Death of a Second Wife

by Maria Hudgins

  “At least Patrick Lamb and Lettie Osgood are in the clear, aren’t they? No possible motive there.”

  “Ah, ah, ah! Not so fast. None that we know of.”

  “Have you wondered if Herr Merz and Gisele were more than they let on? If they were lovers? It might account for Herr Merz getting so upset when he couldn’t find her at bedtime.”

  “Let’s don’t go there. Stephanie Lamb was the intended victim, and Gisele was collateral damage. She was killed because she saw too much.”

  “Sir?” Seifert raised his eyebrows, then quickly diverted his gaze to the wall and said nothing.

  “Chester and Stephanie Lamb were having problems.” Kronenberg stood up, began pacing the only five feet of unobstructed floor in the van. “Their farm equipment business in Virginia was in trouble and Lamb thinks his wife was skimming the profits. Brian Lamb has hinted as much—and, by the way, that man knows more than he’s told me so far. Stephanie led Chet around as if he had a ring through his nose. He says he was in the Black Sheep from ten-thirty until whenever, but no one remembers him and he can’t tell us anything about the man he allegedly talked to for hours. Chet Lamb is definitely our man.”

  * * * * *

  As if he had heard Kronenberg call his name, Brian knocked on the van’s door a few minutes later. At Dotsy’s insistence, he hiked across the meadow as soon as he finished his morning coffee. Entering, he took a deep breath. “Is this a good time? I need to tell you a few things I omitted earlier.”

  Kronenberg pulled out a folding chair for Brian, then seated himself in the power position behind the van’s only free-standing desk. Seifert grabbed his note pad and scooted his chair to the corner behind his boss.

  Brian’s tongue darted over his lips. “I need to fill in a few blanks in what I’ve already told you—no, that’s not quite right.” He cleared his throat. “I haven’t told you the truth about where I was on the night of the murders.”

  “I trust that’s what you plan to do now.”

  “Exactly.” Brian leaned forward, pressed his elbows into his knees. “I wasn’t in Geneva that night. I was in LaMotte. I spent the night in the big hotel there and took a taxi up here the next morning.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that to begin with?”

  “Because I didn’t want my father to know I was in LaMotte, and I felt like I had to tell you the same story I told him. I didn’t think it would make any difference—at the time.”

  “Now it does.”

  “Right.” Brian told the story of his meeting at the Black Sheep with the man who had been checking into the Merz family businesses. Words flew from his mouth faster and faster as he talked about Stephanie’s role in Lamb’s Farm Equipment, her stake in MWU, the Merz family’s import/export business, and Chet’s ostrich-like refusal to see the problem.

  Kronenberg stopped him with an upraised hand a couple of times, letting Sergeant Seifert catch up in his notes. “And this meeting took place in the Black Sheep Bar. Now you’re going to tell me you just happened to run into your father there.”

  Brian’s face reddened. “Well, yes. I did. But I couldn’t let Dad see me, so I got out of there as fast as I could.”

  “What a coincidence. You were actually there, and saw your father where he said he was, on the evening for which he needs a witness to his whereabouts.” Kronenberg slapped his open palm on the desktop. “I don’t believe in coincidences!”

  “I’m telling you the truth.”

  “You understand, Mr. Lamb, that I’ll need confirmation of your story. What was the name of this gentleman you met in the Black Sheep?”

  “I don’t feel comfortable telling you his name, because—”

  Kronenberg withered him with a stare.

  “But, of course, you need the name. I understand. Of course.” Brian threw up two hefty hands, protectively. “He’s going to be furious when you call him. I promised the guy nothing he told me would go any further and I wouldn’t involve his name in anything that came up later. He was probably thinking about a possible lawsuit. But not murder!”

  “His name, please.”

  Brian cleared his throat and croaked, “Francois Bolduc. Lives in Zurich,” then pulled out his cell phone and dictated the number.

  “Can anyone verify that you really went to the hotel after you left the bar?”

  “Talk to the concierge. A man was on duty that night. I asked him about getting a taxi in the morning.”

  “You’ve talked this over with your father?”

