Crime (8 page)

Schmied thumbed through the transcript of the interrogation. “You’re right,” he said finally, and pushed the files away. He disliked such little games by the police; they never really got anybody anywhere.

“Besides which, the weapon involved, the lamp the student was killed with, showed no fingerprints,” I said. The trace evidence had revealed only
her
DNA.

“That is correct. But the sperm in the girl’s hair came from your client.”

“Oh come on, Mr. Schmied, that’s just crazy. He ejaculates on the girl and then pulls on his gloves to bash her head in? Boheim’s not a moron.”

Schmied’s eyebrows shot up.

“And all the other traces, the ones that were lifted off water glasses, door handles, window handles, and so on, are perfectly explicable by the fact that he stayed in the hotel—they imply no guilt.”

We argued for almost an hour. At the end, Schmied said, “On condition that your client lays out his relationship to the deceased in detail at the hearing, I will agree that the arrest warrant may be withdrawn tomorrow morning.”

He stood up and held out his hand to say good-bye. As I was standing in the doorway, he said, “But Boheim will surrender his passport, pay a high amount in bail, and check in with the police twice a week. Agreed?”

Of course I agreed.

·    ·    ·

When I left the room, Schmied was pleased that the affair would now die down. He had never really believed Boheim to be the perpetrator. Percy Boheim gave no appearance of being a raving madman who would crush the head of a student with a rain of blows. But, Schmied was also thinking, who knows his fellow human being? Which was why, for him, motive was very seldom the deciding factor.

Two hours later, just as he was locking the door to his office on his way home, his phone rang. Schmied cursed, went back, picked up the receiver, and let himself down into his chair again. It was the Homicide Division’s leading investigator on the case. When Schmied hung up six minutes later, he looked at the clock. Then he pulled his old fountain pen out of his jacket, wrote a brief summary of the conversation, and inserted it as the first page on top of the file, switched off the light, and remained sitting for some time in the darkness. He now knew that Percy Boheim was the killer.

The next day, Schmied asked me to come to his office again. He looked almost sad as he pushed the pictures at me across his desk. The photos clearly showed Boheim behind his car window. “There’s a high-resolution camera positioned at the exit from the hotel garage,” he said. “Your client was filmed leaving that garage. I received the pictures this morning—the Homicide Division called me last night after you and I had spoken. I wasn’t able to reach you again.”

I looked at him, puzzled.

“The pictures show Mr. Boheim leaving the hotel garage. Please look at the time on the first photograph; the video camera always stamps them in the bottom left-hand corner. The time is shown as 3:26:55. We checked the clock setting on the camera; it’s correct. The cleaning lady discovered the dead girl at 3:26. That time is also correct; it’s confirmed by the first call to the police, which came in at 3:29. I’m sorry, but there can’t be any other perpetrator.”

I had no alternative but to withdraw from the remand hearing. Boheim would remain in detention as a suspect until the trial.

The next months were taken up with preparations for the trial. All the lawyers in my chambers were working on it; every tiny detail from the file was checked and rechecked—the cell-phone tower, the DNA analysis, the camera in the garage. The Homicide Division had done good work; there were almost no mistakes we could find. Boheim Industries commissioned a private detective agency, but it came up with nothing new. Boheim himself stuck to his story, despite all proof to the contrary. And despite his miserable prospects, he remained good-humored and relaxed.

Police work proceeds on the assumption that there is no such thing as chance. Investigations consist of 95 percent office work, checking out factual details, writing summaries, getting statements from witnesses. In detective novels, the person who did it confesses when he or she is screamed at; in real life, it’s not that simple. And when a man with a bloody knife in his hand is bent over a corpse, that means he’s the murderer. No reasonable policeman would believe he had only walked past by chance and tried to help by pulling the knife out of the body. The detective superintendent’s observation that a particular solution is too simple is a screenwriter’s conceit. The opposite is true. What is obvious is what is plausible. And most often, it’s also what’s right.

