Death of a Second Wife (A Dotsy Lamb Travel Mystery) (22 page)

“Let’s walk over there,” I said, pointing to the same cluster of houses, “and see if we can call a taxi.”

“To take us where?”

“Into LaMotte. You have your wallet with you? Good. We can pay the cabbie and then we can pay a visit to the Black Sheep.”

Chet shook his head. “We’ve been over all that. The bartender doesn’t remember me.”

“I have a couple of ideas, Chet. Will you trust me? Turn yourself in to the police. I’ll get you out. I promise.”

He just looked at me.

“Trust me?” I gave him my sternest look.

He stood there for what seemed like an hour, shoulders drooping, eyes cast down, but finally he nodded. No more than a slight dip of the head but it would have to do.

Twenty-
Four

I caught my breath as our little electric cab rolled by the LaMotte train station, praying that Chet wouldn’t jump out and make a run for it. I had the driver take us past the police station first, so I could see what we were dealing with in terms of what was where. If the police station had been across the street from the Black Sheep, for instance, it would have been too risky for us to walk in the front door of the bar, but it wasn’t.

Just as I thought, the tables in the Black Sheep weren’t all visible from the long bar. An L on one end held several tables and ended in a hall leading back to the restrooms. The place was nearly empty at this time in the afternoon. The bartender looked up and nodded at us when we entered
, but not as if he recognized either of us. In fact, it wasn’t the same bartender as the one I had talked to that night when Lettie and I were there.

“Where did you sit that night?” I asked.

“I told you, I don’t remember much about that night.”

“You may not remember the name of the man you were talking to or how many drinks you had, but you can remember where you sat. You’ve only been in here once. Only one table in this room, and only one chair at that table should feel right.
Which one, Chet?
You sat here for hours, facing one of these walls. Do any of the pictures on the walls look familiar? You got up at least once and went to the bathroom. Where did you get up f
rom
? Which way did you have to walk to get to the bathroom? Did you go to the bar and order drinks or did the man you were talking to get the drinks? Or did someone bring them to your table? What feels right?”

“I was sitting in here.” Chet shambled over to a table within the L and stopped. He walked around the table, put his hands on the back of the chair facing a row of downhill racing photos. “I was sitting here.”

“And from the bar, the bartender wouldn’t have been able to see you.”

Chet turned and looked. “No.”

“Which explains why he didn’t remember you. Now, think again. Your glass is empty. What happens next?”

“I turn around and catch the eye of a girl. I hold up two fingers.”

“A girl. Good. And she brought you and your friend two more.”

“She must have.”

“We need to find that girl.”

“Let’s talk to the bartender.”

I thought about it. The longer the police had to keep looking for Chet the greater the chance they’d run into us, and they’d never believe Chet was just about to turn himself in. By this time Odile would have told them about Chet running and me chasing after him. “Let’s go to the police station,” I said as gently as I could.

“I can do it. I don’t want you to go with me.”

I understood how he felt, but wasn’t sure I could trust him to do it alone. Ah well, I’d already done all I could do. I’d brought him this far and given him hope. If he fled now, I wouldn’t try to stop him. “Give me some money before you leave.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“You have a wallet and I don’t. I may need some money before I go back to the house, and I’d like your driver’s license, too. You won’t need it where you’re going.”

Chet pulled the laminated card and a few variously colored Swiss francs from his wallet, handed them to me, sort of saluted, and walked out. I stepped into the main room and seated myself at the bar. While the bartender was pouring me a Coke, I asked him, “Do you have any way of checking who was waiting tables on the night of—let’s see—it would have been last Sunday. I was talking to our waitress that night about a restaurant she recommended in San Moritz. I wrote down the name but I lost the little slip of paper and we’re going there tomorrow.”

“I can check the time cards, but I can’t give out any home addresses or phone numbers.” He toweled the bar in front of me and deposited my glass of Coke.

“I understand. But she might be coming in today, mightn’t she? And if so, I could stop back by.”

He couldn’t have heard my last few words because he had already disappeared through the doorway behind the bar. He came out a minute later and said, “Kelly Wheeler. She won’t be in tonight because she works at the Edelweiss restaurant on Saturday evenings.

Perfect. I thought I had seen a sign for that restaurant but I was wrong
. I couldn’t find it. After wandering a few narrow streets, I dropped in at the post office and asked directions. Once seated in the sleek, modern Edelweiss, I ordered a salad and asked for Kelley Wheeler. Not really dinner hour yet, most of the tables were already full. Kelly turned out to be an American college student taking a semester abroad. When she brought my salad, I introduced myself and asked her to have a seat, but she told me they weren’t allowed to sit with customers.

“You’re from Virginia?” she said, taking my menu. “Wait. Is this about the bunker murders at the Chateau Merz?”

“Are we that well known?” I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. “Yes. I’m staying there.” Without revealing my relationship to the victims, I asked, “Have the police talked to you? I’m not asking you to tell me what you told them, but I need to know if they’ve talked to you.”

“No. They came in and talked to Hans but not to me.”

“I wonder why they didn’t,” I said. “You were working at the Black Sheep that night, weren’t you? That was last Sunday night.”

Kelly scratched her chin against the menu she held to her chest. “Yeah. I was.” She paused for a minute. “They probably didn’t talk to me because my name wasn’t on the work sheet for that night. They probably tried to talk to Ursula because her name was on the sheet, but she’s been out all week. They called me at the last minute.”

“Wouldn’t Hans”—I assumed that was the bartender—“have told them about the substitution?”

“He probably wouldn’t remember.
When they get busy, he pays no attention to us.”

I dug into my pants pocket and pulled out Chet’s driver’s license. “Take a real good look at this man. Might he have been there, possibly sitting at a table in the section near the bathrooms?”

She looked at the photo, then the name. “Lamb. Your husband?”

“No.”

She squinted, wrinkled her nose, twisted her mouth to one side. “Yes! Absolutely! He and another guy—blond hair, hefty guy. This guy”—she touched Chet’s photo with her pinkie finger—“was drinking scotch and sodas and the other guy was drinking beer. The blond guy left and this guy went on drinking until he was so wasted he couldn’t walk straight.”

“That sounds like him.”

“I was worried about him, even. Oh my God! I can’t believe it. This is the same man. I was worried about him, so I told Hans I was leaving for a minute because I wanted to make sure this guy didn’t pass out in the street, you know. Hans paid no attention so I’m sure he wouldn’t remember it.”

At this point, Kelly apparently forgot the rules and sat in the chair opposite me.

“I followed him down the street and he turned on Wilhelmstrasse, then he turned back because he was obviously lost and he walked past me, so I asked him if I could help him, and he said he was looking for the elevator.” She laughed. “I said, ‘the elevator?’ like—I figured he was delusional or something, but then I remembered about the elevator they have that goes up to the houses”—she pointed up—“where the Chateau Merz is. We make deliveries there sometimes. We send someone with the food to this door where we ring a buzzer and they let us in so we can leave the food in the tunnel.”

“That’s right. I’ve picked up food there myself.”

Kelly looked over her shoulder as if to check whether she was being watched by the headwaiter. “I led him around and down Dorfstrasse, but when we got there, there was already a couple with a key to the tunnel. They said they were staying at one of the houses up above, but not Chateau Merz. I’d remember if they said Chateau Merz. They told me which one, but I forget what they said. Anyway, I sort of whispered to the woman and told her what the problem was, and she said they would make sure he got home. So I left him at the door to the tunnel and that’s the last I saw of him.”

I prodded her for anything else she could recall about this couple or the house where they were staying, but to no avail. Nevertheless, it was enough. There weren’t more than three or four other houses that had access to the elevator, so I shouldn’t have too much trouble finding the couple who could tell police exactly where Chet was, and in what state, late that Sunday night.

* * * * *

Back at the house, I found Odile in the kitchen and Juergen in his little office on the stairwell landing. Simultaneously typing on his computer and talking on the phone, he didn’t hear or see me until I stepped around the side of his desk. He held up one finger and quickly ended his phone conversation. “What’s happening?” He slid his chair back and steered me to the living room. On our way down the stairs, I learned that Juergen already knew about Chet’s arrest. Somehow he’d heard that Chet turned himself in. I was relieved to know Chet hadn’t chickened out.

