Maigret and the Burglar's Wife Page 2

  “ ‘That you?’

  “‘Yes!’

  “ ‘Are you alone?’

  “ ‘Yes. Where are you?’

  “ ‘In a little bistro by Gare du Nord… Look, Tine’— he always calls me Tine—‘I’ve got to go away for a while.’

  “ ‘Somebody see you?’

  “ ‘It’s not that… I don’t know… A man saw me, yes. But I don’t think it was a policeman.’

  “ ‘Get any money?’

  “ ‘No. It happened before I’d finished.’

  “ ‘What happened?’

  “ ‘I was busy on the lock when my flashlight fell on a face in a corner… I thought somebody had come in and was watching me. Then I saw the eyes were dead.’ ”

  She watched Maigret.

  “I’m sure he wasn’t lying. If he’d killed someone, he’d have told me… And I’m not making stories up for you. I could tell he was almost passing out. He’s so scared of corpses…”

  “What sort of person was it?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t make it very clear. He kept wanting to hang up, because he was afraid somebody’d hear him. He told me he was taking a train in a quarter of an hour—”

  “To Belgium?”

  “Probably, since he was near Gare du Nord… I looked at a timetable. There’s a train at five-forty-five.”

  “Do you have any idea what bistro he was calling from?”

  “I scouted around the district yesterday and asked some questions. But no good. They must’ve taken me for a jealous wife; they weren’t going to give anything away.”

  “So all he really told you was that there was a dead body in the room where he was working?”

  “I got him to tell me a little more. He said it was a woman, that her chest was covered with blood, and that she was holding a telephone in her hand.”

  “Is that all?”

  “No. Just as he was about to run—and I can imagine the state he was in!—a car drove up in front of the gate.”

  “You’re sure he said the gate?”

  “Yes. A wrought-iron gate. I remember it struck me particularly. A man got out and came toward the door. When he entered the hallway, Alfred went out through the window. ”

  “His tools?”

  “He left them behind… He’d cut out a windowpane to get in. That I’m sure of, because he always does. He’d probably do it even if the door was open; he’s sort of a stickler, or maybe superstitious.”

  “The man saw him?”

  “Bad luck. As he was going through the garden—”

  “He mentioned a garden?”

  “I didn’t make it up! Just as he was going through the garden, someone looked out the window and turned a flashlight on him. Maybe Alfred’s, since he’d left his behind. He jumped on his bicycle and, without looking around, rode down as far as the Seine—I don’t know exactly where. He threw the bike in, in case he could be recognized by it… He didn’t dare come back home, so he walked to Gare du Nord and called me, telling me not to say a word.

  “I begged him not to run away. I tried to reason with him. He did promise to write me, poste restante, saying where he’d be, so I could join him.”

  “He hasn’t written yet?”

  “There hasn’t been time for a letter to get here, though I did go to the post office this morning… I’ve had twenty-four hours to think things over. I bought all the papers, thinking there’d surely be something about a murdered woman.”

  Maigret picked up the telephone and called the Neuilly police.

  “Hello! This is the PJ… Any murder during the last twenty-four hours?”

  “One moment, sir. I’ll get you the desk.”

  Maigret spent some time asking questions.

  “No corpse found on the street?… No night calls? No bodies fished out of the Seine?”

  “Absolutely nothing, Chief.”

  “Nobody reported a shot?”

  “No.”

  Lofty waited patiently, like someone making a social call, both hands clasped on her bag.

  “You realize why I came to you?”

  “I think so.”

  “First, I thought the police had maybe seen Alfred, and in that case his bicycle would have given him away. Then there were the tools he left behind. Now that he’s bolted over the border, no one’ll ever believe his story… And he’s no safer in Belgium or Holland than in Paris. I’d sooner see him in jail for attempted burglary, even if it meant five years all over again, than see him up for murder.”

  “The trouble is, there’s no body,” Maigret said.

  “You think he made it up? Or I’m making it up?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “It’ll be easy for you to find the house he was working in. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this—I’m sure you’ll think of it yourself—but the safe’s bound to be one of those he put in. Planchart must keep a list of customers, and there can’t be that many in Neuilly who bought a safe at least seventeen years ago.”

  “Besides you, did Alfred have any girlfriends?”

  “Ah! I guessed that was coming… I’m not jealous. And even if I was, I wouldn’t come to you with a pack of lies to get him back, if that’s what you have in mind. He doesn’t have a girlfriend because he doesn’t want one, the poor dope. If he wanted one, I’d fix him up, with as many as he liked.”

  “Why?”

  “Because life’s not much fun for him, as it is. ”

  “Have you any money?”

  “No.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll get by, as you well know. I came here only because I want you to prove that Freddie didn’t kill anyone.”

  “If he wrote to you, would you show me his letter?”

  “You’ll read it before I do. Now that you know he’s going to write me poste restante, you’ll have every post office in Paris watched. You forget that I know your tricks.”

  She had risen to her feet; very tall, she looked him over as he sat at his desk.

