A Matter of Breeding (16 page)

‘Werthen?’

‘Sorry. Just something I overlooked at the scene. I think our man might have given the victim a note telling her where to meet him and then took the note with him after killing her. He knows the victims somehow. These are not just random.’

He explained about the pocket lining turned inside out.

‘On the strength of a bit of silk lining showing?’ Stoker was rightfully skeptical.

‘On the strength of intuition. But do not tell Gross.’

Later that afternoon Thielman returned to town with a progress report on this latest murder.

‘Her name was Monika Stiegl,’ the inspector told Werthen and Stoker. ‘She was just eighteen. My god, what were the parents doing letting her gad about on her own at that age? She even had a job at Kleinman and Brothers in Graz. A pharmaceutical firm. She was what they call a typist.’

Thielman all but spat this information out; the new woman was not for him.

‘I am not sure that working for a living led directly to her death,’ Werthen said, but Thielman was not in a listening mood.

‘The parents filed a missing persons report on her this morning when she failed to come back from an outing with her boyfriend yesterday. They were frantic, as you can imagine. The fellows at the morgue managed to clean up the body before viewing, sheet up with just the face showing. It was their daughter.’

‘And the boyfriend?’ Stoker said. ‘By your demeanor, it would appear he too had an alibi.’

‘Rainer.’ He consulted the notepad in his breast pocket. ‘Rainer Frank. A student at the university. Going to be a lawyer, he says. He is either the best actor I have ever seen outside the theater, or he was as devastated by the news of Monika’s death as were her parents. He knew nothing of her plans yesterday. Like Monika, he still lives at home, and he was there all day yesterday and last night studying tort law. Parents confirm it. As does a university friend, fellow named Mandel, who was studying with Rainer.’

‘So we have nothing to go on?’ Stoker said, sounding downcast.

They were sitting in Thielman’s office at the gendarmerie. From the door came another and familiar voice.

‘On the contrary. We now are assured that the killer is playing with us. Leading us on a merry chase. The oilskin coat is the gauntlet thrown down to us to try and catch him.’

Three pairs of eyes turned toward the door.

‘Gross!’ Werthen said. ‘You’re free!’

Gross, looking rather rumpled still, stood beaming at them from the doorway. ‘They could hardly hold me now that the murders have continued while I was safe under arrest. Lechner was not present to wish me well, but I sensed him in spirit. I shall miss the rats, however.’

‘But how did you hear about the oilskin coat, Gross?’ Thielman asked.

‘One of your team happened to come to Karlau Prison. He was more than happy to regale not only me but the other warders with details of the raid on the evil Finster’s home, only to discover a pianist and a man crippled with migraine.’

‘It is good to see you, Gross,’ Werthen said, rising and moving to shake the criminalist’s hand. ‘We have no time to waste if my calculations are correct.’

Now three pairs of eyes were turned on Werthen.

‘What have you been holding back?’ Inspector Thielman said.

‘Nothing,’ Werthen replied. ‘Stoker and I have simply gone more deeply into the idea of the murders being tied to the phases of the moon.’

He quickly explained to Gross about his deduction at the scene of this latest outrage that the spherical mutilations on the sternums of the victims actually had to do with the four quarters of the moon.

‘I was able to check the earlier reports and photographs of Maria Feininger and Annaliese Reiter and I was correct in deducing that the circular wounds on those two are consistent with my theory. Feininger’s wound symbolizes the last quarter, Reiter’s is the new moon, Klein’s the first quarter, and Stiegl’s the full moon.’

‘Bravo, Werthen,’ Gross said, taking a chair and joining them. ‘But why the urgency? Perhaps the series of murders has been completed with the four quarters.’

‘You do not believe that Gross, nor do I,’ Werthen said.

‘Next month then it starts all over?’ Thielman said.

Werthen shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. Sooner than that.’

‘The completion of the blood moon?’ Gross said.

‘Exactly. I’m not a great one for folklore, but I seem to recall from the time I served as a criminal lawyer here in Styria that the populace has a particular way of celebrating All Hallow’s Eve. That the phases of the moon leading up to the thirty-first are just steps in time to the night of flying demons and wild men.’

