by David Stukas
Monette looked away in disgust. “I guess when you have works of art and live in a palace, you have to have security cameras everywhere. I wonder if we’ve been on camera all along?” she mused.
The look of horror on Michael’s face was almost terrifying—but not half as terrifying as the look on my face. “Uh-oh!” I uttered.
“What’s the matter?” Monette asked. “It looks like you’ve seen Roger Ebert with his clothes off.”
“I just had a scary thought—although not quite as scary as the one you just mentioned. The count and I had sex all over the house, and it’s probably caught on videotape everywhere.”
“So you’re afraid the police will find the tapes?” Monette ventured.
“No, I’m afraid they’ll see what I did on them.”
Monette smiled with that oh-boy-delicious-dirt look. “And what sort of things did you do on those tapes? You have to tell me, because I’m on this case and it could be important,” she said with a naughty chortle.
“Well, Siegfreid dressed up like a priest in a latex priest outfit and I wore a choirboy’s outfit—not in latex,” I said, as if wearing a choirboy’s outfit with a high wool content during a sexual act was acceptable. “And he kind of lit candles in places where candles should never burn,” I said, calmly exposing myself to the greatest potential blackmail ever allowed.
Monette stared at me with her mouth open for what seemed like an eternity, so I carefully reached over and gently closed it for her.
When she didn’t respond, I ventured even deeper. “Is it the candle thing?”
“No, no, I’m still trying to get past the latex priest thing. Where do you get a latex priest outfit? I can’t even get jeans to fit me!” she complained.
“Could we leave this conversation ... and this room?” I pleaded.
“Yes, I think we need to go upstairs and look at some of these hidden cameras. This is just too strange. The footage of Siegfreid in the music room having cocktails with various people intrigues me.”
We went upstairs to the music room, went to the bookcase where the hidden camera captured the count and his friends, and guess what we found?
No camera. No wires, either. No holes bored in bookcases.
We went back down to the room where we found the videotapes and checked out the scenes captured in other rooms. Then we went to those rooms and I give you just one guess what we found. If you answered nothing, you just won an all-expenses-paid vacation to Scapoose, Oregon.
“I just don’t get it,” Monette moaned. “Why would the count have surveillance cameras all over the place and then have them taken out suddenly? I just don’t get it.”
I began to relax a little—a little, I said. If the cameras looked like they were taken out a while ago, then maybe my little acting debut wasn’t caught on tape for all to see. I tried to divert attention elsewhere. “Maybe the count was trying to catch the murderer on tape, blackmailing him or something, and when he got whatever he was after, he had the cameras taken out. I don’t get the lack of holes in the cabinetry, though.”
Monette, who seemed uniquely stumped until now, seemed to make her first discovery in the case, however small. “Robert, I’m sure there are miniature video camera-recorders that fit inside a book or something. But if what was on the tape was so important, then why stockpile the tapes downstairs in a servant’s quarters when you would want them where someone could find them in case you were murdered? I think we need to look at those tapes more closely.”
“Do we have to?” Michael whined. “I was thinking of going out for a while.”
“Michael, Stevie Wonder could see right through you,” Monette stated. “Didn’t you just finish having sex a few minutes ago?”
“Yes, but that’s ancient history, Monette.”
“My god, Michael, you really are a machine! Go on ... go!” she commanded. “Sometimes I wish I had your four-wheel sex drive, Michael. Mine wouldn’t even push a tricycle downhill.”
“I’ll be gone for just a little while,” Michael said, leaving Monette and me to investigate our latest clue.
Monette and I took the tapes and went through them together. We started reviewing the tapes at regular speed, but when we discovered how many there were, we decided to fast-forward through them. We watched the count eating alone, yelling at the servants, having cocktails with friends, talking on the phone, reading books and magazines, getting head from a muscular skinhead ... wait a minute!
“Uh,” was all Monette could say.
