Just a Corpse at Twilight (11 page)

"Good," de Gier said when Ishmael put the microphone down.

"Thank you," Grijpstra said.

Ishmael rowed back to the Point, taking Grijpstra along. The Tao-guided Wall Street investment banker had had no time to sink a telephone cable between shore and Squid Island and Grijpstra remembered he had made a promise.

Chapter 8

"Are you ready?" Katrien asked, her finger on the tape recorder that Nellie had brought in a few minutes earlier.

The commissaris, in a silk robe, exuding a pleasant fragrance of after-shave, sat in his study. A large map ofthe northern section of the Maine coast was stick-pinned to a board on his desk. His right hand, holding a sharpened pencil, hovered over the first page of a new notebook.

"I heard the tape," Katrien said. "Nellie played it for me. She asked all your questions. Don't you think Grijpstra will be annoyed if he finds out we're doing this?"

"No," the commissaris said. "I thought I would try and use Nellie-type questions but that would be complicated. I had to use my own. He answered them so he doesn't mind."

Katrien pressed the recorder's button.

"Nellie?" Grijpstra asked.

"Oh, HenkieLuwie, I'm so pleased you called. Are you all right?"

"Just dandy, dear, just dandy."

"Did you get to de Gier?"

"Yes."

"Do you miss me?"

Katrien interrupted the tape. "She had to ask that too."

"That's fine," the commissaris said, waving at the interruption as if it were a mosquito. "That's fine, dear."

Katrien pushed the recorder on again. "So how is Rinus?" Nellie asked.

"Not so good."

"Is he crazy?"

"Not now."

"You think he was crazy?"

"He's been doing this New Guinea Papuan bone-through-the-nose stuff," Grijpstra said. "But that sorcerer who taught him, that shaman he's always talking about, that fellow probably knows what he's doing by himself on his island, and de Gier's level is more like a group thing out there in the bush .. ."

". . . under the banyan tree?" Nellie asked. "That's what Rinus said in his letters from New Guinea. Doesn't that sound romantic? I saw a banyan tree in the zoo, in the greenhouse. It's beautiful, with all those air roots . . ."

". . . it's regular Christmas trees here . . ."

". . . but Christmas trees are magic too, Henkie-t Luwie, we have them right here in Holland, you don't have to go all that way to . . ."

"Listen," Grijpstra said, "this is a pay phone, you have to call me back. Write this down—01 207 ..."

The recorder kept clicking, then came on again.

"HenkieLuwie? Isn't this horribly expensive? Are you billing de Gier?"

"Don't worry about money."

"I do worry. HenkieLuwie?"

"Yes?"

"Was de Gier crazy?"

"He could have been when he attacked subject. He has said as much."

"Does he remember kicking poor Lorraine?"

Katrien switched off. "Isn't Nellie clever?"

The commissaris waved impatiently. "The corpse, Nellie, the corpse . . ."

"HenkieLuwie? Is de Gier sure he saw Lorraine's corpse?"

"Yes," Grijpstra said. "Everybody here is of some origin or other, from someplace eke I mean, and Lorraine was Swedish, and she had that hair, very fair, almost white. Angel hair?"

"You like that, Henk? I could bleach mine a bit more."

"No Nellie, please. And she had those feet."

"Swedish feet?"

"Special feet. Very slender."

"The judges liked my feet. But my breasts . . ."

"Regular breasts," Grijpstra said. "And the breasts were not exposed. Bad George was carrying the body rolled up in a blood-soaked blanket."

"You're sure it was blood?" Nellie asked.

"Could have been water," Grijpstra said. "It was dark, de Gier was out of his mind. They told him it was blood and he freaked out as usual. Mr. 'Murder Brigade Detective.' Tsksh. Jesus." Grijpstra snarled. "So we have recognizable hair hanging out one side of the blood-soaked blanket and recognizable bare feet hanging out the other and the body was dead."

"Wasn't de Gier too drunk to be sure?"

"No," Grijpstra said. "I do believe that angel-haired slender-footed body was dead. De Gier is too insistent. And don't forget he has seen hundreds of corpses in his time. There's something about dead bodies that makes them change into objects. Leftovers. Castofis. De Gier may have been crazy but he knows about being dead."

Katrien switched offthe recorder. "That's bad, Jan. No? I think that sounds bad."

"I'd like to hear the bad part again," the commissaris said. He was listening carefully when Katrien replayed the tape, leaning toward the recorder.

". .. but he knows about being dead," Grijpstra's hoarse voice said.