Through the sliding glass doors to the porch, I saw Brian, one foot on the porch railing, also talking on the phone. I filled Juergen in on the afternoon’s events and then asked him to help me locate the couple who helped Chet find his way home early that Monday morning. He returned to his office for his little black book where he kept a list of neighbors and their phone numbers. Four houses in addition to Chateau Merz had access to the elevator, he told me. He went down the list, phoning each one. No answer at the first one. Voice mail picked up at the second. On the third, he talked to someone, then rang off.

“
Ja
, that was old Herr Eggenberger. He and his wife are both nearly deaf. I don’t think he understood what I was saying.”

Calling the fourth house, he talked to a domestic who promised to deliver Juergen’s message.

“Now what?” I said.

Juergen looked at his watch with the dancing dials. “We have time to run over to the Eggenbergers
’ before dinner. I told Odile we’d eat about eight.”

“Do you think they’re the ones we’re looking for?”

“I don’t know, but they’re home, so we might as well talk to them.”

We tramped eastward, passing the elevator hut in the wood, then climbed over a split rail fence and up a steep slope. Juergen slowed his pace to let me catch up. He wasn’t even breathing hard. “Are you certain about Chet? That he didn’t do it?” he asked.

“As sure as I can be. I was married to him long enough to know he’s no killer.”

“I must say, you’re kinder than a lot of ex-wives would be.” He stopped walking and pointed to a house with dark timber siding, then altered his path in its direction.

“So who’s our best bet now, Juergen? Chet didn’t do it. Who did?”

“Until today, I’d have said Milo, Gisele’s would-be lover.”

“Until today? Why until today?”

“Because I got a call from a friend in town today, about noon. Milo has a perfect alibi.” Laughing, he laid his hand on my shoulder. “He was in jail at the time of the murders.”

“In jail? What for?”

“Drunk in public.”

“So that must have done it for the police. With Milo out of the picture, they figured it had to be Chet.”

“Kronenberg has been itching to arrest Chet from the very beginning. I thought, when I turned in those tapes,
they would clear things up. Chet said he had come in straight from the elevator about two a.m., and I figured the tapes would back him up.”

“Don’t they?”

“They show him coming in about the time he said he did, but they don’t show where else he might have gone, either before he came in, or after. Kronenberg says he could have come in and slipped out again.”

“
How do you know all this? You and Odile both seem to know everything at the same time the police do.”

“We have our ways.” He picked a purple columbine and inserted it into a buttonhole of my cardigan.
He stepped back and gazed out toward peaks to the south. “We used to communicate by yodeling from one peak to another. Our voices would carry for miles. Now we use the telephone and email, but we’re just as terrible gossips as we’ve always been.”

I itched to ask him if he and Gisele had been lovers. There was plenty pointing to it. Zoltan’s statement to the police that he’d seen them kissing. The
flirtatious way I’d seen them interacting. The tapes showing Juergen going to the window at intervals, all that night. His anxiety when he couldn’t find her at bedtime. Milo’s anger at Gisele.

But I couldn’t think of a way to ask.

After several knocks separated by long pauses, Frau Eggenberger opened the door. Her crinkled blue eyes lit up when she saw Juergen. Shuffling along in quilted bedroom slippers, she led us down a hall and onto a side porch with a breath-taking view of the Matterhorn. Herr Eggenberger started to stand up, but Juergen begged him to remain seated. He asked them to speak in English in deference to the language-challenged American, me.

For the next few minutes, both Eggenbergers assured us their hearts went out to us in this terrible time. I wondered how they felt about extending sympathy to Juergen and me since, as far as they knew, either of us might be the killer. I got the impression they had known Juergen since he’d been a child
, and they might believe they knew him well enough to trust it wasn’t he. But they didn’t know me from Lady Gaga.

Juergen brought up the reason for our visit. “We are looking for someone who rode up in the elevator Sunday night with . . . with another American guest of mine.”

Herr Eggenberger looked at his wife. “Gordon and Daphne. Didn’t they say something about a man in the elevator?”

“
Ja.
Yes, I remember!” Frau Eggenberger leaned forward, one hand quivering eagerly. “Gordon and Daphne are friends of ours from London. They’ve been staying with us for the last two weeks. They told us . . .”

