“Why couldn’t this murder be one of that type?” she asked.
“It could,” he admitted readily enough. “In that event, I’d say that Rita Swaine pulled the trigger. But, whether she was justified, is another question.”
“Would you represent her if she’s guilty?”
“It depends on what you mean by being guilty. I don’t necessarily define murder the same way the district attorney defines it. If there were circumstances of moral provocation, they might be just as compelling as circumstances of physical provocation. In other words, the law says that if a man is in a position to do you great bodily harm, or to kill you, and he comes at you, apparently for the purpose of putting a murderous intent into execution, you have the right to kill him. In other words, that’s a physical provocation. It’s all the law, in its blundering generality, can take into comprehension. But, how about the person who brings a crushing mental or moral pressure upon a more or less helpless victim? I admit circumstances like that aren’t common. But, with certain temperaments, they might be possible.”
“Chief,” she said, “will you please unfocus your mind long enough to get your clothes packed?”
“Not now,” he told her, frowning, and starting once more to pace the floor. “I’m going back to first principles and building up from there. Now then, let’s look at the victim — Walter Prescott — an unsocial individual — selfish, cruel, cold, ruthless— In short, just the type of person who could commit a murder.”
“But he didn’t commit a murder, Chief. He was murdered.”
Mason said, “That’s the puzzling part of it, Della. He should have been the murderer instead of the corpse.”
“This,” Della Street pointed out, “isn’t getting us any nearer China.”
“I think it is,” Mason said thoughtfully. “It sounds foolish, and yet I think it’s getting me some place. It’s paradoxical. The man who was murdered isn’t the man who was murdered, but the man who committed the murder. Now, if we can follow that contradictory premise through to a logical conclusion, Della, we’re certainly going to be one jump ahead of the police, because that’s a starting point of deductive reasoning which would never suggest itself to them.”