Where the Bones are Buried

by Jeanne Matthews

  Swan tasted her drink. “I wouldn’t have guessed you could get bourbon in Berlin. And everybody I’ve met speaks perfect English.”

  “But only you can use it to say nothing. Are you telling me that you were present when somebody committed a murder?”

  “Nearby. Believe me, Dinah, I didn’t know it was going to happen.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Ten years ago, Cleon asked me to ride along to Brunswick with him. He said he had to stop off on the way to town to serve a subpoena. Polly drove. We got to this witness’ house and he and Polly went inside. I waited in the car. When they got back, Cleon had blood on his shirt and jacket. He said, ‘It was a bleeping trap,’ and when I asked about the blood, he said he had shot a couple of drug cops.”

  “Weeping Jesus. Cleon killed federal agents and you knew about it?”

  “I was scared to death of him from that day on.”

  “Let me get this straight. It was Cleon who killed these people and not Reiner Hess?”

  “That’s right. I never told a soul for fear of what Cleon might do. I didn’t know until a month ago that Polly had recorded what we said in the car.”

  Dinah took a long drink of her wine, mostly to give herself time to process the rolling revelations. Ten years ago, 2003. Swan had been divorced from Cleon for twenty-five years. She had been married to Hart Pelerin and widowed, and she had remarried three times since then. “What were you doing palling around with Cleon? Were you planning to go back to him?”

  “No. It was supposed to be a friendly drive to Brunswick, that’s all. If I’d known he was going to shoot somebody, I’d never have gone.”

  If Swan didn’t know what Cleon intended, if she just happened to be sitting in his car, she wasn’t liable under the felony murder rule. Of course, she could be prosecuted by a district attorney who didn’t believe her. How could she prove she didn’t know? And if she’d helped Cleon escape, she was guilty of aiding and abetting. With Cleon dead and the other felon blackmailing her, Dinah could understand how she would feel she had no choice but to accede to Pohl’s demands. Still, there were too many loose threads to weave into a coherent whole. “How does Hess fit into this disaster?”

  “I wrote him and asked if he could reason with Polly. Buy him off or scare him off, do something to help me out of this pickle. But that tax scandal has forced the man to go to ground like a hunted fox.”

  “You expected Hess to pay the ransom to Pohl for the recording?”

  “Why not? I thought he would take care of Polly and share some of his money with Margaret and me, for all our trouble. I’ve never given his name to any of that plague of agents who’ve pestered me since Cleon’s death.” She drank a few sips of bourbon. “Anyhow, Reiner was never the villain that Margaret imagines. Cleon may have hidden money from her, but it wasn’t Reiner’s doing. Cleon was the devil incarnate. If it hadn’t been for him—”

  “Oh, stop it. You stayed close to him after your divorce. You stayed close the whole time you were married to my father and long after he died.”

  “I told you I was afraid of Cleon.”

  “Since when, Mom? Ten years? Twenty? When were you first afraid of him?” Dinah felt the old compulsion to ask her straight up if she knew that Cleon had killed Hart Pelerin, but she chickened out again. “You could have been smart and told the feds that Cleon had killed two of their own. They would have locked him away where he couldn’t hurt anyone else.”

  “Smart?” Her eyes glistened with tears. “I had three years of high school on the Big Cypress Reservation. I dropped out after my father hanged himself and I married Cleon the day I turned eighteen. He was already a lawyer, working for Highbrow, Uppity and Snob up in Atlanta. Smart for me has always been to say as little as possible and let other people believe whatever suits them. You don’t have to tell me that I’ve been stupid, that I’ve put myself and Margaret in jeopardy. I just hope it doesn’t suit my daughter to believe that I’m a murderess.”

  Dinah thought of all the times she’d faulted her mother for being glib and superficial, hiding behind her smiles and her charm. It had never occurred to her that the studied nonchalance covered feelings of inferiority.

  The Matthias lookalike returned to take their order and Swan turned on the charm automatically. “Would you recommend something for me? A specialty of Berlin?”

