to. However — that knife isn’t from the hospital.”

“How do you know?”

“Too new,” Craig said. “We haven’t bought any new kitchen equipment in a long time. Did you notice how shiny the blade was?”

“Shiny’s right.” The Captain sat down in Amundsen’s chair, pulled out a drawer and rested his legs. “Too new for fingerprints. But how can you be sure some cook didn’t buy a new knife for your kitchens?”

“I check on the housekeeping expenditures; it’s part of my job.”

“And nobody on the kitchen payroll could’ve purchased a new knife without your permission?”

“No. He’d be in trouble if he did. Somebody could have brought one in; I’ll have to give you that. But it wasn’t part of the hospital’s equipment.”

“All right, all right. We’ll look over those records a little later, if you don’t mind. Now — how are we going to check all the — how many is it? — four hundred patients in the two buildings? Any way of knowing where they’d all be at—” he glanced at his notebook — “between six and about eight-thirty p.m.?”

“The chief residents in the two buildings, and the head nurse keep close tabs on all visitors. Quietly, you understand. But it would be difficult for a patient to slip into one of the wards unobserved.”

“Call ’em.”

Amundsen reached for the phone and asked for Dr. Bruff, Dr. Collins and Miss Mazarin. Stevenson went back to studying his notes, and Craig returned to his own thoughts.

He had last seen Al Cox that morning, at Halfway Mark, the small luncheonette which catered to doctors, nurses and patients alike. Cox had been drinking coffee with a group of his colleagues; and he had been very much alive — and quite disputatious about it — at the time.

A short, stocky young man, he had had a kind of rude vigor and an arrogant swagger which made other people react strongly to him, both pro and con. He was obviously angry at the time, and though Craig had his own problems on his mind he had overheard most of the exchange.

He had been in Halfway himself to drink strong black coffee and get back on his feet after the morning battle with his nine o’clock patient an analysand with a singularly irritating habit of misquoting Freud — or using him as a bludgeon.

For a moment, wistfully, Craig had considered again the possibility of giving up patients and concentrating wholly on teaching. Then, remembering the four girls at home, the fifth child on the way, and Marianne’s shining certainty that this one would be a boy, he had smiled in spite of himself. Patients provided the bread and cheese; and teaching, under present economic conditions, had to be for love — or its next door neighbor. No, he would have to steel himself to the continued dueling. If only, he thought, they would either read a lot less about psychoanalysis — or a great deal more. He added another spoonful of sugar, and was aware of voices rising behind him.

“We can’t come, I tell you,” Cox’s voice had an extra edge to it. “We won’t be making the social circuit for a while. Vicki’s going to have another baby.”

Van Diver’s light voice answered him. “Vicki is? All by herself, Al?” and laughed.

“You know damn well what I mean,” Cox was savage.

It made young Dr. Smith sound particularly tactless, then, when he looked up from his magazine and commented, “Another baby? How’d that happen?”

There was an embarrassed silence, broken by Cox. “We didn’t know it was loaded,” he snarled, and rose to leave the room.

Meredith and the others had also gotten up quickly and were exchanging embarrassed glances.

“Back to the wards for me, fellows,” one of the young doctors said.

“Anybody going over to Fernworth with me?”

They divided, half going to Fernworth and half remaining at Hartwood, the main building. As they were leaving, however, Kay Ballard the young social worker from the Children’s Wing, came in. Craig was not the only one who noticed that Cox, catching her eye, returned again to the table, and that she quickly joined him with her cup of coffee.

II

Miss Mazarin pinpointed Miss Ballard, too. But Craig was both amused and surprised to find that the head nurse entrusted her suspicions to his ears alone, by-passing the inquiring police officer entirely. Accustomed to her stony dislike of physicians in any stage of development, he was unprepared for her even more virulent dislike of men outside the profession. Her answers to Captain Stevenson’s questions were as starchily correct as her uniform.

It was not until Stevenson had dismissed all of them, Craig, Miss Mazarin, Amundsen and the two discomposed chief residents, that he found himself alone with the embattled chief nurse.

She followed him, rustling protestingly, to his small office at the far end of the corridor. Anxious to call home, Craig found himself placed instead in the position of confidant. He did not know whether to laugh or to remain sober. He was very tired and the situation was sticky and disagreeable. Moreover, his wife would be worried about him by now. Still, to find himself being consulted instead of patronized by Miss Mazarin, was an experience he was not wholly prepared to bypass. He regarded her steadily as she began.

