Maigret 51 Maigret Travels Page 4

  In the wardrobe, one of the men counted eighteen suits, and no doubt there were just as many in Ward’s other suites, in Cannes, Lausanne and London.

  ‘You can send in the photographer,’ Doctor Paul called out.

  Maigret was looking everywhere and nowhere, registering the slightest details of the suite and what was in it.

  ‘Phone Lucas and ask if he has any news,’ he said to Lapointe, who seemed a little lost in all the hubbub.

  There were three telephones, one in the sitting room, another by the bed, the third in the bathroom.

  ‘Hello, Lucas? Lapointe here.’

  By the window, Maigret was conferring in a low voice with the prosecutor and the examining magistrate. Doctor Paul and the photographer were in the bathroom, where they couldn’t be seen.

  ‘We’ll see if Doctor Paul confirms what Dr Frère said. According to him, the bruises …’

  Doctor Paul appeared at last, as jovial as ever.

  ‘You’ll have to wait for my report, and probably the post-mortem, because I assume there’ll be one, but what I can tell you now is this. Firstly, with a constitution like that, the fellow could have lived until at least eighty. Secondly, he was fairly drunk when he got in the bath. Thirdly, he didn’t slip, and whoever gave him a helping hand had to work quite hard to keep his head underwater. That’s all I can say for the moment. If you want to send him to me at the Forensic Institute, I’ll try to find out more …’

  The prosecutor and the examining magistrate exchanged glances. Should they order a post-mortem or not?

  ‘Does he have family?’ the prosecutor asked Maigret.

  ‘From what I gather, he had two children, both minors, and his divorce from his third wife wasn’t yet final.’

  ‘Brothers and sisters?’

  ‘Just a moment …’

  He picked up the telephone again. Lapointe was signalling to him that he had something to tell him, but first Maigret asked for the bar.

  ‘Monsieur Arnold, please.’

  ‘One moment …’

  Soon afterwards, Maigret announced to the prosecutor:

  ‘No sisters. He had one brother, who was killed in India at the age of twenty-two. There are also a few cousins, but he never kept up relations with them … What was it you wanted, Lapointe?’

  ‘Lucas told me something he’d just heard. At about nine o’clock this morning, Countess Palmieri called from her room and asked for several telephone numbers.’

  ‘Was a record kept of them?’

  ‘Not those in Paris. There were two or three of them, apparently, including one she called twice. Then she called Monte Carlo.’

  ‘What number?’

  ‘The Hôtel de Paris.’

  ‘Do we know who she called?’

  ‘No. Do you want me to get through to the Hôtel de Paris?’

  It was all still within the same world. Here, the George-V. In Monte Carlo, the most luxurious hotel on the Riviera.

  ‘Hello, mademoiselle? Can you get me the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo, please? … What?’

  He turned, embarrassed, to Maigret.

  ‘She’s asking whose account she should put the call on.’

  ‘On Ward’s,’ Maigret replied impatiently. ‘Or mine, if she prefers.’

  ‘Hello, mademoiselle? … It’s for Detective Chief Inspector Maigret … Yes … Thank you.’

  He put the phone down and announced:

  ‘Ten minutes to wait.’

  In a drawer, they had found letters, some in English, others in French or Italian, all jumbled up, letters from women and business letters mixed together, invitations to cocktail parties and dinners. In another drawer were files, in a more regular order.

  ‘Shall we take them away?’

  Maigret looked questioningly at Judge Calas and then nodded. It was eleven o’clock, and the hotel was starting to wake up, you could hear bells ringing, valets and chambermaids coming and going, the constant clatter of the lift.

  ‘Do you think, doctor, that a woman could have held his head under the water?’

  ‘It depends on the woman.’

  ‘They call her the little countess, which suggests she’s rather small.’

  ‘It isn’t the height or the girth that counts,’ Doctor Paul grunted philosophically.

  ‘It might be a good idea to have a look at 332,’ Maigret said.

  ‘332?’

  ‘The countess’s suite.’

