Robert Alter - 101 Mystery Stories

“As for the windows, they were closed and undamaged; a bullet fired from outside would have shattered the panes. Besides, a revolver doesn’t carry far enough to have been fired from outside the range covered by the cordon of policemen. Look at the plan! Eat it up with your eyes! And you may restore some hope of life to poor Corporal Manchard, who has given up sleeping and looks upon himself virtually as a murderer.”

I timidly ventured, “What do you know about Ceccioni?”

“That he used to be rich. That he’s hardly practiced medicine at all, but rather devoted himself to politics — which made it healthier for him to leave Italy.”

“Married? Bachelor?”

“Widower. One child, a son, at present studying in Argentina.”

“What did he live on in Lyons?”

“A little of everything and nothing. Indefinite subsidies from his political colleagues. Occasional consultations, but those chiefly gratis among the poor of the Italian colony.”

“Was there anything stolen from the house?”

“Not a trace of any larcenous entry or of anything stolen.”

I don’t know why, but at this moment I wanted to laugh. It suddenly seemed to me that some master of mystification had amused himself by presenting Joseph Leborgne with a totally impossible problem, simply to give him a needed lesson in modesty.

He noticed the broadening of my lips. Seizing the plan, he crossed the room to plunge himself angrily into his armchair.

“Let me know when you’ve solved it!” he snapped.

“I can certainly solve nothing before you,” I said tactfully.

“Thanks,” he observed.

I began to fill my pipe. I lit it, disregarding my companion’s rage which was reaching the point of paroxysm.

“All I ask of you is that you sit quietly,” he pronounced. “And don’t breathe so loudly,” he added.

Ten minutes passed as unpleasantly as possible. Despite myself, I called up the image of the plan, with the six black crosses marking the policemen.

And the impossibility of this story, which had at first so amused me, began to seem curiously disquieting.

After all, this was not a matter of psychology or of detective flair, but of pure geometry.

“This Manchard,” I asked suddenly. “Has he ever served as a subject for hypnotism?”

Joseph Leborgne did not even deign to answer that one.

“Did Ceccioni have many political enemies in Lyons?”

Leborgne shrugged.

“And it’s been proved that the son is in Argentina?”

This time he merely took the pipe out of my mouth and tossed it on the mantelpiece.

“You have the names of all the policemen?”

He handed me a sheet of paper:

Jérôme Pallois, 28, married

Jean-Joseph Stockman, 31, single

Armand Dubois, 26, married

Hubert Trajanu, 43, divorced

Germain Garros, 32, married

I reread these lines three times. The names were in the order in which the men had been stationed around the building, starting from the left.

I was ready to accept the craziest notions. Desperately I exclaimed at last “It is impossible!”

And I looked at Joseph Leborgne. A moment before his face had been pale, his eyes encircled, his lips bitter. Now, to my astonishment, I saw him smilingly head for a pot of jam.

As he passed a mirror he noticed himself and seemed scandalized by the incongruous contortions of his hair. He combed it meticulously. He adjusted the knot of his cravat.

Once again Joseph Leborgne was his habitual self. As he looked for a spoon with which to consume his horrible jam of leaves-of-God-knows-what, he favored me with a sarcastic smile.

“How simple it would always be to reach the truth if preconceived ideas did not falsify our judgment!” he sighed. “You have just said, ‘It is impossible!’ So therefore...”

I waited for him to contradict me. I’m used to that.

“So therefore,” he went on, “it is impossible. Just so. And all that we needed to do from the beginning was simply to admit that fact. There was no revolver in the house, no murderer hidden there. Very well: then there was no shot fired there.”

“But then...?”

“Then, very simply, Luigi Ceccioni arrived with the bullet already in his chest. I’ve every reason to believe that he fired the bullet himself. He was a doctor; he knew just where to aim — ‘less than a centimeter above the heart,’ you’ll recall — so that the wound would not be instantly fatal, but would allow him to move about for a short time.”

Joseph Leborgne closed his eyes.

“Imagine this poor hopeless man. He has only one son. The boy is studying abroad, but the father no longer has any money to send him. Ceccini insures his life with the boy as beneficiary. His next step is to die — but somehow to die with no suspicion of suicide, or the insurance company will refuse to pay.

“By means of an anonymous letter he summons the police themselves as witnesses. They see him enter his house where there is no weapon and they find him dead several hours later.

“It was enough, once he was seated on his bed, to massage his chest, forcing the bullet to penetrate more deeply, at last to touch the heart...”

I let out an involuntary cry of pain. But Leborgne did not stir. He was no longer concerned with me.

It was not until a week later that he showed me a telegram from Corporal Manchard:

AUTOPSY REVEALS ECCHYMOSIS AROUND WOUNDS AND TRACES FINGER PRESSURE STOP DOCTOR AND SELF PUZZLED POSSIBLE CAUSE STOP REQUEST YOUR ADVICE IMMEDIATELY

“You answered?”

He looked at me reproachfully. “It requires both great courage and great imagination to massage oneself to death. Why should the poor man have done that it vain? The insurance company has a capital of four hundred million...”

He was my best friend — damn him! But I got even...

I’d better begin at the beginning. Jack Burnham had been my best friend since we were little kids, since the day, in fact, when I stopped a bigger kid from beating Jack up in the schoolyard. It was true that Jack had swiped this kid’s pencil box, but that didn’t seem to me to be reason enough for the bigger kid to try to take Jack’s head off. But throughout our school careers that’s what other kids tried to do, usually for similar reasons. Jack never learned to respect other people’s property. It kept me busy keeping him from being murdered. But I suppose it wasn’t his fault if he hated to buy something he could swipe, or if he wouldn’s spend a dime if he could get someone else to spend it; it was just the way he was, the way he had been born. And people can’t help that; I understood that.

In college I was lucky enough to get a job after classes, something Jack didn’t happen to manage; so of course I had to cover most of the expenses when we ate away from the dormitory, or whenever we went out on a rare double-date. But I didn’t mind. After all, that’s what friends are for, aren’t they? And I certainly didn’t get angry with either Jack or Noreen when Noreen came to me after graduation and said she wanted to break our engagement, that she had decided Jack was a better bet than I was. Well, after all, you can’t dictate love, or desire for security, or anything else; I understood that well enough.

After that we sort of went different ways, Jack to New York and a job in the brokerage firm that Noreen’s father was president of, and me to the west coast and after a rather checkered career, into the TV writing business. We corresponded regularly, though, and we spoke on the phone whenever I felt flush enough to stand the phone charges — both Noreen and Jack loved to reminisce whenever I called. So, as I say, we kept in touch, and I still considered him my best friend — in fact, I considered the two of them my best friends.