“I know you’re good, Marty, but how did you find him in just four days?” said Muller. “That cabin’s way out. And Merkel must have taken precautions to make sure he couldn’t be traced. He’s a hardened criminal.”
“That’s what’s so surprising. He seems to have made no attempt to hide his location. Like he wasn’t afraid of being followed, which is ridiculous when a woman like Sylvie Merkel is involved. He had the Alsatian, a few rifles and a handgun, but even so. The only sign of covering his tracks was buying the cabin with cash. He even used a shared credit card to buy supplies at a nearby petrol station. He seems to have passed through there quite a few times, judging by the petrol purchases. That’s what tipped us off. After that it was easy. It was almost as if he didn’t expect his wife to look for them.”
“Where was Merkel during this time?” asked Captain Schlaukopf.
“With me most of the time. Until I got closer. She didn’t want to get too close to the Alsatian I think. It would have recognized her. I spent two days checking out the cabin before I went there with Merkel, just to make sure her husband was there. He spent most of the time in the cabin, but I did notice him hunting. There wasn’t any sign of Susie. Eventually, I had to sneak in the front door when Michael Merkel left it open. Susie Merkel had been locked in a small room. I didn’t have much more time to look around. The Alsatian chased me out. I told Merkel, and she insisted that she go with me.”
Schlaukopf stood up. He said, embracing me, “You look after yourself, Marlowe. We’ll keep you updated. Just be careful around Walker.”
“I’ll try. Things haven’t exactly been easy lately. With her anniversary and all. I’m going a bit mad, the last three or four days. Seeing things, you know. Some people seem… different, lately. I’d say it was the drink, but I haven’t drunk since the night before Merkel came to me.” It hadn’t been a conscious decision. With these things, it rarely was. Work. Work. That was all I had time for. In the PI business, work came in drips and drabs. When I didn’t have work, which was all too often, I spent most of my time drinking.
I turned to leave, but before I did, I asked Muller, “What’s up with Walker? I know things between me and him were rarely good, but he seems to have developed a hatred of me.”
“I don’t have the right to tell you, Marty,” answered Muller. I looked at him sternly. I could do that, sometimes. He relented. “Alright. Stuff’s being going bad on the marriage front. He hasn’t taken it well.”
I nodded succinctly. “I’d ask you give him my condolences, but I know he doesn’t want them” I looked back at Schlaukopf. He had changed into that fox-thing he had been before. I blinked and he went back to normal. I really was losing it.
Before I thought too much about it, I rushed out of the Police Department and hopped into my car. It was an old Jaguar E-type, a 2+2 coupe, my grandfather’s, of course. For a moment, it allowed me to forget everything else, and concentrate only on the road.
3
Family
Then all anxiety was at an end and they lived together in perfect happiness.
(Hansel and Gretel)
I went back to my apartment after my conversation with Schlaukopf and Muller. Pouring myself a healthy measure of Jack Daniels, I sat down with my laptop and started working on the Merkel case. It was beginning to become an obsession of mine. Google translate reckoned that eins, zwei, drei, vier were German for one, two, three, four.
I’d have to ask Muller to make sure – he’d moved to the States from East Germany in 1989 – but it sounded right. There were a few more tattoos I hadn’t noticed. Mrs. Merkel literally had tattoos everywhere. Quite a few of them appeared to be in German.
What was the German connection? Merkel sounded German. Wolfermann did too. But that didn’t mean much. Phillips was an English surname and I was hardly English. Sylvie Merkel seemed to have retained the German nationality of her ancestors. A little search on Google revealed that her grandfather, Hans Wolfermann, had left Berlin, Germany, in 1949 with his wife and young children, and moved to Vermont. Her father had moved to Seattle in 1973, where he met her mother. He had retained German citizenship.
