‘You wait for the prosecutor. I’ll meet you back here, probably, in a while. Criminal Records won’t be long.’
Unable to find an envelope, he stuffed the photos in his overcoat pocket, smiled at Lognon, whom his colleagues had already nicknamed Inspector Hard-done-by, and hurried off down the stairs.
They were going to have to work their way slowly and meticulously through the block, question all the tenants, including the stout woman with the curlers who looked as if she took an interest in what happened on the stairs and may have seen the murderer going up or coming down.
Maigret stopped at the lodge first and asked Madame Boué if he could use the telephone, which was near the bed, under a photograph of Monsieur Boué in uniform.
‘Is Lucas back?’ he asked, once he was through to the Police Judiciaire. He dictated the particulars on the identity card to another inspector.
‘Get in touch with Moulins. Try to find out if she still has family. We need to find anyone who knew her. If her parents are still alive, see they’re informed. I assume they’ll come immediately.’
He was walking away along the pavement, heading up towards Rue Pigalle, when he heard a car pull up. It was the public prosecutor. Criminal Records would be close behind, and he preferred not to be there, any moment now, when twenty people would be bustling about those two little rooms where the body was still lying in the same position.
There was a bakery on the left and, on the right, a wine seller with a yellow shop front. No doubt Picratt’s made more impact at night thanks to its neon sign, standing out against the darkened buildings on either side, but in the day, you could have walked past it without suspecting a nightclub even existed.
The façade was narrow, just a door and a window, and, in the rain and murky light, its display of photographs looked seedy and depressing.
It was after midday. Maigret was surprised to find the door open. An electric light was on inside, and a woman was sweeping between the tables.
‘Is the owner here?’ he asked.
She looked at him unconcerned, broom in hand, and asked, ‘Why?’
‘I’d like to talk to him in person …’
‘He’s asleep. I’m his wife.’
She was in her fifties, maybe getting on for sixty. She was fat, but vivacious with it, with beautiful brown eyes in a puffy face.
‘Detective Chief Inspector Maigret, of the Police Judiciaire.’
Still no sign of her being flustered.
‘Do you want to sit down?’
It was dark inside, and the red of the walls and the curtains looked almost black. Only the bottles behind the bar, near the still open door, reflected the odd glint of daylight.
The room was long and narrow and low-ceilinged, with a cramped stage for the musicians containing a piano and an accordion in its case. Around the dance-floor, there was a set of booths formed by partitions roughly one and a half metres high, which afforded the customers a measure of privacy.
‘Do I need to wake Fred up?’
She was in slippers, with a grey apron over an old dress, and hadn’t washed or done her hair yet.
‘Are you here at night?’
She said simply:
‘I keep an eye on the lavatories and do the cooking if customers want to eat.’
‘You live here?’
‘On the mezzanine. There’s a staircase at the back that runs from the kitchen up to our flat. But we’ve got a house in Bougival, where we go when the place is closed.’
He didn’t get the impression she was worried. Intrigued, certainly, to see such an important member of the police calling on her establishment, but otherwise it was nothing new, and she was waiting patiently.
‘Have you had this club for long?’
‘It’ll be eleven years next month.’
‘Do you get a lot of customers?’
‘Depends what day it is.’
He saw a little printed card on which was written in English:
Finish the night at Picratt’s,
The hottest spot in Paris.
The little English he remembered allowed him to translate:
Finissez la nuit au Picratt’s,
L’endroit le plus excitant de Paris.
Excitant wasn’t right. The English word was more expressive. L’endroit le plus chaud de Paris, that was better, with a very specific sense of chaud.
She was still looking at him calmly.
‘Do you want anything to drink?’
She knew he would refuse.
‘Where do you hand out these flyers?’
‘We give them to the doormen of the big hotels, who slip them to their guests, especially the Americans. At night, late at night, when the foreigners are starting to get bored of the big clubs and have run out of places to go, the Grasshopper prowls around, thrusting cards into people’s hands and dropping them in cars and taxis. Basically we start working pretty much when the others stop. Get it?’
He got it. More often than not the people who came here would have trailed all over Montmartre without finding what they were looking for, and this was their last shot.
‘Most of your customers must be half-drunk when they get here?’
‘Of course.’
‘Did you have a lot of people last night?’
‘It was Monday. We never get a crowd on Mondays.’
‘From where you sit, can you see everything that goes on in the club?’
She pointed to a door marked ‘W.C.’ at the end of the room, on the left of the stage. There was a matching door without a sign on the right.
‘I’m almost always over there. We’re not that keen on serving food, but sometimes customers will ask for some onion soup, or foie gras, or cold lobster. Then I’ll pop into the kitchen for a moment.’
‘Otherwise you stay in here?’
‘Mostly. I keep an eye on the girls and at the right moment I come over with a box of chocolates or some flowers or a satin doll. You know how it works, right?’
She wasn’t trying to sugar the pill. She had sat down with a sigh of relief and taken one foot out of her slippers, a swollen, misshapen foot.
