Death of a Hawker (5 page)

"Hey."

"Yes," Grijpstra said. "The only place I can think of is Nellie's bar. It will be closed but she'll open up if she is in."

"Don't know the place."

"Of course you don't."

* * *

They read the sign together. It said "If I don't answer the bell don't bang on the door for I won't be in." They read it three times.

"What nonsense," de Gier said finally. "If she isn't in she won't mind us banging on the door."

Grijpstra rang the bell. There was no answer. He banged on the door. A window opened on the second floor.

"Fuck off. Do you want a bucket of dishwater all over you?"

"Nellie," Grijpstra shouted, "it's me."

The window closed and they heard steps.

"It's you," Nellie said. "How nice. And a friend. Very nice. Come in."

The lights were switched on and they found themselves in a small bar. The only color in the bar seemed to be pink. Pink curtains, pink wallpaper, pink lampshades. Nellie was pink too, especially her breasts. De Gier stared at Nellie's breasts.

"You like them, darling?"

"Yes," de Gier said.

"Sit down and have a drink. If you buy me a bottle of champagne I'll give you topless service."

"How much is a bottle of champagne?"

"A hundred and seventy-five guilders."

"I am a policeman," de Gier said.

"I know you are, darling, but the police pay a hundred and seventy-five guilders too. I hate corruption." "Do you ever have any policemen in here?"

Nellie smiled coyly and looked at Grijpstra.

"You?" de Gier asked.

"Sometimes," Grijpstra said, "but I don't pay. Nellie is an old friend."

"And you get topless service?"

"Of course he does," Nellie said briskly. "What will you have? It's a bit early but I'll mix you a cocktail. I don't serve straight drinks."

"No, Nellie," Grijpstra said. "We want to use your bar for an hour or so. Our commissaris wants a quiet place to talk; there will be some others as well. Do you mind?"

"Of course not, dear." Nellie smiled and bent over the bar and ruffled Grijpstra's hair. The breasts were very close to de Gier now and his hands twitched. "The bar is closed tonight anyway," Nellie crooned. "These damn riots are bad for business. I haven't seen a customer for two days and my runners can't get anyone through the roadblocks."

Her lips framed a snarl. "Not that I would welcome any customers these days, not with all this tension about."

"And you still dress like that?" de Gier asked, and stared.

Nellie giggled. "No. I wear jeans and a jersey, like everybody else, but I don't want Grijpstra to see me in a jersey. He is used to me like this, so I slipped on a dress."

"Wow," de Gier said.

Nellie patted her breasts. "Disqualified me for a Miss Holland contest once. I had too much, they said. But they are good for business."

"Do you have a license for this place?" de Gier asked.

Her face clouded. "I thought you were a friend."

"I am curious, that's all."

"No, I don't have a license. This isn't a real bar. It's private. I only entertain one or two clients at a time. The runners bring them in."

Prostitution, de Gier thought, straight prostitution. He knew there were bars like Nellie's bar but he hadn't come across one yet. Grijpstra had and he hadn't told him. He looked at Grijpstra and Grijpstra grinned. De Gier raised his eyebrows.

"Nellie had trouble once and I happened to answer the call."

"That was a long time ago," Nellie said and pouted. "You were still in uniform then. I haven't seen you for a year; you are lucky I am still here." She groaned. "That's the way it is. The nice ones are busy and they don't pay and the bastards take far too much time, but they pay."

De Gier could imagine what the bastards would be like. The stray tourist, the lonely businessman. "Want a nice woman, sir, something really special? Cozy place? All to yourself? A little champagne? Not too expensive? Let me show you the way, sir." And an hour, two hours maybe, three hours at the most later, the bastard would be in the street again with a stomach full of fuzz and a light head and a light wallet. She would squeeze them in stages. A pink spider in a pink web. And out the minute they were dry, out into the street. And the runner would be waiting and slip in for his cut and rush out again, to catch the next fly.

"How's business, Nellie?"

She pulled in her underiip and bit it. "Not so good.

The guilder is too high and the dollar too low. I don't get them as I used to get them. It's Japanese now and they make me work."
*

A majestic woman, tall and wide-shouldered, with long red hair framing the green slanting eyes. De Gier could feel her strength. The strength of a voluptuous snake.

