"Was there a connection?"
"No. And the third killing had no connection either. Then I looked at the intervals between the three murders. Twenty-six days between the first and second, and between the second and the third. Does that suggest anything to you?"
She didn't answer.
"Sure it does," he said gently. "Twenty-six days is a fair average for a woman's menstrual period. I checked it in your guide to gynecology."
"My God, Edward, you call that evidence?"
"By itself? Not much, I admit. But added to all the other things, it begins to make a pattern: a psychopathic female whose crimes are triggered by her monthly periods."
"But killing strangers? I still don't believe it. And you keep saying the percentages are against it."
"Wait," he said, "there's more."
He leaned down, picked up a stack of papers from the floor. He held them on his lap. He donned his reading glasses, began to flip through the pages.
"This may take a little time," he said, looking up at her. "Would you like a drink of anything?"
"Thank you, no," she said stiffly.
He nodded, went back to his shuffling until he found the page he wanted. Then he sat back.
"The probabilities are against it," he agreed. "I admit that. Going by experience, Slavin is doing exactly right in looking for a male killer. But it occurred to me that maybe the percentages are wrong. Not wrong so much as outdated. Obsolete."
"Oh?"
If she was curious, he thought mournfully, she was hiding it exceedingly well.
He looked at her reflectively. He knew her sharp intelligence and mordant wit. He quailed before the task of trying to elicit her approval of what he was about to propose. At worst, she would react with scorn and contempt; at best, with amused condescension for his dabblings in disciplines beyond his ken.
"I've heard you speak many times of the 'new woman,'" he started. "I suppose you mean by that a woman free, or striving to be free, of the restraints imposed by the oppression of men."
"And society," she added.
"All right," he said. "The oppression by individual men and a male-oriented society. The new woman seeks to control and be responsible for her own destiny. Correct? Isn't that more or less what the women's liberation movement is all about?"
"More or less."
"Feminism is a revolution," he went on, speaking slowly, almost cautiously. "A social revolution perhaps, but all the more significant for that. Revolutions have their excesses. No," he said hastily, "not excesses; that was a poor choice of words. But revolutions sometimes, usually, have results its leaders and followers did not anticipate. In any upheaval-social, political, artistic, whatever-sometimes the fallout is totally unexpected, and sometimes inimical to the original aims of the revolutionaries.
"When I was puzzling over the possibility of the Hotel Ripper being female, and trying to reconcile that possibility with the absence of a record of women committing similar crimes, it occurred to me that the new woman we were speaking about might be 'new' in ways of which we weren't aware.
"In other words, she might be more independent, assertive, ambitious, courageous, determined, and so forth. But in breaking free from the repression of centuries, she may also have developed other, less desirable traits. And if so, those traits could conceivably make obsolete all our statistics and percentages of what a woman is capable of."
"I presume," Monica said haughtily, "you're talking about crime statistics and crime percentages."
"Some," he said, "but not all. I wanted to learn if modern women had changed, were changing, in any ways that might make them predisposed to, uh, self-destructive or antisocial behavior."
"And what did you find out?"
"Well…" he said, "I won't claim the evidence is conclusive. I'm not even sure you can call it evidence. But I think it's persuasive enough to confirm-in my own mind at least-that I'm on the right track. I asked Thomas Handry-he's the reporter; you've met him-to dig out the numbers for me in several areas. I took the past fifteen years as the time period in which to determine if the changes I suspected in women had actually taken place."
"Why the past fifteen years?"
He looked at her stonily. "You know why. Because that period, roughly, is the length of time the modern feminist movement has been in existence and has affected the lives of so many American women. And men too, of course."
"You're blaming everything that's happened to women in the past fifteen years on women's liberation?"
"Of course not. I know other factors have been influential. But a lot of those factors, in turn, have been partly or wholly the result of feminism. The huge increase in the women's work force, for instance. Now do you or do you not want to hear what Handry discovered?"
"I'd feel a lot better if your research had been done by a woman."
He gave her a hard smile. "She would have found the same numbers Handry did. Let's start with the most significant statistics…"
He began speaking, consulting pages on his lap, letting them flutter to the floor as he finished with them.
"First," he said, "let's look at drugs… Statistics about illegal drugs are notoriously inaccurate. I'm talking now about marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. It's almost impossible to get exact tallies on the total number of users, let alone a breakdown by sex and age. But from what reports are available, it appears that men and women are about equal in illicit drug use.
"When we turn to legal drugs, particularly psychoactive drugs prescribed by physicians, we can get more accurate totals. They show that of all prescriptions issued for such drugs, about 80 percent of amphetamines, 67 percent of tranquilizers, and 60 percent of barbiturates and sedatives go to women. It is estimated that at least two million women have dependencies-addiction would be a better word-on prescription drugs. More than half of all women convicted of crimes have problems with prescription drug abuse. Twice as many women as men use Valium and Librium. Fifty percent more women than men take barbiturates regularly. They're a favored method of suicide by women."
"There's a good reason for all that," Monica said sharply. "When you consider the frustrations and-"
"Halt!" Delaney said, showing a palm. "Monica, I'm a policeman, not a sociologist. I'm not interested in the causes. Only in things as they are, and the effect they may have on crime. Okay?"
She was silent.
"Second," he said, consulting more pages, "the number of known female alcoholics has doubled since World War Two. Alcoholics Anonymous reports that in the past, one in ten members- was a woman. Today, the ratio of women to men is about one to one. Statistics on alcoholism are hard to come by and not too accurate, but no one doubts the enormous recent increase of female alcoholics."
"Only because more women are coming forward and admitting their problem. Up to now, there's been such social condemnation of women drinkers that they kept it hidden."
"And still do, I imagine," he said. "Just as a lot of men keep their alcoholism hidden. But that doesn't negate all the testimony of authorities in the field reporting a high incidence of female alcoholism. Women make the majority of purchases in package liquor stores. Whiskey makers are beginning to realize what's going on. Now their ads are designed to attract women drinkers. There's even a new Scotch, blended expressly for women, to be advertised in women's magazines."
"When everyone is drinking more, is it so unusual to find women doing their share?"
"More than their share," he answered, with as much patience as he could muster. "Read the numbers in these reports Handry collected; it's all here. Third, deaths from lung cancer have increased about 45 percent for women and only about 4 percent for men. The lung cancer rate for women, not just deaths, has tripled."