Merkel’s story was much the same. Grandparents, Wilhelm and Adel Merkel, moved to Vermont in 1949 from Berlin, Germany. His father had moved to Seattle in 1973, where he had also met his wife. Wilhelm and Adel had both retained German citizenship too.
In both Vermont and Seattle, the families had lived in the same neighborhood. Whether it was West or East Berlin they left was not specified, but it was probably safe to assume that Hans Wolfermann and Wilhelm Merkel had lived near each other there too. Not only were Mr. and Mrs. Merkel both descendant from German immigrants who moved to the US in 1949, but their families appeared to have lived near each other for their entire time in the US.
A member of each family had gone to prison for the same crime. Too many coincidences. There had to be a reason for it. Perhaps Hans and Wilhelm were just very friendly, or cousins, or something like that. Then it would make sense that their sons were also friendly and that when one moved to Seattle, the other followed. Once more, it would be logical for the children of two close friends to know each other well and therefore marry each other in later life.
That answer seemed simple, too simple. It just wasn’t right. There had to be another reason, or at least something else that contributed to it. Both Sylvie Wolvermann and Michael Merkel had extensive criminal convictions and connections. Perhaps their fathers had too. Checking that out would take a lot of time. I could get into the Seattle PD files easily enough, with Captain Schlaukopf’s permission, but juvenile records in Vermont would be more complicated. Once again, getting records of their grandfathers’ supposed criminal connections in Vermont would be difficult. So they could have run a crime syndicate, dating back to the 1940s, but at the moment it was basically hypothetical conjecture.
Before I could think any more about it, my sister, Ashley rang. “What is now, sis?”
“Do you want to have dinner over at our place? Just for tonight,” she answered softly.
“Will you stop bugging me? I’ll be fine,” I answered angrily. This wasn’t the first time she’d asked. It got especially bad this time of year. “Stop fussing over me.”
“Christ. It’s her anniversary. Do you want to remember her alone? Would she want you to do that?” said Ashley, turning on the lawyer voice. She was the Assistant Prosecutor. All too often we had ended up working together. At one point she even went out with Muller, though only when he was a junior detective and that was at least five years before.
“Stop blackmailing me. I’m fine on my own.”
“Marlowe, it doesn’t work like that. Muller and Schlaukopf are coming over. I’m doing roast chicken,” said Ashley, urging me with every word “Don’t be difficult. Just come over for once, little bro.”
I relented. “Fine, have it your way. I’ll come.”
“Thank you, Marty.”
My grandparents’ house was old and big. My maternal grandfather had been something of a businessman. He had made a fortune on a variety of different things, but mostly through his company Bergman International, which manufactured weapons and technology for the Army, and designed buildings. My cousin, John Bergman, was currently CEO of Bergman International. The house was built on a site of six acres. By default and luck, my sister had taken ownership of the house. My uncle already had a house by the time my grandfather died, so he had given it to my mother. Technically, I still had a half share in the house, but with enough room to sleep sixteen people, it was far too big for a single man like me. Besides, on my pay, I wouldn’t have been able to maintain the extensive gardens.
Ashley opened the door. She was blonde, with blue eyes, and most took that package as a sign of stupidity. That stupidity was extremely misplaced. Of the pair of us, she was the smartest by far. My sister would have been a good detective, a better one than I. I suspected that she had decided on being Assistant Prosecutor because it was a lot saf
er than being a detective. Besides, it paid better. She embraced me, saying, “Marty, you actually came.”
“I did. There’s no point sounding so surprised.”
“Come in,” she said, rather grandiosely. I moved to walk in the door, but before I could Ashley slipped her hand into my shoulder bag and produced my bottle of Jack Daniels.
“Tut, tut. You’ll have to survive on Coca-Cola tonight,” she muttered mockingly, hiding the bottle behind her back.
“Can we just have dinner? I don’t have all night” I said impatiently. Without a word, Ashley led me into the house’s big dining room. The roast chicken was ready, spread out with vegetables and potatoes, as were Artie Schlaukopf and Wilhelm Muller.
