'Hey Bern, you got a pad for me?' she said to the barman.
He handed her an order pad and nodded at me. 'Guy here wants to talk to you.'
The girl looked me up and down, shook her head and grimaced. 'I don't think so, Bern.' She laughed. 'You'd better give him his money back.'
Bern touched her arm as she went to walk away. 'He's a bull.'
She looked again. I let her look while I took in a few details of my own in the back bar mirror. Someone, and my money was on Bern, had taped two glossy photographic prints to the mirror. One was of our dear departed Kaiser Wilhelm II, the other of our glorious president, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg.
'You been in the wars, soldier?' the girl said, suddenly up close.
I took a deep breath but my sinuses were still too swollen to make out what scent she wore, if any. I looked her up and down. Not even any jewellery, though she had a mole on one hip and a small red scar to the left of her belly button.
'How does the moustache stay on?' I said.
'What do you mean?' she said, fondling it. 'This is all natural. It's my hair that's fake.'
'Nice.' I glanced at her blonde crotch, a reflex action.
'Thanks. I get that a lot.'
'Not sure about the helmet though.'
'Look, I need to get along and earn my tips, so do you want to come to the point?'
Her eyes were blue, not brown. This would be a cinch. I took a quick sip of beer.
'You knew Emma Gross?' I said.
She folded her arms, a move that emphasised what little cleavage she had. 'Why now?'
'What?'
'I said, why now? Why are you here bringing this up now? Emma's death was months ago, more than a year, even.'
Her pale skin was colouring up beautifully. Maybe this wouldn't be such a cinch after all. I was turning soft, remember.
'We've reopened the case. We don't think we got the right guy last time.'
'Oh yeah, who's we? Cause that detective I spoke with last year, he wasn't worth shit.'
'And who was that?'
'What, you think I've got nothing better to do than sit around remembering detectives' names?'
'Why don't you just relax and tell me what you know, and this'll all go a lot smoother.'
'Are you threatening me now?'
'No, I – '
'Bern, did you hear that, this guy's threatening me.'
Bern rubbed a hand over the stubble on his head. I put my palms down on the sticky surface of the bar.
'Look, Trudi, no one's threatening anyone,' I said.
'You got someone for the murder already. Why would you want to go hunting for someone else?'
'Did Emma have a boyfriend?'
'Oh man...'
'Yes or no.'
'No.' Something in her face told me there was more.
'But?'
'But what?'
'She didn't have a boyfriend but there was...someone, right? A girlfriend?'
'Christ on the cross, Herr Detective, not all prostitutes are dykes, you know.'
'So tell me. She had someone, but not a boyfriend?'
Applause from the tables drowned out her words. The woman on stage twirled on her heels as the band syncopated its tune all to hell. Trudi moved closer. One of her pink nipples brushed my jacket sleeve but I put that down as a mistake.
'There was some guy,' she said, raising her voice, 'some suitor she had regular. I never knew his name, though God knows I tried to find out. But she wouldn't say. Then it all went...different somehow. I don't know. We didn't talk for a long time.'
'But you worked the same hotel. The Adler? Worked the same streets around the station, right?'
Trudi went over to Bern, who was keeping his distance. She took his cigarette from between his lips and jammed it into her own mouth and smoked off a good deal of it in a couple of puffs. Hell of a trick, though hardly surprising given her former calling.
She came back with the cigarette burning in her fingers. 'Yes,' she said, through the smoke leaking from her rouged lips.
'So you saw her around even though you stopped talking so regularly?'
'Uh-huh.' She took another drag. The cigarette was down to the end now.
'About how long before she died did she stop talking to you?'
'I don't know. Couple of months. Sometime after Christmas. We'd had a nice Christmas together. Worked all through but on the 24th, the evening, when we gave each other presents. It was nice, you know? Something to remind us of home?' She smiled, gazing into the distance, seeing beyond the confines of the cellar bar in its faceless city street. 'It wasn't like she stopped talking to me, if you get me. She withdrew all round, didn't really talk to anyone so much. I don't know what it was, but it wasn't long after she started with this regular suitor. I think that was something to do with it.'
