Maigret at the Coroner's

by Georges Simenon

  Cole was surprised at his question.

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘At four in the morning, if they want?’

  ‘As long as they’re not on duty, they may even not show up at all.’

  ‘And if they’re drunk?’

  ‘That’s their business. What counts is that they do what they’re assigned to do.’

  Why did that infuriate him? Was it because he remembered his own military service and the ten o’clock curfew, those weeks of waiting for one wretched midnight pass?

  ‘Don’t forget, these men aren’t conscripts.’

  ‘I know. Where does the service recruit them?’

  ‘Wherever they can. In the street. Haven’t you seen the trucks that sometimes stop at a crossroads and play music? Inside there’s a display of photographs of exotic countries, and a sergeant to explain the advantages of a military career.’

  Cole always seemed to be playing with life, as if it were really quite amusing.

  ‘You find all kinds in the armed services, it’s the same everywhere. I suppose that where you come from, it isn’t just the good little boys who sign up … Hello! Bill! My friend Julius … Have a drink!’

  For the tenth or twentieth time that evening, Maigret heard a stranger tell him about his adventures in Paris. For all these fellows had been to Paris. All of them gave the same slightly ribald tone to their tales.

  ‘Have a drink!’

  If the coroner were to question him in the morning, he could answer like the others:

  ‘I don’t remember how many drinks. Maybe twenty?’

  The more he drank, the more taciturn he became, to the point of looking as mulish as Sergeant O’Neil.

  He had decided to understand, and he would understand. So there! He had already discovered why Harry Cole irritated him. The FBI man was convinced, in short, that Maigret was a big shot in his own country but that here, in the United States, he was incapable of figuring out anything. The more Cole watched him thinking things over, the more it amused him. Well, Maigret happened to believe that men and their passions are the same everywhere.

  The important thing was to stop looking at differences, stop being astonished, for example, at the height of the buildings, at the desert, the cacti, the cowboys’ hats and boots, the jukeboxes and machines for flipping little balls into holes.

  ‘So: there were five servicemen and one girl,’ he thought. ‘And all but one of them had been drinking.’

  They had been drinking the way Maigret was now drinking, mechanically, as all the men around him that evening were doing.

  ‘Hello, Harry!’

  ‘Hello, Jim!’

  It was as if nobody there had a last name. And as if they were all the very best of friends. Each time Cole introduced someone to him, he would add meaningfully: ‘A great guy!’

  Or else: ‘A fantastic fellow!’

  Not once did he ever say: ‘A bastard.’

  Where were the bastards? Did this mean that there weren’t any?

  Or that standards were more forgiving here?

  ‘Do you think that those five servicemen are free to go out tonight?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t they be?’

  What he would have done with them in Paris! And above all, what they would have been in for when they returned to quarters!

  ‘They haven’t been charged with anything, have they?’

  ‘Not yet,’ grumbled Maigret.

  ‘As long as a man has not been found guilty …’

  ‘I know! I know!’

  He drained his glass in an unpleasant humour. Then he considered one of the couples in their booth. Their lips had been locked together for a good five minutes, and the man’s hands were nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Tell me: they are probably not married, correct?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘So they have no right to go to a hotel?’

  ‘Not unless they sign the register as man and wife, which is an offence that can cause them real trouble, especially if they have crossed state lines.’

  ‘Where do they make love?’

  ‘In the first place it’s not certain that later on they’ll still need to do so.’

  Maigret shrugged angrily.

  ‘And then there’s the car.’

  ‘And if they don’t have one?’

  ‘That’s unlikely. Most people have a car. If they haven’t, let them deal with it. It’s their business, isn’t it?’

  ‘And if they’re caught doing that in the street?’

  ‘That will cost them a lot.’

  ‘And if the girl is seventeen and a half instead of eighteen?’

  ‘That can rack up around ten years in prison for her partner.’

  ‘Bessie Mitchell wasn’t eighteen …’

  ‘But she’d been married and divorced.’

  ‘Maggie Wallach, who seems to be the musician’s mistress?’

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘It’s obvious.’

  ‘You’ve seen them at it?’

  Maigret gritted his teeth.

  ‘Mind you, she was married, too. And divorced.’

  ‘And Erna Bolton, who’s with the brother?’

  ‘She’s twenty.’

  ‘You’re familiar with the case?’

  ‘Me? It has nothing to do with me. I already told you that there was no federal offence. If they had used the post office, for example, in the commission of a crime, that would fall under my jurisdiction. Or if they had smoked a single joint. Have a drink, Julius!’

  There were twenty of them at the bar, drinking and staring straight ahead at the rows of bottles and the calendar showing a naked woman. There were naked – or half-naked – women just about everywhere, on the advertisements, the publicity calendars, and photos of pretty girls in bathing suits on every page of the newspapers and all the cinema screens.

