Du Droit de Punir (1871)

Aging friends meet once a week at a nearby mall to play bridgeaexercise their brainsalaugh, eat lunch and exchange personal information about feelings, family and ideas as well as personal health issues. Their friendships go back many years to playing tennis together as well as other group activities. Now, however, they are not as active as they once were, and for some of them, bridge has become their mode of (often obsessive) competition. Interacting upon them (from a distance) are other aplayersa who have reached a higher competitive level of play in the local bridge hierarchy. The major player here is Robert Milton Agee, a disgruntled, divorced retiree with familial mayhem on his mind, which turns into actual murderaall to the horror of the women friends, as well as the local bridge-playing community in general. In the end, the only retribution could be called cerebral, completely open to conjecture, incomprehensible to everyone when the perpetrator dramatically expires, leaving everyone totally flummoxed with no recourse to a much-desired explanation. In the bridge-playing vernacular, aAces and spaces.a