“Wait a minute. I want to see this,” I exclaimed, slowing the tape down to regular speed. I watched as an anonymous gay skinhead wearing a leather collar and army fatigues polished the count’s family jewels to an erogenous luster. “Well,” I said, trying to be as adult and open-minded as the heir to a shipping fortune could be, “he obviously did this before my time, so I guess this is none of my business. Being a citizen of the world, I have to be open-minded about this sort of thing. I guess that’s what it means to be a European.” I paused briefly and changed gears. “I’m not sure I minded being an uptight American, though.”
Monette looked at me, stunned at what she was seeing. And, as a card-carrying lesbian, revolted—a fact that she made clear to me, punctuated with two fingers being thrust down her throat.
We fast-forwarded the tape again, only to find more and more examples of the count and his unquenchable libido. It was only when I saw the count dressed in a latex priest’s outfit that I hit the ceiling.
“That son of a bitch!” I frothed. “He told me I was the only one he had ever played the priest with—he probably meant that day!”
“Relax, Robert. Maybe the fact you’re fabulously wealthy is some balm for your weary mind. Look at it this way: a hundred million deutsche marks would buy a lot of penicillin.”
“Thank you, Monette,” I said with complete exasperation. “Now I feel secure in the knowledge I’ll be the only millionaire at the VD clinic! So give me your opinion, Monette. Where do we stand? Any theories yet?”
“I don’t know. It’s too ... too many loose ends. Too much of this case is too messy. It’s too ... too! In my experience in having read every mystery ever written, murder is never this messy. There’s something we’re not seeing that pulls this whole thing together. I’ve got to think,” she said, putting her head in her hands like great detectives always did.
“Monette?”
“Yes?”
“Do you think the will is going to hold up in court?”
Monette looked at me and saw exactly what was going through my mind. “You want to be filthy rich, don’t you?”
“Wouldn’t you want to be?”
“No, Robert. I really enjoy working for the Endangered Herbs Society of America, making thirty-six thousand dollars until I reach the age of sixty-seven, when I can look forward to fabulous meals of Seafood Medley or Fancy Feast eaten right out of the can. Of course it would be nice to know where my next rent check was coming from. Or to be able to go on vacation to somewhere that doesn’t include a dysfunctional relative because I can’t afford anything better. Do I want to be rich? You betcha!” she said.
“To tell you the truth, yes, a bazillion deutsche marks would make me feel a lot better ... but I was also thinking it would make it easier to hire a very good German lawyer.”
“Believe me, I’ll solve this whole mystery or my name isn’t k.d. lang.”
“So you don’t think this case is hopeless, do you, Monette?” I pleaded.
“Oh, no. It’s a notch above hopeless,” she said, brimming with strained cheerfulness.
A notch above hopeless, I thought. In a nutshell, Monette had just described my life. Well, at least one notch above is one notch up.
13
From Hopeful to Hopeless with Enthusiasm
As the day wore on, Monette and I sat on the couch in the music room and stared at each other without moving. I now knew how Whitney Houston must have felt on her wedding night with Bobby Brown.
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br /> While Monette was lost in thought, the phone rang, jarring us back into reality. I answered the phone, found it was Herr Taucher, and handed the phone to Monette.
“So you found out who the body in the fridge was? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Um. Yes. Wow! Is that so? Very interesting. Verrrry interesting. Robert? Yes, that was him who answered the phone. OK, I’ll tell him. That’s right. Let’s talk later today. I have a few phone calls to make. Auf wiedersehen.”
I was boiling over with excitement until Mrs. Stark entered the room. Monette sounded confident and like she would solve this messy affair soon.
“What did the inspector say, Monette?” I asked impatiently.
“He said you’re his prime suspect and within minutes, a polizei will be here to confiscate your passport.”
