Where the Bones are Buried (11 page)

Swan aimed a moist, contrite look over the rim of her glass. “I lied to y'all, I sure did. I don't know if the truth would've worked out any better. Maybe, though it didn't seem like it would at the time. There's nothing I can do now but say I'm sorry. I truly am. I hope you won't be stingy meting out grace, baby. You may need a smidgen of forgiveness yourself someday.”

Dinah had underestimated her mother's instinct for the emotional jugular. She thought about her upcoming confession to Thor. A smidgen of forgiveness from him would be a godsend. Anyhow, she didn't believe that Swan had killed Pohl. Call it filial devotion or hereditary insanity, it amounted to the same thing. Now her first priority was to get her crossed off Lohendorf's suspect list.

“Did you meet Pohl last night?”

“Yes. He called and told me to meet him at six. I went to the tower like he said, but when I got there he was already dead. I took a gun, but I didn't fire it.”

“Jerusalem! How did you smuggle a gun into the country?”

Kurt returned with the duck and the second round of drinks. Swan smiled absently, but made no attempt to restart the banter. He offloaded the food and departed.

Swan cupped her hands around the bourbon. “About the gun…”

“As easy as smuggling kudzu honey, I'm sure. Someday you can regale me with the story of how you bamboozled airport security on two continents. Right now, I need to know if you touched Pohl's body, or took anything away with you.”

“I felt inside his coat to try and find the tape. I couldn't keep from seeing his face.” Her voice quavered. “It was hideous. I can see it still.” She pressed her palms against her cheeks. “Do you think the police will let me go home?”

“Maybe. But you need to admit that you
did
know Pohl. It's your lies that have put their hackles up. You can be sure Lohendorf knows that Pohl spent time in the States. He may even know that he worked for Cleon. Play the ‘old lady' card. Tell him that Pohl was intimidating you, demanding money. You don't have to say for what. Having a secret isn't a crime. Tell him you discovered Pohl's body, you checked to see if he was still alive, and when you saw blood, you were frightened and ran away.”

“What if they found the tape? They'll play it and turn me over to the feds as an accessory to the murders.”

“We'll see. You didn't know what had happened until it was all over and Cleon said what he did. You were probably in shock. But Lohendorf will want an explanation of why Pohl pretended to be Hess.”

“I had to keep Margaret thinking it was Reiner we were dealin' with or she wouldn't have gone along. And Polly agreed it would be best not to use his real name.”

Dinah was past surprise or anger. She said, “Here's what we'll do. We'll hand over your gun. Lohendorf will see it hasn't been fired. He'll probably reprimand you for touching the body, but if you stick to the story about checking to see if the man was still alive, that will explain any trace of DNA you may have left behind. You could be deported for misleading the police and smuggling a weapon into the country, but at least you'll be out from under suspicion of murder.”

“It's a little more complicated than that.”

“I know, I know. We'll have to get around the tie-in with Hess, but…” The look on Swan's face stopped her. “What complication were
you
thinking of?”

“The gun's gone missing.”

Chapter Seventeen

On his way to Japan in 1492, Christopher Columbus bumped into the Bahama Islands and, thinking they were the East Indies, he labeled…he mislabeled the inhabitants Indians
.

Dinah crossed out the sentence and began again.

Indigenous peoples of North America were called Indians because of a nautical miscalculation that Columbus never acknowledged.

She x'd that out and scrolled through her notes on the computer. Troubles and misunderstandings had abounded from the first meeting between Europeans and Indians and they persisted like anthrax spores. The Indian problem in Berlin played havoc with her thoughts and once again, the forecast of things to come didn't bode well for the Indians. She had hoped that a temporary shift in focus would give her yeasty thoughts time to take shape and some simple, obvious solution would rise out of her subconscious. It hadn't. The only thing on the rise was her angst. She gave up and drifted into the kitchen.