  ‘But good lord, what happens when these fellows want a woman?’

  Harry Cole, more used to whisky than Maigret, looked him right in the eye and burst out laughing.

  ‘They get married!’

  The truth was, the coroner had been careful not to ask what seemed like the most basic questions. Was he hoping to arrive at the truth anyway? Did he simply not give a damn?

  Perhaps, after all, the inquest was only a kind of formality, and no one was very eager to find out what had really happened that night.

  One of the two men who had testified so far had lied, that was clear. It was either Sergeant Ward or Sergeant O’Neil.

  Yet no one had seemed surprised by that. They were both questioned with the same politeness, or, rather, the same detachment.

  ‘Do you think they’ll have the bartender testify?’

  ‘What for?’

  He was the same one serving them that evening, the one with a boxer’s mug.

  ‘They’re going to throw us out,’ announced Cole with a glance at the clock. ‘Do you want anything to go?’

  And seeing Maigret’s amazement, he pointed out two of the customers.

  ‘Look!’

  At another counter off near the door, where bottles of spirits were sold, the men were buying flat pints that they slipped into their hip pockets.

  ‘Maybe they’ve got a long road ahead of them, right? Or else they have some trouble sleeping.’

  The FBI man was making fun of him, and Maigret did not say another word to him until he dropped him off in front of the Pioneer Hotel.

  ‘I gather that you’ll be spending the day tomorro
w at the inquest?’

  Maigret grunted a vague reply.

  ‘I’ll come get you at lunchtime. You’re lucky: the proceedings will take place in Courtroom Two, upstairs, and it’s air-conditioned. Good night, Julius!’

  Without any malice, as if he were not talking about a dead girl, he added, ‘Don’t go dreaming about Bessie!’

  3. The Little Chinese Fellow Who Did Not Drink

  There were at least three people who said good morning to Maigret, and that pleased him. Like the first floor, the second floor of the county courthouse was surrounded by an arcade. The sun was already hot; groups of men waiting for Ezekiel’s summons smoked cigarettes in the shade.

  Ezekiel in particular, his big pipe in his mouth, nodded cordially at him, as did the juror with the wooden leg.

  Maigret had been wondering, on the way over from his hotel, if the public’s change of attitude towards Sergeant Ward would be noticeable.

  On the previous day, when O’Neil was talking about the second time the car had stopped, his statement that Ward and Bessie had walked off together towards the railway tracks had been met, not with murmuring, but with something like a small collective shock. They must all have felt the same pang in their hearts.

  Would they now look at Ward the way people instinctively do at those among them who have killed?

  Not far from the officer who had brought them, the five airmen were there, smoking their cigarettes like everyone else, waiting to enter the courtroom. Like schoolboys who have fallen out with one another, they all kept at a certain distance.

  It seemed to Maigret that Ward, his blue eyes lowering under big black brows, was standing more apart from the others, the object of distant furtive glances.

  Had he gone home to sleep? What was his attitude towards his wife now? And hers towards him? Had he asked her to forgive him? Had they quarrelled to the point of separation?

  The Chinese airman, with his big almond eyes, was as delicate and pretty as a girl.

  He was short and seemed much younger than his friends. It’s the same in school, where there is always one boy who is teased and called a sissy!

  There were some new curious spectators. The newspaper had published its account of the first day under boldface headlines:

  Sergeant Ward Claims He Was Drugged

  O’Neil Contradicts His Testimony on Several Points

  O’Neil still had the look of a conscientious prize student. Too conscientious. Had he and Ward conversed at all since the previous day?

  Maigret had awakened in a bad mood, with a splitting headache and, to put it bluntly, a hangover, but that had passed. Still, it bothered him to have relied on the local remedy. Ever since his first days in New York, he’d been astonished to see people he had left seriously inebriated the night before turn up early the next morning bright-eyed and cheerful. After he’d been told the secret, he noticed in all the drugstores, cafés and bars those bottles of a particular blue mounted upside down on walls, with a nickel-plated spout that measured the proper dosage into a glass of water.

  The water would begin to fizz and foam, and they would serve it to you as casually as if it had been a Coca-Cola or your breakfast coffee. A few minutes later, the lingering fumes of alcohol would be gone.

  Why not? Next to the machines for getting drunk, the machine for getting sober. It was only logical.

  ‘Members of the jury!’

  They were going back into the classroom, and this one was more spacious than the previous day’s venue. It looked like a real courtroom, with a balustrade between the court and the public like a communion rail, a desk for the coroner, a stand with a microphone for the witness. The jurors, seated in an authentic jury box, took on a new solemnity.

  Now Maigret could better observe people he had not been able to see easily the day before, one of them a burly redhead who stayed close to the attorney, taking notes and speaking to him in a low voice. At first Maigret had taken him for a secretary or a journalist.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he asked the man next to him.

