The Killing of Emma Gross (30 page)

Where was that damn schnapps bottle? It lay behind me in the middle of the room, untouched by the brawl and just out of reach. I dropped the apron and grabbed for the seat cushion of the chair I'd thrown at the green man. The chair lay close enough that I didn't have to move, or so I thought. I stretched for it, my fingertips pushing it further away. I shifted beneath Frau Stausberg, slid her head down my lap. Blood had saturated my trousers and it was beginning to get sticky.

I snagged the cushion and pulled it to me. I threaded my fingers and supported the back of Frau Stausberg's head with them, easing her onto the cushion. She mumbled.

Her head supported now, I backed away and got to my feet. My knees gave way and I fell onto all fours. I crawled like that to the schnapps bottle, picked it up and crawled back to Frau Stausberg. I opened the bottle and poured the contents over Wenders' apron. I folded the apron into a kind of pad and pressed it to Frau Stausberg's head wound. She flinched, tried to speak once again.

I shushed her into silence. She lay still, though her eyes moved about the place like she was following the trajectory of a fly. I shushed her some more, kept on dabbing.
Come on Frau Wenders,
where the hell are you
.

Something Frau Stausberg had said clamoured for my attention. Something about Ritter having told Johann Stausberg what to do with a rope?

Good Christ, did that mean Ritter had planned for Johann to strangle those girls in April? It was possible. Ritter could have heard about Stausberg from the father of the blond kid I'd spoken to when the father had made his complaint. That would explain how Ritter had found out Stausberg liked playing with rope and had a temper. And if that was true, it meant that not just the murder charges, but the
whole case
against Johann Stausberg was a frame-up concocted by Michael Ritter.

But why? And what was the importance of the rope? The marks on Ohliger's neck had suggested strangulation by hand, not ligature. And had Scheer even been strangled at all?

Voices bounced about the stairwell, male and female. Stiff soles clomped up the steps. A shako came into view, followed by the head of its wearer, a fresh-faced
Schupo
whose waxed moustache looked like it had been grown to add some gravitas to the youthful features.

'Oh my,' the
Schupo
said. He took in the bleeding woman and the blood on my hands and he went for his baton.

I dropped the apron and went for my ID.

'Just hold it there, mister,' the
Schupo
said.

'Frau Wenders?' I shouted. There was no sign of her. But surely I'd heard her in the stairwell before this blue coat had come up? Where'd she got to now?

'What's your name?' I asked the officer. My tone threw him off. He paused and stroked his moustache, the baton hanging loosely in his hand.

'Who wants to know?'

I came up empty for my ID in the first pocket and tried another. His blue eyes narrowed and he raised his baton again.

'Wait!' I shouted. Again, he paused.

'Who are you?' he said.

No luck in that second pocket either. Damn it, please tell me I hadn't lost my goddamned ID now. That would just top it all off. I searched a hip pocket. My fingers closed around the Luger and without thinking I pulled out the gun.

The
Schupo
went for the bayonet hanging at his belt.

'Wait!' I tried again. 'I'm Thomas Klein. Detective Thomas Klein.' I dropped the Luger and dove into my other hip pocket. There it was, my ID. I pulled that out too and flashed it in the boy's face.

'Detective Klein?' he said. 'Well why didn't you say so?' Then, after the usual
Schupo
hesitation, he added, 'Sir.'

'We need medical assistance, urgently,' I said.

'That woman who found me, sir. She said something about going and fetching a doctor.'

'That's a start. Do you think you could arrange transportation to the nearest hospital?'

He scratched the back of his neck.

'A taxi, a passing civilian auto, a delivery truck,' I tried. 'Anything. Just go.'

'Sir.' He went for the stairs.

I called him back. 'Round up any other
Schupo
on the beat nearby, will you? We'll need to secure this room, and the street out front.'

