“Torrence wants to speak to you.”
Torrence’s voice at the other end of the line was excited.
“Is that you, chief? You haven’t found the lady in the white hat? The Paris paper’s just arrived, and I’ve read the story. Well, the description fits someone I’m on the track of here.”
“Go on.”
“Since there’s no way of getting anywhere with the fool of a postmistress here, who claims she can’t remember a thing, I started a search in the hotels, the boardinghouses, questioning garagemen and railway station employees.”
“I know.”
“The season hasn’t started yet, and most of the people arriving at Concarneau are local residents or people who are more or less familiar, commercial travelers and . . .”
“Make it short.”
For conversation had been broken off all around him.
“I was thinking that if someone had come from Paris or somewhere else in order to send off the telegram . . .”
“Yes, I see all that.”
“Well, there’s a young lady in a blue suit and a white hat who arrived the very evening the telegram was sent off. She came in by the four o’clock train, and the message was handed in at a quarter to five.”
“Did she have any luggage?”
“No. Wait. She didn’t stop at the hotel. Do you know the Hôtel du Chien Jaune down by the pier? She had dinner there and sat around in a corner of the café until eleven o’clock. In other words, she left again on the 11:40 train.”
“Have you verified that?”
“I haven’t had time yet, but I’m certain of it because she left the café at exactly the right time, and she had asked for the railway timetable immediately after dinner.”
“Didn’t she speak to anyone?”
“Only to the waitress. She read the whole time, even while she was eating.”
“Have you been able to find out what kind of book she was reading?”
“No. The waitress maintains that she had a foreign accent, but she doesn’t know what it was. What shall I do?”
“Go back and see the postmistress, of course.”
“And after that?”
“Ring me or ring Lucas if I’m not in the office, then come back.”
“All right, chief. Do you think it’s the same woman, too?”
When he hung up Maigret had a little spark of glee in his eye.
“Maybe Madame Maigret will have put us on the track,” he said. “Will you excuse me, chief? I have some urgent checking to do myself.”
By chance Lapointe was still in the inspectors’ office, visibly worried.
“You there, come with me!”
They took one of the taxis from the rank on the Quai, and young Lapointe still didn’t feel any more confident, for it was the first time the chief inspector had taken him out with him like this.
“Corner of the place Blanche and the rue Lepic.”
It was the time of day when, in Montmartre, and especially in the rue Lepic, barrows were lined up along the pavements, piled high with vegetables and fruit fragrant with the smell of soil and springtime.
Maigret recognized on his left the little table d’hôte restaurant where the taxi driver had had lunch and, opposite, the Hôtel Beauséjour, only the narrow doorway of which was visible between two shops, a delicatessen and a grocer’s.
Rooms by the month, week, or day. Running water. Central heating. Moderate charges.
There was a glass door at the end of the corridor, then a staircase with a sign on the wall: Office. A hand drawn in black ink pointed upstairs.
The office was on the first floor, a narrow room facing the street, with keys hanging on a board.
“Anyone there?” he called.
The smell reminded him of the time when he was just about Lapointe’s age, in the Hotels Section, and used to spend his days going from one boardinghouse to another. It smelled of a mixture of washing and sweat, unmade beds, slop pails and food being warmed up on spirit lamps.
A slatternly woman with red hair leaned over the bannisters.
“What is it?”
Then, all at once, realizing that it was the police, she snapped crossly:
“I’m coming!”
She took her time upstairs, moving buckets and brooms; finally she appeared, buttoning her blouse over her protruding bosom. At close range, her hair proved to be almost white at the roots.
“What’s the matter? They checked here only yesterday, and I have nothing but quiet tenants. You’re not from the Hotels lot, are you?”
Without answering he described to her, so far as the taxi-driver’s testimony permitted, the companion of the lady with the white hat.
“Do you know him?”
“I may. I’m not sure. What’s his name?”
“That’s just what I’d like to know.”
“Do you want to see my book?”
“First I want you to tell me whether you have a tenant who looks like him.”
“Nobody except Monsieur Levine.”
“Who’s he?”
“I don’t know. A very decent man, anyhow, who paid for a week in advance.”
“Is he still here?”
“No. He left yesterday.”
“Alone?”
“With the little boy, of course.”
“And the lady?”
“You mean the nurse?”
“Just a minute. Let’s begin at the beginning so as to save time.”
“That’ll suit me fine, because I haven’t any to spare. What’s Monsieur Levine done?”
“Just answer my questions, will you? When did he arrive?”
“Four days ago. You can check in my book. I told him I hadn’t got a vacant room, and it was true. He insisted. I asked him how long for, and he told me he’d pay for a week in advance.”
“How could you accommodate him if you had no room?”
Maigret knew the answer, but he wanted to make her say it. In this kind of hotel the first-floor rooms are generally reserved for occasional couples coming in for a few minutes or an hour.