Ashley gestured to the head of the table. “Little bro, I’ve reserved this seat for you.”
I looked back at her silently. The dinner started rather the same. Everyone else tried to start a conversation, but it always peppered out. I was beginning to change my mind about coming. Ashley’s cooking had always been good. She seemed have put in extra effort today. Eventually, Ashley said, “So how’s work?”
“Work-like,” I answered.
“Very funny, Marlowe,” muttered back Muller.
“I’m serious, little bro,” continued Ashley.
“Aren’t you always?” I muttered.
“Just answer the question.”
“Not very good,” I answered. “You heard about that murder in the forest. Victim was a client of mine.”
“Jesus. What about the girl?” said Ashley. “They said you were with her on the news.”
“Yeah. I’m not really popular with her at the moment. She kept saying how we should go back for her mother. Maybe we should have,” I said darkly. “But I have nagging suspicion that if we had it would have ended even worse.”
“It probably would have,” muttered Muller. “Mrs. Merkel knew what she was doing.”
“That’s what I don’t understand,” I said, puzzled. “She could have left him. Everything would have been fine. I know domestic abuse is complicated, but she was a strong woman, not the sort to fall prey to a violent man.”
“Do we have to talk about work at dinner?” groaned Schlaukopf. His wife had long decided that neither he nor his children could talk about work at dinner. He had always tried to maintain that, even when he was eating with work colleagues.
“Bit late for that, Captain,” I muttered, nearly humorously for some odd reason.
“Suppose it is,” Captain Schlaukopf agreed. Then his face lit up as if the time for him to say something he had long wanted to had come. He spoke again. “On that subject, why don’t you come back to the force?”
I laughed gruffly. “Why would I? Being a PI with the personal trust of the head of the Homicide Unit is enough.”
“You can’t arrest people. You can’t shoot the murderers you find,” countered Muller. He seemed to have dropped the reserved and quiet manner that usually hung about him, and started talking as he only did among close friends. “Detectives like Walker don’t trust you like they should,” he urged. “Just come back. Walker isn’t that bad, but I don’t trust him as much as you.”
“True, but I’m free, Wil. That’s all I want to be” I said happily, reclining in my chair “Don’t you tire of the pressure? And the murders? I’m a PI. I can investigate anything I want to.”
“You like investigating adulterous spouses?” chuckled Captain Schlaukopf.
I shrugged easily. “That’s only a small part of my business. I can be very picky. I only take interesting cases, and most adultery cases are pretty boring.” Occasionally, though, I did take them, normally only if a prenuptial agreement was involved, in which case, I would be paid enough to make me forget my boredom.
“You still do them anyway.”
“You would too, Captain, if you discovered one day you had a grand total of one dollar in your bank account.”
“Are things really that bad?” said Muller softly.
“Not at the moment,” I agreed. “I’ve got about three hundred and fifty dollars in my bank account, thanks entirely to Mrs. Merkel. But there was nothing before she wandered into my apartment.”
“Boys, stop arguing. My brother is just stuck in his ways,” interrupted Ashley. “Annie failed to get him to become a PI when he was a detective. Now it’s just the opposite. Anyway, don’t you boys have something to show Marty?”
Muller and Captain Schlaukopf led me up the stairs of my grandfather’s gothic mansion. It would have looked more at home in Boston or the North East, but, instead, it was in Washington. The stairway was creaky. Very little had been done to preserve it. The paint had faded, and the grandeur it had once known was but a memory. A mansion that had once housed an extended family now belonged to one woman. Ashley hired in cleaners occasionally, but the house was so big that there was always something covered in dust and dirt. The stairs were a prime example.
