“Shelley Cox. Wife of a Victor Cox who teaches film history at the drama institute. Odd bloke.”
“Odd family, I fear. She had 2.8 grams of alcohol in her blood. And that wasn’t from just one night out, believe me. I’ve seen a good deal of cirrhosis of the liver in my time but this was really impressive. What’s inside her isn’t a liver any more, it’s like the Rock of Gibraltar. Plus a badly inflamed pancreas producing insufficient insulin, with diabetes as the result. I haven’t had the time to check it out properly, but it seems obvious to me that the central nervous system has also been damaged. In the stomach I couldn’t find anything except a few peanuts and a double peptic ulcer. She hadn’t eaten all day long. Arms and legs thin as a stick, but a swollen belly, bad teeth – to sum it up, totally kaput with booze. A lamb to the slaughter.”
“So she was pissed out of her brain and fell into the dock and drowned?”
“No way. There was no water in her lungs, but she had three broken ribs, a ruptured spleen and a nasty wound to the head. Somebody probably ran her over while she was lying unconscious in the road, then panicked and chucked her body into the water. She must have died on the spot.”
“Any idea of the time of death?”
“About midnight on Saturday night.”
“And they have in fact found bloodstains on the Nassau Bridge. Nice work, chief. I won’t keep you any longer.”
Sax shuffles over to his workbench, takes a hermetically sealed test tube off a rack and holds it under the bright light of a desk lamp.
“Look what I found in her left Eustachian tube – in her ear, to put it simply.”
Luyckx bends over.
“What’s that?”
The test tube is teeming with tiny transparent creatures.
“A nest of baby spiders. A spider must have laid her eggs there, I can’t see any other explanation. I found the remains of a silk cocoon in the auricular cavity, protected by a plug of earwax. Never seen anything like that before,” says Sax. “A normal person would have gone stark raving mad.”
“Perhaps she did too,” sighs Luyckx. When he questions Cox later he will casually mention the problem of the spiders in his wife’s ear. For now he just doesn’t want to lose face and pretends that Sax’s revolting discovery hasn’t surprised him at all.
“Well I never liked spiders anyway. Oh yes, before I forget, can you give me one of her rings?”
Sax hands Luyckx a brown envelope.
“That’s all her jewellery. It’s not worth much.”
“Thanks. Got any gigs coming up?”
“At eleven in the Blue Note in Mortsel. With Steve Lancing on piano and Sonny Spencer on drums.”
“If I get a chance I’ll drop in. There’s no business like show business!”
5
Ma Mussel
“I felt sorry for her, officer. The way that woman wasted away over the years! Emaciated, that would be the word. She was on her last legs, Officer, still flirtatious, yes, but she was shagged out. And she knew it, because Dixie was no fool,” sighs the sleek rotund woman, sliding a large glass of amber-coloured beer under Lannoy’s nose.
Ma Mussel, as she was called, is the cheery landlady of the café of the same name on Godefridus Quay, which is well known for its draught triple brews and its jumbo mussels à la provençale. It’s the seventh and last pub Lannoy has visited in the course of his investigation.
“Eleven years ago, Officer, when my Maurice was still alive, on the sixth of March 1987, the day that we opened up here and they were showing the ferry sinking off Zeebrugge, she was sitting there at the table eating mussels. Even then she could knock back two or three bottles of white without batting an eyelid. Later she would come just for the wine which you won’t find any better anywhere else, you know, and not for my mussels. But recently she had gone crazy and would just drink anything. Anything except water. I think she drank water for the first time in her life last Saturday when she ended up in the docks. Poor Dixie.”
“Was she always out on her own?” asks Lannoy, keeping one eye on the television behind her where the three surviving Beatles are attending a memorial service for Linda McCartney.
“Yes. Or sometimes with some bloke she had run into somewhere who was as pickled as she was. She knew every boozer in the neighbourhood. They’re a kind of family.”
“She didn’t have any regular boyfriend or anything?”
“I heard she was married. Or had been. But I never saw her husband. She said she’d had enough of the butterfly on her back.”
“What?”
