Maigret at the Coroner's Page 6

  ‘You went off on your own?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Did you see Sergeant Ward?’

  ‘I saw him disappear into the darkness with Bessie.’

  ‘Did they return together?’

  ‘Ward came back and got behind the wheel. Then he said impatiently: “To hell with her! That’ll teach her.”’

  ‘Pardon me: was it during the first stop that Ward said that?’

  ‘Yes, sir. There was no other stop before Tucson.’

  ‘Didn’t Bessie ask Ward to follow her, on the pretext that she wanted to talk to him?’

  ‘Before, yes.’

  ‘Before what?’

  ‘Right when the car pulled over. She was the one who told him that she didn’t want to go any farther, and Ward slowed down. Then she added, “I need to talk to you. Come on.”’

  ‘At the first stop?’

  ‘There was no other stop.’

  The silence was rather long. Seen from the back, the four servicemen never moved.

  ‘Then what?’ sighed the coroner.

  ‘We went back to town and we dropped off the three others.’

  ‘Why did you stay with Ward?’

  ‘Because he asked me to.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Did he tell you he meant to go and look for Bessie?’

  ‘No, but that’s what I understood.’

  ‘Did you give him any cigarettes?’

  ‘No. Along the way, he asked me to get his pack from his pocket. I took a cigarette from it and lit it for him.’

  ‘Was it a Chesterfield?’

  ‘No, sir. A Camel. There were three or four left in the pack.’

  ‘Did you smoke any of them, too?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I don’t remember. I fell asleep.’

  ‘Before the car stopped?’

  ‘I believe so, or else right after. When Ward woke me up, I saw a telegraph pole and a cactus near the car.’

  ‘Neither of you got out of the car?’

  ‘I don’t know if Ward got out. I was sleeping. He took me to his place and tossed me a pillow so I could bed down on the couch.’

  ‘Did you see his wife?’

  ‘Not that time. I heard them talking.’

  ‘In short, you both drove back along the highway to look for Bessie, and neither of you got out of the car.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Did you see any other cars? Did you hear the train?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  All those hale and hearty fellows were between eighteen and twenty-three years old. Bessie, who was seventeen, had already been married, divorced and – now – was dead.

  ‘Recess!’

  Walking past a glassed-in office, Maigret heard the attorney talking on the phone.

  ‘Yes, doctor. In a few minutes. Thank you. We’ll wait …’

  It was probably the doctor who had performed the autopsy and who would be the next witness. He must have been quite busy, for the break went on for more than half an hour, giving the coroner time to work his way through five or six ordinary offenders.

  The officer who had escorted the five airmen was called over for consultation by the attorney and Mike O’Rourke, who were having an animated discussion in a corner of the corridor. Shortly thereafter they closeted themselves in the office marked ‘private’, where the coroner then joined them.

  4. The Man Who Wound Clocks

  One of Maigret’s uncles, his mother’s brother, had one mania. As soon as he entered a room with a clock in it – no matter what kind of clock, large or small, an old pendulum clock with a glass-fronted case or an alarm-clock on the mantelpiece – he was unable to attend to any conversation until he could at last go over to wind up the timepiece.

  He did this everywhere, even when visiting people whom he hardly knew. Sometimes he did the same thing in a shop where he had gone to purchase a pencil or some nails.

  He was not a clockmaker, however: he worked in the Registry Office.

  Did Maigret take after his obsessive uncle in some way? Cole had left him a note at the hotel reception desk, with a flat key in the envelope.

  Dear Julius,

  Have to make a quick hop to Mexico by plane. Probably back tomorrow morning. My car in the hotel parking lot. Key enclosed.

  Sincerely yours.

  What would Cole have thought of him, of the French police, if he had known that Maigret had never learned to drive?

  In these parts, men his age flew private planes. Most ranchers, who were really only large-scale farmers, had their own planes, which they employed to go fishing on Sundays. And many even used helicopters to crop-dust their fields.

  Maigret had not felt like eating alone in the hotel dining room and had set off on foot. He had been wanting for some time to roam the streets but had never been given the chance. To go two blocks, people jumped into their cars.

  He passed a handsome white-colonnaded building in the colonial style surrounded by a well-kept lawn. The previous evening, he had noticed the glowing neon sign of the Caroon Mortuary, a local funeral home.

  ‘The Best Funeral at the Best Price’, said their newspaper advertisement.

  And every evening, the undertaker sponsored a half-hour of soothing music on the radio. It was Dr Caroon who did the embalming. Maigret had received frankly disgusted looks after announcing that in France they put dead people in the ground without gutting them like chicken or fish.

  The wiry, nervous little doctor had seemed quite hurried and hadn’t said much at the inquest. He had mentioned the head (‘completely scalped’), two severed arms, flesh ‘brought to me higgledy-piggledy’.

