Where the Bones are Buried (23 page)

Chapter Thirty-five

It was after ten when she woke up—alone in the big bed in the bedroom, if a woman in her condition could be considered “alone.” She could no longer laugh off her symptoms as some psychosomatic reaction to stress. She was well and truly pregnant, bushwhacked by Fate and the effing transdermal contraceptive patch. If the bathroom was occupied, she thought she might take the Smith & Wesson and shoot her way in.

After a dismal quarter hour communing with the toilet bowl, she clumped into the kitchen, infuriated with herself. She rinsed out the sludge of overcooked coffee still in the pot and made fresh. While it was brewing, she canvassed the apartment to see who was in. No Jack. No Thor. No Margaret. Just K.D., innocently asleep on the air mattress in the office with Aphrodite curled against her back. Dinah rubbed her temples. In her arrogance, she had expected to be ragging on K.D. for getting pregnant. The turnabout served her right. The repercussions from liberating a bear seemed simple in comparison.

She went back to the bedroom to find something to wear. If she took this pregnancy to the end, none of the clothes in her closet would be wearable for a long time. Big if. Big dilemma. She deferred the decision to another day and squeezed into her skinniest jeans. Carpe diem.

Margaret's suitcase was still lying open next to the bed. She should write a letter to the manufacturer describing how it had survived a grenade attack. Maybe the company would feature Margaret and her hard-sided Pullman in an ad and she could earn a bit of money. Dinah lifted up one side of the case to look at the singed exterior. Something thunked. She pushed aside a roll of shirts and tees to reveal a Taurus .22 with gold accents and a rosewood grip, the gun that had been stolen from Swan's room.

Carefully, she took it out and just as she'd been taught, turned it to the side, pulled back the slide, and looked into the ejection chamber. Loaded. When did that happen? Swan had said it wasn't loaded when she went to the tower to meet Pohl. Another lie to assimilate, but who was the liar? She carried the pistol back to the kitchen, poured herself a mug of coffee, and sat down to cogitate. How had Margaret come into possession of Swan's gun and why?

K.D. scuffed into the room and launched her defense. “Before you jump all salty on me, I hope you know that keeping a bear penned up in a tiny pit is cruel and inhumane.”

Dinah knew that the bear was the symbol of Berlin. There were hundreds of painted Buddy Bears in public squares all over the city. This was the first she'd heard of a live bear outside of the zoo. “What were you planning to do with this bear after you freed it? Bring it home with you? Because in case you hadn't noticed, we're oversubscribed for beds.”

“Hahaha. How do you expect me to tell you stuff if you don't take it seriously?”

“Okay, K.D. Seriously, what was the plan?”

“Dolf and his Bear Alliance friends were going to walk her through the park as a kind of protest. They are positively heroic for trying to free her. They just want Schnute to live out her old age in a natural sanctuary. Anybody who watches her even for a minute can see that she's totally depressed after so many years in captivity. Her daughter Maxi died last month and she's all alone with nothing but a few old barrels and tires to look at. When Dolf broke open her pen, she followed him out like a lamb.”

Dinah cut to the chase. “And then the cops came and you and the bear people followed them to the station like lambs. How much did it cost Thor to spring you?”

“It wasn't a big fine and I'll pay him back. I'll get a job. Or I can do stuff for you. I'll stay with Jack when you need me to.” The defense rested. She helped herself to a cup of coffee, took her phone out of her pocket, and began texting her friends.

Dinah's circuits were overloaded with matters of life and death. She couldn't get too worked up about Schnute. The coffee tasted brackish and she got up and grubbed through the pantry for a box of tea.

“Whoa!” K.D.'s eyes zeroed in on the gun. “That's creepy. Hey, you didn't—?”

“No. To whatever you were thinking.”

“You shouldn't have a sexy little toy like this lying around with Jack in the house.” She picked it up and fondled it.

“Put it down, K.D. Now.”

“I'm not the child, you know.”

Dinah wasn't so sure. “Have you talked with your mother since you got here?”

“Why would I? She doesn't care where I am as long as I'm out of her hair.”

“We all have our faults, K.D. You should lighten up on your mom. Try to see things from her perspective and be a little less judgmental.”

“Like you are with Swan?”

“Our mother problems aren't comparable.”

“Why's that? They're both narcissistic nits.”

