Maigret and the Spinster by Georges Simenon Read Free Book Online

like so many elderly bachelors—and his apartment smelled as he did of stale pipe smoke, soiled underwear, and solitude.
    “One moment…I’ll switch on the light.”
    His study might have been that of a lawyer or a business consultant. Dark furniture, black shelves filled with law books, tables covered with green file boxes, periodicals, and documents.
    “You do smoke, I think?”
    He himself had a row of ten or so pipes carefully set out on his desk. Having first pulled the blind down over the window, he filled one for himself.
    “Do you still not remember me? Admittedly, we only met twice, the first time at Chez Albert, on Rue Blanche…”
    “I know, Monsieur Charles…”
    “The other time…”
    “In my office at the Quai des Orfèvres, eight years ago. I had a few questions to ask you…And I must admit that you had an answer to everything.”
    A cold smile, a frozen smile on a frozen face, colorless but for a tinge of pink in the fleshy nose.
    “Please take a seat…I was out this morning.”
    “May I ask where you were?”
    “Now that I know what’s happened, I realize that this is going to look bad for me…All the same, I may as well admit that I spend a good deal of my time in the Palais de Justice. Owing to my former connection with the law, I daresay, I can’t seem to lose the habit…Ever since…”
    “Ever since you were disbarred in Fontenay-le-Comte…”
    A vague shrug, as if to say: Just so…but it’s of so little consequence!
    And the former lawyer from the provinces went on:
    “I spend most of my time at the courts…Take today, for instance…There was a most interesting case being heard in Court Thirteen…A case of blackmail within a family…Maître Boniface, who represented the son-in-law…”
    Monsieur Dandurand, formerly Maître Dandurand, who had been living in one of the oldest private residences in Fontenay, was forever cracking his stiff finger joints.
    “Please stop fidgeting with your fingers and tell me what you went to see me about in my office,” sighed Maigret, relighting his pipe, which had gone out.
    “I am so sorry…When I left the house at eight o’clock this morning, I was unaware of what had happened in the apartment upstairs. It wasn’t until four o’clock, in the Palais, that one of my friends…”
    “You learned of the murder of Madame Juliette Boynet, née Cazenove, who, like yourself, came from Fontenay-le-Comte.”
    “That is so, Chief Superintendent. I came back home, but you were not here. I preferred to say nothing to the policeman on duty outside…I returned by streetcar to the Quai des Orfèvres. You must have been on your way here by then. Chief Superintendent Cassieux, who knows me…”
    “You must indeed be known, under the name of Monsieur Charles, to the head of the Vice Squad…”
    Dandurand went on as though he had not heard:
    “Chief Superintendent Cassieux told me about Cécile and about…”
    Maigret got up and tiptoed across the tiny hallway, the door leading to which stood ajar. When, abruptly, he flung open the front door, Nouchi, whose eye had been glued to the keyhole, almost fell flat on her face. She straightened up just in time, and was off up the stairs like greased lightning.
    “You were saying?”
    “Knowing that I should find you here, I decided to have dinner first…Then I had to wait some time for a streetcar on Place Saint-Michel. But here I am at last…I wanted to tell you myself that I was in Madame Boynet’s apartment last night, sometime between midnight and one o’clock…She and I were friends, and I was, in a sense, her professional adviser.”
    Without realizing what he was doing he cracked his finger joints again, and then hastily murmured an apology:
    “Forgive me…Old habits die hard…”

FOUR
    I t was a little after ten o’clock at night. Madame Maigret, having finished turning down the big double bed, was standing in front of the glass-fronted wardrobe beside it, putting her hair in