Just a Corpse at Twilight
( Amsterdam cops - 12 )
Janwillem Van De Wetering
Janwillem Van De Wetering
Just a Corpse at Twilight
Chapter 1
Henk Grijpstra, private detective, a portly fifty-odd-year-old in a pinstriped three-piece suit, drove home to his girlfriend Nellie's slender gable house on the Straight Tree Canal, inner city, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where he lived and had his office.
Grijpstra felt contented: He had done a good job that day. It hadn't been much of a job, entailing the pacification of a smalltime blackmailer who had been worrying a smalltime merchant, but once again it had been Grijpstra's own job, a job he could have refused. Although his resignation from the Amsterdam Municipal Police dated back over two years now, there hadn't been a day since he'd been self-employed that Grijpstra hadn't congratulated himself on his exceptional good luck. He could send prospective clients home now, he could say "Well, sir, this isn't quite my cup of tea." Grijpstra could also, if he wanted to be polite, recommend the competition. He didn't even have to cite reasons for refusing commissions. There would be reasons, of course: There was a certain type of clients arrogance Grijpstra was allergic to, and he never worked on divorces or other love-related entanglements. "What's love anyway?" Grijpstra would ask his beloved Nellie. He would raise a finger. "I'll tell you what love is. Love is a fart in a brown paper bag." He wouldn't lower the finger until she nodded agreement.
Nellie, smiling sweetly, would make coffee, cut cake, carry in the cat, anything to get HenkieLuwie off the subject. Nellie liked love entanglements herself. Apart from the romantic aspect there was income involved and surely she and Grijpstra needed a good constant cash flow. Would he just look at her fully automated five-story mansion, his fuel-guzzling American four-wheel drive, at his monthly journeys to luxurious Luxembourg, would he just think of the cost?
"But, HenkieLuwie," Nellie wailed whenever she heard a disgruntled client slam her recently restored antique front door. "Don't we need the money?"
"All will be well in the end." Grijpstra, with a wide gesture, would flick all demons of need away. "Don't worry about your worries."
Grijpstra, allowing his full-size Ford Bronco to run amber traffic lights, smiled. He thought ofhis many years in the Amsterdam Municipal Police, the "yessir years," as his former partner, Detective-Sergeant Rinus de Gier, now called them. Cops can't refuse jobs, they're ordered about by superiors. Adjutant Grijpstra and Sergeant de Gier, the Murder Brigade's most respected team, working under a famous chiefofdetectives, could never refuse a case. It wasn't just the chief, the old "commissaris" who ordered them about, it was also the Dutch superego, Holland's sense of righteousness, the frame of national conscience within which adjutant and sergeant acted. Grijpstra and de Gier often dreamed ofbeing free of morals imposed by bureaucratic rules.
Grijpstra also dreamed ofowning his own car. Like the freedom dream itself, the dream vehicle was outrageous. Grijpstra, in all his working years, what with obese Mrs. Grijpstra and the voracious kids, could never afford a private car.
"Can you afford your dreams?" the commissaris would ask. He would pat Grijpstra's shoulder. "Adjutant, once dreams come true, so do their consequences. Can you live with what desire will drag along for you?"
Private Detective Grijpstra smiled. Here independent, affluent Grijpstra was, driving his very own gleaming blue-and-white vehicle, high on big wheels. Grijpstra felt pleased that quiet summer evening in the big car's majestic driver's seat as he looked down on pitiful compacts, scurrying mopeds, pathetic pedestrians. Wasn't the Grijpstrayan universe, for the moment anyway, just hunky-dory?
Could he make hunky-doriness last?
Grijpstra gripped the wheel as his body swayed, prey to an abdominal cramp, to what felt like a sharp-snouted beetle gnawing about for a moment, an inch behind his navel. Grijpstra remembered the beetle, it had warned him before.
Grijpstra drove on, considering possibilities.
Was he about to lose something? What did he own that money couldn't replace? His health? He didn't mind getting sick; Nellie would serve him gourmet foods on the little tray table that fit across his legs, fluff his pillows, change the sheets. He could read, watch videos, look through his bird books. Losing his detective license would be just fine too-perhaps it was time to live in the country, potter about, maybe fish in a quiet tributary of the Amstel River. He had enough to do: paint, play drums. Nellie? Grijpstra didn't think he would lose Nellie. Have an accident, lose his life? No more Grijpstra to worry about. No more Grijpstra?
