The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (24 page)

There was an unused cubbyhole in the attic, immediately above the master bedroom, which was entered through a trap door in the bedroom ceiling. Mrs Oesterreich fixed the cubbyhole up with a cot, a rug, a small table, a couple of chairs, some candles and other necessities of life and, one day when Fred was at the factory, moved Otto, who had quit his job with the sewing-machine company, right in. She put a snap lock on Otto’s side of the trap door so that if her husband should, for any reason, try to get into the attic cubbyhole he would think the trap door was stuck.

The arrangement went just fine. Mrs Oesterreich, feigning one excuse or another, would remain home from the factory and, as the cold winter winds blew outside, would give her signal to Otto—three taps on the trap door—and he would open it up and descend into the bedroom.

Otto came out for exercise around the house only during the day, or when the Oesterreichs went out for the evening. Before going out at night with Fred, Walburga would give Otto the signal that it was all right to come down. But Otto never set foot off the premises.

Because of the demands that Walburga Oesterreich had made on him for almost four years now, Otto had hardly grown at all, still being under five feet and weighing only a hundred and five pounds. And what did Otto think of all this? He just loved it. Only a mixed-up character would have gone for such an arrangement but Otto was mixed up from way back. An orphan, he had had a hard raising. Because of his small stature and his nondescript face, nobody had ever paid the slightest attention to him—until Mrs Oesterreich had spied him.

Otto was living in a sort of dream world up there in the attic, not having to face the realities of life and with all his wants taken care of. Talk about social security! Mrs. Oesterreich supplied Otto with adventure books, which she obtained from a public library, and, as Otto read by daylight or by candlelight, he was transported into regions far removed from Milwaukee.

Sanhuber had by now developed a voracious appetite. The fellow could eat enough for three men. Mrs Oesterreich kept him supplied with whole loaves of German rye bread, bottles of milk, and cheeses, liverwursts and bolognas, so that he could have snacks at night when the garment manufacturer was on the premises and Otto could not come down out of his hideaway.

There were just two precautionary measures that Otto had to abide by. One was that he was never to make the slightest sound at night, when Oesterreich himself might be just below him, there in the bedroom. The other was that he was never, under any circumstances, to go near a window in the cubbyhole that looked out on the backyard. The window was opaque with dust, and the light of a candle, which Otto kept at that end of the cubbyhole furthest from the window, was not visible after dark.

After a couple of years of reading adventure stories, Otto became something of a connoisseur of the stuff. Not only a connoisseur, but a critic. An urge to express himself, long bottled up, took the form of a decision to write adventure fiction for the pulp magazines.

So Otto began to scratch away with a quill pen, up there in the attic, turning out adventure stories laid, for the most part, in the South Seas and the Orient. Mrs Oesterreich bought a typewriter, learned how to peck away at it, and typed Otto’s stories and sent them to the pulp magazines. She rented a post-office box under an assumed name and used the box for all correspondence on the literary level.

Otto, who was very prolific, turned out his stories pretty rapidly. During his first year as a writer, he drew nothing but rejection slips. Then, suddenly, he got the hang of the thing and his stories started selling. Although he used a nom de plume in the magazines, the checks were made out in his name. He endorsed them over to Mrs Oesterreich and she opened a special bank account for him. Thus the little fellow became self-supporting.

Sometimes, while writing late at night, Otto would become so engrossed in his work that he would cough or clear his throat. “Where’s that noise coming from?” Oesterreich would ask his wife. “Oh,” Mrs Oesterreich would answer, “it’s probably a dog somewhere.”

“It sounds closer than that. It sounds like it’s coming from the attic.”

“It’s probably mice.”

When the Oesterreichs were out for an evening to visit friends and drink schnapps, Otto liked to go down to the kitchen and raid the ice box. Oesterreich, coming home with his wife about midnight, was a great one for a snack before going to bed. He would go into the ice box, take out a roast, and look at it in a puzzled sort of way. “Whatever happened to all the meat on this thing?” he would ask his wife.

