“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.”