Maigret in Montmartre (3 page)

The first room was a kind of sitting-room—pleasantly furnished, spotlessly clean, and, contrary to what might have been expected, perfectly tidy. The first thing Maigret noticed was the floor—the parquet was as well polished as if it had been in a convent, and there was an agreeable smell of beeswax. He must remember to ask the concierge, on the way out, whether Arlette did her own housework.

Through the half-open door of the bedroom they could see Dr Pasquier putting on his overcoat and arranging his instruments in their case. On the white goatskin rug at the foot of the bed (which had not been disturbed) lay a body in a black satin dress: all they could see was one very white arm and a mass of shining, copper-coloured hair.”

The most pathetic impression always comes from some absurdly trivial detail, and when, this time, Maigret felt a slight lump in his throat, it was because, while one of the girl’s feet was still wearing its high-heeled shoe, the other was unshod, the toes showing through a mud-spattered stocking in which a ladder started from the heel and ran up beyond the knee.

“Dead, of course,” said the doctor. “ The fellow who did it held on to her until he’d made sure of that.”

“Can you say when it happened?”

“Not more than an hour and a half ago. There’s no sign of stiffness yet.”

Maigret noticed behind the door, near the bed, an open cupboard in which dresses were hanging—nearly all evening dresses, most of them black.

“Do you think he caught her from behind?”

“Probably; I found no trace of a struggle. I send my report to you, I suppose, Monsieur Maigret?”

“If you please.”

The bedroom was neat and bright, not at all suggestive of a night-club dancer’s room. Here, again, everything was in order, except that Arlette’s imitation mink coat was flung untidily on the bed, and her handbag lay on an armchair.

Maigret explained:

“She left the Quai des Orfèvres about half past nine. If she took a taxi she must have got here about ten o’clock. If she came by bus or Metro it would be a little later, of course. She must have been attacked at once.”

He went over to the cupboard and looked carefully at the floor inside.

“Someone was waiting for her, hiding in here. He must have grabbed her by the throat the moment she’d taken her coat off.”

It had happened such a short time ago: the police were not often called in so promptly to the scene of a crime.

“You don’t need me any longer, I suppose?” inquired the doctor.

The local Inspector asked, in his turn, whether he need wait till the photographers and other experts arrived, and was glad to get back to his office, which was only a few yards away. As for Lognon, he stood in a corner looking sulky, expecting to be told that he, too, was no longer needed.

“You haven’t found anything?” Maigret asked him as he filled his pipe.

“I had a look in the drawers. See what’s in the left-hand one in the chest of drawers over there.”

It was full of photographs, all of Arlette. Some of them were for publicity, including those which were displayed outside Picratt’s. These showed her in a black silk dress—not the day dress she had on now, but a skin-tight evening dress.

“You belong to this district, Lognon; did you ever see her turn?”

“I never saw it myself, but I know what she had to do. As you can see from these photos at the top of the pile, her “dancing” consisted of wriggling about, more or less in time to the music, while she gradually took off her dress—the only thing she had on. By the end of her act she was stark naked.”

Lognon’s long, bulbous nose twitched and almost seemed to be blushing.

“Seems that’s what they do in America—strip tease, they call it over there. Just as the last stitch dropped off her, the light would go out.”

He hesitated, and then went on:

“Have a look under her dress.”

Seeing that Maigret, surprised, was waiting for more, he added:

“The doctor who examined her called me and showed me. She’s completely shaved. And even out of doors she had nothing on beneath the dress.”

Why did they all three feel embarrassed? By tacit agreement they avoided looking at the body, which still had something wanton in its appearance, as it lay outstretched on the goatskin rug. Maigret only glanced at the remaining photographs, which were smaller—probably taken with an ordinary camera—and showed the girl naked, in the most erotic poses.

“Try to find me an envelope,” he said.

At which Lognon, the damn fool, gave a silent sneer, as though he suspected his superior of taking the things away to gloat over privately in his office.

