She wouldn't have done it, of course. But did she really want to send one of Lathrup's other victims to the electric chair, simply because he was a little more primitive than she could ever be and had become, for a moment, a kind of madman, driven to desperation by a wrong which, for all she knew to the contrary, might have been much greater than the one which Lathrup had inflicted on her?
She suddenly remembered that there was a term for that in law which two or three states recognized as a justifiable legal defense in a first-degree murder case. An irresistible impulse. A man might know the difference between right and wrong and hence be legally sane and yet be compulsively driven to kill.
It was horrible, yes. She'd always go in fear of such a man and you couldn't think of him as entirely normal and he wouldn't deserve to get off scot-free. You could be modern and enlightened and humane and fight for a more civilized legal code, but there had to be a streak of hard cruelty in all killers which set them apart from men and women who merely killed in their thoughts. Or if you wanted to think of it in another way, their ability to go all the way—irresistible impulse or not—was a very terrible thing; it did make them wild beasts in a sense, more tigerlike that the overwhelming majority of mankind.
Her hands shook so she had difficulty opening her hand-bag again and putting the gun into it. But she was breathing a little more easily now, and there was a less frightened look in her eyes. The killer wouldn't know she'd found the gun, and she certainly had no intention of confronting him with it. She'd hide it somewhere or get rid of it—perhaps go right over to the East River at noon and very cautiously throw it in. Unless—she did decide to ... to go to the police. Had she any right to take so much for granted—that he wasn't a human monster who might not kill again?
If she got rid of the gun she'd be committing a very serious crime. She could be sent to prison for a long term of years. An accessory to murder after the event was what concealing that kind of evidence would make her.
She wasn't a criminal. She knew deep in her heart that she wasn't. But the law took a very dim view of that kind of personal interpretation of what was or wasn't a criminal act.
She'd have to decide. She'd have all morning to decide, to think about it. She'd put the hand-bag in her desk and pretend that nothing had happened to upset her, that it was a perfectly normal morning as far as she was concerned, if a morning six days after a murder could be thought of as normal. Eaton would come into her office, smiling a little, still worrying about the problem of replacing Lathrup, and putting twice the usual amount of responsibility on her shoulders, and on the shoulders of Lynn Prentiss and Macklin and Ellers—who would probably be too tight to give a damn. With Lathrup gone he probably wouldn't be fired, although he deserved to be, with his inability to remain sober two days in a row. The whole staff had been under quite a strain.
It helped her to swear inwardly, to be as cynical and hard-boiled as she could in a moment of torment and uncertainty such as this. Her father's face in the locket flashed once more across her mind and she thought: "Poor dad! Poor gentle, kind, moralistic, unworldly dad, who never quite knew what it was all about and whom I loved so very much. Do you know what your darling daughter has become? She has not only slept with a man out of wedlock, she's about to become an accessory to murder after the event. Or she may decide not to. It would make her much more of a hypocrite and less honorable and decent, actually, because she wanted to kill Lathrup herself. But maybe you'd prefer her to stay on the right side of the law."
Climbing up out of the excavation took her less than three minutes but she was conscious every moment of the bulge which the big pistol made in her hand-bag—it was a miracle she'd been able to fit it in—and she hoped no one would notice how lopsided and distended the bag looked when she arrived at street level.
It was only when she reached the pavement above the pit again that she realized that the worst possible calamity had taken place. Not one member of the office staff but three saw her climb out of the excavation, for it was now five minutes to nine and a rush to reach the office on time was in progress.