The Sergeant's Cat

by Janwillem Van De Wetering

  De Gier got into the unmarked car and opened Grijpstra’s door. He waited until Grijpstra had forced his bulk into the car’s interior. “What’s wrong with Jane? It’s a good name. She’s a good woman, too. We’re headed for the southern suburbs.”

  The car stopped at the first set of traffic lights. Grijpstra tore at the cellophane cover of a cigar. His eyebrows were still raised as he looked at the sergeant again.

  De Gier made the car surge forward, following bicycles whose riders were impatient and wouldn’t wait for the lights to change. “The shot in the night was fired in Ouborg, an exclusive area for the well-heeled.”

  “And Jane?”

  The car was half on the sidewalk, speeding to pass clogged traffic, and de Gier had to pay attention. Finally he reached a square offering more space. “Jane?”

  “You said she’s a good woman,” Grijpstra said patiently. “How do you know? Did you try? With success?”

  “Not yet.” De Gier avoided more traffic lights by crossing over to the part of the boulevard reserved for streetcars, ambu­lances, and patrol cars. “I think she’s good, but it might just be that she’s not prepared to prove my point.” He looked at Grijps­tra triumphantly. “A shot in the night.” He hunched his shoul­ders and lowered his chin so that he could look up and admire tree branches adorning a starry sky. “It’s a lovely night, but ripped apart by a shot. That’s what the lady on the phone said. She lives next door, in another small palace. She also said that a car drove away after the shot had been fired—an expensive car, silver-colored. She didn’t note the license number.” The un­marked car sped up again. “And she heard a woman scream.”

  “What do you know,” Grijpstra said, and glanced over his shoulder. “And look at that.”

  De Gier looked into his rear mirror. A patrol car had de­tached itself from the parking lot in front of a suburban police station and was following them, flashing its lights, its siren howl­ing.

  “Ignore them,” Grijpstra said, sucking on his cigar. He checked the speedometer. A hundred kilometers an hour. He listened to the scream of tires. He nodded.

  “You’re nodding,” de Gier said. “You usually complain when I drive too fast. Are you changing?”

  “Everything changes,” shouted Grijpstra. He had to shout because the patrol car was now riding next to them.

  De Gier braked.

  “Why?” Grijpstra wondered aloud. The patrol car stopped ahead and two cops tumbled onto the pavement.

  “Because their car is brand-new and ours is falling apart,” de Gier said. “Old cars don’t drive very fast. They were cutting me off.”

  “Ho-ho-ho!” the cops shouted. “Speeding, dear sir? And failing to stop when followed by a patrol car flashing its lights, with its siren howling. Are you blind? Are you deaf?”

  De Gier showed his police card. Grijpstra loosened the mi­crophone from under the dashboard and held it up by way of proof.

  “Detectives, eh?” the cop on the left said.

  “Can we come, too?” asked the cop on the right.

  “Something nice?” the cop on the left asked.

  “Be our guests,” de Gier said, “as long as you don’t make so much noise. It’s close. Ouborg. Do you happen to know where that may be?”

  The patrol car guided them. The address was in a lane over­shadowed by plane trees, with spacious homes on each side. A windmill stood behind the trees, artistically cutting the night sky with its sails.

  A lady came running toward them, waving her arms.

  “I don’t think that’s legal,” one of the cops said a little later.

  “That’s breaking and entering,” the other cop said. “You need a permit, signed by a commissaris.”

  “The hell,” de Gier said, hammering on a window with the butt of his gun. “I’ve looked through the side window and I’ve seen a lady on a bed. She has no clothes on and she’s bleed­ing from the head.”

  “That won’t work,” Grijpstra said, “the new gun is mostly made of light plastic. It won’t break glass. Use this rock.”

  “Jane,” Grijpstra said.

  “I beg your pardon?” asked de Gier.

  “She looks like Jane,” Grijpstra said. “Very much like Jane, and she’s dead. Sit down, Sergeant. You always faint when in the presence of a corpse. Ah, it’s suicide, see? She’s still holding the gun. There’s a glass. She had a drink first and then she shot herself through the temple. But why is she naked?”