“She would talk about weird things that nobody understood.”
“Did she come in on Saturday?”
“Yes, about seven or so. She was totally dolled up. ‘Well Dixie,’ I asked her, ‘are you going to a ball tonight?’ ‘It’s Saturday,’ she said, and sounded really sad. She drank two vodka tonics and watched a bit of a film on her own about crocodiles in the Nile, yes, the TV’s always on here. And then she said one of those strange things again. ‘There’s a big black shadow that lives inside me, Ma,’ she said. And then she was gone. Into the rain, in her lovely dress. I never saw her again.”
With the Macumba, Lannoy had visited more or less every well-known bar in the Bonaparte Dock: the Acapulco, Café Admiraal, the Nieuwe Zanzi Bar, Chez Rik, Sandra’s Corner and finally Ma Mussel’s. Everyone he had questioned about Shelley Cox agreed that what had happened to Dixie was bound to occur sooner or later. How many times had they fished her out of the gutter and called Ahmed of Islam Taxis, who knew where she lived, to take her home. The true regulars had known her so long that they couldn’t remember any more when exactly she had first appeared in the area. She was such a part of their community that her absence registered more than her presence. “She was like a dark angel who drops silently to earth,” said Sandra of Sandra’s Corner, who dabbled in poetry in her spare time. “She would appear, do her rounds, bum around for a few nights, and then she would disappear again for a couple of days. And apart from Ahmed, who’s as silent as the grave whatever the language, nobody knew where she lived. Not a happy angel, no. After midnight, when she started babbling in her own little private language, the tears would sometimes stream down her cheeks. But everybody loved Dixie. And when she’d run out of money she would always find some victim to buy her another drink. Because she couldn’t do without it any more, the poor old sod.”
“Sometimes in the early hours she would stumble in,” said Cross-Eyed Carmen from the Acapulco, “and start to drink up the dregs in the glasses on the counter. And then if I gave her a cup of coffee, she’d go crazy. With me, her best friend!”
“So how much is it?”
“Nothing, Inspector.” Ma Mussel waves away the hundred-franc note Lannoy is holding out. Just come by one evening with your wife and have a plate of mussels. That would be a real pleasure. Say hello to The Sponge.”
Lannoy realizes that apart from café gossip he has learnt nothing new today. Obviously there hadn’t been any real eyewitnesses. No one had seen what had happened on Saturday at midnight on the Nassau Bridge. It had been raining so hard that there wasn’t a soul out in the streets. Or perhaps nobody wanted to talk about it.
6
Victor Cox
Who is this withdrawn, exhausted man sitting with atrophied decency opposite Luyckx and staring at him fuzzily through his glasses? What is he hiding, sitting there so quietly? How many revolting stories have been piling up for years behind that impenetrable mask? Why does he not ask any questions, why does he sit there petrified, sunk in thought, as if he has guessed or knows what Luyckx is going to tell him?
In this kind of awkward situation, The Sponge feels more at ease than anyone else, and he takes his time. He studies every reaction, interprets the slightest movement, the smallest expression of the enemy. Because, given the circumstances, and until someone has proved the contrary, Luyckx considers him a suspect, and at this moment Cox is the living incarnation of the enemy.
“First of all I’d like to apologize for keeping you waiting so long. Do you smoke?”
“I’m trying to give up. Nowadays smoking is rather common.”
First lie, thinks Luyckx. Given the tension, even someone who wants to give up smoking would accept a cigarette. With provocative slowness, he lights up a cigarette for himself, and leans back in his office chair with his hands clasped behind his head.
“Once there was something stylish about smoking,” Cox continues quietly. “It was part of every seduction ritual. There was something sensual, almost sexual, about it. It was simply impossible to resist the fatal charm of a Dietrich, a Garbo or a Swanson when these divas drew on their cigarettes and the white smoke rose in elegant coils in the blaze of the spotlights. Try to visualize Humphrey Bogart or James Cagney without a cigarette, or Edward G. Robinson without a cigar. I cannot imagine it. Those fellows knew what smoking meant for style. But nowadays…”
The professor’s voice sounds monotonous, thin, absent-minded. The voice of a priest who no longer believes what he preaches. This distinguished gentleman is more dangerous than he seems, thinks Luyckx, and comes straight to the point: “Mr Cox, I fear I have bad news for you.”