Dinah's phone plinked. She hadn't noticed, but Thor had plugged it into the recharger for her. She looked at the name on the caller ID. Swan. She blew out a breath.

“What?” demanded K.D.

“Private call. Do you mind?”

She rolled her eyes and scuffed out, back to her texting.

Dinah dipped a teabag up and down in a cup of hot water. “Hi, Mom. How are you this morning?”

“Couldn't be better. Klaus took me to the most fabulous restaurant last night. You simply wouldn't believe the chandeliers. The menu was thick as a Sears catalog. Good gracious, everything you could imagine and all of it simply out of this world. And that rude Mr. Amsel never came back to bother me. I'm still at the Adlon.”

“That's good.” Dinah went deep into her reservoir of tolerance and asked in a non-judgmental voice, “Did you know that Reiner Hess was also staying at the Adlon?”

“Reiner here? You don't say!”

“Don't lie to me,” she snapped, tolerance depleted that fast. “Was that another of your secrets?”

“You sound like you're spoilin' for a fight, baby. Is something wrong between you and Thor?”

“Something's wrong between you and me and has been. Don't lie and don't stonewall, Mom. I'm past the fairy tale stage now.”

“I didn't know Reiner was here, Dinah.”

“That's thin.”

“It's true. It sounds like Mr. Amsel uses his hotel like a private guest house.”

Dinah couldn't argue with that.

“I'd like to talk to Reiner,” said Swan. “What's his room number?”

“He traded his hotel room for a jail cell. Margaret ratted him out to Inspector Lohendorf and he was arrested last night. Incidentally, did Margaret know you had moved to the Adlon?”

“I told her where I was going when I went back to the Wunderbar to pack up my things after she threw me out. That afternoon after we'd been to the morgue and seen Polly.”

Dinah rethought the timing. “But you knew the gun was missing before our lunch that day. When did you notice it was gone?”

“The night of the murder. I put it in the drawer and went down to the bar for a bourbon to steady my nerves. I decided I should hide the gun in a better place, but when I went back to the room, it was gone. It was almost like I'd dreamt it.”

“Are you sure Reiner never visited you in your room at the Adlon?”

“Not when I was here. After what you told me about Margaret and Reiner, nothing would surprise me.”

“I wouldn't be too sure of that.”

“Well, I can't wait to hear all of your news at our family dinner tonight, but listen here, baby. That thing you asked Klaus to find out for you, the whatchamacallit. I had to call you while it was fresh in my mind. Wait now. He wrote it down for me on this napkin.
T-o-t-s,
gosh
his writing is teensy.
T-o-t-s-c-h-l-a-g
, is that it?”

“Yes. That's right.”

“Well, there's more to it than that. Are you ready?
Fahrzeug Totschlag
. I'll spell it.
F-a-h-r-z-e—”

“Just tell me what it means in English, Mom.”

“Vehicular homicide. It was a terrible car accident at
Nür-burg-ring
, which Klaus says is a famous racetrack southwest of Berlin. They call it the ‘green hell,' the green on account of all the greenery it winds through, and the hell on account of the curves—a hundred of them in thirteen miles. They hold lots of races there during the year, but they also let tourists drive the course on certain days.”

Dinah felt a pang of premonition and regret. “What happened?”

“I was coming to it. In April, two-thousand-and-three, Alwin Pohl was driving the track drunk in the middle of the day. He spun out and skidded broadside into another tourist's car. Polly wasn't injured, but the driver of the other car was badly hurt and his wife was killed.”

“Did Klaus get the name of the dead woman?”

“Sabine Eichen. Poor thing. The accident report Klaus read to me says a piece of flying metal came through the windshield and took the top of her head clean off.”

Chapter Thirty-six

There could be no doubt now. Baer murdered Pohl. The photo Farber took of him as he arrived at the powwow showed him wearing the red-fringed ghost shirt. It must have been saturated with blood as he kneeled over Pohl's body and inflicted a wound that in the context of all the Indian mimicry, seemed like a scalping. In reality, it was meant to mirror the wounds Sabine Eichen sustained in the car crash. When Baer greeted Dinah at the powwow, he was bare-chested and strung with beads. He must have buried the bloody shirt in the woods or hidden it under the ice in the cooler he carried. Had the police searched the cooler? She didn't recall seeing them search any of the picnic tackle.

