Cécile is Dead (6 page)

‘Detective Chief Inspector Maigret, if
I'm not mistaken?' asked the tenant quietly, still in the doorway. ‘As
it happens, inspector, I have just come from your office. I know this is not a good
time, but I also know what has happened.'

A name rose to Maigret's lips.
Monsieur Charles … he suddenly felt sure that there was some connection between
that name and the man before him. What did
they recall to his mind, for goodness' sake? A little bar and café, its regular
customers …

‘Is there something urgent you want to
tell me?'

‘Well … That's to say I thought
… If you'd take the trouble of coming up to my apartment for a moment? May I,
Madame Benoit? Forgive me for asking you to climb up four floors, inspector. I have just
been to Quai des Orfèvres, where I learned about that poor girl Cécile … I admit it came
as a shock.'

Maigret rose to his feet and followed
Monsieur Dandurand to the stairs.

‘I could see that you recognized me
without remembering who I was … We'd better hurry; the light will soon go
out.'

He looked for a key in his pocket and put it
into the lock. Looking up, Maigret saw the shadowy outline of Nouchi leaning over the
banisters. Next moment a gob of spit fell to the landing with a dull splosh.

Monsieur Dandurand must be a chilly soul. He
wore an overcoat thicker and heavier than Maigret's, and a woollen scarf wrapped
round his neck. His appearance was lacklustre and not particularly attractive, in the
manner of old bachelors of a certain age, and his apartment itself seemed the right
setting for a man on his own who was getting on in years, with a pipe that had gone cold
and bed linen that was less than spotless.

‘Let me have a minute and I'll
put on the light.'

His study could have belonged to a lawyer or
a businessman. Dark furniture, black wooden bookshelves full of
legal tomes, green filing cabinets, with periodicals and
files lying on the tables.

‘I think you smoke, don't
you?' he asked Maigret.

Dandurand himself had a dozen pipes
carefully arranged on his desk, and he filled one of them after pulling down the blind
over the window.

‘Don't you remember me yet?
It's true that we met only twice, once at Albert's in Rue Blanche
…'

‘Yes, now I do remember, Monsieur
Charles …'

‘And the second time …'

‘In my office at Quai des Orfèvres,
eight years ago, when I had to ask you to explain certain things. I must admit that you
had answers to all my questions.'

A cold, icy smile on an icy face, where only
the rather prominent nose was slightly pink.

‘Please sit down. I wasn't here
this morning.'

‘May I ask where you were?'

‘I realize, now that I know what has
happened, that telling you that may be held against me. However, I am in the habit of
spending some time at the Palais de Justice. A lawyer's old habits die hard, and
after …'

‘After you were struck off the list of
practising advocates at Fontenay-le-Comte.'

A vague gesture, as if the man were agreeing
that he was right, but the matter was of little importance. The former provincial lawyer
went on, ‘Since then I have been spending most of my time at the Palais. Today
there was a strange case in Court Thirteen, a case of extortion among members of the
same family. Maître Boniface, representing the son-in-law …'

Monsieur Dandurand,
formerly Maître Dandurand, who had lived in one of the oldest town-houses in Fontenay,
had a habit of cracking his fingers, which seemed to need oiling.

‘Would you mind leaving your finger
joints alone and telling me why you went to my office?' sighed Maigret, lighting
his pipe.

‘Excuse me … when I left home at about
eight this morning I had no idea of what had happened on the fifth floor. It
wasn't until I was in the Palais at four in the afternoon that a friend of mine
…'

‘Told you about the murder of Madame
Juliette Boynet, née Cazenove, and like you a native of Fontenay-le-Comte.'

‘Exactly, inspector. I came back, but
I failed to find you here, and I preferred not to talk to the officer whom you had left
in charge. I caught a tram, hoping to find you at Quai des Orfèvres. Our paths ought to
have crossed. Inspector Cassieux, who knows me …'

‘Yes, the head of the Drug Squad, also
heading up Vice, certainly ought to know the name of Monsieur Charles.'

The other man went on, as if he had failed
to hear that. ‘Inspector Cassieux told me about Cécile, and …'

Maigret had risen to his feet and had
tiptoed across the front hall, to which the study door still stood open. When he
suddenly opened the front door of the apartment Nouchi, whose eye was glued to the
keyhole, almost fell over backwards. She straightened up and, slippery as an eel, rushed
to the stairs.

‘You were saying?'

‘And then I
thought I had time to dine. I waited in Place Saint-Michel quite a long time for the
tram, and here I am. I knew I'd find you here. I wanted to be the one to tell you
that last night, between midnight and one in the morning, I was in the apartment of
Madame Boynet, who was my friend and in a way my client.' He cracked his fingers
again, without thinking, and made haste to say, ‘Sorry. It's an old habit of
mine.'

It was a little after ten in the evening. In
front of the wardrobe mirror, beside the large bed that she had just turned down, Madame
Maigret was putting her hair in curlers, sometimes holding them in place with one of the
hairpins that she held between her lips. Boulevard Richard-Lenoir was deserted. Beyond
Porte d'Orléans the road was also deserted, shining in the rain, but a few seconds
later three, four, then six cars came driving fast along it, preceded by a huge beam of
pale light.

As the car headlights passed they hardly
touched Madame Boynet's house, which was too tall for its width and looked even
more unattractive for having no other buildings directly beside it, so that it had a
rough, unfinished appearance.

There was still a light on in Madame
Piéchaud's grocery shop, where the grocer herself was sitting in front of the fire
so as to save heating another room. On the other side of the front door of the apartment
building the bicycle shop was in the dark, but its back door stood ajar, and light could
be seen in the room behind the shop, which contained a bed and a young man polishing his
shoes.

