Maigret at the Coroner's Read online

  7. The Inspector’s Questions

  It was not Harry Cole, but O’Rourke who seemed to be their host. Instead of taking his guests to a restaurant, he had brought them to a private club downtown.

  The premises were new, inviting, surprisingly modern. The bar was probably the best-stocked watering hole Maigret had ever seen: while they had their cocktail, he was able to count forty-two different whiskies, not to mention seven or eight labels of French cognac and some authentic Pernod, unseen in Paris since 1914.

  Lined up facing the bar, with their familiar symbols of plums, cherries and apricots, were the perfectly polished slot machines. Just as Maigret was about to drop in his usual nickel he noticed that these machines took either silver dollars, half-dollars or quarters.

  ‘I thought these machines were illegal,’ he remarked. ‘The day I arrived, in fact, I read in a Tucson paper that the sheriff had impounded a number of them.’

  ‘In public places.’

  ‘And here?’

  ‘We’re in a private club.’

  O’Rourke had a merry look in his eyes. He seemed happy to enlighten his colleague from overseas.

  ‘You see, there are many private clubs, at every level of society, so to speak. This one is neither the most elegant nor the most exclusive. Four or five rank higher, and a whole slew are lower.’

  Looking around the vast dining room where they would be eating, Maigret began to understand why he had noticed a relative lack of restaurants.

  ‘No matter what your job, you have your own club, and moving up in society you go from club to club.’

  ‘Meaning that everyone can also play the slots.’

  ‘Just about.’

  And with a sidelong wink, O’Rourke dropped a big new silver dollar into a slot, then casually swept up the four identical coins that tumbled down.

  ‘There’s a dice game downstairs that’s our equivalent of your roulette. We play poker, too. Don’t you have clubs in France?’

  ‘A few, only among certain social classes.’

  ‘Here we even have a club for railway workers and post office employees.’

  Maigret exclaimed in surprise.

  ‘Then – will you please tell me what all your bars are for?’

  Harry Cole was drinking his double whisky as if performing a ritual.

  ‘First off, they provide neutral ground. A man doesn’t always want to meet people in his own category.’

  ‘Just a minute! Stop me if I’m mistaken. Don’t you mean, rather, that a man doesn’t always want to behave the way he’s obliged to among people of his own category? I suppose that here, for example, it’s pretty poor form to drink yourself under the table?’

  ‘Correct. For that there’s the Penguin Bar or its like.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘There are also those who don’t belong to any category, in other words, to any club at all.’

  ‘Those poor folks!’

  ‘Not only people who don’t have money, but those who don’t conform to the customs of a specific social class. Listen to this! In Tucson, which is a major city, there’s a club for folks of Mexican background who’ve been here for several generations. In that club, speaking Spanish is frowned on! Those who still speak it or speak English with an accent go to a different club, for newcomers. Have a drink, inspector!’

  All around them, the setting and service were those of a deluxe restaurant in Paris. One of the sheriffs ate his meals there almost every day.

  ‘Tell me, do the airmen at the base have their club as well?’

  ‘They have several.’

  ‘When they want to behave in a certain way, are they also obliged to go off to the bars?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Our friend Julius is catching on,’ remarked Cole, eating hungrily.

  ‘Many things are still a mystery to me.’

  There was wine on the table, French wine that O’Rourke had had the delicacy to order without mentioning it. This big man of unsophisticated appearance was not without finesse. On the contrary, and as the evening went on, Maigret liked him more and more.

  ‘Would it bother you if I talked about the inquest?’

  ‘That’s why I’m here.’

  It had been a set-up. Perhaps it was O’Rourke who had asked Cole to introduce him to his colleague?

  ‘If I understand correctly, your position here is the same one I hold in Paris. The sheriff, your superior, corresponds roughly to the head of the Police Judiciaire.’

  ‘Except that the sheriff is elected.’

  ‘As for the attorney, he’s rather like our public prosecutor. And the deputy sheriffs you have under you are the equivalent of my brigade officers and inspectors.’

  ‘I believe that’s about right.’

  ‘I’ve noticed you feeding the attorney most of his questions. You’re doubtless also the one who’s been preventing certain other questions from being put to the witnesses …’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Had you already questioned those witnesses?’

  ‘Most of them.’

  ‘And you asked them all the questions?’

  ‘I did my best.’

  ‘What’s Corporal Van Fleet’s family background?’

  ‘Pinky? His parents run a large farm out in the Midwest.’

  ‘Why did he join the Air Force?’

  ‘His father insisted that he work the farm with him. Pinky did so, unwillingly, until two years ago, when, one fine day, he left and joined up.’

  ‘O’Neil?’

  ‘Both his parents are teachers and very respectable people. They wanted to make him into an intellectual and felt let down when he wasn’t at the top of his class. And he’d had enough of it as well. Whereas Van Fleet went from the countryside to the city, O’Neil went from a small town out to the country. For almost a year, he worked picking cotton down south.’

