Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [54]
Inspector Macé noted the matching initial B and had Mme. Bodasse brought for questioning. She said she had last seen Voirbo when he had gone to a concert with her nephew, Désiré Bodasse, who lived in the rue Dauphine. That was on December 13, a month earlier, and she hadn’t seen Désiré since, but that did not worry her, for he was eccentric and sometimes disappeared for periods of time. Macé asked her to describe Voirbo. “He was short,” she said, “and generally wore a long overcoat and a tall hat.” 29
On a hunch, Macé took Mme. Bodasse to the morgue to show her the stocking with the initial B. Shocked, she said it had belonged to her nephew. She herself had sewn the B and the two crosses on the stocking. She identified her nephew’s leg by a scar which had come from a fall on the jagged edge of a bottle. Macé was now sure he knew the name of the victim, and he had a good idea who his killer was.
Macé went to Bodasse’s apartment at 50, rue Dauphine. No one answered his knock, but the concierge claimed that he had seen light in the room each night. Indeed, after gaining entrance to the rooms, Macé found a candle still flickering, making him think that someone had tried to make it seem as though Bodasse was still living there. There was another notable absence: Mme. Bodasse had told Macé that her nephew had a strongbox containing valuables hidden in a secret compartment of his old bureau. It was gone. Further search turned up a slip of paper hidden in the case of a silver watch; it contained a list of numbers of Italian securities. These could easily be negotiated, for they were payable to the bearer.
Macé assigned two policemen to keep watch over Bodasse’s rooms while he proceeded to Voirbo’s old apartment on the rue Mazarine. The concierge of the building confirmed that Voirbo and Bodasse were very good friends, though she did think it strange that Bodasse had not been at Voirbo’s wedding. She recalled that the two men had argued about Bodasse’s stinginess. Voirbo had been angry when his friend had refused to lend him ten thousand francs for the wedding. Most interesting of all was the story told by Voirbo’s former maid. When she had arrived to clean his apartment on the seventeenth of December, she found that it had already been scrubbed down — some of the floor tiles were still wet. She was surprised, for Voirbo had not been very tidy and never cleaned his own room. When she asked him why he had done so this time, he claimed that he had spilled some kerosene on the floor accidentally. Even more incriminating was the fact that when he was about to move to a new place, he paid his remaining rent with an Italian stock certificate. Macé was able to determine that it bore one of the serial numbers from the list found in Bodasse’s watchcase.
The police on duty at Bodasse’s apartment reported that nothing unusual had happened except that Voirbo had dropped by to see his friend. It turned out that Voirbo was a police spy who pretended to be an anarchist and attended meetings of radicals to report on their activities. The policemen, not knowing that he was in fact a suspect in the murder, accepted him as one of their own and told him what they were doing in Bodasse’s place.
Annoyed that Voirbo must now know that he was a suspect, Macé decided to call him in and confront him. He saw before him a short, stout man with a high hat and long coat. Voirbo was very calm and confident and answered questions precisely. He explained that he had been worried about his old friend and that as a member of the secret political police, he had used his contacts to investigate his disappearance. His chief suspect, he told Macé, was a butcher named Rifer. Rifer was a gambler and heavy drinker