Cécile is Dead (16 page)

‘Will you come with me, Monsieur
Spencer?' Out of doors, he turned up the collar of his overcoat. ‘We ought
to have kept that taxi waiting for us. But believe it or not, the man I'm most
afraid of at the Police Judiciaire is our accountant. I don't know if
they're as fierce about expenses in the United States … While we wait for a tram,
why don't we have a drink in this bistro where the builders go for a snack? Oh,
you've left your hat behind.'

‘I never wear a hat,' said his
companion.

Maigret took a long look at the American
inspector's red hair, on which raindrops stood out like beads. There were
certainly some things that were beyond his understanding!

‘I'll have a calvados,' he
said. ‘How about you?'

‘Can I get a glass of milk
here?'

Was that what gave this man of thirty-five a
complexion as pink as the moist muzzle of a young calf?

‘In a large
glass,' said Maigret, addressing the bistro manager.

‘The milk?'

‘No, the calvados.'

And Maigret patiently refilled his pipe. Had
that cold fish Dandurand risked his head to put those eight hundred thousand francs back
in the old woman's little footstool?

They left the registry office. A gap-toothed
clerk had initially replied to Maigret's questions by saying, in a bad-tempered
tone, that he couldn't give the information required. Then he noticed the
inspector's badge, and became so frantically eager to oblige that it took him
twice as long as he should have needed to consult the voluminous registers.

The local town hall was neither old nor
modern, just ugly: ugly as a whole, in its proportions and its materials, ugly in all
its details. Its staff were coming out just as Maigret and his American companion were
going in, because twelve noon was striking. The large man of dishevelled appearance,
with three chins and a paunch that preceded him, and whom everyone was keen to greet,
must have been the mayor of Bourg-la-Reine.

The inspector and his companion stopped to
wait at the top of the short flight of steps, four or five in all, because a heavy
shower was falling. The market, which stood in the shade of trees in the little square,
was packing up. Stalls were being taken down. The muddy ground was littered with
detritus. There was blood-red meat in the butcher's shop opposite, where a large,
pink woman sat at the till. Children were being let out of a nearby school, and they
rushed away, shouting. Many of them wore shoes with wooden soles. A green and white bus
was coming along.

This wasn't
Paris now, or a little provincial town or a village. Maigret glanced at his American
companion, and their eyes met. Spencer Oats obviously understood, for he gave a slight
smile – a smile that was rather clouded, like the scene before them.

‘It's not always much cheerier
than this back home either,' he murmured.

The visit they had just paid to the town
hall was on business that any inspector or indeed any officer of lower rank could have
transacted. Maigret had wanted to know, first, how long Charles Dandurand had been
living in Juliette's apartment building.

The answer was exactly fourteen years.
Before that he had lived in furnished accommodation in Rue Delambre, near Boulevard
Montparnasse.

And Juliette's husband, Boynet the
building contractor, had died fourteen and a half years ago.

Standing at the top of the steps down from
the town hall, the two men waited for the worst of the rain to pass.

‘Do you know, Monsieur Spencer, why
criminals would rather deal with us than with the lawyers?'

‘I guess I'm beginning to get
some idea.'

‘And remember we can use brute force –
not as often as it's sometimes claimed, but more than an examining magistrate or a
deputy public prosecutor … It's just that in the course of investigations
we've lived in the defendants' own world. We've been to their homes,
we know their customs, their families and friends. This morning I was drawing a
distinction between the criminal
before
and
after
he commits a crime.
Well, what we want to know about
is his life
before
he steps outside the law. When we hand him over to the lawyers,
that's the end of him. He's broken with his life as an ordinary man, and
almost always it's a final break. He's a criminal, that's all, and the
lawyers treat him as such.'

With almost no transition, Maigret sighed,
‘I'd give a good deal to know what Charles Dandurand was really doing in
Juliette's bedroom. Putting those banknotes back, or …? Oh, look, the rain is
easing.'

They made a dash for it, the inspector with
his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched, the American as casually as if he
were strolling along in bright sunlight.

‘Would you mind lunching in a
bistro?'

‘I'd be delighted. Our men at
the embassy, or those who have been showing me around so far, haven't taken me
anywhere but the big fancy restaurants yet.'

They took the tram to Porte d'Orléans
and in passing glanced at the building that resembled a slab of Neapolitan ice cream,
its brickwork turning black in the rain.

‘The difficult part,' said
Maigret, ‘is putting yourself in their place, thinking and feeling like them.
Another handicap for the judge, who lives in too neutral an atmosphere. My own home
isn't so very different from this place. Come in!'

Turning into a small street, Maigret had
pushed open the door of a very simple restaurant, with a metal counter, marble-topped
tables and sawdust on the floor. A rubicund man with broken veins on his face, wearing a
blue cotton apron, came over to shake Maigret's hand.

‘It's a long time since we saw
you, Monsieur Maigret! I
must tell my good
lady. Mélanie! What can you offer Monsieur Maigret today?'

Mélanie came hurrying out of the kitchen,
stomach first, wiping her hands.

‘Oh, if only you'd phoned us
first! Let's see … there's coq au vin, and I had some nice-looking ceps
brought in this morning … does your friend like ceps?'

There were only a few regular customers in
the bistro. The windows were misted up, and you couldn't see anything outside.

‘The usual Beaujolais, Monsieur
Maigret?'

Maigret went into a small phone kiosk, and
the American, looking through the glass, saw that his face was grave and concerned.

