The other man was wearing quite modest and rather shabby clothes. He almost always wore a beige raincoat that was too tight for his powerful frame; on reflection, he must have been heavier than Wallas.
“And he had glasses.”
It is the old maid who adds this detail. But Mademoiselle Dexter protests: Andre WS has never worn glasses. Her colleague insists on her point: she remembers distinctly, she even pointed out, one day, that it made him look like a doctor.
“What kind of glasses?” Laurent asks.
They were thick-rimmed tortoise-shell glasses with slightly tinted lenses.
“What color were they tinted?”
“A kind of smoky gray.”
“Were the two lenses exactly the same color, or was one of them a little darker than the other?”
She hadn’t noticed this detail, but it’s quite possible, as a matter of fact, that one of the lenses was darker. It’s hard to tell about the visitors-who come up to the windows with the light behind them-but she remembers now that…
Laurent asks Juliette Dexter the exact time of the last visit of the man with the poste restante number.
“It was around five-thirty or six,” she answers; “he always came around then-a little later, maybe, at the beginning of the month, when it took longer to get dark. In any case, it was when we were busiest.”
Wallas interrupts her: he had understood, from what the girl had told him when she gave him the letter, that the other man had come by shortly before, toward the end of the morning.
“Yes, that’s right,” she says after a moment’s thought; “but that time it wasn’t you yet. He came a little after eleven, as he did from time to time, as well as making his evening visits.”
Did he come regularly every evening? And when did his visits start? No, he didn’t come regularly: sometimes more than a week passed without him showing up, and then they would see him every evening for four or five days-and even mornings, too, sometimes. When he came, it was because he was expecting a message or a series of messages; mail never came for him during his periods of absence. He received mostly pneumatic messages and telegrams, rarely ordinary messages; the pneumatic messages came from within the city itself, obviously, the telegrams from the capital or elsewhere.
The girl stops talking, and since no one asks her anything further, she adds after a moment:
“He should have found his last pneumatic when he came by this morning. If he didn’t, it’s the fault of the central service.”
But her reproach almost seems to be addressed to Wallas. And no one knows if the tinge of regret in her voice refers to that urgent letter which has not reached its addressee, or to the inefficient functioning of the post office system in general.
Mademoiselle Dexter saw the man in the tight raincoat for the first time when she returned from her vacation, early in
October; but the poste restante number had already been rented for some time since. When? She couldn’t say exactly; it will be easy, of course, to find the date in the post office records. As for knowing if the man had already come during the month of September, they will have to ask her replacement about that.
Unfortunately, Madame Jean does not remember; she didn’t notice, at the time, that name of Andre WS nor did she recall having ever seen this face-Wallas’ face-with or without glasses.
Mademoiselle Lebermann thinks that he had come already, that he had even come long before, for that very remark she had made about his looking like a doctor must have dated from August, since it was in August that Doctor Gelin had taken on an assistant and she had thought at first that this was…
“Could you say,” the commissioner asks her, “if it was the right lens that was darker, or the left?”
The old maid takes several minutes to answer.
“I think,” she says finally, “that it was on the left side.”
“That’s strange,” Laurent says thoughtfully. “Think carefully; wasn’t it more likely the right eye?”
“Wait a minute, Commissioner, wait a minute: I said ‘on the left side,’ on my left side-for him that meant his right eye.”
“Good, that sounds better,” the commissioner says.
He would like to know, now, if the beige raincoat did not have a rip across the right shoulder last night. The girl didn’t look up when the man turned around, and she hadn’t seen any such rip from the front. Mademoiselle Lebermann, on the other hand, had looked up and watched him as he left: there had been an L-shaped tear across the right shoulder.
Lastly, they are not in agreement as to the contents of the telegrams either: the girl can remember extremely short and commonplace texts-confirmations, counter-orders, meetings-without any detail that suggests the nature of the business referred to; Mademoiselle Lebermann refers to long messages with obscure phrases that must have had a secret meaning.
“Telegrams are always short because of the price,” Juliette Dexter adds, as though she had not heard what her colleague had just declared. “People don’t repeat what the correspondent already knows if they don’t have to.”
Madame Jean has no opinion about what is or is not said in a telegram.
Alone again, Wallas and Laurent add up what they have just learned. The total is soon reached, for they have learned nothing at all. Andre WS never told the post office girl anything that could furnish a lead or suggest his activities; he was not talkative. On the other hand, he does not seem to have been someone from the neighborhood: at least, no one knows him there.
Mademoiselle Lebermann has given her personal opinion at the end of the questioning: a doctor specializing in illegal operations. “There are some funny doctors around here, you know,” she has added knowingly.
There is no reason to reject this hypothesis a priori, but Laurent points out that his own, according to which it is merely the wood export market that is in question, has a better chance of being the right one after all; and besides, it would fit in better with the way the messages happened to be grouped.
Furthermore, it is still not certain that this Andre WS is the person Madame Bax saw from her window at nightfall, in front of the gate of the house in the Rue des Arpenteurs. The rip the drunk described in the back of the raincoat might have served to identify him, but the young post office employee has specified she saw nothing of the kind; now it is impossible, on this point, to take into account the affirmative testimony of the old maid, and the raincoat alone-without the rip-is not proof enough; any more-obviously-than the resemblance to Wallas which, if it were to be taken seriously, would just as well lead to accusing the latter.
Before leaving the commissioner, Wallas also examines a police report, the work of one of the two inspectors who, the evening before, made the first examinations of the dead man’s residence.
“You’ll see,” Laurent remarked as he handed him the slender file of typed pages, “it’s an interesting piece of work. This boy is a little young, of course: you can tell it’s his first crime. For instance, he wrote this memorandum on his own, since our investigation has officially been interrupted. I even think he must have made additional investigations on his own account, after having been told to finish up. The enthusiasm of a neophyte, you understand.”
While Wallas is reading the document, the commissioner makes a few further remarks-apparently ironic ones-as to the young inspector’s conclusions and the naivete with which he has received the suggestions of people who “obviously were taking him in.”
The text begins as follows: “On Monday, October twenty-sixth, at eight minutes after nine…”
The first pages discuss in detail, but without digressions or commentary, the telephone call from Doctor Juard and the information furnished by the latter as to the professor’s death and the attack itself. Then comes an extremely precise description of the house and its environs: the corner of the Rue des Arpenteurs, the little garden with its hedge of spindle trees and its fence, the two doors to the house-one in front, the other at the rear-the arrangement of the ground-floor rooms, the staircase, the carpet, the study on the second floor; the arrangement of the furniture in this last room is also analyzed in scrupulous detail. Then follow the police observations proper: bloodstains, fingerprints, objects apparently not in their normal place or position…“lastly the fingerprints number 3- right hand-also figure distinctly on a cubical paperweight weighing between seven and eight hundred grams, placed to the left of the manuscript page-about ten centimeters away.”
Aside from these exaggeratedly detailed notations, the memorandum furnishes more or less the substance of the first reports made by the inspectors, to whom Laurent had introduced Wallas this morning. However, two new
