Fenton shrugged. "Who can say, exactly? Probably the same kind of cruel pleasure most women who fall into that category get from keeping a man dangling. Only, as I say, she seems to have been exceptionally generous-minded about it, at least at first. Women like that really fall into three categories. The first is scared stiff when a man so much as touches them, but they enjoy leading men on. The second had some kind of trauma in childhood which prevents them from warming up to men, but they'd genuinely like to be generous and don't intend to be deliberately cruel. The third kind is like Lathrup. What they are, basically, is men-destroying women. They can be both generous and cruel, and aren't actually repelled by men physically. They'll go all the way, but the hooked frog had better watch out."
"You know what, Joe? You really should have been a psychiatrist."
"Suppose we drop all that for the moment. You asked me what I'd found out. You want to hear it, or don't you?"
"Why not? We're supposed to be working together on a homicide case."
"All right, here it is. I put a trailer on the young writer. Not a shadow, no Squad close-check. Just did a little more digging, keeping him in view. He was just one of twenty suspects. Thought nothing important would turn up. His name's Ralph Gilmore, by the way. I gave you a brief run-down on him. Have you forgotten?"
"Naturally not," Gallison said. "But when you just called him a young writer—"
"All right, you remember. Good. I won't ask you how much you remember, because I went into most of this before and you failed to remember straight off. But anyhow, the digging paid off. All Gilmore did, about ten days ago, was go into a pawnshop on Park Row and buy himself a gun. The kind of under-the-counter deal that infuriates me, and this is one pawnbroker who'll wish he'd thought twice—or three times. He'll have the book thrown at him."
Gallison narrowed his eyes. "What kind of gun was it, Joe."
"What kind do you suppose? It couldn't have been any other kind, could it? She was shot with a forty-five, and if he'd bought a pearl-handled woman's gun did you think for a moment I'd have looked as stunned as I did just now?"
"You might have. It would have shown he had murder on his mind. At the last moment, he might have decided that a big automatic was what he really needed."