"Again, Jan?" Katrien asked.

"No, just carry on, dear."

"So what are you going to do, HenkieLuwie?" Nellie asked.

"Find that corpse," Grijpstra said. "Flash and Bad George are trying some extortion. Rinus has been spending a lot ofmoney so they think he's loaded. They gave him a big bill for saving me too, left it on the doorstep of the pagoda. You should see this place, Nellie. American wealth . . ."

"Saved you from what?" Nellie asked shrilly.

"Oh, I started rowing to Squid Island from the wrong place and there was a bit of a wind so they came looking for me and the dog spotted me—nice dog, Nellie, we should keep a dog too."

"Puppies poop and rip up carpets," Nellie said. "What makes you think that corpse is still there? Wouldn't they have burned it? Or dumped it overboard?"

"Extortionists do not destroy the evidence implicating their victim."

"So you find Lorraine's body," Nellie said. "Then what will you do?"

"I don't know, Nellie."

"You can't help a killer to escape."

"Something else," Grijpstra said. "There's a lot of drug traffic here. Imported and locally grown."

"Not your business, huh, HenkieLuwie?"

"The sheriff's business," Grijpstra said.

"I should say so," Nellie said.

"That's not quite what I meant. . .. Oh, by the way, Nellie, if you see the commissaris tell him that this hermit he and de Gier knew here, Jeremy, got old and sick and rowed himself into nowhere, but there's a disciple, a man called Ishmael."

"I don't like hermits, Henk. Hermits don't have enough to lose."

The commissaris winked at Katrien. She made a movement to stop the tape. He shook his head.

"Ishmael seems to be helpful," Grijpstra said. "And there's a woman who works in the restaurant here, a friend of Rinuss, who'll drive me to Boston to change my money. She's from Hawaii and she wants to go to Boston to see an exhibition of Hawaiian historical paintings. . . ."

"Henk!"

"I can't drive myself," Grijpstra said, "I get too sleepy, you know that."

"How old is this Aki, Henk?"

"Thirty-ish?"

"No! From Hawaii! They all swing their hips, and they're immoral. Remember that movie? How they crawled all over the sailors? And made them stay with them and that poor captain had to go home alone?"

"Aki's gay, Nellie. She lives with Beth, Beth owns the restaurant. It's all right, Nellie."

Katrien switched off the recorder. "After that, they're fighting. Poor Nellie. She's very upset about that gorgeous Hawaiian lady, Jan." She caressed his bald head, a little heavy-handedly. "Too bad you couldn't go."

Chapter 9

De Gier had gone ashore later in his own dinghy, a hand-crafted nutshell made out of thin cedar strips that sat high on the water. He joined Beth and Aki, plus Ishmael and Grijpstra, at the restaurant, where he arranged the journey to Boston. "Aki's car is a rustbucket, the doors are full of rainwater. They slosh when you bang them shut. You'd better take my car."

The rental, a shiny new four-door "Ford product," as Beth and Aki called it, impressed Grijpstra. Grijpstra remembered, from "World War Two days in Holland, the time when there were no cars except German army vehicles. He also recalled the first American cars coming in after liberation: large shiny chariots that zoomed quietly on Holland's deserted highways, superior inventions from an advanced planet, benevolent robots symbolizing a luxurious beauty that had been beyond a child's imagination.

"Wow!" Grijpstra said when he first saw de Gier's rental. "Nice wheels."

"All yours," de Gier said.

"You guys must be rich," Aki said as she drove the car, cruise-controlled at sixty-five miles an hour, on Interstate 95, a highway that appeared like an endless park to Grijpstra. "Rinus just keeps that car sitting at the Point? At what? At forty bucks a
day?"

"He had an inheritance," Grijpstra said, sitting back, fingers intertwined on his stomach, undergoing the pleasant repetition ofa million trees, similar but never identical, with rock arrangements sloping down to the multilaned highway.

He remembered a letter from De Gier that referred to the rocks along Interstate 95. De Gier, combining his interests in gardening and the surreal, wrote that the rocks might have been placed by Chinese monks. Grijpstra visualized that image: a thousand monks, in straw sandals, robes tucked into belts, practicing the art of shifting overweight rocks along a thousand miles of foreign roadway, in the hope of pleasing the deity within by abusing their emaciated bodies. But this was America, pleasing a different facet of that very same deity, and there were machines alongside the interstate, mechanical dinosaurs with long necks, daintily moving rocks about with their muzzles.

