Wilford's face froze slightly. "Obviously, Dr. Wolf, if security were involved, it is a matter I cannot discuss with you, especially over the phone. You may write me a full, confidential report, and we will consider what is to be done."
Wolf cut the connection in exasperation and pushed his chair away from the desk.
"Well, there's a bureaucratic mind for you!" he exclaimed. "He wants a problem solved and then refuses to give you the information necessary to solve the problem."
Slowly he filled his thinking pipe and lit it. "The hell with them," he said, finally. "We'll see this thing through ourselves. We'll have another session with Britten tomorrow and get to the bottom of his story."
"I hope," Alma Heller added, "that there is a bottom to be found."
As the attendants strapped Jim Britten on the table, the next morning, Dr. Wolf thought how often the formula for murder repeated itself in this psychiatric age. Knock off the victim, prepare a real sick motive, and be sure you'll go to a hospital for treatment, to be released after a "cure." Under these circumstances the psychiatrist must become a detective—required to dig deep for the real motive, which generally resolved itself into the classical ones to love-hate-money.
From his point of view as a doctor, any murder was a sick act, but the authorities were interested only in the legal question of whether the murderer knew what he was doing, and why.
In this case, the question of the motive had a fascination to Wolf even from a purely academic point of view.
"Let's face it," he told Britten. "We both know you killed Glover. You've heard the play-back of yesterday's session, so you can no longer fall back on the old excuse of 'everything went black and when I came to he was dead.' Nobody gets away with that any more."