  ‘Can you determine the cause of death?’

  ‘It was definitely caused by the impact of the locomotive. The top of the skull was torn off like the lid from a box, and bits of brain tissue were found several yards away.’

  ‘Do you affirm that Bessie was still alive at the moment of impact?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Could she not have been unconscious, from the effects of either blows or intoxication?’

  ‘That is possible.’

  ‘Did you find any traces of blows that might have been delivered before her death?’

  ‘Given the state of the body, such a determination is impossible.’

  That was all. No mention of any examinations of a more intimate order that might have been made.

  Maigret was almost alone as he walked along downtown, and it had been like that in every American city he had visited. No one lives in the heart of the city. As soon as the offices and stores close, the crowd streams back towards the residential neighbourhoods, leaving almost-empty streets where the shop windows, however, stay lit up all night long.

  He came to a drive-in eatery and suddenly felt a craving for a hot dog. Half a dozen parked cars were fanned out in front of the door, and two girl carhops were serving their occupants. There was in fact a kind of counter inside, with stools anchored to the floor, but somehow Maigret felt shabby at the idea of arriving on foot and sitting inside.

  He felt it several times a day, this impression of shabbiness. These people had everything. In no matter what small town, the cars were as numerous and luxurious as on the Champs-Élysées. Everyone wore new clothes, new shoes; shoe repair shops were hard to find. Crowds all looked well scrubbed and prosperous.

  The houses were new, too, full of the latest appliances. They had everything: that was the right word.

&nb
sp; Yet five young fellows in their twenties were up before the coroner because they’d spent the night drinking with a girl who had then been torn apart by a train.

  Why should it matter to him? He was not here to worry about that. Study tours like this one he had been offered after so many years were more like pleasure trips. He had only to allow himself to be escorted from city to city, accepting fine dinners, whiskies and cocktails, deputy-sheriff badges, listening to the stories he was told.

  He couldn’t help it: he was as anxious as he was in France whenever he plunged into a complicated case he had to resolve at all costs.

  They had everything: fine. And yet the newspapers were filled with accounts of crimes of every kind. In Phoenix the authorities had just arrested a gang of violent offenders, the oldest of whom was fifteen and the youngest, twelve. Only yesterday, an eighteen-year-old student in Texas had killed his wife’s sister – since he already had a wife. A thirteen-year-old girl, already married as well, had just given birth to twins while her husband was in prison for robbery.

  Maigret headed automatically for the Penguin Bar. Going there by car had made the trip a breeze. Now he had a better idea of how big the city was and he began to regret not having taken a taxi, as he was streaming with perspiration.

  They had everything. So why had the people at the Penguin the previous evening been so dejected?

  Was Maigret taking after his uncle who wound up clocks, even some that weren’t his? He had never thought about the man that way and perhaps he was discovering the real reason for his uncle’s mania: he must have had a phobia about run-down clocks. Well, a ticking clock can stop from one moment to another. People are careless, forget to wind up the mechanism.

  It was instinctive: his uncle did it for them.

  Maigret as well felt uneasy when he sensed that something was out of kilter. So he would try to understand, stick his nose in everywhere, sniffing around.

  What was out of kilter in this country, where they had everything?

  The men were tall and strong, healthy, well groomed and in general, rather cheerful. The women were almost all pretty. The stores were bursting with merchandise, the houses were the most comfortable in the world, there were cinemas on every street corner, no beggars to be seen and poverty seemed unknown.

  The undertaker paid for a music programme on the radio, and cemeteries were delightful parks that people felt no need to surround with walls and iron railings as if they feared the dead. The houses as well had green lawns, and at that hour men in shirtsleeves or no shirts at all were watering their flowers and grass. There were no fences or hedges to shut the gardens off one from another.

  Dear God, they had everything! They organized themselves scientifically to make life as pleasant as possible and from the moment the alarm went off, your radio would affectionately wish you a good day on behalf of some brand of hot cereal, without forgetting your birthday when the time came.

  So, what was it?

  That question was doubtless why Maigret was becoming so interested in those five men whom he didn’t know from Adam or Eve, and in Bessie who was dead and whom he’d never seen even in a photo, and in the other people who paraded through the courtroom.

  Many things vary from one country to another. Others are the same everywhere.

  But what changes colour the most across borders? Might it be poverty?

  Maigret was familiar with the poverty of the poor neighbourhoods of Paris, of the little bistros of Porte d’Italie or Saint-Ouen, the filthy destitution of the slums outside Paris and the discreet penury of Montmartre and Père-Lachaise. The rock-bottom misery of the river embankments, of Place Maubert or the Salvation Army.

  That kind of poverty you could understand, and trace its origins, follow its development.

  The poverty he sensed here was not unwashed and in rags, it was poverty with bathrooms, and it seemed harsher to him, more desperate, more pitiless.

