The Perfidious Parrot (11 page)

“I see,” the commissaris said, puzzled.

Whatever happened, Carl said, the
Rodney
would dock in Key West for repairs. Any day now. The
Rodney
was a perfect vessel but oversights will occur and the ocean does not forgive weakness. Everything would be taken care of in due course. Sometime soon they would all be on their way to the Antilles, to see some action.

“Not all of us,” the commissaris said and filled his client in about a jeep hitting Lobster Lateta and the Key West Police holding on to de Gier for further questioning.

“I hope he brought his gloves,” laughed Carl.

“Beg pardon?”

It was okay, Carl said, he had to hang up now. The boatswain was reporting seaweed in his vessel’s exhaust.

Carl sounded nervous. “He has to lower a diver.”

“Good luck,” the commissaris said.

“You think de Gier will be arrested?”

“Could be.” The commissaris’s aching legs were bothered by an onshore breeze. He lay down and covered himself up with a cotton blanket. Grijpstra rested on the next enormous bed. Together they analyzed the confrontation at Lobster Lateta. Grijpstra’s theory, an arranged simultaneous failure of brake and accelerator, seemed acceptable. The gentleman/cowboy was
not drunk. He didn’t look like a substance abuser either. De Gier, before he was escorted to the police van, had reported on its mechanical malfunctions, but the jeep was new with not two thousand miles on the odometer.

“Not logical as a mishap,” the commissaris concluded.

Grijpstra’s theory included a “hellish machine,” a Dutch legal term, indicating a device intentionally installed to cause physical harm.

De Gier entered the room after midnight.

“Gallivanting?” the commissaris asked.

The enquiry had taken up some time. De Gier had been told not to leave town and to be prepared to be picked up at any given moment.

“Trying to be clever,” Grijpstra said. “To the police of all people. To the
American
police. Don’t you watch movies? They kill you here for being clever.”

“Sergeant Symonds,” de Gier said, “takes us for big players. Our profiles are wrong. We can’t be tourists. We’re a godfather with two lieutenants. We’re here to be
bad
.”

The commissaris sat up. He smiled gleefully. “Is that so?” He rubbed his hands. “So what’s the Key West Police sergeant like?”

De Gier reported. “Black female, mid-thirties, tall, attractive, lot of strong white teeth, efficient, intelligent, can think for herself.”

“Did you charm her?” Grijpstra asked.

“Not the type.”

De Gier had, after spending over an hour in a badly ventilated cell, spoken the truth to Sergeant Ramona Symonds. He and his two friends were eating lobster tail and stone crab claw
at their cozy little table in the classy restaurant when a jeep careened off Duval Street and aimed straight for them. Subsequently, as a former Amsterdam Murder Brigade detective, now self-employed as a private eye, de Gier had alerted Harry, the bicycle-cop, to technical points of interest. Harry, however, seemed to have a personality disorder. An extreme case of paranoia? Or someone who likes to annoy his betters?

“Harry is a dear,” Ramona said. “So what brings you here, my former colleague?”

De Gier and his associates, an ex-police non-com and a retired chief-detective, had been invited by the shipping firm of Ambagt & Son to join the directors on their yacht for a journey to the Netherlands Antilles.

Yes, the invitation was connected to a professional project.

No, de Gier could not divulge further information.

No, nothing illegal. “Really, Miss. No? You prefer to be addressed as Sergeant? Really, Sergeant.”

What was Ambagt & Son’s business?

Crude oil in tankers.

No, no drugs.

So far the to-and-fro had been easy, rhythmic, a round of table tennis, ping-pong, ping-pong.

After that some tension occurred. “No kidding,” the sergeant said, straightening her shirt, adorned on the sleeve with three small gold chevrons. “Crude oil? That’s not a big product here in Key West, you know that? And I know the FEADship you mentioned. The
Admiraal Rodney
, right? She destroyed one of our quays, behind the Hotel Singh, not six blocks from here. That was last year. A FEADship is just about the most expensive
type of private yacht that plies our seas. Made in Holland. Just like you.

“And you live in …” she checked de Gier’s passport, “… in Amsterdam. Isn’t that where heroin is supplied, free of charge, by the city?” Sergeant Symonds rummaged through a stack of papers. “It so happens that I just read something on that. Here. A newspaper clipping, an article on Amsterdam drug use.
Heroin Heaven
.” She nodded angrily. “Something my kid brother from Detroit would like to try out. It would make him happy.”