Luyckx shakes the contents of Sax’s envelope on to his desk: three rings, a pair of long, glass earrings, a double row of pearls.
“Do you recognize this jewellery?”
“Yes. This is the ring that Barrie Chase wore in Cape Fear. This one, with the little diamond, was worn by Ida Lupino in High Sierra. This is Veronica Lake’s wedding ring from This Gun for Hire and the earrings belonged to Karen Morely in Howard Hawks’s Scarface, in which Osgood Perkins, the father of Anthony Perkins, also had a role – not many people know that. The pearls are the necklace Tony Curtis wore in Some Like It Hot. Fake jewels, every one of them. Mere props. But nevertheless of value to collectors. I still recall every occasion when I bought them. Long, long ago.”
“So Mrs Cox didn’t wear her own wedding ring?”
The fact that Luyckx is talking about Shelley Cox in the past tense does not seem to have struck her husband.
“I made her a gift of Veronica Lake’s ring as her wedding ring.”
It is usually impossible to disconcert The Sponge, but he is now staring speechlessly at Victor Cox. A normal man would burst into tears if in this situation he was confronted with his wife’s jewellery. What was simply a roundabout way of disclosing the brutal truth to him is not having the slightest effect on the imperturbable professor of cinema history.
Luyckx appreciates that it is going to be a long night and Cox is anything but easy prey.
“Mr Cox, if I just now kept you waiting, it was because I was down at the forensic institute, where they’d not yet finished with the material remains of your wife.”
Cox does not budge an inch, stares ahead deathly pale and clears his throat. He takes off his glasses, wipes his eyes and then looks enquiringly at Luyckx, as if waiting for him to continue.
“Your wife is dead, Mr Cox. This afternoon we fished her out of the Bonaparte Dock.”
“Shelley has been dead for years.”
Outside the sky is turning purple and red. The lurid light of the setting sun is mirrored in the façade of the Boeren-toren skyscraper. The carillon begins to chime. The noise of the traffic subsides. The city is drifting off to sleep. Luyckx shuts the window, draws the colourless cotton curtains and switches on his desk lamp.
“What do you mean: ‘Shelley has been dead for years’?”
“Figuratively, I mean. Did she commit suicide?”
“Why do you think she committed suicide?”
“It’s a long story.”
“It’s not suicide,” interrupts Lannoy, who has been standing for a while in the doorway listening.
“Let me introduce you. Luc Lannoy, my partner.”
“My condolences on the loss of your wife, sir.”
“Had she been drinking?” asks Cox.
“You could say that.”
“2.8 grams of blood alcohol!”
“Oh dear!” says Cox absent-mindedly, as if they are talking about someone he scarcely knows, “then she probably stumbled into the water.”
“She was run over.”
“Right,” says Luyckx. “Sax has confirmed it. She was probably killed on the spot.”
“After the accident someone dragged her to the docks and chucked her into the water,” says Lannoy.
“Are you sure it’s her? It was Shelley’s birthday on Saturday. That’s probably why she was wearing her prettiest dress – she’d turned forty.”
“Shit. Forty!”
“How do you know she was wearing an evening dress?”
“I saw her leave.”
“Do you own a car?”
“Of course I have a car.”
“What make?”
“Ford Sierra.”
“Colour?”
“Grey. But what’s this got to do with my car?”
“Where’s your car now?”
“At the Ford garage on Sint-Bernardsesteenweg. Minor repair. On Saturday afternoon someone damaged my right fender and headlight in the supermarket car park, and of course left without saying anything. You know what people are like nowadays.”
Luyckx and Lannoy exchange glances.
“Does the name Dixie mean anything to you?”
“ No… Why?”
“In Docklands everyone knew your wife by the name of Dixie.”
“I’ve never heard that name before. How in Heaven’s name did she end up there?”
