Maigret and the Man on the Boulevard (10 page)

“This way…I was in the middle of doing my housework…”

In spite of that, her hair was neatly brushed, and she was wearing a dark dress with every button fastened. The floor boards gleamed. Next to the door were two felt pads, which she no doubt slipped under her feet whenever she came in with wet shoes.

“I'm afraid I'm leaving dirty marks all over the place.”

“It doesn't matter.”

The interior, though older and better kept, was very similar to that of the house in Juvisy. There were the same sort of ornaments on top of the furniture, and on the dresser stood a framed photograph of a police constable, with a medal attached to it.

He had no wish to embarrass her, or to take her by surprise. Anyway, there was no question of surprise. He said simply:

“I've come to talk to you about Louis.”

“I've been expecting you.”

Although she looked sad, there were no tears in her eyes. She was preserving a decent composure.

“Please sit down.”

“I'm afraid I'll make your chair cover all wet. You and Louis Thouret were very good friends, were you not?”

“He was fond of me.”

“No more than that?”

“It could have been that he loved me. He'd never been happy at home.”

“Did your relationship begin when you were both working in the Rue de Bondy?”

“Aren't you forgetting that my husband was still alive at that time?”

“Was Louis particularly attentive to you?”

“He never treated me any differently from any of the other women in the packing department.”

“So it wasn't until later, after the firm of Kaplan had gone out of business, that you really got to know one another?”

“It was eight or nine months after my husband's death.”

“Did you meet again just by chance?”

“You know as well as I do that a widow's pension isn't enough to live on. I had to find work. Even when my husband was alive, I took a job every now and then. That's how I came to be working at Kaplan's. But I never worked full time. Anyway, one of my neighbors introduced me to the personnel officer of the
Châtelet
, and I was taken on to show people to their seats.”

“Is that where…?”

“Yes. It was a matinee. The play was
Round the World in Eighty Days,
I remember. I was showing Monsieur Louis to his seat, when I suddenly realized who he was. He recognized me, too. And that was all there was to it. But he came back to the theater often, always for the matinee, and he got into the way of looking out for me. This went on for quite some time, because, apart from Sundays, there were only two matinees a week. Then one day, after the show, he invited me to have an aperitif with him, and I accepted. We ate a hurried snack together, because I had to get back in time for the evening performance.”

“Had he, at that time, already taken the room in the Rue d'Angoulême?”

“I imagine so.”

“Did he tell you that he had no job?”

“He didn't say that, just that he was free in the afternoon.”

“Did you ever find out what he did for a living?”

“No. I didn't feel it was my place to ask.”

“Did he talk much about his wife and daughter?”

“A great deal.”

“What did he say?”

“It's not the sort of thing one cares to repeat, you know. When a man is unhappy in his home life, and confides in one…”

“Was he unhappy at home?”

“They treated him like dirt, on account of his brothers-in-law.”

“I don't quite understand.”

Maigret understood perfectly well, and had done for some time, but he wanted to encourage her to talk.

“They both had very good jobs, with free travel for themselves and their families thrown in…”

“And a pension at the end of it.”

“Yes. They despised Louis for his lack of ambition, and his willingness to spend the rest of his life as a miserable storekeeper.”

“When he took you out, where did you go?”

“Almost always to the same little café in the Rue Saint-Antoine. We used to stay there for hours, just chatting.”

“Do you like waffles?”

She blushed.

“How did you guess?”

“He used to buy them for you in the Rue de la Lune.”

“That was much later, when…”

“When you began visiting him in the Rue d'Angoulême?”

“Yes. He wanted me to see the place where he spent so much of his time. He called it his den. He was very proud of it.”

“Did he ever tell you what made him decide to take a room in town?”

“Just so as he could have somewhere he could call his own, if only for a few hours a day.”

“Did you become lovers, eventually?”

“I often went to his room.”

“Did he ever buy you jewelery?”

“Just a pair of drop earrings about six months ago, and, more recently, a ring.”

She was wearing it.

“He was too kind, too sensitive. He needed cheering up. Whatever you may think, I was, first and foremost, his friend, the only friend he had.”

“Did he ever come and see you here?”

“Never! It wouldn't have done, on account of the concierge and the neighbors. It would have been the talk of the district in no time.”

“Did you see him on Monday?”

“I was with him for about an hour.”

“What time of day was that?”

“Early afternoon. I was out shopping.”

“Did you know where to find him?”

“We had arranged to meet.”

“On the telephone?”

“No. I never telephoned him. I fixed it up when I was with him the time before.”

“Where used you to meet?”

“Nearly always at our usual little café. Sometimes on the corner, at the junction of the Rue Saint-Martin and the Grands Boulevards.”

“Was he on time?”

“He was never late. On Monday, it was cold and foggy. I have a sensitive throat. We went to a news cinema.”

“In the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle?”

“How did you know?”