  ‘Mullins?’

  ‘When quite young, he had some trouble with the police and was sent to reform school. His parents died when he was ten or twelve. The aunt who took care of him is a strict and unbearable creature.’

  ‘Is the doctor’s report complete?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Five men spent much of the night drinking with one woman. This woman was found dead on the railway tracks. Well, not for a moment has anyone at the inquest ever brought up what might have happened between the woman and one or more of those men.’

  ‘That is never brought up.’

  ‘Not even in your office?’

  ‘In my office, it’s different. I can tell you that the autopsy was as complete as could have been desired.’

  ‘The result?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Who?’

  It was a little as if, until now, Maigret had seen only a kind of painted picture of the case, like the backdrop in a photography studio. That was what the public saw, and it seemed to satisfy them.

  Now real people, and what they had really done, were slowly replacing the artificial image.

  ‘It didn’t happen out in the desert.’

  ‘At the musician’s place?’

  That visit to the musician’s apartment had been bothering Maigret all along.

  ‘First, the doctor discovered that Bessie had had sex with a man during the night, but that this had happened rather a while before her death. You know that in such a case there is a procedure similar to a blood test that can sometimes tell if this or that man has had relations with someone. I
spoke first to Ward, and he went scarlet. It wasn’t fear, but jealousy and rage. He jumped up, shouting, “I knew it!”’

  ‘Mullins?’

  ‘Yes. He confessed right away.’

  ‘In the kitchen?’

  ‘It was planned in advance. He had confided to Erna Bolton that he was mad with desire for Bessie. For some reason or other, Erna doesn’t much like Sergeant Ward. She promised Mullins, “Maybe later, at the musician’s place …”

  ‘She admitted that she kept watch near the kitchen. She’s the one who warned the couple that Ward was coming. And it was to fool him that Bessie thought fast enough to grab a whisky bottle and take a swig from it.’

  Now Maigret saw more clearly why some witnesses were thinking hard before answering any questions, weighing every word.

  ‘Don’t you think these details would have interested the jurors?’

  ‘It’s the result that counts, isn’t it?’

  ‘And you’ll get the same result?’

  ‘I’m making sure of it.’

  ‘Is it from a sense of decency that you avoid all questions of a sexual nature?’

  As he was asking that question, Maigret remembered the slot machines in the bar and thought he understood.

  ‘I suppose you want to avoid setting any bad examples?’

  ‘That’s about it. In France, if what I’ve heard is true, you do precisely the opposite. The newspapers tell all about the shenanigans of government ministers and VIPs. Then, when some ordinary little guy is unfortunate enough to do the same, you toss him in the slammer. Any more questions, inspector?’

  ‘If I’d had time, I would have written them down. Does Erna claim that her friend Bessie was in love with Mullins?’

  ‘No. She thinks, as I do, that Bessie was truly in love with Sergeant Ward.’

  ‘But she wanted Mullins?’

  ‘When she’d been drinking, she wanted any man.’

  ‘Did that happen to her often?’

  ‘Several times a week. And on Ward’s side, it was romance. When he didn’t come to see her, he wrote her every day and sometimes talked on the telephone with her for half an hour.’

  ‘Did she hope to marry him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And he?’

  ‘That’s difficult to say. I’m sure he answered me sincerely. He’s a decent enough fellow, really. He got married the way lots of young folks get married around here, in a matter of days. You meet a girl. You think you’re in love because you want her and you go looking for a marriage licence.’

  ‘I noticed the court avoided summoning the wife.’

  ‘Why bother? She’s not in good health. She’s having trouble raising her two children. She’s expecting a third, and that’s what was holding Ward back. He would really have liked to marry Bessie and at the same time he was afraid of hurting his wife.’

  Maigret had not been mistaken in comparing these grown men to schoolboys. They played at being tough. They thought they were tough. A hoodlum from La Bastille or Place Pigalle would have scorned them as choirboys.

  ‘Was it you, chief, who identified the body?’

  ‘My men had done it before me. Bessie went through my office five or six times.’

  ‘Because she was engaging in prostitution?’

  ‘You always use words that are too specific, and that’s why it’s so hard to answer you. For example, when she worked at the drive-in restaurant, Bessie earned about thirty dollars a week. Well, the apartment she shared with Erna cost them only sixty dollars a month.’

  ‘Did she earn anything on the side?’

  ‘Not necessarily in cash. She got taken out to eat and drink. A cocktail costs fifty cents! A whisky, the same.’

  ‘Are there lots like her in the city?’

  ‘At different levels. There are some you take out for spaghetti at a drive-in and others whom you invite for a chicken dinner in a nice restaurant.’

  ‘Erna Bolton?’

  ‘Mitchell keeps a close eye on her. It would cost her a lot to cheat on him, and I’m convinced he’ll marry her one of these days. They aren’t little saints, but they’re not bad people.’