‘They haven't picked up that
idiot Gérard yet,' he said, returning to their table. ‘I'll look in on
his wife this evening.'

‘You said they were short of money in
the household …'

‘We've done something about
that, of course … Well, there's a baby who I suppose will never know the
circumstances in which it came into the world! … Why the hell did Charles Dandurand
…'

The American felt that nothing else Maigret
said was of any importance. He was solely occupied with the problem of Dandurand.

‘Why Dandurand?' Maigret
mused.

‘If he killed the old woman …'
Spencer ventured to say.

‘If he killed the old woman I'm
an imbecile and I'll have to start my investigation all over again, Monsieur
Spencer. First, why would he have killed her? She was worth more
to him alive than dead … He knew he couldn't inherit
from her … And as for stealing the eight hundred thousand francs in her apartment, well,
you saw for yourself that he did no such thing. And how could he have done it? She says
goodbye. She escorts him back to the door. I'm sure that she locks it carefully.
And she also bolts it, he says, and I believe him. She goes back to her bedroom. She
undresses. She's already taken off one stocking and she is sitting on her bed when
… No, Monsieur Spencer, it wasn't Dandurand who went back up, opened the door of
her apartment and …

‘Yet four days later, almost in my
presence, he doesn't hesitate to let suspicion fall on him when he enters that
bedroom … to do what?

‘And remember that the old
woman's papers – her receipts, her certificates of ownership – everything that was
in the sitting-room desk and in effect is of no value at all to the murderer, since he
can't make any use of it without giving himself away – remember that all that has
disappeared.

‘On the other hand the banknotes,
which in theory are anonymous, didn't leave their hiding place, or if they did
briefly leave it they were returned … do you like these ceps à la bordelaise?'

‘Allow me to say, inspector, that
you're not as observant as you might be, or you would have noticed me helping
myself three times. As for the Beaujolais, I'm afraid it may make me a slightly
inattentive companion this afternoon …'

‘Wait till you try the coq au vin!
Mélanie was cook for
twenty years to one of
our ministers. He went to the bad, but he appreciated good cooking … Would you have
guessed that Juliette was once a rather beautiful woman? There's a photograph of
her in the apartment … I wonder if by any chance her husband was jealous …'

These simple words were enough to lead him
into a new deep abyss of reflection, from which he did not emerge until Mélanie appeared
to ask if they liked her coq au vin. Maigret glanced at the door now and then.

‘Are you expecting someone?'

‘Yes, a gentleman whom I don't
much like. It seems that he's been hanging around Quai des Orfèvres for a good two
hours, so I asked him to come and see me here.'

A few minutes later a taxi drew up beside
the pavement, and Maître Leloup, stout and self-important, paid the driver and came into
the bistro.

‘I've brought you what I
promised,' he announced, putting his morocco leather briefcase on a free table.
‘As you will see, the claims of my client, who is an honourable man, are not
exaggerated.'

The lawyer couldn't have had lunch
yet, but the inspector did not invite him to share their meal, or to take off his
coat.

‘I'll look at the material
soon.'

‘How are your inquiries
going?'

‘Slowly, Maître Leloup,
slowly.'

‘I'd like to point out a detail
that may have escaped you … And please note that I am not criticizing the methods that
have won you a certain celebrity. I have sent someone trustworthy to Fontenay, to
question persons of
a certain age who knew
Madame Boynet when she was a girl, and was still Juliette Cazenove.'

Maigret was eating steadily, as if
indifferent to this gossip, and the American watched him with curiosity.

‘I have learned,' said Maître
Leloup, ‘some things which will certainly surprise you …'

At this the inspector murmured very quietly,
‘Oh, I don't think so.'

‘Juliette Cazenove was regarded as
rather reckless when she was a girl – reckless with her body, to be more precise
…'

‘And she was said to be Charles
Dandurand's mistress, wasn't she?'

‘Someone has told you?'

‘No, but I thought as much. Dandurand
was some ten years older than her … even then, I imagine, he liked unripe
fruit.'

‘It was a scandal at the
time.'

‘But it didn't keep Juliette
from marrying her building contractor and going to live with him in Paris. I know all
that, Maître Leloup.'

‘And what do you conclude?'

‘I don't conclude anything.
It's too soon for conclusions … Wait! I bet that phone call is for me!'

And he hurried to the phone kiosk with a
hopeful expression on his face. It was indeed for him, since he stayed on the phone for
some time, and when he came back he looked relieved.

‘Let's have some more of
Mélanie's coq au vin,' he said to the proprietor.

You would have thought that he hadn't
eaten any lunch
yet. His appetite came back
to him. He drank a full glass of Beaujolais and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.
His eyes were sparkling.

‘They've picked up
Gérard!' he said at last. ‘Poor boy!'

‘Why do you say
poor
boy
?'

‘Because he acted like the idiot he
is. Let's have another bottle, Désiré. Guess what? Yes, he got on a train for the
Belgian border, as I foresaw. Once there, he saw some local gendarmes making a more
thorough search of the carriages than usual … whereupon he lost his head, climbed out of
the train on the wrong track and started running across country, wading through clay and
mud, with the gendarmes on his heels. He saw a farm and made for it. Where do you think
they found him? Hiding in the lavatory. He struggled so hard and so long that they had
to half knock him out. He's on his way back to us … he'll be back in Paris
at three-fifty.'