The Killing of Emma Gross (20 page)

'The lucky part was Kürten leaving her alive,' I said.

'Well, quite. But lucky none the less. I'm afraid that's how it is with these serial killers.'

'Serial killers?' I said.

'Yes,' he smiled, 'it's a phrase I've been working up for a magazine article. Has quite a ring to it, don't you think? I mean, mass-murderer is all very well, but it's a little imprecise. Surely a mass-murderer is someone who kills several people at the same time, while what we have here is actually quite a different phenomenon – a killer who targets several victims, but in a series, one after the other.' He bounced his spoon in the air to illustrate his idea.

'No, my point was – and incidentally I'll be repeating it in my article – that traditional police work hasn't a hope when up against men of this stamp. Against the likes of Kürten and Haarmann all we can do is wait for them to make their mistakes and try to be there to spot them when they happen.'

A goddamned magazine article. I must've been the only mug in all of
Kripo
not treating the job as some kind of stepping stone to glory. He sipped more coffee and then topped up his cup from the pot. 'I phoned your watch commander today, told him you'd be free to return to normal duties as of tomorrow.'

'Oh,' I said. Now the end of my involvement in the case was in sight, I wanted to stay and see it through.

'Well, you can't be surprised, surely? Not after today.'

'I suppose not.'

I sipped my coffee. It was thick and strong with a good foam on the top.

Gennat blew his mouldy-leaf smoke at me. 'Of course, he reminded me that tomorrow and the day after fall on your days off. So you wouldn't be due back until Friday morning.'

His brown eyes sparkled.

'What are you saying, sir?'

'It occurs to me, thinking back over the Haarmann case, that the difference between a good detective and a bad one isn't just luck, it's also having the balls to keep pushing at a problem until that luck comes along. After all, you had one stroke of luck already.'

'Oh?' I said.

'Yes, who was it who picked up the Butlies case in the first place? For eighteen months, all of Düsseldorf
Kripo
tries to track down the Ripper, without success, and then the answer just falls into your lap? That's the kind of luck that clears cases. Maybe you're due some more of the same. Believe me, you keep pushing on this Gross case and you're going to need it.'

He rooted for his wallet. 'Lunch is on me, I think.' He passed me a couple of Reichsmark. 'And for God's sake get yourself a haircut and a shave. I might not be able to control what you do for the next two days, but I won't have you going round looking like a damned hobo.'

The bastard was giving me permission to go rogue. And making sure I couldn't prove it. Talk about your political animal.

'Sir...' I began. I wanted to tell him about my two captives and maybe even ask his advice on defusing the situation since he was in the mood to dish it out. But he spoke before I had the chance to go on.

'Oh, and let's have an end to this cavorting with Marxist reporters, eh? If there's one thing guaranteed to get you chucked off your little case – and off the department – it's that.' He took another drag on his cigar. 'Anyway, you wanted to say something.'

'Did you ever find out what happened to that young man?' I said after a second or two of mental fumbling.

'Mmmn? Which young man?'

'The one in Hanover whose parents hired that PI.'

Gennat shrugged and finished his coffee. 'Same as happened to all the others. Haarmann fucked him and tore his throat out.'

The air felt cool on my smooth face and around my ears as I entered the lobby of the Hotel Adler. Vogel's hat I'd left in the barbershop. A tip, if you will.

The clack-clack-clack of a ceiling fan drew my eyes upwards. The spinning blades cast swirling patterns into the tobacco smoke hovering beneath them. Flies bobbed and buzzed above the florid faces of dark-suited men occupying the chintz armchairs scattered about. In the smoked-glass mirror above a huge stone fireplace, a blonde with dark roots and stiletto heels tottered past a potted palm with brown spots on its leaves, on her way to a dark-suited lap. She just about kept time with the big band music crackling into the room from a concealed wireless. The blonde was the only one paying any attention to the music. When I turned to watch her without the mirror's assistance she looked unreal, un-tinted and back to front.

The lamp fittings trembled in time to the sound of a train pulling out of the station half a block away. I approached the check-in desk tucked into the corner by the stairs. The girl behind the desk had eyes as black as tar and a white cap atop her black hair which drew my eyes to the round studs in her ears. She wore a white blouse with a black skirt and a small white pinafore. She also had a crooked back. My heart gave that careless-fisherman's tug and I wondered when it was I'd grown so soft. Probably at the point when I'd accepted money for a shave from another man.

'Can I help you sir?' the maid asked. Her hand rested on an open ledger on the desk.

You can tell me who killed Emma Gross for a start
, I thought
.
Besides avoiding having to deal with my captives, what was I doing here? On top of my suspicion of Ritter's paperwork on the case, it was true that crime scene sketches and photographs were a poor substitute for standing there in the space where murder was done and picking up what you could from the dimensions and the objects in the room. But what could I hope to find more than a year after the fact?

'I very much hope so,' I said, for some reason putting on the same posh voice I'd used on the telephone with Berg. I thought she'd be expecting that, maybe, I don't know. I flashed her my ID. Her eyes widened and she held up an index finger, then vanished through a door beside the pigeon holes. Another black mark against Kürten's confession: no wall clock. My watch told me it had just gone five pm.

The door opened and another woman bustled out to meet me. The thick lenses she wore on a beaded chain around her neck magnified the blue of her eyes, and dark hair ran to grey at the sides of her head where it obscured her ears. She snatched the ID from my hand and held it up to her lenses.

'It is genuine,' I said.

'What is this about?' She rolled something hard around her mouth, making her lips bulge so that I forgot my first question. Either she was hooked on hard candies or she had a pair of false teeth that didn't fit.

