3

Maigret 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.

How long would it take him to pinpoint the jarring element in the Bourg-la-Reine case? The sandwich was tasty. The beer was good. He ordered another glass.

Almost invariably, when he was engaged on a sensational inquiry, some newspaper or other would print a piece on “The Methods of Chief Superintendent Maigret.” It might almost be called a tradition.

Well! Journalists were welcome to their opinions, like anyone else! Maigret came out of the movies…He had a sandwich…He drank beer…Sitting beside the steamy window of La Coupole, he might have been a substantial property owner from the provinces, dazzled by the bustle of the streets of Paris.

To tell the truth, his mind was a blank…He was on Boulevard Montparnasse, and yet he was not, because wherever he happened to be, the wedge-shaped house was always right there with him. He was forever going in and out of it. Spying on Madame “Saving-Your-Presence” in her lair. Climbing the stairs and coming down again.

Fact number one: the old woman with dyed hair had been strangled…Fact number two: her money and her papers had disappeared…

Eight hundred thousand francs…

To be precise, eight hundred thousand francs in one-thousand-franc bills. He tried to picture the thickness of such a bundle of bills.

Cécile sitting down to wait in the “aquarium” at the Quai des Orfèvres at eight o’clock in the morning.

It was odd, but he was already having difficulty in recalling her face, distinctive and familiar though it had been. He could see the black coat, the green hat, and the bag on her lap, that enormous ridiculous bag that she was never without, and which looked like a small trunk.

Now Cécile too had been killed, and the bag had vanished.

Maigret sat there, holding up his glass, wholly unaware, needless to say, of what was in it. If anyone had spoken to him just then, he would have had to make a long journey back to the present.

What was it that did not ring true?

He must not go too fast, or the elusive truth might be frightened away before he had time to grasp it.

Cécile…the bag…the broom closet…

The strangled aunt…

Because the young woman with the squint had also been strangled, it had been assumed that the two murders…

He heaved a sigh of relief and took a deep draught of frothy beer.

Everybody, himself included, had been looking for a single murderer, and that was why they were going around in circles, like a sightless horse on a merry-go-round.

But why not two? He had had vague doubts from the start.

“L’Intransigeant, late extra! L’Intransigeant, late extra! Read all about it!”

He bought the paper. The picture on the front page caused him to frown. It was of himself, looking fatter than he believed himself to be, biting fiercely on his pipe, with his hand on the shoulder of a young man in a trench coat, who was none other than Gérard. He could not remember having put his hand on Cécile’s brother’s shoulder. Presumably it had been a reflex action.

The reporter had thought it significant. The caption read as follows:

Does this mean nothing, or can it be that Chief Superintendent Maigret is laying his heavy hand on a cringing murderer?

“Idiot!…Waiter!…My bill!”

He was furious and yet, at the same time, pleased. He left La Coupole with a lighter tread than when he had gone in there from the movies. Taxi. What the hell! What if the accounts department did query it on the grounds that the métro was the fastest means of getting from one place to another!

Ten minutes later, he was back at headquarters, absorbing its atmosphere on his way to his office. The Pole was in there, perched awkwardly on the edge of a chair, while Lucas was occupying the Chief Superintendent’s own armchair. Maigret winked at Lucas, who, quick to take the hint, went with him into the inspectors’ room next door.

“Janvier and I between us have been at him for ten hours now. He’s stood up to it so far, but I have the feeling he’s beginning to crack.”

“My guess is that we won’t be through until early tomorrow morning.”

The Pole would not be the first to be driven to the wall slowly but surely!

“Now if you could look in yourself, around about two or three, and clinch it…”

“I can’t spare the time,” grumbled Maigret.

The offices were about to be vacated. One solitary light was kept burning in the vast dusty corridor, and one solitary man was on duty at the switchboard. But in Maigret’s office the Pole was still sitting opposite a determined Lucas, who would be relieved by Janvier at intervals, to enable him to slip out for a glass of beer and a bite to eat at the Brasserie Dauphine.

“Any phone calls for me?”

“One from someone called Dandurand.”

“Did he leave a message?”

“He said he had something of interest to tell you…and that you could reach him at his apartment.”

“Any callers?”

“Not that I know of…You’d better ask the guard…”

“A young man in a raincoat, wearing a black armband. He seemed very agitated. He asked me what time you would be back. I told him I couldn’t say. He wanted me to give him your home address, but I refused.”

“Gérard Pardon?”

“Could be…He refused to fill in a form.”

“What time was this?”

“About half an hour ago.”

“Did he by any chance have a newspaper with him?” asked the Chief Superintendent, much to the astonishment of the messenger.

“Yes, he did…L’Intransigeant. He was holding it all crumpled up in his hand.”

Maigret went back to the inspectors’ room.

“Anyone free in here?…Torrence?”

“I’m due at Bourg-la-Reine, Chief.”

“Don’t bother about that. I want you to go to Rue du Pas-de-la-Mule. Number Twenty-two. Do you know the boy?”

“Cécile’s brother, do you mean? Yes…I saw him at Bourg-la…”

“Good! I want you to call at his lodgings. I hope he’s back there by now. If he’s in, don’t let him out of your sight…I don’t want him doing anything foolish, do you understand?…Be nice to him…I don’t want him scared off, quite the reverse.”

“What if he isn’t there?”

Maigret’s brow darkened. He shrugged helplessly.

