Thomas Godfrey (Ed) (50 page)

“Loraine Boitel,” he told
Lucas. “The landlady of this rooming house was witness at her marriage to Jean
Martin. Loraine Boitel was working for Lorilleux at the time. Try to find out
if she was more than a secretary to him, and if he ever came to see her. And
work fast. This may be urgent. What have you got on Lorilleux?”

“He was quite a fellow.
At home in the Rue Mazarine he was a good respectable family man. In his
Palais-Royal shop he not only sold old coins and souvenirs of Paris, but he had
a fine collection of pornographic books and obscene pictures.”

“Not unusual for the
Palais-Royal.”

“I don’t know what else
went on there. There was a big divan covered with red silk rep in the back
room, but the investigation was never pushed. Seems there were a lot of important
names among his customers.”

“What about Loraine
Boitel?”

“The report barely
mentions her, except that she waited all morning for Lorilleux the day he
disappeared. I was on the phone about this when Langlois of the Financial Squad
came into my office. The name Lorilleux rang a bell in the back of his mind and
he went to check his files. Nothing definite on him, but he’d been making
frequent trips to Switzerland and back, and there was a lot of gold smuggling
going on at that time. Lorilleux was stopped and searched at the frontier
several times, but they never found anything on him.”

“Lucas, old man, hurry
over to Rue Pernelle. I’m more than ever convinced that this is urgent.”

Paul Martin appeared in
the doorway, his pale cheeks close-shaven.

“I don’t know how to
thank you. I’m very much embarrassed.”

“You’ll visit your
daughter now, won’t you? I don’t know how long you usually stay, but today I
don’t want you to leave until I come for you.”

“I can’t very well stay
all night, can I?”

“Stay all night if necessary.
Manage the best you can.”

“Is the little girl in
danger?”

“I don’t know, but your
place today is with your daughter.”

Paul Martin drank his
black coffee avidly, and started for the stairway. The door had just closed
after him when Mme. Maigret rushed into the dining room.

“You can’t let him go to
see his daughter empty-handed on Christmas Day!”

“But—” Maigret was about
to say that there just didn’t happen to be a doll around the house, when his
wife thrust a small shiny object into his hands. It was a gold thimble which
had been in her sewing basket for years but which she never used.

“Give him that. Little
girls always like thimbles. Hurry!”

He shouted from the
landing: “Monsieur Martin! Just a minute, Monsieur Martin!”

He closed the man’s
fingers over the thimble. “Don’t tell a soul where you got this.”

Before re-entering the
dining room he stood for a moment on the threshold, grumbling. Then he sighed: “I
hope you’ve finished making me play Father Christmas.”

“I’ll bet she likes the
thimble as well as a doll. It’s something grownups use, you know.”

They watched the man
cross the boulevard. Before going into the house he turned to look up at
Maigret’s windows, as if seeking encouragement.

“Do you think he’ll ever
be cured?”

“I doubt it.”

“If anything happens to
that woman, to Madame Martin....”

“Well?”

“Nothing. I was thinking
of the little girl. I wonder what would become of her.”

Ten minutes passed.
Maigret had opened his newspaper and lighted his pipe. His wife had settled
down again with her knitting. She was counting stitches when he exhaled a cloud
of smoke and murmured: “You haven’t even seen her.”

Maigret was looking for
an old envelope, on the back of which he had jotted down a few notes summing up
the day‘s events. He found it in a drawer into which Mme. Maigret always
stuffed any papers she found lying around the house.

This was the only
investigation, he mused, which he had ever conducted practically in its
entirety from his favorite armchair. It was also unusual in that no dramatic
stroke of luck had come to his aid. True, luck had been on his side, in that he
had been able to muster all his facts by the simplest and most direct means.
How many times had he deployed scores of detectives on an all-night search for
some minor detail. This might have happened, for instance, if Monsieur Arthur
Godefroy of Zenith had gone home to Zurich for Christmas, or if he had been out
of reach of a telephone. Or if Monsieur Godefroy had been unaware of the
telephone inquiry regarding the whereabouts of Jean Martin.

When Lucas arrived
shortly after 4 o’clock, his nose red and his face pinched with the cold, he
too could report the same kind of undramatic luck.

A thick yellow fog,
unusual for Paris, had settled over the city. Lights shone in all the windows,
floating in the murk like ships at sea or distant beacons. Familiar details had
been blotted out so completely that Maigret half-expected to hear the moan of
fog horns.

For some reason, perhaps
because of some boyhood memory, Maigret was pleased to see the weather thicken.
He was also pleased to see Lucas walk into his apartment, take off his
overcoat, sit down, and stretch out his frozen hands toward the fire.

In appearance, Lucas was
a reduced-scale model of Maigret—a head shorter, half as broad in the shoulders,
half as stern in expression although he tried hard. Without conscious imitation
but with conscious admiration, Lucas had copied his chief’s slightest gestures,
postures, and changes of expression—even to the ceremony of inhaling the
fragrance of the plum brandy before touching his lips to the glass.

The landlady of the
rooming house in the Rue Pernelle had been killed in a subway accident two
years earlier, Lucas reported. Luckily, the place had been taken over by the
former night watchman, who had been in trouble with the police on morals
charges.

