The Hollow-Eyed Angel (9 page)

"Very tricky," de Gier admitted.

"Almost impossible," the lieutenant said. "Things happen. The best thing we can do is happen along as best we can. But the baron set up that perverted wedding." He moodily stirred his stewed eels.

"Did Baldert want to kill the baron?" Grijpstra asked.

The lieutenant nodded. "That's the whole thing. The baron holds a huge mortgage on Baldert's golf club. Baldert is late with two or three payments, the baron forecloses. We have a recession going on. The bank won't refinance."

"And the guy is gay," de Gier said. "Is that what you mean by the baron setting himself up? He intended to drive Baldert crazy with jealousy?" De Gier also stirred his stewed eel moodily. "This is getting complicated. A master-servant relationship. A gay relationship. And all of it twisted."

"How sick can we get?" Grijpstra asked.

"The baron wasn't feeling well," the lieutenant said.

"So you treated the case as a potential murder?"

The lieutenant mentioned availability of key ingredients: ample motivation, opportunity, Baldert's presenting himself all the time, getting in the way, saying it wasn't his fault, lying. He was taking practice shots. There was a ball there. No, there wasn't. Well maybe there was.

"Okay," Grijpstra said. "So champion Baldert aimed a murderous golf ball at his former master's head and missed and felt guilty, either about aiming or missing, or both, but why do you suppose that we knew anything about that? Had we known, we would have come to see you, but the chief-constable said..."

"We were set up too," de Gier said. "You see, our own chief, who is working on a case in New York, has us researching the concept of driving a golf ball as a means of effecting death. Neither the adjutant nor I play golf. The Amsterdam chief-constable is the only golfer we know. Maybe our own chief knew that. Maybe he also knew of our chief-constable's being concerned about this murder in Crailo. Maybe our chief planned this, steering us toward the chief-constable. Now the chief-constable directs us toward his own golf club, the Crailo Club, and sets us up to stumble into your case, to bring about a fresh approach. Maybe our own chief, chief of detectives, a sly old mouse, tried to kill two birds with one goddamn stone..."

"...with one goddamn golf ball," Grijpstra said, "and here you apprehend us, goofing around your Mister Bad Conscience "

The lieutenant, drinking more beer, picked up on Bad Conscience. He was, somewhat incoherently, but staying within certain limits, talking about how bad guys get caught. Bad guys want to get caught and therefore deliberately trip themselves up, and all law enforcement has to do is pick the suckers up, handcuff the suspects, take them to trial. The only reason that law enforcement works is because of suspects tripping themselves. But Baldert had tripped himself up twice. Baldert's fate would therefore be the ultimate horror. No human punishment for the baron killer. Limbo forever. Baldert in purgatory.

De Gier reminded the lieutenant of basic police law. "We, the police, are required to do our utmost to restore the citizens' peace of mind. We are supposed to work toward mutual benefit. The law actually says so. We are supposed to take care of the needy: emotionally, physically, whatever is needed. If Baldert wants to regain his peace of mind by getting arrested you might..."

The lieutenant poured more beer.

Grijpstra, in between drinking more beer, saw a way out. There were the circumstances. Baldert kept providing incriminating evidence. Yes, suspect admitted to organizing the plastic wind-up duck race. Why? Because it would attract all the partying guests down to the pond. From there they couldn't see Baldert swinging his club. Yes, it was ridiculous for Baldert, the golf club's owner and manager, and the organizer of the so-called wedding party, to practice his drive at that moment. Yes, the hundred-yard distance between Baldert swinging his club and the baron lolling in his chair in the pavilion would enable the ball to arrive at killing speed. Yes, Baldert was gay. Yes, the baron was gay. Yes, the baron and Baldert went back a long way, to glorious army days. Yes, the baron was known to sit in the cane chair in the pavilion, drinking and smoking and sniffing, until he fell over. Yes, Baldert missed him on purpose, just by a few inches, to shock the baron into sudden death.

"If that isn't cold-blooded planning," Grijpstra said, "if that isn't premeditated first-class murder.

The lieutenant, drinking more beer, doubted the underlying strength of his case. Baldert's championship shot had missed. He didn't know about missing. Didn't murder require hitting?

"Attempted murder?" Grijpstra pleaded.