“There are always the ’casuals’ rooms,” she replied, using the traditional term.
“Was the child with him?”
“Not at the time. He went to fetch him and came back with him an hour later. I asked him how he was going to manage with such a young child, and he told me that a nursemaid he knew would take care of him most of the day.”
“Did he show you his passport, his identity card?”
According to regulations, she ought to have asked for these documents, but she obviously hadn’t complied.
“He filled out his slip himself. I saw at once that he was a respectable man. Are you going to make trouble for me just for that?”
“Not necessarily. How was the nurse dressed?”
“In a blue suit.”
“With a white hat?”
“Yes. She would come in the morning to bathe the kid and then take him out.”
“And Monsieur Levine?”
“He would hang around in his room until eleven or twelve o’clock. I think he went back to bed. Then he would go out, and I wouldn’t see him again all day.”
“Or the child?”
“Nor him either. Not much before seven o’clock at night. It was she who would bring him back and put him to bed. She would lie down on the bed fully dressed while she waited for Monsieur Levine to come home.”
“What time did he come in?”
“Not before one in the morning.”
“Would she leave then?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t know where she lived?”
“No. I only know that she took a cab when she left, because I saw her.”
“Was she intimate with your tenant?”
“You mean did they sleep together? I’m not sure. From certain signs I think they did sometimes. They have a right to, haven’t they?”
“What nationality did Monsieur Levine put on his slip?”
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“French. He told me he’d been in France a long time and was naturalized.”
“Where did he come from?”
“I don’t remember. Your Hotels man called for the slips yesterday, as usual on Tuesdays. From Bordeaux, if I’m not mistaken.”
“What happened yesterday at noon?”
“I don’t know about noon.”
“During the morning then?”
“Someone called and asked for him about ten o’clock. The lady and the kid had been gone quite a while.”
“Who called?”
“I didn’t ask him his name. An ordinary little man not very well dressed, a bit shabby.”
“French?”
“Certainly. I told him the room number.”
“He’d never been here before?”
“No one had ever called, except the nurse.”
“Did he have a southern accent?”
“More like a Paris accent. You know, the kind of man who stops you in the street trying to sell you fancy postcards or take you Lord knows where.”
“Did he stay long?”
“Well, he waited by himself while Monsieur Levine was getting ready to leave.”
“With his luggage?”
“How did you know? I was amazed to see him carrying his luggage out.”
“Did he have much?”
“Four suitcases.”
“Brown ones?”
“Nearly all suitcases are brown, aren’t they? Anyhow, these were good quality, and at least two of them were real leather.”
“What did he say to you?”
“That he had to go away unexpectedly, that he’d be leaving Paris that day, but he’d be back in a little while for the child’s things.”
“How much later did he come back?”
“About an hour. The lady was with him.”
“Weren’t you surprised not to see the little boy?”
“So you know about that too?”
She was growing more cautious because she was beginning to suspect that the matter was of some importance, that the police knew more about it than Maigret wanted to tell her.
“All three of them stayed in the room quite a time and they were talking pretty loud.”
“As if they were quarrelling?”
“As if they were arguing at least.”
“In French?”
“No.”
“Did the Parisian take part in the conversation?”
“Not much. Anyhow, he went out first, and I didn’t see him again. Then later Monsieur Levine and the lady left. As they passed me on their way out, he thanked me and told me he expected to be back in a few days.”
“Didn’t it seem queer to you?”
“If you’d kept a hotel like this one for eighteen years, nothing would seem queer to you.”
“Did you clean up their room yourself afterward?”
“I helped the maid.”
“You didn’t find anything?”
“Cigarette ends all over the place. He smoked more than fifty a day. American cigarettes. Newspapers too. He bought just about all the papers published in Paris.”
“No foreign newspapers?”
“No. I thought of that.”
“So you were curious?”
“One always likes to know what’s going on.”
“What else?”
“The usual rubbish, a broken comb, torn underclothes . . .”
“Any initials?”
“No. It was the kid’s underclothes.”
“Good quality?”
“Pretty good, yes. Better than I’m used to seeing around here.”
“I’ll be back to see you again.”
“What for?”
“Because some details that escape you at present will certainly come back to you when you think it over. You’ve always been on good terms with the police, haven’t you? The Hotels Section doesn’t bother you too much?”
“I get you. But I don’t know any more.”
“Good morning.”
He and Lapointe were back on the sunny pavement in the midst of the bustle.
“A little drink?” suggested the chief inspector.
“I don’t drink.”
“You’re quite right. Have you thought things over in the meantime?”
The young man realized that he wasn’t talking about what they had just found out at the hotel.
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“I’ll speak to her tonight.”
“Do you know who it is?”
