Maigret and the Pickpocket, page 3
“Are you going to be sick?”
His companion shook his head but still did not dare open his mouth. He was clutching his chest with both hands, deathly pale, on the point of collapsing to judge by the near-convulsive movement of his fingers and the uncontrollable trembling of his lips.
“Take your time… Don’t try to talk… Would you like to come and have a drink in the café on the corner?”
Again a shake of the head.
“It’s your wife, isn’t it?”
The man’s eyes said that it was. Finally he opened his mouth to take a deep breath, but succeeded only after a long pause, as though his nerves were clamped in knots.
“Were you there when it happened?”
“No…”
In spite of everything, he had managed to utter the single syllable.
“When did you see her last?”
“The day before yesterday. Wednesday…”
“In the morning? In the evening?”
“Late in the evening…”
They were walking, automatically, across the great sunbathed courtyard, all around which people were leading their daily lives in different compartments in the building. Most of them were eating, or just about to do so.
Fragments of sentences reached their ears:
“Did you wash your hands… ?”
“Watch out… It’s very hot.”
Kitchen smells, particularly leeks, mingled here and there with the already springlike air.
“Do you know how she died?”
The young man nodded, short of breath once again.
“When I got back…”
“One moment… You left the apartment late on Wednesday evening. Keep walking. Standing still won’t do you any good. What time, roughly?”
“Eleven o’clock…”
“Was your wife still alive? Was she in her dressing gown when you left her?”
“She hadn’t undressed yet…”
“Do you work at night?”
“No. I was going out to scurry up some money… We were broke…”
They both glanced unthinkingly at the open windows as they passed by, and at some of them the occupants stared back, doubtless wondering what they were doing, walking about in this fashion.
“Where were you going to look for the money?”
“Friends’ houses…Anywhere.”
“Did you succeed?”
“No…”
“Did any of these friends see you?”
“At the Old Wine Press, yes… I still had about thirty francs in my pocket. I looked in at various places where there was a chance of finding somebody I knew…”
“On foot?”
“In my car… I didn’t abandon it until I ran out of gas, at the corner of Rue François-Premier and Rue Marboeuf…”
“What did you do then?”
“I walked…”
The young man Maigret had on his hands was exhausted, his nerves raw, like a person who has been flayed alive.
“How long have you been without food?”
“Yesterday I ate two hard-boiled eggs in a bistrot. …”
“Come with me…”
“I’m not hungry… If you are thinking of giving me lunch I may as well tell you right away…”
Maigret was not listening but made for Boulevard de Grenelle and went into a small restaurant where there were several unoccupied tables.
“Steak and chips for two,” he ordered.
He wasn’t hungry either, but his companion was in need of sustenance.
“What’s your name?”
“Ricain. François Ricain… Some people call me Francis… It was my wife who…”
“Listen, Ricain. I’ve got to make a couple of telephone calls…”
“To bring your men here?”
“Before I do anything else I’ve got to call the local Inspector, to let Headquarters know what’s happening. Do you give your word you won’t budge from here?”
“Where would I go?” Ricain replied bitterly. “In any case you’ll arrest me and put me in prison… I won’t be able to stand it… I would rather…”
He didn’t finish, but his meaning was clear.
“A half bottle of Beaujolais, waiter…”
Maigret went to the cashier to get some telephone counters. As he had expected, the local Inspector was out to lunch.
“Do you want me to get a message to him right away?”
“What time will he be back?”
“Around two o’clock…”
“Tell him I’ll be waiting for him at half past two in Rue Saint-Charles, by the entrance of the house on the corner of Boulevard de Grenelle…”
At the Public Prosecutor’s office, he only got through to a junior clerk.
“A crime has apparently been committed in Rue Saint-Charles. Take down the address… When one of the officers on duty comes back, tell him I will be outside the entrance at a quarter past two…”
Finally Police Headquarters, where Lapointe took the call:
“I’ll expect you at Rue Saint-Charles in an hour. Alert Records… Tell them to be at the same address around two o’clock. Tell them to bring something to disinfect a room where the smell is so strong you can’t get in. Alert the pathologist. I don’t know who’s on duty today. See you there…”
He went and sat down opposite Ricain, who had not moved and was looking around as if unable to believe that this commonplace spectacle was real.
It was a modest restaurant. Most of the customers worked in the neighborhood and ate alone, reading newspapers. The steaks were rare and the fried potatoes were crisp.
“What’s going to happen next?” asked the young man, automatically picking up his fork. “Did you alert everybody? Is the circus about to start?”
“Not before two o’clock. From now till then, we’ve got time to chat…”
“I don’t know anything…”
“People always think they don’t know anything…”
He must not push him. After a few moments, as Maigret was putting a piece of meat in his mouth, François Ricain began, unconsciously, to cut his steak.