  He recommended the Brandenberger Landente, stuffed duck with red cabbage and potato dumplings. That reminded Swan of a numbered duck she’d had in Paris once, which reminded the waiter of duck-hunting on a private estate on the Baltic last year.

  Dinah hardly heard. Her thoughts were in ferment. She supposed Pohl had recorded Cleon to use as leverage in case they were caught and Cleon tried to lay the blame off on him, but why had he waited until now to threaten Swan? He must have seen her picture among Farber’s Facebook Indians, remembered the recording, and decided to dig it out to fatten his kitty for Barcelona and a new life with Lena.

  “What will you have?”

  “Dinah? The young man asked you a question.”

  “Oh. Just another glass of wine, please.”

  Swan patted his sleeve. “Bring us an extra plate, Kurt. We’ll share the duck.” She ordered another bourbon Presbyterian and sent him away with a grin on his face.

  When they were alone, Dinah said, “How much money did Pohl want from you?”

  “Four hundred thousand Euros. That’s more than a half million dollars. I told him I didn’t have that kind of money, but he didn’t believe me. He said he knew I had the wampum, which I took as a very disparaging word. He said he knew about Panama. He said Cleon told him that’s where he parked his cash.”

  “Why would Cleon entrust a goon like Pohl with his banking info? And why would Pohl think that you inherited it?”

  “I don’t know. I told him you were the only one who could dip into that money.”

  Dinah rubbed her temples. Her mother had thrown her to the wolf. Did Pohl tell anyone else? She would have to think about that later. She could juggle only so many hot potatoes at a time. “If Pohl believed you were going to pay him, why would he run our car off the road and shoot at you before he got the money?”

  “I said you wouldn’t give it to me unless you thought my life was in danger. That’s what that doll was about.”

  A minute went by while Dinah digested yet another lie. She felt as if she were swimming underwater in one of those deep, murky channels of the Suwannee. How could she believe anything Swan said? An old brain twister sprang to mind, something about a lost traveler on an island with two tribes, the Truthful Whitefeet and the Lying Blackfeet. They all wore moccasins so that the traveler couldn’t tell them apart. The only way to ascertain the right directions was to ask a question that both the truth-tellers and the liars would answer in the same way. Dinah couldn’t think of a single question that would produce a straight answer. Anger boiled out of her. “You’ve played us all for fools, haven’t you? Margaret, Pohl, me. And you’re still fooling Margaret, letting her think you need money when you don’t. Your money problem is lying dead in the morgue. Now all you have to do is fool the police.”

  Swan aimed a moist, contrite look over the rim of her glass. “I lied to y’all, I sure did. I don’t know if the truth would’ve worked out any better. Maybe, though it didn’t seem like it would at the time. There’s nothing I can do now but say I’m sorry. I truly am. I hope you won’t be stingy meting out grace, baby. You may need a smidgen of forgiveness yourself someday.”

  Dinah had underestimated her mother’s instinct for the emotional jugular. She thought about her upcoming confession to Thor. A smidgen of forgiveness from him would be a godsend. Anyhow, she didn’t believe that Swan had killed Pohl. Call it filial devotion or hereditary insanity, it amounted to the same thing. Now her first priority was to get her crossed off Lohendorf’s suspect list.

  “
Did you meet Pohl last night?”

  “Yes. He called and told me to meet him at six. I went to the tower like he said, but when I got there he was already dead. I took a gun, but I didn’t fire it.”

  “Jerusalem! How did you smuggle a gun into the country?”

  Kurt returned with the duck and the second round of drinks. Swan smiled absently, but made no attempt to restart the banter. He offloaded the food and departed.

  Swan cupped her hands around the bourbon. “About the gun…”

  “As easy as smuggling kudzu honey, I’m sure. Someday you can regale me with the story of how you bamboozled airport security on two continents. Right now, I need to know if you touched Pohl’s body, or took anything away with you.”

  “I felt inside his coat to try and find the tape. I couldn’t keep from seeing his face.” Her voice quavered. “It was hideous. I can see it still.” She pressed her palms against her cheeks. “Do you think the police will let me go home?”

