Maigret and the Man on the Boulevard (4 page)

“Did he drink?”

“Just a glass of wine, like everyone else. Occasionally, he would have a liqueur with his coffee.”

“Where did he go for lunch?”

“He hardly ever went out. He nearly always brought sandwiches wrapped in oilcloth. I can see him now. He ate standing up, with his packet of sandwiches open on the table. Afterwards he would go out into the courtyard and smoke his pipe, before returning to the stockroom. Very occasionally he would go out, announcing to me that he was having lunch with his daughter. This was toward the end of his time here. His daughter was quite grown-up by then, and had an office job in the Rue de Rivoli.

“‘Why not bring her back here, Monsieur Louis? I would so love to meet her.'

“‘I will one day…' he promised.

“But he never did. I've often wondered why.”

“Have you lost touch with Mademoiselle Léone?”

“No, indeed. In fact, I have her address. She lives with her mother. She doesn't work in an office any more. She's opened a little shop in the Rue de Clignancourt in Montmartre. She may be able to tell you more than I can. He used to go and see her too. On one occasion, when we were talking about her, he told me that she was selling layettes and all sorts of other things for babies. It seems odd, somehow.”

“What's odd about it?”

“That she, of all people, should be selling things for babies.”

People were beginning to come into the lodge to collect their mail. They looked at Maigret uneasily, assuming, no doubt, that he, like others before him, had come to evict them.

“Thanks for your help. I'll be back before very long, I daresay.”

“Have you any idea who might have done it?”

“None,” he frankly admitted.

“Was his wallet stolen?”

“No, nor his watch.”

“Well, then, he must have been mistaken for someone else.”

The Rue de Clignancourt was right on the other side of town. Maigret went into a little bar, and made straight for the telephone booth.

“Who's speaking?”

“Janvier here, chief.”

“Any news?”

“In accordance with your instructions, the men are already out on the job.”

These were the five inspectors, each assigned to a different district, who had been detailed to comb all the hardware shops in Paris. As for Santoni, Maigret had instructed him to find out everything he could about Monique Thouret. By now, he must be in the Rue de Rivoli, sniffing round the offices of Geber et Bachelier, Solicitors.

If Madame Thouret had been on the telephone, Maigret would have rung her in Juvisy, to ask whether, during the past three years, her husband had continued to leave home every morning with his lunch wrapped in a square of black oilcloth.

“I'd be glad if you'd send a car for me.”

“Where are you?”

“In the Rue de Bondy. Tell the driver I'll be waiting opposite La Renaissance.”

He was on the point of instructing Janvier, who for once was not snowed under with work, to assist with the inquiries among the shopkeepers in the Boulevard Saint-Martin. Inspector Neveu was already on the job, but for work of that sort extra help was always appreciated.

But he had thought better of it, mainly because he had an urge to return to the district himself.

“Any other instructions?”

“I want photographs sent to all the newspapers. They've played down the story so far, and I'd be grateful if they'd keep it that way.”

“I get it. I'll send you a car right away.”

Partly because the concierge happened to have mentioned Calvados, and partly on account of the extreme cold, Maigret went into a bar and ordered a glass. Then, with his hands in his pockets, he crossed the boulevard to have another look at the cul-de-sac where Monsieur Louis had been found stabbed.

So reticent had the newspapers been on the subject of the murder that not a single one of the passers-by stopped to peer at the paving stones, in the hope of finding traces of blood.

He stood for quite a time gazing into one of the two display windows of the jeweler's shop. Inside, he could see five or six assistants of both sexes. The jewelery was, for the most part, second-rate stuff. Many of the pieces on view were described as
bargain offers
. Both windows were crammed with goods: wedding rings, paste diamonds, and possibly one or two genuine ones, alarm clocks, watches, and hideous mantel clocks.

A little old man, who had been watching Maigret from inside the shop, must have decided that he was a potential customer, since he came to the door with a smile on his face, intending to invite him in. But the chief superintendent thought it was time he took himself off, and a few minutes later he was getting into the Headquarters car.

“Rue de Clignancourt,” he said to the driver.

It was a good deal quieter than the Boulevard Saint-Martin, but this too was a district of small tradespeople, and Mademoiselle Léone's shop—from the sign above it, he gathered it was called Le Bébé Rose—was so completely eclipsed by a horse-meat butcher's on one side and a cabmen's eating place on the other that one would have to be in the know to find it.

Going into the shop, he could see in the back room an old woman in an armchair, with a cat on her lap. Another, younger woman came forward to meet him. He looked at her with a slight sense of shock. She did not conform to his preconceived notion of what a shorthand typist who had worked for the firm of Kaplan should look like. What was it about her? he wondered. He could not say. Presumably she was wearing felt slippers, as her footsteps made no sound. For this reason, she reminded him a little of a nun, and her deportment also was that of a nun, for she advanced seemingly without moving her body.

She wore a faint smile, which was not confined to her mouth, but played about all her features. She had a very gentle expression and a self-effacing manner.

How strange that she should be called Léone, the more so as she had a broad pug-nose, such as one might see on an aged lion slumbering in a cage.