He had stated that he would be unable to eat. Not only was he eating, but he drank, and a few minutes later the Chief Inspector had to order a second half bottle.
“Even so you can’t possibly understand…”
“Of all the things people say, that’s the one I’ve heard most often during my career. But nine times out of ten I have understood…”
“I know. You’ll be teaching me to blow my nose next…”
“Does it need blowing?”
“It’s not a laughing matter. You’ve seen, as I have…”
“The difference being that you had already seen it before. Isn’t that right?”
“Certainly.”
“When?”
“Yesterday, at about four o’clock in the morning.”
“Hold on a minute while I get this straight. The day before yesterday, that’s to say Wednesday, you left your apartment at about eleven o’clock in the evening and your wife stayed behind…”
“Sophie pressed me to take her too. I made her stay because I don’t like begging for money in her presence. It would have looked as if I were using her…”
“Right! You left by car. What sort of car?”
“A Triumph convertible.”
“If you needed money so badly, why not sell it?”
“Because I wouldn’t have got a hundred francs for it. It’s an ancient car I bought secondhand, and it’s passed through God knows how many hands. It hardly stands up on its four wheels…”
“You looked for any friends who might be able to lend you money, and you didn’t find any?”
“The ones I found were almost as broke as I was…”
“You returned home, on foot, at four o’clock in the morning. Did you knock?”
“No. I opened the door with my key…”
“Had you been drinking?”
“A certain amount, yes. At night, most of the people I see hang around bars or night clubs…”
“Were you drunk?”
“Not to the point…”
“Depressed?”
“I was at my wits’ end…”
“Did your wife have any money?”
“No more than I did. There must have been twenty or thirty francs left in her bag.”
“Go on… Waiter! Some more chips, please…”
“I found her on the floor. When I went over to her, I saw that half her face had sort of… gone… I think I saw brains…”
He pushed his plate away and drank down his fourth glass of wine in gulps.
“I’m sorry. I’d rather not talk about that…”
“Was there a weapon in the room?”
Ricain stopped short, looking narrowly at Maigret, as though the crucial moment had come.
“A revolver? An automatic?”
“Yes.”
“An automatic?”
“Mine… A 6.35 Browning made in Hertal…”
“How did you come to have this weapon in your possession?”
“I was waiting for that question. And you probably won’t believe me…”
“You didn’t buy it at a gunsmith’s?”
“No. I had no reason to buy a gun… One night there were several of us, just friends, in a small restaurant in La Villette. We’d had a lot to drink… We were showing off and pretending to be tough…”
He had reddened.
“Especially me… The others will bear me out… It’s a phobia of mine. When I drink, I think I’m really somebody… Some people we didn’t know attached themselves to us. You know how those things go on into the small hours. It was in winter, two years ago. I was wearing a sheepskin jacket. Sophie was with me. She had been drinking too, but she never completely loses her head…
“Next day, around noon, when I went to put on my jacket, I found an automatic in the pocket. My wife told me I’d bought it the night before, in spite of her pleas… I was insisting, apparently, that I absolutely had to kill someone who had a grudge against me… I kept repeating:
“ ‘It’s him or me, you see, old man!’ ”
Maigret had lit his pipe and was looking at his companion without betraying any sign of what he was thinking.
“Can you understand?”
“Go on… We were at Thursday, four A.M. I suppose nobody saw you come home?”
“Of course not.”
“And nobody saw you go out again?”
“Nobody.”
“What did you do with the weapon?”
“How do you know I got rid of it?”
The Chief Inspector shrugged.
“I don’t know why I did it. I realized I’d be accused…”
“Why?”
Ricain looked at his questioner in amazement.
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? I was the only person with the key… The weapon that used belonged to me, and stayed in the chest of drawers… We sometimes had fights, Sophie and I… She wanted me to get a steady job.”
“What is your profession?”
“If you can call it a profession… I’m a journalist, without being attached to any particular paper… In other words I place my copy where I can, mostly movie reviews. I’m also an assistant director, and sometimes a script writer…”
“Did you throw the Browning into the Seine?”
“Just below the Bir-Hakeim bridge. Then I walked…”
“Did you go on trying to find your friends?”
“I didn’t dare to any longer. Someone might have heard the shot and telephoned the police. I don’t know… One isn’t necessarily logical in moments like that…
“I was about to be hunted down… I would be accused and everything would be against me, even the fact that I had roamed about part of the night… I had been drinking… I was still in search of the first bar to open… When I found one, in Rue Vaugirard, I drank three straight glasses of rum…
“If anybody were to question me, I would be in no fit state to answer. I was sure to get muddled. They would shut me up in a cell. I suffer from claustrophobia, so badly that I cannot travel by subway… The idea of prison, with huge bolts on the door…”
“Was it claustrophobia that gave you the idea of running away abroad?”
“You see! You don’t believe me!”
“Perhaps I do.”
