Maigret's Childhood Friend Page 9

From the badly lit corridor Maigret recognized the smell because, when he had first arrived in Paris, he had stayed in a similar hotel in Montparnasse, the Hôtel de la Reine Morte. What queen did it refer to? No one had been able to tell him. The managers were from the Auvergne and they were fiercely determined that no one should cook in the rooms.

  It was a smell of warm sheets, of human lives crammed together. The fake marble plaque outside announced, as at the Reine Morte:

  Rooms by the month,

  the week and the day.

  Every convenience.

  Bathrooms.

  They neglected to mention that there was only one bathroom per floor, and that you had to queue to use it.

  In the office he found a woman in slippers and a dressing gown, flaxen-haired, doing the day’s accounts at a roll-top desk, with the key panel in front of her.

  ‘Monsieur Bodard, please.’

  She didn’t look up and muttered:

  ‘Fourth floor … Room 68.’

  There was no lift. The stair carpet was threadbare, and the smell became more intense the higher one climbed. Maigret knocked at number 68, at the end of the corridor. No reply. After the third knock, a rather aggressive male voice said:

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘I’d like to talk to Monsieur Bodard.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘I’d rather not tell the whole hotel about it by shouting through the door.’

  ‘Couldn’t you come back another day?’

  ‘It’s quite urgent.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘If you open the door a crack, I’ll be able to tell you.’

  There was a sound of bedsprings. The door half opened, and Maigret saw a shock of very curly red hair, a boxer’s face, a naked body more or less hidden behind the door. Without a word he showed his badge.

  ‘Are you going to take me away?’ Bodard asked, without a hint of fear or anxiety in his voice.

  ‘I just want to ask you some questions.’

  ‘It’s just that I’m not alone … You’ll have to wait a few minutes.’

  The door closed again. Maigret heard voices and feet moving about. More than five minutes passed before the door opened, by which time he had sat down on a step.

  ‘Come in.’

  The brass bed was unmade. A girl was finishing combing her dark hair at the mirror that hung above the dressing table. Maigret felt as if he had gone back thirty-five years, the setting was so reminiscent of the Reine Morte.

  The girl wore a cotton dress, and her feet were bare in her sandals. She seemed to be in a bad mood.

  ‘I suppose I’ve got to go out?’

  ‘That would be preferable,’ the red-haired man replied.

  ‘When will I see you again?’

  Bodard looked quizzically at Maigret.

  ‘In an hour?’

  The inspector nodded.

  ‘Go and wait for me at the brasserie.’

  She looked Maigret up and down with a far from benevolent eye, picked up her handbag and passed through the door.

  ‘I’m sorry if I’ve come at a bad time.’

  ‘I didn’t expect you so quickly. I thought it would take you two or three days to track me down.’

  He had just put on a pair of trousers. His torso was bare, a strong, muscular torso that compensated for his small height. His legs in particular were short. His feet were bare too.

  ‘If you want to sit down …’

  He himself sat down on the edge of the unmade bed, and Maigret took a seat in the one armchair in the room, which was very uncomfortable.

  ‘I expect you’ve read the paper?’

  ‘Like everyone.’

  He didn’t seem mean. If he was cross with his visitor for interrupting a pleasant tête-à-tête, there was still a sense that he was good-natured, with bright eyes that expressed optimism. He wasn’t a man to be weighed down, to take a tragic view of life.

  ‘Is it really you, Maigret? I thought you would be fatter. And I didn’t think detective chief inspectors went around knocking on doors.’

  ‘It happens, as you see.’

  ‘Of course, you’ve come to talk to me about poor Josée …’

  He lit a cigarette.

  ‘Have you arrested anyone yet?’

  Maigret smiled, because so far it was the redhead who was asking the questions. Their roles were reversed.

  ‘Did the concierge talk to you about me? She’s not a woman, she’s a monument, a funeral monument I would even say. She sends shivers down your spine.’