“I brought you a tester,” said Margaret, placing a small
Apotheke
sack on the table in front of her. “No sense fretting if it's a false alarm. Took me a while to get it across to the pharmacist what I wanted. She couldn't believe that a woman of my vintage would need such a test.”

“Thanks, Margaret.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don't know. One thing or the other.” She pushed the gun across the table toward Margaret. “You want to tell me how you came to have this in your suitcase?”

“Not really.”

“Tell me anyway.”

She poured a cup of coffee and sat down heavily. “When the police came to our door on the night of the murder, I wasn't sure who'd been killed, but I was sure as sunup in the east that Swan had killed him. When she showed up at the Wunderbar, she tried to act sassy, but her voice was reedy and her hands wouldn't stop quaking. It was petty of me, but I confess I enjoyed watching her tap dance around Wegener's questions. I thought, she's killed a man. She's no better than me.”

“How did you know about the gun?”

“Reiner had mentioned it when he drove me out to Müggelsee. He knew Swan had a room at the Adlon. His friend Amsel is a big cheese over there. He told Reiner that Swan had received a package in advance of her arrival. Amsel steamed it open and found the gun.”

“Mom had it with her the night of the murder. She says she dropped it off at the Adlon before returning to the Wunderbar, but somebody took it while she was downstairs in the bar. Did Amsel filch it, give it to Hess, and then Hess passed it on to you?”

“Yes.”

“Loaded?”

“Yes. He thought Swan killed Pohl and this was the murder weapon.”

Dinah sifted the devices and designs, still waiting for some sense to fall out. Setting aside the question of who loaded the gun, nobody but Baer knew the caliber of the real murder weapon. “If Hess thought it was the murder weapon, why didn't he leave it for the police to find?”

“I asked him to take it. I asked him to give it to me.”

The fact that Hess would do Margaret's bidding so meekly passed Dinah's comprehension. But she could think of only two reasons why Margaret would ask for the gun. She said, “Either you wanted to frame Swan for the murder, or you wanted to protect her, and neither reason makes sense.”

“I did it to protect you. With all your other doubts, it would be tough knowing that your mother killed a man, especially in that way.”

“She didn't do it, Margaret. This gun isn't the murder weapon.”

“You're sure?”

“I'm sure.” Dinah couldn't attest to whether she would have killed him if she'd gotten to him before Baer did. She put the mysteriously loaded gun in a Tupperware container and hid it behind a crockpot on the top shelf of the pantry where Jack couldn't see or reach, a precaution that wouldn't have occurred to her if K.D. hadn't mentioned it. Thor always locked his gun in his desk drawer when he came home. She had thought it was just his nature to be prudent.

“I still don't believe that Reiner had anything to do with Pohl's murder,” said Margaret.

“You're right. He didn't.” Dinah reflected on Margaret's change of heart toward Reiner. “You said you gave Hess up to the police because you didn't want me to think you'd colluded with him, but you didn't feel that way two days ago. Did something happen to cause you to change your mind?”

“At our last meeting, I told Reiner that Pohl had been blackmailing Swan for something or other, but I didn't think she had enough money to make it worth his while. He said Pohl was probably after the money Cleon cached in Panama.”

“So he knew.”

“Not from me. He had to have learned about it from Cleon. His knowing made me realize that he'd been buddies with Cleon long after he led me to believe they'd gone their separate ways. I thought Reiner had crawled out of the slime. My dear old friend was dirtier than I thought.”

“Did you ask if he had given Pohl the information, or did the two of them cook up the blackmail plot together?”

“I didn't ask. I didn't want to know. I went to the john and called Lohendorf.”

Dinah felt bound to call Lohendorf to tell him her news about Baer Eichen, but there was no longer a sense of urgency and for once, she felt like waiting. She had other, more pressing things on her mind and she needed a time out. “Tonight, we're all going to smoke the peace pipe and exorcise the demon spirit of Cleon Dobbs once and for all. You, me, Mom, K.D.”

“It'll end in a cat fight.”

“No it won't. Thor can referee. Anyway, I want you there.”

“I'll think about it.”

“Be there, Margaret. I'll be making an important announcement.” She picked up the
Apotheke
sack and forged into the bathroom for her appointment with Destiny.