“What can I do for you, monsieur?”

She was dressed in black. Her face and hands were colourless, ethereal. Comforting gusts of warmth blew into the shop from the big black stove in the back room, and everywhere, on the shelves and on the counter, there were fragile knitted garments, bootees threaded through with pink or blue ribbons, bonnets, christening robes.

“I am Chief Superintendent Maigret of the Police Judiciaire.”

“Oh?”

“I have to inform you that Louis Thouret, a former colleague of yours, I believe, was murdered yesterday.”

No one else had taken the news to heart as she did. And yet, she didn't cry, or fumble for a handkerchief, or screw up her face. The shock of it froze her where she stood and, for a moment, he could have sworn, arrested the beating of her heart. And he saw her lips, which were pale anyway, turn as white as the baby clothes all around her.

“Please forgive me. I ought not to have put it so bluntly.”

She shook her head, wishing him to understand that she did not hold it against him. The old lady in the back room stirred.

“If I am to find his murderer, I need to learn everything there is to be known about him.”

She nodded, but still did not speak.

“I believe you knew him well?”

For an instant, her face lit up.

“How did it happen?” she finally asked, with a lump in her throat.

She must have been ugly even as a little girl, and, no doubt, she had always been conscious of the fact. Glancing toward the other room, she murmured:

“I'm sure you'd be more comfortable sitting down.”

“I don't think your mother…”

“We can talk freely in front of Mother. She's stone deaf. But she does like company.”

He could not possibly have admitted to her that he felt suffocated in this airless room, where the two women spent the greater part of their cramped existence.

Léone was ageless. In all probability she was over fifty, perhaps a lot older than that. Her mother looked all of eighty, as she darted a glance at the chief superintendent with her bright little birdlike eyes. It was not from her that Léone had inherited her broad pug-nose, but from her father, if the enlarged photograph on the wall was anything to go by.

“I've just come from seeing the concierge in the Rue de Bondy.”

“It must have been a great shock to her.”

“Yes. She was very fond of him.”

“Everyone was.”

She colored a little as she spoke.

“He was such a good man!” she hastened to add.

“You saw quite a lot of him, isn't that so?”

“He came to see me several times. You couldn't say I saw him often. He was a very busy man, and he lived a long way out of town.”

“Do you happen to know how he spent his time latterly?”

“I never asked him. He seemed to be doing well. I presumed he was self-employed, as he didn't have to keep office hours.”

“Did he never talk to you about the people he met?”

“We mostly reminisced about the Rue de Bondy, and Kaplan's, and Monsieur Max, and stocktaking. What an upheaval that used to be every year, with more than a thousand different lines in stock.”

She hesitated.

“I presume you've seen his wife?”

“Yesterday evening, yes.”

“How did she take it?”

“She couldn't understand how her husband came to be wearing light brown shoes when he was killed. She claims that the murderer must have put them on him.”

She, like the concierge, had noticed the shoes.

“No. He often wore them.”

“Even when he was working in the Rue de Bondy?”

“No, only after he left. Some time after.”

“How long after?”

“About a year.”

“Did it surprise you that he should be wearing light brown shoes?”

“Yes. It was different from his usual style of dress.”

“What did you think about it?”

“That he had changed.”

“Did you notice any actual change in him?”

“He wasn't quite the same man. His sense of fun had changed. Sometimes he laughed as if he would never stop.”

“Did he never laugh in the old days?”

“Not in that way. Something new had come into his life.”

“A woman?”

It was cruel, but he had to ask.

“Perhaps.”

“Did he never confide in you?”

“No.”

“Did he ever make love to you?”

Vehemently, she protested:

“Never! I swear it! I'm sure no such thought ever entered his head.”

The cat had jumped off the old lady's lap and on to Maigret's.

“Let it stay,” he said, as Léone seemed about to shoo it off.

He had not the courage to light his pipe.

“I daresay it was a bitter blow to you all when Monsieur Kaplan announced that he was about to close down the business?”

“We were all hard hit, yes.”

“And especially Louis Thouret?”

“Monsieur Louis was particularly attached to the firm. It had become a habit with him. Just think of it, he'd been working there from the age of fourteen, when he joined as a messenger boy.”

“Where was he from?”

“From Belleville. From what he told me, his mother was a widow. She brought him along one day to see old Monsieur Kaplan. He was still in short trousers. He had had practically no schooling.”

“Is his mother dead?”

“She has been for many years.”

Why was it that Maigret had the feeling that she was hiding something? She had spoken freely, and had looked him straight in the eye, and yet there was something evasive about her, as though she were gliding furtively away from him on silent, felt-shod feet.

“I believe he had some difficulty in finding another job?”

“Who told you that?”

“I gathered it from some of the things the concierge told me.”

“It's never easy for someone over forty to find work, particularly if one has no specialist qualifications. I myself…”

“Did you look for a job?”

“Only for a few weeks.”

“And Monsieur Louis?”

“He persisted longer.”

“Is that just a supposition, or do you actually know he did?”

“I know he did.”

“Did he ever come and see you during that period?”

“Yes.”

“Did you help him financially?”