‘It’s in the research I did also for
Dracula
,’ Stoker added. ‘The old beliefs of southern Europe when witches and evil doers are eradicated on the last of October. I concur with Advokat Werthen. Our killer is only building up to a crescendo on the thirty-first.’

Berthe was having trouble concentrating today. It seemed a frivolous waste of time to be sitting in front of an easel at Tina Blau’s studio at the Vienna Art School for Women and Girls in the Prater when she should have been following leads in the Lipizzaner matter. Or should have been assisting her husband in Styria with yet another gruesome murder.

But there were, quite frankly, no leads to be following regarding the breeding scandal. She had come to a dead end there. And as for assisting her husband in Styria, it seemed there were already enough chefs in the kitchen with that, what with her husband, Stoker, and now Gross freshly released from prison. What a farce that had been; somebody should lose their position over that travesty. Or their pension.

So, she had taken herself off to painting lessons this morning, hoping that by focusing on art instead of the case at hand, perhaps some other thoughts might come bubbling to the surface. However, it was not working out that way.

‘Distracted today, Frau Meisner?’

She was indeed distracted, so much so that she had not even noticed Tina Blau moving to her easel.

‘A snow scene, I see,’ Blau joked as she examined the blank white canvas.

‘I should not have come today,’ Berthe said, embarrassed. ‘Sorry. I seem to have drawn a blank in a number of endeavors.’

‘Frau Mayreder tells me that you and your husband work in private inquiries. Is one of your cases proving a trial?’

‘Actually, more than a trial. It has become quite a headache.’

Blau looked around to make sure the other women were working away diligently at their paintings, and then to Berthe she said with schoolgirl curiosity, ‘I don’t suppose you could tell me about it.’

Berthe found herself smiling at the eagerness of this painter to be informed of the seamier side of life. ‘I don’t see why not,’ Berthe said. However, she tailored her story for public consumption, focusing on the mysterious suicide of the riding master at the Spanish Riding School instead of on the possibility of tainted breeding with the famed Lipizzaner stallions. After all, it was part of her commission for Franz Ferdinand that that part of the affair somehow be kept from public consumption.

‘It was such a sad thing,’ Blau said once Berthe had finished. ‘The poor man—’

‘Putter,’ Berthe added. ‘Captain Wilhelm Putter.’

‘Yes. He had done so much in his life, risen from quite unpromising beginnings. And to end like that. Tragic, really. What could bring a man to end his life so?’

‘That is exactly what I am trying to ascertain,’ Berthe said.

‘I have long had an interest in the Lipizzaner horses,’ Blau said. ‘It was my husband Heinrich who inspired me in that. He loved painting those horses. Even when we were living in Munich, he would come back periodically to Vienna simply to paint the stallions at the stables and at the morning exercises. I have quite a collection of those canvases still.’

Berthe did not know quite what to say to this other than to make a polite ‘hmm’.

‘Seems so long ago, now,’ Blau said, caught in her own memories for a moment. Then, shaking herself out of these thoughts, she widened her eyes. ‘You must have found the article in the
Arbeiter Zeitung
interesting.’

‘Which article would that be?’

‘From yesterday. A sort of follow up by this young journalist. He wrote about the young protégé of Putter’s who discovered the body. A sad story, but inspiring, as well. The boy, an orphan, came from much the same origins as Captain Putter. He took the lad under his wing as it were. It seems they were quite inseparable for a number of months before the captain’s death.’

‘No, I haven’t seen it,’ Berthe said, growing suddenly excited again about the case.

‘I’ve got the paper here somewhere,’ Blau said. ‘I usually keep them for a week before disposing of them. The women sometimes like to have something to read during breaks.’

Blau set off toward her office and returned quickly with yesterday’s
Arbeiter Zeitung
in hand.

‘Here we have it,’ she said, handing the paper to Berthe. ‘It’s the bottom article on the front page.’

Berthe eagerly took the paper and was quite surprised to see that the article was penned by none other than Erika Metzinger’s young man, Bernhard Sonnenthal.