The beetle bit again, briefly, almost making Grijpstra lose control of the wheel.
Grijpstra parked the Bronco in the expensive rental garage around the corner, strolled home, got kissed by Nellie and purred at by Tabriz. Tabriz, an oversize cat with a coat like a well-worn Oriental carpet, had once belonged to former Detective-Sergeant de Gier. De Gier, who, like Grijpstra, had announced his resignation at the commissaris's retirement party some two years ago, had been traveling since then. He lived in America now, on the deserted coast of Maine, on his own rented island, where he happily pursued a philosophical quest. De Gier, ten years younger than Gri-jpstra, more intellectual, taller, athletic, and a talented amateur jazz trumpet player, had taken time out in order to grasp the point of it all.
"Good riddance," Nellie would say to her newfound friend, Katrien, "to bad rubbish… Oh, sorry, Henkie-Luwie, I never know whether you're in the room or not. I wish you wouldn't move about so quietly, dear."
Katrien was the wife of the retired commissaris.
Grijpstra's beetle, pushed back by beeftongue and caper stew on noodles, a Nellie specialty that came with a spinach salad, hardly moved about now. Grijpstra, relieved, was about to sit down on the couch for his after-dinner espresso when the beetle bit again, just as the telephone rang.
Grijpstra, massaging his stomach, pointed his nose at the phone. "You take it, Nellie."
"HenkieLuwie," Nellie said from the couch. "Please. It's after nine. It'll be a client."
The beetle tore at Grijpstra's intestine. Grijpstra, trying to deal with the animal's onslaught, waited for the answering machine to click on.
"Henk?" the answering machine's little speaker asked plaintively.
Grijpstra sighed and picked up the phone. Rinus, he should have said joyfully. His old pal phoning all the way from America, how nice. How're you doing, old buddy? Good to hear you. Everything okay? Grijpstra didn't say any of that.
"Yes," Grijpstra said coldly.
"Oh dear," Nellie said.
"I am in deep shit," de Gier said.
"Tell me about it," Grijpstra said.
De Gier reported.
Grijpstra and de Gier had been cops together for years. Then, a few words sufficed to clarify a situation, but that was in the past. De Gier was a private citizen now.
"You're kidding," Grijpstra said.
De Gier wasn't kidding.
"What's up?" Nellie asked, watching TV.
Grijpstra covered the phone's mouthpiece. "Rinus says he killed a woman. The idiot kicked her down some cliffs. Must have been drunk. Stoned maybe."
Grijpstra, his hand still on the phone, looked peaceful enough, with his back to a window in Nellie's cozy sitting room, sitting on the armrest of her couch. Behind him elm trees on the canal's quay slowly waved their branches, looking like comforting holy men's arms in wide sleeves woven from countless fresh green leaves. A sea gull flying close to the house briefly filled the window's frame. Geraniums blossomed on the wide windowsill, the middle plant glowing deep red, the other two pink.
"Not really, right?" Nellie aske
d. She looked back to the screen-her evening images were never real, not even when the news readers showed the misery of famine, crime, or war.
"Not really, right?" Grijpstra asked across the Atlantic.
"Yes, really, wrong."
De Gier's reality was a jetty on the coast of Maine, where he screened his eyes from a cloudless sky above an energetically foaming Bay of Fundy. The turbulent water reflected harsh daylight because, given the earth's restless rotations, the East Coast of the United States is still going strong six hours after Western Europe's day is over.
De Gier was telephoning from the fishing village of Jameson, Maine. The battered pay phone, center of a random design of scratched and written numbers, was attached to a weathered board on the outside wall of Jameson's only restaurant, Beth's Diner. The diner was housed in a ramshackle building, still elegant in its old age, surrounded by a gallery of chiseled slender posts under a moss-and-lichen-covered shingled roof. The restaurant's overall color had become silver-gray within peeling baby blue framing. Rotted-out gingerbread decorations and cornerposts sculpted long ago to resemble Greek pillars witnessed past glory, dating back to Jameson's days as a real port, when it had wharfs where clipper ships were built for the China trade, when the town was the hub of a worldwide lumber business, when it exported granite cut out of the islands, the building blocks of America's big cities. Now there was only lobstering, with crabbing on the side (as long as they were in the lobster traps anyway), and just a touch of tourism, accidental mostly, for Jameson was well away from any beaten track. There were some old folks too, in RVs or trailers hiding behind cedar fences, snowbirds who were gone before the autumn colors faded. Then there were oddballs "from away," like Rinus de Gier, who, since his resignation from the Amsterdam police force two years back, had been without a fixed address or a known source of income.
