Maigret in Montmartre by Georges Simenon

worst of all, that kind, and that would explain a lot that seems mysterious.”
    “You mean her obsession about attracting men?”
    “Yes. And the way she set about it. I’m no infant in arms myself. I did the same job at one time, and worse, as you probably know. But not the way she did. That’s why there’s nobody to take her place. The genuine ones, the professionals, never put so much energy into it. Look at them. Even when they let themselves go you can feel they’re not really enjoying it.”
    Fred came across to Maigret’s table every now and then and sat down for a few words with him. On each of these occasions Désiré brought them glasses of brandy and water, but Maigret noticed that the liquid in Fred’s glass was always the paler of the two. As he drank his own he thought of Arlette and Lapointe, sitting together in this same box on the previous evening.
    Inspector Lognon would deal with the Countess, in whom Maigret felt little or no interest. He had known too many women of that kind—middle-aged, nearly always on their own, nearly always with a brilliant past life, who took to drugs and sank rapidly into utter degradation. There were probably a couple of hundred of them in Montmartre, and several dozen, slightly higher in the social scale, in comfortable flats in Passy and Auteuil.
    It was Arlette who interested him, because he had not yet managed to place her, or to understand her completely. “Hot stuff, was she?” he asked Fred at one moment.
    Fred replied, with a shrug:
    “Oh, I don’t bother much about the girls, you know. It’s quite true what my wife told you yesterday. I go to join them in the kitchen, or upstairs while they’re changing. I don’t ask them what they think about it, and the whole thing passes over very quickly.”
    “You never met her outside this place?”
    “In the street?”
    “No. I mean, did you never make a date with her?”
    He had the impression that Fred hesitated, glancing towards the far end of the room, where his wife was sitting.
    “No,” he said at last.
    He was lying. That was the first thing Maigret discovered on arriving at the Quai des Orfèvres next morning (he was late and missed the report). The atmosphere in the Inspectors’ office was lively. Maigret began by telephoning to the Chief, to apologize and to say that he would come along as soon as he had heard what his men had to say.
    When he rang, Janvier and young Lapointe came hurrying to his door in a neck-and-neck race.
    “Janvier first,” he decided. “I’ll call you presently, Lapointe.”
    Janvier looked as knocked-up as Maigret himself, and had obviously spent part of the night in the streets.
    “I was rather expecting you to look in on me at Picratt’s.”
    “I meant to. But the farther I went, the busier I got. In fact I haven’t been to bed at all.”
    “Found Oscar?”
    Janvier took from his pocket a paper covered with notes.
    “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I called at practically every small hotel between the Rue Châteaudun and the Montmartre boulevards, and showed the girl’s photograph in all of them. Some of the proprietors pretended not to recognize her, or tried to dodge the question.”
    “And the result?”
    “She was known at at least ten of these hotels.”
    “Did you try to find out whether she’d often been there with the same man?”
    “That was the point I pushed hardest of all. Apparently she hadn’t. It was usually about four or five o’clock in the morning when she turned up, and the men she brought were well loaded—probably clients from Picratt’s.”
    “Used she to stay long with them?”
    “Never more than an hour or two.”
    “Did you discover whether she took money from them?”
    “When I asked that, the hotel-keepers looked at me as though I was cracked. She went twice to the Moderne with a greasy-haired young man who was carrying a saxophone case.”
    “That’d be Jean-Jean, the musician from the night club.”
    “Perhaps.