“Doctor.” It had the sound of an order.

“Yes, Miss Mazarin? What is it? I really should phone my wife, but if you’ll make it brief—”

“There is something you should know. About Dr. Cox, I mean.”

“Perhaps, if you think it is important, you should have told Captain Stevenson.”

She shook her head firmly. “No. No policeman for me, thank you. They don’t care what kind of reputation the hospital gets.”

And you do, he thought, with just a touch of bitterness. You care one hell of a lot. That must be why we all fall short of your ideal.

She went on, ignoring his slightly reproachful frown. “None of the patients is mixed up in this thing, Doctor. This is a personal thing.” Her lips narrowed disapprovingly. “It’s a bad thing. But I’m not going to have one of my patients taking the blame for it. Not when I know — when everybody around here knows — precisely what was going on.”

“What was going on, Miss Mazarin?”

“Doctor Cox and Miss Ballard — were behaving outrageously,” she said, her color rising. “What’s more, they had a nasty little fight, right in Halfway Mark, only this morning. You don’t have to take my word for it; you can ask Vi. She can tell you all about it. So can anybody within fifty feet of the place at the time.”

Vi, he thought. Vi worked behind the counter at Halfway, but she waited on customers only in accordance with some strict order of precedence known to herself alone. One of the high-priced consulting doctors with expensive offices up front might possibly catch her eye, and have his order immediately taken, with a deferential smile. Staff doctors were occasionally accommodated — residents very rarely. Patients were left to the less efficient care of Vi’s two assistants. The rest of the time Vi spent collecting for possible future reference the gossip and scuttlebut of the huge edifice. Craig was certain that if anybody knew anything that was “going on”, it would be Vi. He nodded, without comment.

“I don’t want to say anything about a dead man,” went on Miss Mazarin, saying it just the same. “But this thing wasn’t even decent — the way they didn’t ever try to hide it, or anything. A divorce they were talking about, Doctor, and everybody heard them. And they heard him saying that it was out of the question and that she might as well forget it. The things she said to him a moment later weren’t exactly professional, or ladylike even, if you know what I mean.”

Miss Mazarin looked at Craig and then raised her eyes to the picture over his head. “I think she was blazing mad. And I think you ought to ask her where she was when he got that knife in his back.”

“Why didn’t you give this information to the police?”

She sniffed. “I don’t think it’s any of their business, that’s why. If we’re going to have trouble in the hospital, I say it’s the hospital’s affair to straighten it out. Those police — they think my patients are all loonies.” She used the word as though it were a large rough stone that she had to swallow.

“They think all these poor sick people are just waiting for an opportunity to kill people or cause trouble. Well, they’ve got a lot to learn, Doctor. There are more so-called sane people on the outside waiting to get into trouble than you’ll ever find in here.”

He met her eye; and for the first time in his seven years at the hospital an exchange of warmth and understanding took place between them.

“I couldn’t agree more with you as to that, Miss Mazarin,” he said. “I’ll talk to Miss Ballard myself, the first thing in the morning. I don’t think there’s anything to it,” he hastened to add. “Miss Ballard has a quick temper but I don’t think she’s capable of killing a man. But I can’t believe any of the patients here did it, either.”

She almost thawed, closing the door behind her.

Nevertheless he was troubled, all that night and the next morning. Kay Ballard was quick, tempermental, and very pretty. She also had a highly trained mind and a great deal of self-discipline — putting aside affairs of the heart. She might be capable of a great many interesting things, but hardly of murder. But who...?

His mind went back effortlessly to a day six months before — a day when he had returned from his coffee break at Halfway to find his office a shambles. His name plate had been ripped off the door, seemingly by someone in a fit of violent anger. Inside his papers lay scattered across the rug, a few ripped into shreds, the rest crumpled past recovery. A photograph of his children lay on the floor, the letters on the desk had been rifled and his keys were gone. Staring at the mess, unable to comprehend it, he had finally noticed a scrawled red-crayon message on the blotter.

“This will teach you,” the message read in shaking script. “I told you I wanted another Doctor. I hate him. And I hate you too.”

And he had remembered — Margot Gillingham. She had been an outpatient at the clinic, recommended by a private-patient social agency which had been unable to cope any further with her case. As chief of the residents’ training program he had assigned her to Dr. Cox; and their difficulties had been immense and discouraging from the beginning.

