“You went to the funeral?” said Dirk, a sturdy detective who preferred dogs to people. “And then came home to a dead neighbor? Some job we got, right? But whatever, we just keep on keepin’ on. So where’s this Koos Jollema you want to talk to?” He leaned out the Cordoba’s passenger window and yelled, “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” Then he turned back to Felix. “Just Koos, huh, no middle name? His baby sister had one: Fetty Sjoukje Jollema.”
Felix had always assumed that Fetty was a nickname. Amsterdammers loved nicknames, and one look at Fetty told you exactly where hers had come from. In fact, he’d always thought she was called Fatty, just spoken with an Amsterdam accent.
“An original Frisian name, Felix, a name to be proud of.”
It sounded like Dirk might himself have Frisian blood in him.
“Supposedly died of a heart attack.”
Which might well have been the end of the story, except the case had turned out to be not quite that simple. The coroner found bruises on her throat, and her apartment had been ransacked.
“And we caught a guy goin’ through the place.”
The guy was Vladimir. The officers who’d responded to the call had found him in the living room. Fetty lay stretched out on the carpet, and Vladimir was digging around in an open drawer.
“He handed us this bullshit story that some other guy had threatened him with a bottle right outside the dead lady’s door, then took off in a handicapped car. He’d been walkin’ past the house when he heard a scream, which is why he went up, to make sure the neighbor lady was okay. So what were we supposed to make of that, Felix? We stuck him in a holding cell so he could think over his story. Anyway, we were too busy with other cases to deal with him, if I can call this a case.”
“His wife says he wanted to ask the man about his Canta. She’s worried about him.”
“I was locked up in a cell, my wife would worry too.”
“You could have let him call home and tell her what was going on.”
“Come on, Felix. We’re cops, not the Salvation Army.” Dirk gave him a sidelong glance. “You knew Fetty. She have anything worth stealin’ tucked away in her drawers?”
How was Felix supposed to answer that question? Instead, he avoided it. “Let’s see what the brother has to say for himself. What was he doing there? He hadn’t been to see her in years.”
“What I hear, he’s not the kind of guy you invite over for tea. He’s done time, Felix, two years for aggravated assault — way back when, but still. Not to mention several arrests for public drunkenness.”
Koos Jollema lived at the end of the Lijnbaansgracht, the slender canal that formed the western border of the Jordaan. The city wall had once stretched along the far side of the canal, but in later years it had been replaced by a long row of cheap rental units squashed side by side.
There were plenty of similar one-room apartments in the Jordaan too. They were claustrophobic little dumps, which was why so many of their residents spent much of their time in the neighborhood cafés. Which, according to one of his neighbors, was where they were bound to find Koos.
“One hundred percent chance he’s drinking himself stupid at the Van der Kruk,” she told them.
And, sure enough, they spotted a red Canta right around the corner from the Café Van der Kruk, on a side street where little had happened over the last few hundred years, other than a steady decline. The café itself was shabby enough to fit right in, nothing more than a room in which to sit and drink. In addition to the bar, there was a scattering of tables, each topped with a length of Persian carpet that wasn’t antique, just old. It was quiet inside.
The bartender was a heavy man with a few remaining strands of black hair combed over the top of his head and plastered to his scalp. He knew what Felix and Dirk did for a living before they even opened their mouths.
“Koos, you got company,” he called. “Cops. You been fucking the apes in the zoo again?”
Koos sat alone at a table next to a door along the back wall.
Dirk headed toward him. Felix stayed put by the front door.
“Relax,” said the bartender. “That’s the bathroom. No windows, no way out. And he can’t run, anyway.”
Fetty’s brother struggled to his feet. He was a little fellow with a deeply lined face and baggy pouches beneath his eyes. He staggered out from behind the table, and they saw that he dragged his right leg when he walked. He was clearly drunk.
“She send you after me?” he growled. “Jus’ ’cause I took a bottle of her whiskey? She don’t have enough to bitch about without that? I should’ve smacked her in the mouth with it and knocked that guy’s block off, the dirty yuppie.” He saw Felix looking at his leg. “Yeah, why don’t you take a picture? That fucking bastard knocked me from the deck down into the hold. I could’ve died. My knee never did heal right. And they said it was my fault I stuck a knife in him. And then my sister just totally wrote me off.”
“We’d like to talk with you about your sister,” said Felix.
They brought Koos back to his apartment, but once Dirk saw the condition of the place he insisted they go elsewhere. “This joint’s a pigsty! My dog would turn up her nose. And Brother Koos stinks to high heaven. Good thing your car’s already a wreck, Felix. At least it can’t get any worse. Come on, let’s take him someplace nice and quiet.”
Felix agreed. The only thing he could see in the apartment that wasn’t filthy was the opened bottle of whiskey on the table. He tried a cabinet door in the kitchen, looking for a glass, and his hand came away sticky. Koos apparently put things away without bothering to wash them.
“There’s no money here, so he can’t have stolen any,” Dirk said. Of course, Felix already knew where Fetty’s money was.
They saw Koos staring at the whiskey.
“Take it along,” said Felix.
Dirk wasn’t so sure. “You don’t think we’ll get in trouble?”
“He’s not going to tell anyone.”
It was a brief ride to the Palmgracht, with Koos in the backseat, a small glass of whiskey in his hand. Dirk sat beside him. Koos looked ready to fall asleep, but Dirk poked him in the ribs to keep him upright.
“Come on, pal. This ain’t a cab here.”
They listened to his story. Koos denied having killed his sister, but he showed no empathy or sorrow at her death.
“She was my sister, sure, but she was a nobody. Yeah, I grabbed her by the throat, but I didn’t hurt her. She shouldn’t’ve blown me off like she did. Wouldn’t even let me have a shot of her whiskey. But she called me, you know? I mean, I don’t have a phone, but she called my neighbor and had her go get me, and then she told me this big story how she’d come into a shitload of money, so now she could make it up to her bastard son. Well, fuck him, he don’t need money up in heaven, they taught me that in Sunday school. Now she can spend the rest of eternity up there with him. He can show her around, he’s been there long enough to know the ropes. That’s what I went to her place to tell her. ‘It’s not true,’ she whined, ‘it’s not true!’ I was lying, I wasn’t gonna get a cent of her money. What was I supposed to do, just sit there and take it?”
Dirk glanced at Felix. “You have any idea what he’s talkin’ about?”
“Hear him out.”