Grave Intent

by Alexander Hartung

  “Chandu.” Matt tapped his forehead.

  “Is Becks around?”

  “’E’s just there at the bar,” Matt replied in a strong British accent.

  Chandu entered the main room, which was full of comfy sofas, armchairs, and elegant little tables where clients could set down their glasses. The dark-brown polished wooden walls set off the brightly colored furniture. The women wore tasteful black dresses that looked designed more for some society ball than for a bordello. Each and every one of them was every man’s dream in the flesh, tastefully made up and with perfect figures. They moved with a sensuous grace in their high heels, confident of their beauty. One night with one of them exceeded the monthly income of a wealthy executive, but from what Chandu had heard, it was worth every euro.

  The establishment had none of the usual brothel clichés. The owner acted more like a top businessman than a pimp. His black hair was neatly trimmed. He wore a dark suit with a fashionable silk tie, and his shiny leather shoes reflected the soft glow from countless lamps. Becks could have easily passed himself off as a banker or lawyer.

  When he saw Chandu, he waved and gestured to the stool next to him at the long bar.

  “Chandu.” He shook the big man’s hand. His handshake was firm, assertive. “What brings you here? Work or pleasure?”

  “I wish it was pleasure, but it’s work.”

  Becks was drinking red wine. He signaled the barkeep, who immediately filled another glass with red and placed it before Chandu.

  “I don’t recall being in debt to any of your friends.”

  Chandu raised a hand to reassure him. “It’s not about you, Becks. It’s about someone you might know.” He reached for his glass, toasted his host, and took a sip. He knew nothing about wine, but it did taste excellent. Whatever this was that Becks had served up, he wouldn’t be finding it in a supermarket. Maybe the rumors were true—that he’d bought a major winery in France where he intended to spend his old age.

  Chandu nodded in appreciation and set down the glass. “I’m looking for a small-time blowfly named Robin Cordes. Was dealing, then moving some goods, and ended up in the slammer for it. He’s out again and keeps a low profile.”

  “I have nothing to do with small-time blowflies.”

  “Supposedly our small-time dealer changed his ways in the slammer and is now doing poker games.”

  “I see. Now I’m listening.”

  “Which is why I’m here. Robin owes a friend of mine a heap of money. It would spare me a lot of legwork if you’d seen him around.”

  “You have a photo of this Robin?”

  Chandu pulled out his phone, selected a photo, and turned the screen to Becks.

  “Ah, that Robin,” Becks said. “I was just playing with him yesterday.”

  Chandu nearly dropped his phone. It was all he could do not to show his surprise. “Just not my lucky day, I guess.” He was hoping that word had not gotten out about Robin dying. The media were reporting that the grave killer had a new victim but weren’t releasing any names.

  “It wasn’t that big of a game. Seven people total. Robin had arranged the date, got the room, set it all up, and brought in the players.”

  “How did he know of you?”

  “I went with a friend, on his recommendation.”

  “Where did you guys play?”

  “In the Ochsen, not here.”

  “In a family pub?”

  “In a back room. Was just a poker table in there. The owner brought the drinks. Was quaint but kind of nice.”

  “A setup?”

  Becks shook his head. “Only beginners fall for that. It was a clean game.”

  “Who all was there?”

  “My buddy Joe and I. Robin. There was a couple with too much dough, names I forget. A young snot name of Bernd, and some lawyer. Müller or something like that.” Becks sipped his wine. “Why you interested in the game? I thought you were only after Robin.”

  Chandu wanted to swear out loud—the serial killer himself might have been sitting at that very table. But he couldn’t let down his cover and admit he was investigating for the cops. The consequences would be nasty. Bouncers would be the least of his problems.

  “What kind of money are we talking about here? The table had something, I’m guessing.”

  “I went home with five grand. It was just Bernd and I left at the end. The woman lost an all-in after a couple hours. The husband three hands later. The lawyer had played away all his cash by that point, since he was probably the worst poker player in the whole world. No idea what he was doing there. Joe’s stomach wasn’t taking the meat platter too well and he puked his guts out. That left only the young guy and me. A one-on-one is just too boring for me, so I took off.”

