The Maine Massacre (5 page)

De Gier cut two good-sized slices with the knife the sheriff had left on the table.

"Here we are. Keep it in a strongbox in my room. Bourbon. You drink bourbon over there?"

"Not too often, but we would like to."

The sheriff poured. "Try it, you'll like it, as the dealers say to the junkies. But they give them shit. This is the real stuff, hundred proof, a present from a grateful subject because we caught another subject with twenty thousand dollars' worth of antiques taken from the first subject's house. I've been hoarding the bottle, but it'll have to go."

They drank.

"Yes?"

"Yes." De Gier's eyes shone.

The sheriff smiled. "That's better. I thought that maybe you wouldn't fancy the good stuff and then it would be hard to get to know you. Right. Now tell me, sergeant, what brings you here?"

De Gier told him about the fund financing exchange of American and Dutch police officers.

The sheriff sipped, lowered his glass, raised it, and sipped again.

"Yes," he said slowly, "but I don't buy that. You'll have to credit me with some intelligence, sergeant, even if you find me in Jameson, Maine. Why would an Amsterdam murder brigade police detective be sent here? There are such cities as New York, or Chicago, and there is a place called Los Angeles. There is crime over there and the quality of the crime could be compared to what you have in Amsterdam. But in Jameson... No, sergeant. This town is barely on the map. So tell me, if you want to tell me. What have we got here that makes you interested, so interested that a general troubles himself to phone die Woodcock sheriff all the way from his shiny office on the eighty-fourth floor of his Manhattan plastic palace?"

The bourbon oozed down to de Gier's stomach and warmed his blood on the way. He felt tempted to tell the truth. The truth is the best lie. He took a deep breath and told the truth.

"I see," the sheriff said a few minutes later and got up and refilled the glass. "And this
comrmssaris,
this gold-braided gentleman with the pain in his legs, he is due soon, is he?"

"He should be here now."

"A little old man with thin gray hair and grandpa spectacles?"

"That's right."

"I saw him. He came in on the regular plane before the state troopers dropped you off from their spacecraft. Is he staying with a lady called Janet Wash?"

"Don't know that name. He'll be staying with his sister, Mrs. Opdijk. Her husband died a few days ago. They have a house on Cape Orca."

"Ah," the sheriff said. "So you are finally telling me. In your own way, of course. My predecessor left a file on Cape Orca; the file is mine now. Cape Accident it should be called, for he wrote them all off as accidents. The old sheriff wasn't too fond of work I believe, although I wouldn't spread that belief around, even if he lives in Boston now."

"The old sheriff?" de Gier asked. "Are you the new sheriff?"

"Oh yes, sergeant. Very new. Three months now and I still don't know the country at all. I was born and raised in the capital, a long way from here. But I know Cape Orca because I read the file. And Pete Opdijk died under my supervision so to speak. An accident. The fifth. Schwartz just ran away, but he might have been another if he had stopped to wait."

"Schwartz?"

"Captain Schwartz. The name is not familiar?"

"No."

"Maybe not, suit yourself. Maybe you came in on the Opdijk angle. Opdijk was a Dutchman and Captain Schwartz an American, even though he professed to be a Nazi. The others were Americans too, but their deaths link them to Opdijk, your client."

"Client," de Gier said.

"I'll tell you what I know. You can read the file later. A third and last glass?"

They had the third glass and the sheriff told his story while they drank it.

It wasn't a bad story, de Gier thought, with some good open leads. But his interest was academic, a foreign tale told in a foreign country. He would be no part of it. He would take the commissaris back to Amsterdam and he would see what he would see in the meantime.

Yes, de Gier thought, as the baseboard radiators popped and rattled in the warm room, the snow on the spruce outside glowed a deep red in the gentle touch of the setting sun, and the bourbon seeped through his tall body. It was a good story. Cape Orca.

"What's an orca?" he asked when the sheriff finished and got up to show him the bathroom.

"Orcas are killer whales," the sheriff said. "They are intelligent and skilled animals, as intelligent and skilled as the contract killers in New York. And their only aim is to kill. The orcas hunt in groups, and they comer their prey and rip it apart. They used to come into the bay here, but the Coast Guard fought them and now they're scarce. The bay and the cape are still called after them. They are silent and quick and always deadly. Yes, sergeant, mat's what orcas are, deadly. And mighty hard to catch. Especially when the sheriff doesn't know his way about and the chief deputy is fat and the other two deputies are about as eager as hound dogs raised on bone glue and sawdust. Another drink?"

"Yes," de Gier said. "Please."

4

T
HE COMMISSARIS WAS AWAKE, BUT NOT QUITE. HE struggled to remain in the in-between state of awareness where thoughts are sharp and definite and abstractly pure and can be experienced and enjoyed without the necessity of bothering to translate them into the always-false world of activity. He wriggled his toes and tensed and released the muscles of his hips and back. The padded blanket dropped back and a warm draft drifted over his body. There was no pain, not even the slightest twinge in the nerve ends of his legs, the heart and ever-productive source of his rheumatism. But happiness, by definition, cannot last and he knew that his hand would raise the blanket and his brain would order his body to step into the room, and he dreaded the moment.

