The Third Place

by J Sydney Jones

  On the other hand, it was equally possible that they had been called back to Belgrade for their incompetence and another team dispatched for a second attempt.

  But one thing at a time. Werthen and Gross had personally visited over a dozen flophouses, hostels and run-down boarding houses where such guests might hope for a bit of anonymity. It was late in the afternoon when Gross suddenly recalled the Pension Geldner. Werthen well remembered it when Gross spoke the name. They had talked with the pipe-smoking hostess of the inn when trying to track a suspect in their very first case working together. It might very well be the sort of place where assassins from Belgrade would seek lodging. And if not, maybe the good Frau Geldner would have other suggestions for them.

  When they reached the building on a bleak street in the Sixth District, they were surprised to find a constabulary sergeant stationed at the front desk. Werthen recognized him as a former witness for the prosecution in an art theft case that Werthen was defending. The officer had managed to make Gross, who was acting as an expert witness, look a bit of a fool. Werthen searched for the name: Friedman? Feltz? The officer gave him no time to wonder.

  ‘Well, if it isn’t Advokat Werthen,’ the sergeant said. ‘And his expert witness. I’m sure you remember me: Sergeant Feldman. What brings you two here?’

  ‘I was about to ask you the same,’ Werthen replied.

  ‘Murder.’ Sergeant Feldman said the word with relish.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The old frau herself. Geldner. I always said it’d be the pipe-smoking that’d do her in or one of her anarchist guests.’

  ‘Murder,’ Gross intoned. ‘Well, there goes a possible informant.’ And then, as an afterthought: ‘In that case, it must have been a guest.’

  Feldman nodded.

  ‘When did this happen?’ Werthen asked.

  ‘Saturday night, it appears. The body was discovered on Sunday by the woman’s nephew. Pretty cut up about it, the boy was.’

  ‘Murdered Saturday night and you still have the premises guarded?’ This from Gross, who made such a proposition sound like a breach of good manners.

  ‘That would be your doing, Doktor Gross,’ Feldman said with a degree of irony.

  ‘How so?’ Werthen asked.

  ‘I believe the good sergeant is making a small joke,’ Gross said to Werthen. ‘My dictum about protecting the crime scene from clumsy feet and fingers.’ Then, to Feldman: ‘Which means you folks have not yet had the time, more than twenty-four hours after discovery of the body, to visit the scene or to make more than a preliminary investigation. Which suggests,’ Gross plunged on despite the efforts of Sergeant Feldman to reply, ‘that the death of an anarchist innkeeper takes very low priority in the Police Praesidium.’

  Sergeant Feldman shrugged. ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Oh, I do say so, sir. But for myself and my colleague, this death may assume very high priority indeed. I assume the body has been moved?’

  ‘Bodies,’ Sergeant Feldman said. ‘Looks like the Serbian chap did the deed with a blade and then collapsed on his bed, dead from a hemorrhage or some such.’

  ‘Or some such. Most scientific,’ Gross said.

  But the word ‘Serbian’ had caught their interest.

  ‘How do you know the nationality of the other?’ Werthen asked. ‘I very much doubt the guests here oblige by registering with the correct information.’

  ‘He was carrying a letter. Seems to be from his wife. The postmark is from Belgrade. They’re still translating the Serbian, but it’s pretty clear he was from there, too. Dimitrov’s the name. But I shouldn’t be telling you any of this. It’s police business.’

  ‘It’s our business now,’ said Gross, presenting Feldman with the letter from Montenuovo with a flourish.

  Feldman glanced at the letter, then handed it back with a shrug. ‘Means nothing to me. Like I said, this is police business. No one’s allowed in the room.’

  Werthen saw a phone on the desk and without asking permission he placed a call to a number at the Hofburg. It took fifteen more minutes, but a call came through for Sergeant Feldman that made his ears turn red. Werthen could hear the anger in the voice on the other end of the line.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Feldman finally said. ‘I understand, sir.’ He hung up the receiver, looking like a well-chastised pupil.

  ‘I assume we can examine the crime scene now,’ Gross said with a satisfied smile on his face.

  The sergeant nodded, not bothering to speak.

