Maigret Takes a Room Read online

There was light above the door as well as in the windows on the right and on the second floor. Maigret didn’t need to ring. Someone must have been watching them, because the door opened. Inspector Vacher looked quizzically at Maigret.

  ‘He’s going to pull through,’ he said.

  And a woman’s voice, from the room on the right, exclaimed:

  ‘What did I tell you?’

  It was a funny voice, at once childish and joyful. A very tall, very fat woman, framed in the doorway, held out her hand warmly and said:

  ‘I am delighted to make your acquaintance, Monsieur Maigret.’

  She was like an enormous baby, with pink flesh, an undefined figure, big blue eyes, very blonde hair and a dress the colour of a sweet. Seeing her, one would have thought that nothing tragic had happened, that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

  The room where she welcomed them was a snug sitting room where there were three liqueur glasses on the table.

  ‘I’m Mademoiselle Clément. I have managed to send my tenants to bed. But, of course, I can call them down when you like. So, your inspector isn’t dead?’

  ‘The bullet pierced his right lung.’

  ‘Nowadays surgeons can repair these things in the wink of an eye.’

  Maigret was rather thunderstruck. For one thing, he had imagined the house and its owner quite differently. The two inspectors, Vauquelin and Vacher, whom Torrence had sent to the property when news of the attack came in, seemed to be enjoying his surprise: Vauquelin, more forward than Vacher, even winked at him, pointing at the fat woman.

  She must have been about forty or forty-five but in appearance she was ageless. Just as, in spite of her impressive volume, she was weightless. And there was so much exuberance in her that in spite of the circumstances you half expected to see her explode into jolly laughter.

  It was a case that Maigret had barely been personally involved in. He hadn’t come to the property. He had worked on papers, from his office, leaving the responsibility for the operation to Janvier, who had been delighted.

  No one at headquarters would have imagined that this case, which was called the ‘Stork affair’, presented the slightest danger.

  Five days earlier, at about 2.30 in the morning, two men had gone into a little nightclub on Rue Campagne-Première, in Montparnasse, the Stork, when it was about to close.

  They were wearing black face masks, and one of them was carrying a revolver.

  At that moment there was no one left in the club but the boss, a young man called Angelo and the lavatory attendant, who was busy putting her hat on in front of a mirror.

  ‘The till!’ one of the masked men had ordered.

  The manager had put up no resistance. He had put the evening’s takings on the bar and, a few moments later, the robbers had left in a dark-coloured car.

  The next day it was Maigret who had interviewed the lavatory attendant, who was plump and well preserved.

  ‘Are you sure you recognized him?’

  ‘I didn’t see his face, if that’s what you mean. But I did see a thread on his trousers and I recognized the fabric.’

  A stupid detail, in fact. Two hours before the robbery, one of the customers at the bar had gone to the lavatory to wash his hands and comb his hair.

  ‘You know how it is. Sometimes you look at a particular spot without knowing why. Well, as I held out his towel to him, I was staring at a bit of white thread on his trousers, near the knee on the right-hand side. The thread was about ten centimetres long and formed a kind of design. I even remember thinking that it looked like a profile.’

  She had almost taken it off, and the only reason she hadn’t was that the young man had gone out at that moment.

  Because he was a young man. A kid, she said. She had seen him at the bar several times, lately. One evening he’d met a girl who was a regular at the Stork and had taken her there.

  ‘Will you take care of it, Janvier?’

  Three hours later, not more, one of the robbers was identified. Janvier had only needed to find the girl, one Lucette, who was staying in a local hotel.

  ‘He spent the whole night with me.’

  ‘At his place?’

  ‘No, here. He was surprised to learn that I’m from Limoges because he’s originally from there too, and his parents still live there. His name is Paulus. I thought he was barely eighteen, but he’s nineteen and a half.’

  It might have taken longer if Janvier hadn’t looked in the tenant registry and found the name of Émile Paulus, from Limoges, recorded for four months in a furnished room on Rue Lhomond.