The door opened.

"Jan?"

"Yes, Suzanne, I am awake."

"I brought you some coffee and orange juice."

"Good."

"I'll put it down here. When you're ready to come down we can eat. I have some frozen
hutspot
that can be warmed up quickly."

He shivered.
Hutspot,
a stew of carrots and potatoes and shredded meat, always reminded him of vomit drying on the cobblestones of an Amsterdam alley.

The little shape padded over the carpet. He heard the tray click as it hit the night table.

"You slept for eight hours, Jan, but you had such a long journey. Why don't you go back to sleep again?"

He sat up. "No. I think I'll start on your husband's papers. You said you had them all together. Would you mind bringing them up?"

She came back with a briefcase filled with different-colored cardboard files, and he opened them and glanced through their contents. He grunted miserably. All so simple and straightforward and Suzanne hadn't even looked at the policies. He totaled the monthly payments the pension funds and insurance policies would render and raised his eyebrows. Suzanne would be able to live in style. He checked the last bank statement and the stubs of a checkbook. A few hundred dollars' balance, but his eyebrows shot up again when he saw the total of Opdijk's savings account. Very nice indeed. No trouble there.

"Suzanne?"

She answered his shout and came into the room again.

"Do you know if the doctor sent you a death certificate? I will need several copies to make the insurance policies pay out."

Suzanne began to cry quietly.

The commissaris cleared his throat. He had forgotten that he should commiserate. "I am sorry, dear, but I do need the certificates."

"Yes, Jan, I understand. I'll get them. They were addressed to me and they're in my cabinet. Just a moment, Jan. Do you need paper and envelopes and stamps too? To write to the insurance companies?"

"Yes, please."

He got up and put on his dressing gown and slippers and winked at himself in the mirror. Suzanne still had her wits about her. She would cry, but she would also get her money. Oh well. He sipped the coffee and rushed out of the room. He spat the coffee into the toilet. Boiled, weak, too much milk. He came back and tried the orange juice. That was fine. Perhaps he could live on orange juice for a few days. If only the house could be sold quickly. He hoped that the furniture could be auctioned. There would also be the car he had seen when they arrived, a sturdy four-wheel-drive vehicle, a station wagon, in good condition but hard to sell he supposed. Everybody around would already have a car. He would have to persuade her to make some sacrifices, but he could always work on her fear of staying. Fear and greed, two powerful urges he might be able to manipulate to everybody's benefit.

She brought the writing materials and he sat down and wrote the letters and licked the stamps. He might be able to post them after dinner if she would let him use her car. He lit a cigar and ambled about the room. A nice room, but the wallpaper was a little elaborate. Suzanne woud have bought it in Holland. A farmer and his wife, in folksy clothes and wooden shoes, doing a jig against the background of a windmill. Good God. He looked away, but the design repeated itself. The jig continued on all the room's walls. The commissaris stared in horror. The farmer and his wife were smiling inanely, a thousand times, many thousands of times. He would have to try to stay away from the walls. But what else was there to look at? The windows. He pulled the shades and sighed with relief as the opaque linen snapped up and rolled itself on a bar.

The view destroyed the jig of the imbecilic couple. He sighed with wonder as he admired the bay below, its ice mirroring the starlight. An icy, immense wasteland of pure beauty, stretching away to a shore covered by a growth of what appeared to be evergreens surrounding an island. The island sloped up to a hill. There were no lights, but a high jetty stuck out into the bay. He looked up just as a moving cloud revealed the half moon, and when his eyes dropped down again the ice of the bay had become a light shade of, of what? Mauve? A very soft blue? The color seemed hard to define. He forgot the question. Why name the color? He stayed in front of the window until his sister called him, and he had time to see the narrow channel in the ice between the island and his side of the shore. The channel would run out to the ocean. He also saw the ridges and domes where ledges and rocks had been frozen over and become raised when the tide went down. He shook his head when he remembered the simple beaches of Holland, a hundred miles of yellow sand protected on one side by monotonous dunes and attacked on the other by steady breakers. He had always liked the Dutch beaches, but this was a different beauty, a distorted beauty almost, dating back to the beginning of the planet, when the first shapes were created out of turmoil.

"Jan?"

There was a sob even in that one-syllable word. He promised himself not to be irritated by his sister's gift to find suffering in anything. He remembered Suzanne as a child, a girl, a young woman. He had been able to find a way to put up with her misery then. All he had to do now was remember the recipe and repeat the performance.

"Yes, I'll be coming down, dear. Just let me shave and dress. It won't take long."

"The food is on the table, Jan."

"Very well." She would get her way. He wondered how Opdijk had put up with her sniffling approach. Would he have hit her from time to time? But Suzanne didn't look battered. Perhaps Opdijk had found ways of keeping himself busy.

"What did Opdijk do here, Suzanne?"

"He did everything, Jan. He chopped wood and he worked in the garden and he often went to town. He was the president of the club—that took a lot of his time. They have boats and things, and there were dinners and parties. I didn't always go."