  ‘The key?’ Werthen said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘The crime scene.’

  Feldman sighed. ‘It’s unlocked. That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘Twenty-four hours a day?’ Gross thundered. He looked at Werthen, exasperation replacing his former smile.

  They both shook their heads.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Down the hall, they soon came to a room which had a sign pasted on it: Entrance Forbidden.

  Opening the door, Werthen was greeted with a smell from a butcher’s shop. The stench of blood was strong; its visual presence was, as well – on the coverlet of one bed and on the floor beside another cot.

  ‘Two beds,’ Gross said.

  Werthen nodded. It implied two occupants, not one.

  They spent the next hour going over every nook and cranny in the room. In the first ten minutes Werthen found a length of metal pipe with stains at one end that looked like dried blood. The pipe had been ill concealed on top of the sole wardrobe in the room, as if cast aside and simply forgotten. There was no telling how long it had been there, but there was very little dust on it as opposed to the top of the wardrobe.

  Not sure of the pipe’s importance, he still handled it carefully, gripping it with a handkerchief from his breast pocket and setting it by the door to be taken away for further examination.

  ‘What brought her in here?’ Gross suddenly asked.

  ‘Perhaps she was killed elsewhere and hidden in here.’

  ‘Or maybe she was caught snooping,’ Gross said. ‘We need to inspect the bodies.’

  Werthen was afraid he was going to suggest that. The morgue at the General Hospital was not his favorite place to visit.

  There was a small valise in the wardrobe containing the meager belongings of the mysterious Herr Dimitrov. A shaving kit, grimy shirt with two celluloid collars, a change of underwear. At the very bottom was a ball of fur that unrolled into a very long and very real-looking gray beard.

  ‘Stranger and stranger,’ Gross mused, looking at the beard.

  Feldman had decided to take a chair; he was seated behind the desk when they came back to the entrance.

  ‘Who was sharing the room?’ Gross asked.

  Feldman looked up from the illustrated paper he was glancing at. ‘What do you mean, sharing?’

  ‘Two cots. Two occupants.’

  ‘There was only one when we got here. Nothing in the registry.’

  ‘May we see it?’ Werthen asked. ‘The registry.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ Feldman said, getting out of the chair so that Werthen could sit in front of the large leather-bound registration book open on the desk.

  He flipped the pages for recent dates and quickly saw that a page was missing. ‘A page has been torn out,’ he said.

  Feldman didn’t react.

  ‘It could very well hold the name of the other lodger.’

  ‘I’m not the investigating officer,’ Feldman said. ‘Talk to Drechsler. I’m just the watchdog.’

  ‘This nephew that discovered Frau Geldner’s body. Is he still around?’ Gross asked.

  Feldman made a slight laugh. ‘He’s about the only who is, I can tell you that. The rest of the lodgers had someplace else to go suddenly. Room twelve, down the other hall. He was in there last I knew.’ He looked at Gross now, spying the length of pipe the criminologist was carrying. ‘You can’t be tampering with evidence.’

  Gross stared at him for a moment. ‘Sergeant Feldman, you may have a
great mind for measurements but I have a feeling you would not know what evidence would look like if it came up and bit you. Now what is the name of this nephew?’

  Feldman glared back at Gross. ‘Kaufmann. August Kaufmann. And that’s a bit of evidence, too. So there.’

  As they walked down the hallway, Gross tucked the length of pipe into the deep evidence pockets he’d had sewn into the lining of his overcoat.

  ‘Can’t be frightening the witnesses now, can we, Werthen?’

  Werthen realized something fundamental about Gross at that moment. Other people do their jobs; Gross reveled in his. He was enjoying this more than he would a plate of schnitzel or a fine wine from Gumpoldskirchen.

  They knocked on the door of room twelve and it was opened by a small man. His squinched face with eyes and nose too close together gave him a porcine appearance.

  ‘May I help you?’

  The man’s voice was high and whiney; there was nothing very prepossessing about him.

  ‘We are working with the police,’ Gross said. ‘My name is Doktor Gross and this is my colleague, Advokat Werthen.’

  Kaufmann’s eyes brightened at this announcement. ‘Not the Doktor Hanns Gross? The eminent criminologist?’