  Finding the door closed, they had to go in search of a chambermaid. The suite, which also comprised a sitting room, smaller than the one in 347, a bedroom and a bathroom, had already been cleaned.

  Although the window was open, a smell of perfume and alcohol lingered in the air. The bottle of champagne had been removed, but the whisky bottle was still on the pedestal table, three-quarters empty.

  The prosecutor and the examining magistrate, being too well brought up or too shy, stopped in the doorway, while Maigret opened cupboards and drawers. What he discovered was a feminine version of what he had discovered in David Ward’s suite, expensive objects that are only found in a few shops and are like the symbols of a certain lifestyle.

  On the dressing table, jewellery lay about as if it were of little value: a diamond bracelet with a tiny watch, rings and earrings worth some twenty million francs in all.

  Here too, papers in a drawer, invitations, bills from dressmakers and milliners, leaflets, Air France and PanAm timetables.

  No personal letters, as if the little countess neither received nor wrote correspondence. What Maigret did find, in a closet, was twenty-eight pairs of shoes, some of which had never been worn. Their size confirmed that the countess really was small.

  Lapointe came running.

  ‘I just spoke to the Hôtel de Paris. The switchboard operator notes the calls the guests make, but not the ones they receive, except when they’re away and she has to take a message. There were more than fifteen calls from Paris this morning, and she can’t say who this one was for.’

  Lapointe hesitated, then added:

  ‘She asked me if it was as hot here as it is down there. Apparently …’

  But nobody was listening to him any more, and he fell silent. The little group set off back to David Ward’s suite and on the way encountered a rather strange procession. The manager, who had doubtless been alerted, was at the head of it, like a scout, keeping an anxious eye on the doors, which might open at any moment. He had brought along one of the blue-uniformed bellboys to clear the way.

  Four men followed, carrying the stretcher on which David Ward’s body, still naked, lay hidden by a blanket.

  ‘This way,’ Monsieur Gilles said in a muted voice.

  He was walking on tiptoe. The bearers advanced cautiously, trying not to hit the walls and doors.

  They headed, not for one of the main lifts, but for a corridor that was narrower than the others, with less bright, less new paint, which led to the goods lift.

  David Ward, who had been one of the hotel’s most prestigious guests, was leaving it by the route reserved for trunks and other large items of luggage.

  There was a silence. The prosecutor and the examining magistrate, who had nothing more to do, were reluctant to go back into the suite.

  The prosecutor sighed. ‘You deal with it, Maigret.’ Then he hesitated, and said in a lower voice: ‘Handle this with care. Try to make sure the papers don’t … Well, you know what I mean. The ministry was clear about that.’

  How much less complicated it had been the day before, round about the same time, when Maigret had gone to Rue de Clignancourt to pay a visit to the debt collector, a father of three, who had been shot twice in the stomach while trying to protect his bag containing eight million francs.

  He had refused to be taken to hospital. If he was going to die, he preferred to do so in the little room with the pink-flowered wallpaper where his wife watched over him and the children, when they got back from school, walked on tiptoe.

  In that case,
they had a lead, the beret that had been left on the premises, which was sure to lead them to the culprits in the end.

  But in the case of David Ward?

  ‘I think I’ll go over to Orly,’ Maigret said suddenly, as if talking to himself.

  Was it because of the Air France and PanAm timetables left in the drawer, or because of the telephone call to Monte Carlo?

  Or was it because he had to do something, anything, and an airport seemed in line with a person like the countess?

  3.

  Concerning the little countess’s comings and goings and Maigret’s qualms

  He was not to leave the George-V as quickly as he had intended. As he was giving instructions to Lucas by telephone before going to the airport, young Lapointe, who had gone to take another look around Countess Palmieri’s bedroom, brought back a coloured metal tin, originally for English biscuits, now stuffed full of photographs.

  It reminded Maigret of the tin his mother had used for buttons when he was small, into which she dipped every time a button was missing from a garment. That one was a tea tin, decorated with Chinese characters, which was an unusual thing to find in the house of an estate manager who never drank tea.

