Maigret Has Doubts Read online

  Maigret has Doubts

  Une confidence de Maigret

  the 82nd episode in the Maigret Saga

  1959

  Georges Simenon

  translated by Lyn Moir

  * * *

  3S XHTML edition 1.0

  scan notes and proofing history

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  Contents

  Chapter 1 Madame Pardon’s Rice Pudding

  Chapter 2 The Geraniums on Rue Caulaincourt

  Chapter 3 The Concierge Who Wanted Her Picture in the Paper

  Chapter 4 How Adrien Josset Spent the Rest of the Night

  Chapter 5 The Obstinate Silence of Doctor Liorant

  Chapter 6 The Old Man Who Couldn’t Sleep

  Chapter 7 Monsieur Jules and Madame Chairman

  Chapter 8 Madame Maigret’s Coq au Vin

  * * *

  Copyright ©1959 by Georges Simenon Translation copyright ©1968 by Hamish Hamilton Ltd

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to:

  Permissions, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers,

  757 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y.10017

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Simenon, Georges, 1903-1989 Maigret has doubts.

  Translation of: Une confidence de Maigret.

  “A Helen and Kurt Wolff book.”

  I. Title.

  PQ2637.I53C59413 1982 843'.912 81-48020

  ISBN 0-15-155558-3 AACR2

  Printed in the United States of America

  First American edition 1982

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  Maigret Has Doubts

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  1

  Madame Pardon’s Rice Pudding

  The maid had just placed the rice pudding on the circular table, and Maigret had to make an effort to appear both surprised and gratified, while Madame Pardon, blushing, gave him a sharp look.

  This was the forty-fourth rice pudding in the four years that the Maigrets had dined regularly once a month at the Pardons’. The Pardons in turn came once a month to Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, where it was up to Madame Maigret to provide a good meal.

  Five or six months after the visits had started, Madame Pardon had served a rice pudding. Maigret had had three helpings, saying that it reminded him of his childhood and that for forty years he hadn’t eaten one as good, which was true.

  After that, every dinner at the Pardons’ new apartment on Boulevard Voltaire finished with the same creamy pudding that underlined the character of these get-togethers—sweet, soothing, and a little dull.

  Since neither Maigret nor his wife had any family in Paris, they had practically no experience of those evenings spent on a fixed day with sisters or sisters-in-law, and the dinners with the Pardons reminded them of childhood visits to aunts and uncles.

  This evening the Pardons’ daughter Alice, whom they had known as a schoolgirl and who had been married a year ago, was at the dinner with her husband. She was seven months pregnant and had the “mask of pregnancy,” particularly the red blotches on her nose and under her eyes, and her young husband watched her diet carefully.

  Maigret was going to say once again how delicious his hostess’s rice pudding was when the phone rang for the third time since the soup. They were used to it. It had become a kind of game at the beginning of the meal to guess if the doctor would get to the dessert without being called by one of his patients.

  The telephone stood on a wall shelf with a mirror above it. Pardon, napkin in hand, grabbed the receiver.

  “Hello, Doctor Pardon…”

  The others were silent, watching him, when suddenly they heard a voice so shrill that it made the phone vibrate. No one except the doctor could make out the words. They were only sounds piled one after the other, like a record played too fast.

  Maigret, however, frowned as he saw his friend’s face become grave, a worried look spreading over it.

  “Yes… I’m listening, Madame Kruger… Yes.”

  The woman at the other end of the line needed no encouraging. The sounds fell over each other like a litany, incomprehensible but pathetic to those who didn’t have their ear to the receiver.

  A wordless drama was being acted out in the slight variations of expression on Pardon’s face. The doctor, who had been watching the byplay with the pudding a few minutes before, now seemed to be far away from the quiet middle-class dining room.

  “I understand, Madame Kruger… Yes, I know… If it would help you, I’ll come and…”

  Madame Pardon threw a look at the Maigrets that said, “See! Another dinner to be finished without him.”

  She was wrong. The voice shrilled on. The doctor grew more uneasy.

  “Yes… Of course… Try to put them to bed…”

  They could see that he felt discouraged and helpless.

  “I know …I know… I can do no more than you can.”

  No one was eating. No one in the room spoke.

  “You understand that if this goes on it’s you who…”

  He sighed and wiped his forehead with his hand. At forty-five, he was almost bald.

  He finished by sighing wearily, as if he were giving in to unbearable pressure:

  “Then give him a pink pill… No, only one… If that hasn’t had any effect in half an hour…”

  Everyone sensed a certain relief in the voice coming over the phone.

  “I won’t leave the house… Good night, Madame Kruger.”

  He hung up and sat down again. The others avoided asking him what it was all about. It took several minutes to get the conversation going again; Pardon took no part in it. The evening kept to its traditional rhythm. They got up from the table and had their coffee in the living room, its table covered with magazines because that room was used as the waiting room during office hours.