"See that?" Aki asked. "That dragline we just passed? Made in
Japan?"

"Rains," Aki said a little later, looking sexy in a short leather skirt and a T-shirt printed with a design of bare-breasted Hawaiian dancers under palm trees. "Frost must have dislodged the granite. They're always working on this road. Rinus had an inheritance? Are you kidding? Isn't he lucky? So he can do all that traveling and gadding about."

"Yes," Grijpstra said.

"Watching nature out of his dinghy," Aki said. "You know what he paid for that dinghy? Over two thousand, and that's secondhand. It took two men a month to build it." She shook her head. "He says I can have it when he leaves."

"Lucky with investments too," Grijpstra said. "Rinus just keeps making money. A golden thumb."

"You're kidding."

I'm kidding, Grijpstra thought.

There were more miles sliding by. Grijpstra liked the well-behaved traffic controlled by an occasional gleaming cop car. He told Aki this was the way it should be, just a few people in a million square miles, just a few rules, the minimum of good-looking law enforcement, nice food in road restaurants, attractive wildlife grazing along the highways' shoulders and well beyond in bordering fields. He pointed at long-tailed magpies fluttering between white pines, at a large dark shape cantering lightly across a glade. "What the hell was that?"

"Moose," Aki said. "There are lots of moose in Maine, more now that we've killed off the wolf. Moose are bigger than camels, you know. Moose are next on the list. You can get a license to shoot them now. One of the state's new attractions. Five hundred bucks a pop. They're easy: they'll wait for you, you can walk up to them, say hello, blast them between the eyes."

"Will there be any left?"

"Maybe," Aki said. "Hairy Harry and Billy Boy will stuff the last one for target practice." She touched Grijpstra's knee. "Or it'll be like the nature movies. See these moose?" She deepened her voice. "Behold the broad flattened antlers. North America's largest deer. This is rare footage, folks, taken of the last-known herd some ten years ago." Aki snarled. "And then you hear shots and you see the final moose crumple and fall, breathe blood."

"No," Grijpstra said. He raised his hands in defense. "Please, Aki."

"I'm sorry." She pulled her hand back to the wheel. "It's my name, it makes me ghoulish. You know my full name?"

Grijpstra closed his eyes, frowning as he searched his memory. "Akiapola'au?"

She laughed. "That's awesome, Krip. They can't even remember it in Hawaii. You know what it means?"

"Vulture finch?"

"Who told you that?" She shook her head in disbelief. "You have a special interest in me?"

"You told me," Grijpstra said. "First time we met. I'm a detective. I'm trained to recall data."

"I'm data to you?"

Grijpstra shrugged. "Just a habit. Tell me about the Hawaiian vulture finch."

"It's a lie," Aki said. "I tell it to make myself interesting. Nobody knows about Hawaiian birds here but there is such a thing at home as a vulture finch."

"There are no regular vultures in Hawaii?"

"No big land birds at all," Aki said. "Hawaii is nowhere. Nowhere is too fir for big birds to fly to, but little birds were blown over by hurricanes. There's this little cute-looking bird that you'd swear is a finch that feeds on dead bodies. That's how I found out life isn't Walt Disney. I was out as a kid playing and there was a dead man in a field, a drunk who got hurt and who dragged himselfout there, and the body was crawling with gorgeous little birds, gorging themselves."

"Yecch ..."

"But why? It's not really revolting." Aki asked. "There's no biological reason for vultures to be big."

"You know about biology?" Grijpstra asked as the car slowed down. There was a commotion further along the interstate.

"My major subject," Aki said, "at the University of Honolulu, and now I serve eggs over easy to the wild men of Jameson, Maine. It's not a pretty story, Krip."

Traffic had stopped. A car had left the road ahead, at a high speed probably, for it had rolled over a few times. And it had been a while ago because an ambulance was now back-
l
ing up to the wreck, policemen were directing traffic, and a helicopter hovered above.

Eventually traffic moved again. "Makes me think of Beth's father," Aki said. "It was last winter. Big Daddyti been to the grave of Beth's sister. The man was eighty years old and almost blind but every few days he made himself take flowers to the cemetery, to alleviate some guilt. Apparently he had maltreated the girl. Then Big Daddy disappeared. Nobody could figure it out. He'd bought the flowers at Gary's Greenhouse behind Main Street, and Gary had seen him drive ofFtoward the cemetery, which is along a straight road through the forest west oftown. The flowers were found on the grave but Big Daddy never came back."