  In a closet in 332, Maigret had seen suitcases from a famous luggage shop on Avenue Marceau, and even the small everyday objects, a shoe horn, a paperweight, were luxury brands.

  And yet it was in a simple biscuit tin that the countess kept, in no particular order, photographs of herself and her friends, snapshots taken on her travels, showing her in a swimming costume on board a yacht, somewhere in the Mediterranean probably, or water-skiing, or somewhere in the mountains, surrounded by snow.

  In some of the photographs, she was accompanied by the colonel, sometimes alone with him, most often with other people whom Maigret recognized as actors, writers, people whose pictures were often in the newspapers.

  ‘Are you taking the tin with you, chief?’

  It was as if Maigret were reluctant to leave this floor of the George-V even though there seemed to be nothing more to be learned.

  ‘Call the nurse. But make sure it’s the same one as last night.’

  It was the same, for the good reason that there was only one attached to the hotel. Her main tasks, Maigret was to learn somewhat later, were to treat hangovers and give injections. For a few years now, a third of the guests, on their doctors’ orders, had been getting injections of one kind or another.

  ‘Tell me, Mademoiselle …’

  ‘Genévrier.’

  She was a sad, dignified woman of indeterminate age, with the dull eyes of those who don’t get enough sleep.

  ‘When Countess Palmieri left the hotel by ambulance, she was in her nightdress, am I right?’

  ‘Yes. We wrapped her in a blanket. I didn’t want to waste any time dressing her. I put some clothes and underwear in a suitcase.’

  ‘Including a dress?’

  ‘A blue tailored suit, the first thing I found. Shoes and stockings, too, of course.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘A handbag, which was in the bedroom. I made sure it contained a comb, a compact, lipstick, everything a woman needs.’

  ‘Do you know if there was any money in the handbag?’

  ‘I saw a purse, a chequebook and a passport.’

  ‘A French passport?’

  ‘Italian.’

  ‘Is the countess Italian?’

  ‘French. She became Italian through her marriage to Count Palmieri, and I assume she held on to Italian nationality. I don’t know. I don’t have anything to do with that kind of thing.’

  In the lift, there was a man Lapointe couldn’t stop staring at, whom Maigret eventually recognized as the greatest American film comedian. It was strange, after seeing him so often on the screen, to encounter him in the flesh, in a lift, dressed like anybody else, with bags under his eyes and the glum air of someone who drank too much the night before.

  Instead of heading for the lobby, Maigret dropped into the bar, where John T. Arnold was sitting over a whisky.

  ‘Would you mind coming over here for a moment?’

  There were still only a few customers, most looking as sallow as the American actor, except for two who had spread business documents on a pedestal table and were engaged in a serious discussion.

  Maigret passed the photographs to Arnold, one at a time.

  ‘I assume you know these people? I noticed you’re in some of these pictures yourself.’

  Arnold did indeed know all of them. Many were figures whose names were known to Maigret, too: two former kings who had once ruled their countries and now lived on the Riviera, an ex-queen who lived in Lausanne, a few princes, a British film director, the owner of a major brand of whisky, a ballerina, a tennis champion.

  There was something a little annoying about the way Arnold spoke of them.

  ‘Don’t you recognize him? That’s Paul.’

  ‘Paul who?’

  ‘Paul of Yugoslavia. This one’s Nénette.’

  Nénette wasn’t the nickname of an actress or a demimondaine, but of a lady who received ministers and ambassadors for dinner in her apartment on Faubourg Saint-Germain.

  ‘What about this one who’s with the countess and the colonel?’

  ‘Jef.’

  ‘Jef who?’

  ‘Van Meulen, the chemicals man.’

  Another name Maigret knew, of course, one you found on cans of paint and many other products.

  He was in shorts and a huge straw hat, like a South American planter, and was playing bowls on a square in Saint-Tropez.

  ‘He’s the countess’s second husband.’

