“Were you planning a trip with her?” Detective Jansen asked. Harry had been a cop for more than three decades; at last he knew how it felt to be a suspect.
Harry explained that Rooie took a lot of trips—all Harry did was read the travel books. He’d long been in the habit of lending her his guidebooks, Harry said. She’d been accustomed to asking him where she should stay and what she should see.
“But you didn’t have a relationship with Rooie, did you, Harry?” Nico asked. “You never actually took a trip with her, did you?”
“No, I never did,” Harry replied.
It was generally a good idea to tell the cops the truth. Harry hadn’t had a relationship with Rooie; he’d never taken a trip with her, either. That much was true. But the cops didn’t have to know everything . It wasn’t necessary for Nico Jansen to know that Harry had been tempted. Oh, how he’d been tempted!
Sergeant Hoekstra Finds His Witness
Nowadays, Sergeant Hoekstra wore his police uniform only on those occasions when the red-light district was overrun with tourists or out-of-towners. (He’d worn it to Rooie’s funeral, too.) And when it came to giving tours, Harry was the 2nd District’s cop of choice—not only because he spoke better English (and German) than any other policeman in the Warmoesstraat station but also because he was the acknowledged expert on the red-light district, and he loved to take people there.
He’d once shown de Wallen to a group of nuns. He not infrequently showed “the little walls” to schoolchildren. The window prostitutes would calmly look the other way when they saw the children coming, but once a woman in a window had abruptly closed her curtain; later she told Harry that she’d recognized her own child among the group.
Sergeant Hoekstra was also the 2nd District’s cop of choice when it came to talking to the media. Because false confessions were common, Harry had quickly learned never to give the exact details of a crime to the press; on the contrary, he often provided the journalists with false details—this tended to expose the crazies in a hurry. In the case of “Red” Dolores’s murder, he’d managed to draw out a couple of false confessions by telling the journalists that Rooie had been strangled after “a violent struggle.”
The two false confessions were from men who said they’d choked Rooie to death with their hands. One of them had persuaded his wife to scratch his face and the backs of his hands; the other had convinced his girlfriend to kick him repeatedly in the shins. In both cases, the men looked as if they’d been party to “a violent struggle.”
As for the actual method of Rooie’s murder, the detectives had wasted no time at their computers; they’d conveyed the necessary information to Interpol in Wiesbaden, Germany, whereupon they discovered that there’d been a similar slaying of a prostitute in Zurich about five years earlier.
All Rooie had been able to do was to kick off one of her shoes. The prostitute in the area of the Langstrasse in Zurich had managed a little more resistance; she’d broken a fingernail in what must have been a brief struggle. Some fabric, presumably from the killer’s suit pants, was caught under the prostitute’s broken nail; it was a high-quality fabric, but so what?
The most convincing connection between the Zurich murder and Rooie’s murder in Amsterdam was that in Zurich there’d also been a standing lamp with the lamp shade and the lightbulb removed but undamaged. The Zurich police hadn’t known the part about photographing the victim. The murder in Zurich hadn’t had a witness; nor had anyone mailed the Zurich police a tube of Polaroid print coater with a perfect print of the presumed killer’s right thumb.
None of the prints taken from the prostitute’s room off the Langstrasse in Zurich had matched the Amsterdam thumbprint, however, and in Wiesbaden there was no matching thumbprint in the Interpol file, either. The second print on the tube was a clear, small print of a right index finger. It indicated that the probable witness had picked up the print coater with “her” thumb and index finger at either end. (The witness must have been a woman, everyone had decided, because the fingerprint was so much smaller than the print of the probable murderer’s thumb.)
Another small but clear print of the witness’s right index finger had been taken from one of the shoes pointed toes-out in Rooie’s wardrobe closet. And the same right index finger had touched the inside doorknob of Rooie’s window room—doubtless when the witness had let herself out on the street, after the murderer had gone. Whoever she was, she was right-handed, and she had a glass-thin, perfectly centered scar on her right index finger.
But Interpol had no match for the probable witness’s right index finger, either—not that Harry had expected Interpol to match that print. He was sure that his witness wasn’t a criminal. And after a week of talking to the area’s prostitutes, Harry was also sure that his witness wasn’t a prostitute. She was probably a goddamn sex-tourist!
In a short period of time, less than a week, every prostitute on the Bergstraat had seen the likely witness as many as a half-dozen times! And Anneke Smeets had talked to her. The mystery woman had asked for Rooie one night, and Anneke—in her leather halter top, and brandishing a dildo—had told the tourist Rooie’s alleged reason for not working at night. Rooie was with her daughter, Anneke had said.
The prostitutes on the Korsjespoortsteeg had seen the mystery woman, too. One of the younger whores told Harry that his witness was a lesbian, but the other prostitutes had disagreed; they’d been wary of the woman because they couldn’t tell what she wanted.
As for the men who walked and walked past the window prostitutes— always looking, always horny, but never making a decision—they were called hengsten (“stallions”), and the prostitutes who’d seen Ruth Cole walking past their windows called her a female hengst . But of course there is no such thing as a female stallion, which is why the mystery woman made the prostitutes uneasy.
One of them said to Harry: “She looked like a reporter.” (Reporters made the prostitutes very uneasy.)
A foreign journalist? Sergeant Hoekstra had rejected the possibility. Most of the foreign journalists who came to Amsterdam with a professional interest i
n prostitution were told to talk to him .
From the prostitutes in de Wallen, Harry discovered that the mystery woman hadn’t always been alone. There’d been a younger man with her, maybe a university student. While the witness Harry was looking for was in her thirties and had spoken only English, the boy had definitely been Dutch.
That had answered one question for Sergeant Hoekstra: If his missing witness was an English-speaking foreigner, who had written the eyewitness account in Dutch? And some additional information shed a little light on the carefully printed document that the witness had mailed to Harry. A tattooist whom Harry regarded as a handwriting expert had looked at the meticulous lettering and concluded that the text had been copied .
The tattooist’s name was Henk, and he did most of the lettering at the tattoo museum in the red-light district, the so-called House of Pain. (His specialty was a poem—any poem you wanted—tattooed in the shape of a woman’s body.) According to him, the witness’s pen had paused too long on every letter; only someone copying a foreign language would have written each letter so slowly. “Who has to work this hard not to make a spelling mistake?” Henk had asked Harry. “ Someone who doesn’t know the language—that’s who.”
The prostitutes in de Wallen did not think Harry’s witness and the Dutch boy had been a sexual couple. “It was not just the age difference,” said the Thai prostitute whom Ruth and Wim had visited on the Barndesteeg. “I could tell they’d never had sex with each other.”
“Maybe they were working up to it,” Harry had suggested. “Maybe they were going to have sex.”
“I didn’t think so,” the Thai prostitute said. “They couldn’t even tell me what they wanted. They just wanted to watch, but they didn’t even know what they wanted to watch!”
The other Thai prostitute who remembered the unusual couple was the old sadist with a reputation for terrorizing her clients. “The Dutch boy had a beeeg one,” she declared. “He really wanted to do it. But his mommy wouldn’t let him.”
“That boy was ready to fuck anything, except me,” the transvestite from Ecuador told Harry. “The woman was merely curious. She wasn’t going to have sex. She just wanted to know about it.”