Death of a Second Wife (A Dotsy Lamb Travel Mystery) (18 page)

Chet said, “Where is he?”

“He’s still in Zurich. His father’s been taken to the hospital and now he’s slipped into a coma. Juergen sounded as if he doesn’t expect him to come out of it.”

Chet set his fork down slowly and reached for his wine glass. Brian glanced sideways at Chet. I wondered what they were both thinking. If old man Merz died, would it have any ramifications for Chet? Was Stephanie in her father’s will? Did Stephanie have a will? Was Chet the beneficiary? But Stephanie had already predeceased her father. What would happen to her share of her father’s fortune in this case? I figured it would depend on how the will was worded. Sometimes they had the phrase “or her heirs or survivors” and the money would be passed along to Stephanie’s beneficiaries, but lacking that phrase it might be distributed to the father’s other heirs.

And the most important question of all,
did Chet know?

After a long, rather awkward silence, Erin piped up. “When is he coming back?” She looked at me. “Does Detective Kronenberg know where he is? I thought none of us could leave.”

“Juergen asked permission before he left.”

“Sounds like special treatment to me,” Brian said. “Rich guy gets to leave. What if I went up to the van and told him
I
had to leave because
my
father was sick?”

Chet swallowed a gulp of wine and winced.

“I didn’t word that right, did I?”

“Kronenberg has Juergen’s passport,” I said. “Juergen can’t leave the country any more than the rest of us can.”

* * * * *

After dinner Patrick was called to the police van. I watched from my bedroom window as he trudged across the meadow in the rosy twilight. The sun had slipped behind the western ridge, casting the remaining patches of snow in gold, the meadow grass in amber. Patrick’s silhouette, hands jammed into pants pockets, shrank and disappeared into the van. I wondered what this was all about.

I stood at the window for a while longer, scanning the sky for that glider. I still wanted to get the numbers on the bottom of the wing, even though I hardly needed more confirmation that the glider at the airstrip and the one that had been buzzing our house were one and the same. A large bird soared in lazy circles over the meadow. All seemed peaceful.

A man came flying out of the van, shouting, running northward. Seconds later, another man—this one I recognized as Kronenberg—dashed out in the same direction. They soon disappeared behind the rise that blocked my view of the bunker, so I ratcheted my window open with the little handle on the sill. Male voices, excited, angry. Had the first man been Patrick? I had to know.

Skittering down the stairs and through the living room, I took the outside flight of stairs to ground level and from there, up the hill and across the meadow. I stood on the little rise and watched two men escort a third across the area still set off by crime scene tape and into the van. The man twisted, growled, and kicked, but Kronenberg and his assistant had him firmly by each arm. Thank God, it wasn’t Patrick. It was Zoltan, the handyman.

* * *
* *

I waited on the porch for over an hour, wondering when Patrick would come back. I was dying to know what was happening inside that van. I figured Patrick must have left before the scuffle with Zoltan and then possibly headed elsewhere for a walk to clear his head. But perhaps he’d seen it all. I hoped he had.

Full dark now, I didn’t see Patrick until his head popped up from the stairs. He grabbed me by the elbow and pushed me to the other end of the porch. “You’ll never believe what’s happened!”

“They’ve got Zoltan, don’t they?”

“How do you know that? Never mind. They caught Zoltan poking around inside the police tape and ran out and grabbed him. They brought him into the van—I was just sitting there—and they threw him down in a chair. He was swearing and spitting and they were holding him down. They started questioning him: What were you doing there? Did you find anything? Did you go inside the bunker? Stuff like that.

“I figured they’d tell me to leave, but they didn’t. Finally, I figured out why. They don’t know I speak German. They probably thought, ‘forget him, he doesn’t know what we’re saying anyway.’ So I stayed.

“When Zoltan did start talking, he told them he thought it was okay to go into the bunker now, because it’s been days since the murders. They didn’t believe him, but Mom, here’s the good part. Zoltan told them he saw Juergen and Gisele somewhere over toward that little shed where they keep the golf cart. On the day of the murders. They were kissing, he said.”

“Uh
-oh.”

“Right. And then he said he saw some guy named Milo—this was later the same day—come over the hill and go into the house. Into the kitchen. He came out with Gisele, they walked over toward the bunker and he started yelling at her.” By this time Patrick was so excited
, he knocked his own glasses to the porch floor. He snatched them up but didn’t put them back on. “He was yelling, calling her a whore, calling her a bitch. Gisele was crying, he said. Then this guy, Milo, he drew back and swung but Gisele ducked in time so he didn’t actually hit her, but he would have if she hadn’t ducked.”

“Who is this Milo?”

“All I got was that he works at the post office in town. Kronenberg seemed to already know who he was.”

“Gisele’s boyfriend,” I said.

“Anyway, after he took a swing at her, she ran back to the house and Zoltan claims he didn’t see anything else. After that, they looked at me and I was just sitting there, playing with my cell phone like I didn’t know or care what this was all about, and Kronenberg told me I could leave.”

* * *
* *

Lettie and I had a lot to tell each other that night. She told me about her talk with Erin
, and I filled her in on Zoltan’s exploits, Patrick’s paragliding adventure, and my discoveries at the airstrip. Now I knew who owned the glider and, in all likelihood, who had been soaring over the house at odd hours. His name was Anton Spektor. What I didn’t know was why.

Lettie, bless her little photographic heart, said, “
Déjà vu!
Anton Spektor was one of the names on Juergen’s email list.”

Nineteen

“Did you see this?” Seifert, Kronenberg’s junior officer, bent over and picked up a button. Cracking ice with his gloved hands, he pared it down to its original size and showed it to his superior.