  ‘One more question, Monsieur Arnold. Do you know anyone who’s currently staying at the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo whom the countess might have tried to telephone if she was in trouble?’

  ‘She phoned Monte Carlo?’

  ‘I asked you a question.’

  ‘Jef, of course.’

  ‘You mean her second husband?’

  ‘He spends quite a lot of the year on the Riviera. He owns a villa in Mougins, near Cannes, but most of the time he prefers the Hôtel de Paris.’

  ‘Have they stayed on good terms?’

  ‘Excellent terms. She still calls him Daddy.’

  The American comedian, having strolled around the lobby, now came and stood at the bar. He wasn’t asked what he wanted, but was automatically presented with a large glass of gin and tomato juice.

  ‘Were Van Meulen and the colonel on good terms?’

  ‘They were old friends.’

  ‘What about Count Palmieri?’

  ‘He’s in one of the photographs you’ve just shown me.’

  Arnold picked it out. A tall, dark young man with thick hair, in swimming trunks in the bow of a yacht.

  ‘Another friend?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Many thanks …’

  Maigret was about to stand, then changed his mind.

  ‘Do you know who the colonel’s notary is?’

  John T. Arnold again appeared somewhat impatient, as if Maigret were far too ignorant.

  ‘He has a lot of them. Not necessarily notaries as you French think of them. In London, his solicitors are Messrs Philps, Philps and Hadley. In New York, the firm of Harrison and Shaw handles his affairs. In Lausanne—’

  ‘With which of these gentlemen do you think he placed his will?’

  ‘He’s left wills everywhere. He kept changing them.’

  Maigret had accepted the whisky he had been offered but Lapointe, discreetly, had taken only a glass of beer.

  ‘Many thanks, Monsieur Arnold.’

  ‘Please don’t forget what I told you. Handle with care. There are bound to be complications …’

  Maigret was all too well aware of this, and it wasn’t putting him in a good mood. He was irritated by all these people whose customs were so different from those of ordinary mortals. He was starting to realize that he was ill prepared to understand them
and that it would take months to become fully conversant with their affairs.

  ‘Come, Lapointe.’

  He hurried across the lobby without looking right or left, for fear of being buttonholed by Monsieur Gilles – he liked the man well enough, but he, too, would be sure to advise caution and discretion. By now the lobby was almost filled to bursting with people speaking every language under the sun and smoking cigarettes and cigars from around the world.

  ‘This way, Monsieur Maigret …’

  The doorman led them to the place where he had parked the small police car, between a Rolls and a Cadillac.

  Tip? No tip? Maigret didn’t give one.

  ‘Let’s go to Orly, son.’

  ‘Yes, chief.’

  Maigret would have liked to go to the American Hospital in Neuilly and question the nurse, the receptionist, the switchboard operator. There were lots of things he’d have liked to do, things he should be doing. But he couldn’t be everywhere at once and he was anxious to track down the little countess, as her friends called her.

  And she was indeed little, she was slight and pretty, as he knew from her photographs. How old could she be? It was hard to say. Most of the snapshots had been taken in bright sunlight, giving a better idea of her body, almost naked in a bikini, than the details of her features.

  She had brown hair, a cheeky little pointed nose and sparkling eyes, and liked to pose as a mischievous young thing.

  He would have sworn, though, that she was pushing forty. The hotel records would have told him for sure, but he hadn’t thought of it earlier. He was going too fast, with the disagreeable impression that he was sabotaging his own investigation.

  ‘I’d like you to go to the George-V later and get her registration form,’ he said to Lapointe. ‘Then have the clearest of the photographs enlarged.’

  ‘Are we putting it in the newspapers?’

  ‘Not yet. I also want you to go to the American Hospital. Have you got all that?’

  ‘Yes. Are you leaving?’

  It wasn’t certain yet, but he had the feeling he was.

  ‘If I do go, telephone my wife.’

  He had travelled by plane four or five times, but that had been a while back, and he barely recognized Orly, where there were new buildings and the whole place was busier than Gare du Nord or Gare Saint-Lazare, for instance.