He looked puzzled but he snapped off a salute and went down the stairs. His police whistle tore at the air outside the window. Then came the sound of more footsteps. Frau Wenders returned to the landing, along with a bearded overweight man in a grey flannel suit.

He popped a pince-nez on his nose, sized up the scene and then dropped to one knee with a groan. He opened his kit bag on the floor and started rooting through it. His knees clicked. 'Damned arthritis,' he said, to no one in particular.

He took away my hand and the folded apron.

'Hmmn,' he said.

'She was hit with a hammer,' I said.

'Well...possible fracture of the parietal...' He hummed and sat back on his heels. 'There's little I can do here. She needs to get to a hospital as soon as possible.'

'Will she live?'

He ignored me and crouched over Frau Stausberg again. He pulled a small bottle and a cloth from his bag, wetting the cloth and dabbing it at the wound the way I had with the schnapps-soaked apron.

The Schupoman reappeared.

'Sir,' he said. 'Got a taxi downstairs. And another couple of men outside.'

'Good. Help the doctor get her into the taxi.'

'What do you want us to do after?'

'Secure the scene, like I said. Then inform the detectives at the precinct house.'

'What happened, sir?'

'She was attacked, man. Can't you see?'

'Yes sir, but begging your pardon, who attacked her?'

'The man on the pavement outside, of course, you imbecile.'

The
Schupo
swapped glances with Frau Wenders and the doctor.

'But there isn't any man outside, sir,' the
Schupo
said. He spoke as one would to a backwards child.

'What?'

I crossed back to the window and leaned out into the street. A crowd had gathered, but I had no eyes for the vultures. To me the pavement was empty.

The green man had gone. And there was no sign of his hammer anywhere, not in the room and not down on the street.

A small pool of blood was all that remained to suggest he had ever been there at all.

I stumbled down the basement stairs to Willi's. The double bass and kick drum on the stage pulsed through me, the trombone catching the tone of my caffeine rush. I parted the flag from the doorway and staggered in.

Bern came over as soon as he saw me lean on the bar. I had to lean on it. I was trembling too much not to.

Bern ran a hand over his head stubble and flexed his tattooed arms beneath a shirt so sweat-soaked his nipples and his chest hair were visible through the material.

'You're drunk,' he said, reading me all wrong. 'You here to cause trouble?'

'That depends. Where's Trudi?'

He checked the watch in his apron pocket, then frowned and touched his Kaiser Bill.

'What is it?' I said. 'Hasn't she turned up?'

I checked my watch: twelve twenty am. Assuming she was working the same shift that night, she should have been out on the floor by then. I cast an eye over the tables and the naked girls bearing trays of drinks and snacks. Trudi wasn't among them.

I had no time for this. No time. I'd spent hours at the hospital answering questions about the attack and waiting for news about Frau Stausberg's condition. Detective Kaufmann had come along for the questioning and I'd had to answer the same questions two or three times over. He'd called out the lab boys to scrape the blood off the pavement and see if they could ID it as human. I'd got the feeling from the looks he gave me that he was humouring me, telling me that. I asked him about witnesses and he sidestepped my question in such a way as to avoid saying what I hadn't wanted to hear: no witnesses. At least, not to my version of events. No one had come out yet and said I was talking shit, but really, when you looked at it, what were the chances of a man falling out of a third floor window and getting up again afterwards?

Frau Stausberg, no one could tell me about. I still didn't know if she was going to be all right.

In between all that, I'd dozed. Still hadn't got much in the way of what you'd call real sleep, though. My mind had raced ahead, putting together what Frau Stausberg had told me with the information I'd extorted from Frieda Brandt.

It was the question of the rope that had tugged at me, and a Karl Berg phrase from the Gross autopsy:
asphyxiation from forcible strangulation with a ligature of at least 5mm in diameter.