***

She came out a half-hour later, deniability down the drain, and cloistered herself in the office. She lay down on the air mattress and stared up at the ceiling. She had shied away from committing to a long-term relationship out of fear she would replicate her mother's fickle behavior. Living with Thor had diminished that fear, but motherhood was magnitudes more serious than living together. And if she had cause to fear that she'd replicate her mother's child-rearing behavior, shouldn't she do what she could to avoid the accident? She wondered if Jack had been an accident. Thor loved him, but no man wants to make a habit of begetting accidents, and she would be a much worse mother than Jennifer. She couldn't even relate to a cat.

Aphrodite squalled like an angry infant and scratched at the door, wanting out. There were no answers written on the ceiling, and Dinah got up as undecided as she was when she lay down. The one thing she knew was that she wouldn't tell Thor until she had made up her mind. Regardless of any views to the contrary, this was her decision, and hers alone. She was still waiting to find out what Thor intended to do with her confession. Under no circumstances would she give birth behind bars.

She opened the door and Aphrodite streaked through the living room and into the kitchen. K.D. and a young man with dark hair and artless blue eyes sat on opposite ends of the sofa.

“Dinah Pelerin, this is Dolf Kugler.”

“The man who took you into the bear pit with Schnutes?”

“Yes, Frau Pelerin. But Schnutes was very gentle and I did not mean to get K.D. in trouble.”

“Do you have a gentling effect on women as well as she-bears, Dolf?”

The question flustered him. He looked helplessly to K.D.

“Never mind,” said Dinah. “Are you busy tonight or have your parents set a curfew?”

He shook his head.

“Excellent. Our family is gathering for a special dinner and I'd like for you to join us. K.D., this is not a request. Big issues will be on the table. Be there. I will let you know where and when. And will you animal lovers please feed the cat?”

She tapped on the bedroom door. “Margaret?”

“Come in.”

Dinah looked in. The Monkey 47 was open on the bedside table and a glass poised at her lips. “Taper off, Margaret. I need you on your best behavior tonight.”

“You're pretty high-handed, aren't you?”

“Yes, if that's what it takes to get my life in order. And I'll ask you not to refer in any way whatsoever to my condition. Is that clear?”

“All right. But isn't your condition the important thing you're going to announce?”

“No.”

Thor and Jack walked into the apartment, Jack talking a mile a minute. They had seen the Kenyan Wilson Kipsang shatter the men's world marathon record as he crossed the finish line of the marathon at the Brandenburg Gate. Jack was giddy with excitement. Thor, not so much. He greeted Dolf with grudging civility and the air between him and K.D. was decidedly frosty. He couldn't have slept more than two or three hours after his run to the jail to bail her out, and yet he'd gotten up early to take Jack to the finish line.

Dinah took him aside. “You look tired.”

“I'm okay. You?”

“Much better. I want to hear about Lohendorf's interrogation of Hess and I've learned some things I need to tell you about. Maybe Lohendorf should be present. Nothing's urgent now. If you're beat, we can wait until this afternoon and invite your friend Jens to join us for the debriefing.”

He laughed. “You sound like a spy back from some secret mission.”

“Dinah! I have to show you something.” Jack grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the office.

“Don't interrupt,” said Thor. “Dinah and I are talking.“

“But this is important, Dad. You've got to come see this.”

The seriousness in his eyes made Dinah relent. “What is it, Jack?”

“In here.”

He led them into the office. His fleet of model cars were lined up on the floor next to the TV, the red Ferrari GTO that Baer had given him out in front. He picked it up, popped the hood, and took out a tiny microcassette. “What do you suppose it is?”

She took the cassette out of his hand and examined it. The first possibility that hurtled through her mind was that this was the tape Pohl used to blackmail her mother.

“You think it's an interview with Stirling Moss?” asked Jack.

“Who?”

“You know, the Formula One driver who raced the car.”

“Oh, right. Yes, that's probably what it is.”

“Do you think Baer wanted me to have it?”

She forced a tight smile. “I'm sure of it.”

“Can we listen?”

She crossed her fingers and prayed that the answer was no. If this was the tape of Swan's conversation with Cleon on the day he killed two federal agents, if it was the smoking gun that could send Swan to prison, then Dinah wanted to be the first person to hear it. “Do you own a microcassette recorder, Thor?”

“No.”

His eyes transmitted a ray of suspicion, which made it hard for her to hold the smile. But she did. “I'll just hold onto it until we can find something to play it back on.”