  At Mademoiselle Clément’s house.

  ‘Do you want to give me a warrant, chief?’

  Janvier had brought someone with him. It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, Maigret remembered, and the sun was shining. He had come back two hours later and had put an envelope containing some banknotes as well as a toy gun and a piece of black cloth down on the inspector’s desk.

  ‘It’s Paulus.’

  ‘Does the amount match?’

  ‘No. There’s only half. The rogues must have shared. But among them there are three dollar bills. I went and questioned the manager of the Stork, who confirmed to me that an American had paid in dollars that night.’

  ‘Paulus?’

  ‘His bed was unmade, but he wasn’t in his room. Mademoiselle Clément, the landlady, hadn’t seen him coming out and assumes that he must have left the house at about ten o’clock in the morning as usual.’

  ‘Have you left someone down there?’

  ‘Yes. We’re going to set a trap.’

  The surveillance only lasted four days and led nowhere. Maigret paid it no attention; he saw on the report the name of the inspector in charge and, regularly, the phrase ‘nothing to report’.

  The press had said nothing about the police discovery. Paulus hadn’t taken any luggage with him, and it seemed likely that he would come back to look for the little fortune stashed away in his suitcase.

  ‘Did you take part in the stakeout, Vacher?’

  ‘Twice.’

  ‘How did that go?’

  ‘I think that on the first day Janvier stayed in the house, up there, waiting for Paulus in his room.’

  He glanced at fat Mademoiselle Clément.

  ‘He must have been suspicious. The kid must have been warned before he went up the stairs.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘We went outside. I didn’t get the chance to do the night-time stakeout. By day, it was easy and pleasant. There’s a little bistro a little way away, opposite, with two tables on the terrace. They serve food there and, my goodness, the cooking isn’t bad at all.’

  ‘Was the house searched on the first day?’

  It was Mademoiselle Clément who replied, joyfully, as if it was a pleasant adventure.

  ‘From basement to attic, Monsieur Maigret. I should add that Monsieur Janvier came back to see me at least ten times. Something bothered him, I don’t know what. He spent hours up there, pacing the bedroom. Other times he came to sit here and chat to me. Now he knows the stories of all my tenants.’

  ‘What happened this evening exactly? Did you know he was outside?’

  ‘I didn’t know it was him, but I knew that a policeman was mounting guard.’

  ‘Did you get a chance to see him?’

  ‘I glanced out at about nine thirty, before going to bed. I saw someone pacing back and forth on the pavement, but the streetlight is too far away for me to have recognized the silhouette. I went back to my bedroom.’

  ‘Is it upstairs?’

  ‘No. On the ground floor. It looks out on to the courtyard. I started undressing and I was about to take my stockings off when I heard Mademoiselle Blanche running downstairs shouting I don’t know what. She opened my door without knocking.’

  ‘Was she dressed?’

  ‘In a dressing gown. Why? When she doesn’t go out, she spends her evenings reading in her bed. She’s a good girl. Her room i
s on the first floor, beside the Lotards, and looks out on to the street. She heard a gunshot, leaped out of bed and went to look out of the window. At first she didn’t notice anything. She did think she saw someone running, but she isn’t sure.’

  ‘We questioned her,’ Vauquelin said. ‘She isn’t sure at all.’

  ‘Apparently some windows were open. A woman opposite pointed out something on the pavement, on our pavement, and Mademoiselle Blanche made out a body lying on the ground.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I put on my dress, I hurried into the corridor, where there’s a telephone on the wall, and I called the police. Monsieur Valentin came out of his room, and I wanted to stop him opening the door. He did it anyway, and I think he was the first one to go over to the body. He’s a charming man, a real man of the world, you’ll see.’

  Mademoiselle Blanche was a good girl, Monsieur Valentin was charming. The Lotards were doubtless perfect people. Mademoiselle Clément smiled on life, on men, on women, on Maigret.

  ‘Will you have a little glass of liqueur?’