  “No. He knows nothing about this.”

  “What about Juergen Merz?”

  “I haven’t talked to him, either. I’m not looking forward to him finding out I’ve had a spy looking into his business affairs.”

  “Have you any reason to think the murders of Stephanie and Gisele were related to these business problems?”

  “I have no idea why either of them was killed.”

  Kronenberg glared at him.

  “No idea at all.”

  Seventeen

  I felt as if I should tiptoe around the house and peek into each room before entering, the eerie calm a paper-thin blanket over the tumult beneath the surface. Lettie and I had talked until two a.m. after I came in from star-gazing with Juergen. It had taken Juergen and me quite a while to get rid of Babs Toomey, determined as she was to out-last me and have Juergen to herself. Under the Alpine stars. How romantic. Every time I tried to leave, he’d grab me by the collar and insist I wait until he located one more nebula, one more star cluster, in his telescope. I could tell he hadn’t finished all he wanted to tell me about Gisele, but he finally gave up, packed up his equipment, and handed Babs something heavy to carry back.

  Patrick moved his things upstairs to the room beside Lettie and me, the one Babs and Erin had vacated. Lettie told me Patrick and Erin had retreated to that room, closed the door, and talked for more than three hours, emerging occasionally to replenish the contents of their glasses. Coke, she thought.

  I carried my morning coffee to the living room and found Juergen sitting in his favorite chair, the big leather one with the butt-sprung seat. His face now drawn and haggard, he looked years older than the energetic man who picked me up from the taxi four days ago. The laptop on his knees wobbled as he typed an email message to someone, hit “send,” and picked up the cell phone chirping on the arm of his chair.

  I slipped out the sliding glass door to the deck, respecting his privacy. To the south, I saw Chet sitting on a rock near the edge of the precipice that marked the limit of Chateau Merz’s lawn, and from where I stood it looked as if one step forward would send him over the edge. I caught my breath. His silhouette sloped from his head to his elbows as if he had no shoulders left. Where was Brian? Still with Kronenberg in the van? Spilling his guts? I wished I were a fly on the wall inside that van.

  Stepping back inside, I pulled the door shut behind me.

  Juergen closed his laptop, set it on the ottoman in place of his feet, and scrubbed his face with both hands. “I have to go to Zurich. They’ve taken my father to the hospital.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “They don’t know yet.” He stood, his gaze swerving to the windows. His eyes teared up. “What next? My God, what next?”

  “How will you get there?”

  “I left a car at a garage in LaMotte.”

  I wondered how many cars he had. I wondered if he had a plane and whether he ever flew into the landing strip I’d discovered.

  “I must go and talk to Kronenberg,” he said, and then he shocked me. “Would you like to come with me to Zurich?”

  I’m sure I stammered a bit before I answered, “I’d like to, but I really need to hang around here. I haven’t talked to Patrick since . . . since yesterday. And we do need to talk.”

  “Of course. I didn’t think.” Juergen turned his back to me and stepped closer to the windows. “I’ll probably be back late tonight or early tomorrow. I’ll call the house here and check on things
periodically.” He slid a door open and stepped through to the deck, then turned back to me. “Take care, Dotsy—keep your eyes and ears open.”

  * * * * *

  From my bedroom window, I watched Brian slog across the meadow from the van to the house. A minute or so later, Juergen made the reverse trip. I watched for perhaps ten minutes, then saw him leave the van, taking the path north of the house that led eastward to the elevator hut. Meanwhile, Lettie came in and flopped onto her bed.

  “Juergen’s father has been taken to the hospital,” I told her. “He’s going to Zurich to see him.”

  “I assume he cleared it with Detective Kronenberg.”

  “Do you know what Juergen just asked me?” I turned from the window and looked at her. “He asked me to ride along with him to Zurich.”

  “Why? I mean, was it like a come-on or more like so we can talk?”

  “I’m not sure. If it was a come-on, I’m flattered. He’s probably ten years younger than I am.”

  “Have you called Marco yet?”