  “When?”

  “Around eleven or so.”

  “What was Robin’s take?”

  “Hundred per person for arranging and dealing. A bonus from the owner, maybe. How much he owe your friend?”

  “Over four,” Chandu lied.

  “Right. It’ll work out.”

  Chandu kept up his cover. “You know when the next game is? I could go and have a talk with him.”

  “I gave him my number. When he calls, I’ll let you know.”

  “Thank you.” Chandu shook Becks’s hand. “For the help and for the nice wine.” He stood. “Anything I can ever do for you, just call.”

  Becks nodded. “Will do.”

  Chandu waved to Matt on the way out. Once outside, he went around the block, pulled out his phone, and punched in Jan’s number. His friend picked up on the second ring.

  “I think I have the crime scene,” Chandu said. “Tell our chain-smoker she should pack her bags. Looks like a late dinner.”

  Jan lost no time. In a matter of minutes he had gathered a few people from Patrick’s team—including four crime-scene investigators, two uniformed cops, and Zoe with her irresistible charm—and headed over to the Ochsen. The owner paled at the sight of the group, who threatened to shut down his business if he didn’t cooperate. He gave investigators access to all the rooms, stopped all work in the kitchen, and began to confess all. He was gray-haired, with an ample belly and a red nose that suggested he liked to partake of the many varieties of schnapps lining the back wall of his bar.

  “How do you know Robin Cordes?” Jan asked him.

  “We have a friend in common who helped me get some kitchen equipment for cheap.” The man was rubbing his hands on his apron as if he’d just reached into a foul-smelling trash can.

  “Stolen goods, you mean?”

  “I didn’t say that,” the owner protested. “It was all legal. Invoiced and all that. Just a real good deal.”

  Stolen ovens were of no interest to Jan. “Whose idea were these poker games?”

  “Robin came to me about five weeks ago. Said he had a proposal for how I could use the old room in back. He would organize a poker game once a week for people who had dough.”

  “So what did you get out of it?”

  “Robin said the players would be drinking a lot more than apple juice. I got whiskey, vodka, and champagne and marked it up three times cost. No one batted an eye. They soaked it up like sponges. On a single poker night I did more drink sales than a whole month from the bar.”

  “You do know that poker games like that are illegal?”

  “It was all on the up and up. Robin swore to me that he wasn’t using marked cards and he was dealing them himself.”

  “I don’t mean the poker. I mean playing for real money. They call it gambling.”

  The owner stared at the floor in shame. “What was I supposed to do? Business was getting bad. People wanting more and more crazy things. Sushi, pizza, all that vegetarian stuff. Your standard meat platter isn’t exactly drawing crowds these days.”

  “You know the people who took part in these poker games?”

  “No one besides Robin. They wanted to be left alone. I took the orders, brought the drinks, cleared out again.�
�

  “Are there surveillance cameras here?”

  “You making a joke? I pour the beers and serve liver dumplings. I empty the register every night. There’s nothing to steal here. Why a camera?”

  “Yeah, a camera would be way too easy,” Jan muttered under his breath. “Could you describe the players for me if I sent a professional sketch artist by here?”

  “I can try.” The owner shrugged. “I do remember faces well.”

  Jan closed his notepad. “All right. That’ll be it for now. Please keep yourself available for any further questions.”

  The owner nodded and shuffled into the kitchen.

  Jan was heading over to the back room when Zoe’s voice came echoing into the dining room. “Jan! Get your ass out here.”

  He sighed. He was the lead detective, but Zoe always made him feel like the gofer boy.

  He went through the kitchen and out into the back lot. The medical examiner was standing next to an investigator who was taking photos of a spot on the ground. As Jan came closer, he realized it was a bloodstain.

  “Crime scene?”