"Who is your friend, Grijpstra?"

"Sergeant de Gier," Grijpstra said.

"Nice. Very nice. I don't often see handsome men nowadays; they are getting scarce." The green eyes became innocent.

"Careful," Grijpstra said. "He has a way with ladies."

She giggled. "Don't worry, Grijpstra. I prefer your type, warm and heavy and fatherly. Handsome men make me nervous. They don't really need me and I hate it when I am not needed. Well, gentlemen, what can I do for you?"

"Let me use the phone," Grijpstra said.

She pushed the phone across the counter of the small bar and suddenly leaned over and kissed him full on the mouth. Grijpstra returned her kiss and reached out and patted her buttocks. De Gier looked away.

^*
The ranks of the Dutch municipal police are constable, constable first class, sergeant, adjutant, inspector, chief inspector, commissaris, chief constable.

"Evening," the commissaris said brightly.

Grijpstra was rubbing his lips with a crumpled handkerchief. "Nellie's bar, sir, only place we could find. Very quiet."

"Your ears are red," de Gier said.

Grijpstra mumbled through his handkerchief. "Introduce me to the lady," the commissaris said, and climbed on a bar stool.

Nellie smiled and extended a hand. "A drink, commissaris?"

"A small jenever, if you have it."

Nellie poured six glasses.

"I thought you didn't serve straight drinks," de Gier said and looked at the woman's breasts again. He wasn't the only one who looked. The commissaris was fascinated; so was the doctor, so was the fingerprint man.

"Cleavage," the doctor said. "Lovely word, isn't it? Cleavage?"

The others grunted their agreement.

"Yes," the commissaris said and raised his glass, "but it isn't good manners to discuss a lady's anatomy in her presence. Cheers, Nellie.
*
'

The glasses were raised, emptied and plonked down on the counter. Nellie grabbed the bottle and filled them again.

"Lovely," the doctor said stubbornly. "As a doctor I should be immune perhaps but I am not. There is nothing more beautiful in the world. There are sunsets, of course, and sailing ships in a strong wind, and a deer running in a glade in the forest, and flowers growing on an old crumbling wall, and the flight of the blue heron, but nothing compares to the female chest. Nothing at all."

"Right," the fingerprint man said.

Nellied smiled and a slow ripple moved her bosom, a delicate ripple which started almost imperceptibly but gathered force gradually and ebbed away again.

De Gier sighed. The commissaris turned his head and stared at de Gier.

"She charges a hundred and seventy-five guilders for a bottle of champagne," de Gier explained.

The commissaris inclined his small head.

"And then she takes off the top of her dress, sir, there's a zipper at the waist." De Gier pointed at the zipper.

Grijpstra had put his handkerchief away and was fumbling with a black cigar which he had found in a box on the counter. "What do you want the commissaris to do?" he asked gruffly. "Order champagne?"

The commissaris smiled and scraped a match. "Here," he said mildly. "It isn't the right night for champagne."

Grijpstra inhaled and glared at de Gier. The smoke burned Grijpstra's throat and he began to cough, pushing himself away from the bar and upsetting a stool. The smoke was still in his lungs and he couldn't breathe and he was stamping on the floor, making the glasses and bottles, lined up on narrow shelves attached to a large mirror, touch and tinkle.

"Easy," the doctor said, and began to pound Grijpstra's solid back. "Easy, put that cigar away!"

"No. I'll be all right."

"Syrup," Nellie said. "I have some syrup, dear."

The thick liquid filled a liqueur glass and Grijpstra swallowed obediently.

"All of it," Nellie said.

Grijpstra emptied the glass and began to cough again, the cigar smoldering in his hand.

"Stop coughing," de Gier said. "You have had your syrup. Stop it, I say." Grijpstra hiccupped. "That's better."

They drank their second glass of jenever and Grijpstra quieted down.

"We'll have to talk business," the commissaris said to Nellie. "I hope you don't mind, dear."

"Do you want me to go away?"

"Not unless you want to. Now, what did you think, doctor? You had time to study the body, did you?"