  I had forgotten about calling Marco. When we were at the Black Sheep last night, Lettie and I had decided the smartest way to start making sense of my tangle of observations was to call Marco, the policeman. “I’ll do it now.”

  I grabbed my cell phone and headed for the deck. Out there, I’d found, I could get a stronger signal. Passing through the living room, I noticed Juergen’s laptop still sitting on the ottoman. I picked it up. Its cover was closed, but it was warm on the bottom.

  “Juergen left this thing turned on and now he’s gone to Zurich,” I said to Lettie, who had followed me down the stairs. “The battery will go dead before he comes back.”

  “Do you know how to turn it off?”

  I opened the cover and found the screen still lit, his email inbox displayed. “He forgot to log out of his mail, too.”

  We weren’t really snooping, I reasoned. We were doing him a favor. Lettie shouldered up to me and we scanned his incoming messages. Most of the senders and subjects were in German, but a few were in English. A couple of the names sounded Russian. Lettie pointed to one with a subject line that read, “Done.”

  “Click on that one, Dotsy. Apparently it’s in English. Let’s see what it’s about.”

  “No way. You see the little bullet on the left side? That means Juergen hasn’t read it yet. If we click on it, the little bullet will go away and Juergen will know someone read it before he did.”

  “Whatever.”

  Lettie knows I hate that word. It’s her way of saying, “Whatever.” The last three incoming messages, all unread, came from a Kamilla Duerr. Two of those had arrived within the last ten minutes. I shut down the computer and took it to Juergen’s little office on the stairwell landing behind the living room.

  * * * * *

  Marco answered on the third ring with, “Pronto,” an Italian greeting that always makes me feel I should hurry up. “What time is the wedding?” he asked. “Are you getting dressed now?”

  “There is no wedding. It’s been called off.” I explained and could almost hear Marco slapping himself on the forehead when I told him Erin might already be married.

  “Stai mentendo!” he said. “Tell me you are lying!” He asked how Patrick was taking it, and I had to confess my son and I hadn’t really had a chance to talk yet. “So what are you waiting for? Come to Florence! We are having a festival and I miss you!”

  “I can’t. The Swiss police have my passport and I can’t leave the country. I’m afraid Chet’s wife and the house cook have been murdered. We’re all suspects.” This prompted a torrent of Italian from the other end. When Marco’s verbal monsoon abated, I said, “I need your help.”

  “I cannot help you. I told you, I cannot leave Florence until the festival is over.”

  “I don’t mean come here, I mean listen. Several things have happened that I can make no sense of, and I want to pick the brain of a man who knows all about international crime and Italian shoes and spies—and Johannesburg.”

  Marco loves flattery. He laughed in that hearty way he has, then listened while I poured out my crazy laundry list of unexplained observations. He said, “Johannesburg is in South Africa, of course, where they mine gold, silver, and diamonds. Crime in South Africa is something you do not want to get mixed up in. It is horrible. The conditions in the mines are inhuman. As for your spies in gliders, you can find out who is doing this by simply asking. Go to the place—the landing strip—and ask them who flew on a certain day. It is not privileged information.”

  “And Marco? Somehow, Russian names—the Ukraine—there may be . . . oh, I don’t know what I mean.”

  “Russian, did you say?” He paused. “That rings a bell in my head. Something.”

  “What?”

  “I do not know. Let me think about it. I will call you back.” He paused. “What do you need to know about the red shoes?”

  I laughed. “Nothing. If I get a chance I’ll take a picture of them and you can find out who made them. Maybe they keep a list of fools who pay that kind of money for a pair of shoes.” I paused, and then added, “I miss you, Marco.”

  “I miss you, too.”

  * * * * *

  I wore a silly smile for an hour after that call. Patrick found me in the kitchen and consented to let me make him a sandwich. We ate at the butcher-block table in the middle of the room.

  “Where have you been all morning?” I asked.

  “I went down to LaMotte and talked to Father Etienne.”

  I felt a little jab. He’d confided in Father Etienne rather than me, his own mother. I tucked that hurt away and said, “Did it help?”

  “Sort of. He’s hard to understand. His English is not good, but mostly he just listened.”

