Death of a Second Wife (A Dotsy Lamb Travel Mystery) (26 page)

“Now that I’m in the clear, we still have to find out who did it.” I laid my blue plastic bag of clothes on the bench beside me. “Do you think Kronenberg will let me go home now?”

“No, I do not. You are not in the clear, Dotsy. All Kronenberg knows now is that your button was deliberately planted, probably by someone who intended to throw suspicion on you. It has nothing to do with whether you actually did it. You are still under suspicion as much as anyone else in that house.”

It seemed the sky had suddenly darkened. “What do I have to do, for heaven’s sake? Can he keep us all here until the case is solved? What if it’s never solved?”

“I suppose there is a limit. He has to let you go sometime. And if Kronenberg checks out the leads I have given him, he should be able to solve it fairly soon. It has to be connected to the gold smuggling operation.” Marco planted his hands on his knees and squinted out toward snow-capped peaks in the distance. He chewed on one side of his mustache. “
Has
to be!”

“One problem. Who swiped my pink cashmere sweater? Obviously someone inside the house
did, and I don’t think Anton Spektor or any other members of the Russian mafia could be wandering through without someone noticing.”

“And who, other than Kronenberg and his assistant, knew the sweater was about to be taken in as evidence?”
Marco said.

I thought about it. “This is probably way off the mark, but Odile, our cook, seems to know everything the police know. Might she have a friend at the station?”

“Talk to her. Find out.”

“From the very beginning I’ve bounced back and forth between insider and outsider. Were the murders done by someone staying at the house or by someone else? It’s almost unbelievable, but I still don’t know.”

“Why were Gisele and Stephanie up there at that time of night anyway?” Marco asked, using their names as familiarly as if he had known them. “Exactly when did the murders take place?”

“Between eleven-thirty and four a.m.
, they say. I know Stephanie was in the bunker at eleven-thirty, pulling wine for the house. No one saw either of them after that.”

Marco stood and stretched. Holding out a hand to me, he pulled me up and we resumed our graveyard tour. “Tell me about Juergen.”

“He’s rich, of course. He’s spent most of his adult life as an adventurer, climbing mountains and things like that. I think he chafes a bit at being forced to stick close to home since his father got too old to oversee the family businesses himself. His family is important to him. You should have seen how Stephanie’s death and his father’s death told on his face. He loves astronomy. He keeps a telescope at the chalet.”

“Astronomy?” Marco put an arm around my shoulder.

“It’s logical, I think. An adventurer who hates being tied down. Climb mountains. Reach for the stars! If you can’t reach the stars, stand on a mountain top and look at them. Maybe that’s why he’s never married.”

“What was his relationship with Stephanie?”

“Funny you should ask. Odile told me they fought like cats and dogs when they were children.”

“That means nothing. Most brothers and sisters fight.”

“Plus, Stephanie was a woman who got her own way and stuck her nose in other people’s business. She was about to tell Patrick about Erin’s previous marriage—although I’m grateful to her for that. Funny, I wonder how she did find out. And why she apparently waited until she got to Switzerland to call the Cook County Vital Records place.”

“And you suspect Juergen and Gisele were having an affair?”

I didn’t recall telling him that, but supposed I must have. “Gisele had a boyfriend here in town. A guy named Milo. By the way, Brian told me yesterday that he was going to pay Milo a visit. I wonder if he did.”

“Go on. What about this Milo?”

“I’ve never met him. But I got the feeling that first night, Juergen was so upset, looking for Gisele. I sort of thought she and he intended to spend the night together. Later on, I found out about Milo and heard she and he had a fight in the meadow near the bunker that afternoon.”

“Do you think Juergen is gay?”

Marco’s question startled me. “I’ve never thought about it. I don’t think so.”

“It might explain why he’s never married.”

“Oh come on, Marco. Lots of people don’t get married for lots of reasons.”

We had circled the main part of LaMotte and come back around to the intersection of the main street and the one leading to the tunnel. I said, “Do you want to come up to the house?”

“Not yet. There will be enough going on when you walk in. They do not know you are out of jail. It would not be a good time for me to meet your ex-husband.” He kissed me on the cheek. “Tell Patrick I’m here and I’d like to talk to him. He can come to my hotel.”

Twenty-
Eight

I called the house and told Odile I was on my way up so she could buzz me in at the tunnel entrance. Stepping out into the sweet pine-scented air above, I indulged in a little Julie Andrews euphoria and hoped no one was watching. As I approached the house I looked to the meadow beyond it and spotted Chet plodding toward me from the direction of the bunker. He quickened his steps when he saw me, then grabbed me, and folded me in a hug. I couldn’t help comparing his embrace to that of Marco’s of a few minutes earlier. Marco’s won. By comparison, Chet’s felt sterile. Cold. Perfunctory.

“Where have you been?” he asked, now holding me at arm
’s length. “We’ve been expecting you for more than an hour.”

“How did you know I was out?”

“Odile told us.”

“Ah, yes. The mountain grapevine.”

“So you outfoxed them, eh? Something about the buttons on your jacket.”

“Later. Where’s Patrick?”

“At the house, I think. He was in his room a little while ago.”

Over Chet’s shoulder I spotted Juergen just emerging from the bunker. “Have you and Juergen been in the b
unker?”

“He was showing me some old artillery. He has short
-wave radio and gas masks from the forties.” His arm still around my shoulders, he steered me toward the house.

“What was it like yesterday, when everyone heard I’d been arrested?”