"Club? What club?"

"The Blue Crustaceans. Opdijk was always very social. The doctor said he should be more careful, his heart... But he just slipped on the rocks."

"Had he been drinking?"

"No, he only drank after five. It happened in the morning. He had gone down to cut a dead tree, and when he didn't come back for coffee I went to look for him. The chain saw was still going. I couldn't understand it. The saw was halfway in a log, but he wasn't there and when I looked down I saw him, a long way down, on the rocks. He was looking at me, but his eyes were dead. Oh, Jan..."

"Yes. We'll have a look at the spot tomorrow. Slippery down there, I suppose."

"Yes, Jan."

After dinner he looked through the rest of the files and checked Opdijk's bookkeping, which had been kept up to the day preceding the man's death. He found the deed of the house stating that the total property was just under three acres. There were no mortgage payments in the tidily kept records. Opdijk owned his property outright. It would make the sale easier.

"Is there a real estate agency in town, Suzanne?"

She looked up from die sock she was knitting. "Yes, Jan, Mr. Astrinsky's office."

"I'll see him tomorrow."

"He is a nice man, Jan, also a member of the club. Opdijk knew him well. They sometimes drank together, too much I am afraid. I was always so worried when he would come home late, but he would drive slowly and he always made it."

"Any other realtors?"

"No, there's only Mr. Astrinsky."

"I see. So I can't make them bid against each other. Well, there's no hurry, dear. You are well off. We can have the house listed, and it can be sold later."

"But I do want an apartment in Amsterdam, Jan, not a room. Will there be enough to buy an apartment?"

"There's a lot of money in the savings account."

"Will it buy me a nice apartment?"

He thought, clicking the pencil against his teeth. "Yes, there is enough for a down payment. You can easily get a mortgage for the difference."

"I don't want any debts, Jan. I always hated debts, and I would like a three-room apartment."

"There isn't enough cash for that."

"Can't you sell this house right away?"

"Yes," he said. "Yes. Don't worry, dear. I'll see what can be done and then I'll do it."

"I am so glad you came, Jan."

He had his doubts. A forced sale would drop the value, but it would be useless to try to advise her. Under the sadness there was an iron will, misdirected of course, but that wasn't his affair. He had committed himself to be of help and it had to be the help she wanted. The apartment she had in mind might cost over fifty. Still, he wouldn't throw her money away unless she forced him to. And there was the matter of time—he couldn't stay too long. He sighed, got up to look out the living room window, and sighed again. The moon was higher now and the bay had subtly changed. He mentioned the island, and she came and joined him at the window.

"That's Jeremy's Island. I've never been there. Opdijk went a few times, but he didn't like Jeremy; called him a filthy old man."

"Is he?"

"Yes, in a way. He lives there by himself, and I suppose he doesn't have a bathroom or electricity or anything. But he is very polite. He always waves when he comes by in his boat."

"You know him at all?"

"Not really, Jan. I don't know anybody except Janet. She comes to tea and I've been to her house, not often."

He left the window reluctantly. "Can I use the station wagon, Suzanne? I'll mail the letters. I've asked the pension and insurance people to send the money to you care of my address in Amsterdam. Once you have your apartment you can contact them again or I'll do it for you."

"Yes," she said. "How nice. In Amsterdam. I've been so homesick, Jan."

He looked at the stacks of Dutch magazines, at the reproductions of paintings of canals, bridges, dikes, views of Amsterdam streets looking cheap in plastic frames. He had seen the kitchen and looked at shelves filled with Dutch cans, jars, pots. She hadn't even changed her food, after that many years in another environment, in America, the land of plenty. An expensive household to run if everything has to be imported. He was surprised that Opdijk had allowed her to waste money like that. Perhaps the man hadn't been as tough as he had imagined him to be.

She went with him to the garage and waited until the station wagon's engine caught, then opened the doors. He drove too fast at first and the wheels spun, but he shifted down and only one wheel sunk into the ditch at the side of the path and the car growled back again on firm ground. The mailbox was at the end of the road. He promised himself to drive around again in the morning to determine the layout of the land. It would be silly to face the realtor without any ideas at all. The man might be honest, but even an honest man gets tempted when faced by an idiot.

When he got back Suzanne was sitting in front of the fireplace wringing her hands. Her original misery seemed to have acquired an additional twist. She seemed close to hysteria. He sat down next to her and held her hand.

"What is it, dear?"

"They all died, Jan, all of them. I
must
get away. They are all dead now. There's only me left, me."

"All of them?"

She told her story in bursts, trailing off every now and then until he patiently guided her back. He asked as little as possible, waiting for the information to fit. Gradually the pattern emerged, a definite report with a beginning and an end. The end was Opdijk's death. But the event seemed to relate to other events. When, two hours later, she had calmed down and they had drunk coffee he had made himself and he had seen her safely to her room, he went to his own and made some notes. The notes had six headings and each heading was a name. He read the notes to himself and lit a fresh cigar and puffed and underlined a word here and there. Then he wrote them again, slowly and meticulously.