Maigret and the Spinster by Georges Simenon Read Free Book Online Page A

curlers with the aid of hairpins that she was holding in her mouth. Boulevard Richard-Lenoir was deserted. The main road beyond the Porte d’Orléans was also deserted, glinting under the rain, but only a few seconds later a procession of three, four, six cars appeared on it, preceded by a broad beam of brilliant light.
    These headlights, as they went past, barely brushed against Madame Boynet’s house, disproportionately tall as it was, and the uglier for having no neighboring houses to conceal its rough-hewn sides.
    Madame Piéchaud’s grocery store was still showing a light. The proprietress was sitting in front of the stove in the shop to save fuel. On the other side of the front door of the building, the bicycle shop was dark, except for a patch of light from the open door to the back room, where there could be seen a bed and a young man polishing shoes.
    The Siveschis had gone to the movies. The concierge, reluctant to go to bed while Maigret was still in the house, was consoling herself by finishing the bottle of red wine, while at the same time entertaining her cat with a commentary on the events of the day.
    Over there at the Forensic Laboratory, far away on the other side of Paris, two bodies lay in drawers in that vast human cold-storage plant.
    In Monsieur Dandurand’s apartment, Maigret puffed at his pipe, avoiding, as best he could, looking the former lawyer in the eye. The apartment, it seemed, was never aired, since all the usual household smells were blended in a sickening, musty staleness that seeped into one’s clothing and clung for a long time afterward.
    “Tell me, Monsieur Dandurand…if I’m not mistaken, it was in connection with a vice charge, was it not, that you were forced to leave Fontenay? Let’s see…it’s ancient history by now, but your name came up at police headquarters only a few weeks back…you got two years.”
    “That’s right,” the lawyer replied coolly.
    And Maigret huddled deeper into his heavy overcoat, as if to insulate himself against any physical contact with this man. He had not taken off his hat. In spite of his apparent grumpiness, Maigret was very generous toward most forms of human weakness, but there were some people who so revolted him that he physically shrank from them. Monsieur Dandurand was among them.
    This revulsion was so deep-seated that Maigret was never wholly at ease in the presence of his colleague Cassieux, who, as head of the Vice Squad, was in charge of all matters connected with personal morality.
    It was Cassieux who had spoken to him of this man, generally known as Monsieur Charles, a lawyer from the provinces, who had been mixed up in a nasty case concerning the corruption of minors, and had served a two-year term before landing up in Paris.
    His was a rather unusual case, conducive to reflections on the strangeness of human destiny. Barred from the exercise of his profession, and swallowed up in the capital city where he was unknown, Dandurand, still possessed of an ample income from investments, was able freely to gratify his vicious tastes. He was one of those dingy, somewhat repulsive, shifty-eyed men who during daytime keep in the shadows and only come to life when they are elbowing their way through the crowds in pursuit of a likely victim.
    The former lawyer had been spotted loitering near the Porte Saint-Martin, Boulevard Sébastopol, and the Bastille—one of the many furtive characters that haunt factory gates and the exits of big stores, and who, at nightfall, scuffle, hunched up and muffled, into the dark doorway of some disreputable establishment catering to their special tastes.
    Needless to say, he was familiar with all such establishments, and was well known to those who ran them.
    “Hello, Monsieur Charles…Let me see, what have I got for you today?”
    He was at home in such places. They had become the breath of life to him, and he needed to go there every day. It did not take long for the other habitués to discover