“Standing up, or just possibly seated… I personally think that he was standing and that he wasn’t expecting this attack… there was no real struggle… he didn’t put up a fight. I examined his fingernails carefully, and I didn’t find any shreds of wool in them, as there would have been if he had clawed at his attacker’s clothes. Nor did I find any blood or hairs, and there weren’t any scratches on his hands either. Who is he?”

  “A night-club owner. Have you any idea when he was killed?”

  “Two full days at least, three at the most, have elapsed since the man died, and I might add one detail, still off the record: in my opinion the body wasn’t exposed to the open air during that period. You’ll be getting a preliminary report this evening…”

  Lucas reappeared.

  “He’s signed the papers… What shall I do with him? Shall I let him go back to Rue Victor-Masse?”

  Maigret nodded, because he still had to examine Émile’s clothes and the contents of his pockets. Later in the day this task would be done again, more scientifically, in the laboratory.

  The things were in another room, piled up on a table. The dark-blue suit was not torn anywhere and there was only a little dust on it. There was no blood. It was scarcely rumpled. As for the black shoes, they were as clean as those of a man who has just left home, with just a couple of recent scratches on the leather.

  Maigret would have been willing to bet that the crime had not been committed in the street but in a house, and the murderer had got rid of the body by leaving it on the sidewalk of Rue des Rondeaux, only toward the end of the previous night.

  Where had it been brought from? The murderer had almost certainly used a car. The corpse had not been dragged along the sidewalk.

  As for the contents of the pockets, they were rather disappointing. Had Émile Boulay been a smoker? It seemed not. There was no pipe, no cigarettes, no lighter or matches. Nor any of those shreds of tobacco you always find in the bottom of a smoker’s pockets.

  A gold watch. In the wallet, five hundred-franc notes and three fifties. The ten-franc notes were loose in one of the pockets, and in the other there was some small change.

  A bunch of keys, a penknife, a crumpled handkerchief, and, in the breast pocket, another handkerchief, neatly folded. A small bottle of aspirin tablets and some peppermints.

  Lucas, who was emptying the wallet, exclaimed:

  “Look! My summons…”

  A summons that Émile Boulay would have found it difficult to comply with…

  “I thought he was in the habit of carrying an automatic, ” growled Maigret.

  The firearm was not among the objects spread out on the table, but there was a checkbook, which the Chief Superintendent looked through. It was practically new. Only three checks had been drawn. The only large one was for five thousand francs and made out to “self.”

  The stub was dated May 22 and Lucas observed right away:

  “That’s funny! That’s the day I summoned him for the second time to the Quai des Orfèvres. I’d seen him there the first time on the eighteenth, the day after Mazotti’s death…”

  “Will you phone the lab to come and get these things and examine them?”

  A few minutes later the two men got back into the car, which Lucas drove with prudent slowness.

  “Where are we going, Chief?”

  “First of all to Rue des Rondeaux… I want to see the place where he was found…”

  In the sunshine, in spite of the cemetery and the railway, the place did not look sinister. From some way off they could see a few sight-seers being kept at bay by a couple of policemen, some housewives at their windows, and some children playing. When the car stopped, Maigret was greeted by Inspector Bornique, who said with an air of false modesty:

  “I was expecting you, Chief Superintendent. I thought you’d be coming and I was careful to…”

  The policemen stood to one side, revealing the silhouette of, a body drawn in chalk on the grayish sidewalk.

  “Who found him?”

  “An employee of the gas company who goes on duty at five o’clock in the morning and who lives in that house over there… that’s his wife you can see at the third-floor window. I’ve got his statement of course. It so happened that I was on night duty…”

  It was not the moment, with the sight-seers there, to rebuke him.

  “Tell me, Bornique, did you get the impression that the body had been thrown out of a car or that it had been put on the sidewalk?”

  “That it had been put on the sidewalk…”

  “On its back?”

  “No, face down… at first sight, you’d have taken it for a drunk who was sleeping it off… except for the smell … Because I must say, the smell…”

  “I suppose you’ve questioned the neighbors?”

  “All those that are at home… mainly women and old men, because the younger men have gone off to work…”

  “Nobody saw anything or heard anything?”

  “Only an old woman, up there on the fifth floor, who suffers from insomnia, so it seems. It’s true that her concierge says that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about any more… She says that about half past three this morning she heard the brakes of a car… they don’t get many in this part of the street, which doesn’t lead anywhere…”

  “She didn’t hear any voices?”

  “No. Just a car door opening, then some footsteps, then the door shutting again.”

  “She didn’t look out the window?”

  “She’s practically bedridden. Her first idea was that there was somebody ill in the house and they’d sent for an ambulance. She waited to hear the door open and shut, but the car went off almost immediately, after making a turn in the street…”

  Inspector Bornique added, as a man who knows his job: “I’ll be coming back at noon and this evening, when the men are home from work.”

  “Has the Public Prosecutor been here?”

  “Very early. He didn’t stay long. It was just a formality.”

  Watched by the sight-seers, Maigret and Lucas got back into the car.

