Maigret and the Man on the Boulevard (6 page)

“Is Jorisse a student?”

“Give me a chance! I wanted to know how long he'd been working there. The manager had to consult his records. He's been with the firm for just over a year. At the beginning, he worked full time. Then, after he'd been there for about three months, he said he was going to work for a law degree, and henceforth could only come in in the mornings.”

“Do you know his address?”

“He lives with his parents in the Avenue de Châtillon, almost opposite the church of Montrouge. But that's not all. Albert Jorisse didn't turn up at the shop today. It's not the first time, it happens two or three times a year, but, up to now, he's always telephoned to let them know. Today, he didn't.”

“Was he there yesterday?”

“Yes. I thought you'd be interested, so I took a taxi to the Avenue de Châtillon. His parents are thoroughly respectable people. They have a flat on the third floor. It's spotlessly clean. His mother was busy ironing.”

“Did you tell her you were a police officer?”

“No. I said her son was a friend of mine, and I needed to see him urgently.”

“Did she suggest you went to the bookshop?”

“Exactly. She doesn't know a thing. He left home this morning at a quarter past eight, as usual. She's never heard a word about this law degree project. Her husband works for a wholesaler in fabrics in the Rue de la Victoire. They couldn't afford to pay for a higher education for their son.”

“What did you do next?”

“I pretended I thought I was on the wrong tack, and that her son probably wasn't the Jorisse I was looking for. I asked her whether she had a photograph of her son. She took me to see the one on the dresser in the dining room. She's a good soul, and she doesn't suspect a thing. All she ever thinks about is reheating her iron, and making sure she doesn't scorch the linen. I stayed on for a while, talking sweet nothings…”

Maigret made no comment, but listened with a marked lack of enthusiasm. It was plain to see that Santoni had not been working under him for long. Everything he said—and even his manner of saying it—was out of tune with the way Maigret's mind, and indeed the minds of his closest associates, worked.

“On the way out, taking care not to let her see what I was doing…”

Maigret held out his hand.

“Give it here.”

As if he didn't know that Santoni had pinched the photograph! It showed a thin youth with a nervous expression and very long hair, the sort whom women often find attractive, and who know it.

“Is that all?”

“We'll have to wait and see whether he goes home tonight, won't we?”

Maigret sighed:

“Yes, we'll have to wait and see.”

“Anything the matter?”

“Of course not.”

What was the use? Santoni would learn in time, as others had learned before him. It was always the same when one took on an inspector from some other branch of the Service.

“The reason I didn't follow the girl was that I know where to find her. Every evening at about half-past five, or a quarter to six at the latest, she calls in at the office to hand over the money she has collected, and write her report. Do you want me to go there?”

Maigret hesitated on the brink of telling him to drop the whole thing. But he thought better of it. It would have been unfair. After all, the inspector had done his best.

“Just check that she does go back to the office, as usual, and then make sure she goes off to catch her train.”

“Maybe her boyfriend will be waiting for her there?”

“Maybe. What time does he usually get home in the evening?”

“They have dinner at seven. He's always in by then, even if he has to go out again later.”

“They're not on the telephone, I suppose?”

“No.”

“What about the concierge?”

“I don't think she is either. It's not the sort of place where you'd expect to find telephones. But I'll check.”

He consulted the street directory.

“You'd better go back there some time after seven, and see what you can find out from the concierge. Leave the photograph with me.”

Santoni had taken the photograph, there was no going back on it, Maigret thought. So he might as well keep it. It could come in useful.

“Will you be staying here in your office?”

“I don't know where I shall be, but keep in touch with our people here.”

“What shall I do between now and then? I've got nearly two hours to kill before setting out for the Rue de Rivoli.”

“Go down and have a word with the Licensed Premises chaps. They may have a registration form in the name of Louis Thouret.”

“You mean you think he took a room somewhere in town?”

“Where do you suppose he left his brown shoes and colorful tie when he went home?”

“That's a thought.”

It was now fully two hours since Monsieur Louis's photograph had appeared in the afternoon editions of the newspapers. It was only a small photograph, tucked away in a corner, and the caption read:

Louis Thouret, murdered yesterday afternoon in a cul-de-sac off the Boulevard Saint-Martin. The police are on the track of the killer
.

It wasn't true, but that was what the papers invariably said. It was odd, come to think of it, that the chief superintendent had not yet received a single telephone call. If the truth were told, it was chiefly on this account that he had decided to return to the office and, while he was about it, clear his in-tray.

Almost always, in a case of this sort, there were people who believed, rightly or wrongly, that they recognized the victim. Or they claimed to have seen an unsavory looking character lurking near the scene of the crime. More often than not such claims were unfounded. All the same, every now and again, one or more of these people would lead him to the truth.

For the past three years, Monsieur Louis, as he was known to his former colleagues and to the concierge in the Rue de Bondy, had left Juvisy at the same time every morning. Morning and evening, he never missed his usual trains. He continued to take his lunch with him, wrapped in a square of oilcloth, as he had always done.

But how had he spent his time, after he had got off the train at the Gare de Lyon? That was still a mystery.

Except, that is, for the first few months, when, in all probability, he had spent every moment desperately looking for another job. Like so many others, he must have joined the queues outside the offices of one of the newspapers, waiting to pounce on the Situations Vacant columns. Maybe he had even tried his hand at selling vacuum cleaners from door to door?

