“If our visitor returns,” he said, groping for words, “while my colleague and I are upstairs, ask him if he means a blonde girl with blue eyes. If he admits that, and I’m sure he will, bring him upstairs. Knock three times in quick succession on the door, wait a few seconds, then open the door and shove him inside. We’ll take it from there.”
The hotelier nodded.
“What if he doesn’t want to come upstairs?” he asked.
“Don’t worry, he’ll come up.”
Beautiful Cynthia was not at all happy to see Vledder and DeKok enter her room. On the contrary, there was a definite expression of disappointment on her attractive face. DeKok gave her a friendly grin.
“We’re here to protect you,” he said cheerily. “We got a tip that Freddy Blaken has been spotted in the neighborhood. Apparently he’s looking for you. He asked for you downstairs not long ago.”
She did not react immediately. She appeared unmoved by DeKok’s announcement. She darted a furtive glance at the inspectors, but there was no sign of fear.
“We’re happy to see you’re still alive,” continued DeKok in the same cheerful tone. “I gave the owner clear instructions.” He paused and sneaked a look at the expression on her face. “Otherwise we might have been too late!” He said this in a lugubrious voice.
Her eyes narrowed.
“You’re spying on me?” she yelled at him.
DeKok shook his head.
“Not at all, not at all,” he answered calmly. “I’ve just taken some necessary precautions. That’s all. Remember, you told me you had no idea where Blaken could be found. How was I to know you would contact your own murderer?”
“I didn’t contact him.”
DeKok lifted both eyebrows briefly.
“But didn’t you phone him this morning to tell him where to find you?”
She avoided DeKok’s eyes and lowered her head. Her blonde hair closed off her face as if a curtain had been drawn.
“Didn’t you phone?” insisted DeKok.
“Yes.”
“Strange behavior for a prospective victim.”
She raised her head slowly. The blonde curtain opened up. Her big blue eyes looked at him. They were moist and a tear rolled down her cheek.
“I want to make up with Freddy,” she whispered. “You understand, Mr. DeKok, I wanted to make up before it was too late and you’d arrest him.” She sighed deeply. “After all,” she went on, “he did it all for me, just for me, because he loved me. I only realized that after I had already betrayed him.”
DeKok rubbed his face with a flat hand. He looked at her intently between his fingers. He was in uncharted waters. Love and women…he knew it was a combination fraught with quickly changing emotions. He thought briefly about his own wife. He had never been able to discover why she loved him.
“Is that why you asked him to come here?” he asked the girl.
She nodded slowly.
“To talk it over,” she said listlessly.
DeKok pushed his hat slightly forward and scratched the back of his neck.
“So you did know where to reach him?”
“I only had a phone number, in Utrecht.”
DeKok grimaced.
“Weren’t you afraid he would hurt you?” He continued, sarcasm in his voice. “Only this morning you crawled underneath the bed just at the thought it might be him.”
A sad smile hovered around her lips.
“This morning, yes.” She sighed as if a century had passed since then. “I changed my mind; I’m no longer afraid. If you hadn’t alerted the man downstairs, Freddy would have come up. I would have had a chance to tell him I still love him. I could have apologized to him for the affair with Jan Brets…could have told him it was nothing but a mistake.” She crushed the collar of her dress between nervous fingers. “Then it would have been up to him,” she said with another deep sigh.
The expression on Vledder’s face was a mixture of painful surprise and embarrassed disbelief.
“You would have just waited for him to react?” he asked incredulously. He snapped his fingers. “Just like that? Kiss me, kick me, or kill me, I don’t care!”
As if in a daze she stared past him and nodded.
“You’re crazy,” he spat vehemently. “Certifiable! That’s not love! It has nothing to do with love, it’s—”
He was interrupted by three quick knocks on the door. DeKok shoved Vledder to one side and sprang away himself, out of view of anyone entering the room. In the same moment the door flew wide open. A powerfully built young man stood on the threshold. His dark eyes looked into the room.