The lieutenant wouldn't risk that. He hated being made a fool of in court.

"Poor Baldert," Grijpstra said.

De Gier shook his head. "The way that poor devil kept offering me his wrists for handcuffs."

Grijpstra wouldn't give up yet. "The autopsy didn't help? Would you tell us about that?"

The lieutenant wished for nothing more than a chance to share that experience. Somehow he hadn't gotten to see an autopsy until Baron Hilger van Hopper's emaciated corpse was stretched out on the morgue table in the nearby city of Bussum. He ordered more stewed eels. The waitress served, making a bit of a mess, because she looked the other way as she dug about the seemingly writhing bodies.

Grijpstra, who had phoned Nellie with a request to freeze his portion of the mussel soup, liked seafood. He didn't mind so much that the stewed eels seemed to be moving about in "their juice." That's what de Gier was saying. De Gier was fond of seafood too but the eels looked strange.

"Their juice," the lieutenant laughed. He sucked up a fat piece. "Delicious," the lieutenant said. "You know how come they grow so nicely in these parts? You'll never guess. It's because we have fur farms nearby. As there is no market for the fur-bearing animals' carcasses the waste product gets dumped into the sea around here. Eels thrive on carrion."

"The autopsy?" Grijpstra asked.

The lieutenant described how a small circular saw had cut into the baron's skull, and how long knives cut out the dead man's entrails.

De Gier gently pushed his plate away.

"The autopsy's result?" Grijpstra asked. "Any signs of severe bruising? Broken ribs?"

Not a sign, the lieutenant said. If there had been a ball whizzing by, and he personally believed there had been, it traveled clear through the open pavilion.

Grijpstra sighed. "So what did Baron Hilger van Hopper die of?"

The pathologist's verdict had been "depletion of all life systems due to total physical exhaustion, due again to overstimulation by a lethal combination of alcohol and other drugs."

"Opium up his ass," the lieutenant said. "There was that too. He used suppositories. Too vain to suffer needle marks. Can you imagine? And as for the contents of the baron's intestines—"

De Gier got up abruptly.

"Are you okay now?" Grijpstra asked, after de Gier had gotten back into the Fiat, some five miles out of Amsterdam, near a cluster of dwarf pines decorating the bank of the Al motorway.

De Gier wasn't sure.

"It will be hard to find emergency lanes closer to the city," Grijpstra said. "Try those pines again. You'll have something to hold on to. It's hard to vomit out of a car's window."

A municipal police patrol car stopped. Grijpstra showed his identification. The constable sniffed. "Beer? How many?" Grijpstra told the constable about stewed eel, carrion and an autopsy related to a murder case he and the sergeant had been forced to imagine in progress. He went into details while de Gier vomited within hearing distance.

"Yech," the constable said.

"Our colleagues should be informed that they handle their vehicle too roughly," de Gier said, after watching the patrol car jump back into traffic. "I hope you noted a number."

De Gier had, while holding on to a tree, been thinking, about golf.

Grijpstra had been thinking too, about Central Park.

The detectives agreed that they had chased a red herring.

"Not fish," de Gier said.

"Goose," Grijpstra said, "wild goose. You think he really set us up to go to Crailo? Or could this be stupidity?"

De Gier still didn't feel well.

Grijpstra drove for a while. "You have been to New York."

De Gier had, twice. On both occasions he had walked through Central Park. It's what you did in New York. The park had impressed him. He had listened to jazz, rowed some ladies across a pond, watched caged wild animals, observed children on a carousel, dodged bicyclists and joggers. He was sure nobody would be allowed to play golf there. Golf would be too dangerous, like having people taking rifle practice. He had seen folks playing baseball and football on playing fields behind the Metropolitan Museum, so maybe Uncle Bert had been hit by a random ball that covered some immense distance. But why think of
golf
?

"Immense distance?" Grijpstra asked.

When de Gier interviewed Johan Termeer, the nephew, Jo had placed the death of his uncle near the Sheep Meadow. The Sheep Meadow, as de Gier recalled, was over a kilometer from the ball playing fields he remembered.

"You didn't tell me," Grijpstra said.

It hadn't occurred to de Gier to question the cornmissaris's line of thinking. It did now. De Gier liked that. "It's nice not being able to hold on to things, isn't it?"