My heart broke through my chest as I felt an overwhelming sense of dread only equal to facing Sister Mary Gonzales in third-grade Catholic catechism. (Despite the happy-go-lucky nature she projected to our parents, I still maintain she carried brass knuckles in the pockets of her habit and worked closely with Latin American dictators as a torture expert. You wanted a confession—however false—against a Marxist guerrilla? Call Sister Mary! She can choke a man with her rosary beads or do things with a crucifix that artist Andre Serrano never even contemplated.)
“Well,” Julia reported contentedly, “I guess now that The Wall is down, they don’t torture prisoners the way they used to, Robert. But I’ve read that a lot of the old East German secret police, the Stasis, are still around. In fact, a lot of them now work for the German penal system.”
“Thank you for the words of positive encouragement and support, Mrs. Stark. Now, if you don’t mind, I could use a handful of Seconals.”
“I’d glad to help, Robert,” Julia said, rushing to my execution. “Not in an overdose, mind you. You just might want one to sleep, what with all that’s hanging over your head.”
Julia’s unusually long emphasis on the word hanging was just another salvo in her attempt to inflict further damage. She was obviously angry her attempts on my life at her Newport mansion failed, and if you can’t kill ’em, at least wound them.
I’ve always suspected the American prison system is missing a model employee by not hiring Julia as head executioner. She’d plunge an intravenous needle into the arm of a condemned criminal without a hint of emotion, turn to the assembled, teary-eyed witnesses, and wonder what all the fuss was about.
Monette spoke up. “I wouldn’t start ordering prison overalls just yet. Herr Taucher just told me the body found in the house was a customs inspector.”
“Customs inspector?” I said, completely baffled. “Do you think he was letting the count ship stuff into the country with a blind eye, then decided to squeal unless the count paid up?” I conjectured proudly, thinking I had single-handedly solved the case.
“Robert, as usual, you are completely wrong. He was a customs official at the airport, assigned to a part of the airport where the smaller jets came into the country. And get this, mostly private jets. His name is ... was Ralf Reimann.”
“Whoa!” I commented.
“It gets even better. After the announcement broke on the television news, several wealthy people came forward and confessed Ralf was shaking them down for money.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
Monette continued like a bloodhound on the trail of an escaped convict with a body-odor problem.
“The customs guy was blackmailing wealthy German citizens. Ralf would plant contraband in their luggage and then pull them aside and tell them he would let it go, but he’d talk to them later. Naturally, no one wanted a hint of scandal, so they’d pay him off. He didn’t ask for a lot, so most people put up the money rather than risk having a lot of publicity.”
Things were becoming a little clearer to me. “So do you think he had something on the count, tried to extort money out of him, and Siegfreid lured the customs guy here, killed him, and put him on ice—so to speak?”
“That’s certainly a possibility,” Monette conjectured. “But it would have to be something really important to kill someone. You don’t murder someone because they put a few grams of cocaine into your luggage.”
“So you think it was something bigger? Like the count’s shipping business?”
“I don’t think we know enough yet. But it had to be something that threatened the count enough to commit murder.”
“I don’t know,” Julia spoke up, thumbing through a German equestrian magazine, presumably trying to get in touch with her four-legged relatives. “I think some people deserve to be murdered for reasons others may consider petty.”
Like mother, like son. They both seemed to speak without considering the impact of their words. On the other hand, perhaps they did. That was the unnerving thing about Julia: I never knew if she was just a clueless, overly pampered Republican fossil completely uninterested in the less fortunate of the world, or playing an insidious game of cat and mouse. We both chose to ignore her comment.
Julia continued. “Robin, what is the name of the manservant here? I need someone to send my clothes out for dry cleaning.”
“Karl,” I answered, hoping it would get her off my back and out in front of a fast-moving intercity express train.
“You know, I like that guy. He’s helpful, professional—knows what he’s doing.”
It figured Julia would take a shine to Karl. Like two peas in a pod. Never mind Karl was a homosexual. Julia and Karl were united by another, more intense bond: homicide.
