Morgue Drawer Four (23 page)

“The newspaper,” Martin said. “If the Pope is driving an SLR, they’ll know about it.”

He took out his cell phone, dialed a number he knew by heart, and then gave his name and mentioned “coroner’s office.”

“No, we haven’t got any interesting bodies right now, at least not on my end,” he said apparently in response to a question. “This time I’ve actually got a non-business-related question, if that’s all right. I’ve found myself in a silly bet with someone, and I’m hoping you can confirm that I won.”

He listened for a moment and then laughed. “All right, does Dr. Eilig, a.k.a. Dr. Christian, own a Mercedes SLR?”

Martin’s face grew long. “No? Are you sure?” The corners of his mouth that had sunk down in disappointment suddenly shot up.

“Are you sure? Wow, I’m so relieved.”

He laughed again, promised to keep sending official press releases to the e-mail address he already had, and hung up.

“That guy is a freelancer over at the
Cologne Advertiser
, and he owes me various favors,” Martin explained with a very satisfied expression on his face. I was amazed because I hadn’t at all expected Martin to keep an account like that. Once again I’d been completely wrong about him, and once again he’d surprised me. I was going to have to start getting used to the idea that people can be complex and interesting even outside the environment I’d been hanging out in the past few years. It’s actually kind of exciting to see the world this way. Even women here weren’t just bed bunnies but human beings, with intellect and personality. OK, I wasn’t quite that far yet, but hanging around with Martin had started to open my mind up to all kinds of new possibilities.

“Eilig did have an SLR, but it hasn’t been seen for about ten days. After a reporter had asked him about it three days ago, he said he’d gotten an excellent offer for the car from a prospective buyer abroad, and he sold it to him.”

“Well now all my warning lights are flashing,” I said.

“Exactly,” Martin said, his voice squeaking with excitement. “We got him.” He said it aloud. And he said it again: “We got the bastard.”

We drove to Eilig’s address in Cologne, which Martin had elicited from another reporter so no one would notice his sudden interest in the man. His apartment was one of six in the building, each seventy square meters according to the poster in front advertising the two empty units. These were condos, actually, but that didn’t surprise us. If the arrangement of the doorbells and nameplates matched the arrangement of the apartments, then Eilig’s apartment was on the second floor on the right. Martin positioned the car in front of the entry while I orbited the building and got a marvelous view through the gigantic wall of glass into the living room where Eilig was sitting in a deep leather armchair staring into space. Strictly speaking he was staring at the flat-screen TV hanging on the wall in his line of sight, but the TV was turned off, and I didn’t think that Eilig was staring at the dark glossy rectangle.

In his left hand he was holding a glass with three melting ice cubes in it. Either the guy was missing his car with a longing that really made you feel sorry for him, or else he had another problem. I was already inclined toward the latter analysis, even before seeing him like this. But if you watched the call girl you hired to brighten your mood die in agony, and then you decided you needed to spirit her body away without anyone noticing, and to do that you had to abuse the coolest fucking car in the world, only to have someone steal your rocket ship complete with the body in the trunk, then I’m thinking you’ve got a pretty good reason to feel melancholic. But then if on top of that you also needed to murder the car thief to keep even his dying words from publicly disclosing the corpse in the trunk, then from my perspective that would be reason enough to be staring into space with a drink in your hand. Eilig apparently thought so, too. He didn’t stir.

I reported my observations to Martin, and he was pleased Eilig was home. He was less interested in everything else.

I whooshed back to the living room window and stopped in horror. The chair was empty. After a moment’s terror I saw Eilig standing over by the bookcase. He was just hanging up the phone. He turned around, picked up an attaché case from next to the armchair, and walked out of the living room.

I raced back to Martin and updated him on my surveillance just as the red warning light started blinking at the entrance to the ramp leading down to the underground garage. A Jag with tinted windows exited. We couldn’t tell who the driver was, but we both automatically assumed Eilig was sitting in the car, and we followed him. In the trash can. Fortunately traffic was heavy, and we were hitting all red lights instead of green, so our little pedal car was actually able to keep up in the car “chase.”

Eilig wasn’t concentrating on his driving, which may have been due to any number of causes, not the least of which was indubitably a certain blood alcohol level, if you recall the glass with the ice cubes. As we followed him we enjoyed some excited speculation. Where was he driving to? And why? At first we thought he was driving to his local parliamentary office since he had an attaché case with him, but he wasn’t driving in the right direction for that. Then he started getting closer to the neighborhood where Semira had lived, but that didn’t make any sense. Ultimately he just kept heading eastward, toward Cologne’s medieval old town and the Rhine, which runs north-south through the middle of Cologne.