  ‘How long did you know Joséphine Papet?’

  ‘Wait … It’s now June … It was the day after my birthday, so the 19th of April.’

  ‘How did you meet her?’

  ‘By ringing on her doorbell. That day I rang on all the doorbells in the building. That’s my job, if you can call it a job. They must have told you: I sell insurance.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Each of us has two or three arrondissements, and we spend our days combing them.’

  ‘Do you remember what day of the week it was?’

  ‘A Thursday. Again, it’s because of my birthday that I remember, and I had an awful hangover.’

  ‘In the morning?’

  ‘At about eleven.’

  ‘Was she alone?’

  ‘No. There was a big scrawny beanpole who said to the woman:

  ‘“I’ll be off.”

  ‘He looked at me closely and he left.’

  ‘So you sell life insurance?’

  ‘Accident insurance too. And savings insurance, a new thing that’s enjoying a certain success. I haven’t been in the branch for a long time. Before that I was a waiter in a café.’

  ‘Why did you change jobs?’

  ‘You said it: for a change. I’ve also been a fairground barker. It takes a lot more blarney than insurance, but insurance seems more respectable.’

  ‘Mademoiselle Papet became your client?’

  ‘Not in that sense.’

  He laughed.

  ‘In what sense?’

  ‘I should tell you that she was in her dressing gown, with a headscarf over her hair, and there was a vacuum-cleaner in the middle of the room. I did my routine and all the while I was eyeing her up.

  ‘She wasn’t that young, but she was nicely rounded, and I had a sense that she thought I wasn’t too bad either.

  ‘She announced that she wasn’t interested in life insurance, for the good reason that she had no heirs, and her money would go God knows where.

  ‘Then I talked to her about capital insurance, a tidy sum that you get hold of at sixty or earlier in the case of accident or illness.’

  ‘Did she bite?’

  ‘She didn’t say yes or no. Then, as usual, I tried my luck … There’s nothing I can do about it. It’s just how I am. Sometimes they get angry and give you a slap, but it’s worth trying, even if it only works one time in three.’

  ‘Did it work?’

  ‘Like a dream.’

  ‘How long have you known the young person who was here just now?’

  ‘Olga? Since yesterday.’

  ‘How did you meet her?’

  ‘In a self-service restaurant. She’s a shop assistant at Bon Marché. It’s your fault that I didn’t find out whether she was worth it …’

  ‘How many times did you see Joséphine Papet again?’

  ‘I didn’t count them. Ten times? Twelve?’

  ‘Did she give you a key?’

  ‘No. I rang the bell.’

  ‘She didn’t fix you a day?’

  ‘She just told me she was out on Saturday and Sunday. I asked her if the tall guy with the grey hair was her husband, and she told me he wasn’t.’

  ‘Did you see him again?’

  ‘Twice.’

  ‘Did you get a chance to talk to him?’

  ‘I’m not sure he thought much of me. He gave me a bit of a dirty look and left as soon as I arrived.

  ‘“Who
is he?” I asked Josée.

  ‘She told me:

  ‘“Don’t worry about him. He’s a sad sack. I picked him up like a stray dog.”

  ‘“But you’re sleeping with him?”’

  ‘“I have to. I try not to make him suffer too much. Sometimes he wants to kill himself.”’

  Jean-Luc Bodard seemed sincere.

  ‘You didn’t meet any other men in her apartment?’

  ‘No, that is to say I didn’t see them. We agreed that if she had visitors she would only open the door a crack, I would talk about insurance and she would tell me she wasn’t interested.’

  ‘Did that happen?’

  ‘Two or three times.’

  ‘What day of the week?’

  ‘There’s a question … What I do know is that once it was a Wednesday.’

  ‘At what time?’

  ‘Four o’clock? Four thirty?’

  Wednesday was Paré’s day. And yet the man from Navigable Waterways had told him he never went to Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette before half past five or six o’clock.

  ‘Did he see you?’

