Maigret and the Spinster (5 page)

This was true. Maigret remembered seeing it. But, in that case, why had she hesitated when he had asked her about the staircase light?

“Thank you, mademoiselle. You may go now. Your parents will be wondering.”

“My parents and my sister have gone to the movies…”

She looked crestfallen. Surely she hadn’t expected Maigret to go up with her to the apartment!

“Don’t you have any other questions to ask me?”

“No…Good evening.”

“Is it true that Cécile is dead?”

By way of reply, he shut the door on her.

“It’s a disgrace, saving your presence,” sighed the concierge. “Another glass of wine, Chief Superintendent?…I wouldn’t put it past her to be taking men up to the apartment in the absence of her parents. Did you see the way she looked at you? It quite made me blush for my own sex…”

Cars and trucks rumbled endlessly past. Maigret returned to the cane armchair, which creaked under his weight. The concierge got up to refill the stove and, when she sat down again, the cat jumped up onto her lap. It was hot. Everything seemed very remote. The cars and trucks belonged to a distant world, almost, as it were, to another planet. With the lodge as the center, the real world was confined within the walls of the building. Above the bed hung the rubber bulb which released the catch of the front door.

“I take it no one could get into the house without your knowing it?”

“I don’t see how, there are no keys…”

“What about the shops?”

“The doors leading into the building have been bricked up. Madame Boynet was scared of burglars.”

“You say that, in the past few months, she never left the house?”

“Mind you, she wasn’t absolutely helpless. She was able to move about the apartment using a cane. Sometimes, she even managed to get as far as the landing, to spy on the tenants or check on whether I’d cleaned the place properly…You never heard her coming…She crept about in felt slippers, and she’d had her cane fitted with a rubber tip.”

“Did she have many visitors?”

“None…except for her nephew, Monsieur Gérard, who would look in from time to time. Mademoiselle Berthe never came near her aunt…I believe, saving your presence, that she has a steady boy friend. I ran into her one Sunday, when I was visiting the cemetery, in company with a very respectable-looking gentleman of about thirty. I had the feeling that he was a married man, though I couldn’t see whether he was wearing a wedding ring.”

“In other words, Madame Boynet lived quite alone with Cécile?”

“That poor girl! So gentle, so devoted! Her aunt treated her like a servant, but she never complained! Now there’s one who couldn’t be accused of running after men! And besides, she wasn’t strong. Her health was far from good. She had stomach aches, but that didn’t keep her from carting the garbage can down five flights of stairs, and going back carrying a bucket of coal.”

“I suppose it was Cécile who took the money to the bank?”

“What bank?”

“I presume that when Madame Boynet received her rent money…”

“She wouldn’t have put her money in the bank for all the tea in China. She was far too mistrustful…Come to think of it, I remember now that, at the beginning, Monsieur Bourniquel wanted to pay by check.”

“‘What’s this?’ she exclaimed indignantly. ‘Just you go and tell the man that I want cash…”

“Monsieur Bourniquel dug his toes in. He stuck to his guns for a fortnight, but in the end he had to give in…”

“Another glass, Chief Superintendent? I’m not a great one for drink as a rule, saving your presence, but with the right occasion…”

The bell sounded above the bed. She got up, leaned across the eiderdown, pressed the rubber bulb, and announced:

“That’s Monsieur Deséglise, the tenant of the third-floor left. He’s an inspector with the bus company. He’s on shift work.”

And, to prove it, a man went past the lodge wearing the cap of the municipal bus company.

“The other tenant on that floor is a piano teacher, a spinster. Her name is Mademoiselle Paucot. Her pupils arrive at hourly intervals, and you can’t think how they mess up the stairs when it’s raining. I’m surprised Monsieur Dandurand isn’t back yet…When I think of what that impudent kid dared to insinuate…Those little minxes, vicious as they are, wouldn’t think twice about putting a man behind bars just to draw attention to themselves. Did you see the way she looked at you? You, an elderly married man and a public official…I know what that means, because my husband was a public official himself. He worked on the railroad. Ah! good…here is Monsieur Dandurand.”

She got up and once again leaned across the bed to press the rubber bulb. Lights came on in the hall and on the stairs. The soft swish of an umbrella being closed was followed by the careful scraping of shoes on a mat.