'Two months isn't that long a time to go without regular contact,' I said.
Her eyes flashed lamp light at me. 'It is when you've been so...it's a hell of a long time in streetwalker years, bull.'
'Were you two lovers, Trudi?'
She dropped the smoking stub and ground it out under her heels. Funny, I hadn't noticed she'd been wearing shoes earlier.
'Okay, it doesn't matter. This regular guy, you never saw him?'
'I might have done, but I wouldn't know. Never one for taking it easy, our Emma. There was never any one guy I noticed her with more than any other.' She locked eyes with me. 'They all get to look the same, after a while.'
I held myself still on my stool. 'You found her in room thirty-seven that night, right?'
She shook her head and sighed the last of the smoke from her lungs. 'Next morning. About six am.'
'How'd you know she was in there?'
'I had a suitor the same night. I saw her go upstairs. Didn't see her come down. In the morning I saw the key for thirty-seven was still missing from the pigeon hole and I went up to knock on the door. It was open and she was inside.'
'Did you see the suitor she went upstairs with?'
Trudi looked up from staring at the floor. 'No, damn it!' She leaned in and said, 'You think if I'd seen him I wouldn't have shouted it out loud to the world?' She gave a disgusted grunt and waved me away. 'But I told you all this before.'
'Me?'
'No, that other detective.'
'Dark hair, buck teeth?'
'That's right.'
'Name of Ritter? Inspector Michael Ritter?'
'Well, Inspector someone-or-other. Beyond that I don't remember. But the teeth, yeah, that sounds like him. He didn't seem all that interested so how'm I supposed to believe you'll be any different?'
'Trudi, if you know something – '
'Frieda,' she said. 'Frieda Brandt. Find her.'
Trudi lifted a drinks tray from behind the bar and moved off with her sights on the tables.
'Who is she?' I called.
'Emma came to me that night, the night she died. We had a talk. There was a lot going on. Find Frieda Brandt. If anyone can tell you more, she can.'
'Where do I find her?' I called.
'If I knew that I'd tell you,' she called back.
Bern had crept closer over the course of the conversation. Now, as I looked at him, he shrugged.
'Another beer?' He pointed at my glass.
'No, save it.' I pushed off the stool and got to my feet. 'Tastes like shit, anyway.'
'You're breaking my heart, bull. Maybe you want to try some other place next time.'
The girl on stage had finished her act. The band stopped playing. The drummer gave a circus roll and the girl whipped off her fake moustache to a smattering of applause. Many of the drinkers sported fake moustaches too. What some people would do for fun.
I headed for the curtain, in reality a large black-and-white imperial banner, the bigger brother of the one hanging above the door outside. So now I had another name but no idea of how the woman who owned it might be connected to the case. Of course, the best way of finding that out would be to f
ind her. I had the feeling that would be easier said than done.
20
First thing you did when you wanted to find someone in Düsseldorf? You hit the residential records. Each precinct house kept records of who lived in its precinct; whenever anyone moved, he had to notify his local precinct before registering his new address with whichever precinct he'd moved to.
Two snags. First, not everyone bothered to register. Second, there was no central department to coordinate these records. If I wanted Frieda Brandt's address I'd have to visit each and every precinct until I found it.
Unless...
I took a bus to my precinct. If not for the sign above the door and the bars on the ground floor windows, the station house would have been impossible to distinguish from the five-storey apartment buildings either side of it. It had the same weathered, unwashed façade, the same number of high windows, the same three steps leading from the street to the door. As I walked up the steps, the place felt like home, albeit the kind of home you never wanted to go back to.
I pushed through the door into the waiting area. Two Schupo were wrestling a citizen to the ground beneath the information board. A couple of the posters had come loose and floated to the tiled floor. The citizen was babbling the way habitual drunks do. The smell of weeks-old booze-sweat hit me and I had to hold my breath as the Schupo hauled the man to his feet and to the cells in the basement.
