Free Maigret in Montmartre by Georges Simenon Page B

young woman in a blue shot-silk dress with spangles.
    “This is Inspector Maigret, who’s investigating the murder of Arlette. You needn’t be frightened. He’s O.K.”
    The girl might have been pretty if she had not been as tough and muscular as a man. She looked almost like a young man in woman’s dress—so much so that it was embarrassing. Even her voice added to the impression—it was deep and rather hoarse.
    “Do you want me to sit here?”
    “I should be glad if you would. Will you have something to drink?”
    “I’d rather not just yet. Désiré will put a glass in front of me. That’s all that’s needed.”
    She seemed tired and worried. It was hard to realize that she was there to attract men, and she did not appear to have much illusion on the point.
    “Are you Belgian?” he asked, because of her accent.
    “Yes—from Anderlecht, near Brussels. Before I came here I was with a team of acrobats. I began when I was only a kid—my father belonged to a circus.”
    “What is your age?”
    “Twenty-eight. I got too rusty for that line of work, so I took up dancing.”
    “Are you married?”
    “I was, to a juggler. He walked out on me.”
    “Was it with you that Arlette left here last night?”
    “Yes, as usual. Tania lives near the Gare St Lazare, so she goes down the Rue Pigalle. She’s always ready before us. I live practically next door, and Arlette and I used to walk together to the corner of the Rue Notre-Dame de Lorette.”
    “She didn’t go straight home?”
    “No. That happened sometimes. She’d pretend to turn to the right and then, as soon as I was round the corner, I’d hear her walking on up the street, to get a drink at the tabac in the Rue de Douai.”
    “Why didn’t she do it openly?”
    “People who drink don’t usually like to be seen hurrying off for a last glass.”
    “Did she drink a great deal?”
    “She had two glasses of brandy with me before we left, and she’d already had a lot of champagne. And I’m pretty sure she’d been drinking even before she got here.”
    “Was she unhappy?”
    “If so, she never told me about it. I think she was just disgusted with herself.”
    Betty was perhaps in the same state of mind, for she said this with a dreary expression, in a flat, indifferent voice.
    “What do you know about her?”
    Two clients, a man and a woman, had just come in, and Désiré was trying to steer them to a table. Seeing the place was empty, they looked at each other hesitantly, and finally the man said, with an air of embarrassment:
    “We’ll come back later.”
    “They’ve come to the wrong address,” remarked Betty calmly. “This isn’t the place for them.”
    She made an effort to smile.
    “It’ll be a good hour before we get going. Sometimes we begin our programme with only three people watching.”
    “Why did Arlette take up this job?”
    Betty gave him a long look, and then murmured: “That’s what I often asked her. I don’t know. Perhaps she enjoyed it.”
    She glanced at the photos on the wall.
    “You know what she had to do in her act? They’re not likely to find anyone who can carry it off so well. It looks easy, but we’ve all tried it and I can assure you it takes a bit of doing. Because if it’s done just anyhow, it looks indecent at once. It really has to be done as though one were enjoying it.”
    “Did Arlette do it like that?”
    “I sometimes wondered whether she didn’t do it because of that! I don’t mean because she wanted the men—very likely she didn’t. But she had to feel she was exciting them, keeping them on tenterhooks. When it was over and she went off into the kitchen—that’s the ‘wings’ of this place, we go through there on our way upstairs to change—she’d open the door a crack and peep out to see what effect she’d produced—just the way actors peep through the hole in the curtain.”
    “She wasn’t in love with anyone?”
    There was quite a long silence before Betty replied: