by Rick Blechta
The footsteps stopped at the entrance to the apartment. “Oscar? Are you in there? Is everything all right?”
“Come in and turn right, Roderick. I’m in the bathroom. And for God’s sake, don’t touch anything!”
Roderick appeared in the doorway. “What are you doing in—” He stopped as he caught a whiff of the smell coming from the floor in front of him. “Oh dear.”
“We’ve got a problem. A big, big problem.”
“What?”
“Thekla’s dead.”
My friend’s jaw hit bottom. “What?”
“In the living room. Somebody’s done the same thing to her that was done to that damned baron.”
Roderick grasped at a forlorn straw. “Are you certain she’s dead?”
I nodded. “There’s blood all over the place.”
We went back to the living room and looked down at the obscenity lying on the floor. Someone had certainly done their job thoroughly. The first thing I noticed was her hands—which she’d probably brought up in a reflex action to ward off the blow. All she’d managed to do was get her fingers sliced to ribbons. Judging from the amount of blood, she hadn’t died right away. I guess Thekla’s heart must have only been nicked and continued pumping a river of scarlet down the front of her sweatshirt. The poor girl had bled to death. The carpet around her body was now a soggy mess of coagulating blood, and the smell I couldn’t identify when I’d first entered the room had now been etched on my memory forever.
Roderick and I stood mutely. Even though she had been trying to weasel a million bucks out of me, Thekla hadn’t deserved to die like this. Nobody did. I walked over to the body and gently closed her staring eyes, as much for us as for her dignity.
“What do we do now?” Roderick asked as I stood up.
“You’re the one who speaks the language. Call the cops and then get the hell out of here! You are definitely not getting involved in this.”
Roderick shook his head. “I stay,” he said firmly, and I knew from his tone that it would be a needless waste of time to argue.
I sighed. “Then get it over with.”
“There’s something you should know first. Shortly after you went inside, someone came out of the building in a devil of a hurry.”
I’d forgotten about that in the aftermath of the shock of finding the unfortunate maid. I told Roderick about the figure rushing by me as I arrived at the apartment door. “I couldn’t see anything because of the darkness. What did you see?”
“Not much more. The snow is falling rather thickly for one thing, and there wasn’t much light for another. All I saw was a dark coat and a pulled-down beret, but I got the impression that the person was a woman. Apparently there was someone else waiting in a doorway across the street. The two took off at high speed. I probably should have given chase, but frankly, I was worried about you. Maybe I made the wrong choice.”
“I’d give anything to know who it was,” I answered, and staring down at the body, thought about the probability that the person had been the murderer—of both Thekla and von Heislinger. If only I hadn’t tripped over that damned broom!
“You might not have liked what you saw.”
“Why in hell not?”
“It was just an impression I had, and truthfully, it was fleeting, but the person who ran out of here was short...and could have been Tory.”
I immediately opened my mouth to object, but everything that had happened the past few days rushed up to stare right into my face. Too much, too much. And the last in the string of horrors lay over in the corner of the room.
Sighing heavily, the weight of the world crushing me down, I turned to look again at the bloody handiwork of someone who was very, very sick. “Best to get this over with, I suppose.”
Roderick nodded and took out the cell phone.
***
The Viennese cops arrived promptly, I’ll give them that.
By mutual agreement, Roderick and I didn’t tell them much, just what they obviously needed to know. The cops in turn asked the questions that might be expected: why were we there; how did we know the deceased; did we see anything they should know about? Even to me, the answers we gave sounded lame, and you could see suspicion form pretty quickly in their eyes. Roderick pointed out that if we had killed Thekla, why had we called them and then stuck around? It fell on deaf ears. Reinforcements were called in.
The cops who’d been first on the scene were low on the totem pole and didn’t seem to know who Roderick and I were, but the next wave certainly did, and they immediately called in the heavy artillery. By that time, Roderick and I had been separated into the apartment’s two bedrooms: standard police procedure.
Oberstleutnant Müller eventually arrived around midnight. The guy babysitting me almost fell off his chair and gave a pretty snappy salute when he saw who had walked in to find him dozing. After a glare and a quick head movement from his superior, the cop saluted again and scurried out the door.
As he transferred the glare to me, Müller’s face displayed all the bonhomie of someone who’d been dragged out of a nice, warm bed and into a snowstorm. I envied the lackey who’d just left.
Müller drew himself up. “I am through fooling around with you, Herr Lukesh. You are in very serious trouble now. Your only hope is to tell me exactly what is going on and why you are here. No more half-truths and wisecracking remarks!”
Even though I knew Müller meant business and was a dangerous adversary, all I could think of him saying was, “We haf vays uf making you talk!” Maybe it was the situation, the hour or a combination of both, but I felt very close to laughing out loud.
Müller must have seen it in my expression, because his own darkened further. “Come, come! What is it to be, Herr Lukesh?”
“I don’t know what options I have. I’m not from this country, after all. Where I come from, I don’t have to say anything until I speak to a lawyer.”
Müller smiled evilly. “So it is to be that way? Too bad for you that your friend Herr Whitchurch has already told us everything. It is going to be a pleasure to sign your arrest papers.”
As a ploy, it wasn’t bad. If I hadn’t read so many detective novels, I might have figured the jig was up and spilled the beans, but as I had been led off to this bedroom earlier, staunch Roderick had stuck his thumb up and called out, “Solidarity forever, old man.”
When I merely smiled and shook my head, Müller spun on his heel and slammed the door hard enough to rattle the pictures on the walls. My babysitter returned with a pal this time and they both sat staring at me for another hour before a third cop (not so much saluting, but obviously still an important man) arrived, put handcuffs on me and led me out by the arm. The crime scene men were still at it in the living room on hands and knees making a minute search of the carpet.
Roderick and I met on the stairway, each firmly in tow between two cops as we were marched down to the street.
“What’s up?” I asked Roderick over my shoulder.
“Not too much. Did he try it on you?”
I shrugged. “Yup. My guess is they’re taking us to a basement somewhere and will beat a confession out of us with rubber hoses.”
The cop on my left said loudly, “You will not talk, if you please!”
At least he was fairly polite about it. In the movies, he would have thrown me down the stairs to shut me up.
It had puzzled me why we hadn’t been hustled out of the place hours earlier, but I understood—as well as the reason for Müller’s evil grin—when I saw the phalanx of media that awaited us out on the street. They’d set up enough lights to shoot a scene from The Ten Commandments. On top of that, several hundred people stood behind some police barricades. Mom and Dad were just going to love this back in New York.
As we emerged, reporters began screaming questions at us in six different languages, the crowd jeered, and I had it hammered home what a horrible thing it is to be so publicly arrested. We were being tried right there on the street. I
put my head down and tried to shut out the noise and the light bursts from a thousand flashes. Müller was probably somewhere nearby, chuckling over his revenge.
Down at the main cop shop, they forced me to sit alone in a small room for another three, deadly boring hours, probably to reflect on my sins and be ready to tell all, but in reality forcing me to reflect on Tory’s possible sins. If Roderick was correct, what in heaven’s name had she been doing in that apartment? I could only come up with one answer—one I didn’t know how to face.
Two different groups of detectives went at me on and off after daybreak. I only told them that Thekla had contacted me to say that she had information that might clear my wife and I’d gone to meet her, which wasn’t that far from the truth. At first they’d scoffed, making it clear they thought they had their murderer. Later on, they must have gotten further information from the crime scene, because they seemed slightly more inclined to believe that I’d merely been in the apartment, and not the prime mover in what had happened there.
***
Shortly after nine a.m, Müller entered, looking pressed and fresh as a daisy. An underling followed him and another man: about my height, a good hundred pounds heavier, though, with a fringe of gray hair around his bald pate and an air of knowing more than anyone might guess. In other words, he had to be a civil servant, a politician or a lawyer. A briefcase dangling from his right hand, he sailed into the room rather like an ocean liner making its way into port. I stood, feeling inclined to salute.
“Herr Lukesh, I am Schultz.” His English sounded as good as any broadcaster on the BBC.
I found out later that this was the way Schultz generally introduced himself. Being the most famous criminal lawyer in Austria, I guess he could get away with it, kind of like old Ludwig coming into a room and telling everyone, “I am Beethoven.”
“Your embassy,” he continued, “when they found out what had happened, asked me to come down and meet with you. I am a criminal lawyer. Does this meet with your approval?”
I nodded, and we shook hands.
“Herr Lukesh,” the lawyer began, “the situation in which you find yourself has been outlined to me, and I think it wisest that we consult in private. Do you agree with this?”
Shrugging, I said, “You’re the expert.”
While Schultz opened his briefcase, Müller and his underling stared at me balefully, then left the room.
“Tell me what I need to do,” I said.
“First, I need to know everything that has happened,” Schultz answered, then smiled slyly, “and I will decide how much of it Müller needs to know.”
I began to warm up to the guy.
It took a good hour to get things together, and I was sure that Müller would be in a far worse mood when we finally called him back into the room, but surprisingly, he returned with a smile on his craggy face. I didn’t like it.
Schultz stood. “My client agrees to answer your questions, and at the end will make an official statement.”
Müller’s smile widened. “Good.” The cop stated for the taped records who was in the room, then got down to work. “Tell us how you came to be in that apartment last night.”
I looked at Schultz who nodded and said, “Don’t worry. I will stop you if you need stopping.”
“Yesterday I was contacted by someone whose call I had been expecting—”
“You were expecting a call?” Müller interrupted.
I sighed heavily. “Yes. Thekla, the ah, deceased woman, had contacted me earlier and said she had evidence which would clear my wife of von Heislinger’s murder.”
“She called you at your hotel?”
“No, we’d made arrangements for her to call me at a pay phone.”
“Why was that?”
“Because I thought that my phone at the hotel might be tapped.”
Müller ignored the implication. “And what was said to you?”
“She was offering to sell me videotape evidence which would prove that my wife did not kill Rudolph von Heislinger.”
“And you never contacted us about this? It was your duty to report this information to the authorities immediately, and yet you did not. Why is that, Herr Lukesh?”
I looked Müller in the eye. “Because I did not think the police would believe me, nor would you be interested in what I had to say.”
We tried to stare each other down for several seconds. Schultz kept silent, although I got the feeling that he was weighing whether or not to speak.
“Herr Lukesh, you had information which might have been of significant importance in the brutal murder of an Austrian citizen, and you chose not to inform the authorities? I find this very hard to comprehend. At what game are you playing?”
Even though I felt like giving back what I was getting, I realized it would do no good for my cause to get into a shouting match. So I bit my tongue and looked at Schultz. “Would it be possible to speak to my attorney alone?”
Müller seemed inclined to be obstructive, but after a few words in German from Schultz, all the cops left the room again.
“Tell me where I stand on this,” I said looking down at my hands.
The Viennese lawyer spoke rapidly, outlining the ins and outs of the legal situation. I had withheld vital information on a serious criminal matter, and Müller could rightfully throw the book at me. “But if handled correctly, he might not,” Schultz said at the finish.
“How so?”
“If we appear to cooperate with him, something might be negotiated. I am assuming that you wish to have your freedom?”
That’s about all that had occupied my thoughts since the cops had arrived at the apartment. I sighed and let Schultz broker the deal when Müller returned. He didn’t say yes, but he didn’t say no, and while my lawyer didn’t look overly happy about that, he nodded and I got down to telling my story.
We actually decided to leave out very little. Schultz felt the police stood a far better chance of finding the video than us, and that with the knowledge of its existence, they might also begin to think of other suspects than my darling wife. With that in mind, there was no real reason to hold much back.
The stenographer busily took down my statement. Müller leaned back in his chair with arms folded, a non-committal expression on his face.
When I finished, he looked at me for a long moment. “And you have honestly told me the complete story, Herr Lukesh?”
I knew enough not to look over at Schultz. “Yes, I have.”
“You wish to add nothing more?”
Something in Müller’s expression and tone of voice made me suddenly wary.
“Did you discuss the payment of so much of your wife’s money with her?” he asked.
“How could I when I have no idea where she is!”
Müller pounced. “Don’t you?” he roared. “I am tired of lies and half-truths from you, Herr Lukesh! You have probably been in constant contact with your wife, and yet you still lie to me about that—and under the guise of ‘coming clean’ as you put it.”
This was too much. “I am not lying. What I have told you is the truth!”
The Oberstleutnant leaned back in his chair and smiled beatifically. “Then please explain, Herr Lukesh, why we have found your wife’s fingerprints all over that apartment—including one exceptionally clear print in blood on Thekla Grillzer’s neck!”
“The object of the most massive international police search in recent memory, violinist Victoria Morgan, now implicated in a second murder, can safely be said to be the most hunted person on the planet.”
—from The World at Six on the radio network of the CBC
Chapter 18
TORY
I was running for my life when I fled that apartment. Hitting the street, I didn’t break stride as I streaked right past Elen’s hiding place. It didn’t take much for her to figure out that something was desperately wrong, so she took off after me. As we ran down the rest of the block, I tensed, expecting someone to shout at us to s
top. Turning the corner, I kept on running until it felt as if my lungs would burst. Finally, we made it to the end of a long, curving street and slid to a stop on the icy sidewalk.
I bent over, sides heaving and managed to gasp, “Thekla’s dead.”
“What did you do to her?”
“Not me! Someone else. I found her with a knife sticking out of her chest, same as last time.”
“Sweet Jesus!” Hearing the ee-ah, ee-ah, ee-ah of emergency vehicles, I started to panic, ready to make another dash for it.
“Wait!” Elen said, grabbing my arm. “They’re not coming this way.” We waited a few more tense moments, then, “They’ve stopped.”
“Do you think it’s back at the apartment?”
I’m not sure, with the way things echo around these streets. Want me to go back and look?”
“No! Don’t leave me alone.”
“Then let’s keep walking. It isn’t safe here,” Elen said, looking around at the thickly falling snow, “nor sane to be out here on a night like this.”
There’s not actually much I remember clearly of the rest of that night. I think I went into shock. The cold night air, the swirling snow and the fear of capture mingling with the ugliness of what I’d seen caused something to snap inside my head. Elen says that I started giggling as we walked along the deserted streets, the rotten weather fortunately keeping sensible people indoors. She knew we had to get out of the public eye and do it quickly. I would have been content for her to lead me anywhere she wanted, even if it was right to the nearest police station.
She wasn’t sure of her way. The streets were those narrow, meandering ones you find in the older sections of most European cities, and vistas of pretty much the same kind of streets greeted us whenever we got to the next corner. Elen hadn’t been in the city long enough to recognize any of the street names, and it wasn’t like she could stop anyone to ask the way.