A ligature.
Ritter had got Stausberg to attack those girls with a rope in April because Gross' killer had used a rope in February. Because Ritter had used a rope. He'd murdered Gross because she'd gone back on their agreement. Then he'd stabbed the body to make it match the murders of Ohliger and Scheer and make it look like part of a wider pattern. But somewhere down the line he'd thought the real killer wouldn't confess to Gross' murder – after all, who could have predicted Kürten's lust for notoriety? Ritter had realised the need for a scapegoat he could control, someone who would confess to all three murders and make the heat go away. Someone mentally unstable, to cover the killing of so many random victims. Prone to playing with rope, to explain the ligature marks on Gross' corpse. So he'd brainwashed Stausberg and sent him out to attack those women to establish a similar pattern to the killings.

What with all that on my mind, it had taken me until after eleven pm to work out Trudi might be in danger too.

I rapped the bar. 'Hey, has she turned up or not?'

Bern's face told it all. Trudi wasn't there, and she should have been, and turning up late for the job was not something she made a habit of.

'Why don't you just clear off, bull?' Bern said. 'Christ, you look like you've been sleeping under a hedge.'

Not quite. I'd been existing on coffee, waiting for Trudi's shift to start. And now here I was at Willi's, and here she wasn't.

'Where does she live?'

Bern snorted away the idea that he was going to tell me. He turned away. I'd had it with this guy. Pure adrenaline propelled me over the bar. I got him in a choke hold with my left arm. I pulled the Luger, kept it below bar level as I dug the barrel into his spine.

'Give me her address or I'll paralyse you with a bullet, damn you.'

Goddamned top-floor apartments, they'll do it to you every time. I took the ill-lit stairwell at a jog to try and keep the adrenaline pumping around my system. I was getting that tell-tale sharp pain at the back of my knees that meant my legs were getting ready to give out. When I got to the top floor and knocked on Trudi's door my breath was coming in short, painful bursts and those now-familiar white and purple fairy lights sparkled in my corneas. Or did I mean my retinas? Either way, I was going to have a hell of a time at my next medical. That's if I was still in the department by the time the next medical rolled around.

'Yeah?' Trudi called, once I was through knocking. I recognised her voice. Still alive then, though her voice had a tremor in it and she didn't open up. Maybe there was someone in there with her. Someone with a weapon.

I got out the Luger again and tried the door handle. Locked.

'Who is it?' Trudi called, louder this time. Harder, too.

I kicked in the door and she came at me with a kitchen knife. The knife snagged in my jacket. My boxing instincts took over and I let Trudi's momentum carry her over my hip. She careered over me and landed face-up on the landing. The knife dropped. I kicked it away down the stairs and trained my gun on her.

'Are you alone?' I said.

She gurgled and shook her head, though whether that meant she couldn't answer me or no she wasn't alone, that was anyone's guess. She'd been wearing a cloche hat so tight-fitting it was still perched on her head, even after she'd practically somersaulted over me. That was some quality workmanship, right there. I pulled her inside the apartment and shut the door. Tried to, anyway. It wouldn't shut properly. Too much of the door frame had come away from the wall where I'd kicked it.

'Don't move,' I told her, and left her just inside the doorway. I walked further into the room, pistol out in front of me. A studio apartment: bed – a stained mattress on the floor – wooden chair bearing an open and over-stuffed cardboard suitcase, a wardrobe that was too big for the room, a washstand. Three sky lights, all open and doing nothing to dissipate the stifling heat. It was like my room, only lighter for more of the day, no doubt. A bare light bulb dangled from a fraying cord near the door. It burned too brightly to look at for long. There was no other door, there was no alcove, and there was nowhere for anyone to hide, save the wardrobe.

I crept to the wardrobe and pulled it open. Empty, not just of Ritters or green men, but of clothes too. Bare wire hangers swung on their pole. The shelf compartments were empty, clean patches edged with dust to show where the folded linen had been. I crossed to the open suitcase on the chair. It was full of dresses and underthings, and more clothes lay atop rumpled blankets on the mattress.