Cox had conferred with him, his face grim, after nearly every session. Craig had been intrigued, however, with the particular quality of her hostility, and he had desperately wanted to get on with the case.

But Miss Gillingham finally strode into Dr. Craig’s office, and demanded another doctor, her voice quivering hysterically.

“He hates me, do you hear? He hates me and he fights me every step. I’ll do something desperate if you don’t get me another doctor. You understand, don’t you? There has to be a change.”

Craig nodded, soothingly, and tried to draw her out. But she could only go on repeating that Dr. Cox hated her. After conferring with Cox, Craig decided that they should try to work the problem out together. Refusing to do anything drastic would be better for both the doctor and the patient. She had retaliated with the vicious attack on Craig’s own office — and had never come back.

I wonder, he thought. It was my office she wrecked. But could she have been angry enough at Cox to murder him — angry still, half a year later?

He picked up the phone and called Stevenson, giving him the girl’s address and the particulars of the case. That hard-pressed official, glad to find somebody in the hundreds of potential suspects who might possibly furnish a motive, promised to get on it right away.

Craig was hanging up when Kay Ballard walked into his office.

“I didn’t do it, Bill,” she said. She lit a cigarette with shaking fingers, but her voice was firm.

“I didn’t think you did,” he replied, returning her level gaze with reassuring candor. “But people heard you quarreling yesterday, and you know what a violent quarrel can suggest. People talk, Kay, in a place like this. You know that.” He sighed and gazed out the window.

Her face reddened slightly. “They’d talk just the same, whether we’d had our fight out loud or in private. At least we didn’t hide around corners and sneak our meetings.”

She sounded angry and infinately sad at the same time. “We were fighting about a divorce, if that’s what you wanted to know. About how there wasn’t going to be one. But it wasn’t an ultimatum. I’d have gone on seeing him, just the same. And he knew it. It was just one of those damn stinking things that sometimes happen. I fought with him at the top of my voice. I didn’t realize my quarrel was going to be held against me in a murder investigation.” She ground out her half-finished cigarette and burst suddenly into tears.

Craig went, to a cabinet, found a glass and a pill, and brought them back to her.

“Take this. It will make you feel better. Now then. You and Dr. Cox were talking very seriously about a divorce, was that it?”

She nodded.

“And he said it was impossible. He was telling some of the other residents this morning that he and Vicki were going to have another baby. Did you know that?”

She nodded, her lips tight.

“And last night somebody killed him.”

“They should have killed his wife,” she said flatly. “She had no understanding. She rode him unmercifully. Some of the women you doctors marry when you’re going through med school...” She was frankly contemptuous. “Then you get a little older and you see what a mess you’ve made of your lives, and it’s too late. Well, I can tell you this. I felt like committing coldblooded murder yesterday. But I would never have murdered Al. I’d have murdered Vicki. And I still would — if I were capable of killing anyone.”

She tried to smile, but the effort merely twisted her lips grotesquely. “I’ll tell the nice policeman all about it, Bill. Don’t worry. But you can take it from me. I didn’t kill him. I wouldn’t have killed him. I’d have done a lot of things with him, but not that.”

And she walked out.

III

It proved to be a long day, rough on Craig’s nerves. The newspapers had a field day. Murder in a mental hospital was exactly what they’d needed for a slack season between Cold War pronouncements and they took full advantage of it.

There were diagrams of the hospital; which, admittedly, was something that lent itself to a mystery-fiction type treatment. But it’s one of the oldest in the United States, Craig reminded himself. What do they expect — the Lever Building? The red-brick edifice rambled through five buildings and over eleven acres, all told, and it had been supplied by some nineteenth century architectural genius with underground corridors which might have come straight out of a Gothic novel. And the murder victim was a sympathetic figure in the eyes of the public. A poor boy, who’d worked his way through medical school against impossible odds. A pregnant wife, devastated by the blow. Their four children, at home with Grandmother when the blow fell.

It revolted and at the same time kept alive a nagging kind of persistence in Craig’s mind. Somewhere there’s some connection, he thought. There has to be. Something will fall into place alongside of something else and produce the answer. But I don’t think it will be a psychotic patient with a butcher knife. He felt very determined and stubborn about that.

At four p.m. Captain Stevenson phoned him. The police officer was, for a change, genial, if not downright amused.

“Dr. Craig, I’m thinking seriously of putting two of my men to work guarding your life,” he said.