  “Rue Victor-Masse…”

  Piles of cherries and some early peaches could be seen on the peddlers’ pushcarts with housewives circling around them. Paris was very gay that morning, with more passers-by on the shady sidewalks than on those exposed to the sun.

  In Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette they caught sight of the yellow front of the Saint-Trop’, whose entrance was closed by an iron grille; on the left of the door was a frame containing photographs of nudes.

  On Rue Victor-Masse an almost identical frame showed on the longer façade of the Train Bleu, and Lucas drew up a little farther on, outside a middle-class house. It was a grayish building, fairly prosperous-looking, and a couple of brass plates announced the names, one of a doctor, the other of a building society.

  “What is it?” asked a rather disagreeable concierge, opening her glass door.

  “Madame Boulay…”

  “Third floor on the left, but…”

  After looking at the two men, she changed her tone.

  “You’re from the police, aren’t you?… In that case you can go up… Those poor women must be in an awful state…”

  There was an almost silent elevator and a red carpet on the staircase, which was better lighted than in most of the old apartment houses in Paris. On the third floor they could hear voices behind a door. Maigret rang the bell and the voices stopped, footsteps drew near, and Antonio appeared in the doorway. He had taken off his jacket and was holding a sandwich.

  “Come in… don’t take any notice of the mess…”

  A baby was crying in a bedroom. A little boy was clinging to the dress of a young woman who was already fairly plump. She had not had time to do her hair, which hung down her back.

  “My sister Marina…”

  She was red-eyed, as was only to be expected, and looked somewhat distraught.

  “Come this way…”

  She took them into an untidy living room. There was a rocking horse overturned on the carpet and some dirty cups and glasses on the table.

  An old, much fatter woman in a baby-blue dressing gown appeared at another door and looked suspiciously at the newcomers.

  “My mother, ” said Antonio, introducing her. “She speaks hardly any French… she’ll never get used to it…”

  The apartment was huge and comfortable, equipped with the rustic furniture that you find in the big stores.

  “Where’s your other sister?” asked Maigret, looking around him.

  “With the baby… she’ll be coming soon…”

  “How do you explain all this, Chief Superintendent?” asked Marina, who had less of an accent than her brother.

  She had been eighteen or nineteen when Boulay had met her. That meant she was twenty-five or twenty-six now, and she was still very beautiful, with a mat complexion and dark eyes. Had she kept her pride in her appearance? It was not easy to judge in the circumstances, but the Chief Superintendent would have been willing to bet that she had stopped bothering about her figure or her clothes, that she’d been living happily with her mother, her sister, her children, and her husband, without bothering about the rest of the world.

  As soon as he had come in, Maigret had sniffed the air, recognizing the smell of the place; it reminded him of Italian restaurants.

  Antonio had obviously become the head of the family. Hadn’t he rather occupied that position in the time of Émile Boulay? Hadn’t it been he whom the former steward had had to ask for Marina’s hand?

  Still holding his sandwich, he asked:

  “Have you discovered anything?”

  “I’d like to know if he had his automatic in his pocket when he went out on Tuesday night.”

  Antonio glanced at his sister, who hesitated for a moment and then rushed into another room. She left the door open, revealing the dining room, which she crossed before going into a bedroom. She opened a drawer and came back with a dark object in her hand.

  It was the automatic, which she handled gingerly, like someone who is frightened of firearms.

  “It was in its usual place, ” she said.

  “He didn’t always carry it on him?”

  “Not always, no… not recently…”

  Antonio broke in.

  “After Mazotti was killed and his gang went back to the South, Émile didn’t feel the need to be armed any more…”

  That was a significant point. It meant that when he had left home on Tuesday evening, Émile Boulay hadn’t been expecting a dangerous or delicate encounter.

  “At what time did he leave you, madame?”

  “A few minutes before nine, as usual. We had dinner at eight. Then he went to kiss the children good night in their beds, as he always did before going out…”

  “He didn’t strike you as being worried?”

  She made an effort to remember. She had very beautiful eyes, which, under normal circumstances, must have been gay and caressing.

  “No… I don’t think so. You know, Émile wasn’t at all demonstrative, and people who didn’t know him must have imagined that he was very reserved…”

  Tears came to her eyes.

  “In reality he was very kind, very attentive…”

  She turned toward her mother, who was listening, her hands folded over her stomach, and said a few words to her in Italian. Her mother nodded in confirmation.

  “I know what they think about people who run night clubs. They think they’re some kind of gangsters and it’s true there are a few like that…”

  She wiped her eyes, and looked at her brother as if to ask his permission to go on.

  “But he was timid if anything… perhaps not in business matters… He lived in the midst of dozens of women he could have done what he liked with, but instead of treating them as most of his colleagues do, he regarded them as employees, and if he was strict with them, he was also respectful. I know that because I worked for him before becoming his wife…

  “You can believe me or not, as you like, but he spent weeks circling around me like a young man would have done. When he spoke to me during the show, it was to ask me questions: where I was born, where my family lived, whether my mother was in Paris, whether I had any brothers and sisters…

  “Not once, during all that time, did he touch me. Nor did he ever offer to take me home.”