If Swan could be believed, the gun she took to her rendezvous with Pohl was a Taurus .22 semi-automatic with gold accents and a rosewood grip. It had entered the country legally, shipped unloaded and properly documented by a licensed gun dealer in Georgia to her, care of the Hotel Adlon where she had reserved a room. The Adlon is where she'd gone when she disappeared after breakfast on the morning of the murder. She had taken possession of the package containing the gun, checked in, and phoned Pohl. He provided her with the number of his bank account and instructed her to make
eine Geldüberweisung
, a transfer of funds. Since the money was supposed to come from Dinah's account, and Germany is six hours ahead of Panama, it wouldn't show up in Pohl's account until the next day. Notwithstanding this delay, Swan had conned him into giving her the tape at the powwow, ahead of the transfer. At least, she assumed that she had conned him. It was possible. In his haste to jet off to Barcelona the next day, Pohl might have given her the benefit of the doubt. They'd never know now.

Absentmindedly, Dinah opened the freezer. A new tub of chocolate ice cream greeted her eyes. A yellow sticky glued to the carton read,
Borrowed yr coral shirt Hope u don't mind, ciao, kd
. That blouse was Dupioni silk from the KaDeWe and it had cost Dinah most of what she earned working on the dig in Turkey. Nervy brat. What good would it do if she did mind?

She grabbed the ice cream and a spoon and sat down for some heavy brain bashing. Who could have taken the gun from Swan's hotel room at the Adlon? Who knew she had a room there? Swan said that she had told only Pohl, but Pohl must have told Lena. She was privy to his extortion of Swan. Was she his co-extortionist? Lena had fixated on Swan as the murderer, but she might not be the only one of Pohl's acquaintances with a dangerous secret. What if he had other victims? Blackmailers didn't stick to a limit, like fishermen.

Whether the motive was blackmail or sexual jealousy, Lena was the key. Lohendorf and Wegener would already have interrogated her about her relationship with Pohl. They were undoubtedly good cops, but they didn't have a mother in the suspect pool and Lena had had time to polish her story since her wild visit on the night of the murder. Had they asked her about blackmail? She was hiding something. Dinah wondered if she could find out what while keeping under the radar of the police.

The cuckoo moaned five times. Late, but if she hurried, Florian Farber's gallery might still be open and he could tell her where the Bischoffs lived. She had no idea where K.D. had gone, but there was no sense worrying. She was nothing if not self-reliant and she wouldn't go out without a few bills in her pocket. Dinah tossed the ice cream back in the freezer and, on a hunch, counted the cash that Thor kept in a sugar canister in the pantry. She was pleasantly surprised to find it all there. Maybe K.D.'s delinquent phase was winding down. Dinah scribbled a note reminding her to feed Aphrodite and clean the litter box. She added a P.S.,
I'll be home by nine if you want to have a late dinner
.

She found one of Berlin's ubiquitous taxis idling in front of the Presse & Tabac in Hausvogteiplatz. The driver didn't understand her when she gave him the address so she jotted it down on a scrap of paper. He nodded, like how-could-you-not-pronounce-something-that-simple, and motioned her into the backseat. As he zipped in and out of traffic, she listened to retro American pop songs on the radio and rehearsed her opening gambit with Farber. He had seemed enamored of Swan yesterday morning, but his attitude changed following the discovery of Pohl's body last night. Could he seriously believe she had something to do with the murder?

The driver navigated around the Gendarmenmarkt onto Behrenstrasse and swung onto Ebertstrasse past the Holocaust Memorial. Drifts of yellow leaves swirled across the field of gray, tomblike slabs dedicated to the memory of the Jews killed by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. The enormity of the crime, the systematic extermination of six million souls, never failed to astound her. It was humanity's moral nadir, an indelible stain on the German State and the German psyche. Several times she had walked through the maze of stone blocks. She hadn't yet mustered the courage to visit the subterranean “Room of Names,” where the lives of individual victims were recounted by a disembodied voice.