“If he’s not back that would be a disaster. There’ll be nothing left but to wait for a phone call from the river police…Unless, by any chance, he’s managed to get hold of a gun…Just a minute…You’d better call me in any event at…let me think…who in the building would be likely to have a telephone?…Of course! Dandurand! Call me at Charles Dandurand’s apartment. You’ll find the number in the directory. Good night, my boy.”

He went back into his office for a moment and lingeringly examined the Pole from head to foot, as if to assess his stamina. Then, with another wink to Lucas, this time signifying “He’s falling apart!,” he left.

He took a taxi to the now familiar building at Bourg-la-Reine. He looked around. Where was the detective who was supposed to be watching the house? A figure loomed out of the shadows.

“Here I am, Chief.”

It was Verduret, a new recruit, a pleasant youth, tremendously overawed by the Chief. He could scarcely address him without stammering.

“Any developments?”

“Monsieur Charles, the fourth-floor tenant, came home by streetcar at six o’clock. There was someone waiting for him in the hall…A little fat man in a belted gray overcoat, carrying a briefcase.”

It did not take Maigret long to identify this visitor as Monfils’s lawyer, Maître Leloup.

“Did he stay long?”

“Half an hour. The Hungarian went out about five, and I haven’t seen him since. As for his daughter…”

The young inspector waved toward a couple of shadowy figures pressed up against the fence on the patch of waste ground.

“They’ve been there for the last three quarters of an hour,” he said with a sigh. “And they haven’t moved in all that time…”

Unseen by the inspector, Maigret blushed, and went into the building. In passing, he waved to Madame Benoit, who was sitting with a plate of soup in front of her, and climbed the four flights of stairs with a heavy tread. Monsieur Charles must have recognized his step, because he opened the door before the Chief Superintendent had time to ring the bell.

“I was expecting you. Do please come in. After your meeting with my friends this morning…”

The Chief Superintendent was finding it uncommonly hard to get used to the rancid smell of the old bachelor’s flat. He found the atmosphere physically as well as morally repugnant, and he puffed furiously at his pipe, emitting dense clouds of smoke.

“What was the object of Maître Leloup’s visit?”

“So you’ve already heard?…He’s threatening me with a lawsuit over the estate. He’s convinced that Juliette made a will. Apparently, she said as much more than once in letters she wrote to her cousin Monfils, wishing him a happy New Year…I think you ought to make him show them to you. It seems she referred to her nephew and nieces as degenerates and parasites, and complained that, after all she had done for them out of respect for her sister’s memory, all they cared about was her money…”

“‘They’ll get the shock of their lives,’ she wrote in conclusion, ‘and so will the Boynets and the Machepieds, when they find out that I have made you my sole heir.’ ”

“Did Maître Leloup go no further than to threaten you?”

Monsieur Charles’s lips twitched in a chilly smile.

“He made me what he called a fair and generous offer.”

“Share and share alike?”

“More or less. If there really were a will, it would be worth considering.”

Monsieur Dandurand cracked his finger joints.

“However, that lot didn’t know Juliette as I did. To tell the truth, I was the only one who knew her as she really was. She was so terrified of dying, of having one day to leave all her money behind, that she almost persuaded herself that she would never die, at least not in the foreseeable future. She often used to say to me: When I grow old…”

Much as he disliked the man, Maigret could tell that he was speaking the truth. He himself had never seen Juliette, except as a corpse with crudely dyed hair, yet the impression he had formed of her corresponded exactly with Monsieur Charles’s account.

“So?”

“I showed Maître Leloup the door. But it wasn’t about that that I called you. I’m well aware that my position is delicate, and I realize that, as far as I’m concerned, the best thing that could happen would be for you to find the killer.”

“Or the killers,” mumbled Maigret, apparently immersed in contemplation of a water color hanging on the wall.

“Or the…? Well, have it your own way…Come to think of it, for all we know, there might be several killers.”

“At any rate, there are two corpses, and, therefore, two murders.”

And Maigret placidly relit his pipe.

“It’s just a theory…As I was saying, soon after you left, I remembered…”

He picked up a clothbound notebook from his desk.

“When you’ve been in the legal profession as long as I was, you can’t easily shed the habits of a lifetime…Every time I paid Juliette the interest on her investments, I was careful to record the numbers of the bills. Perhaps it was foolish of me, but as things have turned out you might find the information useful.”

The notebook was filled with figures.

“Remember, I had nothing else to occupy my time.”

Maigret could just imagine him in his evil-smelling study, transcribing columns of figures with chill satisfaction. True, the bills hadn’t belonged to him. All the same, he had derived a sensuous satisfaction from handling them, recording the numbers, clipping them together into so many bundles, then sorting them into larger bundles, secured with elastic bands.

“I’m sure you won’t forget,” he concluded, handing the notebook to the Chief Superintendent, “if you collect the reward that my friends have offered to put up, that I gave you every assistance.”

They could hear Nouchi bounding up the stairs, three at a time. She paused for a moment on the landing outside. Had she been behaving as improperly as the plump girl in the cinema?

What business was it of the Chief Superintendent’s, anyway? In what way could the behavior of this urchin…?

“Well! That’s it…Not wishing to be out when you called, I didn’t dine at my usual restaurant, but made do with a cold chop at home. Did you have dinner? Can I give you a small glass of something?”

“No, really, thanks…”

“Sooner or later, you’ll realize that I’ve done all I could and…Oh well!…as you please…”

Maigret, without so much as a parting word, opened the door and let in a gust of piano music. This was no doubt old Mademoiselle Paucot’s way of compensating for the scales she had to listen to all day long from her pupils.