Maigret’s Pipe - Seventeen Stories Page 2

  “Are you on good terms with her?”

  “I’ve always told her she shouldn’t have married such a useless fellow. Apart from that, since we never see one another…”

  “Are you often out? You told me you were a widow. I imagine the pension you get from the Army is inadequate?”

  She assumed an air of modest dignity.

  “I work for my living. To begin with, I mean after my husband’s death, I took in lodgers — two of them. But men are such dirty creatures. If you’d seen the state in which they left their rooms!”

  At the time, Maigret had not been consciously listening, yet now he could recall not only her words but her intonations.

  “For the past year I have been companion to Madame Lallemant, a very respectable lady, the mother of a doctor. She lives alone, near to Charenton lock, just across the way, and every afternoon I… She’s more like a friend, if you see what I mean.”

  Actually Maigret had not taken the matter very seriously. The woman might have been a crackpot; he was not interested. She was typical of those visitors on whom one is forced to waste half an hour. As it happened, the Director had come into the office, or rather had peeped in as he often did. He had cast one glance at the visitors, and he too had realized from the look of them that nothing of importance was involved.

  “Can you spare a moment, Maigret?”

  They had stood together for a short while in the next room, discussing a warrant for arrest which had just been telegraphed from Dijon.

  “Torrence will see to it,” Maigret had said.

  He had not been smoking his best pipe, but a different one. He must, presumably, have laid down his best pipe on the desk a little earlier, when Judge Coméliau had rung him up. But at that point he had not been thinking about it.

  He had gone back into the room and stood by the window, his hands behind his back.

  “In short, Madame, you’ve had nothing stolen?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “I mean you’re not lodging a complaint of burglary?”

  “I cannot do so, since…”

  “You simply have the impression that in your absence somebody, during the last few months and particularly during the last few days, has taken to entering your house?”

  “And even once during the night.”

  “Did you see anyone?”

  “I heard someone.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “A cup fell down in the kitchen and broke. I went downstairs immediately.”

  “Were you armed?”

  “No. I am never frightened.”

  “And there was nobody there?”

  “Nobody was there any longer. The broken pieces of the cup were lying on the floor.”

  “And you have no cat?”

  “No. No cat and no dog. Animals make too much mess.”

  “Couldn’t a cat have got into the house?”

  The young man, on his chair, looked increasingly anguished.

  “You’re trying the Superintendent’s patience, Maman.”

  “In short, Madame, you don’t know who breaks into your house and you have no idea what they could be looking for there?”

  “None whatsoever. We’ve always been respectable people and…”

  “If I may give you one piece of advice, it’s to get your lock changed. Then we shall see if the mysterious visits persist.”

  “And the police will do nothing?”

  He was propelling them towards the door. It was nearly time for him to visit the Director in his office.

  “In any case, I’ll send round one of my men tomorrow. But short of keeping watch on the house all day and all night, I can’t really see…”

  “When will he come?”

  “You told me you were at home in the mornings.”

  “Except when I’m doing my shopping.”

  “Will ten o’clock suit you?… Tomorrow at ten. Goodbye, Madame. Goodbye, my boy.”

  He pressed the bell. Lucas came in.

  “It’s you?… Will you go to this address tomorrow morning at ten o’clock. You ’ll find out what it’s all about.”

  He spoke without conviction. Police Headquarters share with newspaper offices the privilege of attracting every sort of crank and crackpot.

  Now, sitting at his window where the cool evening air was beginning to steal over him, Maigret was grumbling:

  “That blasted kid!”

  For it was the boy, without a shadow of a doubt, who had pinched his pipe from the desk.

  “Aren’t you coming to bed?”

  He went to bed. He was cross and sulky. He felt hot and sticky in bed and he grumbled again before going to sleep. And next morning he woke up without zest, as one does after falling asleep with something unpleasant on one’s mind. It was not a presentiment and yet he was very conscious — as was his wife, though she dared not mention it — that the day was starting badly. Moreover, there were thunderclouds about and the air was already sultry.

