A Widow for One Year

Harry then told her the whole story. The story moved Mrs. Bosman to tears, but the old lady was no fool. “Of course I knew that my dear husband was visiting the prostitute,” she confided to Harry. “But the way I see it, she did me a kindness—and she did keep him from dying in the street!”

Only a few years before her murder, Rooie Dolores had reduced her annual vacations to one warm-weather holiday in April or May. She’d spent her last Christmases with the Bosmans; there were so many grandchildren that Rooie had a lot of presents to buy. “It’s still cheaper than going skiing,” she’d told Harry. And one dark winter—it was the winter before she was killed—Rooie had asked Harry to join her on her warm-weather holiday on a fifty-fifty basis.

“You’re the one with the travel books,” she’d teased him. “ You pick the place and I’ll go with you.” Whatever had been the charm of those divorced fathers, taking perpetual vacations with their subdued children, it had finally worn thin with her.

Harry had imagined taking a trip with Rooie for a long time, yet her invitation both surprised and embarrassed him. The first place he’d thought of being with her was Paris. (Imagine being in Paris with a prostitute!)

Harry had started writing in the margins of his travel books, and underlining key sentences about the appropriate hotels. One of the first hotels Harry considered staying in was the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire, the same hotel where Ted had taken the photograph of Marion with Thomas’s and Timothy’s feet . But the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire was not as highly recommended as the Hôtel de l’Abbaye or the Duc de Saint-Simon. Harry had decided that he wanted to stay somewhere in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, but he believed that the choice of their hotel should be left to Rooie.

Harry brought his Paris guidebooks, replete with his underlinings and marginalia, to Rooie’s room on the Bergstraat. He’d had to linger in the street until she finished with a customer.

“Oh, Harry!” she’d cried. “You want to take an old whore to Paris ? April in Paris!”

Neither of them had ever been to Paris. It would never have worked out. Harry could imagine Rooie liking Notre-Dame and the Tuileries, and the antique shops that he’d only read about; he could see her happily on his arm in the gardens of the Luxembourg. But he couldn’t quite picture her at the Louvre. After all, she lived in Amsterdam and she’d not once been to the Rijksmuseum! How could Harry have taken her to Paris?

“Actually, I don’t think I can get away,” he hedged. “April gets busy in de Wallen .”

“Then we’ll go in March,” Rooie told him. “We’ll go in May ! What’s it matter?”

“I don’t think I can really do it, Rooie,” Harry had admitted to her.

Prostitutes are familiar enough with rejection; they handle it pretty well.

After he’d got the call that Rooie had been murdered, Harry looked around her room on the Bergstraat for the guidebooks, which Rooie hadn’t returned. They were stacked on the narrow reading table in the WC.

He also noted that the murderer had bitten Rooie, and that the way her body had been carelessly pushed off the bed made it seem there had been nothing ritualistic about the killing. She’d most likely been strangled, but there were no thumbprint or fingerprint bruises at her throat; this pointed to her being choked with a forearm, the hoofdagent had thought.

That was when he saw the wardrobe closet with the shoes pointed toes-out; a pair of them had been kicked out of alignment with the others, and there was a space in the middle of the row where another pair of shoes would have fit.

Shit! There was a witness ! Harry had known then. He knew that Rooie had been one of the few prostitutes who went out of her way to do a kindness for the first-timers. He also knew the way she did it: she let the first-timers watch her with a customer, just to see how it was done. She’d hidden a lot of girls in her wardrobe closet. Harry had heard about Rooie’s method at one of the meetings for first-time prostitutes at The Red Thread. But Rooie hadn’t gone to those meetings for quite some time; Harry wasn’t even sure if The Red Thread still held meetings for first-time prostitutes.

In the open doorway to Rooie’s window room, the sniveling girl who’d found Rooie’s body sat sobbing. Her name was Anneke Smeets. She wa

s a recovered heroin addict—at least she’d convinced Rooie that she was recovered. Anneke Smeets was not dressed for working in the window; usually she wore a leather halter top, which Harry had seen hanging in the closet.

But in the doorway Anneke looked plain and disheveled. She wore a baggy black sweater with stretched-out elbows and jeans that were ripped in both knees. She had no makeup on, not even lipstick, and her hair was dirty and stiff. The only suggested wildness, amid everything that was plain about her, was that Anneke Smeets had a tattoo of a lightning bolt (albeit a small one) on the inside of her right wrist.

“It appears that someone might have been watching from the wardrobe closet,” Harry began.

Still sobbing, the girl nodded her head. “It looks like it,” she agreed.

“Was she helping out a first-timer?” Harry asked Anneke.

“Nobody I knew!” said the sobbing girl.

And so Harry Hoekstra suspected—even before Ruth Cole’s eyewitness account arrived at the Warmoesstraat station—that there’d been a witness.

“Oh, God!” Anneke suddenly cried. “Nobody picked her daughter up from school! Who’s going to tell her daughter?”

“Somebody already picked her up,” Harry lied. “Somebody already told the daughter.”

But he told the truth, a few days later, when his best friend among the detectives, Nico Jansen, wanted a word with Harry—in private. Harry knew what the “word” would be about.

There were the Paris guidebooks on Jansen’s desk. Harry Hoekstra wrote his name in all his books. Nico Jansen opened one of the travel books to the part about the Hôtel Duc de Saint-Simon. Harry had written in the margin: The heart of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, a great location.

“Isn’t that your handwriting, Harry?” Jansen asked him.

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