  ‘Did Sergeant Mitchell know that his sister and Mullins had had sex in the kitchen?’

  ‘Erna took him aside to tell him about it!’

  ‘How did he react?’

  O’Rourke began to laugh.

  ‘I wasn’t there, inspector. I only know what he felt like telling me. Did you know that he was his sister’s guardian and that he took this seriously?’

  ‘By letting her sleep with any man she fancied?’

  ‘What would you have had him do? He couldn’t be with her night and day. She absolutely had to earn her living, and she wasn’t well educated enough to work in an office. He tried to have her work as a salesgirl in a five-and-ten-cent store, but she didn’t last longer than a day because she kept chatting with the customers and made mistakes in her arithmetic. Mitchell saw Ward as better than nothing, and he might have wound up marrying her. Mullins would have been an improvement, since he was single.’

  Now it was Maigret’s turn to laugh. The characters of all these people were changing right before his eyes with every revelation O’Rourke made.

  Brandy had been served, a vintage bottle, which the chief deputy sheriff was proud to offer his guest. O’Rourke, who had heard that cognac must be decanted before it is drunk, held his glass reverently in the palm of his big hand.

  ‘To your health!’

  What surprised Maigret was not the leniency of men like his police colleague, or like Harry Cole, who brought his prisoner along for lunch in a good restaurant.

  That kind of indulgence was common at Quai des Orfèvres, too. In Paris there were certain bad characters whom Maigret knew by heart, ran into now and then, and to whom he sometimes said: ‘You’ve gone too far again, my friend, and I’ve got to arrest you. It’ll do you good to meditate in the shade for a few months.’

  What did astonish him was the attitude of the jurors, the public. For example, when the witnesses had described the drunken saga of that night and mentioned the number of rounds, no one had even blinked.

  Those people seemed to understand that it takes all kinds to make a world and that a certain percentage of any society will always fall by the wayside.

  At the top of the criminal heap, there are the major mobsters, who are almost indispensable since it’s thanks to them that everyone can obtain what is forbidden by law.

  Those gangsters need killers to settle their accounts among themselves.

  Not everyone can belong to a club catering to a certain social class. Not everyone can climb the social ladder.

  There are those who descend it. There are those who are born at the very bottom. There are the weak, the ones born unlucky, as well as those who become bad guys to brazen it out and believe in spite of everything that they’re still good for something.

  And it was all this that these ordinary people seemed to understand.

  ‘Does Van Fleet have a mistress?’

  ‘Are you asking me if he sleeps more or less regularly with a woman?’

  ‘If you prefer.’

  ‘No. It’s more difficult than you think. Aside from a Bessie or an Erna Bolton, a woman, in that situation, always manages to get herself married. Bessie had almost made it. Erna will.’

  ‘So that he could count only on the odd opportunity?’

  ‘Rare opportunities, yes.’

  ‘And O’Neil?’

  ‘O’Neil as well! Let me
point out, by the way, that Ted O’Neil, all appearances to the contrary, is the most timid of all. He feels out of place. He isn’t comfortable in his own skin! He had a strict upbringing. I wonder if he doesn’t sometime miss the paternal homestead and that whole righteous world that has now shut him out.’

  ‘His parents don’t write to him?’

  ‘They no longer wish to know him.’

  ‘Wo Lee?’

  ‘When you have lived in a city along with a few hundred Chinese, you’ll find that you’re better off not trying to understand them. I think Wo Lee is a good little boy, and he wants to succeed. He’s proud of his uniform. He’ll get himself bravely killed in the next war.’

  Harry Cole, who had hardly said a word, watched them both with an enigmatic smile.

  But now he spoke up: ‘I know a little about the Chinese.’

  ‘What do you think of them?’

  ‘Nothing!’ he said, tongue in cheek.

  Most of the diners had finished eating; from the now crowded bar came loud chatter and the clinking of glasses. People were playing cards in a neighbouring room.

  ‘Question?’

  ‘Yes. I’m not sure how to ask it. I keep coming back to the fact that they were five men and one woman and they had been drinking. Mullins, you told me, had given in to temptation. He got want he wanted. That left Ward’s three other pals. Don’t you think a big red-faced boy like Van Fleet, a solid young man like O’Neil wanted her as well?’

  ‘Quite possibly.’

  ‘Don’t you think she played the same game with them as she did with Mullins?’

  ‘Probably. She must have got them going, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Do the Chinese, like blacks, have a certain predilection for white women?’

  ‘Your turn, Harry.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s a real preference. Their natural inclination would be for their own women. But with them it’s a question of pride.’

  ‘So,’ continued Maigret, returning to his theme, ‘they were five men and one woman in a car. All squeezed together in the back seat, as I remember, in the dark, there were O’Neil, Bessie and Wo Lee. Wait! I’ve started at the wrong end. You said Ward was jealous. He knew Bessie’s temperament and her behaviour when drunk. Yet he’s the one who organized this night out with his pals.’