"Bah," Grijpstra said. "Now then. If anyone in Central Park were playing golf, which you say no one would, they would hit their balls nearly a mile from where Termeer was found. So we are wasting our time. And the chief is wasting his."

Relying on the given situation and their knowledge of the cornmissaris's personality and capacity of endurance, Grijpstra and de Gier diagnosed temporarily impaired judgment due to stress, plus depression about his forthcoming retirement. The old man was ill. He had been limping and coughing when de Gier saw him off at Schiphol Airport. He would now be required to run about in strange territory while attending fatiguing lectures. Pursuing the Termeer case had to be an unbearable extra burden.

"He needs help," Grijpstra said.

Chapter 8

                                        The commissaris had planned to see, and to interrogate if possible, the mounted female officer whose horse had been in contact with the older Termeer, and to pay a visit to Termeer's neighbor Charlie, but the codeine had worn him out and he had trouble getting up. His dreams had been bothersome again. He dragged himself to Le Chat Complet where Mamere served him coffee instead of the tea he ordered, saying, "You mess too much with tea, monsieur." She brought him crisp croissants and fresh strawberry jam. He was told to have patience regarding the boiled eggs he had ordered.

While eating his breakfast he reflected on his nightly adventures. His dreams the previous night seemed more complicated than before. Once again the tram driver played the leading part. The commissaris was a little boy, on his way to school. He wore short pants and a jacket that were hand-me-downs from his older brother, Therus The boy-commissaris was carrying his lunch in a foldable metal lunchbox, closed with a red band of elastic. The tram driver wanted to share his lunch, after asking him, via the tram's intercom, to come over and sit next to her "Little boy in the hand-me-down clothing, come and sit up here with me," hidden speakers in the car said. It was embarrassing. It also made him jealous. He didn't want to share the tram driver's wonderful presence with his fellow passengers.

The commissaris remembered that, in the dream, the tram driver's voice was deep and husky. He wondered what this could mean. Was he feeding a demon or a goddess? The sharing of his cheese sandwiches and apple with the long-legged creature had been erotically interesting, despite the fact — or maybe because — his dream companion stared at him with empty eye sockets. The commissaris remembered that, as a young boy, adult women, when they displayed their legs, often drove him mad with desire.

What could the symbol of the blond tram driver's legs have to do with his present quest?

Cats were passing the restaurant's windows and the three musicians behind the counter were harmonizing their song, much encouraged by the cafe's clients.

The commissaris concentrated on the painting of the youthful and naked Mamere and her tongue-lolling dog under the palm tree of her native Haiti.

"You like?" the real Mamere asked when she finally served the eggs. He nodded. She pointed at the huge painting. "That was dreamtime when I got my sons." She named the men behind the cafe's counter. "Dieudonne, Zazeu and FilsTrois," Mamere said proudly. "I very fertile then."

"Beautiful voices Dieudonne, Zazeu and FilsTrois have," the commissaris said.

"You better accent in French than in English,"

Mamere said. "What you do for profession?"

The commissaris said that he was a policeman from Amsterdam, investigating the recent death of a countryman, another
Hollandais,
near Central Park West.

"Ah," Mamere said noncommittally, then rushed off to pour more coffee.

Back in his suite the commissaris still had a few minutes before he was to be picked up. He looked down at the park. There were benches there where people kept sitting down and getting up. Young men on roller skates whizzed around at high speed. The commissaris noticed a system in the complicated movements, a well-organized activity. He concluded that, possibly, drugs were being dealt. He watched a young woman, dressed in a neat suit with a tailored blouse: an office worker, a secretary maybe. She made signs at one of the roller skaters. She raised her left hand, made a fist, then made her thumb pop up. Then she got up and sat down on another bench. The roller skater sped by the vacated bench and scooped up a green piece of paper. Another roller skater passed the waiting woman and dropped something in her lap.

There was a knock at the door. Chief O'Neill came in. "How're you doing, Yan?"

Yan was doing fine. He showed O'Neill 'what was going on below.

O'Neill nodded. "The roller skaters are members of Trevor's gang. Small stuff. Dime bags. Retail bullshit. We're after Trevor for the murder of Maggotmaid. Or, rather, Hurrell is after Trevor." The chief smiled. "We all have our hang-ups."