De Gier said that drug
trafficking
in Amsterdam was illegal.

“But isn’t the city a hub for the international trade?” Sergeant Symonds asked. De Gier denied it. She didn’t hear his answer as her phone was ringing. She picked up the receiver, listened, thanked the speaker, replaced the receiver. The large brown eyes under artfully curved eyebrows searched de Gier’s face. Her soft voice vibrated. De Gier’s spine vibrated too. He assumed she sang, in a choir in a church perhaps. “The jeep driver was murdered,” the soft vibrating voice said. “You knew that.”

De Gier knew nothing.

“Didn’t you tell me just now that you’re a private eye?” the sergeant asked. She curved her thumb and index finger around her eye.

De Gier said he was.

“And before that you were a Murder Brigade detective?”

He was.

“Many years?”

Many years.

Amsterdam, Sergeant Symonds said, was a lovely city, she had spent a week there, as a Police Academy student, during an exchange program. She had stayed in the youth hostel near
Vondel Park. Low priced. Nice people. Free beer at the Heineken brewery and a harpsichord and two flutes concert at the cathedral, the Wester Church it was called, she believed. Beautiful music. Raw herring at a street stall, with onions, hold the capers.

De Gier said he was glad she had liked his city.

“But there was quite a bit of trash floating in your canals.”

The trash problem had been handled since then, de Gier said. Dogs had been trained to use the streets’s gutters. Car theft was down somewhat and street crooks playing the shell game were now being detained and lectured on human values. The problem of stolen bicycles would be next. Mugging was an exclusive now, done only by foreigners who could not obtain free heroin at city clinics. When caught these unfortunates were promptly deported.

“You retired early?” Sergeant Symonds asked. “How come? Col-league?”

De Gier thought that the sergeant pronounced the syllables in an irritating manner.

“No pension?”

De Gier admitted to not having waited for his pension.

She poured from a green metal thermos. De Gier tasted. “Delicious.” She said that she had bought the coffee at the Fleming Street supermarket. She wheeled her chair back, half-opened the lower drawers of her desk and used them as foot rests. She looked innocent, friendly, across the rim of her coffee mug. She asked if de Gier, an experienced criminal investigator, would care to think along with her. Now wasn’t this an interesting case? Where to start though? At the presence of three foreign ranking for-mer po-lice-men? Okay?

“Okay,” de Gier said, disturbed somewhat by the way she cut up the words “former” and “policemen.”

Okay, Symonds said. She was pleased he was thinking along with her so nicely. And these three pension-ignoring former policeman, sorry, the commissaris was collecting his pension, yes? Good. But the other two disdained a monthly income for the rest of their possibly long lives? How come? Did the new born private eyes enjoy private resources? And another thing, the trio arrived in Key West, drug-town of the Florida Keys, straight from Amsterdam, drug-capital of Western Europe, and these three in-di-vi-du-als …

De Gier didn’t like the way she said that.

 … were driving a new rented Cadillac in the sergeant’s jurisdiction, aiming the expensive vehicle at the most elegant restaurant in sight, Lobster Lateta—jeez, just a little ball of dark chocolate with a bit of whipped cream on the side would be around nineteen dollars at LL—and there said trio met, in the most violent way imaginable, even for Key West (where a Cuban shot his friend last week for refusing to share his bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich), a British gentleman dressed up in a thousand dollars’ worth of Lone Ranger clothing—now, wasn’t all this somewhat extraordinary, yes?

“Maybe goddam crazy?” The sergeant looked neither innocent or friendly now. “Right? Colleague?”

“Not crazier than anything else.” De Gier declared that, after having reflected and studied the miracle of existence, anything—and he meant more than a gentleman/cowboy dying, a rental jeep racing between a trombone-playing Navajo and a rickshaw-riding mummy, more than the Milky Way galaxy, more than the occurrence of a universe, or even the phenomenon
of space—de Gier declared that anything at all came about by happenstance, was just there, for no reason.

The sergeant stared at him.

“Chance occurrences,” de Gier said, “explain you and me too.” He smiled reassuringly. “And there is no guilt.”