  Gross was rather taken aback by this at first, then smiled broadly. ‘None other,’ he said fulsomely.

  ‘I live and breathe for publication of the Archiv. Fascinating reading.’

  Werthen realized that Kaufmann meant Gross’s semi-annual journal publication, Archiv für Kriminal-Anthropolgie und Kriminalistik, in which the maestro published accounts of his famous cases, among other articles by jurists, criminologists and chemists.

  ‘And I’ve heard of you, too, Advokat,’ he said, beaming at Werthen. ‘Your cases with Doktor Gross.’

  ‘You’ll excuse me for saying so,’ Gross said, ‘but one hardly expects to find a reader of my little journal at the Pension Geldner. And may I extend my condolences for the loss of your aunt,’ he quickly added, remembering common civility for once.

  ‘Yes, Tante Emma will be missed,’ Kaufmann said. ‘But please, come in.’

  His room was much better appointed than the others, with a large desk piled high in books and a pair of armchairs along with a real bed, not a cot, and a wardrobe of solid oak. On the walls were a collection of stories clipped from newspapers detailing crimes both petty and severe.

  He followed their gaze to the cuttings. ‘Not to worry, gentlemen. I am a student of law at the university, not a criminal manqué. Have a seat, please.’

  They did so and Werthen offered, ‘We actually met your aunt once. Several years ago, in another investigation.’

  Kaufmann took the desk chair. ‘One of her guests, I suppose. Tante Emma was rather emphatic about her political leanings.’

  ‘As you are, sir?’ Gross inquired.

  Kaufmann shook his head, somewhat amused at the question. ‘No. I stay here out of financial necessity. My aunt is … was good enough to allow me to stay gratis during my studies. I wouldn’t be able to go to law school otherwise.’

  ‘And what happens now?’ Gross asked. ‘I mean, now that she …’

  Kaufmann pursed his lips. ‘I’m not quite sure. I see what you might be getting at, though. Qui bono, no? Who stands to gain from her death? Not I, that I can assure you. She was most displeased with my bourgeois complacency. Perhaps she left the pension to the cause. It would be like her.’

  ‘You discovered the body, we understand.’ Werthen could find no gentler way to broach the subject.

  ‘I did. She wasn’t about for the morning coffee. I usually helped out with that, you see. My bourgeois way of paying back. Anyway, she was not in her room. I unlocked it after knocking. I was worried, you understand. Tante Emma was a woman of schedules despite her anarchist espousals. Well, I went looking for her, wondering if she were actually cleaning rooms on her own rather than waiting for Maria – that’s the daily houseworker, you see.’

  ‘Even on Sundays?’ Gross said.

  A nod from Kaufmann. ‘Even on Sundays. There was no one about in the rooms – at least, no one answering their door.’

  ‘So how did you finally find her?’ Werthen asked.

  ‘Well, not to put too fine a point on it but it was the smell, you see, coming from that room. I could distinctly sense it when knocking at the door. I had no idea what I might find inside. I only knew that someone had made a mess and it was only going to stink more as the day progressed. Not the blood, you know. But the other … When a person dies, there is no more control …’

  ‘Quite,’ Gross said. ‘So you entered.’

  ‘Yes, and I immediately saw my aunt laid out on one cot, blood around her chest. I ascertained she was dead before I saw the second victim.’

  ‘Victim,’ Gross repeated.

  ‘Well, the other dead person.’

  ‘Not the killer.’

  ‘No. Hardly. That would be the other one. The man who was here first and then joined by the unfortunate second man. Herr Wenno, I believe he called himself. Very private sort, suspicious looking. Most of our guests are the private type, but Herr Wenno made a profession of it. And his hands. There was something quite odd about the way he held his coffee cup. I noticed it just the once and then he no longer took coffee with us at the pension. He held the cup in both hands and his little fingers stuck straight out as if they would not bend. Quite odd. But the police must have already mentioned this. I tried to tell them on Sunday.’

  ‘It seems to have been a professional kill.’ Doktor Starb at the General Hospital morgue closed the drawer in the refrigerated unit and Werthen was grateful for his brevity. Frau Geldner’s corpse was in fine condition; he had hardly been able to discern the incision above her drooping left breast, but it had been lethal.