  The glasses contained chartreuse, and she tasted hers greedily.

  ‘How do your tenants get into the house at night? Do they have a key?’

  ‘No, they ring the bell. I have a cord by the head of my bed, like concierges do, as well as an electric switch that controls the light in the corridor and on the stairs.’

  ‘Do they call out their names?’

  ‘They don’t need to. Before opening the door to them I light up the corridor. My room is at the end. It’s an old house, oddly built. It’s funny. I only have to lean out of bed and I can see who’s coming in and who’s going out through a little pane of glass.’

  ‘Do they have to wake you up to leave as well?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And during the day?’

  ‘The door stays open. But there’s another spyhole in the kitchen, and no one can pass by without my knowledge. I’ll show it to you.’

  She promised that as she might have promised him a picnic.

  ‘Do you have lots of tenants?’

  ‘Nine. I mean that I have nine rooms that I let out. In fact, with Monsieur Paulus, it comes to eleven people, because I have two couples, one on the first floor and another on the second.’

  ‘Had everyone come back when the attack took place?’

  ‘No. Monsieur Lotard had gone out and came back a quarter of an hour later, when the police were already here. Mademoiselle Isabelle wasn’t in her room either. She came back just before midnight. Those gentlemen questioned her like the rest. Everyone understood that they didn’t need to take it personally. They’re very respectable people, you’ll see …’

  It was nearly two o’clock in the morning.

  ‘Would you mind if I made a call?’

  ‘I’ll show you the phone.’

  It was in the corridor, under the stairs. Maigret discovered the two little windows to which Mademoiselle Clément had referred and which allowed her to keep an eye on her tenants, either from the kitchen or from her bedroom.

  He dialled the number of the hospital, and his eye fell on a kind of money-box attached to the wall. Above the money-box, in nice round letters, it said:

  Tenants are requested to put a franc here for each local call.

  For regional and intercity, please speak to Mademoiselle Clément. Thank you.

  ‘Does anyone cheat?’ he asked with a smile.

  ‘Sometimes. I can see them through the spyhole. They aren’t always the ones you would think. Monsieur Paulus, for example, never failed to put his coin in the money-box.’

  ‘Hello! Cochin hospital?’

  He was put through to at least four different services, all with sleepy or hurried voices, to find out at last that Janvier had plunged into a deep sleep and that his temperature was satisfactory.

  Then he called Juvisy to pass on the news to Madame Janvier, who spoke in a low voice for fear of waking the children.

  ‘Your inspector told me that this time he was expecting a daughter,’ said Mademoiselle Clément when he had hung up. ‘The two of us talked a lot. He’s such a likeable man!’

  2.

  In which Maigret in turn becomes one of Mademoiselle Clément’s ‘charming’ tenants, and in which he makes a number of acquaintances

  There was a wider space, at the start of the huge corridor, near the staircase, where two benches which looked like school benches had been placed.

  It was there, at midday, just as the sound of bells ringing echoed all around the hospital – with a convent bell somewhere in the courtyards – that Maigret found Madame Janvier, who had been there for almost half an hour.

  She was weary. But she did smile at him to show him that she was trying to be strong. On all the floors there was a commotion that sounded like an army barracks, probably the nurses changing shift. They saw them passing by, laughing and jostling one another.

  The sun sparkled, and some of the gusts of wind were almost warm. Maigret had no raincoat: he wasn’t yet used to it.

  ‘Apparently they’re going to come and get us in a few minutes,’ said Madame Janvier.

  She added with a hint of irony, of bitterness:

  ‘They’ve given him a bit of a wash.’

  Because here she wasn’t allowed to be present when her husband was being washed. It sometimes happened that Madame Janvier came to collect her husband from Quai des Orfèvres. Maigret would meet her from time to time. For the first time, however, he realized that she was almost faded as a woman. Barely ten years before, nine years exactly, in fact, Janvier had introduced him to a fiancée with full cheeks that dimpled when she laughed, and now she had that neutral look, that overly serious expression you see on women in the suburbs, their backs aching, busying themselves with their housework.