  He walked along the embankment to the Quai des Orfèvres, and twice he automatically felt in his pocket for his favourite pipe. He climbed the dusty staircase, breathing heavily. Emile greeted him with:

  “There’s somebody to see you, sir.”

  He cast a glance into the glass-walled waiting-room and there he saw Madame Leroy, sitting on a chair upholstered in green plush, perched on the edge as though ready to spring. She caught sight of him and duly rushed up to him, tense and angry and anxious, a prey to countless varied feelings; grasping the lapels of his jacket, she shouted:

  “What did I tell you? They came back last night. My son has disappeared. Will you believe me now? Oh! I quite realized that you thought I was crazy. I’m not such a fool. And see here, see here…”

  She was fumbling wildly in her handbag, and pulled out a blue-edged handkerchief which she brandished triumphantly.

  “This… Yes, isn’t this a proof? We’ve got no handkerchiefs with blue on them at home. And yet I found this on the floor beside the kitchen table. And that’s not all.”

  Maigret stared gloomily down the long corridor, where the morning’s activities were in full swing and where people turned back to stare at them.

  “Come with me, Madame,” he sighed.

  It was just his bad luck. He had felt it coming. He pushed open the door of his office and hung up his hat in its usual place.

  “Sit down. I’m listening to you. You tell me that your son…”

  “I tell you that my son disappeared during the night and that heaven knows what’s become of him now!”

  II. Joseph’s Slippers

  It was not easy to know exactly what she thought about her son’s fate. A short while before, at Police Headquarters, during the fit of weeping that had broken out with the suddenness of a summer storm, she had lamented:

  “You see, I’m convinced they’ve killed him. And there you were, doing nothing at all. Don’t imagine I don’t realize what you were thinking. You took me for a lunatic. Yes, you did! And now he’s probably dead. And I shall be left all alone and helpless.”

  But now, as their taxi sped along under the spreading branches that overshadowed the Quai de Bercy like an avenue in some country town, her features had resumed their hardness, her glance its keenness, and she said:

  “He’s a weak creature, you see, Superintendent. He’ll never be able to resist women. Just like his father, who gave me such a dreadful time!”

  Maigret was sitting beside her in the taxi and Lucas in front beside the driver.

  Outside the boundaries of Paris, in the Charenton district, the embankment still bore the name Quai de Bercy. But there were no more trees; factory chimneys on the other side of the Seine, and on this side warehouses and suburban villas, built while the area was still almost rural and now hemmed in by blocks of flats. At a street corner, a café-restaurant painted aggressively red, with yellow lettering, a few iron tables and two skimpy bay-trees in tubs.

  Madame Roy — no, Leroy — tapped on the window excitedly.

  “It’s here. Please don’t pay attention to the untidiness. I needn’t tell you I never thought about doing the housework.”

  She searched her bag for a key. The door was dark brown and the outer walls a smoky grey. Maigret had time to make sure that there were no traces of housebreaking.

  “Please come in. I suppose you’ll want to go round all the rooms. Look! the pieces of the cup are still lying where I found them.”

  She had spoken the truth when she said the place was clean. There was no dust anywhere. Tidiness prevailed. But good heavens, how depressing it was! More than depressing, dismal. An excessively narrow passage, the lower half painted brown and the upper half dark yellow. Brown doors. Wallpaper that had been there for at least twenty years, so faded as to be colourless.

  The woman went on talking. Perhaps she talked to herself when she was all alone, because she could not bear the silence.

  “What surprises me most is that I didn’t hear anything. I sleep so lightly that I wake up several times during the night. But last night I slept like a log. I’m wondering…”

  He looked at her.

  “You’re wondering whether somebody didn’t give you a drug to make you sleep?”

  “That’s impossible. He couldn’t have done that. Why? Tell me, why should he have done that?”