  “Can I phone?” one of the policemen asked. “I know Headquarters’ secret number.”

  The other cop wandered about the room. “Posh,” he com­mented. “That painting is by Edward Hopper, a famous Amer­ican, worth a year’s wages—two maybe. Look at the books. The collected works of a number of geniuses, at fifty guilders a vol­ume. What would that antique couch cost?”

  “The house alone costs a million,” Grijpstra said. “Yes? What is it, Sergeant?”

  De Gier stood in the open door to the garden, nicely sil­houetted against the dark, clear sky, flanked by small poplars. He was a tall man, narrow-waisted, wide-shouldered. His mus­tache was modeled on those of high-ranking cavalry officers a hundred years back. His eyes were large, brown, softly pleading. His cheekbones were pronounced, his hair thick and curly. He looked good framed by the open garden door until he staggered and grabbed a post.

  “Don’t look at the lady,” Grijpstra said. She had been at­tractive, but she was bleeding now and her eyes stared strangely. “Did you see anything worth noting?”

  “Yes,” de Gier said. “There’s a car in the garage and it’s burned out. It was a Camaro, I think, or a Corvette, resembling a fish of prey. Chevrolet makes those cars, for the rich and happy people.”

  “So what do we know?” Grijpstra asked three hours later in the car on the way back to the inner city, driving quietly through empty streets, silent but for the chirruping of birds and the squeak of a paperboy’s roller skates.

  “That the lady is dead,” de Gier said, “and that the doctor isn’t pleased. The fingerprint gentlemen aren’t pleased either.” He held up a finger. “The doctor seems to think she was drugged.” He held up a second finger. “The fingerprint gentle­men checked her hand. They think she didn’t fire the gun. If she had, the porridge they smeared on her palm would have discolored—because of the fumes of the exploding cartridge, mixed with her sweat and the oil of the gun.”

  “Modern methods,” Grijpstra said unhappily. Grijpstra was an older man, in a forbidding three-piece dark blue suit softened a little by thin white stripes.

  “Adjutant,” de Gier said, “we do have modern methods and they’re sometimes known to work. If the corpse didn’t kill herself, then somebody else did. The murderer shot her and took her hand afterward and inserted the gun in it.”

  “Why did she take her clothes off?” Grijpstra asked. “Did she make love to the killer? The doctor wasn’t sure.”

  “He used modern methods, too, our killer,” de Gier mused, “and then he drove away in his silver-colored car. But we have found that the lady’s lover is also the owner of the house. He’s a man by the name of Wever and he doesn’t drive a silver car. He hasn’t been home for a few days. And we know the lady’s name, which is Cora Fischer.”

  “Drive on,” Grijpstra said. “I don’t want to go to Head­quarters. The building is bleak at this hour, in the early morning.”

  “Where would sir like to be driven to?”

  “To an all-night café on a picturesque canal where we can drink gin and beer and smoke black cigars. If we get drunk, we’ll leave the car and stagger home.”

  “Right,” de Gier said. “Here’s your beer and here’s your gin and here’s my coffee.”

  “Is there cognac in your coffee?” Grijpstra asked. “What a lovely café this is. Behold the heavy rotten beams supporting a smoky ceiling. Take a look at that
criminal-looking bartender and that small crowd of hopeless alcoholics. Isn’t Amsterdam a beautiful city?”

  “There’s cognac in my coffee,” de Gier said. “Let me wish you good health. Cora Fischer. First she was loved and later killed. This is a choice crime and I’m glad I work for the police. And you know, she looked rather relaxed. I hardly think there was a fight. Was she drugged or not?”

  “I’m not quite sure,” the pathologist said some six hours later. “Sit down over there, Sergeant. The autopsy will supply us with tangible information. I haven’t seen you here before. Are you sure you can take it? I’ll have to cut and saw.”

  “He can’t take it,” Grijpstra said, “and I don’t think I can either, but the law says there should be some officer of the law here to watch you. But the inspector is otherwise engaged, and the commissaris has been told to rest in the morning. Please go ahead.”

  “I’m going out for a walk,” said de Gier. “It’s a nice day and I hardly ever visit cemeteries. I’ll walk about for a while and study flower arrangements on tombstones. I’ll be back when you’re done.”