Craig sighed. “You’ve talked to Margot Gillingham?” he asked,

“That’s right. And she says she didn’t do it but she wishes she had. And she’d very much like to kill you, too, if she can find a convenient time.”

“I’m sure of it. But where was she when it happened?”

It was Stevenson’s turn to sigh. “Over in New Jersey with a flock of relatives and friends — at a beer party. There’s a girl who shouldn’t be allowed near anything alcoholic. Just the same there are so many witnesses we’re having difficulty combing them out of our hair. No possible chance she could have got away. Anyway... you know something?”

“What?”

“I don’t think she’s the killing type at all. As you head-shrinkers would say — she just hasn’t got the right psychological equipment to carry it off.”

“Right you are, Captain. A good diagnosis. She might have tortured him to death by screaming at him but she never would have killed him deliberately. You’d make a pretty good psychologist.”

Stevenson grunted. “When you have a vacancy down there, let me know. I practice a little of the stuff every day. Anyway, that’s about done. You have any other ideas?”

Craig hesitated. Half formed, in his mind, there smouldered an idea. Nevertheless it was more curiosity than suspicion.

“Not right now,” he said. “But I’ll keep trying. When I get a bright idea I’ll let you know.”

There were other pressing problems to take care of, and they were not long in developing kinks. Marianne called about one minute to six, just as Craig was thinking thankfully of home, dinner, and a drink.

“Bill?” Her voice had the high, light quality he associated with suppressed excitement. “Don’t come home. I’ll meet you down at the University Hospital.”

“You mean right now?” He couldn’t quite believe it, although it had happened three times before. “Are you all right, Marianne?”

“I’m fine,” she assured him. “Marvelous. I have a cab. Mrs. Beasley’s here and will stay until you get home. The girls are getting supper and we’re all ready for the big event. So just keep calm. I’ll see you in half an hour.”

She blew him a kiss and hung up before he could answer.

Before he could get out of the office, though, Amundsen was in. Badly shaken by the lack of developments and enraged with the newspapers because of their holiday treatment of the crime, Amundsen queried him about the probability of Cox’s assailant being among the patients. And, if so, what possible measures could be taken to uncover the culprit, aside from waiting for a confession.

“It shouldn’t be hard to get a confession,” Craig assured him. “Any disturbed neurotic or psychotic will look for punishment soon after committing an act of violence. Confession lightens the burden by relieving guilt feelings. The real danger, as I see it, will be in having a great many patients who did not actually do the murder seek to take the blame. It’s natural enough — almost inevitable.”

“But Cox himself. I hear stories now. Stories I didn’t hear before. What kind of man was he actually?”

Craig paused before answering, fingering the brass letter opener on his desk. What kind of man had Al Cox been?

“There are a lot of different answers to that, sir,” he told the superintendent. “I saw him often in the course of my daily rounds. He was sharp, intelligent, eager to succeed. He had — let’s call them difficulties. He was a poor boy, to begin with. And he married young, and had a family, at a time when marriage was a burden on his career. With nurses, and sometimes with fellow residents, he could be sharp, or even disagreeable. With the help, he was almost arrogant. Miss Mazarin will back me up, I think. But with the patients he was unfailingly a good doctor.”

“But Stevenson, that damned policeman, tells me there was one patient who hated him, and who caused you some trouble, too, if I’m not mistaken.”

“But the resentment was in her mind, sir, and had nothing to do with Cox really. It was a transference. It had nothing at all to do with his behavior toward her. We have a great deal of that to deal with. But, it just doesn’t always come out in such violent forms. We tried — I tried — to work it out to a point where the girl could see that the hostility she experienced came from within herself. But she was determined to have another doctor, and she became enraged with me, finally, because she became convinced I was the one who was frustrating her. She would naturally think that in her kind of illness.”

Amundsen nodded. “I’m afraid these things are a lot more complicated than the police will believe; or want to believe. The thing I fear, Dr. Craig, is that in their anxiety to wind this case up, they’ll hang it on somebody who is completely innocent. And then it will be weeks and months of trouble for all of us. Not to mention the hospital’s reputation, which, in my poor way, I’m concerned to guard.”

“I understand only too well,” Craig said. “What troubles me especially is this: if one of the patients didn’t do it — and I’m virtually certain none of them did — where do we look? It happened right here in the hospital, worse luck for us. And he couldn’t have stabbed himself in the back. Was it one of the medical staff? Or a disgruntled nurse? Or an angry cleaning man?”