‘What’s this all about? I don’t want to rush you, but it will soon be time to go and wake Fred up. He’s a man and he needs more sleep than me.’
‘What time did you go to bed?’
‘Around five. Sometimes I don’t turn in before seven.’
‘And when did you get up?’
‘An hour ago. I’ve had time to sweep up, you see.’
‘Your husband went to bed at the same time as you?’
‘He went up five minutes before me.’
‘He didn’t go out this morning?’
‘He hasn’t got out of bed.’
She was becoming a little worried by all this talk of her husband.
‘This isn’t to do with him, is it?’
‘Not especially. It’s about two men who came here last night, around two in the morning, and sat in one of the booths. Do you remember that?’
‘Two men?’
She looked round the tables, as though thinking back.
‘Do you remember where Arlette was sitting before she did her act for the second time?’
‘She was with her young man, that’s right. I even told her she was wasting her time.’
‘Does he come often?’
‘He’s been three or four times recently. You get ones like that who end up here by mistake and fall in love with one of the women. As I always say to them, you can go there once if you fancy, but make sure they don’t come back. The pair of them were over there, in the third booth from the door, number six. I could see them from where I am. He spent the whole time holding her hands and telling her stories with that moony look they always get.’
‘What about in the next booth?’
‘I didn’t see anyone.’
‘Not at any point in the evening?’
‘We can easily find out. The tables haven’t been wiped down yet
. If there were any customers at that one, it should still have damp rings from their glasses and cigarette or cigar butts in the ashtray.’
She didn’t move while he went to check for himself.
‘I can’t see anything.’
‘Any other day I would be less certain, but Mondays are so dead we’ve thought of not even opening. I’d swear we didn’t get a dozen customers all night. My husband will be able to confirm it.’
‘Do you know Oscar?’ he asked point-blank.
She didn’t start but he had the feeling she became a little more guarded.
‘Which Oscar?’
‘An older man, short, burly, grey hair.’
‘Doesn’t ring a bell. The butcher is called Oscar, but he’s tall and brown-haired with a moustache. Perhaps my husband …?’
‘Go and fetch him, will you?’
He was left sitting on his own in what felt like a purple tunnel, with the door on to the street at the end, a pale grey rectangle that looked like a screen criss-crossed by the flickering figures of an old newsreel.
On the wall facing him, he saw a photograph of Arlette in the inevitable black dress, which clung so tightly to her body that she looked more naked in it than in the obscene photographs he had in his pocket.
He had hardly taken any notice of her this morning, in Lucas’ office. She was just another little creature of the night, like so many others. He had been struck by how young she was, though, and something had seemed wrong. He could still hear her tired voice, the voice they all get early in the morning after they have drunk and smoked too much. He pictured her worried eyes, remembered a glance he had automatically darted at her breasts, and, most of all, the woman’s smell she had given off, almost the smell of a warm bed.
He had rarely come across a woman who gave such a strong impression of sexuality, and it jarred with the anxious little girl’s look in her eyes, and even more with the apartment he had just visited, the beautifully polished floor, the broom cupboard, the meat-safe.
‘Fred’s coming right down.’
‘Did you ask him?’
‘I asked him if he’d noticed two men. He doesn’t remember them. In fact, he’s sure there weren’t two customers sitting at that table. Number four. We use numbers for the tables. There was definitely an American at five, who drank a bottle of whisky, and a large group, including some women, at eleven. Désiré, the waiter, will be able to back me up tonight.’
‘Where does he live?’
‘In the suburbs. I don’t know exactly where. He gets a train home from Gare Saint-Lazare in the morning.’
‘Do you have other staff?’
‘The Grasshopper, who opens car doors, carries bags and hands out flyers now and then. And the musicians and the women.’
‘How many women?’
‘Apart from Arlette, there’s Betty Bruce. Her photo’s on the left there, you see. She does acrobatic dances. And then Tania, who is on the piano when she’s not doing her turn. That’s all for the moment. Obviously there are girls who come in to have a drink, hoping to meet someone, but they’re not part of the family. This is a family business here. We’re not ambitious, Fred and me, and when we’ve put enough money aside, we’re going to live a quiet life in our house in Bougival. Look, here he is …’
A man in his fifties, short and powerfully built, in a perfect state of preservation, his hair still black apart from a few flecks of silver at the temples, came out of the kitchen, putting on a jacket over his collarless shirt. He must have grabbed the first clothes he could find because he was wearing evening trousers and slippers without socks.
He was calm too, even calmer than his wife, in fact. He would have known Maigret’s name, though this was the first time he had been in his presence, and he took his time coming over so he could size him up.
‘Fred Alfonsi,’ he introduced himself, holding out his hand. ‘My wife hasn’t given you anything to drink?’
He ran the palm of his hand over table four, as if setting his mind at rest about something.
‘You really don’t want anything? You won’t mind if Rose goes and makes me a cup of coffee?’