  Grijpstra watched how the pathologist, in a white coat and a plastic apron, made the incision: two long cuts from the shoul­ders to the navel and a shorter one from the lower belly to the pubic area. Another doctor, a clone of the first, cut the scalp in order to bare the skull. One doctor cut while the other sawed with an electric gadget that sprayed sawdust against his mask. Why don’t I think of something else? Grijpstra thought. This is not appetizing. They are damaging her, as if she isn’t damaged enough already.

  The lady’s consort, Grijpstra thought, is called Wever, and he owns the villa, worth a million, which is about as much as I can make in twenty years. The man is extraordinarily wealthy, although he isn’t an attorney, or a dentist, or even a registered accountant. He’s rich because he owns illegal gambling houses and a drugs-and-sex joint in the fashionable little seaport of Noordwijk close by. His name is known to us, but we haven’t been able to arrest him so far. He doesn’t pay taxes because he cooks his books. He’s a gangster, an evil spirit from the under­world. With the old police gun we couldn’t shoot him because the bullets would have been stopped in his fat. With the new gun we could kill him easily, but we don’t because that would be illegal. He’s known to us because our undercover detectives visit brothels and are equipped with large ears. We’ve heard that about a year ago he took a new mistress, a certain Cora Fischer, the ex-model of a famous painter, the ex-star of art-loving so­ciety.

  The pathologists handled their knives like indifferent but knowledgeable butchers. As they cleaned the parts taken from the body with fresh water bubbling from a hand shower and dumped them into dishes and bottles, one of them spoke in a loud, monotonous voice, reporting his observations to a clerk, positioned at a safe distance. “Liver,” the pathologist said, “slightly enlarged and discolored.” He weighed the liver and announced the figure. The clerk wrote the figure down.

  Where was I? Grijpstra thought. Right. Cora impressed the arty and the affluent. But the famous painter tired of her and turned her out of his turn-of-the-century loft. She was without employment, but she was still attractive. Wever welcomed her, and Cora became the hostess of his club in Noordwijk and some­times of his illegal blackjack joints. Or so said the undercover detectives who live in the underworld and whisper through tel­ephones and slip letters under Headquarters’ doors.

  “Well?” Grijpstra asked.

  “We still can’t be sure,” the second pathologist said. “We’ll have to do some tests. She didn’t inject, that’s for sure, but she did sniff cocaine. She drank a bit too much and she smoked.”

  “Can I smoke?” Grijpstra asked.

  “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  “I think I will all the same,” Grijpstra said. “This is a good cigar and I’m a bit nervous.”

  “I’ll open a window,” the doctor said, doing so. “Smoking can kill you, you know.”

  “Is that right?” Grijpstra said. “So what killed her?”

  The doctor smiled. “A bullet through the head. No doubt about it. And her vanity. She was a lovely dame.”

  “Well?” de Gier asked.

  “They’re still not sure,” Grijpstra said, “but there was al­cohol in her stomach, mixed with sleeping draught. It’s very pleasant out here.”

  “I saw three thrushes,” de Dier said, “and a crow. Some chickadees, too, and a magpie. Some of the tombstones bear impressive poetry. And I saw a gent with a motor helmet under his arm, hiding behind sunglasses. He must have been a boxer, if his flattened nose is a clue, and is still an athlete judging by his bouncy gait. Look, there he is, riding away on a four-cylinder motorcycle.”

  Grijpstra looked. “That’s a very large gent. Six foot six, I would think. What was he doing here?”

  “I’m beginning to think I know,” de Gier said. “He looked at me for quite a while with much interest . . . Does she still look like Jane?”

  “Mister Wever,” de Gier said four hours later, “listen, and listen good. There are some facts. One of the facts is that your reputation stinks. Your gambling joints and your brothel are no good. You’re a pimp and a drug dealer.”

  “Facts,” Wever said, sitting uncomfortably on a straight-backed chair in Grijpstra’s office, placing his hands on his knees so that the middle fingers rested on the immaculate creases of his tailor-made sharkskin pants, “should be proved. You’ve never proved anything regarding me. You haven’t done that because no drugs have ever been found in the establishments I own. So what’s all this empty talk, eh?”