“What time did you part?”

“Round about four. Half an hour or so before he died, according to the newspapers.”

“Did you know he was going to meet someone?”

“He said nothing about it to me.”

“Did he never mention any friends, people he went about with?”

She shook her head. Looking towards the glass-fronted dresser in the dining room, she said:

“Would you care for a drink? I only have a little Vermouth. I gave up drinking myself a long time ago.”

To please her, he accepted. There was a thick sediment at the bottom of the bottle, which, no doubt, had been there since the late police constable's time.

“When I read about it in the paper, I almost went to see you. I'd heard a lot about you from my husband. I recognized you at once just now, because I've often seen photographs of you in the papers.”

“Did Louis ever consider getting a divorce and marrying you?”

“He was too scared of his wife.”

“And his daughter?”

“He was very fond of his daughter. There's nothing he wouldn't have done for her. All the same, I had the feeling that he was a little disappointed in her.”

“Why?”

“It was no more than an impression. He often seemed sad.”

She wasn't all that cheerful herself, with her monotonous, uninflected voice. He wondered if she was the one who had polished the furniture for him in the course of her visits to the Rue d'Angoulême.

He couldn't imagine her undressing in Louis's presence, and stretching out on the bed. He couldn't even imagine her naked or wearing just a bra and briefs. To his way of thinking, they must have been most at home together sitting at a table in a dark corner of their little café, as she called it, talking in undertones, and glancing from time to time at the clock over the bar.

“Did he spend money freely?”

“It depends what you mean by freely. He didn't stint himself. One had the feeling that he was comfortably off. If I had let him, he would have loaded me with presents, mostly the sort of useless fripperies one sees in gift shops.”

“Did you ever come across him sitting on a bench?”

“On a bench?” she repeated, as though the question somehow troubled her.

She hesitated.

“Once, when I was shopping in the morning. He was in conversation with a man, a thin man. I felt that there was something odd about him.”

“In what way?”

“He reminded me, I don't quite know why, of a clown or a comic without the make-up. I didn't really see his face, but I noticed that his shoes were worn, and the bottoms of his trousers frayed.”

“Did you ask Louis about him?”

“Yes. He said one came across all sorts of people sitting on benches, and he enjoyed talking to them.”

“And that's all you know? By the way, I'm surprised you didn't go to the funeral.”

“I didn't dare show my face. In a day or two, I shall go and put some flowers on his grave. I presume there will be someone to show me where it is? Will the newspapers have to be told about me?”

“Certainly not.”

“That's a great relief. They're very strait laced at the
Châtelet,
and they wouldn't hesitate to sack me.”

It wasn't all that far to the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, so after he had left the widow, he got the driver to run him home, and said:

“You'd better go off and get some lunch. Come back here for me in about half an hour.”

During lunch, his wife watched him more closely than was her wont.

In the end, she plucked up the courage to ask:

“What's the matter?”

“What should be the matter?”

“I don't know. You don't seem like yourself, but like someone quite different.”

“Who for instance?”

“It might be anyone. But it's certainly not Maigret.”

He laughed. He had been thinking so much about Louis that he had begun to behave in the way that he imagined Louis would have behaved, even to the extent of aping what he supposed to have been his facial expressions and mannerisms.

“I hope you're going to change your suit?”

“What's the use? I'll be soaking wet again in no time.”

“Why? Are you going to another funeral?”

He decided to give in, and changed into the clothes she had laid out for him. It was a pleasant sensation, he had to admit, to be wearing dry things again for however short a time.

At the Quai des Orfèvres he did not go straight to his office, but looked in on the Vice Squad first.

“Do you know anyone by the name of Mariette or Marie Gibon? I'd be very grateful if you'd have a look through your records.”

“Is she young?”

“Fiftyish.”

Without further delay, the inspector got out several boxes filled with dusty, yellowing registration forms. He did not have to look far. The Gibon girl, born in Saint-Malo, had been a licensed prostitute for eleven years. She had been referred three times to Saint-Lazare, in the days before it was closed down. She had been arrested twice for stealing from clients.

“Was she convicted?”

“She was released for lack of evidence.”

“Anything else?”

“Just a second. I'll have a look through this other box.”

Her name appeared again on more recent registration forms, but all were at least ten years old.

“Before the war, she was assistant manageress at a massage parlor in the Rue des Martyrs. At that time she was living with a man called Philippe Natali, otherwise known as Philippi, who was sentenced to ten years for murder. I remember the case. It was a gang killing. Two or three men killed a bloke from a rival gang, in a tobacconist's in the Rue de la Fontaine. It was never established who actually fired the shot, so they nabbed them all.”

“Is he still in prison?”

“He died in Fontevrault.”

That didn't help matters.

“And what became of her?”

“Don't know. She may be dead too…”

“She isn't.”

“She must have had quite a packet salted away. She's probably set up an establishment of her own in her home town.”