Amundsen shook his gray head disconsolately, moving at last into the hall. “It’s a bad business. I wish I could go home and go to sleep and forget it. You’d better call it a day yourself, Dr. Craig. You could do with some rest.”

Craig smiled thinly. “Not tonight, I’m afraid. I’m on my way to the University Hospital. My wife is meeting me there.”

“My dear dear boy.” The superintendent was abashed. “And I’ve been holding you up with all this. Go ahead now. Don’t keep her waiting.” He almost shoved Craig out of the swinging back doors.

“And my best to Mrs. Craig. And to you!” he called warmly. He strode across the parking lot to his car, which was parked near the end of the circle.

IV

Marianne was nowhere in sight when Craig arrived at the University Hospital. Having found a white coat for himself, he looked up Pete Jeffries and engaged in an exchange of conversation with the elderly O.B., while both of them drank a quick coffee in the nurses’ kitchen. In the course of their talk, Craig remembered that it was quite likely that Mrs. Cox had been under Pete’s care and queried the obstetrician.

“That’s right,” Pete nodded, pouring a second steaming cup for himself. “Brought her in here last night, near collapse. She’s just down the hall there. Under sedation.”

“Poor girl,” Craig sighed. “Sedation can’t be used forever. She’s going to have a bad time of it, I’m afraid.”

“She always does,” Jeffries said, unexpectedly, and then looked sidewise at Craig. “Excuse me, me, Bill. I don’t mean to appear unsympathetic. But... well, let’s say she isn’t like Marianne; or like ninety percent of my patients for that matter. She fights pregnancy every step of the way. She hates it, and that makes it harder for her, Of course. Even during the first few months.”

Dr. Jeffries sighed, wiped his hands on a towel and turned back to the corridor. “This will be a bad one, of course. But... when anybody feels as sorry for herself as Vicki Cox, I tell you it’s damned hard to give her any extra sympathy. You feel as if she’s already had her share, and then some. All self-imposed.”

“Does she have an especially hard time delivering?” Craig asked, following closely on Jeffries’ heels and looking out the window for the cab.

Jeffries shook his head. “Not her. Perfectly simple. It’s just that some of them love to feel as if it’s a special burden, a kind of personal affront, and they make a real big deal out of it. I’ve seen... but here,” his voice quickened with pleasure. “This, I think, is your Little Woman — and looking wonderful.”

The two doctors met Marianne as she arrived. She was wearing, Craig noticed with tender amusement, an enormous garden hat and the most beautiful blue maternity smock she had been able to get her hands on. She looked radiant, and she greeted them as though she were hostess at a particularly fashionable party.

“Were you going some place, darling?” Craig took her hands and then leaned over to plant a kiss on her smile.

“Some place special.” She squeezed his arm. “I won’t be long, either. Pete, if you’re ready I wouldn’t keep you waiting for the world.” She winked, and turned to follow the nurse. Then she walked back a quick step or two and ran her fingers along the lines in Craig’s face.

“Take it easy, dear, won’t you? I feel wonderful; and you know how it is with me. A picnic. Ask Pete.”

And this time she nearly ran after the nurse.

It wasn’t a picnic. Craig had called the girls three times, each time with increasing anxiety, before he was able to say, “It’s a boy” — not quite believing it himself. There were ecstatic rumbles at the other end, and finally it was sober, sweet-natured Rosemary who said, “Is Mommy all right? Kiss her for us. I’ll get the others to bed. Good night, Daddy,” and hung up.

He leaned his head on his hand for a moment, then ran it through his hair, which was damp with sweat, and straightened his tie and went back to the room, where they were making Marianne comfortable. It was past three. Her face was drawn, and pale, but she managed a twinkle when her husband’s head appeared in the door.

“Bill?” her voice was close to a whisper. He took her hand, smoothing the fingers, and the nurses rustled out, after opening a window and smoothing the sheet one last time.

“Darling,” he answered.

“Bill... you don’t mind?”

“Mind?” He was aghast.

“Mind the boy, I mean? After all, you’ve been head man in that little harem of ours for a long time. Now we’re going to have another male around the house. And a beauty he is, too,” she couldn’t resist adding.

Craig had seen the baby, and felt that perhaps this last description was a bit extravagant.