Herr Eggenberger interrupted her. “They told us they had to help a man find his way home. He was drunk.” He glanced at his wife as if she might object to this characterization of a friend of ours. “A girl brought him to the tunnel entrance and asked them to look after him. Make sure he made it to where he was going.”

“That’s our Chet,” I said.

“They said they followed him until they got close to your house, Juergen, and then they watched him until they thought he had gone inside.”

Juergen looked at me and nodded. “Are they here now? Can we talk to them?”

“I’m afraid you have missed them. They left yesterday for Vienna.”

Rats. The old joke came back to me again:
A man falls out of a plane, but he’s wearing a parachute, but the parachute fails to open, but beneath him is a nice soft haystack, but in the haystack is a pitchfork—tines up, etc
. “Might you possibly have a number where they could be reached?”

Frau Eggenberger pushed herself up from her chair. “I do. I have the number of their hotel in Vienna. Excuse me while I go and get it.”

—but he missed the pitchfork.

* * *
* *

Chet had well and truly missed the pitchfork. As soon as Juergen and I got back to the house, I called the number for the hotel in Vienna and talked to the English couple. They remembered Chet, said the time of their encounter was about two a.m., and promised to call Detective Kronenberg at their earliest convenience.

We were seven for dinner. Babs had usurped Stephanie’s old spot at the end of the table opposite Juergen, an act that might have raised everyone’s hackles except for the fact that it eliminated the awful emptiness in that chair. Lettie had enjoyed her day wandering the streets of LaMotte, reading gravestones in a little churchyard there. Patrick had spent most of his day visiting a few friends who were still in residence at the hostel where his and Erin’s former wedding guests had stayed. Babs and Erin told us they’d done the touristy train ride up another mountain for a better view of the Matterhorn. I told them the whole story of Chet’s day on the lam and his subsequent incarceration. Brian and Patrick, at first deeply concerned, lightened up when I told them about my parasailing insanity in pursuit of their father. Juergen described our visit with the Eggenbergers and the phone call from Vienna that would, hopefully, get poor Chet released.

I secretly hoped the English couple would wait a bit before making that call. A night in jail wouldn’t hurt Chet and it might do him some good.

Twenty-Five

Sunday, April 18—a day I will never forget.

I lay in bed an extra long time that morning, longing for my pillow back home. The one that smelled like me. I could hear Lettie, snoring softly with her mouth open. The comforter on my bed wasn’t wide enough and it slid off sideways, the sudden chill waking me and forcing me to drag it off the floor several times every night. I lay there and rehashed my last dream
, in which I’d been serving a dinner to many people at several tables and thoroughly botching the job. Putting gravy on their ice cream, forgetting people until they shrank to skeletons, bashing soft-shelled crabs trying to crawl off the plates. Another one of my frustration dreams. I tend to have them when life deals me more than I can handle. They’ve happened before.

Chateau Merz had no cuckoo clocks. I don’t know why that thought flitted through my mind a
t that moment. Probably because I wished I could find out what time it was without actually opening my eyes. The house was so chopped up, multi-leveled with narrow halls and angled stairs, that kitchen smells didn’t travel as far as my room. I could see light through my closed eyelids, but I couldn’t tell if coffee was brewing yet or not. I wondered if Chet had come in during the night.

When would Kronenberg let us leave? He couldn’t keep us here forever. Reminding myself to call Marco sometime today, I realized I wanted, more than anything, to talk to Jeffrey and Charlie. For Charlie, in Virginia, it was six hours earlier, wee hours of the morning. Jeffrey’s dance troupe was on a U.S. tour and probably somewhere in the Mountain Time Zone by now. Maybe one o’clock. So Jeffrey might still be up from last night. I could try—how silly. I’d probably scare him to death, calling him at one in the morning.

I heard Lettie slip out of bed.

I needed to do laundry. I opened my eyes and greeted the new day the way a child gre
ets the start of the third hymn. I threw on a pair of jeans and the same shirt I wore yesterday, gathered my dirty clothes into my arms and headed for the laundry room on the bottom level.“Dotsy, where are you?” Lettie called from somewhere. I let her find me. Wide-eyed and flushed, she grabbed my arm and said, “Detective Kronenberg wants to talk to you. He’s in the kitchen.”