  ‘Tell me honestly, detective chief inspector, do you think they targeted him personally?’

  He could understand her train of thought and reflected before answering, even though he had already considered the same idea that morning.

  Obviously, when Janvier had been shot on Rue Lhomond, everyone had immediately thought of Paulus. And yet, as Maigret had said to the commissioner of the Police Judiciaire when the report was issued, this hypothesis seemed less likely the more one thought about it.

  ‘That kid isn’t a killer, chief. I’ve been able to get some information about him. When he arrived in Paris, a year and a half ago, he worked for an estate agency on Boulevard Saint-Denis.’

  He had gone there. The offices, on the mezzanine, were dirty, and vulgar, like the manager, who had the look of a con man.

  On the walls, small handwritten posters were pinned up with drawing pins, announcing the various commercial properties for sale, particularly cafés and bars. It was Paulus’ task to write out the posters in longhand, and also to send out hundreds of circulars.

  Another scrawny youth, with long hair, was working in the waiting room, which had to be lit all day.

  ‘Paulus?’ said the manager, who had a strong rural accent. ‘I kicked him out.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because every day he pocketed a few francs out of petty cash.’

  This was a drawer which always contained some money, not very much, for small daily expenses, stamps, recorded delivery letters, telegrams and the like.

  ‘It’s been six months, chief,’ Maigret went on, ‘since Paulus left this job. His parents sent him a little money, but not enough to live on, because they aren’t rich. He ended up selling encyclopedias door to door. I found his briefcase, which contained a copy, as well as some contracts to be signed for the purchase of twenty-two or twenty-four volumes on the instalment plan.’

  They continued with the inquiry, of course. Paris smelled of springtime. The buds on the chestnut trees burst into tiny, pale green leaves. Thousands of young people like Paulus and his successor walked the streets of Paris with fierce expressions on their faces, looking for a job, for a future.

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nbsp; ‘He must have met a boy who was older than him, and probably wiser about the world. Mademoiselle Clément says that he received a friend here from time to time, and that on at least two occasions that friend slept in Paulus’ room. He’s dark-haired, about twenty-five. We’ll find him. What strikes me most is that to rob the Stork he should have used a child’s revolver. Scaring the manager of a nightclub with a toy and shooting a police inspector in the street in cold blood are two very different things.’

  ‘You don’t think, Maigret, that his friend might have pulled the trigger?’

  ‘What would have been the point? There were really only two reasons to kill Janvier: to go into the house to collect the loot, which was risky, or to clear the way in order to get out. And yet Mademoiselle Clément is quite categorical. No one went in or out.’

  ‘Unless Janvier found an important clue and …’

  Maigret had thought about it all day while Vauquelin kept watch in the house on Rue Lhomond, where Mademoiselle Clément had seated him in the sitting room, near the open window.

  He had even gone through Janvier’s personal desk, drawing up a list of all the cases that the inspector had been involved in over the last few months.

  He hadn’t found anything.

  ‘We’ll find out soon enough if he has any ideas!’ he had sighed.

  Madame Janvier tapped nervously on her handbag, and probably because she felt she was too pale she had put twice as much rouge on her cheeks as she needed, clumsily, which made her look as if she had a fever.

  Someone came to get them. The nurse, before bringing them into the room, gave them her instruction.

  ‘You mustn’t stay for more than a few minutes. Don’t tire him. Don’t talk to him about things that might upset him.’

  It was the first time that Maigret had seen his inspector in a bed and he found him quite changed, not least because the baby-faced Janvier, who was normally close-shaven, his skin pink and taut, was now sporting a growth of stubble.

  The nurse also delivered a little speech to him.

  ‘Don’t forget what the doctor told you. You are expressly forbidden to speak. If the detective chief inspector has any questions to ask you, answer yes or no by batting your eyelids. Don’t get agitated. Don’t get annoyed.’