"De Gier is playing Indians on his own," Grijpstra once told Nellie during a leisurely Sunday breakfast beneath the flowering vines in her backyard. Grijpstra had hypothesteed a possible midlife crisis, arguing that de Gier lived a solitary life, refusing to accept responsibility for wife and kiddies, and therefore had not grown up, so he'd been hit by his midlife crisis later. Nellie had smiled. "Clever Henkie-Luwie."
"So will you come?" de Gier now asked across the Atlantic. "To help out your old buddy? If you please?"
"That nature woman on the island next door," Gri-jpstra, his hand on the mouthpiece again, told Nellie. "Her name was Lorraine. He mentioned her to Katrien. Katrien showed you the letter."
There was a couple kissing on-screen. Nellie switched the TV to mute, she never liked to listen to kissing.
"I thought… weren't those two happy?" Nellie asked. She wanted love to last, for herself and for everyone she knew. She was with Henk now, sharing what used to be Nellie's hotel, now formally closed down after she finally popped her reluctant lover-couldn't His Loveship be stubborn?-from his old apartment at the Tanning Canal. Grijpstra had suffered in overstuffed rooms at the Tanning Canal with his wife, and been happy, without his wife, in empty rooms, visiting Nellie from time to time. He had still been in the police then, paying alimony and rent. Money still counted then. Nellie had offered a free room; Grijpstra, reluctant at the time, agreed. Now that there was Grijpstra's Private Agency, and a lot of money all of a sudden, Nellie no longer took in guests. Things were getting better and better.
"Rinus really murdered her?" Nellie asked.
The TV station slipped into a commercial. Nellie re-moted beautiful actors who were shoving a rhinoceros aside with their imported pickup to wherever it was remoted beautiful actors go when their screen gets switched off. So this was real trouble? Nellie didn't think Rinus would joke about killing off Nature Woman.
"You're not really going anywhere?" Nellie asked.
"I'm not really going anywhere?" Grijpstra echoed.
De Gier, an ocean away, studied his handful of American quarters, three times the size of their Dutch counterparts. He inserted more quarters. The magnitude of the coins reminded him of the magnitude of his problem.
"Henk? You better come and help out here. I don't even remember what happened. Was Lorraine bothering me? Flash and Bad George say I kicked her. Apparently Lorraine fell, here on Squid Island, and hurt herself on the rocks, badly-she was bleeding. I did see blood on the cliff. I was about to perform this thing, this ceremony I was planning. All I remember is that Lorraine came to visit and that she was in the way."
"You don't remember hurting her?"
"I was drunk," de Gier offered, "as I said, and stoned. I've been experimenting with mixtures. I was about to play some music, a CD, jazz, Miles Davis, just got it in the mail. This was a ceremony, if you will, all set up. Well prepared in advance. Lorraine wasn't part of that. She kayaked in unannounced. She was bothering me."
"Ah," Grijpstra said.
"Lorraine messed with my ceremony, Henk."
"So you kicked her off the cliff and left her to bleed to death? Jesus! Ri«Ms/"
"Jesus Rinus is right," de Gier said. "So will you come over, old buddy? This just happened. Nobody knows yet, except Flash and Bad George. They took away Lorraine's body late last night and presented a bill this morning. Got it, old buddy? You and me got a problem; we settle the problem. Okay? Okay."
"Blackmail?" Grijpstra asked, remembering the case he had just dealt with. His own bill wasn't as high as the charge his petty merchant had been feeing. There had to be an incentive for all parties concerned.
He saw little incentive now. What if he carefully replaced the phone, loosened his waistcoat and necktie, laid down a newspaper on Nellie's new coffee table, put his feet on the paper, lit a Cuban cigar-pity he had quit smoking- sipped iced jenever-pity he had quit drinking. What if he said, "Fuck you, Rinus, fuck your little voice whining across a large ocean, we're happy here.'"
"Henk? Hello?" the little voice whined.
"Right here," Grijpstra said. "Tell me about Flash and Bad George, the parties who witnessed this murder."
"They didn't," de Gier said.
"So how did they know you were kicking Victim?"
"Victim told them. She was still alive when they found her."
"Describe your accusers."