“We ate it at dinner.”

“We didn’t eat
that
much.”

Mrs Oesterreich would just look at her husband and make him feel foolish.

One Saturday afternoon, Oesterreich was out in the backyard, burning some rubbish. As chance would have it, Otto chose that very afternoon to disobey the injunction of his mistress never to go near that window in the attic. Otto not only went near the window, but he rubbed some of the accumulated grime away, the better to peer out. He was peering out when Oesterreich, down in the back yard, happened to look up. Otto ducked—but not quite in time.

Oesterreich ran into the house, yelling for his wife. “I
knew
there was something up in that attic!” he yelled. “I just
saw
something
move
.”

Walburga Oesterreich, who was by now equal to practically any situation, feigned puzzlement. “If it’ll make you feel any better, Fred, why don’t you go up to the attic and look around.” Oesterreich tried the trap door, but it wouldn’t give. “The damned thing’s stuck,” he said.

“Fred,” said Mrs. Oesterreich, “I want to have a serious talk with you.”

“What about?”

“I think you should see a doctor.”

“What for?”

Now Walburga Oesterreich came across with her master stroke. She tapped her forehead. “I think something’s wrong in your head, Fred. You’re imagining things. Maybe it’s because you drink too much or maybe it’s because you work too hard. But
some
thing’s wrong, Fred. Promise me you’ll see a doctor.” Fred, fearing the woman might be speaking the truth, would promise nothing of the kind. But thereafter if he heard mice in the attic coughing and clearing their throats he kept his mouth shut about it.

Oesterreich was a great man for a cigar. There were always several humidors filled with cigars around the house. Now Otto (wouldn’t you know it) took up smoking. When Oesterreich began to complain that his cigars were disappearing, his wife put her foot down. He would
have
to see a doctor.

The saw-bones just sat there in his office, looking at Fred Oesterreich while Mrs Oesterreich did the talking. What she was saying was that her husband was imagining that somebody was smoking his cigars and raiding his ice box, that he was seeing things, like an imaginary face at the attic window, and that he thought he heard mice up in the attic, coughing and clearing their throats.

“Is this true?” the doctor asked the apron magnate. Oesterreich said it was. “Do you drink pretty heavily, Mr Oesterreich?” asked the doctor. Oesterreich admitted that he did. “And you work very hard at your factory?” Yes.

The doctor wrote out a prescription. But the prescription didn’t seem to do any good. Oesterreich began to brood about himself. He brooded so much, in fact, that he began to lose his grip. He was no longer the Simon Legree in his factory, no longer capable of lashing the slaves on to greater effort.

Mrs Oesterreich, still carrying on great with her attic Romeo, took her husband to another doctor. The second saw-bones suggested a change of houses.

When the Oesterreichs changed houses, Otto went right along, being fixed up in the attic again. But Oesterreich continued to hear strange sounds every once in a while, and his cigars continued to vanish and edibles disappeared from the refrigerator.

In 1913, when Fred Oesterreich was fifty, his wife forty-six, and Otto twenty-seven, the Oesterreichs moved into still another house. Of course Otto went right along. The liaison between the little fellow and Walburga Oesterreich was still going strong, to the utter satisfaction of both, but Fred Oesterreich was rapidly running down hill. He was still hearing things and imagining things.

Walburga Oesterreich was, at the age of forty-six, a remarkable woman—dripping with magnetism, buoyant of spirit, quick of mind. She was careful of her diet, kept her figure, and saw to it that she got out of a dress everything she put into it. Her dark, Spanish-type features made her age hard to figure out; sometimes, when she was well rested and well satisfied, she looked quite a few years younger than she really was.

Actually, the woman was leading two complete lives—one with her husband at night and one with Otto during the day. Fred Oesterreich, a methodical man, left the house at the same time in the morning and returned the same time at night. When Fred left in the morning, Otto would come down out of the attic, have breakfast in the kitchen, and then either go back to the attic to write or go to bed with Mrs Oesterreich.