“You won’t find him leaving dirty marks all over the place…”

A dry cough. Slow, measured footsteps. The door of the lodge opened.

“Any mail for me, Madame Benoit?”

“Nothing tonight, saving your presence, Monsieur Dandurand.”

A man of seventy, with a gray complexion and gray hair, dressed all in black, carrying a damp umbrella. As he raised his eyes to meet the Chief Superintendent’s, Maigret frowned, feeling sure that he had seen him somewhere before.

And yet, when he had first heard the name Dandurand a little while ago, it had meant nothing to him. He was sure he knew the man. He searched his memory. Where could it have been?

“You are Chief Superintendent Maigret, aren’t you?” said the tenant quietly, still standing in the doorway. “Would you believe it, Chief Superintendent, I’ve just come from your office. I know it’s outside office hours, but I am also aware that occasionally you…”

A name leaped into Maigret ’s mind…Monsieur Charles…Suddenly he was convinced that there was a connection between that name and the man who stood before him. Now what was it that that name conveyed to him? A small café patronized by…

“Is there something urgent you have to tell me?”

“Well…I thought…if you would be so kind as to come up to my apartment for a moment…Excuse us, Madame Benoit…Forgive me, Chief Superintendent, for putting you to the trouble of climbing four flights of stairs…I have only just learned at the Quai des Orfèvres that poor Mademoiselle Cécile…I confess it was a great shock…”

Maigret got up and followed Monsieur Dandurand up the stairs.

“I could see you recognized me, even if you couldn’t recall…We’d better hurry, or we’ll be left in the dark…”

He felt in his pocket for his key and inserted it in the lock. Maigret looked up and saw Nouchi, in shadowy outline, leaning over the banisters. No sooner had he done so than a blob of spittle landed with a plop at their feet.

Monsieur Dandurand was sensitive to cold. He was wearing a coat even thicker and heavier than Maigret’s, and a long woolen muffler wound around his neck. He was unhealthy and unkempt—looking like so many elderly bachelors—and his apartment smelled as he did of stale pipe smoke, soiled underwear, and solitude.

“One moment…I’ll switch on the light.”

His study might have been that of a lawyer or a business consultant. Dark furniture, black shelves filled with law books, tables covered with green file boxes, periodicals, and documents.

“You do smoke, I think?”

He himself had a row of ten or so pipes carefully set out on his desk. Having first pulled the blind down over the window, he filled one for himself.

“Do you still not remember me? Admittedly, we only met twice, the first time at Chez Albert, on Rue Blanche…”

“I know, Monsieur Charles…”

“The other time…”

“In my office at the Quai des Orfèvres, eight years ago. I had a few questions to ask you…And I must admit that you had an answer to everything.”

A cold smile, a frozen smile on a frozen face, colorless but for a tinge of pink in the fleshy nose.

“Please take a seat…I was out this morning.”

“May I ask where you were?”

“Now that I know what’s happened, I realize that this is going to look bad for me…All the same, I may as well admit that I spend a good deal of my time in the Palais de Justice. Owing to my former connection with the law, I daresay, I can’t seem to lose the habit…Ever since…”

“Ever since you were disbarred in Fontenay-le-Comte…”

A vague shrug, as if to say: Just so…but it’s of so little consequence!

And the former lawyer from the provinces went on:

“I spend most of my time at the courts…Take today, for instance…There was a most interesting case being heard in Court Thirteen…A case of blackmail within a family…Maître Boniface, who represented the son-in-law…”

Monsieur Dandurand, formerly Maître Dandurand, who had been living in one of the oldest private residences in Fontenay, was forever cracking his stiff finger joints.

“Please stop fidgeting with your fingers and tell me what you went to see me about in my office,” sighed Maigret, relighting his pipe, which had gone out.

“I am so sorry…When I left the house at eight o’clock this morning, I was unaware of what had happened in the apartment upstairs. It wasn’t until four o’clock, in the Palais, that one of my friends…”

“You learned of the murder of Madame Juliette Boynet, née Cazenove, who, like yourself, came from Fontenay-le-Comte.”

