Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 26, No. 4. Whole No. 143, October 1955

“A detective. We’re accustomed to seeing them about the store. When I learned of his death, my first thought was for my little brothers. I’d already told them we were going to live in the country.”

Did Inspector Lucas really need to blow his nose? In any case he did so.

“Are you sure that this time you have told us the whole truth?”

“I believe so. That’s all I remember.”

“Didn’t your fiancé ever say anything else that revealed his character to you?”

“He was always appealing and quite proper,” she repeated. “In spite of the difference in our ages I felt sure he wouldn’t make me unhappy.”

The Little Doctor said to himself that in another minute she’d harp again on her little brothers. But at this point Lucas cut her short.

“You can go now, Mademoiselle,” he told her. “If I need to see you again, I’ll send for you.”

“And I won’t get into trouble?”

She could hardly believe that it was over, that she was free to leave the building into which she had entered so fearfully.

“I don’t know how to thank you, Inspector. If you only realized...”

“Very well. Goodbye.”

He practically pushed her out the door, and when he came back and shut it behind him, his face betrayed involuntary emotion.

“Well, I wasn’t too much of a brute, was I?” he asked the Little Doctor.

“I was just thinking how different events appear from different points of view,” the Little Doctor answered. “It’s a little bit the way it is in the theater. On one side you have the audience, who believe in the action played out before them, and on the other the actors and stage-hands, who are readying costumes and scenery. To this girl, for instance, Justin Galmet’s death has all sorts of sentimental meanings; to us it’s a mystery, a problem to be solved... How do you size the fellow up in the light of what we’ve just heard?”

Lucas merely shrugged his shoulders. The day before, Justin Galmet had been one more of the strange characters that people every big city. Now there was something positively touching about him. Had he really meant to marry the virtuous Alice and take her little brothers to live with him in the country? And if so, why had a bullet wiped out his plan on the very eve of its accomplishment? For he had said: “A few days from now there’ll be nothing to keep me in Paris...” Days, he had specified, not weeks, after all the years that he had lived there. “‘To keep me in Paris,’ ” the Little Doctor murmured over and over to himself, as if to wring all possible significance out of these words. That was it! There weren’t ten questions to be answered, or even two or three; there was only one, so obvious as to seem stupid. What was keeping him in Paris for a few more days? Once the answer to this was found, the rest would reveal itself automatically.

“Where are you going?” asked Inspector Lucas, lighting his pipe and sitting down at his desk.

“I’m going to have a drink... Inspector, do you know why there are so many drunkards?”

“Hm... No... I suppose...”

“Your supposition is probably incorrect. It’s because the only cure for a hangover is a hair of the dog that bit you!”

The Little Doctor was whistling to himself as he went out onto the street. He seemed to be a man breathing in the joy of life through every pore, and no one could have guessed that a question as obsessive as a horsefly buzzing before a storm was preying upon him. What could have kept the fellow in Paris a few days more? Abruptly he quickened his pace and went straight to the department store, where Gaby and Alice were presiding, as usual, over their respective sections.

“I’m sorry to bother you again, Mademoiselle,” he said to Alice. “I’m perfectly proper, too. That’s why I’m asking you to lunch with me in a little place on the Chaussée d’Antin. When are you free?”

“At half-past 12.”

“Then I’ll be waiting for you at the subway entrance.”

Dollent had chosen an ordinary little restaurant, and dozens of shop clerks were lunching around them. Alice was not altogether at ease, but the gaiety of her companion, who had downed three drinks before she came, occasionally caused her to smile.

“Don’t hesitate to take all the ‘extras,’ Mademoiselle. The check goes on my expense account, I assure you.”

“Have whatever you like best,” he continued. “What would you say to some lobster?”

“Lobster makes me break out with a rash,” she answered ingenuously.

Someone at the next table was eating her favorite dish, and the smell of it proved irresistible.

“Tripe? Good! I like it myself. Waiter, two orders of tripe.”

There are days when the air is washed clean, when the city breaks out into smiling color, when everything is good and beautiful. There in the cheerful, little restaurant it seemed impossible that someone should have gone to the toy department with a pistol which unfortunately was no toy and shot a poor fellow having a pair of slippers tried on...