Lawyers, by contrast, try to find holes in the structures of proof built by prosecutors. Their ally is chance; their task is to disrupt an overhasty reliance on what appears to be the truth. A police officer once said to a federal judge that defense attorneys are no more than brakes on the vehicle of justice. The judge replied that a vehicle without brakes isn’t much use, either. Any criminal case can function only within these parameters. So we were hunting for the chance that would save our client.

Boheim had to spend Christmas and New Year’s in detention. ADA Schmied had given him wide-ranging permission for conversations with his operating officers, accountants, and civil lawyers. He saw them every second day and ran his companies out of his detention cell. His board members and his staff declared openly that he had their support. His wife also visited him regularly. The only person he refused to be visited by was his son; he didn’t want Benedict to see his father in prison.

But still there was no ray of hope that broke through for the trial, due to start in four days. Aside from a few procedural motions, no one had a basic concept for a successful defense. A deal, otherwise a regular occurrence in criminal cases, was out of the question. Murder carries a life sentence, manslaughter a sentence of five to fifteen years. I had nothing that would allow me to negotiate with the judge.

The printouts of the video pictures were on the library table in my chambers. Boheim had been captured on them in piercing detail. It was like a pocket camera strip with six images. Boheim activates the exit button with his left hand. The barrier opens. The car drives past the camera. And then suddenly it was all completely clear. The solution had been in the file for four months, so simple that it made me laugh. And we’d all overlooked it.

The trial took place in Room 500 in the courthouse in Moabit. The state’s case was for manslaughter. Assistant District Attorney Schmied represented the prosecutor’s office himself, and as he read out the charges, the courtroom fell silent. Boheim took the stand as the accused. He was well prepared; he spoke for more than an hour without notes. His voice was sympathetic; people liked listening to him. He spoke with great focus about his relationship with Stefanie Becker. He left nothing out; there were no dark, shadowy areas. He described the course of their meeting on the day of the crime and how he had left the hotel at 2:30. He answered the relevant questions from the judges and the district attorneys both fully and precisely. He explained both that he had paid Stefanie Becker for sex and why, adding that it would be absurd to assume that he would have killed a young girl with whom he had had no deeper relationship.

Boheim was masterful. The discomfort of everyone involved in the trial was evident. It was a strange situation. No one wanted to suspect him of murder—it was just that it couldn’t have been anyone else. Witnesses were not due to be called until the next day.

The tabloids the following morning led with such headlines as
MILLIONAIRE NOT KILLER OF BEAUTIFUL STUDENT?
That was one way of summing it up.

On the second day of the trial, they called Consuela, the hotel maid. Finding the body had taken its toll on her. Her statements about the time were credible. Neither the prosecution nor the defense had any questions for her.

After her, it was Abbas’s turn. He was in mourning. The court asked about his relationship to the deceased, in particular whether Stefanie had ever spoken about the accused and, if so, what she had said. Abbas had nothing he could report.

Then the presiding judge asked Abbas about his meeting with Stefanie in front of the hotel, his jealousy, and his spying on her. The judge was fair; he did everything to ascertain if Abbas had been in the hotel on the day of the murder. Abbas responded no to every question in this vein. He described his gambling obsession and his debts, said he had recovered now and had a limited work permit, which enabled him to wash dishes in a pizzeria to clear those debts. No one in the court believed Abbas was lying: Anyone willing to lay bare his private circumstances in such a way would be telling the truth.

ADA Schmied also tried everything. But Abbas stuck to his story. He was on the witness stand for almost four hours.

I didn’t have any questions for Abbas. The presiding judge looked at me in surprise; after all, Abbas was the only potential alternative killer. I had something else in mind.

Famously, the most important rule for a defense attorney when examining a witness is never to ask a question to which you do not already know the answer. Surprises are not always happy ones, and you do not play with the fate of your client.

The trial produced almost nothing new; the contents of the files were laid out step by step. Stefanie’s girlfriend, to whom she had admitted why she had turned to prostitution, merely cast a shadow on Boheim, who had taken advantage of the girl’s plight. One of the female jurors, who seemed to me to be on our side, shifted uneasily on her chair.

