Maigret and the Spinster (10 page)

“How do you do, Chief Superintendent. Please be seated. My client…”

“One moment!” interposed Maigret. “I was not aware that Monsieur Monfils was in need of a lawyer at this stage.”

“I am here merely to represent his financial interests, I assure you. The present situation appears to be somewhat confused, and until the will has been found…”

“How do you know that any will exists?”

“Oh, come now, it stands to reason! A woman as rich and hardheaded as Madame Boynet, formerly Cazenove, would surely not fail to…”

At this juncture, Madame Monfils and her five sons irrupted into the conservatory, the boys following one another in descending order of height.

“Please excuse us,” murmured the lady, with a suitably doleful smile. “We’re leaving, Henri! We’ve barely time to get to the station…
Au revoir,
Chief Superintendent.
Au revoir,
Maître Leloup. You won’t be staying on much longer in Paris, will you, Henri?”

The children embraced their father, one by one. The porter waited with the luggage. At long last they left, and Henri Monfils, having poured two glasses of brandy and handed one to Maigret without a word, began:

“I thought it my duty, Chief Superintendent, my duty to my family in particular, to consult a lawyer, so that he could represent me in any future dealings with you, and…”

Monfils’s nose was running. He got his handkerchief out of his pocket only just in time. As he was doing so, the Chief Superintendent got up and grabbed his bowler hat, which he had put down on a chair. Monfils stared at him in amazement. “But…Where are you going?”

“If Maître Leloup has any statement to make, he is welcome to come and do so in my office,” retorted Maigret. “Good day, gentlemen.”

Henri Monfils was dumfounded.

“What’s the matter?…What’s got into him?”

And his legal adviser, leaning back in his wicker armchair and warming his brandy snifter in the palm of his plump hand, murmured reassuringly:

“Don’t take any notice…It’s just his way…These police johnnies don’t like conducting their business through a professional intermediary. He was annoyed at finding me here. Leave it to me, and I’ll…”

He interrupted himself to give all his attention to biting off the end of the cigar which his client had presented to him.

“Take my word for it…”

The early editions of the evening papers, which had just come off the presses, ran pictures of the funeral. One of them featured Maigret in a prominent position on the edge of Cécile’s grave, next to the priest, who was sprinkling holy water.

If they could have seen Maigret, with his hands in his pockets and his pipe clenched between his teeth, lumbering down Boulevard Montparnasse with a thoroughly disgruntled air, stopping outside a movie house plastered in brightly colored posters, and, after some little hesitation, going up to the box office and handing over some money, they would have been very much astonished. They being Jourdan, pounding the beat outside the house in Bourg-la-Reine, where lights were beginning to show in the windows; the head of the Sûreté, speaking on the telephone in his office, and wondering what on earth to say in reply to the Public Prosecutor’s questions; and Madame Maigret, busy polishing her brass.

Having bought his ticket, Maigret obediently followed the usherette, in her black silk dress with the Peter Pan collar, as she led him, shining her flashlight, up the narrow stairs.

“Excuse me…Excuse me…Excuse me…”

He squeezed past the row of occupied seats, uncomfortably aware that he was creating a disturbance and treading on a great many toes.

He had no idea what film he was seeing. Booming voices, seemingly coming from nowhere, filled the auditorium, and on the screen a ship’s captain tossed a girl onto his bunk.

“So you came here to spy on me…”

“Have pity on me, Captain Brown. If not for my sake, at least for…”

“Excuse me,” whispered a shy little voice to the right of the Chief Superintendent.

And Maigret could feel the woman next to him pulling something from under him. He had sat down on part of her coat.

M
aigret was feeling warm, “warm and cozy,” as he used to say when he was a child, and if the lights had suddenly been turned on, he would have appeared, leaning back, huddled in his overcoat, with his hands in his pockets and his eyes half closed, as the very incarnation of contentment.

But in fact it was just a device, a little game that he played with himself whenever he became so saturated with a single problem that he felt incapable of further reasoning. If it had been summer, he would have been sitting in the sun on a café terrace with a glass of beer in front of him, his eyes half shut, simmering.