  Patrick tamped wayward breadcrumbs with his middle finger. “He asked me how I could have been so stupid—he didn’t say stupid, he said naïve or something—means the same thing. He also told me I owe you a big one. A big thank you. If you hadn’t picked up on that phone number and followed through on your hunch, I might be getting married,” he looked at his watch, “in about one hour from now.” He put down his sandwich and reached across the table. Laid his hands on mine. “Thanks, Mom.”

  “I wouldn’t say it was a hunch. More like a loose thread. Besides, you were going to call it off anyway, weren’t you?”

  He helped me load the dishwasher, pausing at one point to slip his arm around my waist and kiss the top of my head. I knew he had more to say, but our kitchen chores were done. “I need to go back to that landing strip, Patrick. Will you go with me?”

  “What for?”

  “I’ve seen that glider again. The one we saw up there. It’s flying over this house oftener than you’d expect if it’s only for fun. I want to know who’s doing it, and Marco told me all I have to do is go and ask them.”

  “Another hunch? Hey, what’s up? Are you and Kronenberg in a race to see who can solve these murders first?”

  “Never mind. Humor me. A walk will do us both good.”

  * * * * *

  Before we could leave the house I had to shake Chet off. He wanted to come with us, but I knew that would kill the conversation I wanted to have with Patrick. “Don’t leave me here with Babs Toomey,” Chet pleaded.

  I laughed. Babs was really casting her net wide. I reminded him that Lettie was upstairs and he could, if need be, hide behind her skirts.

  When we reached the spot where the path turned north, away from the hairpin turn in the road, Patrick started to talk. “Erin thinks we can get beyond this. We can go home, check things out, discover that she really isn’t married and everything will be hunky-dory. No problem.”

  “But it’s not that simple,” I prompted.

  “Whatever the case turns out to be, she can probably get an annulment from the church. Then we could get married—legally and with the church’s blessing. But I don’t want to. I’d be marrying a liar! Erin can’t see that.” He stopped walking, clamped both hands on
his head and gave out with a cry that might have been heard at the top of the Matterhorn. “She thinks all she has to do is prove to me she’s not married and that fixes everything, but it doesn’t! It doesn’t even begin to fix it. She lied to me, flat out. If you married someone a couple of years ago and didn’t mention it to your new fiancé, it’s the same thing as lying. We’ve talked to each other about everything, Mom. Everything! I can tell you who she went out with in high school, I can tell you the name of her first grade teacher, I can tell you every little thing she remembers about her father. She only left out one small detail. ‘Oh! Did I mention I got married?’ That’s lying.”

  “And you’re afraid you can never trust her again.”

  “Right. I can forgive, but I can’t forget. That’s impossible. To forget, I’d need a lobotomy. Every time I had reason to doubt her, I’d think, She might be lying.”

  “It’s been my experience that people don’t change, basically. They can change their eating habits, but they don’t change something as basic as their honesty.”

  We had come to the ridge. A half-dozen people and two or three paraglide canopies dotted the meadow beyond. Beside me, Patrick was dancing with pent-up energy.

  “I want to do that.”

  “What, jump off the mountain? You don’t know how, Patrick. You need training to do what they’re doing.”

  “I’m going to go talk to them.”

  Before I could stop him, he trotted off across the meadow toward one of the men. Realizing it would be useless to go with him, I decided to climb up the slope to the airstrip by myself. Patrick was a grown man, supposedly. If he wanted to kill himself, I couldn’t stop him. But that didn’t mean I had to watch him do it.

  Turning to the flat-topped hill, I studied its slope. The left side, where I climbed up the other day, wasn’t the only way to go. There was the chair lift, its cables stretching across the meadow from one support beam to the next, angling up the slope, and vanishing at the summit. The lift wasn’t running at the moment. I also spied a concrete structure with a hand rail on the far end of the hill. Stairs? I hurried in that direction, about a hundred yards, and found that there was indeed an easier way up than the hands-and-knees route I’d taken before. A set of steps rose, turned ninety degrees, and continued to the top, ending a few yards from the long building that seemed to be a combination hangar and office.