On the fourth day of the trial, the policeman we’d been waiting for was called as the twelfth witness. He hadn’t been part of the Homicide Division for very long. It had been his job to secure the video from the surveillance camera in the garage. The presiding judge asked how the policemen had handled the video’s transfer from the security team at the hotel. Yes, he had immediately checked the time coded on the video on the monitors in the hotel’s security office. He had been able to establish that there was a mere thirty-second deviation from the actual time. And he had written this up in his report.

When the defense was invited to cross-examine, I first asked him to confirm that the date he had secured the video was October 29. Yes, that was correct. It was a Monday, around 5:00 p.m.

“Sir, did you ask the watchman at the hotel whether he moved the clocks back to winter time on October twenty-eighth?” I asked.

“Excuse me? No. The time stamp was correct, I checked it.…”

“The video was taken on October twenty-sixth, which still falls within summer time. The changeover to winter time only occurred two days later, on October twenty-eighth.”

“I don’t understand,” said the policeman.

“It’s quite simple. It could be that the clock setting inside the surveillance camera was showing winter time. If this clock registered three o’clock in summer, it would actually be two o’clock, but if it were winter, three o’clock would be the correct time.”

“Right.”

“On the day of the murder, October twenty-sixth, it was still summer time. The clock showed three-twenty-six. If the clock hadn’t been reset, it would actually have been two-twenty-six. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” said the policeman, “but that’s all very theoretical.”

“The theory is the point. The question is whether the clock was correctly set. If not, then the accused left the room an hour before the maid discovered the body. This hour would have allowed any other person to kill the victim. That, sir, is why it would have been critical to ask the hotel’s security staff this question. Why did you not ask it?”

“I can’t remember if I asked or not. Probably the security people told me.…”

“I have here a statement from the head of the security team that we obtained some days ago. He said the clock had never been reset. Ever since the camera was installed, it has run on the same time, which is winter time. Could you now try to better recall whether you asked him this question or not?” I handed the presiding judge and the district attorney’s staff a copy of the statement.

“I … I think I didn’t pose that question,” the policeman said.

“Your Honor, would you please show the witness sheets twelve to fifteen from picture folder B? It concerns the pictures that show the accused leaving the garage.”

The presiding judge found the yellow picture folder and spread out the prints from the video camera in front of him. The witness stepped over to the judges’ table and looked at them.

“There it is: three-twenty-six-fifty-five—that’s the time,” said the policeman.

“Yes, the wrong time. May I direct your attention to the accused’s arm as it appears in image number four? Please look carefully. His left hand is clearly visible because he’s pressing the buzzer. Mr. Boheim was wearing a Patek Philippe that day. Can you make out the numerals on the picture?”

“Yes, they’re perfectly legible.”

“Sir, what time are they telling?”

“Two-twenty-six,” said the policeman.

Unrest broke out on the jammed press bench. ADA Schmied now approached the judges’ table himself to look at the original pictures. He took his time, picked up the photos one by one, and inspected them closely. Finally, he nodded. That gave us the sixty minutes needed to present the theory of an alternative killer and free Boheim. The rest of the trial would be over quickly now; there were no other pieces of evidence against Boheim. The presiding judge declared a recess.

Half an hour later, the district attorney’s office lifted the order of detention on Boheim, and at the next day’s proceedings, he was formally exonerated without any further evidence being heard.

ADA Schmied congratulated Boheim on the verdict. Then he went back down the long hall to his office, finished a summary report on the outcome of the trial, and opened the next file that was lying on his desk. Three months later, he retired.

Abbas was arrested that same evening. The police interrogator was skillful. He explained to Abbas that Stefanie had only prostituted herself to save him, and read him the statement from the girlfriend to whom Stefanie had told the whole story. When Abbas understood the sacrifice she’d made, he broke down. But he had had experience with the police, and he didn’t confess—the crime remains unsolved to this day. Abbas could not be charged with it; the evidence was insufficient.