When they had put in central heating at the Quai des Orfèvres, and the Chief Superintendent had sought and obtained permission to keep his old anthracite stove, some of the young inspectors had raised their eyebrows. Had they but known, it was just the old familiar game. Whenever things were going badly, whenever he had teased and worried a particular problem until it had lost all meaning and become a tangle of loose ends, Maigret would fill his stove to bursting point and then after poking it and turning it full on, toast himself on both sides in front of it. Little by little he would be filled with a glow of well-being, his eyelids would begin to prickle, and he would see everything around him through a haze, which was not entirely due to the smoke of his never extinguished pipe.

In this torpid bodily state, his mind was freed, as in dreams, to wander at will, sometimes in pursuit of will-o’—the-wisps, but occasionally along paths which reason alone could never have discovered.

Madame Maigret had never caught on. Often, after an evening at the movies, she would touch him on the arm and say with a sigh:

“You slept through it again, Maigret…I can’t see the point of spending twelve francs for a seat when you have a perfectly good bed at home.”

The auditorium was pitch-dark, heated by the warmth generated by hundreds of human bodies, pulsating with the lives of all these people, so close together and yet unknown to one another. Above their heads ran the long, triangular beam of pallid light from the projection room, a focus for tobacco smoke.

If anyone had asked him what the film was about…As if that mattered…He watched the images flickering on the screen without attempting to relate to them in any way. Then, conscious of a slight rustle nearby, he looked down.

This powerful man, who for nearly thirty years had, in a sense, been involved with the uttermost frenzy of human passion, with murder, that is, was a puritan. In the semidarkness, he could sense the movements of the woman next to him and her companion’s on the other side, though all he could see was the man’s pale hand. He gave a brief shocked cough. Earlier, when she had pulled her coat from under him, he had had the impression that she was very young. She was motionless. Her face was white, like the man’s hand, like the patch of thigh that he was uncovering, while keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the screen.

Uncomfortably, the Chief Superintendent coughed again, twice.

The lovers ignored him. The girl could not have been much older than Nouchi.

Come to think of it, when Nouchi had seen Gérard going into the building in Bourg-la-Reine, at seven o’clock at night…But had she really seen him? She, too, had been with a man in the dark, pressed up against a wall, no doubt…

The soft sound of a kiss beside him…He could almost taste the moist, unfamiliar mouth…He slumped deeper inside the collar of his overcoat.

Not long ago, Nouchi had been impudently provocative…If he had been so inclined…Was it a common feature of adolescent girlhood, this inclination to throw themselves at the head of any older man, just because he was fairly well known or generally respected?

I bet he’s a lot older than she is! he mused, with reference to his neighbor’s companion.

He was not thinking, but leaving his mind open to any stray scrap of an idea that might come into it, without any attempt at order or coherence.

Had the little Hungarian girl been lying about Monsieur Charles? Surely not. Dandurand was just the sort of man to spy on a young girl through a crack in the door and to show her pornographic photographs. As for Nouchi, she would be all too ready to lead him on to the limit, knowing that, in the last resort, she could shout for help…

The thing that really worried him was her claim that she had seen Gérard Pardon going into the building at seven in the evening, at the very time when Madame “Saving-Your-Presence” was chatting with the Deséglises, out of sight of the stairs.

After she has made her statement officially…

So the word of a perverse kid would be enough to send a man to prison, and who could tell…?

He was troubled, ill at ease. It was not only the thought of Gérard slinking out of the door leading onto Boulevard Arago in the small hours…He was still watching the screen…He frowned. For the last few minutes, he had been conscious of something unnatural. Suddenly he realized what it was: the lips of the characters in the film were moving, but the spoken words did not correspond. In fact, the lips were forming English words, while the sound track was in French. In other words, the film was dubbed.

The couple next to him were behaving more and more outrageously, but the Chief Superintendent’s mind was elsewhere. What was it that had been baffling him for the past three days? That was the key question, though he had not realized it. Now he understood. There was a jarring note somewhere in this case. Somewhere, something did not ring true. What was it? As yet, he had no idea.