I greeted the desk sergeant, a tall, dark-haired man with muttonchop whiskers who'd only worked on my shift a couple of times. He loomed from the front desk. The clock on the wall beside him told me it was twenty to one in the morning. Aside from the echoes of the drunk yelling on his way to the cells, the place was quiet enough to hear the clock ticking. The sergeant had been filling in a form. I handed him my ID.
'Captain's not about I suppose?'
The sergeant glanced at the clock and gave me a look.
'All right.' I held up my hands. 'Stupid question. I need to leave him a message, then. I'll go and take it to his office.'
The sergeant shrugged, emphasising the breadth of his shoulders. The electric lamp overhead made his oiled hair gleam.
'Kaufmann's running the squad tonight,' the sergeant said.
'Thanks.'
'He's out on a burglary though. Only just gone, so if you need to speak to him...'
'I should be okay, thanks.'
Andreas Kaufmann, a detective on the opposite shift to mine. I'd worked with him a couple of times. He was a competent man. Better, he'd be out for the next couple of hours, which gave me the time I needed. I walked past the desk to the stairwell, pushed through the door and went up the stairs. The first floor door led to what passed for my office, the detective squad room. I ignored that floor entirely and went up to the second. I entered the hallway. Silence. At the end of the hall was the captain's office. I headed for that and opened the door.
It wasn't locked. It was never locked, for one simple reason. It was the only room in the building with a telephone. It had to be kept open in case the night watch commander had to make a call.
The large desk looked small against the size of the office, which stretched across the building. There were two windows on opposite sides of the room, one looking out onto the street, the other looking over the courtyards of the apartment buildings on the block. Filing cabinets lined the wall behind the desk. The telephone sat on the desk blotter, its thick rat's tail cable running into the chipped plaster of the wall. Around the telephone were some trays for paperwork – all empty – a carriage clock and a desk calendar still showing Tues, 27th May. There was also a small leather-bound address book by the telephone. I turned on the desk lamp and a moth started flitting around the light. I swiped at it and missed.
I opened the book. Each precinct number was listed under 'P'. Made sense.
I lifted the phone's handle from the cradle and waited for the line to connect, the moth flapping at my face. When the operator came on, I asked for the first precinct number on the list. The operator connected me. Eventually a yawning voice answered the phone and I asked the man on the other end to look through his residential records for a Frieda Brandt and to ring back if he found anything. I repeated this process ten times, then I hit the records room down the hall.
An hour later, I'd got six negative phone calls and a big fat nichts from the precinct files. Whoever this woman was, she didn't live in Flingern, and never had. No, nor Grafenberg, Unterbilk, Oberbilk, Friedrichstadt, Altstadt or Derendorf either.
The phone rang again and I went to answer it.
'Hello?' I said into the receiver.
'Hi, is that Detective Klein?'
'Yes, Klein here.'
'Hello?'
The line buzzed and crackled and the sound of faint voices filtered through.
'Hello?' I said.
'Hello? Are you there?'
'Yes, can you hear me?'
'Yes, I can hear you. Can you hear me?'
'Yes, fine. Do you have any information for me?'
'Yes,' the other cop said. 'We've got an address for her here in the Flehe district. Fifty-five Uedesheimer Strasse. It's near the park.'
I thanked him and hung up.
21
Du Pont and the green man loomed large in my mind, and by then I knew I was putting off having to go and release them. Besides, I needed to take Trudi's lead as far as I could. Perhaps the answer to Emma Gross' murder awaited me in Uedesheimer Strasse.
It was too late to rely on public transportation, so I took a cab out to Flehe. The Rhine curled up under this district of the city, giving it a cut-off island feel. The houses we drove past were large, three or four storeys high.