  Was she going to become aggressive again? Sometimes she seemed to be accusing her son and at other times to be making him out a victim. Meanwhile Maigret moved through the little house with such ponderous slowness as to give the impression of immobility. Like a sponge, he was steeping himself in the surrounding dankness.

  And the woman dogged his footsteps, observing his every gesture, his every look, mistrustful, trying to guess at his thoughts.
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  Lucas, too, was watching his Chief’s reactions, baffled by this odd and somewhat eccentric investigation.

  “The dining-room is on the right, on the other side of the passage. But when we were alone — and we were always alone — we used to eat in the kitchen.”

  She would have been highly surprised and possibly indignant if she had suspected that what Maigret was automatically hunting for as he looked around was his pipe. He went up the staircase, which was even narrower than the passage, with a rickety handrail and creaking steps. She came up behind him, explaining — for she felt a perpetual urge to explain:

  “Joseph slept in the room on the left… Good heavens, I said slept, as if…

  “You’ve not touched anything?”

  “Nothing at all, I give you my word. As you see, the bed’s unmade. But I’d wager he hasn’t slept in it. My son is a very restless sleeper. In the morning I always find the sheets all tangled up and the blankets on the floor. He sometimes talks in his sleep and even calls out…”

  The Superintendent peered into a wardrobe that stood facing the bed.

  “Are all his clothes here?”

  “No, and that’s just it. If they were, I’d have found his suit and his shirt on a chair, for he was hopelessly untidy.”

  It might have been surmised that the young man, hearing a noise in the night, had gone down into the kitchen and been attacked by the mysterious visitor or visitors.

  “Did you see him in bed last night?”

  “I always came to kiss him goodnight in bed. Last night I came up as usual. He was undressed. His clothes were on the chair. As for the key…”

  An idea occurred to her. She explained:

  “I always stayed downstairs last and locked the door. I kept the key in my room, under my pillow, so that…”

  “Did your late husband often spend a night out?”

  She replied, with pained dignity:

  “He did so once, after we’d been married three years.”

  “And from then on you took to keeping the key under your pillow?”

  She made no reply, and Maigret felt convinced that the father had been kept under as strict a watch as the son.

  “So this morning you found the key in its usual place?”

  “Yes, Superintendent. I didn’t think of it right away, but now it comes back to me. So he can’t have wanted to run away, can he?”

  “One moment. Your son went to bed. Then he got up and dressed again.”

  “Look! Here’s his tie on the floor. He didn’t put on his tie.”

  “And his shoes?”

  She quickly turned towards a corner of the room where two well-worn shoes lay at some distance one from the other.

  “Nor his shoes. He’s gone off in his slippers.”

  Maigret was still looking for his pipe, unsuccessfully. He did not exactly know what else he was looking for. He was making a haphazard search of this shabby, dreary room in which the young man had lived. There was a blue suit in the wardrobe, his ‘best suit’ which presumably he wore only on Sundays, and a pair of patent leather shoes. A few shirts, almost all worn and mended at collar and cuffs. A packet of cigarettes that had been opened.

  “By the way, did your son smoke a pipe?”

  “At his age, I’d not have allowed him to. A fortnight ago he came home with a small pipe that he must have bought in some cheap store, for it was shoddy stuff. I took it out of his mouth and threw it in the fire. His father, even at the age of forty-five, had never smoked a pipe.”

  Maigret sighed as he went on to Madame Leroy’s bedroom. She kept saying:

  “You must excuse the untidiness. The bed isn’t made.”

  The banal pettiness of the whole thing was nauseating.

  “Upstairs there are attics where we slept during the early months of my widowhood, when I took lodgers. Tell me, since he hasn’t put on his tie or his shoes, do you suppose…”

  And Maigret, at the end of his tether:

  “I’ve no idea, Madame!”

  For the past two hours, Lucas had been conscientiously searching the house in every nook and cranny, while Madame Leroy followed him, saying from time to time:

  “Look, on one occasion this drawer was opened. The pile of linen on the upper shelf had been disturbed.”

