Just a Corpse at Twilight (12 page)

"Maybe a good way to go," Grijpstra said.

"You figured it out?" Aki asked. Grijpstra sat quietly while the Ford product sped along.

"Getting hungry, Krip?"

He was but he didn't want to eat at any of the fast food places that they passed once in a while: slabs of concrete behind plastic signs. Beth had known of an inn with gourmet food and Grijpstra read the map that she had marked with arrows, giving Aki clear directions.

"Aren't we a deadly combination?" Aki said when they sat on the inn's terrace, facing a pond with a collection of exotic ducks and geese.

"And how do you like these gorgeous fowl, Krip?" Grijpstra knew the birds' names.

"You took biology too, Krip?"

He told her he painted birds, in the Dutch Golden Age tradition, a time when Dutch merchants liked to keep exotic fowl on their country estates and had them portrayed for extra glory.

"And now you see them in America. More Belgian steamed mussels? More French bread? This is America, Krip, we indulge every desire. You don't have to go anywhere to get anything, it's all right here. You solved the puzzle yet, Krip?"

Grijpstra thought so. Beth's father, when he disappeared, was eighty years old and nearly blind so he wouldn't have been able to drive on unfamiliar roads. He had driven home after leaving the cemetery, where else would he have gone? But he hadn't gotten home. On the way home he had become sick or had fallen asleep, like the driver of the overturned car on the interstate just now. A stroke or a cardiac arrest made him slump over the wheel and stamp on the gas at the same time. Being an old man he was driving an old car, a tank of the gas-guzzling type. The car had left the road and barreled into the forest, which, like most in northern Maine, grew up to both sides of the rural road. The car flattened saplings and brushes until stopped by a tree trunk. There the car sat. The saplings behind it bent back.

"What about that big old Packard's massive tracks?" Aki asked.

"This happened in winter?"

"Yes."

"So there might have been snow," Grijpstra said. "Snow covered the car's tracks after the car entered the forest."

"You're good," Aki said.

Grijpstra looked pleased. "That's what happened?"

"Exactly."

"The sheriff sent out search parties?" Grijpstra asked.

"He saw ravens circling the next morning," Aki said, "and an eagle. Eagles are scavengers too. And the big sea gulls. They have cruel eyes. They go for your eyes first, they don't wait for you to die."

"Was Beth's father dead before the birds found him?" Grijpstra asked.

"Oh yes," Aki said, "there was an autopsy. The heart attack must have killed Big Daddy straight off."

Grijpstra enjoyed the cream pie Aki ordered, a Florida pie made from limes, foreign to Maine. He dozed in the car until, close to Boston, the traffic became noisy.

"Motel out of town?" Aki asked. "Hotel in town? Hotels will be expensive. Any preference, Krip?"

He waved his credit card. "Nothing but the best."

Aki had heard about the Parker House being good. "But
very
expensive. You really don't mind?"

He didn't. He liked the skyscrapers lining the parkway and the way Aki handled the car, driving close to cabs so that she could ask their drivers for directions.

"Hold it Krip." The car shot across a sidewalk and dived into a garage. "This is it. Out you go."

Bellboys took over, parking the car, carrying luggage, driving the elevator, ushering them through the lobby.

Grijpstra ordered separate suites. Aki canceled that. "One suite will do." He protested. Til get lonely, Krip. The big city reminds me."

He worried. There was Nellie, there was disease, but then there was safe sex, but he didn't want safe sex either. Besides, why
not
separate suites? What could a thirtyish extraordinarily attractive homosexual Polynesian female want with a sixty-year-old slightly obese white heterosexual male? Information? Information about what?

He missed de Gier. De Gier, while roaming the alleys of good old Amsterdam, would have had something smart to say about the situation. Now de Gier, auto-induced schizophrenic meddler with fourth-dimensional reality, was a goddamn suspect himself.

Aki and Grijpstra talked over dinner, at an age-old oyster bar in Boston's harbor district, eating quahogs stuffed in their shells, root beer for Grijpstra, tonic and lime for Akiapola'au, served by old, ugly, rough but not uncaring waitresses.

"No alcohol, Krip?"

"I can't smoke anymore," Grijpstra said, tapping his chest.

"Can't drink without smoking?"

"True," Grijpstra said. "Yourself?"

"I'm alcoholic.