Apparently he had not succeeded, since he had been driven to borrow money from Mademoiselle Léone and the old bookkeeper.

After that, for several months, he had disappeared from view. By this time, he had not only somehow had to lay his hands on a sum of money equivalent to his salary at Kaplan's, but also to pay back the two loans.

During all that time, he had returned home every evening, just as if nothing had happened, and looking every inch the family breadwinner.

His wife had suspected nothing. Nor had his daughter, nor his sisters-in-law, nor his two brothers-in-law, who both worked on the railways.

And then, one day, he had turned up at the Rue de Clignancourt to pay his debt to Mademoiselle Léone, armed with a present for her, and sweets for her aged mother.

Not to mention the fact that he had taken to wearing light brown shoes!

Had those brown shoes of his anything to do with the keen interest that Maigret was beginning to take in the fellow? He would certainly never admit it, even to himself. He too had longed at one time to own a pair of goose-dung shoes. They had been all the rage then, like those very short fawn raincoats, known at that time as bum-freezers.

Once, early on in his married life, he had made up his mind to buy a pair of light brown shoes, and had felt himself blushing as he went into the shop. Come to think of it, the shop was in the Boulevard Saint-Martin, just opposite the Théâtre de l'Ambigu. He had not dared to put them on at first. Then, when he had finally plucked up the courage to open the parcel in the presence of his wife, she had looked at him, and then laughed in rather an odd way.

“You surely don't intend to wear those things?”

He never had worn them. It was she who had taken them back to the shop, on the pretext that they pinched his feet.

Louis Thouret had also bought a pair of light brown shoes, and that, in Maigret's view, was symbolic.

It was above all, Maigret was convinced, a symbol of liberation. Whenever he wore those shoes, he must have thought of himself as a free man, which meant that, until the moment when he changed back into his black shoes, his wife, sisters-in-law, and brothers-in-law had no hold on him.

The shoes meant something else as well. On the day when Maigret had bought his pair, he had just been informed by the superintendent of the Saint-Georges District, whose subordinate he was at the time, that he was to have a rise in salary of ten francs a month. And, in those days, ten francs really were ten francs.

Monsieur Louis, too, must have been feeling weighed down with riches. He had presented a meerschaum pipe to the old bookkeeper, and repaid the two people who had been prepared to trust him. As a result, he had been able to go back from time to time and see them both, especially Mademoiselle Léone. And at the same time, he had felt free to call on the concierge in the Rue de Bondy.

Why had he never told any of them how he spent his time?

Quite by chance, the concierge had seen him one morning round about eleven sitting on a bench in the Boulevard Saint-Martin.

She had not spoken to him, but had gone back by a roundabout route, so that he should not see her. Maigret could understand that. It was the bench that had ruffled her. For a man like Monsieur Louis, who had worked ten hours a day for most of his life, to be caught idling on a park bench! Not on a Sunday! Not after working hours! At eleven in the morning, when there was always a bustle of activity in every shop and every office.

Monsieur Saimbron had also recently spotted his former colleague sitting on a bench. In his case, in the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, within easy walking distance of the Boulevard Saint-Martin and the Rue de Bondy.

This had been in the afternoon, and Monsieur Saimbron, showing less delicacy than the concierge, had spoken to him. Or perhaps Louis Thouret had seen him first?

Had the former storekeeper come there by appointment? Who was the man who had hovered near the bench, apparently waiting for an invitation to sit down?

Monsieur Saimbron had not described him. Probably, he had not paid much attention to him. All the same, his comment had been illuminating:

“
He was the sort of man one often sees sitting on a bench in that area
.”

In other words, one of those individuals without any visible means of support, who spend hours sitting on benches on the boulevards, absently watching the world go by. The occupants of the benches in the Saint-Martin district were different from those to be seen in many of the squares and public gardens of the city, such as the Parc Montsouris, which are mostly patronized by local residents with private means.

People of that sort are not to be found sitting in the Boulevard Saint-Martin, or if they are, it is on the terrace of a café.

There were the light brown shoes on the one hand, and the bench on the other. As far as the chief superintendent was concerned, they did not seem to fit together.

Finally, there was the overriding fact that, at about half-past four on a wet and gloomy afternoon, Monsieur Louis, for no apparent reason, had turned into a cul-de-sac, followed soundlessly by someone who had knifed him between the shoulder blades, barely ten yards from the milling throng of people on the boulevard.

His photograph had appeared in all the papers, and no one had telephoned. Maigret was still making notes on documents and signing official forms. Outside, the dusk was deepening, and would soon turn to darkness. He had to switch on the light, and when he saw that the hands of the mantel clock stood at three, he got up, and took his heavy winter overcoat down from its hook.

Before leaving, he put his head round the door of the Inspectors' Duty Room.

“I'll be back in an hour or two.”

There was no point in using a car. At the end of the Quai, he jumped on to the platform of a bus, from which he alighted a few minutes later at the junction of the Boulevard Sébastopol and the Grands Boulevards.

At this same hour on the previous day, Louis Thouret had still been alive. He too had roamed around the district, with plenty of time to spare, before having to change back into his black shoes, and make his way to the Gare de Lyon, to catch his train to Juvisy.

The pavements were jammed with people. On every corner they were bunched together like grapes, waiting to cross the road, and when the traffic lights changed, they all surged forward.