  ‘I don’t think so. The door was barely open a crack.’

  Worried, Maigret studied him carefully.

  ‘What do you know about her?’

  ‘Let’s think … She barely mentioned it … I think she was born in Dieppe.’

  She hadn’t lied to the redhead. The local chief inspector had called Dieppe about the funeral and the will. The woman named as Joséphine Papet had indeed been born in that town thirty-four years earlier, to a certain Hector Papet, a fisherman, and Léontine Marchaud, a housewife. She was not known to have any other family in the town.

  Why had she told Bodard the truth, when she had given the others different places of birth?

  ‘She spent some time working in a nightclub before meeting a wealthy man, an industrialist who lived with her for several months.’

  ‘She didn’t tell you what she lived on?’

  ‘More or less. Rich friends came to see her from time to time.’

  ‘Did you know their names?’

  ‘No. But she confided in me, for example:

  ‘“The man with the limp is starting to get on my nerves. If it wasn’t for the fact that he scares me a little …”’

  ‘She was afraid of him?’

  ‘She was never entirely at ease, and that’s why she kept a gun in the drawer of her bedside table.’

  ‘Did she show it to you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She wasn’t afraid of you?’

  ‘Are you joking? Who would be afraid of me?’

  And it was true that his face inspired sympathy. There was even something reassuring about his red curly hair, his almost violet eyes, his thick torso and his little short legs. He didn’t look as old as thirty and he would probably always have the appearance of a young boy.

  ‘Did she give you presents?’

  He got up and walked to the chest of drawers, from which he took a silver cigarette case.

  ‘This.’

  ‘Never any small sums of money?’

  ‘Come on!’

  He was vexed, almost furious.

  ‘It’s my job to ask unpleasant questions.’

  ‘Did you ask the same one to that great beanpole?’

  ‘You mean Florentin?’

  ‘I didn’t know his name was Florentin. That one, yes, he was a kept man.’

  ‘Did she talk to you about him?’

  ‘You bet!’

  ‘I thought she loved him.’

  ‘At first, perhaps. She was glad to have someone to talk to, someone who didn’t matter, someone she could do anything in front of. Usually, single women have a dog, a cat, a canary … You see what I mean?

  ‘Except that big fellow Florentin, if that’s his name, was playing her for a fool …’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘When I met him, he said he was an antiques dealer. He was skint, but he was forever expecting his ship to come in the next day. Sometimes he bought old bits of furniture and did them up. Then he got used to doing nothing.

  ‘“When I get my two hundred thousand francs …” he would say over and over.

  ‘And he would extract a few ten-franc notes from her.’

  ‘Why didn’t she leave him if she’d stopped loving him?’

  ‘You see, she was sentimental in a way people only are in romantic novels. Look! I told you what happened the first time we met. She was no longer a girl. She had experience, right? But afterwards she started sobbing.

  ‘I didn’t understand why, and I had found somewhere else to sit when she said, between two hiccups:

  ‘“You’re going to despise me …”

  ‘You read that in old books, but it was the first time I’d heard a woman use those words …

  ‘Florentin had worked it out. When he felt she’d had enough, he became even more sentimental than she was, he played out heartrending scenes. Sometimes he would leave, swearing that he wouldn’t come back, that she’d never hear from him again, and she went to find him in some hovel he had kept on Boulevard Rochechouart.’

  Maigret wasn’t surprised by the portrait that was being drawn for him of his old classmate. Florentin had done the same thing when they threatened to throw him out of school. The unlikely rumour had circulated that he had literally hung on to the headmaster’s coat-tails, swearing that he would never survive the dishonour.

  ‘Another time, he took the gun out of the bedside table and pretended to aim at his temple …

  ‘“You are my last love, and I will only have you in my life …”

  ‘You know the refrain. For hours, days, she believed him. He got his self-confidence back, and she would start growing suspicious again.

  ‘Basically, I think that she clung on to him because she had no one to replace him and she was afraid of being lonely.’