'I'm here about Emma Gross.' I held out my hand for the ID.

'Don't know anything about that,' the woman said. She shook my hand. She had the look of a woman who would wear too much of the wrong kind of perfume just because it was in fashion. My damned stomach muscles were cramping again. I gave my belly a brief rub and shivered at the sensation.

'This is the Hotel Adler?'

'Yes?'

'You are the manageress?'

'I am the proprietoress.'

'You were the proprietoress on the night of 28
^th
February last year?'

'Yes?'

'Well then you know plenty.' I consulted my notes. 'I'd like to see the room where she died.'

'Who?'

'Emma Gross.' I snatched back the ID.

'I don't know which room that was.'

'Are you in the habit of hosting murders at your hotel, Frau...?

'Frau Holz. And no I am not.'

'Seems to me you might remember a murder, even in a cum-cabin like this.'

The woman gasped and so did the maid, who raised a tiny hand to her mouth and watched Frau Holz for guidance on how to react. She was poised to cringe. Manners again.

Frau Holz adopted a stage whisper: 'This is not a cum-cabin! And I'll thank you to keep such talk out of my hotel.' The woman's eyeglasses fell from her nose and swung in front of her blue satin blouse.

'Well what else do you call a place that charges by the hour?' I turned the ledger and flicked through the pages. 'And doesn't write those guests in the book?' A cum-cabin with pretensions was still a cum-cabin.

'We do no such thing here, officer, I assure you.'

A man and woman descended the stairs with a burst of loud giggling that highlighted the lobby's hushed tones. The man's double-breasted jacket hung open over his waist-coated belly. His neck tie hung loose around his neck and his face had passed through florid to beetroot. The woman had the man's overcoat on her shoulders, just covering her skinny arms and legs and her thin silk dress. She tipped a champagne bottle to her lips until froth spilled down her chin. The man belly-laughed at her and she laughed right along with him. The man nudged me aside, slapped five Reichsmark on the check-in desk and moved off arm-in-arm with his floozy. He paused, clicked his fingers, delved into a pocket and slapped a key down on there too. The key was attached to a large wooden block with the number '12' stamped on it.

The man elbowed me and said, 'You look like you need help, friend. You want to borrow mine?'

He shoved his woman at me, if woman was the right name for such a sack of bones. The floozy spat out champagne and slapped the man's shoulder and then the couple left for the street.

I wiped champagne from my cheek and flung the droplets at Frau Holz, who flinched. The maid busied herself, reaching up to put key number twelve back in its pigeon hole. She stretched so far that her blouse came untucked. I resisted the urge to tuck it in for her.

Following my shave, the cut in my cheek was exposed to the air. It itched like crazy, but the barber had managed to shave around it without opening it up again, something I doubted I'd have been able to do.

'Okay,' Holz shrugged, 'so we do allow guests to have rooms by the hour, but we do not encourage...sexual congress.'

'So what do they do up there? Hold séances?'

'We offer discretion. What our guests choose to spend their time doing is of no concern to us. A view backed up by your vice squad boys, by the way, officer.' Her hand moved toward a cash register behind the desk. She raised an eyebrow.

I waved away the implication. 'Save your money. I'm not vice. Was Emma Gross a regular here?'

'No.'

The maid swallowed and squinted and flitted into the back room. The door clicked shut behind her.

'Is there anyone here who knew her? Who spoke to her, maybe?'

'I'd hardly encourage that, officer. Why, if I'd known she was a whore I'd have kicked her out.'

I looked back into the lobby at the blonde with the dark roots. She wriggled in her florid gentleman's lap and played with his neck tie. In the trade the girls called their marks 'suitors' with ironic formality. She'd got herself an easy one here: guy was turning beet already, and he still had all his clothes on.

I turned back. 'Did you see the man she came in with that night?'

'Who?'

'Emma Gross.'

'When, the twenty-eighth?'

'Yes, the twenty-eighth.'

'No.'

'Was there anybody working here that night who might've?'

'I was the only one working the desk that night.'

'You're sure about that?'

'I answered enough questions at the time, officer, to be sure. Yes.'

'There's no way your maid might have walked in on her in the room?'

She put her eyeglasses back on her nose so she could glare through them at me. 'If Marta was in the habit of doing such things I am sure she would not still be working for me.'

'She was there that night too?'

'No.'

'Mind if I ask her?' I flipped up the hinged top in the check-in desk and reached for the door to the back room.

Frau Holz put out a hand to stop me. 'That is to say, she was not on the desk or cleaning the rooms or the hallways that night, officer. She was in the kitchen, helping chef.'

'And may I speak with the chef?'

She beamed at me. 'Chef is regrettably no longer in my employ, officer.'

'And your husband. Is he around to speak to?'

'He passed away.'

I read through my notes again. 'And you're sure you don't remember which room Gross was killed in that night?'

'That's right.'

'Make any difference if I ask your guests?' I turned and nodded at the florid men in the chairs, taking a couple of steps away from the desk.

'Room thirty-seven,' Holz said. 'But it's occupied right now.'

I checked the ledger. No record of any occupants of room thirty-seven for the whole day, or the night before.

'Holding a séance, are they?'

Now Holz' reticence made more sense. I grinned to myself as I went up the stairs. Thirty-seven was a short walk down the hall on the third floor. I pressed my ear to the door. Groans, grunts and squeaking bed springs issued forth and that grin I'd been wearing bloomed into a full-grown smile.

I tried the handle. The door was locked, of course. I knocked.

'No thank you!' called a man's voice. He sounded out of puff.