  “Maybe. But you need to admit that you did know Pohl. It’s your lies that have put their hackles up. You can be sure Lohendorf knows that Pohl spent time in the States. He may even know that he worked for Cleon. Play the ‘old lady’ card. Tell him that Pohl was intimidating you, demanding money. You don’t have to say for what. Having a secret isn’t a crime. Tell him you discovered Pohl’s body, you checked to see if he was still alive, and when you saw blood, you were frightened and ran away.”

  “What if they found the tape? They’ll play it and turn me over to the feds as an accessory to the murders.”

  “We’ll see. You didn’t know what had happened until it was all over and Cleon said what he did. You were probably in shock. But Lohendorf will want an explanation of why Pohl pretended to be Hess.”

  “I had to keep Margaret thinking it was Reiner we were dealin’ with or she wouldn’t have gone along. And Polly agreed it would be best not to use his real name.”

  Dinah was past surprise or anger. She said, “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll hand over your gun. Lohendorf will see it hasn’t been fired. He’ll probably reprimand you for touching the body, but if you stick to the story about checking to see if the man was still alive, that will explain any trace of DNA you may have left behind. You could be deported for misleading the police and smuggling a weapon into the country, but at least you’ll be out from under suspicion of murder.”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that.”

  “I know, I know. We’ll have to get around the tie-in with Hess, but…” The look on Swan’s face stopped her. “What complication were you thinking of?”

  “The gun’s gone missing.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  On his way to Japan in 1492, Christopher Columbus bumped into the Bahama Islands and, thinking they were the East Indies, he labeled…he mislabeled the inhabitants Indians.

  Dinah crossed out the sentence and began again.

  Indigenous peoples of North America were called Indians because of a nautical miscalculation that Columbus never acknowledged.

  She x’d that out and scrolled through her notes on the computer. Troubles and misunderstandings had abounded from the first meeting between Europeans and Indians and they persisted like anthrax spores. The Indian problem in Berlin played havoc with her thoughts and once again, the forecast of things to come didn’t bode well for the Indians. She had hoped that a temporary shift in focus would give her yeasty thoughts time to take shape and some simple, obvious solution would rise out of her subconscious. It hadn’t. The only thing on the rise was her angst. She gave up and drifted into the kitchen.

  If Swan could be believed, the gun she took to her rendezvous with Pohl was a Taurus .22 semi-automatic with gold accents and a rosewood grip. It had entered the country legally, shipped unloaded and properly documented by a licensed gun dealer in Georgia to her, care of the Hotel Adlon where she had reserved a room. The Adlon is where she’d gone when she disappeared after breakfast on the morning of the murder. She had taken possession of the package containing the gun, checked in, and phoned Pohl. He provided her with the number of his bank account and instructed her to make eine Geldüberweisung, a transfer of funds. Since the money was supposed to come from Dinah’s account, and Germany is six hours ahead of Panama, it wouldn’t show up in Pohl’s account until the next day. Notwithstanding this delay, Swan had conned him into giving her the tape at the powwow, ahead of the transfer. At least, she assumed that she had conned him. It was possible. In his haste to jet off to Barcelona the next day, Pohl might have given her the benefit of the doubt. They’d never know now.

  Absentmindedly, Dinah opened the freezer. A new tub of chocolate ice cream greeted her eyes. A yellow sticky glued to the carton read, Borrowed yr coral shirt Hope u don’t mind, ciao, kd. That blouse was Dupioni silk from the KaDeWe and it had cost Dinah most of what she earned working on the dig in Turkey. Nervy brat. What good would it do if she did mind?

  She grabbed the ice cream and a spoon and sat down for some heavy brain bashing. Who could have taken the gun from Swan’s hotel room at the Adlon? Who knew she had a room there? Swan said that she had told only Pohl, but Pohl must have told Lena. She was privy to his extortion of Swan. Was she his co-extortionist? Lena had fixated on Swan as the murderer, but she might not be the only one of Pohl’s acquaintances with a dangerous secret. What if he had other victims? Blackmailers didn’t stick to a limit, like fishermen.