A moment of paralysis followed, a pause in the action that lasted no longer than a split second. During one heart-stopping instant, Freddy Blaken stood eye-to-eye with his former love and thought about his next move. In that split second, Cynthia screamed.
Her short, sharp scream bounced from one wall to another, alarming Freddy. He felt the threat, then caught the approach of both inspectors in his peripheral vision. Lightning fast, he sprang into action. He whirled around, threw the hotel owner against a wall, and fled down the stairs.
“Grab him!” yelled DeKok.
Vledder bolted out the door.
Freddy Blaken took the stairs in two jumps and raced through the lobby, running out into the street. He threw an old man to the ground and barely escaped an approaching streetcar.
Vledder followed. As soon as he got outside, he saw Blaken turn the corner of the first side street. It was an area regularly patrolled by constables on foot. They’re never around when you need one, thought Vledder. The disappointment slowed him down. He panted. His heart throbbed in his throat. His legs felt like lead. His quarry was at least fifty yards ahead of him and the distance seemed to increase. Blaken ran into one street and out another. When he finally took the time to look around, he could not see Vledder anywhere. Reassured, he slowed down. Finally, upon approaching Damrak, he slowed to a walk, mingled with the crowds, and disappeared in the throngs that entered Central Station.
14
“So, he escaped?”
Vledder hung his head in shame.
“That guy ran so much faster than me. He fled via Herring Packer Alley toward Damrak. He must have disappeared in Central Station. He just vanished in the crowd. Evaporated.”
DeKok smiled at the frustrated face of his colleague.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said encouragingly. “We’ll get him eventually, if not today, tomorrow. Anyway, I’m not so sure he’s the man we want, after all.”
Vledder looked at him with surprise.
“You think he’s not the murderer?”
DeKok shrugged his shoulders.
“I don’t know. We would first have to interrogate him at length. You see, the murderer of Brets must satisfy at least one very important condition.”
“And that is?”
DeKok made an expansive gesture with both hands.
“He would have to be close to Pierre Brassel. He would have to have been in a position to let Brassel know the murder would happen. You see, the murderer must have told Brassel about his plans…and by yelling over the crowd in some bar, as Cynthia told us. No, it would have had to take place in an atmosphere conducive to planning, no, to premeditating a murder. That takes calm, quiet discussion of detail. Cynthia may have flattered herself, believing one of her lovers killed the other over her. The fact is, Brets was not the victim of a crime of passion.” He paused and rubbed the bridge of his nose with his little finger. “Blaken seems to have been the only person to call Brets a clown, but it may not be significant,” he concluded.
Vledder walked over and leaned on the desk.
“You’re still worried about the harlequin posture?”
DeKok nodded. He appeared lost in thought.
“No explanation has surfaced.” His voice betrayed his disappointment. “There is a lot in this case for which there seems to be no explanation. Cynthia’s allusion to a syndicate is fan
tastic, not to say illogical. Just think. A group plans to commit burglaries, the first of which is to take place at Bunsum’s. Bunsum is a friend of Brassel. Part of the plan is to murder a night watchman, to get him out of the way. Brassel, however, invites the intended victim to a party. Jan Brets is the actual burglar, but he’s killed. Brassel doesn’t lift a finger to prevent the murder.”
Vledder nodded sadly in agreement, but suddenly his eyes lit up, as if a single spark had set off an entire new thought process.
“You’re right,” he exclaimed, wildly enthusiastic. Vledder’s moods could be as mercurial as the weather. DeKok made this silent observation, not for the first time. “It would not be logical,” continued Vledder, speaking rapidly, “for Brassel to allow anyone to murder Brets, whom he needed more than anyone else in the so-called gang!”
DeKok, still musing about Vledder’s mood swing, gave him a confused look.
“I don’t understand you.”
Vledder laughed, triumph in his voice.
