She not only found the weapon—a black metal, long-barreled forty-eight calibre pistol equipped with a silencer—but she knew immediately who the owner of the gun was, precisely when and how it had come into his possession, and hence, by inference, who the murderer had to be. Unless, of course, someone who was not the murderer had loaned the gun to someone else. And that seemed unlikely, since a man or woman owning such a gun would know exactly how it had been used and would have gone immediately to the police and cleared himself of all suspicion by naming the borrower and explaining the circumstances under which he had allowed himself to be made an unwitting dupe to the one crime in which a taste for silence could lead straight to the electric chair.
Ruth Porges found the gun in a sixty-foot-deep excavation. In New York City, there are many scenic beauties and intricate works of engineering construction which can be said to be typical of the city as a whole. Every city has them, of course, but some cities are famous for their numerous bridges and reservoirs, or high stately office buildings, or parks and playgrounds, or triple-laned speedways, or museums and schools. New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago and San Francisco all shine in that respect, along with perhaps fifty other cities from coast to coast.
New York is a city of bridges, of course, the most beautiful bridges in the world, if you're willing to waive the Golden Gate. It is also a city of equally beautiful parks and its cluster of tall buildings is second to none. But New York, in recent years, and perhaps more than any other city in the throes of a refurbishing and a reconstruction, of a tearing down and a putting up, is a city of excavations.
Everywhere there are excavations, three or four blocks apart, deep and yawning and carefully encircled by board fences to keep absent-minded people from falling into them in the dark or even in broad daylight. Some are one hundred percent walled in and others are open a little on one side and are hence a menace to the unwary and should painstakingly be avoided if one does not wish to die.
If one does not wish to die! But if the psychologists and the psychiatrists are to be believed, there are a great many people in every large city who wish to die. People on the run, thieves and murderers, wanted by the law, hiding out from day to day in dismal furnished rooms and never knowing when the blow will fall, a knock on the door, a voice demanding: "Open up, Buster—or we'll start shooting through the door!"
Death, blood, a corpse on a mortuary slab. Violence and the aftermath of violence—a grieving widow, fatherless kids, for a cop could die too, and the law and its defiers were tragically intertwined.
The only real difference was, a cop or any reasonably normal person didn't want to die. They wanted to go on living as long as they could. It was the guilt-ridden, the guilt-tormented, who wanted to die. They didn't know it, but they did. To beat their brains out against a stone wall was one kind of temptation to them—a gun, a knife, a noose another. To hang themselves was perhaps best of all, to their distorted way of thinking. But everything that invited death through a lack of foresight, a careless misstep, a needless risk was attractive to them—including a yawning excavation between two towering office buildings on a city street, only four-fifths boarded up.
But when Ruth Porges passed the excavation on her way to work, at nine in the morning, she wasn't thinking of the guilt-ridden alone and how appealing a leap downward through a gap in the boarding might have seemed to some of them. The idea crossed her mind, curiously enough, but only for an instant and then her thoughts went off on another track.
How easy it was to put a quick end to your life if you really wanted to. You didn't even have to go to the top of a tall building and jump. You just had to be a little careless in crossing the street between the early morning traffic—any day in the week.
True, you might be horribly injured and suffer pain and it certainly wasn't the best way. But it was a way, and a very simple one. Not that it would have appealed to her even if her morbid, half-despairing mood of several months ago had failed to depart, leaving only the ugly scar that she was determined to keep from opening again. Lathrup's tragic death had shaken and sobered her, making her realize how uncertain any kind of happiness was and that wanting to die was a very bad thing, because you never knew when it would be your turn to find happiness for a month or a year.