Cécile is Dead (17 page)

‘Has he confessed?' asked Maître
Leloup.

To which Maigret replied in a supposedly
ingenuous tone, ‘Confessed what? Good heavens, I almost forgot the most important
thing! Maître Leloup, would you be kind enough to send your client a telegram on my
behalf? I'm wondering whether by any chance, given the good relations between your
client and his aunt Boynet, she told him certain embarrassing things … Well, how would I
know? For instance, perhaps she gave him presents? You have no idea how interested I
would be to know that!'

At last they were rid of the potentially
shady lawyer and could enjoy Mélanie's coffee at their leisure, together
with the old Armagnac brought out by
Désiré, who came from Gers and still had friends among the wine-growers there. They were
now the only guests left in the neat, simple room with its steamed-up windowpanes. The
table had been wiped clean, and they had placed the letters brought by the lawyer on it.
They were all written on the black-bordered notepaper that old Juliette had used ever
since she was widowed.

My dear cousins,

I have received your good wishes, and I send you mine, with my love. It is hard
for an old woman like me to live with ungrateful people. When I think of all I
did for my sister's children, and how …

Maigret read the letters one by one and
passed them to his companion, who looked at them in turn. They were all alike. They were
dated 2 or 3 January, written in reply to New Year greetings from the Monfils
family.

… They'll get their deserts, because if they think they're going to
inherit my fortune one day …

And in another letter:

Gérard is good for nothing, and never comes to see me without asking for money …
as if I could manufacture it out of nothing!

Berthe fared no better.

… I'm glad she has left, because I was always expecting to see her in a
condition, and that would have been a real scandal in this house …

‘A condition?' asked Monsieur
Spencer, puzzled.

‘An … er … interesting condition. A
discreet way of saying that she expected her niece to get pregnant.'

They were warm and felt good. The Armagnac
perfumed the air and tickled their palates.

It's a terrible thing to be old and infirm and to think that all people
want of me is my money … I can't help thinking that I may have an accident
one of these days …

You may well be happy, living in your little town, without all the anxieties
that make me ill. Cécile pretends to be devoted to me, but she is more like her
own brother than mine …

There is in fact someone who owes me a great deal, but of whom I can't be
too sure either …

Maigret showed this passage to his
companion.

‘She wasn't sure of
anyone,' he murmured.

‘She was right, wasn't
she?'

‘Read the last bit.'

Luckily I am no more stupid than the rest of them, and I have taken precautions.
If anything were to happen to me, I promise you that they won't get away
with it and find themselves well off.

‘“They”,' sighed
Maigret. ‘She lumped everyone together, everyone who approached her, everyone she
suspected of having an eye on her money,
Monsieur Dandurand included. Do you begin to understand it?'

‘Understand what?'

Maigret smiled. ‘You're right, I
sound almost as vague as she does … Understand what, indeed? I should have asked if you
begin to feel it. You must be disappointed if, as you said this morning, you were hoping
to study my methods. I take you trudging round in the rain, I sweep you off to a very
boring town hall, then I make you eat coq au vin … How can I explain it to you?
I
feel it
… When Dandurand comes out of prison, he goes to live in furnished
accommodation in Paris. He meets Juliette again; she isn't widowed yet. What was
her husband like? All we have of him is his photographs. A man of about forty-five,
tall, broad, with a certain presence … So Juliette and Dandurand resume their old
relationship. I expect they meet in the former lawyer's lodgings in Rue Delambre …
The husband dies, and Dandurand soon makes his way into the apartment building owned by
his mistress, whom he continues to see only in secret …'

‘I don't understand the reason
for the secrecy,' objected the American.

There was a long silence. Maigret looked at
his glass, finally sighed, swallowed some Armagnac and said, abruptly changing the
subject, ‘We'll see! Désiré, the bill, old fellow … And if I can't get
any work done this afternoon then you and your wife are to blame … I do wonder what that
bastard went into Juliette's bedroom for. Help me out, can't you, Monsieur
Spencer? Think, if we can only find a satisfactory answer to that question …'

Like a model
secretary, Spencer Oats was putting the black-bordered letters scattered over the table
in order.

‘The precautions,' he ventured
to suggest.

‘The precautions?' Maigret
frowned. Yes, hadn't the old miser spoken in one of her letters about taking
precautions against those who were after her money? She distrusted everyone, including
her former lover.

‘Did you enjoy your lunch, Monsieur
Maigret?' asked the down-to-earth Mélanie, who had more than one celebrity among
her clientèle and treated them all with maternal familiarity. ‘I copied the recipe
out once for Madame Maigret. Has she ever tried it?'

The inspector wasn't listening. Hand
in his trouser pocket, where he had just put his change, he was staring at
Mélanie's apron as if in suspense, and finally said, ‘I wonder why Cécile is
dead. Do you see what I mean, Monsieur Spencer? All the rest can be explained, it was
easy. But Cécile is dead, and … Forgive me, Mélanie. It was an excellent lunch, thank
you, and if he doesn't have any other memories my friend here can tell them about
it in Philadelphia …'

He was in a state of great agitation. On the
pavement he said only a single word, and once they reached the corner of Avenue
d'Orléans he raised his arm to hail a taxi.

‘Quai des Orfèvres, and
fast.'

He had to change his mind on the way.
‘No, go to Gare du Nord first. The Arrivals area, where the main lines come in.
It's later than I thought.'

