“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 dealing, as you think, with a terrorist organization, they’ve been very careful to keep from being contaminated; in this sense, their hands are clean, cleaner than those of a police that maintains such close relations with the men they’re watching. Here, between the policeman and the criminal, you find every grade of intermediary. Our whole system is based on them. Unfortunately the shot that killed Daniel Dupont came from another world!”
“But you know there’s no such thing as a perfect crime; we must look for the flaw that has to exist somewhere.”
“Where are you going to look? Make no mistake about it, Monsieur: this is the work of specialists, they’ve obviously left few things to chance; but what makes the few clues we have useless is our inability to test them against anything else.”
“This case is already the ninth,” Wallas says.
“Yes, but you’ll agree that only the political opinions of the victims and the hour of their deaths have allowed us to connect them. Besides, I’m not so convinced as you that such coincidences correspond to anything real. And even supposing they do, we’re not much further: what use would it be to me, for instance, if a second murder just as anonymous were committed in this city tonight? As for the central services, they don’t have any more opportunities than I do to get results: they have the same files and the same methods. They’ve taken the body away from me, and it’s all the easier for me to abandon it to them since you tell me they have eight more they don’t know what to do with. Before your visit, I already had the impression that the case didn’t have anything to do with the police, and your presence here makes me sure of it.”
Despite his interlocutor’s evident prejudice, Wallas insists: the victim’s relatives and friends could be questioned. But Laurent has no hopes of finding out anything useful from this quarter either:
“It appears that Dupont led an extremely solitary life, shut up with his books and his old housekeeper. He seldom went out and received only rare visits. Did he have any friends? As for relatives, there seem to be none, except for his wife “
Wallas shows his surprise:
“He had a wife? Where was she at the time of the crime?”
“I don’t know. Dupont was married only a few years; his wife was much younger than he and probably couldn’t endure his hermit’s life. They separated right away. But they still saw each other now and then, apparently; by all means ask her what she was doing last night at seven-thirty.”
“You’re not saying that seriously?”
“Certainly I am. Why not? She knew the house and her ex-husband’s habits well; so she had more opportunities than anyone else to commit this murder discreetly. And since she was entitled to expect a considerable inheritance from him, she’s one of the few people I know of who could have any interest in seeing him dead.”
“Then why didn’t you mention her to me?”
“You told me that he was the victim of a political assassination!”
“She could have played her part in it anyway.”
“Of course. Why not?”
Commissioner Laurent has resumed his jocular tone. He says with a half-smile:
“Maybe it’s the housekeeper who killed him and made up all the rest with the help of Doctor Juard, whose reputation-let me tell you in passing-is not so good.”
“That seems rather unlikely,” Wallas observes.
“Even altogether unlikely, but you know that never kept anyone from being a suspect.”
Wallas feels that this irony is in bad taste. Furthermore, he realizes he will not learn much from this official, jealous of his authority but determined to do nothing. Isn’t Laurent really trying to wash his hands of the whole affair? Or else would he like to discourage his rivals in order to make his own investigation? Wallas stands up to say good-bye; he will visit this doctor first. Laurent shows him where he is to be found:
“The Juard Clinic, eleven Rue de Corinthe. It’s on the other side of the prefecture, not far from here.”
“I thought,” Wallas says, “that the newspaper said ‘a nearby clinic’?”
Laurent makes a cynical gesture:
“Oh, you know the papers! Besides, it’s not so far from the Rue des Arpenteurs.”
Wallas writes down the address in his notebook.
“There is even one paper,” the commissioner adds, “that mixed up the first names and announced the death of Albert Dupont, one of the biggest wood exporters in the city. He must have been quite surprised to read his obituary this morning!”
Laurent has stood up too. He winks as he says:
“After all, I haven’t seen the body; maybe it is Albert Du-pont’s.”
This idea amuses him enormously, his overfed body shakes from fits of laughter. Wallas smiles politely. The chief commissioner catches his breath and holds out his hand amiably.
“If I hear anything new,” he says, “I’ll let you know. What hotel are you staying at?”