  “Most likely.” Zoe held up a test tube. “We found little bone splinters in the blood. They could have come from Robin’s skull. Ralf is taking a blood sample we’ll compare with the victim’s DNA. Then we’ll know more.”

  “My name is Romir,” said a man down on the ground.

  “What I said.”

  “That would be progress,” Jan replied. “We know when the poker ended and we have the cemetery break-in time. With a crime scene, we can start building a route profile.”

  “Anything new on the perp?”

  “The owner will help us come up with sketches. I think our murderer was at these card games. But a little more evidence would be nice.”

  “Maybe I can help,” an investigator said as he climbed out of a Dumpster. His protective coveralls had food scraps stuck to them, which didn’t seem to bother him. Jan saw fried potatoes, lettuce, liverwurst. The man was holding a cheap pocket-calendar notebook. “I believe this belongs to Robin Cordes,” he announced proudly. “And it’s full of telephone numbers.”

  Jan let himself smile. The murderer had committed his first mistake.

  He was back in the kitchen, saw the altar lit up with candles, smelled the incense. Father Anberger was tied to the cross and a pool of blood was forming next to him. Jan called out for Chandu, but his friend was nowhere to be seen.

  Betty came out from behind a column, a smile on her face, a shotgun in her hands. Jan raised his hands and wanted to give himself up, and yet his fingers were suddenly gripping his pistol. So he shot. Once, twice, three times. And Betty collapsed. The blood flowed from her body, and her eyes closed.

  Jan started from his nightmare with a scream. His T-shirt was soaked with sweat, his head ached, and he was shivering as if in an ice bath. He had kicked the covers off the bed and was clawing at the pillow with his right hand.

  He took deep breaths. He needed a moment to realize that he wasn’t in that church anymore. Betty was dead. He had survived.

  He stood up wearily. He trudged over to the closet and pulled on a dry T-shirt. In the bathroom, he let warm water run through his hair until the memory began to blur. He sat on the couch with a washcloth on his forehead and turned on the TV. The third time this week. He was barely getting any sleep. He wouldn’t be able to keep this up for much longer.

  Lying on the coffee table was Kerima Elmas’s business card. He always used to be able to work things out for himself. Girl problems, trouble with his boss, a grisly homicide. When things got really bad he’d go get drunk with a friend or maybe end up getting in a fistfight. At some point the bad mood would be driven out. But the last case had left him with scars that were too deep and raw to leave behind. Five beers or a brawl weren’t going to make the nightmares disappear.

  It was 5:14 in the morning. Too early for a phone call. Yet Kerima had told him to try her anytime.

  He picked up the phone and dialed her number.

  “Hello?” The psychologist’s voice sounded sleepy.

  “Frau Elmas, Jan Tommen here.” He was relieved she’d picked up. “Apologies for the time, but you did encourage me to call whenever I’m having trouble.”

  “It’s all right, Herr Tommen.” It sounded like she was fighting back a yawn. “I’m used to restless nights. How can I help you?”

  “I was thinking that I was making progress and getting over what happened with Betty dying, but lately it’s been getting worse.”

  “My guess is, it has to do with this grave murderer. The stress you’re feeling about this case carries over to other matters.” The weariness was receding from her voice. “Perhaps we should talk a little bit about the period right after Betty’s death. What did you do after you realized your girlfriend was dead?”

  “In those first few days after her death? I got rid of everything in my apartment having to do with her. Photos of us together, clothes she left here, and all those little things you give each other when you’re in a relationship. I tossed it all in a big garbage bag, got up real early, and threw it into the trash can outside right before the garbage truck came. So there’d be no way I could weaken and go fish it all back out of the trash.”

  “Did that help?”

