A Widow for One Year (71 page)

“My name’s in the front of the book, Nico. Did you miss my
name
?” Harry asked his friend.

“Were you planning a trip with her?” Detective Jansen asked. Harry had been a cop for more than three decades; at last he knew how it felt to be a suspect.

Harry explained that Rooie took a lot of trips—all Harry did was read the travel books. He’d long been in the habit of lending her his guidebooks, Harry said. She’d been accustomed to asking him where she should stay and what she should see.

“But you didn’t have a
relationship
with Rooie, did you, Harry?” Nico asked. “You never actually took a trip with her, did you?”

“No, I never did,” Harry replied.

It was generally a good idea to tell the cops the truth. Harry
hadn’t
had a relationship with Rooie; he’d never taken a trip with her, either. That much was true. But the cops didn’t have to know
everything
. It wasn’t necessary for Nico Jansen to know that Harry had been tempted. Oh, how he’d been tempted!

Sergeant Hoekstra Finds His Witness

Nowadays, Sergeant Hoekstra wore his police uniform only on those occasions when the red-light district was overrun with tourists or out-of-towners. (He’d worn it to Rooie’s funeral, too.) And when it came to giving tours, Harry was the 2nd District’s cop of choice—not only because he spoke better English (and German) than any other policeman in the Warmoesstraat station but also because he was the acknowledged expert on the red-light district, and he loved to take people there.

He’d once shown
de Wallen
to a group of nuns. He not infrequently showed “the little walls” to schoolchildren. The window prostitutes would calmly look the other way when they saw the children coming, but once a woman in a window had abruptly closed her curtain; later she told Harry that she’d recognized her own child among the group.

Sergeant Hoekstra was also the 2nd District’s cop of choice when it came to talking to the media. Because false confessions were common, Harry had quickly learned never to give the exact details of a crime to the press; on the contrary, he often provided the journalists with
false
details—this tended to expose the crazies in a hurry. In the case of “Red” Dolores’s murder, he’d managed to draw out a couple of false confessions by telling the journalists that Rooie had been strangled after “a violent struggle.”

The two false confessions were from men who said they’d choked Rooie to death with their hands. One of them had persuaded his wife to scratch his face and the backs of his hands; the other had convinced his girlfriend to kick him repeatedly in the shins. In both cases, the men
looked
as if they’d been party to “a violent struggle.”

As for the actual method of Rooie’s murder, the detectives had wasted no time at their computers; they’d conveyed the necessary information to Interpol in Wiesbaden, Germany, whereupon they discovered that there’d been a similar slaying of a prostitute in Zurich about five years earlier.

All Rooie had been able to do was to kick off one of her shoes. The prostitute in the area of the Langstrasse in Zurich had managed a little more resistance; she’d broken a fingernail in what must have been a brief struggle. Some fabric, presumably from the killer’s suit pants, was caught under the prostitute’s broken nail; it was a high-quality fabric, but so what?

The most convincing connection between the Zurich murder and Rooie’s murder in Amsterdam was that in Zurich there’d also been a standing lamp with the lamp shade and the lightbulb removed but undamaged. The Zurich police hadn’t known the part about photographing the victim. The murder in Zurich hadn’t had a witness; nor had anyone mailed the Zurich police a tube of Polaroid print coater with a perfect print of the presumed killer’s right thumb.

None of the prints taken from the prostitute’s room off the Langstrasse in Zurich had matched the Amsterdam thumbprint, however, and in Wiesbaden there was no matching thumbprint in the Interpol file, either. The second print on the tube was a clear,
small
print of a right index finger. It indicated that the probable witness had picked up the print coater with “her” thumb and index finger at either end. (The witness
must
have been a woman, everyone had decided, because the fingerprint was so much smaller than the print of the probable murderer’s thumb.)

Another small but clear print of the witness’s right index finger had been taken from one of the shoes pointed toes-out in Rooie’s wardrobe closet. And the same right index finger had touched the inside doorknob of Rooie’s window room—doubtless when the witness had let herself out on the street, after the murderer had gone. Whoever she was, she was right-handed, and she had a glass-thin, perfectly centered scar on her right index finger.

