Blond Baboon (6 page)

A sign, hung from a cast-iron bar, read
CARNET & CO., FURNITURE, IMPORT & 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.”

The commissaris was nodding, a proud father admiring the antics of a child. The conversation flowed along until Bergen interrupted himself. “Mrs. Camet,” he said sadly, “my longtime partner, you are here to investigate her death, I presume?”

“Indeed.”

“Do you suspect foul play, commissaris?”

The commissaris’s head bent and the gesture reminded de Gier of his cat, Tabriz. Tabriz would drop her head to the side if she wasn’t quite sure if she liked what he had heaped on her dish. “Perhaps not. There are some indications we can’t explain at mis point but they may fall into place and the death may very well be due to an accident. If that is so we would like to come to that conclusion with a minimal delay so that the case can be closed. What can you tell us about Mrs. Caraet, Mr. Bergen? Did she have any close friends, and did any of them visit her, perhaps last night, or did anybody at all visit her last night?”

Bergen’s tight mouth curved downward. He appeared to be thinking hard. “No. I don’t know what she did last night. I was home, working on a tree in my garden that was bumping against the roof. Elaine didn’t come to the office yesterday, but then she hardly ever does these days. She is really semiretired and leaves the running of the business to me. We used to have a lot of contact in the old days, when we were making the firm grow, but mat’s all over now and has been for several years.”

“Mother didn’t have much of a routine,” Gabrielle said. “She liked to get up late and then she would have breakfast in a restaurant somewhere and do some shopping and go to the hairdresser and she sometimes went to the movies. She only had her evening meal at home.”

“I see.” The commissaris got up, looked about, and sat down again.

“More coffee?” Gabrielle asked.

“No, erhm, no. I wonder if you would mind very much, Miss Carnet, if I asked you to let us talk to Mr. Bergen alone for a little while. I would like to ask some questions that, well, may embarrass you.”

Gabrielle laughed and got up, taking the empty cups from the table. “Of course, but I don’t get embarrassed easily. I am a modern girl, you know.”

“Yes, yes,” the commissaris said, still ill at ease. De Gier’s eyes narrowed. He had seen it all before. The situation was shaping up nicely, manipulated detail by detail.

“Now,” the commissaris said when Gabrielle had left the room, “I am sure you know why I asked Miss Carnet to leave us alone for a minute. If Mrs. Carnet was killed last night and didn’t just slip and fall down her stairs—she had drunk a fair amount of wine, you know, Beaujolais, a strong wine, we found an empty bottle—she may have been killed by someone she was on intimate terms with. Would you know of such a person, sir?”

Bergen was thinking again. Evidently he wanted to be helpful but he was weighing his words. “Yes. I see what you mean. Well, Elaine did have a lover for several years, an employee of this firm, a man called Vleuten. He left us two years ago, rather suddenly.”

“Because of any unpleasantness?”

“Yes.” Bergen was scraping his throat industriously. “Yes, you might call it that. A nasty business. You see, Elaine fell in love with the baboon—that’s his nickname, he rather looks like an ape, he didn’t mind being called baboon. Elaine really fell for him, and he does have a nice personality, I’ll say that for him. That was some time ago. Elaine was still in her forties men and rather attractive, she went to pieces later. The wine helped, but that’s another matter.”

“Related perhaps?” the commissaris suggested.

“Yes, related possibly. But there were other reasons, I think. The firm has grown so much that its mechanics became impossible for her to grasp. She could never understand the computerized bookkeeping and store records for instance; she liked to keep the records herself according to some old-fashioned system that she had mastered. She was hurt, I think, when we modernized our administration and most of her work became superfluous, and she began to withdraw. Her desk is over there. There’s nothing on it anymore, not even a telephone. She doesn’t really like to come in now. She doesn’t know what is happening and she doesn’t like to try and deal with anything anymore for fear that it may explode in her face.”

“Yes.” The commissaris’s voice sounded thoughtful. “Yes, quite. A lost lonely woman, that’s the impression I got from seeing her corpse.”

“The word “corpse” made Bergen wince and his hand moved quickly over his left cheek. He had made the gesture before, and de Gier noticed the nervous clasping of the hand after the movement was completed. He looked closely at Bergen’s face. The left side seemed affected in some way, the eye looked larger than the right and the comer of the mouth drooped a little. Perhaps the man had survived a stroke. When Bergen spoke again some letters appeared slightly transformed. The p’s and ft’s popped. De Gier shrugged. He was collecting some very useful information, so Bergen had suffered a stroke once, so what.

“An affair with an employee, mat must have been unpleasant for you. What was Mr. Vleuten’s position in the firm? Was he a salesman?’

“Sales director. He did very well for us. Some of our largest accounts are his work. The baboon was never an administrator and I don’t think he could have run Carnet and Company, but he was certainly doing spectacular work in his own field.”

The commissaris was lighting a small cigar. His voice had crossed the border between being conversational and amiable; the tension that de Gier had originally felt in Bergen’s reactions was easing off.

“Yes, sales,” the commissaris said, waving his cigar. “A business can do nothing without them, but good sales can be spoiled by bad administration. Did Mr; Vleuten aspire to become the head of this firm, was he a rival to you in any way?”

“No. The baboon didn’t aspire to be anything other than what he was but he was a rival nevertheless, a most powerful rival, because Elaine was pushing the baboon right into my chair. And there wasn’t just the business aspect to deal with. The baboon was Elaine’s lover and she was cuddling him right here in this office, holding his hands, nibbling bis ears, gazing into his eyes. You used the word ‘embarrassing’ just now, that’s what it was, embarrassing. I felt a complete fool in my own office the minute the two came in. The baboon was always polite and charming, of course, but Elaine’s behavior made me sick to my stomach. If I brought in some business, and I do that all the time, of course, the matter was completely ignored even if it was a contract involving a million guilders, but if the baboon sold a kitchen table and four matching chairs to a dear old lady running a store in the country we all had to sing the national anthem.”

The policemen laughed and Bergen laughed with them, pleased with his little joke.

“So?”

“So I had to drive die matter to its peak. I simply couldn’t stand it any longer. We had a meeting, the three of us, and I offered to resign and sell them my shares. It was a big risk, for I could have lost out easily, but I was still gambling on Elaine’s insight. She must have known that my experience was important to the company’s future and that the baboon had only proved himself as a salesman, never as an administrator. But she didn’t blink an eye.”

“Really? But the baboon left and you still are here.”