"You went very far tonight—with Lathrup and what you call slightly rough love-making. You went a hell of a long way."
"All right, I won't deny it. So it's hopeless, isn't it? We both agree about that."
"Yes," she said, speaking very slowly and carefully, emphasizing each word, but her heart felt dead within her. "We both agree."
Even though Ruth Porges dressed severely enough in the office she had always—unlike Lathrup—had a liking for mink. An entire coat she could not have afforded, but her mink stole was a very capacious and expensive one. She removed it from the back of the chair where she had tossed it on entering Roger's apartment and draped it carefully over her shoulders. It concealed almost all of the torn parts of her dress. A mink stole in July was an affectation but tonight she was grateful that she had succumbed to the impulse to appear at the nightclub with a fur piece draped over her arm.
She stopped by the door for an instant, bending to put on her slipper. She wondered if, on arriving home, she would find the tip caked with dried blood. She hoped she wouldn't. It might have made her break down and sob half the night. She'd have to remember to take a Miltown on retiring. There was another tranquilizer she was thinking of switching to. It was a little stronger, but quite harmless, really. As harmless as the memory of Roger would be a year from now. Every woman was entitled to at least one mistake in her choice of a man, and, having started late, she was well ahead in that respect.
She walked out into the entrance hall without a backward glance, opened the front door and shut it very firmly behind her. She was glad that Roger had not offered to see her to the elevator or to accompany her to the street and put her into a taxi. She had a great many things to be grateful for.
And she wished—she wished that she were dead.
It was six days after Helen Lathrup had been found slain in her office by Lynn Prentiss that Ruth Porges found the murder weapon. She stumbled upon it by pure accident, in a place where the police hadn't looked and would scarcely have thought of looking.
That she found it at all was due to one of those almost unbelievable blind flukes which fiction writers prefer to shun, but which persist in occurring, with surprising frequency, in real life.