But Interpol had no match for the probable witness’s right index finger, either—not that Harry had expected Interpol to match
that
print. He was sure that his witness wasn’t a criminal. And after a week of talking to the area’s prostitutes, Harry was also sure that his witness wasn’t a prostitute. She was probably a goddamn sex-tourist!

In a short period of time, less than a week, every prostitute on the Bergstraat had seen the likely witness as many as a half-dozen times! And Anneke Smeets had
talked
to her. The mystery woman had asked for Rooie one night, and Anneke—in her leather halter top, and brandishing a dildo—had told the tourist Rooie’s alleged reason for not working at night. Rooie was with her daughter, Anneke had said.

The prostitutes on the Korsjespoortsteeg had seen the mystery woman, too. One of the younger whores told Harry that his witness was a lesbian, but the other prostitutes had disagreed; they’d been wary of the woman because they couldn’t tell what she wanted.

As for the men who walked and walked past the window prostitutes— always looking, always horny, but never making a decision—they were called
hengsten
(“stallions”), and the prostitutes who’d seen Ruth Cole walking past their windows called her a female
hengst
. But of course there is no such thing as a female stallion, which is why the mystery woman made the prostitutes uneasy.

One of them said to Harry: “She looked like a reporter.” (Reporters made the prostitutes
very
uneasy.)

A foreign journalist? Sergeant Hoekstra had rejected the possibility. Most of the foreign journalists who came to Amsterdam with a professional interest in prostitution were told to talk to
him
.

From the prostitutes in
de Wallen,
Harry discovered that the mystery woman hadn’t always been alone. There’d been a younger man with her, maybe a university student. While the witness Harry was looking for was in her thirties and had spoken only English, the boy had definitely been Dutch.

That had answered one question for Sergeant Hoekstra: If his missing witness was an English-speaking foreigner, who had written the eyewitness account in Dutch? And some additional information shed a little light on the carefully printed document that the witness had mailed to Harry. A tattooist whom Harry regarded as a handwriting expert had looked at the meticulous lettering and concluded that the text had been
copied
.

The tattooist’s name was Henk, and he did most of the lettering at the tattoo museum in the red-light district, the so-called House of Pain. (His specialty was a poem—any poem you wanted—tattooed in the shape of a woman’s body.) According to him, the witness’s pen had paused too long on every letter; only someone copying a foreign language would have written each letter so slowly. “Who has to work this hard not to make a spelling mistake?” Henk had asked Harry. “ Someone who doesn’t know the language—that’s who.”

The prostitutes in
de Wallen
did not think Harry’s witness and the Dutch boy had been a sexual couple. “It was not just the age difference,” said the Thai prostitute whom Ruth and Wim had visited on the Barndesteeg. “I could tell they’d never had sex with each other.”

“Maybe they were working up to it,” Harry had suggested. “Maybe they were
going to
have sex.”

“I didn’t think so,” the Thai prostitute said. “They couldn’t even tell me what they wanted. They just wanted to
watch,
but they didn’t even know
what
they wanted to watch!”

The other Thai prostitute who remembered the unusual couple was the old sadist with a reputation for terrorizing her clients. “The Dutch boy had a
beeeg
one,” she declared. “He really wanted to do it. But his
mommy
wouldn’t let him.”

“That boy was ready to fuck anything, except me,” the transvestite from Ecuador told Harry. “The woman was merely curious. She wasn’t going to have sex. She just wanted to
know
about it.”

If the Dutch boy had been with the mystery woman in Rooie’s closet, Harry was sure the two of them would have tried to stop the killing. And, almost from the beginning, Harry had doubted that the witness was a first-time prostitute; unless she’d been an “illegal,” even a first-timer would have gone to the police. And if she’d been an “ illegal,” who would she have found to write her eyewitness account in such perfect Dutch?

A Jamaican prostitute on the Slapersteeg also remembered Ruth Cole. “She was small. She said she was lost,” the Jamaican told Harry. “I took her out of the alley by her arm. I was surprised she had such a strong right arm.”