  Whether the motive was blackmail or sexual jealousy, Lena was the key. Lohendorf and Wegener would already have interrogated her about her relationship with Pohl. They were undoubtedly good cops, but they didn’t have a mother in the suspect pool and Lena had had time to polish her story since her wild visit on the night of the murder. Had they asked her about blackmail? She was hiding something. Dinah wondered if she could find out what while keeping under the radar of the police.

  The cuckoo moaned five times. Late, but if she hurried, Florian Farber’s gallery might still be open and he could tell her where the Bischoffs lived. She had no idea where K.D. had gone, but there was no sense worrying. She was nothing if not self-reliant and she wouldn’t go out without a few bills in her pocket. Dinah tossed the ice cream back in the freezer and, on a hunch, counted the cash that Thor kept in a sugar canister in the pantry. She was pleasantly surprised to find it all there. Maybe K.D.’s delinquent phase was winding down. Dinah scribbled a note reminding her to feed Aphrodite and clean the litter box. She added a P.S., I’ll be home by nine if you want to have a late dinner.

  She found one of Berlin’s ubiquitous taxis idling in front of the Presse & Tabac in Hausvogteiplatz. The driver didn’t understand her when she gave him the address so she jotted it down on a scrap of paper. He nodded, like how-could-you-not-pronounce-something-that-simple, and motioned her into the backseat. As he zipped in and out of traffic, she listened to retro American pop songs on the radio and rehearsed her opening gambit with Farber. He had seemed enamored of Swan yesterday morning, but his attitude changed following the discovery of Pohl’s body last night. Could he seriously believe she had something to do with the murder?

  The driver navigated around the Gendarmenmarkt onto Behrenstrasse and swung onto Ebertstrasse past the Holocaust Memorial. Drifts of yellow leaves swirled across the field of gray, tomblike slabs dedicated to the memory of the Jews killed by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. The enormity of the crime, the systematic extermination of six million souls, never failed to astound her. It was humanity’s moral nadir, an indelible stain on the German State and the German psyche. Several times she had walked through the maze of stone blocks. She hadn’t yet mustered the courage to visit the subterranean “Room of Names,” where the lives of individual victims were recounted by a disembodied voice.

  Opposite the Holocaust Memorial, invisible from the street, stood the concrete cube commemorating the homosexuals persecuted and killed by the Nazis. Its location had sparked contro
versy when it was first erected. Some believed that it encroached too close to the Jewish Memorial. Others believed that the homosexual victims of the Third Reich had been slighted when their memorial was placed out of sight in the bushes. Dinah saw nothing irreverent in the proximity. Germany had a multitude of victims to remember and in Berlin, monuments to the dead were thick on the ground.

  As the taxi turned onto Tiergartenstrasse, she wrested her thoughts back to Florian Farber and those Indian masks that ornamented his gallery. She’d read an article just recently about a contested auction of sacred Native American masks in Paris. The Hopi tribe had filed a lawsuit alleging that some of the items had been stolen, but their attorney was unable to halt the sale. Had Farber acquired his masks legally? Could he have been another of Pohl’s blackmail victims?

  The taxi rounded the corner onto Klingelhöferstrasse and her eyes were drawn reflexively to the Norwegian Embassy with its green, modernistic louvered siding. She had made Thor a promise that she wouldn’t do anything impulsive and already she was breaking it.

  The taxi driver let her out on Kurfürstenstrasse in front of the gallery. She handed him a ten Euro note and went inside. The ambience of desert sage had changed to juniper and the flute music had been replaced by the eerie whine of a primitive fiddle. Today, the Indians staring down from the walls looked glum and aggrieved, as if they’d been falsely accused and were counting on her to uphold the honor of all the tribes.

  Florian Farber, sans war paint and dressed in ordinary business attire, donned wire-rim eyeglasses and scowled at her from behind his desk. His mohawk had been moussed flat and when he spoke, his voice was as blunt as a bat. “What do you want?”

  “Hello, Herr Farber.” She affected an appeasing smile. “I’ve come to ask for your help.”

  He walked to the front of the shop. Without the painted black hand and the white dots, his nose and cheeks appeared red and chapped, with a filigree of broken capillaries. His gray eyes appraised her with the shrewdness of a croupier. “Do you wish to make a purchase?”