“A mess,” the commissaris had said. “This case is a mess, and I wish we could leave it alone. We could, easily. The lady had a little too much to drink, she was upset because of the gale, she slipped, she fell, she broke her neck. A report, that’s all we have to write. I could catch the whole event in half a page and everybody here would accept my version. What do you think?”
There were some mumbles that evolved into one audible word pronounced by Grijpstra: “No.”
“No?”
“No, sir.” Grijpstra’s bulky body filled the commissaris’s chair of honor, a heavy piece of furniture capped by wooden lions’ heads snarling on each side of his wide shoulders. Grijpstra felt fine. He had got up early and had been able to shave and have breakfast in peace, and he had found a clean suit and his favorite shirt, light blue with a detachable white collar, bought at half-price at the last sale of Amsterdam’s best clothing store.
“Why not?” the commissaris asked. “Do you think we have anything to go on? The clues point at a family fight culminating in manslaughter. We don’t have to presuppose ill will or planning. I am reasonably sure that we’ll come up with the reconstruction of a situation where tempers ran high because of irritation aggravated by the unusual weather. The lady was shoved and fell. There was no wish to kill. The case may sizzle out in court after a few hundred hours of work on our part, and we may have made some blunders on the way that may increase the suffering of some of our fellow beings we haven’t even met so far. You think we should go ahead?”
“Yes, sir.”
“De Gier?”
De Gier spread his long muscular hands. His large eyes gleamed; there seemed to be a slight movement in the up-swept ends of his mustache. “No, sir, you shouldn’t ask me. If you start the investigation I will work on it, with pleasure, I may say. There’s a puzzle. The girl was lying, I mink, and I would like to know the significance of the clues, of the whole situation. But perhaps mere is nothing mere; the gale gave a strange impact last night, everything was different. But I have no opinion about whether or not to take the case. Maybe you are right, maybe we’ll do more harm than good.”
“And maybe we shouldn’t concern ourselves with that,” Grijpstra said quietly. “We are the police, we are maintaining order, we have rules.”
“So if the rules lead to more disorder?” the commissaris asked, but he didn’t wait for Grijpstra’s reply. “Never mind. We’ll take the case. I am not asking you, Cardozo, I will ask you in a few years’ time. That doesn’t mean I don’t value your opinion but it has to be formed first.” He got up and walked over to the young detective, sitting straight up on a hard-backed chair. Cardozo got patted on his curly head and the commissaris retreated behind his glass-topped desk. “Right, so we proceed. This is the way I would want you to start out. We have the following persons involved: Elaine Carnet, dead, but she left her corpse mat has to be investigated. I want to know whether the wedding ring fits easily on her finger. Cardozo, you can go to the morgue when mis conference is over. Does anybody have the ring?”
Grijpstra pointed at a carton standing next to his chair. “In there, sir.”
“Good. I saw the fingerprint report. Surfaces have been wiped clean, in the expert’s opinion anyway. The statement wouldn’t hold in court-doorknobs are often in touch with garments and the result is a fingerprintless doorknob-but for us it is a clue. A suspect hiding tracks, or somebody else’s tracks. There is more information that is of interest. The doctor claims that Elaine Carnet had been drinking to the point of intoxication and that she was a habitual drinker but not quite an alcoholic. His report is documented properly and it will hold in court. So Elaine was drunk last night; her lack of self-control may have made her say something that invited an attack and got her pushed down the stairs. Who pushed her? The mysterious cigar smoker? We have Gabrielle Carnet, Elaine’s partner Mr. Bergen, and Elaine’s former lover the blond baboon, a man called Jan Vleuten, and that’s all so far, right?”
“Mr. de Bree, sir,” Cardozo said. “The suspected dog poisoner, the man I interviewed or tried to interview but he slammed the door in my face.”