O'Neill talked about Trevor while he drove the commissaris to the lecture. Traffic was congested, but they had ample time. The commissaris learned why Hurrell was particularly interested in Trevor E. Lee, an oil heir from Houston who had wasted his fortune and was now going all out to make up for his losses.

"It's kind of personal," O'Neill said. "Hurrell has just got to get Trevor. I don't like that much but I think we better give in a bit, for the sergeant's peace of mind." O'Neill grinned. "If there is such a thing. A contradiction in terms. How can something as essentially restless as a mind be peaceful?"

"Just before falling asleep," the commissaris said.

O'Neill laughed. "Or when it isn't working." He tapped the commissaris's arm. "Here is the deal with Trevor. Trevor killed Maggotmaid, we're sure of that. He got her up for the party, plied her with heroin, got her on a table for a sex show and discovered she was male. Or had been male. She'd had the operation. Russo didn't mention
that
at the lecture."

"Oh dear," the commissaris said. "And you can't arrest the suspect?"

"Not with the kind of prosecutors I have to deal with," O'Neill said. He looked grim as he raced the car to beat traffic lights. "And not with the kinds of mistakes our detectives are making. Tom and Jerry—again—somehow managed to mess up the glass. The glass on Maggotmaid's clothes and the glass in the broken door in Trevor's apartment matched, but the evidence got mixed up. You ever have shit like that happen?"

"Oh yes," the commissaris said, "but we're short of cells, so arrests aren't welcome."

O'Neill frowned furiously. "We have the same problems. Quality-of-life offenses? Pickpocketing? Forget it. Overcrowded jails, overcrowded dockets. So Trevor walks. But Hurrell will find a way to kick him into the slammer sometime soon."

The commissaris muttered as the big Chevrolet hurled itself between two buses.

"How?" O'Neill asked, touching his horn playfully. "It's more like why. You see, Hurrell's only child went bad. Young Henry Hurrell became Henriette. But there was no operation. The parents weren't too thrilled and I guess they made the kid miserable. So did the other kids. A nail that sticks out gets hammered sometimes. So Henriette comforted herself with drugs. Mrs. Hurrell left the scene. She divorced Earl and the custody of the youngster went to the father. Mother transferred to a quiet sunny town in Arizona where everybody is so old that the worst they can do is sue each other. The former Mrs. Hurrell couldn't cope with a fourteen-year-old prostituting herself for heroin."

"Himself," the commissaris said.

"Nah." O'Neill shook his head. "I sort of knew the kid, ran into her a few times, and she was definitely female, never mind what her sexual organs looked like. She had a female personality, soft and gende, but that must have changed because she looked like a scarecrow when they found her with the garbage."

"Garbage," the commissaris said. "Right. Sergeant Hurrell seemed bitter about 'garbage.' 'Human garbage,' he said."

"A cold night." O'Neill shook a friendly fist at a yellow taxi closing in, trying to cut him off, but not quite managing it. "Bet you that cabbie is from Ghana. Probably had his driver's license printed up special." He shook his head. "You know, we laugh at those guys, and curse them, but can you imagine what it is like to get thrown into this city and nothing makes sense and you're supposed to drive a goddamn
taxi?"

"A cold night," the commissaris said. "You were talking about Hurrell's transvestite child."

"Right. Human garbage. The kid doesn't go home anymore, is living on the street. Hustles like crazy to keep the opium monkey fed. Picks up the disease from a dirty needle, gets pneumonia. God knows what assortment of deadly diseases those junkie whores collect during the course of one day." O'Neill looked sideways at the commissaris. "But the body persists. Think of the German death camps—bodies lived through that for quite a while sometimes. Abuse, starvation, it looks like we humans like to suffer. One early winter morning the kid faints. Next thing she freezes solid. We don't have too many real cold nights in New York but we do have a few killers. Gets rid of a lot of the homeless." O'Neill raised his voice. "Goddamn homeless, I hate them. You know why? They scare me shitless. Here we are, the most powerful country on the globe and we have human wrecks messing up our recreation areas, crapping around statues, pissing up public transport, dragging their sodden bodies about everywhere. If we can't cure their insane uselessness why don't we just warehouse those wrecks in some nice warm camp somewhere, with lots of TV and junk food and innocuous games to play? But no, sir, we need more aircraft carriers, for we've got to bomb holes in brown people's countries."