There were six flights of stairs leading up from the main hallway. Numerous other flights led away from different floors. None of the rest were connected and most of them had long been forgotten. Some of them even led to dead ends. Others could only be reached through secret doors and passages. There were different ways to reach the cellar and many different levels of it. My grandfather had something of an obsession with architecture. It was his hobby. I doubted that anyone would ever be able to find all of his secret passages unless they ripped down the house itself.
I was led up the attic, the last floor. At five foot eleven, I was forced to stoop. Muller was even worse, but Schlaukopf seemed to fit in just properly. They led me to the western edge of the mansion. Behind an old bookshelf, housing books like ‘The Complete Collection of Sherlock Holmes’, ‘Children’s and Household Tales’ by Brothers’ Grimm, Herodotus’ ‘Histories’ and ‘Dubliners’ by James Joyce, there was a secret passage. I had known it was there since I was eleven years old.
One night I couldn’t sleep, so I had gone down to the mansion’s huge kitchen for a drink of water. It happened that when I was going back up to my room, on the second floor, I had noticed my grandfather ascending the stairs. Naturally, that puzzled me, so I followed him up to the attic. In my caution, I fell behind him, but I knew he had passed through the wall near the bookshelf. I waited for an hour or so before he came out again. The bookshelf slid to the side and my grandfather stepped out of the darkness. He had looked around, as if he knew some was watching him, but he must have decided that he was imagining things, because he went back down without further ado.
I had followed him up there in the middle of the night a few more times. He gone there irregularly, sometimes every night in a week, sometimes only once a week, or every two weeks. There was no pattern to it that I could see at the time, nor afterward. A few times my uncle, Teddy, my mother and my father went with him. As much as I tried, I was never able to figure out what they did in there. I had kept a diary of when they went into the secret door, and of who went when. After about two months of observing them and their strange midnight procession, I decided to find a way into the secret door. So one night after they had left the room, just to make sure they would not surprise me, I sat up and tried to figure out how they did it.
The bookshelf itself had moved aside easily. A suspiciously big wooden panel had been placed behind it. I tried all the usual contraptions that my grandfather used – wooden buttons in the wall, panels in the floor, doorknobs in strange places, a simple hard whack on the door, even pulling at the light holders – but nothing had worked, as much as I tried. Somehow, I’m not sure how, I had managed to get the original plans that were submitted to the Planning Commission. The plans said that the attic should be a meter longer than it was. Eventually, I had told Ashley about my discovery and together we tried to puzzle it out, but the results were the same. Nothing. Nothing at all.
Ashley had tired of it after a few months and we stopped investigating the secret door after about a year. She was fourteen months older than me. By this
time a year had passed, so she was thirteen and her teenager-ness had already asserted itself. Whenever I tried to talk about it, she just said how stupid the whole thing was. So I left it, and in the end, lost interest in it too. I had put so much effort into it without any return, but it had haunted me for the rest of my life, my first unsolved case, and, even twenty years later, it still niggled away at me unconsciously.
“Jesus, don’t tell me you two know what’s in there,” I exclaimed, as the three of us looked upon the dusty bookshelf.
“We do. Your father told us before he died three years ago,” answered Muller, as Schlaukopf pushed the heavy bookshelf to the side.
“What is it?” I demanded.
“Just you wait and see, Marlowe, just you wait and see,” said Captain Schlaukopf, smiling mischievously.
“So why have you waited three years to show me?”
“You know that answer, my friend. You do,” said Muller mysteriously. They were enjoying this, I could see that, but it also seemed to me that they were about to tell me something important. Perhaps it was just the importance I had given to this place that made me feel that way.
“How do we get into that bloody thing?” I demanded angrily.
“Repeat this. Do I find you here, you old sinner! I have long sought you!” explained Schlaukopf softly. “And put your hand against the panel.”
I put my hand on the panel and, feeling extremely stupid, I muttered “Do I find you here, you old sinner! I have long sought you!” I didn’t realize at the time, but it was quote from Little Red Riding Hood by Brothers’ Grimm.
Life Slowly Faded Page 2