“Good. We have him too, but he doesn’t want to see us. We need more material against him, preferably statements by witnesses who saw him feeding the dog. Maybe the witnesses can be found; the garden in which the poisoning took place can be seen by a fairly large number of people, the inhabitants of the houses next and opposite the Carnet house, opposite the rear of the Carnet house, that is. Something for you, Cardozo. Once you have been to the morgue you can do your rounds. If you produce some evidence, no matter how vague, we have a stronger case against your nasty Mr. de Bree and we can haul him in for questioning. So far he is out of reach although I could try to bluff him.”
“That leaves Gabrielle Carnet, Mr. Bergen, and this blond baboon, sir.”
“Yes, sergeant. We don’t know much about Gabrielle yet, in spite of my questioning last night. She’ll have to be seen again, maybe also by Cardozo, for he has met her twice now and mere should be some contact between them. I don’t think you should go, de Gier. You said you didn’t like her, is that right?”
De Gier nodded.
“Lack of sympathy doesn’t make questioning any easier, so Grijpstra can go. You and I can see Mr. Bergen and this blond baboon. It can all be done today. We may come up with other suspects, I hope not, however. There shouldn’t be too many suspects. Mrs. Carnet had a glass of wine with her killer and received him on the porch, not in her splendid living room. She knew the killer intimately and she gave me the impression of being a lonely woman, but the impression may be wrong. It was a strange night and the gale may have influenced our reasoning. Maybe Elaine Carnet had a lot of intimate friends and maybe all the friends hated her. Who knows, but we should find out today.”
The room was silent. A constable brought coffee and Cardozo served.
“Any questions?”
The safe, sir, and the portrait.”
The commissaris rubbed his hands. The safe and the portrait,” he said slowly. “Yes. Um. Um, um, urn. Very good of you, adjutant. You said that you and de Gier found a wall safe hidden by a painting while Cardozo and I were upstairs questioning Gabrielle. The safe contained a box, an old-fashioned cigar box, and the box had three hundred guilders* in it and some change. So perhaps it hadn’t been opened, for the money was there. But according to the fingerprint expert the safe’s handle had been wiped clean. You can ask Gabrielle about the safe when you see her today. Maybe she knows if her mother kept a lot of money in it. And then mere was the painting hung over the safe. We don’t have it here, do we?”
“No, sir.”
“A portrait of Elaine Carnet done when she was young. She was standing next to a piano and she was singing.”
“Yes, sir. The painting was signed ‘Wertheym.'”
The commissaris half-closed his eyes and breathed out sharply. “Well, what would that mean? Just a portrait done by a painter. But we might visit the painter. There may have been some relationship between him and Elaine and he may be able to tell us about her. Very likely not, but we won’t pass it up. Why don’t you visit this painter, adjutant, while Cardozo sniffs around the area of the Carnet house, and then you two can meet later to see Gabrielle. Will that do?”
“Certainly, sir.”
The commissaris looked at his watch. “Ten o’clock, we can finish our coffee in comfort and then all set out. Car-dozo?”
Cardozo shot forward on his chair, almost toppling off. His eagerness made de Gier smile and he pulled his mustache to mask his merriment.
“You are the only one who has something to work on. So far all our suspects are too smooth to grab. They have plenty of little hooks where we could fasten a string, but we don’t know where to look for them. But you have your Mr. de Bree, and we can be almost sure that he did try to kill that dog. We could hold on to him if you can produce some evidence, the slightest evidence will do. He is our only clear contact with the Carnet househo
ld: he knows both Elaine and Gabrielle, his garden borders on theirs, neighbors always know quite a lot about each other. It would be too much to expect that you can find witnesses to the actual death of Elaine-it must have happened late at night, when the gale was having its climax and it was raining heavily. But try anyway, take your time, visit everybody who lives in a house with a view of the Carnet garden.”
“Yes, sir.”
Grijpstra’s eyelids dropped as he looked away from Cardozo’s bright face. The young detective reminded him of a fellow pupil at school, a wiry little get-ahead, an eager-beaver pup mat would drool whenever he could catch a teacher’s attention. The pupil always got straight A’s. He was a general now, in charge of Dutch tank brigades, clumsily plowing down fences on German farms. Grijpstra was glad he wasn’t a general, but then, perhaps generals can get divorces easily. He stopped the thought. Whatever he tried to think about these days would always lead to divorce.
