Maigret in Montmartre (6 page)

Then, after an interval of several years, he turned up in Marseilles, where he was recruiting girls for several brothels in the South of France. He was twenty-eight years old by that time. He was not yet a leading light in the underworld, but he was already too big a man to soil his hands in fights in the bars of the Vieux Port.

He had no prison sentences during that period, though there was one narrow escape over a girl of only seventeen whom he had prematurely ‘placed’, with forged identity papers, in Le Paradis, an establishment at Béziers.

Then came another gap. All that was known was that he had gone to Panama with a cargo of women, five or six of them, aboard an Italian boat, and had gained a certain notoriety over there.

At the age of forty he was back in Paris, living with Rosalie Dumont, alias La Rose, a woman well into middle-age, who had a beauty parlour in the Rue des Martyrs. He was a keen race-goer and boxing enthusiast, and was thought to take bets as a sideline.

After a time he had married Rose, and together they had opened Picratt’s, which was originally no more than a small bar with its own group of regular customers.

Janvier had gone back after lunch to the Rue Notre-Dame de Loretta. He was not in Arlette’s flat, as he was still questioning the neighbours—not only the other tenants in the building, but the nearby shopkeepers and everyone else who might have any information.

As for Lucas, he was left alone to clear up the Javel burglary, and was thoroughly disgruntled about it.

It was ten minutes to five, and darkness had fallen long ago, when the telephone rang in Maigret’s office and he heard what he had been expecting all day.

“This is the Emergency Centre.”

“Is it about the Countess?” he asked.

“It’s
a
Countess, at any rate. I don’t know if she’s the one you’re after. We’ve just had a call from the Rue Victor Massé. A few minutes ago the concierge discovered that one of her tenants had been murdered, probably last night…”

“A Countess?”

“Countess von Farnheim.”

“Shot?”

“No, strangled. That’s all we know so far. The local police are on the spot.”

A few moments later, Maigret jumped into a taxi, which took an endless time to get through the centre of Paris. Going along the Rue Notre-Dame de Lorette, he caught sight of Janvier coming out of a greengrocer’s shop, so he stopped the cab and called to him:

“Jump in, the Countess is dead!”

“A real Countess?”

“I don’t know. It’s quite near here. The whole business is happening in this district.”

For Picratt’s, in the Rue Pigalle, was scarcely five hundred yards from Arlette’s flat, and about the same distance from the Rue Victor-Massé.

On this new occasion the scene was different from that of the morning, for a score of inquisitive idlers were hanging round the door of the comfortable, respectable-looking house.

“Is the Chief Inspector there?”

“He wasn’t at the station. It’s Inspector Lognon who…”

Poor Lognon! He was so eager to distinguish himself, and every time he started on a case he seemed fated to have it taken out of his hands by Maigret.

The concierge was not in her quarters. The walls of the staircase were painted to imitate marble, and there was a dark red stair carpet held in place by brass rods. The atmosphere was rather stuffy, as though all the tenants were old people who never opened their windows; and the place was strangely silent—not one door so much as quivered while Maigret and Janvier were on their way up. On reaching the fourth floor, however, they heard sounds, and a door opened to reveal the long, lugubrious face of Lognon, who was talking to a very short, very fat woman with a tight bun of hair on the top of her head.

They went into the room, which was dimly lit by a standard lamp with a parchment shade. The atmosphere here was more oppressive than in the rest of the house. They suddenly felt, without quite knowing why, as if they were far removed from Paris, from the outside world, from the damp streets with their crowded pavements, the screeching taxis, the hurtling buses with their abruptly grinding brakes.

The place was so hot that Maigret took off his overcoat at once.

“Where is she?”

“In the bedroom.”

The first room was a kind of drawing-room, or had been but in these surroundings the usual names didn’t seem to fit. The whole place looked, somehow, as though it had been put ready for an auction sale, with all the furniture in unaccustomed places.

There were bottles lying round everywhere, and Maigret noticed that they had all contained red wine—the coarse red wine that navvies drink straight from the bottle, to wash down their lunch-time sausage as they sit by the roadside. There was sausage too—not on a plate, but on a piece of greasy paper, mixed up with scraps of chicken; and chicken bones were strewn on the carpet.