“You know,” he said, raising a finger in a subconscious imitation of one of DeKok’s stock gestures, “he didn’t need Brets at all for the burglary. There wasn’t going to be a burglary.”
“Come again?”
Vledder grinned.
“There wasn’t going to be a burglary,” he repeated. “Nobody could gain anything by breaking into Bunsum &
Company. Pierre Brassel was never serious about Operation Harlequin. It wasn’t just fantastic, it was a phantasm. The so-called syndicate, or gang, the entire plan, was a masquerade. Brassel made it all up. His only purpose was to get Brets into the Greenland Arms. Brassel set an elaborate trap!”
“A trap?”
Vledder nodded emphatically.
“Brassel enticed Brets to take lodging at the Greenland Arms by pretending he would give Brets inside information for a big money theft and, probably, more to come. Brets fell for it. Believe me, it had to be that way. Brets fell into a trap.”
Thoughtfully, DeKok chewed his lower lip.
“Still one question remains: who killed Brets
and why?”
Vledder’s face fell.
“You’re right,” he admitted, downcast, “it really doesn’t give us anything new.”
DeKok placed a fatherly hand on the young man’s broad shoulder.
“Wait. It isn’t at all an idle thought,” he said. “No, not at all, on the contrary.” His voice was encouraging. “I really believe that Brets was enticed into a trap. It really looks that way.”
Suddenly he looked piqued. He shook his head and walked away from Vledder. He started to pace up and down the room in long strides. It was always easier to think on his feet. An avalanche of questions needed answers. After about ten minutes, he sat down at his desk and took a blank sheet of paper from a drawer. In the upper left-hand corner he wrote the word trap in large block letters. He hesitated a moment, pen in hand, and then added a question mark to the word.
It was one of his habits. He had developed these customary behaviors over the years. If something particularly bothered him, he would write it down. He believed he could change the question from something abstract to a concrete manifestation by committing it to paper. He stared at the bare word and tapped his middle finger on the center of the paper.
“How did Brassel know?” he asked, irritation evident in his tone of voice. “How did Brassel, a respectable citizen, a professional man, know of the existence of a man like Brets, a man with a rap sheet like an encyclopedia?”
He looked up at Vledder.
“What interest could a man like Brassel have in a man like Brets that would compel him to murder?” He grinned without mirth, still irritated, and gestured toward the piece of paper. “Was it Pierre Brassel? Did the accountant have anything to gain from Brets’s death? It’s hardly credible.”
They remained silent for a long time. DeKok stared at the word trap. Vledder was occupied with his own thoughts.
“It doesn’t compute,” said Vledder after a while, repeating his earlier statement. “There’s just no logical connection anywhere. One thing is obvious, at least at this moment. Brassel is involved up to his tidy chin hairs—no doubt about it! We just cannot fit him into the puzzle, no matter how we try. It really comes down to a single question: what’s Brassel’s involvement in all this?”
DeKok stood up.
“Let’s go ask him,” he said.
Vledder looked at him, baffled.
“Ask who?”
DeKok grinned.
“The man who seems to have all the answers.”
Vledder beamed.
“Brassel?”
“Yes.”
It was a nice, welcoming house, made of red brick with large windows. The area was just outside the suburbs, between the airport and Amsterdam, not far from the main highway, just far enough to give the illusion of country living. Light poured from the windows.
DeKok judged it better to confront the accountant at home rather than in his office. Offices, according to his experience, were impersonal, characterless. They seldom offered a glimpse into the personality of the user. But a home often mirrors the people who live there. That is why he waited until evening.
It was not difficult to find Pierre Brassel. He was, so to speak, on display. The Dutch have a peculiar habit of never closing curtains, except, sometimes, bedroom curtains. Tourists make it a point to walk the streets of Dutch cities, peeking into rooms as they pass by. Nobody takes offense. On the contrary, the Dutch take great pride in their interiors. The interiors invite people to look. Neighborhoods in Dutch cities resemble shopping galleries for furniture and decorating styles. Inhabitants go about their normal occupations, oblivious to the interest of passersby.