The commissaris stubbed out his cigar and the detectives got up but sat down again. The cigar hadn’t been the right signal. The commissaiis had left his desk and was wandering about the room, studying his plants.
He mumbled to himself, took an atomizer from a shelf, and sprayed a large fern that hung from the ceiling on a chain.
“Lovely, look at this new sprout, it’s all curled up like a bishop’s stave.” The detectives stood around the fern and made appropriate remarks. Only de Gier seemed really interested.
“You should have some ferns in your apartment, de Gier, they are both decorative and tranquilizing.”
“My cat will jump them and tear their leaves, sir.”
“Really? Tabriz? I thought she was a pleasant, sedate female. Well, just hang it high enough. It’ll rest your mind as you lie on your bed and it will give you good ideas. The mind really only functions well when it’s properly calmed.” He walked back to his desk and sat down. His small dried-out, almost yellow hands rested on the tabletop. He didn’t hear the detectives as they trooped out of the room.
“Sir?” de Gier asked from the door.
“Hmm? Yes. I’ll meet you in the courtyard in fifteen minutes, sergeant. We’ll visit Mr. Bergen first, the Carnet partner-find the address of Carnet and Company, please, they deal in furniture. I think I’ve seen their building, near the Pepperstraat somewhere.”
The sergeant closed the door slowly. He heard the last two words the commissaris said. “Messy. Yagh!” * A guilder is $0.40, or?0.25.
\\ 5 /////
Thebuilding in the Pepperstraat consisted of six small, three-storied houses joined on die inside while still retaining their apparent individualities. Each house had its own ornamentation, very different from the others if observed carefully, but the overall effect created unity again. The commissaris stood in the narrow street while de Gier drove off again to find a parking place, and looked up to get a good view. He wondered why the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had given rise to so much perfect beauty and how the beauty could have got lost for so long. It was coming back now, there was hope again, but it had been gone for hundreds of years, drab years that had built other parts of the city, long cramped streets of soot-soaked grayness lining up houses that were an insult to humanity with their cramped quarters and stark, forbidding rooflines.
A sign, hung from a cast-iron bar, read CARNET amp; CO., FURNITURE, IMPORT amp; WHOLESALE in small neat lettering. Through several open windows on the first floor the clatter of electric typewriters could be heard. An elderly couple, probably a storekeeper and his wife, were received at the narrow green front door of the first gable by a smooth-looking young man in a tailored suit. A salesman welcoming customers. Elaine Carnet had obviously built up a good business. He felt sorry now that he hadn’t taken time to study the corpse’s face more carefully. From the glimpse he remembered he could detect neither efficiency nor the polite ruthlessness that marks a success in business.
He grinned, maybe he was too hard on the trade. But he had always felt the cutting power of the traders’ brains whenever he had dealt with them. There might be more friendliness, more understanding, in the smaller merchants, the dealers who were in direct contact with consumers. When business works on wholesale and factory levels facial expressions change. He would have to base himself on what he had seen during that brief moment when the constables carried Mrs. Camet’s body out to the hearse. He had only seen an elderly woman, lonely, defeated, unconcerned about such matters as turnover and profit margin and cost control. The business would have been built up by others, although she might have owned the lion’s share of the company’s stock. But he had also seen that extraordinary expression of ghoulish delight.
De Gier came running around the corner. “Sorry, sir, I parked her at some distance.”
“It’s a pity my legs always trouble me, otherwise I could use a bicycle again. To try and use a car these days is more fuss than pleasure. Let’s go in, sergeant.”
Bergen came to the door. He had been advised to expect a visit from the police by the commissaris’s secretary. The man fitted in with the image die firm presented. Not a young man, somewhere between fifty and sixty-the energetic way in which he carried himself might blur a few years. Short silvery gray hair, brushed till it shone, heavy jowls, close shaven, eyes that shone with nervous energy behind heavy lenses framed in gold. An impeccably dressed man, there was no fantasy in the clothes. A dark blue suit, a white shirt, a tie of exactly the same shade as the suit. The sort of man who is chosen by TV commercials to tell the ladies about a new washing machine or some other expensive item that requires some faith before it can be purchased. Mr. Bergen’s voice confirmed the impression he was making, a warm deep sound coming from a wide chest.
