“She shouldn’t have laughed the way she did that last time,” Auslander wailed.
Troy looked wearily at the strained faces of the three men around him, caught sight of his own battered face in the mirror.
“You know what I think?” he asked. “Clara is still laughing — at all four of us! And in a way, I can hardly blame her.”
Death of a Psychiatrist
by Ruth E. Malone
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.