The carpet itself was threadbare and incredibly dirty, and the rest of the furniture was no better—there was a chair with a broken leg, a sofa with tufts of horsehair escaping from it, and the parchment shade on the lamp was singed brown with long use, and quite shapeless.

Next door, in the bedroom, on a bed which had no sheets and had not been made for several days, lay a half-naked body—exactly half-naked, for the upper part was more or less covered by a bodice, while from waist to feet the puffy, livid flesh was bare.

Maigret’s first glance took in the little blue specks on the thighs, and told him that he would find a syringe somewhere at hand. He found two—one with a broken needle—on what served as a bedside table.

The dead woman appeared to be at least sixty, but it was difficult to judge. No one had touched the body as yet. The doctor had not arrived. But she had obviously been dead for a long time.

The cover of the mattress on which she lay had a long slit in it, and some of the stuffing had been pulled out.

There were bottles in this room, too, and scraps of food; and, right in the middle of the floor, a chamber-pot with urine in it.

“Did she live by herself?” asked Maigret turning to the concierge.

The woman nodded, with pursed lips.

“Did she have many visitors?”

“If she had, she’d probably have kept the place a bit cleaner, wouldn’t she?” retorted the woman—adding, as though she felt the need to defend herself:

“I’ve not set foot in here for at least three years, until today.”

“Wouldn’t she let you in?”

“I didn’t want to come in.”

“Had she no servant or charwoman?”

“Nobody. Only a woman friend, as crazy as herself, who used to look in now and then.”

“Do you know her?”

“Not by name, but I see her sometimes in the streets round here. She’s not quite so far gone yet. That’s to say she wasn’t when I last saw her, which was some little time ago.”

“Did you know your tenant was a drug addict?”

“I knew she was half crazy.”

“Were you concierge here when she took the flat?”

“I’d have taken care she didn’t. It’s only three years since we came to the house, my husband and I, and she’s been here for at least eight. I’ve done my best to get rid of her.”

“Is she really a Countess?”

“So it seems. At any rate she was married to a Count; but before that she can’t have been any great shakes.”

“Was she well off?”

“I suppose so, for it wasn’t starvation she died of.”

“You didn’t see anyone going up to her flat?”

“When?”

“Last night or this morning.”

“No. Her woman friend didn’t come. Neither did the young man.”

“What young man?”

“A nice-mannered, sickly-looking boy with long hair, who used to visit her and called her ‘Aunt’.”

“You don’t know his name?”

“I never concerned myself with her affairs. The rest of the house is quiet enough. The first floor tenants are nearly always away, and the second floor is a retired General. You see the style of the place. This woman was so filthy that I used to hold my nose as I went past the door.”

“Did she never have a doctor in?”

“I should think she did! About twice a week. Whenever she was really drunk, on wine or whatever it was, she’d imagine she was dying and ring up her doctor. He knew her, and was never in a hurry to come.”

“A local man, was he?”

“Yes—Dr Bloch, who lives three houses farther down the street.”

“Was it he you rang up when you found the body?”

“No. That wasn’t my business. I got on to the police at once. First the Inspector came, and then you.”

“Would you try to get Dr Bloch on the phone, Janvier? Ask him to come along as soon as he can.”

Janvier began a search for the telephone, which he finally discovered in another, smaller room, where it was on the floor, surrounded by old magazines and tattered books.

Maigret continued to question the concierge.

“Is it easy for anyone to get into the house without your seeing them?”

“Same as in any other house, what?” came the sharp retort. “I do my job as well as any other concierge—better than most and you won’t find a speck of dust on the staircase.”

“Are those the only stairs?”

“There’s a service flight, but hardly anybody uses it. And if they do, they still have to come past my door.”

“Are you there all the time?”

“Except when I’m out shopping: even a concierge has to eat.”

“What time do you do your shopping?”

“About half past eight in the morning, as soon as the postman has been round and I’ve taken up the letters.”

“Did the Countess get many letters?”