“You’re a silly woman.” He laid her hand along his cheek. “Of course I mind. Male jealousy, and all that. I’ll probably hate him when I see all of you silly females gushing over him, the little monster. But I’ll do my best to pretend I’m pleased, for your sake.”

She laughed weakly but still like Marianne, and kissed the hair on the back of his hands.

“Bill... Bill... You’re such a darling. Such a total darling. Just imagine the glorious luck; I’m going to have two of you!” She sighed in utter bliss; and was asleep before he had drawn up the sheet and closed the door behind him.

Next morning reaction had set in, and he sat on the side of the bed, considering for a long while the possibility of canceling his appointments for the day and staying home. He felt tired, and old, and now that Marianne was safe, painfully conscious of the struggles of the months ahead. A small baby, again; with all of the nocturnal disorder and daily high crisis such an event implies. I’m past forty, he thought, and some of the old bounce is gone.

Downstairs the girls were fighting in high voices over breakfast chores, and before he had his socks on at least one spell of tears announced that school time must be near. He groaned; he needed a day off, all right. But maybe he’d better save it until Marianne and the young squirt came home from the Hospital. There was, also, Miss Nine O’clock to be considered. She was as jealous of her time as she was of her relationships. And it might be better, on the whole, not to give her any excuse for triggering off. For intricate reasons, she was going to be unhappy enough about the new addition.

He restored peace over the oatmeal and outlined a series of chores for the girls to undertake in their Mother’s absence with only minor rebellion in the ranks. They were, he reflected as he saw the last and smallest off to school, fine girls. Like their Mother in warmth and quickness and charm; and perhaps, just a little like him in clinging to an old situation until the last possible second. They made the school bus by a hair’s breadth apiece.

The circles under his eyes came in for a good deal of comment, and he was still receiving congratulations — and feeling some pleasure that at least there was another topic of conversation for the staff besides Cox’s death — when nine o’clock arrived. His patient was tense, this morning, in response to God only knew what inward pressures, and he felt a little sorry, considering his own weariness, that he had not canceled. Still, here she was, and they had better make the most of it.

He had not been wrong. It was a rough session; one of the roughest he had ever taken part in with her. Partly, he supposed, because of his own weariness; partly because of something she caught from him and then transferred back again. But she spent nearly all of the fifty minutes berating him, in a high, unnatural childlike voice, not running over with violence but under a strange and defeating control. In a diminishing order of precedence she took apart his personal idiosyncrasies, his supposed crimes against her person, and the furnishings of his small room.

She disliked what she regarded as the disorder; she disapproved of the pictures for their preponderance of sea themes and she complained about the reading matter. A lot of it, of course, was repetition and embroidery from before. But he was noting the peculiar intensity of the attack, (she had complained, too, that his automatic pen was noisy and distracting) when there was a laden pause.

He paused, also, his pen waiting above the notebook and his mind alert to something coming. Then, her voice not changing but growing wary all the same, said with considerable scorn, “Psychiatrists. The whole breed of you.” When he failed to answer the baited contempt there was another pause and then she rushed on, “If I were your wife I’d kill you.” And when he failed to answer that, repeated, “Did you hear me? I said if I were married to you, I’d murder you.”

His pen, which had stopped, moved on, and he thought, of course. The wish — and went on writing. But another part of his mind, suddenly awake, walked off and stood thinking, thinking.

She left, finally and tearfully, after his firm, “Tomorrow morning, then,” and Craig walked back to his desk. He was sweating and vaguely excited. He thought for a moment, and then called Miss Cadbury.

“Martha? Dr. Craig. Be a good girl and cancel my other hours for today, won’t you? Yes, yes. Thank you very much. Yes, we’re delighted to have a boy. Yes, she’s fine. Thank you.”

He sighed, and put his head in his hands for a moment. Then he went to the washroom, doused his face in cold water and straightened his tie.

V

On the maternity floor at University, Dr. Craig paused. By turning right, he could see Marianne, see the baby, have a restful interval before the thing he knew he must do. Paused only for a moment, however; and then turned left.

Vicki Cox was lying in bed, in a room which had been heavily darkened against the expressed orders of the charge nurse. Her eyes were swollen indecently, her face puffed and her whole manner a strange combination of bitter grief and angry resentment. When she recognized Craig she began to weep again, noisily.

He sat beside the bed, waiting for her to stop. Then, “I’m sorry, Vicki. How are you feeling?”