That was when Sergeant Hoekstra realized that he had seen the mystery woman himself ! He suddenly recalled the woman he’d followed through
de Wallen
one early morning; she’d had an athletic way of walking. She was small, but she looked strong. She certainly hadn’t looked “lost.” She’d looked purposeful, and Harry had followed her not only because she seemed out of place, but also because she was strikingly attractive. (Not to mention vaguely familar! It’s a wonder Harry failed to recognize her from her book-jacket photos.) When he became aware that she’d noticed him following her, Harry had gone back to the Warmoesstraat station.

He’d spoken to the two fat prostitutes from Ghana last. The unknown tourist had paused on the Stoofsteeg long enough to ask the prostitutes where they were from; in turn they’d asked Ruth Cole where
she
was from, and she’d told them she was from the United States. (What Harry had learned from the prostitutes from Ghana— namely, that his witness was an American—would turn out to be a more important bit of information than he’d first thought.)

Nico Jansen had come to a dead end on his computer. The Polaroid print coater with the azure-blue cap could have been purchased in either Amsterdam or Zurich. That (according to the mystery witness) the murderer looked like a mole, that he wheezed, that he had squinty eyes (“almost totally closed”) . . . of what use was this without a fingerprint in Zurich that matched the thumbprint on the tube of Polaroid print coater in Amsterdam?

And that the witness had thought the murderer worked for SAS, the Scandinavian airline, proved to be a false lead. Despite the examination of the prints of every male employee working in security for SAS, a matching thumbprint could not be found.

Only because Harry Hoekstra knew English so well, and German a little, was the murderer ever caught. It turned out that the most important piece of information in the eyewitness’s account was the observation that the murderer spoke English with what might have been a
German
-sounding accent.

It was the day after Nico Jansen told Harry that the detectives had come to a dead end in regard to Rooie’s murder. Harry had gone back to the eyewitness account again. Suddenly he saw what he’d been missing. If the murderer’s first language was German, SAS might
not
be SAS—in the German alphabet, as in the Dutch,
a
is pronounced as
ah
. In the German alphabet,
e
is pronounced as
ay
. And to an
American
witness, S
E
S would have
sounded
like S
A
S. The murderer had nothing to do with the Scandinavian airline. The murderer had something to do with security for a company called SES!

Harry didn’t need Nico Jansen’s computer to find out what SES was. The International Chamber of Commerce was happy to help Harry find a company with those initials in a German-speaking city, and in less than ten minutes Harry had identified the murderer’s employer. The venerable Schweizer Elektronik- und Sicherheitssysteme (SES) was located in Zurich; the company designed and installed security alarms for banks and museums all over Europe.

It gave Harry some small pleasure to find Nico Jansen in the detectives’ room, where the computers always bathed the faces of the detectives in an unnatural light and bombarded them with unnatural sounds. “I’ve got something for you to feed into your computer, Nico,” Harry had said. “If you want me to talk to your colleague in Zurich, my German’s better than yours.”

The detective in Zurich was named Ernst Hecht; he was getting ready to retire. He’d presumed he would never find out who had killed a Brazilian prostitute in the area of the Langstrasse almost six years before. But the Schweizer Elektronik- und Sicherheitssysteme was a small but important security-alarm company; for insurance reasons, every employee of the company who’d ever designed or installed a security system for a bank or a museum had been fingerprinted.

The thumb that matched the thumbprint on the Polaroid print coater belonged to a former employee, a security-alarm engineer named Urs Messerli. Messerli had been in Amsterdam in the fall of 1990 to prepare an estimate for the expense of a fire- and motion-detection system in an art museum. He’d routinely traveled with an old Polaroid camera that used 4X5 Land film, type 55, whose black-and-white prints were preferred by all the engineers at SES. They were large-format prints, with negatives. Messerli had taken over six dozen photographs of the interior of the art museum in Amsterdam in order to know how many fire- and motion-detection devices would be needed and exactly where they should be installed.