“Only circulars. From shops that must have seen her name in the directory and got excited because she had a title.”

“Do you know Monsieur Oscar?”

“Oscar who?”

“Any Oscar.”

“Well, there’s my son.”

“How old is he?”

“Seventeen. He’s apprenticed to a carpenter in the Boulevard Barbès.”

“Does he live here with you?”

“Of course.”

Janvier, having made his call, came in to report:

“The doctor’s at home. He had two more patients to see and then he’ll come at once.”

Inspector Lognon was keeping ostentatiously aloof all this time—touching nothing and pretending not to listen to what the concierge was saying.

“Did the Countess ever get any letters with a bank address on them?”

“Never.”

“Did she go out much?”

“She sometimes stayed in for ten or twelve days at a stretch—in fact I used to wonder if she wasn’t dead, for there wouldn’t be a sound out of her. She must have been lying in a stupor on that filthy bed. Then she’d dress up, put on a hat and gloves, and one would almost have taken her for a lady, except that she always had a kind of wild look on her face.”

“Did she stay out long, at such times?”

“It varied. Sometimes for only a few minutes, sometimes for the whole day. She’d come back loaded with parcels. Wine was delivered to her by the case. It was always that cheap red stuff—she bought it from the grocer in the Rue Condorcet.”

“Did the delivery man come into the flat?”

“He used to leave the case outside the door. I had words with him because he wouldn’t use the back stairs—said they were too dark and he didn’t want to fall on his nose.”

“How did you come to hear she was dead?”

“I didn’t hear she was dead.”

“But you opened her door?”

“I didn’t have to take the trouble—and I wouldn’t have taken it.”

“What do you mean?”

“This is the fourth floor. On the fifth there’s an old gentleman, partly paralysed, and I do his housework and take him up his meals. He used to be in the Inland Revenue. He’s been living in the same flat for years and years, and he lost his wife six months ago. You may have read about it in the papers; she was run over by a bus one morning at ten o’clock, when she was crossing the Place Blanche on her way to the market in the Rue Lepic”

“What time do you go up to do his housework?”

“About ten o’clock every morning. On my way down I sweep the stairs.”

“Did you sweep them this morning?”

“Why wouldn’t I have?”

“You go up once before that, with the letters?”

“Not right up to the fifth floor—the old gentleman doesn’t get many letters and he’s in no hurry to read them. The third floor people both go out to work and leave early, about half past eight, so they pick up their letters as they go past my lodge.”

“Even if you’re not there?”

“Even if I’m out shopping—yes. I never lock the door. I do all my marketing in this street, and I keep an eye on the house while I’m about it. Do you mind if I open the window?”

Everyone was hot. They had all moved back into the first room—except Janvier, who was searching through drawers and cupboards as he had done in the morning at Arlette’s flat.

“So you only bring the letters up as far as the second floor?”

“That’s right.”

“And this morning about ten o’clock, you passed by this door on your way up to the fifth floor?”

“Yes, and I noticed it was a crack open. That surprised me a bit, but not much. On my way down I didn’t think to look. I’d put everything ready for my old gentleman, and I didn’t need to go up again till half past four—that’s when I take him up his supper. On the way down I noticed this door was still a crack open, and without thinking, I called out—not loudly:

“‘
Madame la comtesse!
’ ”

“Because that’s what everybody called her. She had a foreign name, difficult to pronounce. It was quicker to say ‘Countess’.

“There was no answer.”

“Was there a light on in the flat?”

“Yes. I haven’t touched anything. That lamp over there was burning.”

“And the one in the bedroom?”

“Must have been, mustn’t it, seeing it’s on now and I didn’t lay a finger on the switch? I don’t know why, but I felt there was something wrong. I put my head through the door and called again. Then I went in, though I wasn’t keen—being very sensitive to bad smells. I peeped into the bedroom and then I saw…

“So I ran down to call the police. There was no one else in the house, except the old gentleman, so I went and told the concierge next door, who’s an old friend of mine; because I didn’t fancy being alone. Some people asked us what was the matter; and there were several of us round the door when the Inspector there turned up.”