Opposite the Holocaust Memorial, invisible from the street, stood the concrete cube commemorating the homosexuals persecuted and killed by the Nazis. Its location had sparked controversy when it was first erected. Some believed that it encroached too close to the Jewish Memorial. Others believed that the homosexual victims of the Third Reich had been slighted when their memorial was placed out of sight in the bushes. Dinah saw nothing irreverent in the proximity. Germany had a multitude of victims to remember and in Berlin, monuments to the dead were thick on the ground.

As the taxi turned onto Tiergartenstrasse, she wrested her thoughts back to Florian Farber and those Indian masks that ornamented his gallery. She'd read an article just recently about a contested auction of sacred Native American masks in Paris. The Hopi tribe had filed a lawsuit alleging that some of the items had been stolen, but their attorney was unable to halt the sale. Had Farber acquired his masks legally? Could he have been another of Pohl's blackmail victims?

The taxi rounded the corner onto Klingelhöferstrasse and her eyes were drawn reflexively to the Norwegian Embassy with its green, modernistic louvered siding. She had made Thor a promise that she wouldn't do anything impulsive and already she was breaking it.

The taxi driver let her out on Kurfürstenstrasse in front of the gallery. She handed him a ten Euro note and went inside. The ambience of desert sage had changed to juniper and the flute music had been replaced by the eerie whine of a primitive fiddle. Today, the Indians staring down from the walls looked glum and aggrieved, as if they'd been falsely accused and were counting on her to uphold the honor of all the tribes.

Florian Farber, sans war paint and dressed in ordinary business attire, donned wire-rim eyeglasses and scowled at her from behind his desk. His mohawk had been moussed flat and when he spoke, his voice was as blunt as a bat. “What do you want?”

“Hello, Herr Farber.” She affected an appeasing smile. “I've come to ask for your help.”

He walked to the front of the shop. Without the painted black hand and the white dots, his nose and cheeks appeared red and chapped, with a filigree of broken capillaries. His gray eyes appraised her with the shrewdness of a croupier. “Do you wish to make a purchase?”

“Not today. Please tell me why you sounded so accusing last night. It seemed almost as if you had some reason to suspect my mother of the murder.”

“Our club has been meeting for ten years. The only new person was Frau Calms. I feel responsible. I invited her. She is a
hexenspruch
. A jinx.”

“Please. You're far too intelligent and practical to believe in jinxes. My mother is innocent and no one could possibly hold
you
responsible for what happened.”

He said, “No one knows what to think.”

“Tell me about Herr Pohl. I understand that he was new to the club.”

“Alwin came only a few months ago. He had lived for some years in America. He had visited several reservations in your Dakotas and in Arizona.”

“And what about Reiner Hess? You said that he was a longtime member.”

“Yes. Like me, one of the original founders.”

“Why was he expelled?”

“His legal situation made it impossible to attend meetings. Also, some members did not wish to associate with an individual who avoided his duty as a citizen to pay taxes.”

“When did you see him last?”

“Six months, perhaps seven. I don't understand your interest.”

She upped the wattage of her smile. “He and my mother are old friends from his days in America. Do you have any idea where he is now or how I could get in touch with him?”

“If I knew where he was, it would be my duty to tell the police.”

She took a different tack. “I'm intrigued by your mask collection. Did Alwin Pohl acquire them for you when he was in Arizona?”

Before he could answer, she wandered over to look at one of the masks up close. Crafted from wood, leather, and horsehair, the blue and yellow face imparted an almost spectral aura. She was no expert, but it looked like an authentic
katsinam
, which the Hopi people regarded as living souls. To sell one would be a sacrilege. “What's the provenance of this one?” she asked, reaching her hand out.

“Don't touch!” He started forward.

She withdrew her hand. “Sorry.”

“As someone versed in Native American cultures, I'm sure you know it is from the Hopi, a one-of-a-kind mask and quite fragile. I would be happy to sell it if you are interested.”