  Outside, the heavy sunlight poured down like honey, but in the house a perpetual grey twilight reigned. Maigret went on soaking things in like a sponge; but he could not face following the others as they went back and forth.

  Before leaving the Quai des Orfèvres, he had got a detective to telephone to Orléans to make sure the married daughter had not paid a visit to Paris recently. That trail led nowhere.

  Could it be that Joseph had had a key made for himself without his mother’s knowledge? But then, if he had planned to leave last night, why had he not worn his tie, and above all his shoes?

  Maigret now knew what those slippers of Joseph’s were like. Out of thrift, Madame Leroy had made them herself from scraps of stuff and cut the soles from a piece of felt.

  Everything in the place looked poverty-stricken, and the poverty was all the more distressing because it was never admitted.

  The former lodgers? Madame Leroy had told him about them. The first who had come, when she had put a notice in the window, was an old bachelor, a clerk at Soustelle’s, the wholesale wine merchants whose house he had noticed while driving along the Quai de Bercy. “A respectable, well-bred man, Superintendent. Or rather, can you call a man well-bred when he empties his pipe all over the place? And then he had a habit of getting up in the night and going downstairs to heat himself some tea. One night I got up and I met him in his nightshirt and underpants on the stairs. And yet he was an educated man.”

  The second room had first been occupied by a stonemason, a foreman, she said, though her son would probably have corrected her. The stonemason had wanted to marry her.

  “He kept on telling me about his savings, about a house he owned near Montluçon to which he wanted to take me when we were married. Note that he never said or did anything I didn’t approve of. When he came in I would tell him: “Wash your hands, Monsieur Germain.” And he would go and wash them under the tap. It was he who cemented the yard for me one Sunday, and I had to insist on paying for the cement.”

  Then the mason had left, possibly discouraged, and he had been replaced by a Monsieur Bleustein.

  “A foreigner. He spoke French very well, but with a slight accent. He was a commercial traveller and he only spent one or two nights a week in the house.”

  “Had your lodgers their own keys?”

  “No, Superintendent, because in those days I was always at home. When I had to go out, I slipped the key into a crack in the front wall of the house, behind the drainpipe, and they knew where to find it. One week Monsieur Bleustein did not come back. I found nothing in his room but a broken comb, an old cigarette-lighter and some tattered underwear.”

  “Had he not given you notice?”

  “No. And yet he was a well-bred man too.”

  There were a few books on the sewing machine, which stood in one corner of the dining-room. Maigret glanced through them casually. They were cheap novels, chiefly adventure stories. Here and there, in the margin of a page, two interlaced initials had been traced, sometimes in pencil, sometimes in ink: J and M, the M almost always larger and more elaborately drawn than the J.

  “Do you know anyone whose name begins with M, Madame Leroy?” he called up the stairs.

  “With M?… No, not that I can think of. Let’s see… There was my husband’s sister-in-law whose name was Marcelle, but she died in childbirth at Issoudun.”

  It was noon when Lucas and Maigret met outside.

  “Shall we have a drink, Chief?”

  And they sat down together in the little red bistro at the street corner. They were both equally depressed; Lucas was in rather a bad temper.

  “What a set-up!” He sighed. “By the way, I discovered this scrap of paper. And guess where? In the kid’s packet of cigarettes. He must have been scarred stiff of his mother, since he actually hid his love letters in his cigarette packets!”

  It was, in fact, a love letter:

  Joseph dear,

  You hurt my feelings yesterday when you said I despised you and would never marry a man like you. You know that I’m not that sort of person and that I love you as much as you love me. I’m sure you’re going to become somebody one day. But please, don’t wait for me so near the shop. You’ve been noticed, and Madame Rose, who does the same thing herself but who’s an old cat, has been making remarks about it. Wait for me by the métro from now on. Not tomorrow, because mother’s coming to take me to the dentist. And above all, don’t get any more such ideas into your head. Love and kisses,