Janvier, meanwhile, had begun an inch-by-inch inspection of the other room, and this called further attention to a kind of discrepancy between the place and the photographs—between Arlette’s home and her work.

In a cupboard they found a little oil stove, two very clean saucepans, plates, cups, and cutlery, which showed that she used to cook at least some of her own meals. In a meat-safe that hung outside the window, above the courtyard, there were eggs, butter, celery, and two lamb chops.

Another cupboard was full of brooms, dusters, and tins of polish. From all this, in fact, anyone would have imagined the place to belong to some elderly, respectable, even rather fussy housewife.

They looked in vain for letters or private papers. There were a few magazines lying about, but no books, except a cookery book and a French-English dictionary. And no photos of parents, of other girls or of boy-friends, such as most young women display in their rooms.

There were a great many pairs of shoes, with exaggeratedly high heels—most of them almost new. Arlette must have had a passion for shoes, or else her feet were sensitive and she had difficulty in fitting them comfortably.

Her handbag contained a powder-compact, an identity card, and an unmarked handkerchief. Maigret slipped the identity card into his pocket. Then, as though he felt ill at ease in the two small rooms, where the central heating was turned full on, he said to Janvier:

“You wait here for the experts. I’ll probably be back before long, but they’ll be arriving any minute now.”

No envelope had been found, so he pushed the photos into the pocket of his overcoat, smiled at Lognon, known to his colleagues as ‘the churl’—and made for the stairs.

There would be a long, tedious business to be gone through in the house: all the tenants would have to be questioned, including the fat woman with her hair in curlers, who seemed to take an interest in passers-by and might have caught sight of the murderer on his way up or down.

Maigret stopped at the concierge’s room and asked her if he might use the telephone, which stood beside the bed, with a photo of her husband, in uniform, hanging above it.

“Lucas isn’t back yet, I suppose?” he inquired when he got through to the Quai des Orfèvres.

He dictated to another Inspector the particulars entered on the identity card, and went on:

“Get into touch with Moulins. Try to find out whether she has any relations left there. There should be people who knew her, anyhow. If her parents are still alive, have them informed: I expect they’ll come straight up to Paris.”

He was walking along the street towards the Rue Pigalle when he heard a car pull up. It was the photographers. The finger-print people and the rest would be arriving too, and he was anxious to be out of the way while some twenty people bustled about in the two small rooms where the body was still lying as it had fallen.

To the left of Picratt’s was a baker’s shop and to the right a wine merchant’s. At night the place showed up clearly, of course, with its neon-lighted sign standing out against the dark fronts of the neighbouring houses. But in the day-time anyone might walk past without even noticing that it was a night-club.

The façade was narrow, just a door and a window; and in the chilly light of this wet morning the photographs in the show-case looked melancholy and rather suggestive.

It was past noon by now. To Maigret’s surprise, the door was open. One electric lamp was burning inside, and a woman was sweeping the floor between the tables.

“Is the proprietor here?” inquired Maigret.

The woman paused in her work and looked at him calmly.

“Why do you want to know?” she asked.

“I’d like to have a word with him.”

“He’s asleep. I’m his wife.”

She must be over fifty—nearly sixty, perhaps. She was stout, but still alert, with fine brown eyes in a plump face.

“I am Inspector Maigret, of the Judicial Police.”

Even at this she showed no uneasiness.

“Please sit down.”

It was dark inside, and the red walls and hangings looked almost black. Only the bottles behind the bar, just inside the open door caught some gleams of daylight.

The room was long and narrow, with a low ceiling. There was a small platform for the musicians, on which stood a piano and an accordion in its case; and on either side of the dance floor the walls were divided, by partitions about five feet high, into boxes where clients could sit in comparative privacy.

“Must I really wake Fred?” asked the woman. She was wearing bedroom slippers and an old dress with a grey apron over it, and she had not yet washed or done her hair.

“Are you here at night?”

“I look after the cloakrooms and do the cooking if clients want a meal,” she explained.

“Do you live in this house?”