  “No. You can’t forget a person for good just by throwing out their clothes and a few mementos. When that person is buried so deep in your heart, they’re a part of you. Beyond salvaging.” Jan’s voice grew softer. “Sometimes I have nightmares and relive what went down in the church, again and again—but sometimes memories of better times surface. When that happens, I don’t just see her face, I can sense her. I’m lying in bed, stroking her back, and feeling her soft skin under my fingertips. Her warm body touching mine makes me tremble. My fingers glide through her hair; it slides across the back of my hand like a warm breeze. I close my eyes and feel her with all my senses. Her scent surrounds us, like sunflowers, a little strong, with a hint of jasmine mixed in. These dreams are so intense,” Jan added, sounding distraught, “it’s as if she’s still right here with me. When I wake up and turn on my side, I reach to pull her close, breathe in her scent, but then I realize that she’s dead, and all the pain comes rushing back.”

  “What do you do then?”

  “Cry, scream, tear at the bedcovers. Sometimes I head over to my punching bag in the living room and pummel it till my arms ache. But mostly I just get up, standing there groggy and blank, drag myself to work, and try to make it through the day.” Jan’s head sank. “Time heals all wounds, they say. Every day I keep hoping it will get a little better, that the memories fade, the pain will get more bearable. But every morning when I wake alone in my bed? It just gets worse.”

  “Worse in what way?”

  “When Betty was still alive, the way she smelled was always with me. It was this perfume that permeated everything. She only had to sleep over for it to stay with me. A kiss or a brief hug was enough. Yet after I have a dream about her, her scent evaporates immediately and becomes only this distant memory. So one day I got up and went to one of the bigger perfume shops. I spent the whole morning there, sampled all the women’s perfumes. I ended up with thirty of those samples, but I finally found it.” Jan closed his eyes and inhaled as if he could smell the perfume just by the power of recall. “It’s from Lancôme. La Vie Est Belle.”

  “Life is beautiful,” Dr. Elmas translated.

  “Yes. How ironic.”

  “Did you buy it?”

  “No,” Jan said. “It was too hard on me. Like actual physical pain.”

  “But why not, if you associate so many fond memories with it?”

  “Maybe I had a moment of clarity, became conscious that the perfume would only make things worse. Something was telling me, Betty is dead, I would never get back my time with her. She wasn’t a part of my life anymore.”

  “Oh, she is definitely part of your life,” Dr. Elmas remarked.

  “How so? She’s lyin
g in a cemetery.”

  “It doesn’t matter that Betty is dead. You think of her when you go to bed and when you get up. You dream of her. There’s a scent that reminds you of her. These are all things that form a strong connection to a person. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since you can draw a certain strength from memories like that. You determine how you remember that person, whether it’s good or bad, what you will carry with you, what you’d rather forget. You narrow your memories of Betty to the best moments you had with her. Again, it isn’t a bad thing. But you also hate yourself for shooting her and ending your time on earth with her that way.”

  “I killed her. That’s the truth.”

  “That’s not the problem. You refuse to see that you had to shoot Betty. Consider what you did objectively, as if you never knew her. Then judge it from that angle.”

  “What if I arrive at the same conclusion?”

  “Then you will never be free of it.”

  Bergman entered police headquarters with a stack of Sunday papers under his arm. Although the rest of the city was enjoying a typically slow Sunday morning, things were as busy as any normal workday in the Kripo. No one was taking time off until the grave murderer was caught. If Robin Cordes’s notebook provided that decisive clue, then he’d be happy to push through all vacation requests.

  On the way to his office, he ran into Kerima Elmas. He put on a smile that was rather friendly—by his standards, anyway. “Good morning, Dr. Elmas.” He was in no mood for a conversation about managing the staff, so he hoped she was there for some other reason.

  “Morning,” she replied, yawning, a hand over her mouth.

  “At least someone’s had fun on a Saturday night,” Bergman muttered as he headed into his office. He set down his papers, turned on the computer, and made his way to the coffee machine.

  Out in the hallway, Bergman waved at a few colleagues. Jan was coming out of the break room, yawning, his cup half-full. He looked both exhausted and feebleminded. He seemed to have fallen asleep on his feet.

  “Morning, boss,” he said, shuffling by Bergman. When Jan saw Kerima in the hallway, he lifted his head and waved at her. His weariness vanished for a moment. He smiled at her.