"It's your gun, Macklin. A war souvenir gun with a long black barrel, the kind of gun some men, with your kind of war record, like to show to friends. Possibly you showed it to her once, but that's also something we'll never know unless you tell us. But she must have known it was your gun or she would not have attempted to hide it. If she'd found a stranger's gun--the gun of someone she had no reason to respect or like or want to protect, she'd have gone straight to the police with it. She must have felt you were justified in killing Helen Lathrup. "If you did show the gun to her once--that wouldn't have prevented you from using it. You had no way of knowing she'd find it and that it would be traced to you. War souvenir guns are often very hard to trace to their owners, but we had very little trouble tracing this one.... You're tagged with it, Macklin. You're also tagged with a fingerprint you left in Ruth Porges' apartment. I imagine you wore gloves and were very careful, but not careful enough. Remember taking one glove off for a moment? Well ... it's not too important, so long as we have that one very fine print." Fenton sighed and his voice hardened a little. "Would you like to tell us why you killed her, Macklin? I must warn you, though, that anything you say now--" Macklin seemed not to hear him. He spoke softly, almost gently, as if the violence which had taken two human lives had been long since spent. "There are two kinds of men in this world--leaving abnormality out of it. One kind, I think, is very rare. The old saying: 'Love is a woman's whole life--to men a thing apart' isn't always true. There are men to whom love is everything. I have always been ... that kind of man. And when she betrayed the great love I had for her, as she betrayed the others, she--" A look of torment came into his eyes. "It would have been better if she had been the one to slay, to kill me then without compassion and without remorse. But that was one cruelty she was incapable of, and so I had no choice...." "Every man has a choice, Macklin," Fenton said. "There was no need--" Fenton was later to regret that he had not been more careful, not stayed more alert and on guard. But when a man does not in the least resemble a killer in his outer aspect, when he can grin boyishly, and disarm everyone with his blunt forthrightness, his wry humor, his complete absence of even the everyday, garden-variety kind of neuroticism which afflicts nine men and women out of ten--when, in short, he seems more robustly wholesome, normal than a football player with a well-rounded love life, it is very easy for a man to go a little astray emotionally and assume that he can't be too dangerous in an immediate way. Fenton had not realized that Gallison was standing so close to Macklin's desk, facing away from Macklin and that the police positive on Gallison's hip could be a very formidable weapon in the hands of killer still bent on saving his skin.