“So it was easy enough to
make him talk,” said Lucas, lighting a pipe much too large for him. “I was
surprised that he had the money to buy the house, but he explained that he was
front man for a big investor who had money in all sorts of enterprises but didn’t
like to have his name used.”

“What kind of dump is it?”

“Looks respectable. Clean
enough. Office on the mezzanine. Rooms by the month, some by the week, and a
few on the second floor by the hour.”

“He remembers Loraine?”

“Very well. She lived
there more than three years. I got the impression he didn’t like her because
she was tight-fisted.”

“Did Lorilleux come to
see her?”

“On my way to the Rue
Pernelle I picked up a photo of Lorilleux at the Palais-Royal station. The new
landlord recognized him right away.”

“Lorilleux went to her
room often?”

“Two or three times a
month. He always had baggage with him, he always arrived around 1 o’clock in
the morning, and always left before 6. I checked the timetables. There’s a
train from Switzerland around midnight and another at 6 in the morning. He must
have told his wife he was taking the 6 o’clock train.”

“Nothing else?”

“Nothing, except that
Loraine was stingy with tips, and always cooked her dinner on an alcohol
burner, even though the house rules said no cooking in the rooms.”

“No other men?”

“No. Very respectable
except for Lorilleux. The landlady was witness at her wedding.”

Maigret glanced at his
wife. He had insisted she remain in the room when Lucas came. She stuck to her
knitting, trying to make believe she was not there.

Torrence was out in the
fog, going from garage to garage, checking the trip-sheets of taxi fleets. The
two men waited serenely, deep in their easy chairs, each holding a glass of
plum brandy with the same pose. Maigret felt a pleasant numbness creeping over
him.

His Christmas luck held
out with the taxis, too. Sometimes it took days to run down a particular taxi
driver, particularly when the cab in question did not belong to a fleet.
Cruising drivers were the hardest to locate; they sometimes never even read the
newspapers. But shortly before 5 o’clock Torrence called from Saint-Ouen.

“I found one of the
taxis,” he reported.

“One? Was there more than
one?”

“Looks that way. This man
picked up the woman at the corner of Boulevard Richard-Lenoir and Boulevard
Voltaire this morning. He drove her to Rue de Maubeuge, opposite the Gare du
Nord, where she paid him off.”

“Did she go into the
railway station?”

“No. The chauffeur says
she went into a luggage shop that keeps open on Sundays and holidays. After
that he doesn’t know.”

“Where’s the driver now?”

“Right here in the
garage. He just checked in.”

“Send him to me, will
you? Right away. I don’t care how he gets here as long as it’s in a hurry. Now
I want you to find me the cab that brought her home.”

“Sure, Chief, as soon as
I get myself coffee with a stick in it. It’s damned cold out here.”

Maigret glanced through
the window. There was a shadow against Mlle. Doncoeur’s curtains. He turned to
Lucas.

“Look in the phone book
for a luggage shop across from the Gare du Nord.”

Lucas took only a minute
to come up with a number, which Maigret dialed.

“Hello, this is the
Police Judiciaire. Shortly before 10 this morning a young woman bought something
in your shop, probably a valise. She was a blonde, wearing a gray suit and
beige hat. She carried a brown shopping bag. Do you remember her?”

Perhaps trade was slack
on Christmas Day. Or perhaps it was easier to remember customers who shopped on
Christmas. In any case, the voice on the phone replied:

“Certainly, I waited on
her myself. She said she had to leave suddenly for Cambrai because her sister
was ill, and she didn’t have time to go home for her bags. She wanted a cheap
valise, and I sold her a fiber model we have on sale. She paid me and went into
the bar next door. I was standing in the doorway and a little later I saw her
walking toward the station, carrying the valise.”

“Are you alone in your
shop?”

“I have one clerk on duty.”

“Can you leave him alone
for half an hour? Fine! Then jump in a taxi and come to this address. I’ll pay
the fare, of course.”

“And the return fare?
Shall I have the cab wait?”

“
Have him wait, yes.”

According to Maigret’s
notes on the back of the envelope, the first taxi driver arrived at 5: 50
P.M.
He
was somewhat surprised, since he had been summoned by the police, to find
himself in a private apartment. He recognized Maigret, however, and made no
effort to disguise his curious interest in how the famous inspector lived.

“I want you to climb to
the fourth floor of the house just across the street. If the concierge stops
you, tell her you’re going to see Madame Martin.”

“Madame Martin. I got it.”

“Go to the door at the
end of the hall and ring the bell. If a blonde opens the door and you recognize
her, make some excuse— You’re on the wrong floor, anything you think of. If
somebody else answers, ask to speak to Madame Martin personally.”

“And then?”

“Then you come back here
and tell me whether or not she is the fare you drove to Rue de Maubeuge this morning.”

“I’ll be right back,
Inspector.”

As the door closed,
Maigret smiled in spite of himself.

“The first call will make
her worry a little. The second, if all goes well, will make her panicky. The
third, if Torrence has any luck—”

Torrence, too, was having
his run of Christmas luck. The phone rang and he reported:

“I think I’ve found him,
Chief. I dug up a driver who picked up a woman answering your description at
the Gare du Nord, only he didn’t take her to Boulevard Richard-Lenoir. He
dropped her at the corner of Boulevard Beaumarchais and the Rue du Chemin-Vert.”