The comments of Lieutenant of Detective Joseph Fenton on that particular aspect of the case would not have been printable.
But there was nothing unprintable about the conversation of the four men who sat now in the Eaton-Lathrup offices discussing the case. In Macklin's office, to be precise, because Macklin was the calmest, most unbiased and level-headed of the four and seemed to know just how comforting a cushion a little sensible talk could provide for pent-up or over-charged emotions.
"I still think we'll have to look for a pathological killer and will get nowhere if we write off that probability," Eaton was saying. He sat in a chair by the window, the sunlight bright on his wide bald patch, the lenses of his frameless glasses and the dial of his costly wrist-watch. He was of medium-height, medium-build and had a gray executive look—a top-echelon executive look—although he was sincerely trying to relax and fraternize.
"I think so too," Ellers said. "I've thought so from the first. I was pretty sure, when they arrested Gilmore and Lieutenant Fenton told me they'd traced the purchase of a gun to him, that they had the right man. That's doubtful now, but I agree with you about the psycho likelihood."
"It's very curious," Eaton said. "This whole pathological killer possibility ... stranger and more chilling that you might suspect. You'd understand better why I'm saying that if you'd known Helen as well as I did. There are people insurance companies shy away from or label very high risks. They're known as the 'accident prone.' It may be based on nothing but superstition, but you'd have a hard time convincing an experienced insurance-policy salesman of that.
"Some people seem to have a rare gift for making accidents happen, of drawing down the lightning upon themselves. They become seriously injured time and time again. And Helen ... well, you might almost say she invited a psychopath to kill her ... just because she dwelt on the horror of that kind of occurrence so often in her mind. The more gruesome aspects of crime fascinated her, and she liked to read about 'ripper cases' and brutal slayings in general. A lot of us do—normal, well-adjusted people in search of exciting reading in the mystery story field. But I always felt, with her, it went considerably beyond that. It was a horror which she acutely feared, a horror of the mind—"
By some kind of near-miracle the veteran ex-newspaperman wasn't even slightly tight and his voice was steady. He was standing a few feet from Eaton, leaning lightly against Macklin's desk and puffing on a light-weight briar.
"I was completely sure," Timothy Hansen said. "Every time Gilmore came to the office to talk with Miss Lathrup I felt uneasily, just looking at him. Those burning dark eyes, and that craggy, strange face of his. Brother! He sure fitted the picture most people probably had of writers—back in the Victorian Age. You'd think he'd stepped right out of the pages of Wuthering Heights."
Hansen was not quite an associate but a little more than an assistant editor. He was still quite young—twenty-seven—and had been on the staff for three years, working directly under Allen Gerstle's guidance. Macklin had always translated that as "thumb" in the preparation of the missing editor's cafe society exposure columns. Gerstle had a fiery temper and could lose it easily, but Hansen seemed to have a genuine affection for him and was taking his vanishment very much to heart.
Macklin sat behind his desk, idly running his forefinger over the space-bar of his typewriter, back and forth lightly, as if he were inwardly telling himself that if he should decide to write an account of the progress which the police had made so far, he would only need to depress the bar continuously.