Pierre Brassel was sitting in an easy chair in front of the fireplace. He was reading. Farther back in the large room, his wife was seated at a large round table, engaged in embroidery. It was a peaceful scene of domestic tranquility and coziness, bathed in a diffused light that suited the image of a respected accountant at leisure.
Although DeKok, like all the Dutch, seldom gave a particular interior a second thought, he felt a pang of guilt. He always felt guilty peeking into the home of someone connected to a case. It gave the police an unfair advantage, he thought. His puritanical background tended to trip him up on these occasions. He felt that he was intruding on the intimacy of the two people in the house, catching them in the act. He would, however, excuse his actions, citing the national habit of putting homes on display. Sometimes, thought DeKok, I am too complicated for my own good.
He and Vledder viewed the tableau for some time, under the cover of darkness. The domestic scene at Brassel’s home made the notion of criminality, especially murder, appear ludicrous. DeKok could not help but think of it all as a bizarre joke. Anytime now, he thought, somebody would start laughing. It might come from the bushes, loud and wholehearted laughter waking up the quiet complacency of the street. All the neighbors would come out to laugh at him, DeKok, the crazy inspector from Amsterdam. He suspected their respected, admired neighbor of nefarious activities. He sighed deeply, then he touched Vledder’s arm and approached the door. He hesitated for one more moment. Then he rang the bell.
They did not have to wait long. A handsome, slender woman opened the door. The voluptuous lines of her figure were silhouetted, etched sharply against the light from within the house. The light sparkled in her blonde hair. DeKok wondered for a moment if he had ever met her before, but he could not place her. Then he thought cynically that his path, at times, seemed to be literally strewn with beautiful blonde women. But of course, there were a lot of beautiful blonde women in Holland, and a lot of them looked alike.
“Mrs. Brassel?” he asked, lifting his hat politely.
She nodded calmly.
DeKok gave her his most winning smile.
“DeKok, DeKok with, eh, a kay-oh-kay.”
She offered her hand in a friendly manner.
“I’ve heard
a lot about you,” she said simply.
She had a slight German accent. It sounded pleasant, the way she spoke.
“This is my colleague Vledder.”
“How do you do.”
The greetings and introductions were conducted in a formal manner. Mrs. Brassel did not seem the least bit surprised by the visit from the two policemen. She acted guileless and natural, as if the men had kept a long-planned appointment.
“You wish to speak to my husband?”
DeKok nodded and took his hat in his hand.
“Yes, ma’am, that is the purpose of our visit.”
She pointed at a coatrack in the hall.
The long-legged Brassel was the epitome of a cheerful host. He arranged easy chairs in a half circle, placed a few small tables within easy reach, and beamed with forthcoming friendliness.
“Coffee?”
Vledder and DeKok nodded ready assent.
Brassel motioned to his wife and she went to the kitchen. DeKok looked after her admiringly until Brassel again required his attention.
“I read somewhere,” remarked the accountant airily, “the police in general, and especially the Amsterdam police, consider coffee to be one of life’s elixirs. One of the tools needed to do the job. Is that right?”
DeKok smiled politely.
“Yes, you might say that. It’s a tonic, all right, a well of inspiration. Although some people need stronger stimulants for inspiration.”
Brassel did not react. He gestured toward the waiting chairs.
“But do sit down, gentlemen,” he said with easy urbanity. “My wife will be here with the coffee in a moment and you’ll be able to judge how coffee should taste. She’s of German origin, you know, my wife, and a marvel in the kitchen. People who have eaten at our table always wonder how I manage to stay so slim.” He grinned apologetically. “But apparently, I don’t have a tendency to, eh…”
DeKok looked at him mockingly.
“A tendency to what?”
Momentarily, something flashed in Pierre’s eyes. Then his lips curled into a smile.
Dekok and the Dead Harlequin Page 10