His wife headed towards the kitchen and disappeared through the door. The man sat down opposite Maigret, his elbows on the table, and waited.
‘You’re sure there were no customers at this table last night?’
‘Listen, inspector. I know who you are, but you don’t know me, do you? Maybe you had a word with your colleagues from the Vice Squad before you came. Those gentlemen drop in from time to time to see me. It’s their job, and they’ve been doing it for years. If they haven’t done so already, they’ll tell you I’m harmless.’
As he said this, Maigret was amused to notice his ex-boxer’s flattened nose and cauliflower ears.
‘If I tell you there wasn’t anyone at that table, that’s because there wasn’t. This is a modest establishment I’ve got here. There’s only a few of us running the show, and I always keep an eye on everything. I could tell you exactly how many people we had in last night. I’d just have to check the dockets for each table at the till.’
‘So Arlette was definitely at five with her young man?’
‘She was at six. The even numbers are on the right: two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve. The odd are on the left.’
‘And at the next table?’
‘Eight? There were two couples, at about four in the morning. Parisians, who’d never been here before, hadn’t known where to go and soon realized that it wasn’t their kind of thing. They just had a bottle of champagne, then left. I closed up almost immediately after that.’
‘So you didn’t see two men sitting on their own, either at that table or at any other one, one of whom was middle-aged, answering more or less to your description?’
Fred Alfonsi smiled as if he’d heard it all before, then replied:
‘If you stop trying to trap me, maybe I could be of some use to you. Don’t you think we’ve had enough cat and mouse?’
‘Arlette’s dead.’
‘What?’ he exclaimed with a start.
Shaken, he got to his feet, shouted towards the back of the club, ‘Rose! Rose!’
‘Yes … I’ll be right there …’
‘Arlette’s dead!’
‘What are you saying?’
She hurried over surprisingly fast, given her size.
‘Arlette?’ she repeated.
‘She was strangled this morning in her bedroom,’ Maigret went on, looking at both of them.
‘Oh my God! Who’s the bastard who …’
‘That’s what I’m trying to find out.’
Rose blew her nose, and he could feel she was on the verge of tears. Her eyes were fixed on the photograph hanging on the wall.
‘How did it happen?’ asked Fred, heading towards the bar.
He carefully chose a bottle, filled three glasses and went and gave one to his wife first. It was an old liqueur brandy, and, without pressing the point, he put a glass in front of Maigret, who ended up taking a sip.
‘She overheard a conversation here, last night, between two men about a countess.’
‘What countess?’
‘I’ve no idea. She thought one of the two men was called Oscar.’
No reaction.
‘When she left here, she went to the local station to report what she’d heard, and they took her to Quai des Orfèvres.’
‘Is that why she was done in?’
‘Probably.’
‘Did you see two men together, Rose?’
She said she hadn’t. Each of them looked as genuinely shocked and heartbroken as the other.
‘I swear that if two men had been in here I would know and I would tell you. There’s no need for us to play games. You know how a club like this works. People don’t come here to see great acts, or dance to the finest jazz. Or for the elegant surroundings. You’ve read the flyer. They go to other clubs first on the hunt for some excitement. If they pick up a girl, we don’t
see them. But, if they haven’t found what they fancy, they end up at our place, more often than not, and by then they’re pie-eyed. Most of the cab drivers who work nights are hand in glove with me, and I tip them well. Some of the doormen of the big clubs have a word in their clientele’s ears as they’re leaving. Mostly we get foreigners, who think they’re going to find something extraordinary. Well, the only thing that was extraordinary was Arlette, who took her clothes off. For a quarter of a second, when her dress was on the floor, they saw her completely naked. To avoid trouble, I asked her to shave herself, because apparently it looks less rude. Afterwards, it was rare someone didn’t invite her over to his table.’
‘Did she sleep with them?’ Maigret asked carefully.
‘Not here, at any rate. And not during working hours. I don’t let the girls leave the building when we’re open. They keep men here as long as they can by getting them to drink, and I suppose they promise to meet up with them when they get off.’
‘Do they?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Arlette as well?’
‘She must have.’
‘With the young man from last night?’
‘Not in a million years. He had what you’d call good intentions. He happened to come in one night with a friend and he fell in love with Arlette on the spot. He came back a few times, but he’d never stay until closing time. Probably had to get up early to go to work.’
‘Did she have other regulars?’
‘There are hardly any regulars in this place, you must have worked that out. Everyone’s just passing through. They’re all the same, of course, but they’re always new.’
‘Did she have any friends?’
‘No idea,’ he said, rather coldly.
Maigret looked hesitantly at Fred’s wife.
‘You never …’
‘You can ask. Rose isn’t jealous; it hasn’t bothered her for years. I did, yes, if you must know …’
‘At her place?’
‘I’ve never set foot in her place. Here. In the kitchen.’
‘That’s always his way,’ said Rose. ‘There’s barely time to notice he’s gone and he’s back already. Then the girl comes out, ruffling her feathers like a chicken.’
Maigret at Picratt's Page 3