No one moved. Not Bob, not any of the girls.
‘Where is she, Colonel?’ asked another. ‘What’s happened to her?’
Merde, something would have to be said, thought Delaroche. ‘We’re working on it.’
‘That makes two of us, Colonel.’
‘Kohler, we’ll discuss it later.’
‘Of course, but I’m glad to know the agence is involved.’
All thirty-two or -six of them stopped whatever they’d been doing. They waited for answers. They damned well wanted them. ‘Well?’ said a forty-year-old with the stretch marks big babies invariably leave for one to hide.
Bob nudged the fitted case, pushing it across the cracked linoleum until it rested not at the colonel’s feet, but at those of this Kripo. Sorrowfully he looked up and waited, too, for an answer. A missing dog and a missing showgirl.
That answer was not long in coming. It couldn’t be, if only partially given. Reaching into a jacket pocket, Kohler took out the girl’s wedding ring-Ach, he’d wrapped it in a pair of white pongee step-ins he must have taken from the judge’s flat, but had no memory of having done or even of where, precisely, among those rooms he’d found them, but … ‘This is it, eh, Bob?’ he heard himself asking, heard the collective gasp, saw lips part, despair enter the gazes of some, tears those of others.
‘Elene’s,’ said one. ‘I knew she was for it. I had a feeling.’
‘Kohler, where the hell did you find that?’ hissed Delaroche.
‘Maybe Bob had best tell us, Colonel, or is it that you already know?’
Not a feather moved. Cigarette smoke trailed.
‘Would I even be asking if I did?’ asked Delaroche.
‘Lulu’s gone and Bob’s no longer worried about her, Colonel,’ said one to break the impasse.
‘They had a fight. Bob’s ear was badly torn,’ said another.
They looked at each other, these girls, and nodded at one of their number.
‘Elene took her, Colonel,’ said the forty-year-old den mother. ‘We knew Madame de Brisac had hired you to find Lulu. We weren’t going to tell you but now … now that Elene hasn’t come to work, we’d best, since that one has her ring.’
‘Lulu was causing Elene lots and lots of trouble,’ said another. ‘Madame Rouget would insist on bringing that damned dog of her friend’s down here to see us.’
‘And do the same when we were up onstage.’
‘Now wait a minute,’ said Kohler. ‘Was Madame Rouget asked to do this by Madame de Brisac?’
The girls threw glances at one another. ‘It’s possible,’ said one, ‘but not likely.’
‘It wasn’t Elene’s fault, Inspector. You are a cop, aren’t you?’
‘I am.’
‘I thought so.’
‘I did too.’ ‘So did I …’ ‘Et moi aussi,’ came the chorus. ‘One can always tell with those.’
Heads were nodded.
‘Lulu wasn’t a regular like Bob, Inspector. Oh for sure, she was friendly enough but she hated Monsieur le Juge who had savagely kicked her in the park last October.’
‘The Parc Monceau?’
‘How is it that you know this, please?’ asked the den mother suspiciously.
‘Never mind, but why did Elene Artur ask to meet the judge there? That’s not the usual sort of place for a girl like that, is it?’
They all shrugged. Some looked away, others stared right back at him. Pregnant, wasn’t she? he wanted to ask but didn’t need to and had best not since the colonel was taking a decided interest in things. ‘Continue.’
‘Ah, bon, since you ask it of me. Lulu could be very friendly with Elene, too, you understand, but hated Monsieur le Juge, and when Lulu smelled him on the girl after those two had been together during the cinq a sept or even earlier in the day, she just went crazy even though the judge was no longer present.’
‘Angry,’ said one.
‘A real hothead,’ yet another.
‘Would bite and bark and sometimes even tear at Elene’s coat or dress when she came in.’
‘Irish terriers are good with most people but can be …’
‘Bitchy,’ said another, ‘especially with big dogs like Bob who was only trying to defend Elene from attack.’
‘Madame Rouget also had her daughter Denise bring Lulu in to see us, Inspector. Twice, I think, or was it three times?’
‘Four. Poor Elene didn’t know what to do.’
But she did.
It wasn’t wise of her to leave the chief inspector alone in the outer office, Suzette told herself, but she absolutely had to get cleaned up. He would go through the papers on her desk. He’d see beyond a shadow of doubt that Madame Henriette Morel was being billed ten thousand francs each this month for the Barrault and Guillaumet investigations, as she’d been billed last month. He’d find M. Garnier’s files on Madame Barrault and Madame Guillaumet, files that were to have been locked up in the colonel’s office had that one come back from Chez Benedicte’s or not have left the door to his office locked as always when he was away, and sometimes even when he was here and in there with a particularly beautiful client.
The inspector would see that on her desk there was also the invoice she had typed for the parents of Captain Jean-Matthieu Guillaumet, who was in the officers’ POW camp at Elsterhorst. Twenty thousand francs they’d been billed this month alone for the agence’s finding ‘conclusive evidence’ of Madame Guillaumet’s plans to commit adultery. The Ritz, no less!
‘And then?’ whispered Suzette to herself. ‘Then he will discover that the Scapini Commission in Berlin, the Service diplomatique de prisonniers de guerre, have requested an estimate of the cost of just such a “conclusive” investigation of her and that this estimate has been placed at between forty thousand and fifty thousand francs.’
It would do no good for her to stand here stupidly and cry. She must get back, but he would also find that that same commission, at the insistence of Madame Marie-Leon Barrault’s husband, who was in the camp for common soldiers at Stablack in Poland, had demanded that such an investigation of his wife be done. Cost: ten thousand francs a month, but that since Corporal Rene-Claude Barrault had no money of his own, Madame Henriette Morel had willingly volunteered to cover that cost as well. Thirty thousand francs then, this month alone to Madame Moreclass="underline" ten for Madame Barrault, ten for Madame Guillaumet and ten for the Scapini’s request.
‘Un gogo,’ M. Hubert Quevillon had said of the woman. He had flashed some of the photos he used from time to time to convince prospective customers that their husbands were indeed fooling around behind their backs. Totally naked girls.
‘A sucker,’ she swallowed, glancing accusingly at herself in the mirror that was above the washbasin. Madame Morel was being billed twice for the Barrault investigation and once for the Guillaumet, whose in-laws were also forking over twenty thousand francs for that one, and soon it would be the Scapini Commission also, whose cost those same in-laws would gladly pay since the Scapini could recommend to the courts that charges be laid and a divorce granted.
A racket, that’s what it was. She knew the chief inspector would find out all of this from her desk alone-Madame de Brisac’s invoice was there too, the search for Lulu, a lost dog: no charge at all. Nothing. Absolument rien simply because that one was not only an old friend but had recommended the firm to Madame Rouget who in turn had recommended it to her daughter Denise and to Germaine de Brisac, the daughter of the other one. The things one did for business. But having scratched the surface, would the inspector not want more?
Hurriedly she took off her slip and underpants and, rolling them into a tight ball, tucked them into her bag. She would put on her overcoat to hide the skirt’s dampness, had best get ready to go home-oui, oui, that is what she’d do. Lock the door and lock him out of the office.