Martin was in high spirits like a kid on Christmas Eve. He was driving frenetically, blathering on about all kinds of nonsense without stopping to take a breath and sniffling about seventeen times. But he didn’t have a runny nose. Just nerves. It was driving me crazy. I hate it when people sniffle. I know, my manners weren’t always the best, either, but I always kept my nose clean—that is a minimum standard of civilization that I retained throughout my whole life. I asked Martin to stop. He said, “Yes, of course,” and then he sniffled again. He didn’t even notice. I suppressed my disgust and left him alone so I wouldn’t make him even more nervous. After all, he had to keep track of the Jag, keep an eye on the road, watch out for traffic, and stop at red lights, even if the Jag darted through a yellow. But we always caught up with him again at the next light; that’s the benefit I guess to a totally uncoordinated traffic light system.

Our drive took us across the Rhine, the cathedral receding downriver behind us to the left, and Martin got even more nervous as he considered the possibility that we might soon be running on empty, but it didn’t come to that. The Jaguar turned off the main road.

“Industrial wasteland” is a buzzword that describes a piece of land where some kind of industrial operation used to be located. First the operation brings in wads of cash while regrettably contaminating the soil and groundwater, then it’s closed, falls into disrepair if the site wasn’t in ruins already, and then the former owner or heirs no longer can or want to be found—thereby sticking the general public with the costs of decontaminating the poison pit. That’s the kind of site our stylin’ Jaguar was driving to.

Martin turned on his blinker to follow, but before he could execute this hair-raisingly idiotic idea, I talked him out of it with a carefully worded question.

“Are you batshit crazy?” I roared.

Martin hit the brakes as hard as he could. Pure reflex.

“We’re going to stick out like Santa Claus at Easter Sunday mass if we follow behind the Jag now,” I said, returning to normal intonation.

“Right, got it,” Martin moaned, sniffling.

“We’re going to have to keep a low profile and follow him on foot,” I said. “So park the car here, and let’s get going.”

Martin parked the trash can on the shoulder, awkwardly locked the doors, and started walking at a brisk pace.

To our benefit, all kinds of bushes and trees had already taken over the abandoned site as their habitat, so we didn’t need to walk around without any cover. I whooshed out in front as a scout, found the Jag not far from us, and even caught another glimpse of Dr. Eilig, who was walking up to a dilapidated building, attaché case in hand. I was torn between going back to Martin and staying with Eilig, but I ultimately decided on Eilig. Presumably that was my error because Martin wasn’t keeping an eye out behind him, either—only in front.

Dr. Eilig took up position on the front steps of the old building, its roof totally missing and its rear gable wall half caved-in, and then looked around. Obviously he couldn’t see me, and he couldn’t see Martin from his location, either. After looking all around again, Eilig stood there for a moment almost hesitantly, but finally he set the attaché case down in the entryway to the old building and walked at a rapid gait back to his Jaguar, climbed in, and drove off.

Martin had just enough time to dive behind a wall as the car raced past him. We couldn’t tell if Eilig saw him.

A few seconds later Martin had reached the attaché, which I hadn’t let out of my sight the whole time. “What’s inside?” he asked.

“How am I supposed to know?” I asked.

“Can’t you see inside it? Or seep into it, or something?” Martin demanded.

“And do you suppose there’s a little light bulb inside, like in the fridge?” I asked back.

“Well I don’t know,” Martin mumbled.

“Why don’t you just open it?” I suggested.

“And what if it’s a bomb?” Martin asked.

“Is it ticking?” I asked.

Martin listened and shook his head.

“So open it,” I said.

He lay the case down carefully, gently pressed on the locks, and the cover sprung open. No bomb. Money. Hundred-euro bills. More than I’d ever seen in one stack before. Sweet!

“Take the attaché and let’s get out of here,” I said. Martin stood there as though he were nailed to the spot.

“Martin!” I yelled, but he showed no reaction.

“He’s being blackmailed,” Martin mumbled thoughtfully. “Eilig is being blackmailed.”

“That’s how I see it, too,” I said. “And that means: we’ve got a problem. To be specific, the blackmailer is going to be showing up in a minute to pick up his cash. We need to clear out of here now.”

“Why is he being blackmailed?” Martin mused to no one in particular.

“He’s got a whole pile of skeletons in his closet,” I said. “And you don’t screw around with people like that. So hobblety-hobblety-ho, let’s go.”

Martin didn’t move. “But who knows about the skeletons in his closet?”

Here again you can see how complicated these college-educated types make life. When confronted with a case full of money, what on earth does a normal person care who is blackmailing who? No one gives a fuck; the main thing is you get to get your hands on the dough. But not Martin.

Martin was taking his own sweet time thinking things through.