He left it at that, watching Boston women. He thought Bostonian women looked like women from The Hague— quiet, dressed with a kind of in-between taste that wouldn't commit them one way or another.

"Want to know when I stopped?" Aki asked.

"Being alcoholic?"

She laughed. "I will always be
that.
Stopped drinking, I mean."

"Tell me."

"When I came to Maine two years ago," Aki said. "You want to know why?"

"Tell me."

"You sure?"

Grijpstra was sure.

"Because of hopping backwards up to a urinal in an army barracks restroom with my clothes off and shy soldiers staring."

"I see."

"Do you?" She laughed. "Ofcourse. You're a detective. I had to pee so bad and I had no idea where I was and I was so pleased I found that toilet and then it was too high and the soldiers came in and they didn't get it either." She laughed again. "Itfs the sort of tale you hear at AA meetings. They keep being told in the hope that they'll go away in the telling but they don't, and then you want to drink again."

"Or not," Grijpstra said, smiling.

"Never," Aki said, "never, Krip." She reached across the table and patted his hand. "You're such a nice man. Isn't this fun? You and I together away from everything. Are you taking me anywhere good afterward?"

"Music?" Grijpstra asked.

"There's good music in Boston, Krip."

"We'll do that," Grijpstra said. "Now tell me about how you got to that army barracks."

"Begin at the beginning? You'll still take me out even if I depress you?"

"I'll still take you out."

The beginning was at a Kona Coast coffee plantation on the big island of Hawaii, idyllic still: barefoot brown children playing in the surf and singing—"I can hold high notes, Krip"—and the volcano lighting up the beach at night and Aki's parents the nicest ever and good marks at school. There was the cat, Poopy, and the dog, Snoopy, and papayas and avocados on the garden trees and dancing in the shopping mall with Aunt Emma beating her gourds and shuffling her big soft feet, coaching all the little kids ofthe neighborhood, any kind of little kids, some of them so white you could hardly see them in the light, some black as midnight, all the native kids golden all over.

Grijpstra laughed.

"You like that, Krip?" She sighed. She wasn't going to tell him the rest of it, then she did. Her father started up with an older ugly woman, nobody knew why,
he
didn't know why, and he lost his job. And they were in a trailer that had been on fire and was still blistered outside. Her father was drinking and beating up people, his car got dented, he wasn't even proud that Aki got a full scholarship in Honolulu and then she started drinking too. Dope, too, everything. Honolulu is the Far East and marijuana is a cash crop in Hawaii.

"Heroin?"

Not too much, she didn't like the needle but it liked her, like the boyfriend did. He with the different faces, who took herto the mainland to keep himin a style he wasn't accustomed to at all, by taking weird men in and out of motel rooms, for years, all the way across the continent, to Maine in the end, where the boyfriend (she kept getting away from him and he kept coming back in different guises, colors, ages) assumed a military face and she was in the barrackswith her clothes off, jumping up, trying to reach that china bowl screwed against the wall out of reach, with all the jocks watching. They weren't even laughing, they were too embarrassed.

"Alcohol?"

"What else?" Aki asked. "It got me arrested then, but I was out of it. The cops might have released me into my family's custody but there wasn't any family left so I finished up with some nuns."

"That's when you became lesbian?"

"I always preferred my own side. With Hawaiians the gay have their own place." Her hand was on his again. "You mind?"

Grijpstra said he was from Amsterdam, which was like . . .

"Key West?"

He didn't know where that was.

"Provincetown?"

Never heard of Provincetown.

"San Francisco?"

Grijpstra remembered watching TV pictures ofmostly beautiful men and women waving protest banners down steep streets and thinking at that moment that the New World was behind the times. In Amsterdam it was getting to be the other way around, with a heterosexual majority trying to move out from the shade of guilty regularity. "Yes," he said happily, "San Francisco."

They were both smiling, having a wonderful time.

"Akiapola'au," Grijpstra asked, "are you and Beth watching the coast for drug trafficking?"

"Daddy-O," she said, her face hardly cooling, "you don't have to be so clever." She leaned over to peck his cheek. "I was about to tell you all about it."

Chapter 10

"So what eke is new?" de Gier asked Grijpstra across a table at Beth's Diner, where he was positioning the table's honey bear within a circle of sauce bottles. "I could have told you that. Isn't that the way law enforcement works? After Aki was treated at the Hospital of the Loving Little Lamb in Lordsville, the cops must have jumped her, with a shitload of charges to back them up. She had been running around all over the country, being bad..."