“Terrible. Terrible,” she sobbed. “How could this awful thing happen to me? What’s the matter down there, that they can’t control the patients? Don’t you have any supervision? This is an awful thing.”

“Yes, it is,” he said in tight control. “Where are the children, Vicki?”

She looked at him, arrested for a moment from her orgy of weeping. “With my mother. We sent them up a week ago; when I found out I was going to... going to...” she couldn’t go on, and buried her face in a corner of the sheet.

“Yes, yes, I know.” He looked down at the tips of his shoes, considering, and then without looking up he said quietly in the best therapeutic voice he had, “Why did you do it, Vicki?” and when she did not answer, still without looking at her, “Because he asked for a divorce?”

For a terrible minute she laughed. He couldn’t help looking up then, startled at the outburst. She lay with her head back on the pillow, as out of control as before, but in a different way. Then she stopped abruptly, and gave him a hostile, scornful stare.

“Divorce? Al Cox would never have divorced me. He knew that, even when he asked me for it. The only person who didn’t know it was Kay Ballard, the little fool. No matter what any other woman had, or could give him, he owed me too much to go through with any divorce. He hated me, Dr. Craig. But he never would have been able to forget those rotten poverty-stricken years I spent with him, in filthy little apartments, pregnant all the time. Keeping the kids quiet so he could study; taking the kids out to a park so he could cram for exams. Eating wheat germ and two-day-old bread so he could pay his fees. If I had given him a divorce he wouldn’t have taken it. He couldn’t. Too much guilt on his conscience.”

She stopped, and Craig forbore to reply. Then, she went on, in a low, singsong voice that was more frightening than either her weeping or her laughter, “No, it wasn’t the divorce. We’d stop talking about that three days before. It was about — me. He hated the way I took my pregnancy. He hated the way I cried all the time. He hated the way the apartment looked. He hated the fact that I never entertained, like the other doctors’ wives. He hated the fact the kids always had buttons off and wore unmatched socks. He hated the way I cooked, and finally, that morning, he stood up to cut himself a slice of bread, and yelled because the knife wouldn’t cut. He said we never had anything that worked in the house, not even a decent knife. And he stomped out.”

She stopped, looked at Craig under dark lashes, and as he settled into silence went on: “I felt pretty bad. This was what you might call a normal enough morning, for us. It’s been that way, I don’t know, seven or eight years now. But when he left I didn’t have anything to do. I piled up the breakfast dishes. I missed the kids. Funny. If they’d been there I’d have taken it out on them, but they weren’t and I missed them.

“I went out. Oh, sometime, I don’t know — maybe ten or eleven o’clock. I felt mad about the things he’d said. But I wanted to prove he was wrong, some way. I wandered down to Sears. Bought some curtains. Bought a cushion for the couch. I don’t know, random things, sort of. And bought a butcher knife. A new, shiny knife with a sharp edge.”

This time Craig ventured, softly, “And?”

“And I came down here to see him; to talk to him. No; no. First I went to a movie some place. And stopped and got some coffee. I felt light-headed. And then, I knew he had duty that night. But I thought I’d try to catch him after he finished supper. I came down and walked in, the back way. Nobody saw me. I had my bag in my arm. Al’s office was open, and I went in. I knew he’d come back there before he went on duty, to smoke or to make a call. And when he came in there I was.

“I came down to make peace with him. That’s funny, isn’t it? But we got to quarreling again. Finally he said he had to get to work, and walked out. I followed him down to the underground corridor. He was on his way to the other building. I didn’t mean to follow him. I knew how mad it would make him. But I’d started to cry again. And finally he turned around and sneered, ‘Go away, go away, will you? Why don’t you try talking to me some time when you aren’t crying?’ ”

She gave a long, long sigh, and sank back into the pillow. “I felt like firecrackers going off in my head. He turned his back. And it was easy. Easier than you’d think. He didn’t expect it, and he fell with no more than you’d call a little grunt. I looked at him for a minute, looked at all that blood starting. And then I turned around, and walked upstairs and through the front lobby and out the door. I’m surprised nobody mentioned seeing me. I must have seen half a dozen people. And I came home, and made some coffee. I’d begun to cry, again — a long time before the phone rang.”

Her voice died, and she closed her eyes, her mouth drawn down in the clear-etched lines of self pity. Craig waited, watching her for a minute, and when she did not go on reached for the telephone, his hand shaking a little.