Was it the effect of the coq au vin, the
Beaujolais, a melting mocha gâteau made by Mélanie and Désiré's
Armagnac? In any case, Spencer Oats was looking
affectionately at his heavyweight companion. He felt as if for some hours he had been
watching a progressive transformation. The inspector, wrapped in his overcoat, bowler
hat tilted backwards on his head, the stem of his pipe clenched between his teeth, was
inhabiting the lives of all the characters in this case he was trying to illuminate: the
unpleasant ones, the mean ones and the sympathetic ones.

‘His wife could be having the baby at
this very moment …'

He was pink-cheeked as if he were the
husband himself. Maigret was there in the train between two gendarmes, where Gérard
should be. He was close to Gérard's wife, along with Berthe. He was in the
apartment building in Bourg-la-Reine, his feet on old Juliette's tapestry-covered
footstool, and at the same time he was a floor below, where Monsieur Charles could hear
everything that went on overhead.

From time to time, at a crowded crossroads,
Maigret saw the pale face of an electric clock, or the white baton of a police officer
in a cape, and he counted the minutes, leaning forward and half-rising from his seat, as
if to relieve the taxi of his weight and let it go faster.

They reached Gare du Nord just in time,
almost too late. There was a group of curious onlookers, and a police officer was
calling, ‘Move along, please.'

Two gendarmes were pushing a thin young man
ahead of them. His trousers were muddy, his raincoat was torn, and he was lashing out as
far as the handcuffs would allow, like a horse between the shafts. And so far as the
public
were concerned Gérard, feverish and
belligerent, was the incarnation of the hunted criminal everyone was after!

His lips quivered when he caught sight of
the inspector.

‘Think you're so clever,
don't you?'

‘Get into this taxi, gentlemen,'
Maigret told the gendarmes, showing them his badge.

They didn't wait to be asked twice.
They were feeling hot; all the way they'd lived in fear that their prisoner would
throw himself out of the carriage door.

‘I don't suppose anyone's
thought of my wife for a moment!'

Large tears welled out from under his
eyelids, but he couldn't wipe them away because of the handcuffs.

‘What's your brigade?'

‘Feignies, sir.'

‘There's a train leaving at
seven minutes past five … I expect you'd rather spend the night at home than in
Paris? Give me your record slips, boys.'

Maigret got the taxi to stop beside the
pavement on the corner of Rue La Fayette. Passers-by, leaning forward to keep their
umbrellas above their heads in the gusts of wind, glanced curiously at the car with the
gendarmes in it. The inspector put their record slips on his knees and signed them. The
two gendarmes got out and disappeared into a bar. Then Maigret slid aside the pane
between the passengers and the driver and spoke to the latter in an undertone. When the
car had begun moving again, he took a small key out of his pocket and removed Gérard
Pardon's handcuffs.

‘You're going to do me the
favour of keeping quiet, aren't you? A few dozen more innocent men like you, and
the Police Judiciaire would have to recruit three times its present force.'

Gérard, who was watching the streets go past
as if he hadn't seen Paris for years, shuddered, and his ever-suspicious gaze was
turned on the inspector.

‘Why did you say “innocent
men”?'

Maigret could not
suppress a smile. ‘Are you going to change tack and claim to be guilty
now?'

‘If you think I'm innocent, then
why did you have me arrested?'

‘And if you really are innocent why
did you run for it? Why, at the sight of the gendarmes, did you gallop away like a foal
and shut yourself up in the smallest room, where no one spends hours on end from
choice?'

Spencer Oats, leaning slightly back, was
taking all this in with the beatific if vague smile of those who have dined well and are
now indulgently watching the twists and turns of a theatrical spectacle. The taxi was as
dimly lit as a lantern with its glass in need of cleaning. Through the windows, figures
seemed distorted, and the umbrellas thronging the pavements took on bizarre shapes. When
the car stopped at a roadblock you could see the passengers in a bus sitting as still as
waxworks in a museum.

‘Listen, young man … I know who killed
your aunt.'

‘That's not true.'

‘I know who killed your aunt, and
I'll prove it to you in the near future.'

‘But that's impossible,'
insisted Gérard, shaking his head. ‘No one can know …'

‘No one except you, am I right? All
the same,
I'd bet that you were asleep when it happened
!'

This time Cécile's brother shivered
and looked at the inspector in terror, unable to believe his ears.

‘There! As you can see …'

‘But … but where are we
going?'

Through the film of rain, Pardon had just
recognized
Place de la Bastille. The one-way
system meant that the car was going along Rue Saint-Antoine to bypass Place des
Vosges.

‘Listen carefully. A reward of twenty
thousand francs has been offered to anyone who identifies the murderer. For reasons that
need not concern you, the Police Judiciaire would not dream of accepting that reward in
any case …'

‘But … you must know that I
…'

‘Shut up! I believe that your wife is
still at your lodgings, with your sister Berthe keeping her company. Since you have a
certain distaste for the maternity hospital, here's the authorization for a
payment on account, to be set against the twenty thousand for which you are about to
qualify. Go on, get in there quickly! We'll wait for you in this taxi. Suppose
Cécile had been able to give you enough money, what hospital were you thinking
of?'

‘The Clinique Saint-Joseph.'

‘Right, Berthe will only have to take
your wife to the Clinique Saint-Joseph, and you can join them there later this
evening.'

Somewhat surprised, the American looked from
one to the other of them.