“She practically lived there. Some of the bar owners had even started calling the district Dixieland.”
“Mr Cox, where were you on Saturday night around midnight?”
Cox frowns, as if he does not understand the question. He is deathly pale. Beads of sweat form on his forehead. He takes out a white handkerchief with embroidered initials and blows his nose.
“At home.”
“Alone?”
“Of course. Like always.”
“Could you prove it?”
“I was sitting watching a film. The Big Knife by Robert Aldrich. In German, on a German channel. But still well worth it. You can check in the TV listings.”
“That’s not proof.”
“Then I don’t have any proof.”
“And no alibi.”
“And I don’t need one! I haven’t touched Shelley for ten years! Why should I do away with her? Because that’s what you suspect, isn’t it?”
“Because she was making your life impossible?”
“Whose life?” His voice sounds weak. He whispers almost inaudibly. “I continue to maintain that she committed suicide.”
“Was she running around talking about suicide plans then?”
“Once she said: ‘I’ll make an end of it before my fortieth.’ But as I’ve already said: it’s a long story.”
“We’ve got all night.”
Cox reflects for a while then begins to sob gently. Almost like a child. Suddenly all his arrogance disappears. He sits opposite Luyckx and Lannoy, an aging kid – caught out and unable to find a word of explanation.
“It’s not easy to strip naked before complete strangers.”
“We’re not asking that.”
“I’d rather write it down, if I may.”
“Sure. Luc, you can go home. And run round to the garage early tomorrow to check out the damage to the gentleman’s car.”
“Can I go too?” asks Cox, rising. “I’ll bring you a detailed account tomorrow, without fail.”
“You stay here. And your account will decide whether the investigating magistrate lets you go home tomorrow or not.”
7
Shelley and Victor Cox
“I started at the top and worked my way down,” declared Orson Welles once in an interview. You could say the same thing about my marriage. And my life.
With these words, Victor Cox starts the account, which he has typed on Luyckx’s compu
ter, sitting flanked by two officers, on the night of 8 – 9th June 1998. It’s six-thirty a.m. and so quiet that you can hear the horns of the ships coming into the harbour in the distance. While Cox, exhausted, lies asleep on a bench in a cell, Luyckx is sitting reading at his desk, stirring a glass of Alka-Seltzer. He lingered until five in the morning in the Blue Note, where Sax played on top form to a half-empty room, and he’s now fighting a splitting headache.
I met Shelley on 11th June 1979 at a fancy-dress student ball at the Drama Institute, where I had been teaching for four years. In homage to John Wayne, who had died that morning in Los Angeles, I was wearing the very same blue uniform worn by the Duke in John Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Including a sword. She had come with one of my students, Tony Blanckaert, who was studying film direction and now works as a plumber in the Antwerp zoo. With her stiff black wig, her light-green eyes, her broad laugh and her dazzling white teeth, and above all her Indian costume – a short dress of imitation deerskin with fringes – she reminded me instantly of Jennifer Jones in King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun. Considering we were the only ones who looked as if we had stepped right out of a Western, it was not difficult to strike up a conversation. She was twenty-one years old and her name was Shelley Verdijck. She worked as an usherette in the Berchem Palace, that long-gone neighbourhood cinema in the Grote Steenweg. Through her job, waiting in the semi-darkness at the back of the hall for latecomers, she had seen a good deal of films, some so often that she knew the dialogue by heart. She sounded happy, smelt of patchouli, and in my eyes was the equal on the dance floor of Cyd Charisse. I was just emerging from a pretty chaotic relationship with a woman who preferred travel to film. I was ready for anything. My only fear was that she would quickly dismiss me as an old buffer as she was eleven years younger than I was. But the difference in our ages did not seem to bother her that evening. And when, pressed tight against one another, we were dancing to Harry Nilsson’s Without You, and she whispered in my ear, paraphrasing Mae West, “Is that your sword I can feel or are you just happy to see me?” I was completely bowled over. “Both,” I replied and asked her then and there to marry me – and felt the floor melt away under my cowboy boots.
No Sale Page 2