Sergeant Symonds smiled widely. She liked that. A perfect construction. Philosophically correct. And didn’t de Gier speak nice English. Weren’t Dutchmen true internationalists? She herself had taken Spanish as second language. In Key West one simply had to.

De Gier appreciated the compliment. He returned it too. Spanish was indeed a beautiful, but difficult language. He himself could barely read it.

“Is that so?” asked the sergeant politely.

De Gier saw her in a straw hat (he was wearing one himself) and he and she were walking on a clean raked beach, as their hands touched and they stopped for a moment to kiss, while she pressed her bosom against his chest, and violins behind the mangroves—never mind the violins, just a double bass and a guitar and maybe some piano, a young Ella Fitzgerald singing a ballad in scat—while de Gier imagined these pleasantries the actual scene was changing.

Ramona jumped up, leaned on her desk, spoke raucously as if coffee beans were being ground in her throat. She said they weren’t here together to sweet-talk each other. Nothing accidental had occurred. The offed Brit was no tourist in a cowboy hat but a fucking bank inspector out of London. He was here on duty. His fucking inspection had been broken off by violent unnatural fucking MURDER. By deliberate fucking with his fucking rented car. Okay?

“You’re sure?” de Gier asked, no longer just erotically but also criminally interested. “How so?”

Symonds stared again. She sighed. She had sat down. Her voice became veiled and jazzy again. “Now, col-league. I am only supposing. I construct a hypothesis based on observed facts. I personally visited Stewart-Wynne’s hotel room which is in the same hotel where you happen to be staying.”

“Eggemoggin Hotel?”

“Couldn’t you find anything more expensive?”

De Gier smiled expectantly. He noted the coffee grinder was starting up again. “So?” the sergeant asked hoarsely, “is that why you left the police? You prefer the luxury of corruption?”

De Gier kept smiling while spreading his hands in innocent defense.

She showed him a visiting card retrieved from the Englishman’s hotel room.
THOMAS STEWART-WYNNE, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, QUADRANT BANK, MAYFAIR
, L
ONDON
.

“You think the victim was on the trail of some financial trickery?” de Gier asked.

Symonds nodded.

“A big loan gone bad? So the other party wanted to get rid of the inspector? Hence the death ride on Duval Street?”

Ramona used her phone. “Harry? Mind coming up here a moment? You and Bert?”

A white-coated technician and Harry the bicycle policeman brought in three Polaroids. De Gier was allowed to look too. The technician used a pencil as pointer. “Here is the hinge of the accelerator, cut through, but not quite. See that spring here and the hook? Shouldn’t be there. Kick the accelerator and this
breaks and that hooks on, and your vehicle is out of control at full speed. Now for the brake, same thing other way round, ram the pedal but nothing works. So here we go, subject drives along Duval revving his engine a bit to make an impression, the thingamajig catches and he is going at full speed, so now he hits the brake but he just keeps going. The technician laughed sadly. “On Duval, when the cruiseships are in, at the height of the season!”

“Couldn’t he have switched into neutral?” de Gier asked.

Policeman Harry didn’t think Stewart-Wynne had time to consider that option, “not in a car with everything just a bit different, plus he is a Brit used to driving on the left side. Not a young man either. Slow reactions.”

Sergeant Symonds looked at de Gier kindly. “Some nightmare, huh? So did
you
mess with that jeep, Rai-nus?” She said his name carefully, after glancing at her notebook where she had written it down in large square letters.

Good work. The sergeant had kept her voice flat. Friendly information, shared with a pal, changed imperceptibly into accusation. De Gier knew the trick. He had performed it himself often enough. The relaxed suspect confesses. As soon as he does, handcuffs click. The suspect is a prisoner and the detectives have a beer around the corner.

Stupid suspect.

“No,” de Gier said flatly.

Bert the technician and Harry the policeman left the room.

Symonds sighed. “You know what is interesting, Rai-nus?”

De Gier found the whole thing interesting, that he was interrogated here at an air-conditioned American police station for instance, by a beautiful uniformed woman. Politely. Correctly.
That the lady had caught him, could lock him up if she felt like it. He didn’t know any black women, not intimately. He would like to. Perhaps he could get her to help him spend his treasure, here in out-of-the-way Key West, in the lawless Bahamas, even in sinister Mexico. Swimming deep under the surface, between colorful coral reefs, his legs between hers.