“Why did Eilig need to have killed you, actually?” he asked.

“Because I stole his car and knew that there was a body in it,” I replied.

“But how did he know that you were the thief?”

“He must have seen me breaking into the car.”

“What could he have seen?” asked Martin the Meticulous, who had never yet just believed the blatantly obvious.

I thought about it. Eilig could have seen only a thin, inconspicuous guy in dark clothes with a cap on driving away in his car. No one followed me as I drove the car to the rendezvous point. No one was standing in the parking lot when I handed the car off. Eilig had no way at all of knowing who I was. Therefore, he was not the one who killed me. But who was it then? And why was Eilig being blackmailed? I asked Martin this as well, since he had infected me with his brooding, and as a result I totally forgot about the danger we were in.

“Why he was being blackmailed is easy,” Martin said. “Because of the body in the trunk.”

“Makes sense,” I said.

“The only question is: by whom?”

The answer hit us at the same time: I had gotten a job from someone to steal the SLR. That someone intended to sell the car in Eastern Europe and had almost certainly discovered the body in the trunk first. His contact in the East…At that moment everything became clear to me: his contact was a tall, thin, good-looking, dark-haired guy who I’d seen for the first time on the day I died, then in Olli’s shop, and most recently at the Institute for Forensic Medicine. All the threads in this case converged into the fat hands of one man:

“Olli.” I thought it to myself, but Martin yelled out the name loud and clear.

“That’s right,” said a completely calm voice that I immediately recognized as Olli’s, from barely five meters away. “And that’s why the money belongs to me and I will thank you to get your manicured hands off it right now.”

Martin and I stood there as though flash-frozen. We hadn’t heard Olli coming; he had just suddenly emerged from the semiruined building. Maybe he’d been hanging around there the whole time. I don’t know; I hadn’t noticed him.

“Uh-oh…” Martin said as he too recognized the obese car smuggler. The activity in his brain was sending out sparks.

“Of course,” Martin said. “You had no need to find out whose SLR it was; you had already hired someone to steal a unique car.”

Olli nodded.

“And when the car was delivered to you with a body in the trunk, the situation was just begging for blackmail,” Martin said.

Olli nodded again. “I’d have been stupid not to ask for some cash on the side.”

“But why did Pascha Lerchenberg have to die?” Martin asked.

Olli stopped short. “How do you get to him?”

“He’s the one who stole the SLR,” Martin said, as though it was the most natural thing in the world that Martin knew that.

Olli’s eyes narrowed between the jiggling fat above and below them into even thinner slits.

“You’re the guy who knew that I had your girlfriend’s BMW,” Olli said.

Martin nodded.

“And now you know that Pascha stole the SLR,” Olli said.

“I already knew that before I stopped by your lot,” Martin said, correcting him.

“And where do you know all of this from?” Olli asked.

Martin wrestled with himself. Should he tell him that he had contact with my immortal soul? He decided to tell the truth because he couldn’t think of a suitable lie. That is pretty much the most dim-witted reason for telling the truth, but my own creativity was totally hamstrung by this special situation, so I couldn’t blame him.

Olli reacted as expected. In an already-quivering voice he asked, “Is that really true? Like Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore in
Ghost
?”

Martin nodded.

And then the tears started flowing from Olli’s eyes again, his double chin jiggled, and the entire man started losing it.

This was presumably our last chance!

“Take off,” I urged Martin. “Fast, while he’s still distracted.”

Martin didn’t want to. He wanted answers—all of them. He was acting as calmly and rationally as he does in his autopsy room, examining a body for as long as it takes to definitively find the cause of the death. He was welcome to do that normally, of course, but here his doggedness was inappropriate and imperiling his life. I begged and pleaded, for naught. He seemed unable to perceive me at all, he was so focused on solving the various deaths and blackmailings.

“You could have blackmailed Dr. Eilig without killing Pascha,” Martin suggested.

“I did not murder that little shit,” Olli sniffled, blowing his nose. He was pulling himself together. We missed our chance.

In view of this new information, Martin thought briefly but single-mindedly about the case, and then came to a realization: “Then Semira’s brother killed Pascha?”

Olli grew pale as the wall. “You know her name?”

“Of course,” Martin said. “Semira’s brother actually came to the Institute to have her body transported back home. He had her papers with him.”

“Semiiira,” Olli wailed, and started weeping again.

Martin stared at him in disbelief, but then we both simultaneously remembered what Semira’s neighbor had told us. She mentioned a man who came to visit Semira. A fat man with fat cars. Olli!

“You were Semira’s pimp,” Martin said.

Olli shook his head. “Agent,” he mumbled.

“Did Semira’s brother know how his sister was earning her money?” Martin asked.