"I like America," the commissaris said.

O'Neill grumbled. "So do I. This is the place. I want to drive cross-country again, or hang out in the Keys. I used to work summers there, crew on sailboats. Or go to Hawaii again, hard to be unhappy in Hawaii, right? They've got it all there." He gestured. "We've got it all everywhere, and if it ain't, UPS will deliver it tomorrow morning. Coast to coast. And anywhere in between."

"And the UPS driver will speak English," the commissaris said. "And the currency will be dollars."

"Efficiency, right?" O'Neill laughed. "I've been to Europe and you have to change language every two hours, but you can't, so you're in trouble. And the backdrops seem so small there." He gestured toward the World Trade Center's twin towers. "Big stuff here." He raised an eyebrow at the commissaris. "You've traveled around in this country?"

The commissaris had been to Maine once. He talked about coves, bays, hills that looked like mountains to a Dutchman. "Few people around. Amazing wildlife. Holland now imports its wildlife from Poland and then has to buy more because it starves or gets poached. Ravens, wild boars, deer—it's hard to share a square mile with nine hundred Dutchmen."

"Lots of lobsters in Maine." O'Neill was frowning again. "But you freeze your ass off in winter." He touched the commissaris's bare wrist. "Know what some jokers did with frozen Henriette? Stuck her in a fifty-five-gallon trash can, upside down. You've seen the signs? DON'T LITTER."

The commissaris had seen the signs.

"Those jokers tried to burn the corpse too, but they ran out of lighter fuel."

The commissaris mumbled disapproval.

"Hurrell caught them," O'Neill said. "A neat piece of detection. Lot of work. This happened early in the morning, when there are only bakers around, paperboys, cheap whores, maybe some sleepless old person looking out of a window."

"He found witnesses like that?" The commissaris sounded surprised.

O'Neill nodded. "Sure did. Hurrell's name isn't in the report because he couldn't take the credit. The defense would claim that he, as the kid's father, was biased."

"Suspects convicted?"

"Yeah," O'Neill said. "The D.A. charged the jokers with intentional and unlawful mutilation of a corpse. That's a felony. One to three years in the clinker."

"And now Sergeant Hurrell won't pay attention to the death of Bert Termeer," the commissaris said, "because he sees Maggotmaid as Henriette, his own child."

"He'll get Trevor," O'Neill said. "You saw what is going on in Central Park, right under your window. Central Park is Hurrell's turf. He'll work the park, get the right statements and hit Trevor with a heavy drug charge."

The commissaris could think of other charges. He tried to translate them from the Netherlandic Penal Code. "Attempted manslaughter — Trevor pushed Maggotmaid through a glass door, causing death by negligence twice, first by administering an overdose of a controlled substance, second by locking, and leaving, a body in the hot and unventilated trunk of a parked car."

O'Neill concentrated on his driving.

"What do you think, Chief?"

O'Neill growled. "None of that will stick." He sighed. "Hurrell is using the right tactics. He pretends he's finished with Trevor, lulling him to sleep, so to speak. He wants to catch Trevor carrying at least a kilo."

O'Neill parked the car. They got out and began to walk. "But you have no case anyway. Bert Termeer died of disease, and maybe exposure." He grinned at the commissaris. "There is no doubt in my mind that the Termeer death was from natural causes. I want to close the case."

The commissaris agreed. He had studied the reports the previous night, seen the photographs. Now he had an expert opinion as formulated by an experienced colleague. The commissaris was about to tell Chief O'Neill that he agreed that Termeer's death was due to an unfortunate combination of circumstances beyond the control of any human agency.

It was just a coincidence, he told himself, that a touring bus appeared. The bus displayed a big number 2 up front. The driver was a blond young woman with heavily made-up eyes. She stopped her huge vehicle soundlessly so that the little old gentleman, walking with some difficulty and the help of a gold-tipped cane, could cross the street at his ease. The commissaris raised his cane in thanks.

The driver waved.

"Strange-looking woman," O'Neill said, walking next to the commissaris. "Macabre makeup. Did you see those eyes?"