  ‘Almost surgical,’ Starb said with a hint of admiration in his tone. ‘No hesitation cuts, just a quick and decisive thrust. Perhaps even a thrown blade.’

  ‘Is there a way to tell the difference?’ Gross asked.

  Starb shook his head. ‘But either way, it’s the work of a professional. Whoever killed Frau Geldner has experience. He’s killed before. And it wasn’t the unfortunate Herr Dimitrov, that I can assure you. My hunch is it was his dying gasps that brought her to the room in the first place.’

  ‘Dying from what?’ Werthen asked.

  ‘Tuberculosis. Both lungs were riddled with lesions. Immediate cause of death was a hemorrhage. Poor fellow drowned in his own blood. I do not find him a likely candidate for murderer.’

  And neither did Gross as they made their way from the hospital onto Alserstrasse. ‘I vote for the mysterious Herr Wenno,’ Gross said, tightening the collar of his coat against the chill late afternoon breeze. Winter was still maintaining a last round of fun in Vienna. ‘The absence of the murder weapon at the scene would indicate a third party.’

  He stopped and pulled his derby low over his forehead. ‘Odd name that. One assumes it is a nom de guerre.’

  ‘I thought so as well,’ Werthen added. ‘A warrior monk. Not a bad name for a professional killer.’

  ‘You impress me, Werthen.’

  ‘Why, because I have a smattering of history to remind me that Wenno von Rohrbach was the first master of the Livonian Brothers of the Sword?’

  ‘No. Because you did not faint when viewing the remains of Frau Geldner.’

  ‘Sorry to have disappointed you.’

  ‘Not me, Werthen. I believe Starb, however, was expecting more dramatics from you. His is a deadly dull job, you know.’

  Werthen did not bother to respond to the pun. It was the sort of petty bantering Gross engaged in when contemplating a problem.

  ‘So, Wenno as the main suspect,’ Werthen said. ‘I think Starb was right about Dimitrov’s death-throws drawing the landlady into the room.’

  Gross nodded, resuming his brisk walk. ‘A likely scenario. And Wenno comes back to find her there. Perhaps she had become curious about her tenants. Maybe he caught her
rifling his possessions. She learned something she should not have.’ He paused for a moment, rubbing his chin. ‘But what are we to make of this length of pipe?’ He tapped the front of his overcoat where the pipe was secured in an interior pocket.

  Werthen had been doing his own cogitating. ‘It’s a murder weapon.’

  This made Gross again stop and stare at Werthen as if he were a circus freak.

  ‘You saw the wound, Werthen. This could hardly—’ A sudden smile crossed the criminologist’s face.

  ‘You mean your other murder?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Werthen said. ‘Falk said the assailant struck Herr Karl with a length of pipe hidden in a coat sleeve. I am no scientist, but the stain on the end of the pipe surely looks like dried blood.’

  ‘A large jump of intuition, Werthen. That could be the blood of a rat cudgeled to death in the pension.’

  ‘The fingers,’ Werthen said. ‘Kaufmann mentioned the awkward way this Wenno held his coffee cup. I need to check my notes, but I swear Herr Falk mentioned something similar about the man Herr Karl had words with before he was killed. So, not so much intuition as deduction.’ He smiled at Gross. ‘And this begs a further connection: if it is the same man who killed Frau Geldner, Herr Karl and Herr Falk, then what is the connection between these deaths? Why would a professional killer bother with mere waiters or a landlady?’

  ‘We’ll know soon enough,’ Gross said. ‘We’ll take this pipe to the crime lab at the Praesidium. They can use the Uhlenhuth precipitin test to at least determine if it is human or animal. We can search the pipe for fingerprints as well and then see if there are any matches in the pension room, but with so many people using the same room over time, I doubt that would provide anything conclusive.’

  Gross looked suddenly downcast.

  ‘No need to be glum about the fingerprints,’ Werthen said. ‘We’re still making progress.’

  ‘On which front? Our job is to keep the emperor alive, not solve the murders of two waiters and a landlady.’