“That is so, Chief Superintendent. I came back home, but you were not here. I preferred to say nothing to the policeman on duty outside…I returned by streetcar to the Quai des Orfèvres. You must have been on your way here by then. Chief Superintendent Cassieux, who knows me…”

“You must indeed be known, under the name of Monsieur Charles, to the head of the Vice Squad…”

Dandurand went on as though he had not heard:

“Chief Superintendent Cassieux told me about Cécile and about…”

Maigret got up and tiptoed across the tiny hallway, the door leading to which stood ajar. When, abruptly, he flung open the front door, Nouchi, whose eye had been glued to the keyhole, almost fell flat on her face. She straightened up just in time, and was off up the stairs like greased lightning.

“You were saying?”

“Knowing that I should find you here, I decided to have dinner first…Then I had to wait some time for a streetcar on Place Saint-Michel. But here I am at last…I wanted to tell you myself that I was in Madame Boynet’s apartment last night, sometime between midnight and one o’clock…She and I were friends, and I was, in a sense, her professional adviser.”

Without realizing what he was doing he cracked his finger joints again, and then hastily murmured an apology:

“Forgive me…Old habits die hard…”

I
t was a little after ten o’clock at night. Madame Maigret, having finished turning down the big double bed, was standing in front of the glass-fronted wardrobe beside it, putting her hair in curlers with the aid of hairpins that she was holding in her mouth. Boulevard Richard-Lenoir was deserted. The main road beyond the Porte d’Orléans was also deserted, glinting under the rain, but only a few seconds later a procession of three, four, six cars appeared on it, preceded by a broad beam of brilliant light.

These headlights, as they went past, barely brushed against Madame Boynet’s house, disproportionately tall as it was, and the uglier for having no neighboring houses to conceal its rough-hewn sides.

Madame Piéchaud’s grocery store was still showing a light. The proprietress was sitting in front of the stove in the shop to save fuel. On the other side of the front door of the building, the bicycle shop was dark, except for a patch of light from the open door to the back room, where there could be seen a bed and a young man polishing shoes.

The Siveschis had gone to the movies. The concierge, reluctant to go to bed while Maigret was still in the house, was consoling herself by finishing the bottle of red wine, while at the same time entertaining her cat with a commentary on the events of the day.

Over there at the Forensic Laboratory, far away on the other side of Paris, two bodies lay in drawers in that vast human cold-storage plant.

In Monsieur Dandurand’s apartment, Maigret puffed at his pipe, avoiding, as best he could, looking the former lawyer in the eye. The apartment, it seemed, was never aired, since all the usual household smells were blended in a sickening, musty staleness that seeped into one’s clothing and clung for a long time afterward.

“Tell me, Monsieur Dandurand…if I’m not mistaken, it was in connection with a vice charge, was it not, that you were forced to leave Fontenay? Let’s see…it’s ancient history by now, but your name came up at police headquarters only a few weeks back…you got two years.”

“That’s right,” the lawyer replied coolly.

And Maigret huddled deeper into his heavy overcoat, as if to insulate himself against any physical contact with this man. He had not taken off his hat. In spite of his apparent grumpiness, Maigret was very generous toward most forms of human weakness, but there were some people who so revolted him that he physically shrank from them. Monsieur Dandurand was among them.

This revulsion was so deep-seated that Maigret was never wholly at ease in the presence of his colleague Cassieux, who, as head of the Vice Squad, was in charge of all matters connected with personal morality.

It was Cassieux who had spoken to him of this man, generally known as Monsieur Charles, a lawyer from the provinces, who had been mixed up in a nasty case concerning the corruption of minors, and had served a two-year term before landing up in Paris.

His was a rather unusual case, conducive to reflections on the strangeness of human destiny. Barred from the exercise of his profession, and swallowed up in the capital city where he was unknown, Dandurand, still possessed of an ample income from investments, was able freely to gratify his vicious tastes. He was one of those dingy, somewhat repulsive, shifty-eyed men who during daytime keep in the shadows and only come to life when they are elbowing their way through the crowds in pursuit of a likely victim.

The former lawyer had been spotted loitering near the Porte Saint-Martin, Boulevard Sébastopol, and the Bastille—one of the many furtive characters that haunt factory gates and the exits of big stores, and who, at nightfall, scuffle, hunched up and muffled, into the dark doorway of some disreputable establishment catering to their special tastes.