  Antonio nodded, with a look that implied he wouldn’t have allowed anything else to happen.

  “Of course, ” she went on, “he knew what Italian girls were like, because there are always two or three at the Lotus. One evening, he asked me if he could meet my brother…”

  “He did the right thing, ” conceded Antonio.

  The mother must have understood a little French, and now and then she opened her mouth as if she were going to break in. But, failing to find the words she wanted, she ended up by keeping quiet.

  A girl came in, dressed in black, with her hair already done and her face freshly made up. This was Ada, who was barely twenty-two and obviously looked just as her sister had at that age. She glanced inquisitively at the visitors and told Marina:

  “She’s finally gone off to sleep.”

  Then she said to Maigret and Lucas:

  “Won’t you sit down?”

  “I understand, mademoiselle, that you were your brother-in-law’s secretary?”

  She, too, had the merest hint of an accent—just enough to give her an added charm.

  “That’s saying a lot. Émile looked after all his business himself. And it’s the sort of business that doesn’t require a lot of paper work.”

  “Did he have an office?”

  “We call it the office anyway… two little rooms on the mezzanine, over the Lotus…”

  “When did he go there?”

  “He usually slept till noon and had lunch with us. About three o’clock the two of us went over to the Place Pigalle…”

  Maigret observed the two sisters one after the other, wondering whether, for instance, Marina might not feel a certain jealousy of her younger sister. He found no trace of any such feeling in her eyes.

  Marina, as far as he could judge, had, only three days before, been a woman content with her lot, happy leading a fairly lazy life with her mother and her children in the Rue Victor-Masse apartment, and probably, if her husband had not been killed, she would have had a large family.

  Very different, with a more energetic, clear-cut personality, Ada went on:

  “There were always some people waiting—show girls, musicians, the headwaiter or the barman of one night club or another, not to mention the travelers in wines and champagne…”

  “What did Émile Boulay attend to on the day he disappeared?”

  “Wait a minute… it was Tuesday, wasn’t it?… We went down to the club to audition a Spanish dancer, whom he took on… Then he saw the representative of an air-conditioning firm. He was planning to install air-conditioning in his four night clubs. At the Lotus in particular they kept having trouble with the ventilation…”

  Maigret remembered a catalogue he had noticed among the dead man’s effects.

  “Who looks after his financial affairs?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who paid the bills, the staff?”

  “The accountant, of course…”

  “Did he have an office over the Lotus, too?”

  “Yes, a little room overlooking the yard. He’s an old man who’s always grumbling, and whenever there’s any money to be spent, it hurts him as if it were his own. He’s called Raison… Monsieur Raison, as everybody says, because if they didn’t call him monsieur…”

  “Is he at the Place Pigalle now?”

  “Yes. He’s the only one who works in the morning, because he’s free in the evening and all night.”

  “I suppose that each night club has its own manager?”

  Ada shook her head.

  “No. It doesn’t work like that. Antonio runs the Paris-Strip because it’s in another part of Paris with a different clientele and a different style. You understand what I mean? Besides, Antonio is one of the family…

  “The other three night clubs are practically next door to one another. In the course of the night some of the performers go from one to another. Émile, too, circulated between them and kept an eye on everything. About three o’clock in the morning we’d sometimes send some crates of champagne from the Lotus to the Train Bleu, or some bottles of whisky. If one of the clubs was crowded and short of staff, we’d send reinforcements from another club where there were fewer people…”

  “In other words, Émile Boulay ran the three Montmartre night clubs in person.”

  “More or less… although in each club there was a headwaiter who was in charge.”

  “And Monsieur Raison looked after the accounts and the paperwork…”

  “That’s about it.”

  “And you?”

  “I followed my brother-in-law around and took notes— a reminder to order this or that, to make an appointment with such and such a tradesman or such and such a contractor, to ring up a girl who was working somewhere else to try and book her…”

  “Did you follow him around in the evening, too?”

  “Only part of the evening.”

  “Till what time, usually?”

  “Ten or eleven. The longest job was getting everything ready about nine o’clock. There’s always somebody missing, a waiter, a musician, or a dancer. Or else there’s a delivery of champagne or party favors that is late…”

  Maigret said thoughtfully:

  “I’m beginning to get the hang of it… Were you with him on Tuesday evening?”

  “Yes, like every evening…”

  He glanced again at Marina and found no trace of jealousy in her face.

  “At what time did you leave your brother-in-law?”

  “At half past ten.”

  “Where were you at the time?”

  “At the Lotus. It was a sort of headquarters… we’d already dropped into the Train Bleu and the Saint-Trop’.”

  “You didn’t notice anything special?”

  “No, nothing… except that I thought it was going to rain.”

  “Did it rain?”

  “A few drops, just as I was leaving the Lotus. Mickey offered to lend me an umbrella, but I hung around and five minutes later the rain stopped.”

 

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