  “If all the stories they tell about you are true, there’s an even chance you’ll believe me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because otherwise you’d be a fool. And you’re not one. Are you going to call Planchart?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll let me know?”

  He looked at her without replying, but couldn’t stop himself from giving her a good-humored smile.

  “Please yourself, then.” She sighed. “I could help you. You may know an awful lot, but there’re things people like us understand better than you do. ”

  Her “us” obviously stood for a whole world, the one that Lofty lived in, a world on the other side of a barrier.

  “If Inspector Boissier’s not on vacation, I’m sure he’ll back up what I told you about Alfred.”

  “He’s not going until tomorrow.”

  She opened her bag and took out a piece of paper.

  “I’ll leave you the phone number of the café under where we live. If, by some chance, you need to come see me, don’t be afraid I’ll start undressing. Nowadays, if it’s left to me, I keep my clothes on!”

  There was a touch of bitterness in her tone, but not much. A second later she was poking fun at herself: “Much better for all concerned!”

  It wasn’t until he closed the door behind her that Maigret realized he had, quite as a matter of course, shaken the hand she’d held out to him. The wasp was still buzzing in circles near the ceiling, as though looking for a way out, never thinking of the wide-open windows. Madame Maigret had announced that morning that she’d be coming to the flower market and had asked him, if he was free about noon, to meet her there. It was noon now. He paused, uncertain, then leaned out the window, from which he could see splashes of vivid color.

  He picked up the telephone with a sigh.

  “Ask Boissier to come see me.”

  Seventeen years had slipped by since the absurd incident on rue de la Lune, and Maigret was now an important official, in charge of Criminal Investigation. A funny notion came into his head, an almost childish craving. He picked up the telephone once more.

  “Brasserie Dauphine, please.”

  As the door opened to admit Boissier, he was saying: “Send up a Pernod, will you?”

  Looking at the Inspector, who had large half-moons of sweat on his shirt underneath his arms, he changed it to: “Make it two! Two Pernods. Thank you.”

  Boissier’s blue-black mustache twitched with pleasure as he went over to sit on the windowsill, mopping his forehead.

  * * *

  Chapter 2

  « ^ »

  After swallowing a mouthful of Pernod, Maigret came to the point.

  “Tell me, Boissier, what you know about Alfred Jussiaume.”

  “Sad Freddie?”

  “Yes.”

  Immediately the Inspector’s brow darkened. He shot Maigret a worried glance and asked, in a voice no longer the same, and forgetting to take a sip of his favorite drink: “Has he pulled off a job?”

  It was always like this with him, Maigret knew. He also knew why, and, by using the utmost tact, had become the only chief inspector to find favor in Boissier’s eyes.

  The latter, by rights, ought to have been one himself, and would have been a long time ago, except for an absolute inability to spell and the handwriting of a schoolboy, which prevented him from passing the simplest examinations.

  For once, however, the administrative staff had not made a mistake. They had appointed Chief Inspector Peuchet, an old has-been, always half asleep, as head of Boissier’s division, knowing that, except for writing reports, it would be Boissier who got through all the work and supervised his colleagues.

  That division wasn’t concerned with homicide, as Maigret’s w
as. It wasn’t concerned with amateurs either—like sales clerks who ran off one fine day with the money in the till, or anything of that sort.

  The customers Boissier and his men dealt with were professional thieves of every kind, from jewel robbers who stayed at the big hotels on the Champs Elysées to bank robbers and con men who hid out mostly, like Jussiaume, in seedy neighborhoods.

  Because of this, they had an outlook quite different from that of the Crime Squad. In Boissier’s line, they were all professionals on both sides. The battle was a battle between experts. It wasn’t so much a question of psychology, as of knowing, from A to Z, the little quirks and eccentricities of everyone.

  It was not unusual to see the Inspector sitting quietly outside a café with a cat burglar, and Maigret, for one, would have found it hard to hold a conversation such as they were having, with a murderer:

  “Julot, it’s a long time since you did a job.”

  “That’s right, Inspector.”

  “When was the last time I pulled you in?”

  “Must be going on six months, now.”

  “Funds getting low, eh? I’ll bet you’re cooking something up.”

  The idea that Sad Freddie might have planned something or done something without his knowledge upset Boissier.

  “I don’t know if he’s really been on the job lately, but Lofty has just left my office.”

  That was enough to reassure Boissier.

  “She doesn’t know a thing,” he stated. “Alfred’s not the type to go blabbing his business to a woman, not even his own wife.”

  The picture of Jussiaume that Boissier proceeded to draw was not really different from the one outlined by Ernestine, even though he tended to emphasize the professional angle.

  “I get fed up with arresting a fellow like that and sending him to prison. Last time, when they dished out five years to him, I damn near gave his lawyer a piece of my mind for not knowing how to do his job. He’s lacking, that lawyer is!”

  It was hard to define precisely what Boissier meant by “lacking,” but the point was plain enough.