  Both windows were open. It was May. The evening was warm and the air of Paris had quite a springlike feel, in spite of the buses and the cars. Families were out strolling on Boulevard Voltaire, and there were two men in shirt sleeves on the terrace of the café across the street.

  Cups filled, the women took up their knitting in their usual corner. Pardon and Maigret sat by one of the windows, while Alice’s husband didn’t really know which group to join and ended up sitting beside his wife.

  It had already been decided that Madame Maigret would be the child’s godmother, and she was knitting a little jacket for it.

  Pardon lit a cigar. Maigret filled his pipe. They didn’t particularly feel like talking, and quite a while went by in silence broken only by the hum of the women’s voices.

  The doctor finally spoke in a low voice, almost to himself:

  “It’s one of those evenings when I wish I’d chosen another profession.”

  Maigret didn’t press him, didn’t urge him to speak. He liked Pardon. He felt he was a real man, in the full sense of the word.

  The other glanced at his watch.

  “This could go on for three or four hours, but she might ring any minute.”

  He went on without giving any details, so that Maigret had to pick up the sense for himself:

  “A tailor in a small way, a Polish Jew, living on Rue Popincourt above an herbalists’… Five children, the eldest only nine, and the wife pregnant with the sixth…”

  He shot an involuntary look at his daughter’s increasing girth.

  “No drug so far discovered can save his life, and he has been on the point of death for five weeks.
I’ve done all I can to get him to go to the hospital. As soon as I mention it he gets into a terrible state, calls his family to him, weeps, groans, begs them not to let him be carried off…”

  Pardon was finding no pleasure in his one cigar of the day.

  “They live in two rooms… The kids cry… The wife’s at the end of her tether… She’s the one I ought to be taking care of, but as long as this goes on there’s nothing I can do. I went there before dinner. I gave the man an injection and his wife a sedative. They have no effect on them any more. While we were at dinner he began to groan again, then to shriek with pain, and his wife, with no strength left…”

  Maigret pulled on his pipe and murmured:

  “I think I’ve got the picture.”

  “Legally, medically, I haven’t the right to prescribe another dose. This isn’t the first telephone call like that. Up until now I’ve managed to convince her…”

  He looked pleadingly at the Inspector.

  “Put yourself in my place.”

  He glanced at his watch again. How much longer would the sick man fight on?

  The evening was soft, with a trace of mugginess in the air. The wives were still chatting in low voices in a corner of the room, their knitting needles marking the rhythm of the conversation.

  Maigret said hesitantly, “It’s not quite the same sort of case, of course. Sometimes I, too, have wished I had chosen another profession.”

  It wasn’t a real conversation, with the dialogue following a logical pattern. There were gaps, silences, slow puffs of smoke rising from the Inspector’s pipe.

  “For some time now we policemen haven’t had the powers we used to have, nor, therefore, the responsibilities.”

  He was thinking aloud and felt very close to Pardon, a feeling that was shared by the other man.

  “In the course of my career I’ve seen our responsibilities shrink, while the magistrates have taken over more and more. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not. In any case, we’ve never had to pass judgment. It’s the job of the courts and the juries to decide whether or not a man is guilty and to what extent he is responsible.”

  He kept on talking because he felt that his friend was tense, his mind elsewhere, in the two rooms on Rue Popincourt where the Polish tailor was dying.

  “Even with the law as it is at present, though we are only the instruments of the Public Prosecutor’s Office and of the Examining Magistrate, there is still a moment when we have to take a decision on which a lot depends. Because, after all, the magistrates, and the juries eventually, form their opinions on the basis of our investigations, on the basis of the facts we have gathered.

  “Just to treat a man as a suspect, to take him to Quai des Orfèvres, to question his family, his’friends, his concierge, and his neighbors about him can change the entire course of his life.”

  It was Pardon’s turn to murmur, “I understand.”

  “Was a certain person capable of committing a certain crime? Whatever happens, it is almost always we who have to be the first to ask ourselves that question. Material evidence is often nonexistent or hardly convincing.”

  The telephone rang. Pardon seemed afraid to answer it, and it was his daughter who picked up the receiver.

  “Yes, monsieur …No, monsieur… No… You have the wrong number …”

  Smiling, she explained to the others. “The Bal des Vertus again.”

  A dance hall on Rue du Chemin-Vert whose telephone number was similar to that of the Pardons.

  Maigret went on in a subdued voice.

  “This man facing you, who seems so normal, could he have killed someone? Do you see what I mean, Pardon? All right, so it’s not a matter of deciding whether he is guilty or not. That’s not the business of Central Police Headquarters. But we still have to ask ourselves if it is possible. And that’s a kind of judging! I hate that. If that had occurred to me when I joined the force, I’m not sure if…”

  A longer silence. He emptied his pipe and took another from his pocket, filling it slowly, seeming to caress the bowl.