“You have to have been in a situation like mine to know what goes on in one’s head… One doesn’t work things out logically. I couldn’t tell you what route I took. I needed to walk, to get away from the Grenelle neighborhood, where I pictured them already on my track. I remember noticing Montparnasse station, drinking white wine on Boulevard Saint-Michel… or perhaps it was in Montparnasse station…
“My idea wasn’t so much to run away… It was to gain time, not to be interrogated in the state I was in. In Belgium, or somewhere else, I would have been able to wait. I would have followed the progress of the investigation in the papers. I would have found out details that I don’t know about and which would have helped my defense…”
Maigret could not help smiling at such a mixture of astuteness and naivete.
“What were you doing in Place de la République?”
“Nothing. I wound up there, just as I might have wound up anywhere else… I had one ten-franc note left in my pocket. I let three buses go by.”
“Because they didn’t have an open platform?”
“I don’t know… I swear. Inspector, that I don’t know. I needed money to take the train. I got on the platform. There were a lot of people and we were packed tightly together. I saw you from behind…
“At one moment you stepped back and you nearly lost your balance. I noticed the wallet sticking out of your pocket… I grabbed it, without thinking, and when I looked up I saw a woman looking straight at me…
“I can’t think why she didn’t give the alarm there and then. I jumped from the bus as it was moving. Luckily, it was a very busy street, with a jumble of narrow streets all around it. I ran… I walked…”
“Two pastries, waiter…”
It was half past one. In forty-five minutes, justice would don its usual trappings, and the studio in Rue Saint-Charles would be invaded by officials, while police outside would keep onlookers away.
“What are you going to do with me?” Maigret didn’t answer immediately, for the good reason that he had not yet made up his mind.
“Are you arresting me? I realize you can’t do anything else, but I swear to you once more…”
“Eat up…Coffee?”
“What are you doing this for?”
“What am I doing that’s so extraordinary?”
“You’re making me eat, and drink… You aren’t pushing me around. On the contrary, you are patiently listening… Surely that’s not what you call grilling a person?” Maigret smiled.
“Not exactly, no… I’m just trying to get the facts into some sort of order.”
“And get me talking…”
“I haven’t pressed you too much.”
“Well, I do feel a bit better…”
He had eaten his pastry seemingly without noticing, and he was lighting a cigarette. A little color had returned to his cheeks.
“Only, I couldn’t go back there, and see… smell…”
“How about me?”
“That’s your job. It isn’t your wife…”
He passed without transition from nonsense to sense, from blind panic to lucid reasoning.
“You’re a strange creature…”
“Because I’m straightforward?”
“I’m not anxious, either, to have you getting in my way when the Forensic Department descends, and I’m even less keen on reporters’ pestering you with questions.
“When my inspectors arrive at Rue Saint-Charles—in fact, they must be there by now waiting for us—I’ll get them to take you to Rue des Orfèvres…”
“To the cells?”
“To my office, where you will wait for me quietly.”
“And then? What happens after that?”
“That depends…”
“What do you hope to find out?”
“I have no idea… I have even less idea than you have, because I haven’t studied the body closely and I haven’t seen the weapon.”
This whole conversation had been accompanied by the sound of glasses, knives and forks, the buzz of voices, the bustle of the waiters and the high-pitched tinkle of the cash-register bell.
The far side of the sidewalk was getting the sun, and the shadows of the passers-by were short and squat. Cars, taxis, buses came past, doors were slammed.
On leaving the restaurant the two men paused, as if hesitating. In their corner in the bistrot, they had been isolated for quite a time from other people, from the life that flowed by, from familiar noises, voices, and images.
“Do you believe me?”
Ricain put the question without daring to look at Maigret.
“The moment for believing or not believing hasn’t come yet. Look! My men are here…”
He could see one of the black cars of the Police Department in Rue Saint-Charles, and the truck of the Records Department, and he recognized Lapointe in the little group chatting on the sidewalk. The big Torrence was there too, and it was to him that the Chief Inspector entrusted his companion.
“Take him to the Quai. Make him wait in my office, stay with him, and don’t be surprised if he falls asleep. He hasn’t had a wink for two nights.”
Shortly after two o’clock, a truck of the Paris City Health Department was seen arriving: Moers and his men did not have the necessary equipment.
Now there were groups of men in the courtyard waiting outside the studio door; the bystanders, kept at a distance by uniformed police, were observing them attentively.
On one side, Dréville, the Assistant Public Prosecutor, and Camus, the Magistrate, were chatting with Chief Inspector Piget of the XVth Arrondissement. All of them had come straight from lunch, and a pretty substantial meal at that, and as the work of disinfecting dragged on, they kept glancing at their watches.
The pathologist was Dr. Delaplanque, relatively new to the job; Maigret liked him and was now asking a few questions. Despite the smell and the flies, Delaplanque had not hesitated to go into the room and make a preliminary examination.