I turned back to Monette. “The one thing that bothers me, Monette, is that Ralf’s murder doesn’t solve the problem of who killed the count, does it?”
“No, but it means there’s another suspect out there.”
Julia uttered a quiet tsk-tsk, and her face fell in disappointment that I was no longer the only prime suspect. “Maybe the count killed the customs guy and then the customs union killed the count for revenge. I’ve heard unions are very strong here.”
Monette gave me a when-is-she-going-to-leave look and continued. “There are a few questions to which I want answers. First, why did the count make those videotapes? I mean, who was he trying to catch on tape and why? Second, why did Siegfreid kill Ralf—and when? What did the guy have on the count? Third, when the count—in a drunken state—left you in the linen closet, who did he meet along the way before he ended up ... where, er, he ended up. And fourth . . .” she said, trailing off.
“Yes, Monette?” I asked, trying to coax out what could be a significant question in this inquiry. “The fourth?”
She looked up right into my eyes and spoke. “And fourth, am I the only fucking person who thinks Anne Heche’s autobiography, Call Me Crazy, is the most understated book title of this century?”
I looked up at Monette and laughed, letting a little stress out of the situation. Julia, however, looked over at me and signaled with that puckered face of hers that jokes about that Ellen Degenerate woman were not amusing. Mrs. Stark probably never forgave Mary McCarthy for injecting lesbianism into her 1963 novel, The Group. I mean, why spoil a perfectly good story about a bunch of Vassar girls by acknowledging the dirty secret that some women love women? But you’d think that, judging from the sort of heterosexual men I’ve seen in monied circles, becoming a lesbian seemed like the only sane choice. Conversely, if Julia represented the typical American heiress, it’s a wonder more wealthy men weren’t gay.
Shortly after Monette compiled a list of questions she wanted to ask Herr Taucher, she gave him a call.
“Number one, which servant occupied the room where we found the surveillance videotapes of Siegfreid? I see,” she said, motioning for me to get her a pen. “The count kept detailed records of his servants? That’s certainly good for us, isn’t it, Inspector? Uh-huh, you found the records in Siegfreid’s papers. Uh-huh. Name? Manfred Weber? Do you know where he’s living now? You’re looking into it? Good. Oh, when you locate some information about him, could you get me
a picture, if that’s possible? You can? Good. OK, second question. What about the will Robert gave you, the one where he gets everything? Euw! A forgery. That’s bad. The real one was at his lawyer’s office in Berlin. And who are the beneficiaries on that one? Yes, I know that’s privileged information. No, the information won’t leave this room. Uh-huh. Uh-huh! Interesting! And who’s he? Tell me about him. Yes ... yes ... no! Wow! OK, slow down. Uh-huh. You’ll find out where this guy lives, right? Good. And the other? Heino? Yes, Robert’s met him. I’d like to know more about him. What’s his role as business partner? That’s a heck of a lot of money to inherit. No one else? No. Well, this is really interesting! OK, third question. Robert says he overheard the count talking to Ludwig Buxtehude on the phone and he heard Siegfreid yelling at Ludwig that he wouldn’t give him another penny . . . or deutsche mark or whatever. Could you find out if there were any monetary arrangements between Siegfreid and Ludwig? You know, loans, personal notes, business arrangements, that sort of thing? Yes, thank you. OK, question number four. Siegfreid had a lot of servants working for him before he fired them all. Oh, you are, are you? Well, you’re two steps ahead of me! Here’s my last question. Did you turn up any information on Siegfreid’s art dealer by the name of Uli? You know, the one Robert and Michael saw eating lunch with the count and who later showed up at Robert’s going-away party? I guess that will do it for now. Yes, let me know when you find out anything else. OK, auf wiedersehen.”
“Monette?”
“Yes, Robert?”
“I think I heard you right when you said the will was a forgery.”
“You are correct.”
“So I’m not rich?”
“Not even close. The only thing you are right now is in trouble.”
“That’s what I was afraid of. So who got all the money?”