The cab pulled up outside number fifty-five. I paid the driver and opened the front gate as the cab drove off. The gate carried three post boxes, suggesting this house was broken up into flats. Sure enough, there were three buzzers by the door, each one bearing a different name. None of the names was Brandt. Of course, maybe Brandt had been the woman's maiden name. Maybe she'd married. Maybe, maybe, maybe. The cogs of police work are oiled with maybes.
Or so I told myself as I pressed the buzzer for the ground floor flat. I kept my finger on for several seconds. Then I buzzed again. It was one forty-five in the morning. Area like this, no autos about, nobody out walking the streets, it was a safe guess that I was waking the inhabitants.
I waited two minutes then buzzed again. A light came on inside the house. A shape lumbered between the light and the glass panel in the door, then the door opened. A middle aged man stared at me with puffy eyes and mussed brown hair and a paisley patterned dressing gown that was too short for his smooth, hairless legs. He was still tying the belt around his thick middle.
I held up my ID and checked the name on the buzzer.
'Herr Weber?' I said.
He grunted.
'I'm looking for Frieda Brandt.'
'Well she doesn't live here.'
I waited for him to add anything. He didn't.
'She used to live here,' I said. 'She's registered at this address.'
'Oh, right.'
Another shape hovered behind Weber.
'Honey? Who is it?' A woman's voice.
Weber turned back and said, 'Just get on with the coffee, will you?'
'But who is it, Uli?'
'It's the police.'
'What do they want?'
'Yeah, what is all this about anyway?' Weber asked me.
'I told you,' I said, 'Frieda Brandt.'
'What's she done?' Weber said.
'Frieda? Oh, she was nice,' said the female voice.
Weber huffed and threw open the door and gestured for me to come in, so in I went, through the vestibule and into the ground floor apartment. The apartment's wood floors shone. African art and masks hung on the wall, the overall effect one of dark wood and white animal hair. Frau Weber was small and round and had deep wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, though the rest of her face was smooth.
'Y
ou're having coffee at this time of the morning?' I asked her.
She nodded while her husband said, 'Well, I'm awake now. I won't be able to sleep again, not for hours. And I've a lot to do tomorrow, so I might as well get started.' He didn't bother to keep the annoyance from his voice.
I nodded at the African artefacts on the walls. 'And what is it you do, Herr Weber?'
'Uli teaches at the university. Don't you, sweetie?'
Weber had pushed past to the kitchen where it sounded as though a coffee pot was bubbling on the stove.
'Lecture, dearest,' Weber called back, 'I lecture at the university, I don't teach. There is a difference.'
Frau Weber rolled her eyes at me, but she was smiling.
'Frau Weber, you knew Frieda Brandt?'
'Oh yes.' She finger-combed her shoulder-length dark hair and rearranged her thick cotton robe. She called out to the kitchen: 'Don't you remember, sweetie? We took the flat from her.' There was a grunt from the kitchen. Frau Weber added. 'She was so helpful, taking us through the rental contract and pointing out what the landlord would and wouldn't do, all that. It was most helpful. Yes, she was nice.'
'Do you have any idea where she moved to?'
'Oh, I'm sorry. She didn't say.'
'How long ago did you move in?'
'About a year and a half. Actually, probably closer to two now I think about it.'
'In 1928?'
'Yes, that's right. After the summer it was. Say September or October.'
'Is there anything else you can tell me about Frau Brandt? Where she worked, perhaps? Whether she worked? Was she married? Did she have any children?'
Frau Weber gave a girlish giggle. Her face crinkled for a brief second before settling down again. 'She certainly wasn't married. I got the feeling she didn't have much time for it, you know, as a way of life. And she didn't talk about children, not the way people do. It's possible, but I didn't see any photographs of her family at all.'
'So she worked?'
The coffee pot sounds had gone and the scent of fresh-brewed coffee hit me. My mouth watered. Weber came through with a cup for his wife and another for himself. He didn't offer me any.
'Yes, she was some kind of nurse wasn't she?' Frau Weber asked her husband who shrugged.
The Killing Of Emma Gross Page 16