The Club Dumas

The magistrate touched the slippered foot of the dead man, and the body turned slightly, slowly, at the end of the taut silk cord that ran from its neck to the light fixture on the ceiling. The body moved from left to right, then back again, until it came gradually to a stop in its original position, like the needle of a compass reverting to north. As the magistrate moved away, he turned sideways to avoid a uniformed policeman who was search­ing for fingerprints beneath the corpse. There was a broken vase on the floor and a book open at a page covered with red pencil marks. The book was an old copy of The Vicomte de Brage-lonne, a cheap edition bound in cloth Leaning over the po­liceman’s shoulder, the magistrate glanced at the underlined sentences:

“They have betrayed me,” he murmured.

“All is known!” “All is known at last,” answered Porthos, who knew nothing.

He made the clerk write this down and ordered that the book be included in the report Then he went to join a tall man who stood smoking by one of the open windows.

“What do you think?” he asked.

The tall man wore his police badge fastened to a pocket of his leather jacket Before answering, he took time to finish his ciga­rette, then threw it over his shoulder and out the window without looking.

“If it’s white and in a bottle, it tends to be milk,”he answered, cryptically, at last, but not so cryptically that the magistrate didn’t smile slightly.

Unlike the policeman, he was looking out into the street, where it was still raining hard. Somebody opened a door on the other side of the room, and a gust of air splashed drops of water into his face.

“Shut the door,” he ordered without turning around. Then he spoke to the policeman. “Sometimes homicide disguises itself as suicide.”

“And vice versa,” the other man pointed out calmly.

“What do you think of the hands and tie?”

“Sometimes they’re afraid they’ll change their minds at the last minute ...If it was homicide, he’d have had them tied behind him.”

“It makes no difference,”objected the magistrate. “It’s a strong, thin cord. Once he lost his footing, he wouldn’t have a chance, even with his hands free.”

“Anything’s possible. The autopsy will tell us more.”

The magistrate glanced once more at the corpse. The police­man searching for fingerprints stood up with the book.

“Strange, that business of the page,” said the magistrate.

The tall policeman shrugged.