Maigret's Anger by Georges Simenon

Author:Georges Simenon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241304020
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2018-09-25T16:00:00+00:00

6.

Before going home to have lunch, Maigret had looked in at Quai des Orfèvres and told Lapointe, almost absent-mindedly:

‘I’d like you to go and have a look around Rue La Bruyère and the neighbouring streets as soon as you can. Apparently a pale-blue American car is usually parked outside Maître Jean-Charles Gaillard’s town-house day and night …’

He handed him a piece of paper on which he had scribbled down the car’s number plate.

‘I’d like to know when the car was there on Tuesday evening, and also when it left yesterday morning or the night before.’

As he said this, he had that look of his: the wide, vacant eyes, the rounded shoulders and lazy, heavy gait.

At such moments people – especially his colleagues – imagined that he was concentrating. Nothing could be further from the truth, but however often he told them, they never believed him. What he was actually doing was a little ridiculous, even babyish. He was taking a glimmer of an idea, the beginnings of a sentence, and repeating it to himself like a schoolboy trying to memorize his homework. Sometimes he would even move his lips or talk in a low voice alone in the middle of his office, or on the street, or wherever he happened to be.

What he was saying didn’t necessarily mean anything. Sometimes it sounded like a joke.

‘Everyone has heard of the lawyer who was killed by his client, but I’ve never heard of the client who was killed by his lawyer.’

That didn’t mean he was accusing Jean-Charles Gaillard of strangling the puny owner of the Lotus and other clubs. He would have been caught off guard if his wife had suddenly asked him as he was eating, ‘What are you thinking?’

He probably would have answered in all honesty that he wasn’t thinking anything. There were also the images he was running through his mind as if through a magic lantern.

Émile Boulay, in the evening, standing on the pavement outside the Lotus … That was a very common occurrence. The little man liked to go and look at the sky, at the crowd flowing by, changing its rhythm and, as it were, its nature as the evening wore on, and calculate the takings of his four clubs.

The second image was extremely unusual. It was of Boulay going into the telephone booth, as the coat-check girl looked on, and dialling a number that didn’t answer.

Three times … Four times … Between attempts, he went for a little walk around the club or out on the street. It was only on the fifth or sixth attempt that he finally got through.

But he didn’t leave immediately. He waited next to Mickey on the pavement, repeatedly taking his watch out of his pocket.

‘He didn’t go home to get his automatic,’ Maigret almost said out loud.

Émile had a licence. He was entitled to carry a gun. When Mazotti and his gang were making trouble for him, he had one on him constantly.

The fact he wasn’t armed that night meant that he didn’t suspect anything.

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