‘There is a ripple effect to death
,
’ the article began. ‘It touches not only the victim, but also those associated with him. In the case of the unfortunate suicide of Captain Wilhelm Putter, late riding master of the Spanish Riding School, the ripples have touched young Franzl Hruda, whom Captain Putter had taken in hand to train as a groom at the Stallburg. Putter’s death brought to an end the dreams of a young boy who wanted only one thing in life: to work with horses. “He was the only one who ever cared,” young Franzl told this reporter. “The only one to believe in me. We shared everything.”’

Berthe stopped reading at that point.

Two things were clear. Sonnenthal, who so loudly complained about feuilleton writers at dinner the other night, was coming perilously close to the borders of that genre with this article. That fact brought a smile to her face, for it made Sonnenthal more human somehow, less of a prig.

The second thing that was painfully clear was that she needed to talk with Franzl Hruda immediately.

By mid-morning she was at the Stallburggasse in search of the young boy. Sonnenthal’s article made it clear that Franzl was no longer working as a groom after the death of his benefactor, but that he continued to haunt the precincts of the stable and the riding school. It took her only five minutes to spot the youth, loitering at the corner of Stallburggasse and Bräunergasse, just a block away from her husband’s legal offices.

As she approached him, he eyed her suspiciously.

‘I’m not doing anything wrong,’ he said.

‘I didn’t say you were,’ she replied with a smile. ‘I only want to ask you some questions about your friend, Captain Putter.’

‘You another journalist? Much good that story did me. Thought they might want to keep me on if others heard about me. All it did was make me what they call person non graded.’

‘
Persona non grata,
’ Berthe corrected, and then wished she hadn’t. But Franzl did not take it amiss.

‘That’s the one. Like they don’t want you around a place.’

‘Exactly. And they don’t want you around here simply because you have dreams of being a groom.’

‘A groom? Whoever told you that? I might as well have stayed at the butcher shop. Not a groom’s life for me. I wanted to train to be a rider. That’s what the captain was preparing me for. He’d say we have to take it step by step, let the others get used to me in the tack room, and then I’d graduate to leading the horses to and from morning training, and finally he would get me on the horses secret like till I could show them all what I could do.’

‘Sounds like a smart plan,’ Berthe said.

A member of the riding school staff was eying them from the entrance to the stables.

‘You know, there is a place nearby where we could talk and it would be much more comfortable.’

‘You never answered me,’ Franzl said.

Berthe shook her head. ‘How do you mean?’

‘If you’re a journalist.’

‘No. But I am gathering information like a journalist might. I am investigating the death of Captain Putter.’

‘He killed himself.’

‘I know. I just want to make sure why.’

‘You’ll excuse me. I mean, you look like a nice woman and all, but I don’t know that I can trust you.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Investigator, like an inspector with the police?’

‘No. Private. Private inquiries. A very powerful person hired me to discover the truth about Captain Putter’s death, and I am hoping you can tell me about that.’

‘Well, see, that’s what I mean about trusting you. Whoever heard of a female investigator?’

She repressed a smile, leveling her eyes at him. ‘And whoever heard of an orphan boy becoming a rider at the Spanish Riding School?’

This brought a tickle of laugh from the youth. ‘That’s pretty good. Where is this place you want to go?’

‘My husband’s office. It’s just in the next block, on Habsburgergasse.’

‘I don’t suppose you’ve got anything to eat there? My aunt says if I’m not going to find a job, then I can’t take food with me in the morning.’

‘I’ll bet we can find a shop along the way and get you something to eat. Sound good?’

He nodded happily. ‘It was getting cold out here anyway.’

Erika Metzinger was busy at the typewriter when they entered the office. Franzl was already gnawing at a bun stuffed with sausage, too hungry to wait for arrival.

‘Meet Franzl Hruda,’ Berthe said to Erika as they came in. ‘Your Herr Sonnenthal wrote about him.’

Erika looked up in amazement. ‘I read about you,’ she said. ‘Nice to meet you, Franzl. My name is Erika.’

‘Yeah, I know. Herr Sonnenthal, he mentioned you.’

Erika reddened at this. ‘He did?’

‘Yeah. He was sympathizing with me about how hard it must be for me to be almost on my own. Said how lucky he was to have a good person in his life like Erika Metzinger.’

Erika was at a loss for words.

‘That is an awfully nice sentiment,’ Berthe said.