“I have a friend who’s a reporter on the same paper that printed that story this morning, but I didn’t see him yesterday. Anyway, I never talk to him about what goes on at the Quai, and he often teases me about that.”
“Does your sister know him?”
“Yes. I didn’t think they were going around together. If I tell my father, he’ll make her go back to Meulan.”
“What’s the reporter’s name?”
“Bizard. Antoine Bizard. He’s on his own in Paris too. His family lives in Corrèze. He’s two years younger than me, and some of his articles carry his own byline already.”
“Do you meet your sister at lunchtime?”
“It depends. When I’m free and not too far from the rue du Bac I go to lunch with her in a snack bar near her office.”
“Go and meet her today. Tell her what we found out this morning.”
“Should I really?”
“Yes.”
“What if she passes this on too?”
“She will pass it on.”
“Is that what you want her to do?”
“Go ahead. But be sure to be nice to her. Don’t let it look as if you’re suspicious of her.”
“But I can’t have her going out with a young man. My father told me to be sure . . .”
“Go on.”
Maigret walked down the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette just for the pleasure of walking and took a taxi only at the Faubourg Montmartre after dropping into a bar for a glass of beer.
“Quai des Orfèvres.”
Then he changed his mind, rapped on the glass.
“Go by way of the rue de Turenne.”
He saw Steuvels’s shop with its door shut, as it was every morning now, for Fernande must have been on her way to the Santé with her set of casseroles.
“Stop a minute.”
Janvier was at the bar of the Grand Turenne and, recognizing him, gave him a wink. What new check-up had Lucas assigned to him? He was deep in conversation with the cobbler and two plasterers in white overalls, and the milky tint of their Pernods was recognizable even at a distance.
“Turn left. Drive through the place des Vosges and the rue de Birague.”
This meant passing the Tabac des Vosges, where Alfonsi was sitting alone at a little table near the window.
“Are you getting out?”
“Yes. Wait for me a minute.”
It was the Grand Turenne he entered, after all, to have a word with Janvier.
“Alfonsi’s across the street. Have you seen any newspapermen over there this morning?”
“Two or three.”
“Know them?”
“Not all.”
“Have you got much more to do?”
“Nothing very serious. And if you have anything else for me, I’m free. I just wanted to talk to the cobbler.”
They were a good distance away from the group and were speaking in lowered voices.
“Something occurred to me just now, after I read the story. The old chap talks far too much, you know. He’s determined to be somebody and he’d make things up if necessary. Besides, every time he finds something to tell it means a few drinks for him. Seeing that he lives right opposite Steuvels’s studio and works in his window too, I asked him whether any women ever came to see the bookbinder.”
“What did he answer?”
“Not much. He remembers one old lady in particular; she must be rich and she comes in a limousine with a chauff
eur in livery who carries her books in. Also, about a month ago, a very elegant young lady in a mink coat. Wait! I made a point of finding out if she only called once. He says no, she came again a couple of weeks ago, in a blue suit with a white hat. It was a day when the weather was very fine, and the paper apparently carried an article on the chestnut tree in the boulevard Saint-Germain.”
“We can trace that.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“So she went down to the basement?”
“No. But I’m a bit suspicious. He’s read the article too, that’s obvious, and it’s perfectly possible that he’s making it all up just to get some attention. What do you want me to do?”
“Keep an eye on Alfonsi. Don’t let him out of your sight all day. You’re to make a list of the people he speaks to.”
“He mustn’t know I’m tailing him?”
“It doesn’t matter much if he does.”
“What if he speaks to me?”
“Answer him.”
Maigret went out with the smell of Pernod in his nostrils, and his cab dropped him at the Quai where he found Lucas in the middle of lunching off sandwiches. There were two glasses of beer on the desk, and the chief inspector took one of them without compunction.
“Torrence has just phoned. The postmistress thinks she remembers a customer with a white hat, but she can’t swear she’s the one who handed in the telegram. According to Torrence, even if she were dead certain, she wouldn’t say so.”
“Is he coming back?”
“He’ll be in Paris tonight.”
“Call the Urbaine taxi company, will you? There’s another cab to be traced, possibly two.”
Had Madame Maigret, who had a fresh appointment with her dentist, left early, as on the other days, in order to spend a few minutes on the bench in the Place d’Anvers garden?
Maigret didn’t go home to the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir for lunch. Lucas’s sandwiches looked tempting, and he had some sent up from the Brasserie Dauphine for himself.
This was usually a good sign.
4
Young Lapointe, red-eyed and scruffy like somebody who has slept on a bench in a third-class waiting room, had given Maigret a look of such distress when the latter had entered the inspectors’ office that the chief inspector had immediately taken him into his own room.
“The whole story of the Hôtel Beauséjour’s in the paper,” said the young man lugubriously.
Friend of Madame Maigret Page 5