  “There’s not another man in Paris like Alfred for breaking into a house full of people without a sound and going to work without even waking the cat. Technically, he’s an artist. What’s more, he doesn’t need anyone to tip him off, keep a lookout, and all that. He works on his own, without ever getting jumpy. He doesn’t drink, doesn’t talk, doesn’t act tough around people. With his talents, he ought to have enough money to choke himself with. He knows just where to find hundreds of safes that he put in himself, and exactly how they work, and you’d think he’d only have to go and help himself. Instead, every time he tries, he messes up, or else gets peanuts.”

  Perhaps Boissier spoke this way only because he saw a parallel between Sad Freddie’s career and his own, except that he enjoyed a constitution that could withstand any number of drinks on café terraces and nights spent on watch in all kinds of weather.

  “The joke is that, even if they put him away for ten years or twenty years, he’d start all over again as soon as he got out. He’d do it even if he was seventy and on crutches. He’s got it into his head that he needs only one lucky break, just one, and that he’s earned it by this time.”

  “He’s had a nasty knock,” Maigret explained. “It seems that he was just getting a safe open, somewhere in Neuilly, when he spotted a dead body in the room.”

  “What’d I tell you? That could happen only to him. Then he ran off? What’d he do with the bike?”

  “In the Seine.”

  “He’s in Belgium?”

  “Probably.”

  “I’ll call Brussels, unless you don’t want him picked up.”

  “I want him picked up most decidedly.”

  “Do you know where it happened?”

  “I know that it was in Neuilly, and that the house has a garden with a wrought-iron gate in front.”

  “That’ll be easy… Be back right away.”

  Maigret had the grace to order, in his absence, two more Pernods from the Brasserie Dauphine. It brought back to him not only a whiff of the rue de la Lune period, but also a whiff of the South of France, particularly of a little dive in Cannes, where he’d once been on a case and, all of a sudden, the whole affair was lifted out of the general rut and took on a holiday aspect.

  He hadn’t definitely promised Madame Maigret to meet her in the flower market, and she knew that she must never wait for him.

  Boissier returned with a file, from which he produced, first of all, the official photographs of Alfred Jussiaume.

  “That’s what he looks like!”

  An ascetic face, really, rather than that of a street boy. The skin was stretched tight across the bones, the nostrils were long and pinched, and the stare had an almost mystical intensity. Even in these harshly lit photographs, full face and side view, collarless, showing a prominent Adam’s apple, the man’s immense loneliness could be felt, and a sadness that was in no way aggressive.

  It had been natural for Jussiaume, a born victim, to be hunted.

  “Would you like me to read you his record?”

  “It’s not necessary. I’d rather go over the file with an open mind. What I’d like to have is the list of safes.”

  Boissier was pleased by this. Maigret knew that he would be, as he said it; he’d intended it as a tribute to the Inspector.

  “You knew I’d have it?”

  “I was sure you would.”

  Because Boissier really did know his job. The list in question was that, drawn from Planchart’s books, of the safes installed in Alfred Jussiaume’s time.

  “Wait till I look up Neuilly. You’re sure it’s Neuilly?”

  “I have Ernestine’s word for it.”

  “You know, she wasn’t really so dumb to come and look you up. But why you?”

  “Because I arrested her sixteen or seventeen years ago, and she made a fool of me.”

  This didn’t surprise Boissier; it was all part of the game. They both knew where they stood. The pale-colored Pernod could be smelled throughout the office, inciting the wasp to a kind of frenzy.

  “A bank… It’s certainly not that. Freddie never took to banks; he’s leery of the burglar alarms… An oil company, but that’s been out of business for ten years… A perfume manufacturer… he went bankrupt a year ago.”

  Boissier’s finger came to a stop finally on a name, on an address.

  “Guillaume Serre, dentist, 43b, rue de la Ferme, Neuilly. You know it? It’s just past the zoo, a street parallel to Boulevard Richard-Wallace.”

  “I know it.”

  They looked at each other.

  “Busy?” asked Maigret.

  He was again deliberately feeding Boissier’s self-esteem.

  “I was just classifying some files. I’m off to Brittany tomorrow. ”

  “Shall we go?”

  “I’ll get my jacket. Shall I call Brussels first?”

  “Yes. And Amsterdam.”

  “All right.”

  They went by bus, standing on the open rear platform. On rue de la Ferme, which seemed quiet and countrified, they found a little bistro with four tables on the terrace, between potted green plants, and sat down for lunch.

  Inside were three bricklayers in white smocks, drinking red wine with their meal. Flies circled around Maigret and Boissier. Farther along, on the other side of the street, they could see a black wrought-iron gate, which should correspond with 43b.

  They weren’t in any hurry. If there had really been a body in the house, the murderer had had more than twenty-four hours in which to get rid of it.

  A waitress in a black dress and a white apron looked after them, but the proprietor came out to greet them, too.

  “Nice weather, gentlemen.”

  “Yes, indeed… Would you, by any chance, know of a dentist anywhere around here?”

  A sideward nod.

  “There’s one opposite, over there, but I don’t know what he’s like. My wife prefers to go to one on Boulevard Sébastopol. This one would be expensive, I’d say. He doesn’t have all that many patients.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “A little.”

  The proprietor paused, looking them over, particularly Boissier.