"Did she tell you how bad?"

De Gier waved vaguely. "Overdrawn checks, theft of rental cars, stealing from Johns, drug charges, and"—he dropped his eyelids halfway—"I think she said this. . .
mail
fraud?
Anyway, there she was, in the hollow of the law's hand, so to speak. Rather than being squeezed, she became an informer. She works for the DEA, watching the coast."

"What's mail fraud?"

"Forgot to ask," de Gier said. "I think the post office here has its own inspection." He waved around him. "Free democracies are tricky places."

"This one has good roads," Grijpstra said. "I like that interstate. I tell you, if I ever get really distraught back home, I'll take that El Al plane out here again and rent one of these Ford products of yours and just
drive."

"You'll fill asleep."

"I'll hire a beautiful lesbian lady driver."

"Aki won't duplicate." De Gier smiled. "So we're doing good." The smile thinned out. "Both you and I, being experienced interrogators, get through to subject. She tells all, in-cludingand up to how the DE A directs her tojameson, Maine. She needs a job for a front and there's Beth looking for a compatible live-in waitress." De Gier tried a new configuration, Honey Bear dominated by the combined forces ofWorcester-shire and horseradish sauce. "The princess and her princess buy a CD player and listen to jazz trumpets for ever after."

They studied their menus.

Grijpstra looked over his.
"So what?"

De Gier nodded. "We should play that. I've got it all on paper. I've been trying to learn but it's hard to transcribe Miles, he sounds incomprehensible at half time, you ever noticed that? The man is just too subtle. At half time that probably doubles. Now if you play Clifford Brown at half time nothing much changes. But all-enlightened practitioner Davis.. ."

"Yes. Yes."

"You listening?"

"Sure," Grijpstra said. "But I meant 'So what?'—not the tune, the question. So what if Aki tells us she's spying on us and that she loves us and won't tell so we tell her what we're doing here and she tells on us anyway? The foreigners she has nothing to do with anyway thrown out? The tricksters tricked?"

De Gier laughed.

Grijpstra shook a heavy head. "Not funny, Rinus."

"But we didn't tell her. . . No!" De Gier put his hand over his mouth. "You
did
tell her? About me and Lorraine? You didn't. Did you? Of course you did. She seduced you. Alone, shy, lonesome . . . oh, shit. . ."

Grijpstra grinned. "Scared you?"

"So you didn't tell her anything," de Gier said. "Okay, this is what I know. Aki and Lorraine were friendly. Sister biologists. They've been out kayaking on occasion, to hear the loons chant at daybreak. Has Aki missed Lorraine yet?"

"She didn't say so."

"So she may still think we're here for drugs." De Gier moved more bottles around. "I was smoking pot the night I pushed Lorraine. She gave it to me too. It came from Jeremy Island, it's all over the place there, hidden under trees mostly. The fishermen grow it."

"With the sheriff's blessing?"

"Of course," de Gier said. "Give and take. Yankees are like the Dutch—why fight ifyou can split the dollar mostly your way? But the homegrown stuff is hard work and doesn't compare in quality to what Hairy Harry is bringing in."

"Or doesn't bring in."

"What?"

Aki came to take their order. De Gier ordered crab rolls for both. "Aren't you lucky?" Aki said to Grijpstra. "You get to eat again and I rush straight back to work. Aren't we busy?" More fishermen were coming in, she had to hurry off.

"Didn't Aki tell you about the arrests near the Point?" Grijpstra asked.

"I heard," de Gier said. "You mean the DEA missing out on the truckers who came to pick up a ship's load of Jamaican or Guatemalan or some other top-quality pot, hidden here near the Point? I read about it. So what happened really?"

"Aki didn't tell you?" Grijpstra looked surprised. "I thought she told all."

"Not all." De Gier looked modest. "I'm not the fatherly type."

"I'm not sure about the details," Grijpstra said. "She said someone spotted the shipment from the air, so that was probably Ishmael. Her contact told her he saw stacks ofbales, in camouflage-colored covers hidden on the shore somewhere near here. So Aki tells her secret employer, and the DEA tells Hairy Harry, as it's his turf. Hairy Harry and Billy Boy hide in the woods waiting for someone to pick up the consignment. The DEA is there too, eager pimply youths according to Aki, lots of them, hands on guns, but Hairy Harry, being the local warlord, is in charge."