The doctor rested his eyes on the lowest point of Nellie's cleavage. "Yes," he said slowly. "Yes, quite. I had enough time although we'll have to do some standard tests later, of course. I have never seen anything like it. He must have been killed this afternoon, at four o'clock perhaps, or four thirty. The blood was fresh. I would think he was hit by a round object, small and round, like an old-fashioned bullet fired by a musket. But it looks as if he was hit several times. There were marks all over the face, or over the remains of the face, I should say. Every bone is smashed, jaws, cheekbones, forehead, nose. The nose is the worst. It seems that the object, whatever it was, hit the nose first and then bounced about."

"A musket," the commissaris said. "Hmm. Somebody could have stood on the roof of that old houseboat opposite the house and shot him from there. But it's unlikely. The Straight Tree Ditch has been patrolled by riot police all afternoon. They would have noticed something, wouldn't they?"

"Your problem, it seems," the doctor said. "All I found was a corpse with a smashed face. Perhaps someone clobbered him with a hammer, jumped about like a madman and kept on hitting him. How about that?"

He looked at the fingerprint man. The fingerprint man was shaking his head.

"No?" the commissaris asked.

"Don't know," the fingerprint man said, "but I found funny prints. There was blood on the windowsill, not much, traces of blood really. But there was also blood on the wall
above
the window, small imprints of a round object, like the doctor said. Round. So the madman must have been banging away at the wall as well, and on the windowsill. With a hammer with a round head. There were imprints on the floorboards too."

"Sha," de Gier said.

"Pardon?" the commissaris asked.

"No," de Gier said, "not a hammer. But I don't know what else."

"A ball," Grijpstra said. "A little ball which bounced about. Elastic, a rubber ball."

"Studded with spikes," the fingerprint man said.

"That would explain the imprints. I photographed them and we'll have them enlarged tomorrow. There were marks, groups of red dots. Say you hammer a lot of spikes into a rubber ball, the heads of the spikes will protrude slightly. We can do a test. Leave some open places so that the rubber can still touch whatever it hits and bounce back."

"But there would have been a lot of balls, wouldn't there?" the commissaris asked. "One ball wouldn't do all that damage, so somebody would be pitching them from the roof of the houseboat, one after another, assuming Abe Rogge was standing in the window and taking them all full in the face. And we found nothing. Or did I miss anything?"

"No, sir," Grijpstra said. "There were no balls in the room."

"Silly," de Gier said. "I don't believe a word of it. Balls ha! Somebody was there, right in the room, and hit him and went on hitting him. The first blow knocked him down and the killer couldn't stop himself. Must have been in a rage. Some weapon with spikes. A good-day."

"Yes," the commissaris said thoughtfully, "a good-day. A medieval weapon, a metal ball on the end of a short stick and the ball is spiked. Sometimes the ball was attached to the handle with a short chain. Would explain the marks on the wall and the windowsill, a weapon like that covers a sizable area. The killer swung it and he hit the wall with the backward stroke. What do you say, doctor?"

The doctor nodded.

"So the killer left and took the weapon with him. Nobody saw him, nobody heard him. The riots on the Newmarket may have drowned the noise."

"His sister heard nothing," de Gier said. "She was upstairs part of the time and in the kitchen part of the time. And that young fellow was upstairs too."

"Could have been one of them," Grijpstra said.

"They both benefit by the death," the commissaris said. "His sister inherits and the young man might believe he could take over the business. And we may assume that it was murder as there seems to have been some planning. The riots may have been used as cover and the weapon is unusual."

"Not necessarily," Grijpstra said. "There may have been a good-day on the wall, as a decoration. Someone lost his temper, grabbed it and..."

"Yes, yes," the commissaris said. "We'll have to find out, but I don't want to go back now. Tomorrow. You or de Gier, or both of you. There are a lot of suspects* These hawkers lived outside the law. They don't pay much tax, sales tax or income tax. They always have more money than they can account for, put away in a tin or hidden in the mattress, or under a loose board. We may be dealing with armed robbery."

"Or a friend had a go at him," de Gier said. "His sister was telling me that he had a lot of arty friends. They would come for meals and drink and talk and he would play games with them, psychological games.