  “I’m telling you,” de Gier said, “that you’re a curse on our society. There’s another fact.” The sergeant held up a finger. “Your girlfriend was murdered—in your house, on your bed.”

  Wever showed the gold stuck in his whitish gums. “So what?”

  De Gier said, “She didn’t shoot herself—our modern methods say so.”

  Grijpstra nodded. “And someone had mixed a sleeping pill into her drink.”

  Wever adjusted his hairpiece. “So you claim. But why should I believe you? Why should the judge believe you? So Cora took a tranquilizer—she often did, she was a highstrung woman, you know. She worried a lot, whether I loved her or if I didn’t. And I didn’t, of course, because I have this other lady, in my club in Noordwijk, who is younger and more appetizing. I was spending nights with Yvette, so Cora shot herself.”

  De Gier had become angry. He was hitting his desktop with the flat of his hand. “And burned her own car? No, sir, you burned her car and later you had her killed. Now listen to me—”

  “But what if I don’t want to listen to you?” Wever asked. “You’re impolite and I’m a gentleman of sorts. I wasn’t home. Alibi, don’t you know? Are you familiar with the word? She shot herself.” Wever got up. He was a big man; he kept getting up.

  “Sit down, Mister Pimp,” de Gier said. “If you leave this office, you’ll be arrested in the corridor, for not paying traffic tickets. And we’ll close your joints.”

  Wever sat down. “What’s wrong with my gambling estab­lishments? Blackjack’s okay. The court says so and the Supreme Court is about to confirm it. Blackjack has to be played with intelligence; that’s why you could never play it. I wasn’t home; I can prove I wasn’t home. It ain’t me.”

  Grijpstra looked up. “Can’t you conjugate verbs correctly? Can’t you do anything right?”

  Wever got angry, too. Sweat trickled down his cheeks on its way to his many chins.

  “What happened was this,” de Gier said. “First you were proud of Cora. Because she was so lovely, and so famous. You installed her in your palace and she was the queen of your club—people pointed her out to each other. You bought her a car worth forty thousand. Clothes. Jewelry. She was a nouveauté. But after a while she wasn’t anymore. But she was still around, cost­ing money. You’re a busi
nessman in a way and like balancing things out. If you lose money you have to gain it back again. So—”

  Wever put up his hands. Sunlight reflected from his var­nished nails. “That’s enough.”

  “Not at all,” de Gier said. “We’re after the truth. So what was Cora to do? She had to smuggle dope. The Camaro nosed into Paris and back again, once a week. Cora carried cocaine and heroin in her pants, in her cleavage. She slipped easily back and forth through the checkpoints, the Customs agents smiling at her. But then she wouldn’t go anymore.”

  “No?” Wever asked. “Changed her mind, did she? What­ever for?”

  “Let’s not be funny,” de Gier said. “She stopped smuggling your drugs because she realized drugs are bad for people. Cora was never a bad girl. You made her bad, but she wanted to be good again.”

  Wever sighed. “Good? That phony, hysterical broad?”

  De Gier stirred his coffee. The room became quiet.

  “Hello?” Grijpstra asked.

  “Yes,” de Gier said. “Then you destroyed her car a few nights back. The fire department came, but they couldn’t save the Camaro—that classy car she liked so much, gone forever. Insured, but that didn’t help her since you weren’t planning on replacing it. You threatened her, right?”

  “Right,” Wever said softly. “Suppose, as long as we’re playing this game together, that what you say is true. It isn’t, but okay. Even if it were true, you can’t prove I killed her. You can’t because I didn’t kill her. I wasn’t home.”

  “You weren’t,” de Gier said, “but you sent your right hand—a gent by the name of Freddie. A big gent—bigger than you, but with a good build. You’re horribly fat, you know. Freddie isn’t, but he does have a fat head, and the chips in it aren’t very complicated. Kill, you say, and Freddie kills. He gets into a silver car and shoots the lady. He also rides a motorbike, by the way.”

  “I’m going,” Wever said. “You’re not only wasting my time, you’re spoiling it. I’ll pay my traffic tickets on the way down. Good-bye.”