"Flash is Flash Farnsworth, Bad George is just Bad George. They're skippers of the Kathy Three, ajunkboat that runs errands between Jameson and the islands. The boat is named after a dog. All I have is a dinghy so I call them by radio if I need anything big. If I don't call they show up anyway; they're kind offriendly, cute, two small-sized guys. They usually come by once a day and if I need them I wave. Last night they were late."
"Flash is bad too?"
"Flash and Bad George aren't too bad," de Gier said. "They're more like silly. Flash has felted hair, like a bird's nest. Bad George had a car accident, his face got stitched up by a cheap doctor who changed it into a doll's face. They're simpletons who live on their vessel with their smart dog, Kathy Two. They came back this morning, after getting rid of Lorraine's body, to get paid off."
"Don't tell me you paid."
"I said I was light on change," de Gier said, "but that you'd help out. Okay?"
"So the law doesn't know yet?"
"No."
"You have choices," Grijpstra said. "You know that, don't you?"
"I pay?" de Gier asked. "I choose to kick Flash and Bad George down the clifis too? I choose to go to jail? Jail isn't pretty here, Henk. Inmates watch a dead screen all afternoon, until the guard comes to push the button for the evening news."
"You could run," Grijpstra said pleasantly. "Just ease yourself away." His sweeping hand illustrated the image.
"It'll ease after me," de Gier said. "Besides, I have to know what happened here."
"Remember what we used to tell suspects?" Grijpstra asked. "When we were out of cells again?"
" 'Run, asshole, run'?" de Gier asked. "No. Listen. This isJameson, Woodcock County, state of Maine. You can find it. Fly in via Boston. Take El Al. I just phoned,
they've got a flight leaving Schiphol Airport at two A.M. your time. Out of Boston there should be a commuter flight to Portland. Rent a car from there. It'll take just a few hours."
"You pick me up."
"I can't," de Gier said. "There's too much going on here. I'm very visible. The sheriff might put out an all-points."
"I get sleepy driving," Grijpstra said.
"You still have that trouble?"
"Getting worse." Grijpstra nodded. "But I know why now-I have these polyps that grow in my sinuses that make me snore and wake up at night. Don't get enough rest. If we go out of town Nellie has to drive me."
"Get operated on."
"Sure," Grijpstra said. "There's a two-month waiting list. Keep me informed meanwhile. Let me know how you're doing. Goodbye for now, Rinus."
"Henk!"
"Right here."
"Take the bus from Portland to Jameson. It's a Greyhound. It's easy, Henk."
"I'll get lost," Grijpstra said. "You're the international type, not me, remember?"
"Ask the commissaris for directions," de Gier said. "He and I were here before when he had to help his widowed sister.
"Hello?" de Gier called, breaking the silence.
"I'm on my own now," Grijpstra said.
"I'm sorry, Henk."
"You don't sound sorry."
"But I am."
"You shouldn't kick friendly women to death," Gri-jpstra said.
"Squid Island," de Gier said, forced by his diminishing stock of coins to talk quickly. "With your back to Beth's Diner that'll be the second island off the peninsula on your left. The island with the pedestal house, lots of glass under two kind of peaked sloping roofs. Like a pagoda, you can't miss it. At rowing distance from the Point. Have Beth-she owns the restaurant, she's a friend-or Aki call the Kathy Three on the citizens band radio. Flash and Bad George will pick you up. Stay away from the sheriff, Hairy Harry."
"Who?"
"Joke," de Gier said. "Hairy Harry's hair never grew." Through a window next to his phone booth de Gier could see the sheriff inside the restaurant. Hairy Harry was a pleasant enough looking man but a poor-quality window pane distorted his bare skull, made it pointed, so that he looked like a space character out of a badly drawn cartoon. Extraterrestrial Hairy Harry was munching a hamburger, with a double helping oftrimmings. The sheriff wore a faded checkered flannel shirt, neatly ironed, and patched but clean jeans stuck into polished half-high boots. His bit of a belly might be more muscle than flab. A long-barreled Magnum revolver in a holster was held up by a polished police-type gun belt, with handcuffs, notebook, and flashlight all neatly inserted. The sheriff raised a hand to greet de Gier, then dropped it to force a stream of honey into his coffee. The honey oozed from an upside-down transparent bear-shaped plastic squeeze bottle. Honeybear's feet looked puny above the sheriff's pink fist.
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