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She hesitated for a moment and then threw up her hands. “Oh, I don’t suppose it makes any difference now. Corny swore me to secrecy, but he’s dead now, isn’t he. Dead and really gone.” She held onto to my forearm again, the tears welled but didn’t spill. I admired her for that.

“Who was it, Jocelyn?” I pressed.

“Oh, someone in that pig society he was always going to.”

“Pig society?”

“Le Société de Cochon Long,” she said with a disdainful exaggeration of a French accent.

“Really?” I exclaimed, just managing to conceal the extent of my surprise and that nearly vaporous sensation, vertebral in its origin, that comes over me when I feel I have somehow uncovered a piece of the larger puzzle. Though in the mundanity of things, I couldn’t see how Corny’s death in a far-off jungle had anything to do with the murders of Ossmann and Woodley. “I didn’t know it still existed,” I said, trying to sound casual.

“Oh, God, all that publicity around the cannibal killing trial brought in every screwball you could imagine. There’s a lot more of them out there than you might suspect.”

I nodded. “Who belongs to the society today?”

“The usual people. Raul is very active, as is Alger from down in the Skull Collection. And some newcomers. Corny didn’t talk about it much. It was, after all, supposed to be a secret society.”

Of course, I thought, determined now to go back to the room with the green baize door and take a much closer look around. I remained awhile longer, going over arrangements I would need to make with the university about an official notice of death and an obituary. I told her I would speak to the dean and to Alfie Lopes about a memorial service if she wanted me to.

“Thank you, Norman, that would be a great help.” She was visibly rallying, doing what had to be done. “I know Alfie well. I’ll call him myself. I’ll need his comfort. He’s so good at times like this.”

As I was leaving, she took one of my hands in both of hers, and her face had a contrite expression. “I’m sorry, Norman, but I forgot to ask, but how is Elsbeth?”

“Not well,” I said, realizing with a wave of empathy that I would be in her shoes before long.

“Oh, I’m so sorry.” But the Widow Chard was also looking me over, I swear, as a man who would soon be single again.

I went back to the museum and spent a good deal of time and effort contacting the list of people I thought should know of Corny’s demise while also penning a suitably ambiguous account of how the news arrived, to the effect: “Though a final confirmation has yet to be made, reliable sources report that Professor Chard died at the hands of a remote tribe on which he was conducting ethnographic research.”

I found on my office phone another recorded communication from Urgent Productions. Mr. Castor’s voice reached out of the little speaker on the phone in a squawk as he apologized a bit too profusely for “losing his cool” during our last conversation. He said he had been under intense pressure from the film’s backers to have “respectful use” of the museum for “the authenticity of the project.” This time I did not find his call a nuisance. On the contrary, it gave me an idea regarding Corny’s fate that I intend to pursue.

While there, I decided to take a look at the room with the baize door in the Skull Collection. Luckily, Mort, back to his usual form, was on duty. He fished out his ring of keys, and we made our way down into the kingdom of grinning death. At first Mort couldn’t open the door. He said the key had been changed. The master wouldn’t fit. But Mort is a man of many resources. He took out of his pocket something that looked like burglar’s tool, pried around for a while, and voilà, the door opened.

Again, there seemed nothing out of place. The table and chairs were as they had been. And just the merest whiff of that distinctive odor I could not place. Until, in making a thorough search of everything in the room, I came across evidence that it had recently been a venue for a meeting. In the wastebasket I