The Siveschis were at the cinema. The
concierge didn't want to go to bed before Maigret had left, and to prime
herself for the wait ahead of her was
finishing the bottle of red wine, while explaining the situation to her cat.

On the other side of Paris, two bodies lay
in refrigerated drawers in the Forensic Institute.

Monsieur Dandurand's apartment never
seemed to be aired, since it was full of a mixture of odours, which in combination gave
off a musty, unpleasant smell that clung to your clothes when you had left, and stayed
with you for some time. Maigret, puffing thick smoke from his pipe, avoided looking the
other man in the face as much as he could.

‘Remind me, Monsieur Dandurand … if I
am not mistaken, it was over a case of indecent assault that you left Fontenay,
wasn't it? Let's see – it's ancient history now, but someone was
mentioning you at the Police Judiciaire a few weeks ago. I think you got two
years.'

‘That's correct,' said the
lawyer coldly.

Maigret huddled even deeper into his heavy
overcoat, as if to protect himself from all contact. He had not taken off his hat. In
spite of the impression of gruffness that he gave, he viewed most human weaknesses with
considerable indulgence, but there were certain people who made him bristle and feel
physically uneasy in their vicinity. Monsieur Dandurand was one of them.

This revulsion went so far that Maigret was
never entirely at ease in the presence of his colleague Cassieux, who, as head of the
Drug Squad, also had the Vice Squad as part of his remit.

It was Cassieux who had mentioned to him the
man generally known as Monsieur Charles, a provincial lawyer
involved in a nasty case involving minors. He had served a
two-year prison sentence before ending up in Paris.

The case had some remarkable features and
cast a strange light on human destiny. Struck off the professional register, and now
living under a false name in the capital, where he was previously unknown, Dandurand
still had a large enough income to indulge his tastes as he pleased. He cut a lacklustre
and repellent figure as he walked around the streets for much of the day, an evasive
expression in his eyes, showing a little liveliness and alacrity only when he was in
pursuit of a potential victim in the crowd.

There were reports of the former lawyer
being seen in the areas around Porte Saint-Martin, Boulevard Sébastopol and the
Bastille. He was one of those who wait in the shadows for workshops and department
stores to close, and then, with their shoulders hunched, often enter the dimly lit
corridor of an establishment catering for special tastes.

He soon knew all those establishments, and
in return all the madams who ran them soon knew him and would ask, ‘Good evening,
Monsieur Charles, and what can I offer you today?'

He made himself at home; he liked the
atmosphere of such places and came to need it daily. Soon word went round that he had
been a lawyer, and now and then he was asked for advice. Finally he was allowed behind
the scenes, not as a client but as a friend.

‘Did you know that the house in Rue
d'Antin is for sale? Dédé's been in difficulties and is off to South America
next week. With five hundred thousand francs in cash.'

To look at Maigret,
you might have thought he was dreaming. Head lowered, eyes fixed on the faded red carpet
on the floor, he suddenly jumped. He thought he had heard a noise above his head. For a
moment he thought it was in Madame Boynet's apartment, and the idea of Cécile
…

‘That was Nouchi,' said Monsieur
Dandurand, with his peculiarly joyless smile.

Of course, since Cécile was dead.

Cécile was dead! At this very moment the
commissioner of the Police Judiciaire, out at an evening bridge party with friends, had
been describing, in a few words, the broom cupboard, the body slumped against the wall
and the tall shape of Maigret observing the scene.

‘And what did
he
have to
say?'

‘Nothing. He just dug his hands into
his pockets, but I think it was one of the hardest blows of his career. He went straight
off, and I'd be surprised if he gets any sleep tonight. Poor old
Maigret.'

Maigret himself knocked out his pipe against
the heel of his shoe and let the ash fall to the floor.

‘You've been looking after
Madame Boynet's affairs, have you?' he asked slowly, grimacing as if the
words tasted bitter.

‘I knew her in Fontenay-le-Comte, and
her sister too. We were almost neighbours. I met her again when I rented this apartment.
She was a widow … I suppose you didn't know her when she was alive? I won't
say she was mad, but she was certainly eccentric, and obsessed with money. She kept her
entire fortune at home with her, she was so terrified of being robbed by the
banks.'

‘And you took
advantage of it!'

Maigret had no difficulty in imagining the
man in those establishments that he frequented, closeted with the middle-aged ladies who
confided in him. Monsieur Dandurand had then climbed another rung on the ladder and got
to know the owners. He must have lost no time in meeting them at the bars in Montmartre
where they gathered in the evening to play cards.

And so Monsieur Charles Dandurand, the
Fontenay lawyer, had become Monsieur Charles, the adviser and colleague of certain
gentlemen who had the utmost confidence in him, because his knowledge of the criminal
code was extremely useful to them.

‘The advantage was hers,
inspector.'

His long, pale hands, their backs covered
with hairs, were fiddling with the pipes on his table. Tufts of grey hair also grew in
his nostrils.

‘Haven't you ever heard of old
Juliette?' he asked. ‘Of course, you're solely concerned with the work
of the homicide squad. But your colleague Cassieux … well, it began with that
establishment in Rue d'Antin when it came up for sale. I mentioned it to Madame
Boynet – I always called her Juliette; we used to play together as children. Juliette
bought it. A year later I acquired the Paradise in Béziers for her, one of the best
houses in France.'

‘Did she know what sort of investments
you were making for her?'

‘Listen to me, inspector, I've
known misers in my time – a provincial lawyer finds that all kinds of people cross his
path – but their avarice was nothing by
comparison to Juliette's. She had a positively mystical love of money. Just ask
the underworld bosses. They'll confirm that Juliette was the sleeping partner in
the ownership of a great many houses. Would you like to know the figures?'