  ‘And then she met you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She saw you as a possible replacement.’

  ‘I think so. She asked me if I still had lots of girlfriends, if I felt any affection for her.

  ‘She didn’t throw her arms around my neck. It was subtler than that. A word from time to time.

  ‘“You don’t think I’m too old?”

  ‘And, when I protested:

  ‘“I’m five years older than you, and a woman ages faster than a man. Soon I’ll have wrinkles …”

  ‘Then she talked to me again about the tall thin fellow who considered himself more and more at home.

  ‘“He wants me to marry him.”’

  Maigret shuddered.

  ‘She said that to you?’

  ‘Yes. She added that she owned a house, that she had set some money aside, that he had suggested buying a bar or a little restaurant near Porte Maillot.

  ‘When he spoke of me it was with contempt. He called me the redhead, or shorty.

  ‘“You’ll see, he’ll end up running rings around you …”’

  ‘Tell me, Bodard, did you go to Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette yesterday afternoon?’

  ‘I get it, inspector. You want me to come up with an alibi. Sadly, I haven’t got one. For a while I had no girls apart from Josée, and I admit that she wasn’t enough for me. Yesterday morning I sold a major policy to a seventy-year-old man who was worried about his future.

  ‘The older they get, the more they worry about the future.

  ‘Then, since the sun was shining, and I’d got a good lunch inside me, I decided to go on the prowl.

  ‘I went down to the Boulevards and moved from bar to bar. It didn’t start very well, but in the end I happened on Olga, the girl you saw, and who’s waiting in a brasserie three buildings down from here. I didn’t meet her until about seven o’clock. Until then, I have no alibi.’

  He added with a laugh:

  ‘Are you going to arrest me?’

  ‘No. So, in short, Florentin had been in a precarious situation for a few weeks?’

  ‘Th
at is to say, if I’d wanted to, I could have taken his place, but I wasn’t tempted.’

  ‘Did he know?’

  ‘He scented competition, I’m sure, because he’s not an idiot. Besides, Josée must have alluded to the situation.’

  ‘If he’d had to bump somebody off, logically it should have been you.’

  ‘That sounds right. He couldn’t have known that I had decided to say no and, little by little, to drop that woman. I can’t bear women who blub.’

  ‘Do you think he killed her?’

  ‘I don’t know, and it’s none of my business. Besides, I don’t know the others. One of them may have been angry with her for some reason or another.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Don’t mention it … Hang on, I don’t fancy getting dressed again. When you go past, could you tell that girl the coast is clear and she can come back up?’

  It was the first time that Maigret had ever had to play such a part, but the request was delivered so naturally, so pleasantly, that he couldn’t refuse.

  ‘Goodnight.’

  ‘Let’s hope so.’

  He found the brasserie, where the regulars were playing cards. It was an old, badly lit establishment, and the waiter smiled ironically when he saw Maigret making his way towards the girl.

  ‘I’m sorry I stayed so long. He’s waiting for you.’

  Completely taken aback, she couldn’t find anything to say, and he headed for the door and had to go back up to Place Clichy to find a taxi.

  Maigret hadn’t been mistaken when he thought that Page, the examining magistrate, had recently been promoted to the job in Paris. His office was on the top floor of the Palais de Justice, which hadn’t yet been modernized. One might have thought that everything in it was a century old, and the atmosphere recalled the novels of Balzac.

  The clerk was working on a white wooden kitchen table. He had covered it with wrapping paper fixed with drawing pins, and the airless office which should have been his, and which could be glimpsed through the half-open door, was filled with stacks of files up to the ceiling.

  Maigret had called a little earlier to find out whether the magistrate was free and he had been told to come up.

  ‘Take this chair. It’s the best one. Or rather the least bad. It used to be part of a pair, but the other one collapsed last week under a witness weighing a hundred kilos.’

  ‘May I?’ Maigret asked, lighting his pipe.

  ‘Please go ahead.