  Finally, he pushed open the door to the Penguin and hoisted himself on to a barstool. The barman remembered him and what he’d had the previous evening.

  ‘Manhattan?’ he asked cordially.

  Maigret said yes. It was all the same to him. It was only eight in the evening. Night had not yet fallen, but there were already twenty or so customers bellied up to the bar, while certain tables in the booths were occupied.

  A girl wearing slacks and a white blouse was waiting on people in the bar. He had not noticed her the previous evening. He watched her. Her slacks, of a thin black gaberdine, clung to her hips and thighs with every step. She seemed to have stepped out of a billboard, a calendar, a cinema magazine.

  When she had finished serving, she slipped a nickel into the jukebox and selected a sentimental tune. Then she sat with her elbows on one corner of the bar, dreaming.

  There were no terraces where people could have an aperitif, watch passers-by in the setting sun and breathe the scent of chestnut trees.

  They drank, but to do so had to shut themselves up inside bars sealed off from the eyes of others, as if satisfying some shameful need.

  Was that why they drank more?

  • • •

  The engine driver had been questioned last. He was a middle-aged, well-dressed man whom Maigret had initially taken for a civil servant.

  ‘When I first saw the body, it was too late to stop my train because I had sixty-eight loaded freight cars behind me.’

  Fruits and vegetables from Mexico in refrigerated cars: such things came in from every country of the world. Hundreds of ships arrived in the ports every day.

  They had simply everything.

  ‘Was it day yet?’

  ‘It was beginning to get light. She was lying across the tracks.’

  They had brought him a blackboard. He had drawn two chalk lines for the tracks and, between them, had sketched a kind of marionette.

  ‘This is the head.’

  Neither her head nor any of her limbs touched the rails.

  ‘She was on her back, her knees up, like this. Here, this is an arm. There’s the other, which was torn off.’

  Maigret looked at the shoulders of the five servicemen, especially Ward’s. Perhaps he had loved Bessie. Had Ward, or one of his friends, made love to her that night?

  ‘The body was dragged over a distance of about thirty yards.’

  ‘Did you have time to see, before the impact, whether she was alive?’

  ‘That I can’t say, sir.’

  ‘Did you have the impression that her wrists were tied?’

  ‘No, sir. As you can see on the drawing, her hands were clasped over her stomach.’

  And in a low voice, he added hurriedly, ‘I was the one who collected the pieces along the tracks.’

  ‘Is it true that you found some string?’

  ‘Yes, sir. It was just a small thing, about six inches long. You find all kinds of stuff on the tracks.’

  ‘Was the string near the body?’

  ‘Maybe a yard away.’

  ‘You didn’t find anything else?’

  ‘Actually, I did, sir.’

  After searching his pockets, he pulled out a small white button.

  ‘It’s a shirt button. I automatically put it in my pocket.’

  He handed it to the coroner, who passed it to the attorney, and it was O’Rourke who showed it to the jury, after which he placed it on the table in front of him.

  ‘How was Bessie dressed?’

  ‘She was wearing a beige dress.’

  ‘With white buttons?’

  ‘No, sir. The buttons
were beige, too.’

  ‘How many men were on your train?’

  ‘Five in all.’

  Harold Mitchell, the brother, had risen to his feet again. He was allowed to speak.

  ‘I ask that the other four be heard.’

  It was the engine driver’s assistant, he explained, who had seen or claimed to have seen a cord around Bessie’s wrists before the impact.

  ‘Recess!’

  • • •

  Something had happened, however, that Maigret had not really understood. At one point, the attorney had stood up and spoken to the coroner, but Maigret had caught only a few of his words. The coroner, in turn, had reeled off his adjournment.

  While everyone else was leaving the courtroom, however, the five servicemen had not followed their officer to return to the base as they had the previous day but had instead been escorted down to the end of the corridor by the deputy sheriff with the big revolver.

  Maigret had been curious enough to go and take a look. He’d found a thick iron door, bars, and, behind them, other bars, those of the jail cells.

  Out under the colonnade, he had approached one of the jurors.

  ‘They were arrested?’

  Because of his accent, the man did not understand him right away.

  ‘For having contributed to the delinquency of a minor, yes.’

  ‘Wo Lee as well?’

  ‘He bought one of the bottles!’

  So they were locked up for having made Bessie drink, Bessie who at seventeen had been married, divorced and was more or less involved in prostitution.

  Maigret was aware that when travelling, a man is always a little ridiculous, because he would would like life to go on just as it does back home.

  Maybe these people had their own approach to the problem? Maybe this coroner’s inquest was only a formality and the real investigation was going on elsewhere?

  He had the proof of it that evening. When one of the regulars lumbered off after calling out a general goodnight to the crowd, Maigret noticed O’Rourke, who had been hidden by the other man.