“Patrick and Brian and Juergen came running in, and Patrick was having a fit. Brian was trying to calm him down and he took him off—somewhere. I don’t know. Juergen told me they’d arrested you. Odile got all flustered and ran to the phone. I asked him to tell me more, but that’s all he knew at that point. And listen, Dotsy. I have never felt so helpless in my life. After all you did for me, risking your neck to bring me back. If you hadn’t done that, they’d have launched a manhunt and I’d probably have been killed! And here I was, listening to Juergen telling me about how they’d arrested you, and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do to help you.”

You could have done what Juergen and Brian did do. Hire me a lawyer.
I said, “Odile ran straight to the phone, did she? Did you overhear anything?”

Chet stopped dead in his tracks, as if he hadn’t expected the question, and tilted his head to one side. “No. She was talking in German.”

“Then what?”

He paused a moment.
“I went up to my room. I wanted to think, you know.”

Yeah, ri
ght. You probably wanted to take a nap.
“Where was everyone else? How did they find out?”

We had reached the porch steps. Chet looked at me questioningly. I waited for him to think about it
, because I needed to know who knew Kronenberg was coming for my pink cashmere sweater,
how
they knew and
when
they found out.

“Babs was in her room. Lettie was somewhere, because she came running to the kitchen when she heard Patrick. I don’t know where Erin was.” He nudged me up a couple of steps. “Oh, yeah. I remember
looking out my window when I got to my room and I saw Zoltan coming toward the house. Then I heard the kitchen door, so I guess he came in that way. Now there’s a weirdo for you.”

* * *
* *

I found Odile in the kitchen, pounding chicken breasts into thin slabs. She seemed startled to see me, her smile of welcome delayed a second too long. “Something smells good,” I said. “But after my last twenty
-four hours, anything other than a jail cell would smell good.”

“The food was not good?” She pronounced it “goot.
”

I let the small talk work its way around to the LaMotte police station and how much she knew about it. As she finally told me, after much beating about the bush, her sister’s daughter worked in the front office and sometimes, yes—she didn’t mind telling
me because there was nothing wrong with it—her niece did call her up from work just to chat.

Certain that Odile’s quick phone call had been to the police station, I tried to drag out more details about what her niece had told her about my arrest. Had the n
iece overheard any of the interview? Had Kronenberg or Seifert walked into the front room and talked about it? Specifically, had they said anything about a pink sweater? Of course. Someone had to type up the search warrant that listed the sweater among other items. Would that job have fallen to Odile’s niece? What other items were on the list? I made a mental note to ask Lettie. If she got so much as a glimpse of that warrant, her photographic memory would have recorded it all, right down to the creases in the paper. She’d probably be able to write it out, even if it was in German.

* * *
* *

Patrick began weeping when he saw me
, and I was glad Chet wasn’t there. He had never had much patience with Patrick’s tendency to go soft. I wondered what had happened to that burst of aggressive dynamism he’d shown when he found out about Erin and called off the wedding. When I told him about the extra button shank and the scene in the interview room, he perked up, let out a whoop, and pumped the air. “Go, Mom!”

“Marco i
s in town,” I said. “He wants to see you.” I told him where Marco was staying. “Patrick, have you heard anyone mention a pink sweater?”

His head jerked back. “Pink sweater? No.”

“Were you here when Kronenberg and Seifert came up yesterday afternoon with a search warrant?”

He shook his head. “I was outside. Brian told me to take a walk because I was hyperventilating, sort of. When I came back they had left
, but Lettie told me about it and showed me the mess they made of your room. I don’t recall her mentioning anything about a sweater, though.”

Patrick walked to his bedroom window. Since the shifting of rooms following Erin and Patrick’s break-up, he’d been sleeping in the
room next door to Lettie and me. Our windows looked out at the meadow, now erupting in yellow bloom, but the bunker door was hidden from our view behind a grassy mound. “The police are here,” he said. “They’re talking to Zoltan.”

I joined him at the window. Zoltan, Kronenberg, and Seifert stood outside the tool shed at the edge of the meadow
, Zoltan fiddling with a leaf-blower and Kronenberg gesturing westward with one arm. “I wonder what they’re talking about.” Zoltan seemed upset, shrugging his shoulders, swinging the leaf-blower this way and that. Could Zoltan have been the one who planted my button outside the bunker? “Patrick, when you were in the van that day and they were questioning Zoltan, did you hear them say anything about a button?”

“A button? No, not that I recall.”

“Did they bring in anything else when they brought him in?”

“Not that I remember. They each had him by one arm
, and they sort of threw him down in the chair and Kronenberg started firing questions at him.”

I remember what Kronenberg had told me: the button had been there before the snow. It was frozen in ice as it woul
d have been if it was lying under the snow, the snow partially melted then refroze, encasing the button. Zoltan’s trespass inside the taped-off area was much later, after the snow and ice had mostly melted. Since then, the weather had been mild.

A few minu
tes later, the policemen left Zoltan to his work and disappeared down the path that led west. I thought they might be heading for the road if they had come up here in a vehicle, or they might be heading for the landing strip, as Marco had strongly suggested. To solve their case, Marco told them, they had to follow the gold. And the landing strip with its glider seemed the only connection between Chateau Merz and the shady Anton Spektor. Why was the glider buzzing our house at odd hours? To see who was here? To see if someone in particular was here? Or were they really interested in the bunker? What could they see of it from the air but a rock wall? Was something they wanted inside the bunker, and were they buzzing the place looking for a chance to sneak in unobserved? They’d have to know the keypad combination or else have an accomplice who would let them in.

Brian and Babs appeared from around the corner of the house and climbed the outside stairs to the deck. I heard a sliding glass door in the living room
below open, then close.

The gold! What if the missing gold was in the bunker?