  ‘Mike!’

  This he already knew; he’d heard others call him that.

  ‘What does he do?’

  ‘Mike O’Rourke? He’s the chief deputy sheriff, the one in charge of the inquest.’

  The county ‘Maigret’, in other words. They were both more or less equally large men, with the same spare tyre above their belts, the same thick necks, and they must have been the same age.

  In the end, was it so different here from Paris? O’Rourke was not wearing his sheriff’s badge or a revolver at his waist. He looked like a peaceable fellow, with a redhead’s pale skin and eyes the colour of violets.

  Was it the sheriff’s idea? He often leaned down to whisper to the attorney. In any case, when the inquest began the attorney rose and asked for permission to question the last witness of the previous day. O’Neil was thus recalled to the stand, where the microphone was adjusted to his height.

  ‘Did you notice the condition of the car in which you returned to the Tucson area? Wasn’t it damaged?’

  The good student frowned, looking up questioningly at the ceiling.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Was it a two-door or a four-door model? Did you get in on the right or the left side?’

  ‘I think it was a four-door. I got in on the side opposite the driver.’

  ‘On the right-hand side, then. And you didn’t notice any evidence that the car had been in an accident?’

  ‘I don’t remember any more.’

  ‘You were quite drunk at the time?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘More drunk than when Bessie left your group?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

  ‘And yet, you hadn’t drunk anything after leaving the musician’s house?’

  ‘Correct, sir.’

  ‘That’s all.’

  O’Neil stood up.

  ‘Excuse me: one more question. Where were you sitting in that last car?’

  ‘I was in front, next to the driver.’

  The attorney indicated that he was through with the witness, and then it was Corporal Van Fleet’s turn. He had fair, wavy hair and brick-red skin, and Maigret thought of him as ‘the Dutchman’. Van Fleet’s pals called him Pinky.

  He was the first witness to seem nervous as he took his seat on the stand. He was making an obvious effort to appear calm but did not know where to look and even chewed his nails a few times.

  ‘You’re married? Single?’

  ‘Single, sir.’

  He had to cough to clear his throat, and the coroner slightly increased the volume of the microphone. He had an incredible armchair, that coroner. He could adjust it for various positions and spent his time leaning farther back, then a little forwards, then back again.

  ‘Tell us what happened on July 27 after seven thirty that evening.’

  A young black woman Maigret had noticed the previous day was sitting behind him, holding a baby, accompanied this time by her brother and sister. There were two pregnant women in the courtroom. Thanks to the air conditioning, it was quite cool, much cooler than the room downstairs, but Ezekiel kept fiddling importantly with this apparatus from time to time.

  The Dutchman spoke slowly, with long silences during which he would search for words. The other four servicemen were all on the same bench with their backs to the visitors’ gallery, and these comrades were the ones at whom Pinky glanced furtively, as if asking to be prompted.

  The Penguin Bar, the musician’s apartment, the departu
re for Nogales …

  ‘Where were you sitting in Ward’s car?’

  ‘I started off in back with Sergeant O’Neil and Corporal Wo Lee, but I had to move up front when Ward told Bessie to change seats. There I sat on Mullins’ right.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘After passing the airport, the car stopped on the right-hand side of the highway, and we all got out.’

  ‘Had you already decided not to continue on to Nogales?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘When did that come up?’

  ‘When everyone had got back into the car.’

  ‘Including Bessie?’

  He hesitated, and Maigret felt that he was trying to catch a glimpse of O’Neil.

  ‘Yes. Ward had announced that we were driving back to town.’

  ‘It wasn’t Bessie who told you that?’

  ‘I heard Ward say it.’

  ‘Did the car pull over a second time?’

  ‘Yes. Bessie told Ward she wanted to talk to him.’

  ‘Was she very drunk? Was she still aware of what she was doing?’

  ‘I think so. They walked off together.’

  ‘How long were they gone?’

  ‘Ward came back, alone, after about five or six minutes.’

  ‘That’s what you’re saying, five or six minutes? Did you check the time?’

  ‘No. But I don’t think he was gone longer than that.’

  ‘And then what did he say?’

  ‘He didn’t say anything.’

  ‘Didn’t anyone ask him what had happened to Bessie?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Weren’t you surprised to be leaving without her?’

  ‘A little, maybe.’

  ‘The whole trip back, Ward said nothing more about it?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Who decided to take a taxi to go back to that spot?’

  Van Fleet gestured towards O’Neil.

  ‘Didn’t the two of you discuss whether or not to take Wo Lee along with you?’

  Maigret, who looked as if he were dozing, gave a start. Again, a seemingly innocuous question appeared to suggest that the coroner knew more than he wanted to let on. O’Rourke, moreover, was just then hovering at the ear of the attorney, who was writing something down.