They had to admit they were fools."

"What?" the commissaris asked.

De Gier explained.

"I see, I see, I see," the commissaris said, then smiled at Nellie.

"Another glass?" Nellie asked.

"No, coffee perhaps, or would that be too much trouble?"

"Coffee," Nellie said, "yes. It would be the first cup I ever served here. I can make some upstairs and bring it down."

The commissaris looked hopeful. "Does everybody want coffee?"

The five men agreed they all wanted coffee, eagerly, like small children asking for a treat. Nellie changed with them. Her smile was motherly, she wanted to care for them. The feeling in the pink whore's hole changed; the soft-shaded lights, the chintzy chairs, the two low tables with their plastic tops decorated with frilly doilies, the sickening disharmony of pinks, mauves and bloody and fleshy reds no longer inspired the urgency of sex but softened down into an unexpected intimacy; five male disciples adoring the goddess and the goddess cares and gives and flows and oozes and goes upstairs to make coffee in a percolator. Grijpstra reached across the bar and grabbed the stone jar of jenever. The glasses were refilled.

The commissaris sipped. "Yes," he said, and looked over his glass. "Strange place this. So all we have is questions. That remark of yours interested me, de Gier."

De Gier looked up, his thoughts had been far away. "Sir?"

"About Abe Rogge trying to make fools out of his friends. A powerful personality no doubt, even the corpse looked powerful. So he humiliated his entourage. The king and his court. One of the courtiers killed the king."

"We only met one courtier," Grijpstra said, "that young anarchist. Another strong personality."

"Intelligent young man," the commissaris agreed, "and with a grudge. But a grudge against us, the police, the State."

"Against power," Grijpstra said hesitantly.

"And Abe meant power to him?" the commissaris asked. "No, I don't think so. It seemed to me he liked Abe. Did that young lady you talked to like her brother, de Gier?"

De Gier hadn't been listening. The commissaris repeated his question. "Oh yes, sir," de Gier said. "She liked him, and they weren't in each other's way. They lived separate lives, each on a separate floor. They only had an occasional meal together."

"She wasn't dependent on him?"

"No, sir, she works for the university, has a degree."

"We might check her clothes for blood spatters."

"No, no," the commissaris said. "I saw her; she isn't the type to jump about waving a good-day."

"That young fellow you were talking about?"

"No, not him either."

The fingerprint man shrugged.

The commissaris felt obliged to explain. "A man who has killed another man an hour ago will be nervous. Louis
was
nervous. The corpse, the crying sister, the police tramping about. He was suffering from a slight shock, but I didn't see any signs of a real mental crisis."

"You are the man who knows," the fingerprint man said.

"No," the commissaris said, and drained his glass a little too quickly. "I don't know anything. Whoever says he knows is either a fool or a saint, a blithering fool or a holy saint. But I have observed a number of killers in my life. I don't think Louis has killed a man this afternoon, but I could be wrong. In any case, he has handled the corpse, he has been in the room. There'll be some blood on his clothes, explainable blood, not enough to raise a serious suspicion. The judge won't be impressed."

Nellie came back with a full percolator and five mugs. They drank the coffee in silence.

"Thank you," the commissaris said, and wiped his mouth with his hand. "We'll go now. You have been very helpful, Nellie."

"Any time," Nellie said graciously, "but not when I have clients."

"We won't bother you. Grijpstra, would you mind asking about in the street? Perhaps the neighbors saw something. De Gier!"

"Sir."

"You come with me, I have another call to make tonight. I should take Grijpstra but you have more to learn.''

They shook hands with Nellie and trooped out. De Gier was last.

"You are lovely," de Gier said quickly. "I would like to come back one evening."

"A hundred and seventy-five guilders," Nellie said, and her face looked cold and closed. "That'll be for the topless service, and the same for another bottle of champagne if you want more."

"Three hundred and fifty guilders?" de Gier whispered incredulously.

"Sure."

He closed the door behind him. The commissaris was waiting for him but at some distance. Grijpstra was closer.

"Did you try?" Grijpstra asked.

"Yes."

"Any luck?"