“Commissaris, sergeant, please follow me. My office is on the top floor, I’ll show the way if you’ll excuse my going ahead.” He must have said it a thousand times, to customers, to suppliers, to tax inspectors.
De Gier was the last to climb the stairs and the commissaris was some six steps ahead of him. As he watched the commissaris’s narrow back he hummed, “Creepy creepy little mouse, Trips into Mr. Bergen’s house.”
Bergen didn’t know what he was up against. De Gier thought of the chief inspector who had been in charge of several murder cases some years before. He had liked to use an innocent, almost stupid approach to lure suspects into talking freely, but he had a sadistic side to his character. He always seemed to take pride in demolishing the suspects’ defenses and to show mem up, finally, for what they were, and the suspects, being human, invariably showed themselves to be little more than brown paper bags filled with farts, a term the chief inspector liked to use. It had never seemed to occur to him that he himself might also fit that definition, and that he might burst or tear if enough pressure were brought to bear on his flimsy outer shell. The commissaris, although he played the game along the same general lines as his colleague, never enjoyed his kills. De Gier wondered if Bergen were a legal prey. So far they had no reason to expect more than some information.
They were ushered into a vast room, half showroom, half office. There was a profusion of leather furniture, couches and easy chairs, and the commissaris and the sergeant were directed to a low settee apparently made of some very excellent cowhide, a choice piece that was no doubt worth a fortune, a perfect example of contemporary Italian design.
“Gentlemen,” Bergen said slowly, keeping his voice on a low pitch that was clearly audible, “some coffee perhaps? A cigar?”
The coffee was served by Gabrielle, dressed in a khaki jumpsuit.
The policemen stood up to shake her hand and Gabrielle smiled and purred. They were asked to be seated again and she bent down to give them their cups. Her breasts were almost entirely visible in the low top of her suit. De Gier was interested, but only mildly. He couldn’t understand the girl’s preference for trousers, the outfit accentuated her rather short bent legs, the way her jeans had the night before. He noted a glint near her neck and concentrated to see what it was.
Gabrielle saw his interest and paused longer man necessary. A plastic thread, de Gier thought, very thin, and some object at the end of it, small and brown and shiny, partly hidden by the breasts, stuck in between. A button, perhaps. Why would she wear a wooden button between her breasts? The thought didn’t go deep and hardly registered.
“You work here too, Miss Carnet?”
“Only sometimes, when Mr. Bergen expects important customers in the showroom or when the firm is very busy. We’re having a visitor this afternoon who buys for a chain of department stores, and Mr. Pullini is in town, of course.”
The commissaris came to life. “Pullini? That’s an Italian name, isn’t it? Didn’t you tell me yesterday that your mother started the business with furniture imported from Italy?”
Bergen had sat down near them, balancing his coffee cup gracefully. “That’s right, commissaris. Most of our merchandise still comes from Italy, but in this room we only show the expensive items. We also sell a lot of mass-produced furniture and we have been specializing lately in chairs and tables that can be stacked. We started selling to restaurants and hotels and canteens and so forth, and last year we began doing business with the armed forces.”
“You must be doing well, yet we are having a depression, are we not?”
Bergen smiled widely. That’s what the merchants say who fail, they’ll always have a depression. I don’t think mere is any real trouble, apart from the high taxes, of course, that’s one factor mat may squeeze us all out of existence.”
“How much are you selling?” the commissaris asked. “Just a rough idea, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I’m being curious, mat’s all.”
“Eight million last year.” Bergen beamed. His polite awareness was clearly weakening, the policeman had made a good impression. But that was a particularly good year, and a lot of that was army and navy business. Even so, we should do well again this year, even without any big contracts. The business is steady, fortunately. There will always be a good demand for furniture and we are well placed in the market.”
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