Now that the snow had melted except for small patches where the sun couldn’t reach, the two were methodically walking the meadow inside the yellow tape, able for the first time to get a really good look at the ground as it would have looked before the snow, near the time of the murders. Best calculations were that the shootings and the onset of snow were separated by less than four hours. Unfortunately, police boots had trodden the snow into mush all over and created soggy pits in the ground beneath. This was their best chance yet to look for that missing shell casing, the one that would have harbored the powder for the bullet that killed Stephanie. Until now they had only been able to clear and search a circle within a ten-foot radius of the spot where Gisele’s body lay. If they could find that second shell casing, it would tell them where the shooter stood when he or she shot Stephanie.

“Zoltan was messing around, just about this exact spot, yesterday,” Kronenberg said, taking the button from Seifert.

“Do you think he planted it? To throw suspicion on someone else?”

“Nope. Look again. Look where you found it. It was frozen solid in ice under undisturbed snow.” He pointed to the spot now disturbed by Seifert’s glove, some five feet from the bunker door and close to the rock wall. “And look at this. Here’s a print that was made after the snow. It’s a shoeprint. Woman’s shoe. But it was made after the snow fell. See? See the difference?”

Seifert bent over and examined the shoeprint.

“Make a cast of this. It won’t tell us anything about the shoe itself because melting has erased all the details that may have been there to begin with, but we may be able to get a shoe size, at least.” Kronenberg slipped the button into his pocket. He turned and gazed out at the mountains to the south. “And call the handsome Milo. Tell him to pay us a little visit.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier for us to go down to town? He’s probably at the post office.”

“Why do I suspect you really want to go to LaMotte and get a nice lunch?” Kronenberg chided him. “Got cabin fever, huh? Stuck up here for a week?”

Seifert muttered a disclaimer.

“No. I want to talk to Milo on our turf. Let him worry while he’s making his way up here.”

Twenty

In the early afternoon, we got a call from Juergen. His father had died. He had already talked to Kronenberg and agreed to return to LaMotte the next day, by which time, he thought, he would’ve relegated funeral and other duties to the appropriate people and wouldn’t be required in Zurich again until the actual funeral. He sounded exhausted and depressed. He asked me if Odile had shown up—I said she had—and told me to keep her on for at least the next three days. “I have business to take care of here,” he told me. “I need to meet with the lawyers Father appointed to execute his estate, and I have to take care of a hundred things at his offices and at home. You understand.”

“Of course.”

“And Dotsy? Thank you for suggesting that my father should never know about Stephanie. It was better this way.”

* * *
* *

I found Lettie, Patrick, and Brian in the living room and relayed the grim news. Erin and Babs walked in, Erin folding her legs beneath her in the large leather chair and Babs positioning herself attractively on one end of the sofa, her slim legs slanted just so. Chet’s head peeked around the corner.
I motioned for him to join us.

Chet slouched on the other end of the sofa and stared fixedly at the chunky, white candles on the glass-topped coffee table while I repeated the gist of Juergen’s phone call.

Brian leaned back in his chair, looked at the ceiling. “Meeting with lawyers and taking care of business? I’d give a pretty penny to be a fly on those walls.”

“Brian,” I scolded gently, “he’s lost his father. Cut him some slack. That’s the thing about a death in the family. The lawyers and the bean counters won’t let you grieve until the
important
things are taken care of.”

“Well. That’s that
,” Babs said.

“We’ve been talking about the dust-up between Kronenberg and Zoltan,” Lettie said.

Neither Chet nor either of the Toomeys knew about this, so Patrick filled them in.

Erin said, “It doesn’t surprise me. Zoltan gives me the creeps. I’ve been wondering why Kronenberg wasn’t looking at him. He’s a more logical suspect than any of us. Always slinking around, leering at Gisele.”

“What about Stephanie? Did he get along with Stephanie?” Lettie asked.

“Based on what I noticed in the days before the rest of you got here, I’d say Zoltan caught hell from her as often as the rest of us did.”

Chet’s head shot up, as if he was considering some sort of defense of his late wife, then he returned his gaze to the candles on the coffee table.

“I’d say right now, Zoltan tops my list,” Patrick said. “That sort usually solves problems with guns.”

“That sort?” Lettie squeaked. “You’re stereotyping, Patrick! I’m surprised at you. Just because he does manual labor . . .”

Patrick slunk lower in his seat. “You’re right. Sorry. But there’s actually a more likely suspect. What about Gisele’s boyfriend, Milo?”

We exchanged all the information we had about Milo. I wondered if Odile was listening from around a corner and considered calling her in. She could tell us more about Milo than the scant facts that he worked at the post office and he argued with Gisele on the day of the murders. A second thought told me we should leave Odile out of it.

“I’ve said all along it was someone from outside this house,” I said, trying not to look smug.

“Hell hath no fury like a—well, in this case—a man scorned.” Patrick said.

Erin’s little round face reddened.

“This Milo,” Chet said, stretching out his legs and resting his coffee mug on his belt buckle, “is an unknown quantity. Young man. Probably hot-tempered. Most young men are. Plenty of motive if he’d just found out she and Juergen were fooling around.”

“Why Chet, I think that’s most unfair!” Babs cooed. “If he had any thoughts of killing her, he’d hardly let himself get caught hitting her.”

“But he didn’t know he was being watched.”

“He didn’t know Zoltan was lurking.”

“Since we seem to be trashing everyone who isn’t here,” Brian said, “what about Juergen?”

I opened my mouth to issue Brian a second warning
, but he gave me no chance.

“I don’t suppose there’s any harm in telling all of you, now
, that Juergen and the Merz family enterprises are in deep doo-doo. Their import-export business has gone bankrupt, reorganized, and re-opened. Stephanie and Juergen are equal share-holders, and there’s never been any love lost between those two. Right, Dad?”