With eyes half shut, he could see the wedge-shaped building on the Route Nationale more clearly than if he had been standing outside it, looking in at the windows of the bicycle shop and the widow Piéchaud’s grocery store. In fact, as he had discovered the previous day, she was not a widow. Her husband had left her for a woman of easy virtue, as the phrase is, and she considered this so shameful that she chose to be known as a widow.

But Madame “Saving-Your-Presence,” in her cozy lodge, with her head askew and her neck enveloped in surgical wadding…

Just because she herself had never opened the front door to a stranger, it had been too hastily assumed that no one had entered or left the building that night.

Now, it had been proved that it was possible to get into the building at seven o’clock in the evening without being seen by the concierge. Who was to say that there were not other times in the day when the same conditions obtained?

Up there on the top floor, that eccentric old woman, Juliette Boynet, had chosen to make a mystery of the visits of Charles Dandurand when he called to discuss her investments in enterprises which were, to say the least, morally dubious. It was all very unsavory but, human nature being what it is, not so very surprising. She was not the first of her kind that Maigret had encountered in the course of his career.

He had met others like Dandurand as well.

What was it, then, that did not ring true, that was contrary to his experience of human nature?

The old woman had been strangled, soon after Dandurand’s departure, as she was about to get into bed. She had still been wearing one stocking.

Was one to suppose that there was a third key in existence, and that it was in the possession of Monsieur Charles? Was one to believe that he had gone into the apartment with the intention of killing the old woman?

He, too, was rich. Juliette was worth more to him alive than dead.

One of his underworld cronies? They were not beginners, faceless hooligans game for anything, but successful men, substantial property owners who would not wish to be mixed up in anything downright criminal.

They were telling the truth when they claimed that this business was a nuisance and an embarrassment to them.

Gérard Pardon…?

By this time, the two next to Maigret were frankly going too far, just as if they had the whole of the dark auditorium to themselves.

Maigret had to keep firm control on himself or he would have shouted:

“Stop it, damn you!”

…Gérard, creeping into his sister’s bedroom at seven in the evening, and hiding there…Gérard present, though concealed from view, at the encounter between Juliette Boynet and Monsieur Charles, perhaps witnessing the handing over of a wad of notes, and determined to get possession of them as soon as his aunt was alone…

Very well! In that case, it must be supposed that Gérard, having committed the murder, had spent the rest of the night in the apartment, since the concierge had not let anyone out.

It would therefore follow that Cécile had been intending to name her brother as the murderer when she sat waiting for Maigret in the “aquarium” at the Quai des Orfèvres…

If all this were true, then it must have been Gérard who had lured her into the broom closet.

But how could Gérard Pardon, who had never had any dealings with the police, possibly have known of the existence of that broom closet, let alone of the door connecting the Police Judiciaire building with the Palais de Justice?

A sudden stirring beside him, a skirt being pulled down, the final credits on the screen, all the lights blazing at once, a prolonged tramping of feet.

Maigret, standing in line like everyone else, looked at his neighbor with interest and saw a serene little face, fresh rounded cheeks, and innocently smiling eyes. He had guessed right, the man she was with was in his forties and wore a wedding ring.

Still feeling somewhat dazed, the Chief Superintendent went out into the noisy hubbub of Boulevard Montparnasse. The time, he guessed, was about six. It was growing dark. Shadowy figures hurried past the lighted shop windows. Feeling thirsty, he went into La Coupole, sat down at a table near the window, and ordered a beer.

He was in a state of indolent lassitude, postponing the time when he would have to return to the harsh realities of life. By rights, he ought to be hurrying back to the Quai des Orfèvres, where Lucas was no doubt grappling with his Pole.

Instead, he ordered a ham sandwich and went on gazing dreamily at the passing crowds. Just now in the movie it had taken him a while, as much as a quarter of an hour perhaps, to identify the cause of his uneasiness, namely, the disparity between the lip movements on the screen and the words on the sound track.