“I'm sure I couldn't afford it,” she said, and moved on to study a red gourd mask replete with turquoise, wood, and horn beads. But by not volunteering a single detail about the chain of ownership, he had ignited her suspicions. She could feel his eyes drilling into her back. She couldn't tell whether his wariness was because of her questions about the masks or Reiner Hess. She returned to him with a smile. “Is your assistant, Herr Bischoff, here today?”

“No.”

“His wife Lena seemed especially upset by Herr Pohl's death. Did you know that she had planned to travel to Barcelona with him today.”

“It is not my business.”

“But you knew?”

“It was obvious that they were involved. Lena is too young for Viktor. She would rather spend her time in the nightclubs than listening to him drum and talk about his spiritual journey.”

“Do you think he knew about the affair?”

“He has been depressed over the last weeks. He looked sad in the photographs from last night.”

“You took photographs at the powwow?”

“Yes. I showed them to Inspector Lohendorf and he downloaded them onto his computer.”

“Will you show them to me?”

“If you wish.”

Surprised but grateful, she followed him to his desk. He sat down, opened his laptop, and set up a slideshow. She leaned over his shoulder, careful not to get too close to his spider-veined cheek.

The first few slides showed Viktor Bischoff in his Drumming Man wig as he arranged the glow logs for the faux bonfire. He appeared not so much sad as stoic. Lena stood with her back to the camera tying the silk streamers.

“Does your camera time-stamp the photos?”

“No. It shows only the date.”

That would have made it too easy, she thought. The show continued. She pointed to a group gathered next to the makeshift bar. “Who are these people?”

“The man with the brown trade blanket around his shoulders is Kicking Horse.”

“What's his name in the real world?”

“Hans Oostrum. Next to him is Luther Wurttemberg, whose Indian name is Quidel, which means Burning Torch. He brought the schnapps. And behind him—”

“Herr Amsel,” she said. “Inspector Lohendorf questioned him at the same time as you last night.”

“Yes. Stefan Amsel. He calls himself Doba, which is from the Navajo. He is a senior executive at the Adlon Hotel.”

Dinah's ears pricked up. “Did he arrive at the same time you did?”

“Within a few minutes, yes. Baer Eichen, the Bischoffs, and I came early to set up the barbecue grill, build the bonfire, and place the LED lanterns. There are rules about fire in the park and we can't be as faithful to the old ways as we would like.”

“What time did the four of you arrive?”

“Between four-thirty and a quarter to five. Stefan and Luther arrived just after with the beer keg and the schnapps. The others arrived together at about half-past six. There, that is Baer in the ghost shirt with the bird in his hair. We were all assembled except for Alwin when you and the Inspector arrived.”

“Seven-thirty,” she said, thinking out loud.

It was odd that Baer had chosen a shirt that symbolized so much disillusionment and death. The Ghost Dance religion was the brainchild of a Paiute medicine man named Wovoka who claimed that Jesus Christ had returned to earth as an Indian to reunite the spirits of the dead. Wearing what he called a “ghost shirt,” Wovoka performed a magic trick whereby he appeared to “catch” a bullet fired at him by a shotgun. Believing their shirts could repel bullets, the Lakota Sioux rebelled against the white settlers at Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1890 and the U.S. Cavalry mowed them down. The ghost shirt had become emblematic of the massacre, which any student of Indian culture would know.

Farber went through the rest of his slideshow. She couldn't keep the names or their Indian get-ups straight. They merged in a hodgepodge of feathers and painted faces, indistinguishable, like the homogenized Indians in old Western movies. With each slide, her hopes of spotting a telltale clue dwindled. Wegener had said that there were twenty-six attendees packing God only knew what lethal weapons under their tunics and buckskins. And with all the drumming and dancing and chanting, nobody would have noticed if one of them had slipped off into the forest to answer a call of nature, or shoot and scalp Alwin Pohl. Adding to the confusion, there was Hess, who lurked “off camera,” like a figment of everyone's imagination.