  “I remember one case, not so long ago… Did you follow the Josset case?”

  “The name rings a bell.”

  “It had a lot of publicity in the papers, but the truth, if truth there was, has never been told.”

  It was rare for him to talk of a case in which he had taken part. Sometimes, on Quai des Orfèvres, among themselves, they would mention a well-known case or a difficult investigation, but it was always just a few words.

  “I can see Josset at the end of his first interrogation, since that was when I had to ask myself the question. I could let you read the report and see what you think. But you wouldn’t have had the man in front of you for two hours. You wouldn’t have heard his voice, watched his face and expressions.”

  The place was Maigret’s office on Quai des Orfèvres; the day, he remembered, was a Tuesday, the time about three in the afternoon. And it was spring then, too, the end of April or the beginning of May.

  When the Inspector arrived at the Quai that morning he had heard nothing about the case, and he was only called at ten o’clock, first by the Inspector at the Auteuil police station, then by Coméliau, the Examining Magistrate.

  There was some confusion about everything that day. The Auteuil police claimed that they had informed Police Headquarters in the early hours of the morning, but for one reason or another it didn’t appear that the message got through.

  It was nearly eleven when Maigret climbed out of his car on Rue Lopert, two or three hundred meters from the parish church of Auteuil, and he found himself to be the very last. The reporters and photographers were there, surrounded by about a hundred spectators held back by policemen. The men from the Public Prosecutor’s Office were already on the spot, and those from the Criminal Identity Division arrived five minutes later.

  At 12:10 the Inspector ushered Adrien Josset into his office. He was a handsome man of about forty, only just beginning to put on weight, and, in spite of being unshaven and wearing rather crumpled clothes, he was still elegant.

  “Please come in. Sit down.”

  He opened the door of the detectives’ office and called young Lapointe.

  “Bring a pad and a pencil.”

  The office was bathed in sunlight, and the sounds of Paris filtered in through the open window. Lapointe, who had understood that he was to take down the interrogation in shorthand, seated himself at one corner of the table. Maigret filled his pipe and watched a row of barges going up the Seine while a man in a small boat kept out of their way.

  “I’m sorry, Monsieur Josset, but I have to note down your answers. You aren’t too tired, are you?”

  The man indicated that he was not with a slightly bitter smile. He had not slept the previous night and the Auteuil police had already questioned him at length.

  Maigret did not wish to read their report, preferring to make his own judgment.

  “Let’s begin with the usual questions of identity— surname, Christian names, age, profession…”

  “Adrien Josset, age forty, born in Sète in the Hérault region…”

  One would have had to know that to pick out the slight accent of the Midi.

  “What does your father do?”

  “He was a primary-school teacher. He died ten years ago.”

  “Is your mother still alive?”

  “Yes. She still lives in the same little house in Sète.”

  “Did you take your degree in Paris?”

  “In Montpellier.”

  “I take it you are a pharmacist.”

  “I took my degree as a pharmacist and went on for a year with medical studies, but there I stopped.”

  “Why?”

  He hesitated, and Maigret saw that it was from a kind of honesty. One could sense that he was trying very hard to answer correctly, truthfully, up to now at any rate.

  “There were probably several reasons. The most obvious is that I had a girlfriend who went to Paris with her fa
mily.”

  “Did you marry her?”

  “No. In fact we broke it off a few months later. I think, too, that I felt I wasn’t cut out to be a doctor… My parents weren’t well off. They had to deprive themselves to pay for my studies… And then when I qualified I would have had difficulty getting into a practice…”

  Because of his tiredness it was hard for him to follow his own train of thought, and he sometimes looked at Maigret as if to reassure himself that the Inspector understood him.

  “Is that important?”

  “Everything may be important.”

  “I see. I wonder if I ever had a real vocation… I had heard of jobs being offered in laboratories—most big drug companies have research laboratories. When I got to Paris, diploma in hand, I tried to get one of those jobs.”

  “Without success?”

  “All I found was a substitute post in a drugstore, then another.”

  He was hot. So was Maigret, who was walking up and down the room, stopping from time to time in front of the window.

  “Did they ask you these things at Auteuil?”

  “No. Different things. I can see that you’re trying to find out what kind of person I am. As you see, I’m trying to answer you truthfully. I suppose that basically I’m no better and no worse than anybody else.”

  He mopped his brow.

  “Are you thirsty?”

  “A bit.”

  Maigret opened the door of the detectives’ room.

  “Janvier! Get us something to drink.”

  He turned to Josset.

  “Beer?”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Aren’t you hungry?”

  Without waiting for an answer he went on, to Janvier:

  “Beer and some sandwiches, please.”

  Josset gave a sad smile.

  “I’ve read about that,” he murmured.

  “Read about what?”

  “Beer, sandwiches. The Inspector and the detectives taking turns asking questions. It’s common knowledge, isn’t it? I never thought that one day…”