“Yes, on the
entresol
. There’s a staircase at the back, leading from the kitchen to our own rooms. But we have a house at Bougival where we go on closing days.”

She seemed quite unperturbed. Her curiosity must have been stirred by the arrival of such an important member of the police force. But she was used to seeing all kinds of people, and she waited patiently for an explanation.

“Have you had this place for long?”

“It’ll be eleven years next month.”

“Do you get a lot of clients?”

“It varies.”

Maigret caught sight of a card on which was printed, in English:

Finish the night at Picratt’s,

The hottest spot in Paris.

He had forgotten most of his English, but realized that ‘hottest’ in this sense must mean exciting—or, on second thoughts, something a bit stronger and more precise than that.

The woman was still gazing calmly at him.

“Won’t you have something to drink?”

She obviously knew that he would refuse.

“What do you do with these cards?”

“Give them to the porters at the big hotels, who pass them on to visitors—especially Americans. And at night, late, when the foreigners are beginning to get bored with the larger night-spots and don’t know where to go next, the Grasshopper strolls about outside and hands cards to them. And he drops them into cars and taxis. We do our real business after the other places close. You understand?”

He understood. Most people, by the time they got here, had been wandering round Montmartre for some time without finding what they wanted, and this was their last shot.

“I suppose most of your clients are half drunk when they come inhere?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Did you have many people last night?”

“It was Monday. There’s never a crowd on Mondays.”

“From where you stand, can you see what goes on in this part of the place?”

She pointed down the room: at the far end, to the left of the musicians’ platform, was a door marked ‘Toilet’. To the right was another door, with no inscription.

“I’m nearly always there. We aren’t keen on serving meals, but sometimes people ask for onion soup,
foie gras
, or cold lobster. And then I go off to the kitchen for a few minutes.”

“Otherwise you stay in this room?”

“Most of the time. I keep an eye on the women, and at the right moment I come along with a box of chocolates, or some flowers, or one of those satin dolls. You know how it’s done, I expect.”

She was not putting on any airs. By this time she had sat down, with a sigh of relief, and now she shook the slipper ofl one swollen, shapeless foot.

“What are you trying to get at? I don’t want to hurry you, but it’ll soon be time for me to go and wake Fred. He’s a man and he needs more sleep than I do.”

“What time did you get to bed?”

“About five o’clock. Sometimes I don’t get upstairs till seven.”

“And when did you get up?”

“An hour ago. As you see, I’d finished sweeping.”

“Did your husband go to bed at the same time as you?”

“He went upstairs five minutes before me.”

“Has he been out of doors this morning?”

“He hasn’t been out of his bed.”

This insistence on her husband’s doings was making her a little uneasy at last.

“It’s not him you’re after, is it?”

“Not specially. But I’m after two men who came here last night, about two o’clock, and sat in one of the boxes. Do you remember them?”

“Two men?”

She looked round at each table in turn, as though searching her memory.

“Do you remember where Arlette was before her turn came round for the second time?”

“Yes, she was with her young man. I even told her she was wasting her time.”

“Does he often come here?”

“He’s been two or three times lately. Every now and then a man does stray in like that and fall in love with one of the girls. As I always tell them, it’s all right for once, but they mustn’t let it keep on happening. They were both here, in the third box as you look in from the street—N°6. I could see them from where I stood. He was holding her hands all the time, and talking away to her with the soppy expression they all get when they’re in that mood.”

“And who was in the next box?”

“I didn’t see anyone.”

“Not at any time in the evening?”

“You can easily make sure. The tables haven’t been wiped yet. If there was anybody at that one there’ll be cigar or cigarette ends in the ash-tray, and the marks left by glasses on the table itself.”

She sat still, leaving him to go and look.

“I don’t see anything.”

“If it had been any other day I wouldn’t be so positive; but Mondays are so slack, we sometimes think it isn’t worth opening. I wouldn’t mind betting we didn’t have a dozen clients in all. My husband will be able to tell you exactly.”