have just done-and therefore to having you protected by my men, if necessary.”
With another smile, Laurent adds:
“So now it’s up to you to tell me what you’re going to do, unless of course that’s a secret.”
Entrenched behind the papers covering his desk, his elbows propped on the arms of his chair, the commissioner rubs his hands together as he speaks, slowly, almost cautiously, then he sets them down in front of him on the scattered sheets of paper, spreading his short, fat fingers as far apart as possible, and waits for the answer, without taking his eyes from his visitor’s face. He is a short, plump man with a pink face and a bald skull. His kindly tone is a little forced.
“You say the witnesses,” Wallas begins…
Laurent immediately raises his hands to stop him.
“There are no witnesses, properly speaking,” he says, rubbing his right palm over his left forefinger; “you can scarcely call the doctor who has not restored the wounded man to life a witness, or the old deaf housekeeper who has seen nothing whatsoever.”
“It was the doctor who informed you?”
“Yes, Doctor Juard telephoned the police last night around nine o’clock; the inspector who received the information wrote down what he said-you’ve just looked at the record-and then he called me at home. I had an immediate examination of the premises made. Upstairs, the inspectors picked up four sets of fresh fingerprints: those of the housekeeper, then three others apparently made by men’s hands. If it’s true that no outsider has come upstairs for several days, these last could be (he counts on his fingers) first of all, those of the doctor, faint and few, on the stair banister and in Dupont’s bedroom; second, those of Dupont himself, which can be found all over the house; third, those of the murderer, quite numerous and very clear, on the banister, on the doorknob of the study, and on certain articles of furniture in this study-mainly the back of the desk chair. The house has two entrances; the doctor’s right thumbprint has been found on the front doorbell, and the hypothetical murderer’s on the knob of the back door. You see that I’m giving you all the details. Lastly, the housekeeper declares that the doctor came in through the front door and that she found the back door open when she went upstairs to answer the wounded man’s call-even though she had closed it a few moments before. If you want me to, I can have Doctor Juard’s fingerprints taken, just to be sure…”
“You can also get the dead man’s prints, I suppose?”
“I could, if I had the body at my disposal,” Laurent answers sweetly.
Seeing Wallas’ questioning look, he asks:
“Haven’t you heard? The body was taken away from me at the same time as the control of the investigation. I thought it was sent to the same organization that sent you here.”
Wallas is obviously amazed. Could other services be concerned with this case? This is a supposition Laurent receives with obvious satisfaction. He waits, his hands lying flat on his desk; his kindly expression is tinged with compassion. Without insisting on this point, Wallas continues:
“You were saying that Dupont, after being wounded, had called to the old housekeeper from upstairs; for the latter to have heard him, deaf as she is, Dupont would have had to shout quite loudly. Yet the doctor describes him as greatly weakened by his wound, almost unconscious.”
“Yes, I know; there seems to be a contradiction here; but he might have had strength enough to go get his revolver and call for help, and then have lost a lot of blood while waiting for the ambulance: there was a relatively large bloodstain on the bedspread. In any case, he wasn’t unconscious when the doctor got there, since Dupont told him he hadn’t seen his attacker’s face. There’s a mistake in the account published by the papers: it was only after the operation that the wounded man didn’t recover consciousness. Moreover, you’ll obviously have to go see this doctor. You should also ask for details from the housekeeper, Madame…(he consults a sheet from the dossier) Madame Smite; her explanations are somewhat confused: she told us, in particular, some elaborate story about a broken telephone that seems to have nothing to do with the case-at least at first glance. The inspectors haven’t made a point of it, preferring to wait until she calms down; they haven’t even told her her employer was dead.”
The two men do not speak for a moment. It is the commissioner who resumes, delicately rubbing his joints with his thumb.
“He may perfectly well have committed suicide, you know. He has shot himself with the revolver once-or several times-without managing to finish himself off; then he has changed his mind, as so often happens, and called for help, trying to disguise his unsuccessful attempt as an attack. Or else-and this would be more in accord with what we know about his character-he has prepared this setting in advance, and managed to give himself a mortal wound that allowed him a few minutes’ survival in order to have time to bequeath the myth of his murder to the public. It’s very difficult, you’ll say, to calculate the consequences of a pistol shot so exactly; he may have fired a second shot while the housekeeper was going for the doctor. He was a strange man, from many points of view.”
“It must be possible to verify these hypotheses from the position of the bullets,” Wallas remarks.
“Yes, sometimes it’s possible. And we would have examined the bullets and the revolver of the supposed victim. All I have here is the death certificate the doctor sent this morning; it’s the only thing we can be sure of, for the time being. The suspect fingerprints can belong to anyone who came during the day without the housekeeper’s knowing it; as for the back door she mentioned to the inspector, the wind might have opened it.”
“You really think Dupont committed suicide?”
“I don’t think anything. I find it’s not impossible, according to the facts I have. This death certificate, which is drawn up quite correctly, by the way, gives no indication as to the kind of wound that caused death; and the information furnished last night by the doctor and the housekeeper is all too vague in this regard, as you’ve seen. Before anything else, you’ll have to clear up these few details. If necessary, you could even get the additional details that might interest you from the coroner in the capital.” Wallas says:
“Your help would certainly have made my job easier.”
“But you can count on me, Monsieur. As soon as you have someone to arrest I’ll send you two or three good men. I’ll be eager to get your telephone call; just ask for one-twenty-four-twenty-four, it’s a direct line.”
The smile on the chubby face widens. The little hands spread out on the desk, palms smooth, fingers wide. Wallas writes: “C. Laurent, 124-24.” A direct line to what?
Wallas again considers the isolation of his situation. The last bicyclists ride off in a group toward their work; standing alone, leaning on a railing, he abandons this support as well and begins walking through the empty streets in the direction he has decided on. Apparently no one is interested in what he is doing: the doors remain closed, no face appears in the windows to watch him pass. Yet his presence on these premises is necessary: no one else is concerned with this murder. It’s his own case; they have sent him to solve it.
The commissioner, like the workmen earlier this morning, stares at him with astonishment-hostility perhaps- and turns his head away: his role is already over; he has no access, on the other side of the brick walls, to the realm in which this story is happening; the sole purpose of his speeches is to make Wallas feel the virtual impossibility of entering it. But Wallas is confident. Though at first glance the difficulty is even greater for himself-a stranger in this city, and knowing neither its secrets nor its short cuts-he is sure he has not been asked to come here for nothing: once the weak spot is found, he will unhesitatingly advance toward his goal.
He asks, just to make sure:
“What would you have done, if you had gone on with the investigation yourself?”
“It’s not in my line,” the commissioner answers, “which is why they took it away from me.”
“Then what is the responsibility of the police, in your opinion?”
Laurent rubs his hands a little faster.
“We keep criminals within certain limits more or less fixed by the law.”
“And?”
“This one is beyond us, he doesn’t belong to the category of ordinary malefactors. I know every criminal in this city: they’re all listed in my files; I arrest them when they forget the conventions society imposes on them. If one of them had killed Dupont to rob him or even to be paid by a political party, do you think we would still be wondering, more than twelve hours after the murder, whether it wasn’t a suicide after all? This district isn’t very big, and informers are legion here. We don’t always manage to prevent crime, sometimes the criminal even manages to escape, but there’s never been a case where we haven’t found his tracks, whereas this time we’re left with a lot of unidentified fingerprints and some drafts that open doors. Our informers are no help here. If we’re