Otto and the lady hit the sack one morning and were making quite a racket when they heard a noise downstairs. Mrs Oesterreich jumped out of bed, rushed to the open door of the bedroom, and listened. Sure enough, somebody was downstairs. “Who’s there!” the lady cried out.

“It’s me,” came Fred’s voice. “Where are you, upstairs?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll be right up,” called Fred.

“No,” answered Walburga, “I’ll be right down.”

While Otto sneaked off to his attic hideaway, Mrs Oesterreich put on bedroom slippers and dressing gown and got downstairs before her husband, who had come home not feeling good, got upstairs. Close—but no cigar.

One night, not long afterward, the Oesterreichs, who had gone out to play cards with friends, got into a drunken fight with the friends and returned home early. Fred, oiled to the gills, caught little Otto in the kitchen, worrying at a leg of lamb. Thinking Otto was an ordinary intruder, he gave the little fellow a frightful beating and tossed him out of the house, little realizing that he was evicting Otto from the only home he had.

Meeting Mrs Oesterreich on the street next day, Otto found that she had everything all planned. Afraid that her husband would suspect that Otto had been considerably more than an ordinary intruder, put two and two together and bust into that attic, Walburga told her lover to go to Los Angeles. She would keep in touch with him through a post-office box, and soon join him in the City of the Angels. She withdrew from the bank the money he had made as a writer and away he went.

Arriving in Los Angeles, Otto got a job as a porter in an apartment house. After all those years in the attic, he hated all that California sunshine. Walburga had no trouble talking Fred into selling out and moving to California but it took him two years to find somebody who would give him half a million dollars for his apron factory.

Landing in Los Angeles in 1918, the Oesterreichs put up at a hotel while he looked around for a business opportunity and she looked around for a house. Walburga found just what she wanted on North St Andrews Place, one of the city’s tonier thoroughfares—a handsome big residence that just happened to have a walled-off portion of the attic right above, of all places, the master bedroom. While Oesterreich rushed around town, investigating business opportunities, his wife fixed up the attic quarters for Otto.

Oesterreich purchased controlling interest in a prosperous garment factory specializing in aprons, dresses and lingerie, and moved with his wife into the residence on North St Andrews Place. Mrs Oesterreich contacted Otto, met him on a street corner one fine bright Southern California day and within the hour the little fellow was ensconced in his new quarters, safely in out of the sunshine.

Things rocked along for four years. Then, on the night of 22 August 1922, neighbors of the couple heard terrifying sounds coming out of the open window, and then they heard what sounded like—and was—the sound of several shots.

The cops found Fred Oesterreich dead on the living-room floor, bullets through his head and his chest. Then they heard the widow yelling for help from a clothes closet in the master bedroom. The closet had been locked by a large, old-fashioned key, which was lying on the floor just outside of the closet door.

Now there entered the scene a man named Herman Cline, the Chief of Detectives of the Los Angeles Police Department—a hard-bitten man who, rumor had it, each morning glanced into a mirror and looked with suspicion at his own reflection. Cline looked at Mrs Oesterreich, who was near hysteria, then at the key that had locked the closet door, and then at a space of about a quarter of an inch between the bottom of the door and the floor.

Mrs Oesterreich told Cline that she and her husband had come home and surprised a burglar. After shooting her husband the burglar had locked Mrs. Oesterreich in the closet to prevent her from phoning the police.

“What’d the burglar steal?” Cline asked Mrs Oesterreich.

Mrs Oesterreich had seen the burglar snatching her husband’s watch—a handsome timepiece studded with diamonds. The lady was carrying on at a great rate. She volunteered the information that in a third of a century of marriage she and dear Fred had never had a single quarrel.

The apron manufacturer had been slain by bullets from a .25-calibre weapon. “I think I’ll go to Milwaukee and look into this Mrs Oesterreich,” Cline told his superior. “She could of locked
herself
in that closet and shoved that key back under the door. Not only that, but any woman who stands there with a straight face and says she’s never even had a fight with her husband’s a liar.”