Death of a Second Wife

by Maria Hudgins

  Seifert bent over and examined the shoeprint.

  “Make a cast of this. It won’t tell us anything about the shoe itself because melting has erased all the details that may have been there to begin with, but we may be able to get a shoe size, at least.” Kronenberg slipped the button into his pocket. He turned and gazed out at the mountains to the south. “And call the handsome Milo. Tell him to pay us a little visit.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier for us to go down to town? He’s probably at the post office.”

  “Why do I suspect you really want to go to LaMotte and get a nice lunch?” Kronenberg chided him. “Got cabin fever, huh? Stuck up here for a week?”

  Seifert muttered a disclaimer.

  “No. I want to talk to Milo on our turf. Let him worry while he’s making his way up here.”

  Twenty

  In the early afternoon, we got a call from Juergen. His father had died. He had already talked to Kronenberg and agreed to return to LaMotte the next day, by which time, he thought, he would’ve relegated funeral and other duties to the appropriate people and wouldn’t be required in Zurich again until the actual funeral. He sounded exhausted and depressed. He asked me if Odile had shown up—I said she had—and told me to keep her on for at least the next three days. “I have business to take care of here,” he told me. “I need to meet with the lawyers Father appointed to execute his estate, and I have to take care of a hundred things at his offices and at home. You understand.”

  “Of course.”

  “And Dotsy? Thank you for suggesting that my father should never know about Stephanie. It was better this way.”

  * * * * *

  I found Lettie, Patrick, and Brian in the living room and relayed the grim news. Erin and Babs walked in, Erin folding her legs beneath her in the large leather chair and Babs positioning herself attractively on one end of the sofa, her slim legs slanted just so. Chet’s head peeked around the corner. I motioned for him to join us.

  Chet slouched on the other end of the sofa and stared fixedly at the chunky, white candles on the glass-topped coffee table while I repeated the gist of Juergen’s phone call.

  Brian leaned back in his chair, looked at the ceiling. “Meeting with lawyers and taking care of business? I’d give a pretty penny to be a fly on those walls.”

  “Brian,” I scolded gently, “he’s lost his father. Cut him some slack. That’s the thing about a death in the family. The lawyers and the bean counters won’t let you grieve until the important things are taken care of.”

  “Well. That’s that,” Babs said.

  “We’ve been talking about the dust-up between Kronenberg and Zoltan,” Lettie said.

  Neither Chet nor either of the Toomeys knew about this, so Patrick filled them in.

  Erin said, “It doesn’t surprise me. Zoltan gives me the creeps. I’ve been wondering why Kronenberg wasn’t looking at him. He’s a more logical suspect than any of us. Always slinking around, leering at Gisele.”

  “What about Stephanie? Did he get along with Stephanie?” Lettie asked.

  “Based on what I noticed in the days before the rest of you got here, I’d say Zoltan caught hell from her as often as the rest of us did.”

  Chet’s head shot up, as if he was considering some sort of defense of his late wife, then he returned his gaze to the candles on the coffee table.

  “I’d say right now, Zoltan tops my list,” Patrick said. “That sort usually solves problems with guns.”

  “That sort?” Lettie squeaked. “You’re stereotyping, Patrick! I’m surprised at you. Just because he does manual labor . . .”

  Patrick slunk lower in his seat. “You’re right. Sorry. But there’s actually a more likely suspect. What about Gisele’s boyfriend, Milo?”

  We exchanged all the information we had about Milo. I wondered if Odile was listening from around a corner and considered calling her in. She could tell us more about Milo than the scant facts that he worked at the post office and he argued with Gisele on the day of the murders. A second thought told me we should leave Odile out of it.

  “I’ve said all along it was someone from outside this house,” I said, trying not to look smug.

  “Hell hath no fury like a—well, in this case—a man scorned.” Patrick said.

  Erin’s little round face reddened.

  “This Milo,” Chet said, stretching out his legs and resting his coffee mug on his belt buckle, “is an unknown quantity. Young man. Probably hot-tempered. Most young men are. Plenty of motive if he’d just found out she and Juergen were fooling around.”

  “Why Chet, I think that’s most unfair!” Babs cooed. “If he had any thoughts of killing her, he’d hardly let himself get caught hitting her.”

  “But he didn’t know he was being watched.”

  “He didn’t know Zoltan was lurking.”

  “Since we seem to be trashing everyone who isn’t here,” Brian said, “what about Juergen?”

  I opened my mouth to issue Brian a second warning, but he gave me no chance.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any harm in telling all of you, now, that Juergen and the Merz family enterprises are in deep doo-doo. Their import-export business has gone bankrupt, reorganized, and re-opened. Stephanie and Juergen are equal share-holders, and there’s never been any love lost between those two. Right, Dad?”

  Chet looked as if he hated making any comment about that brother-sister relationship, but all eyes were on him and silence reigned. “Right. No love lost between those two.” He cleared his throat. “And Stephanie knew Juergen was making a play for Gisele, but she saw it the other way around. As far as she was concerned, Gisele was a gold-digger making a play for Juergen.”

  “Think, Chet!” I stopped myself and forced my voice down about fifty decibels. “What you’re saying gives Stephanie a motive for killing Gisele, or Gisele a motive for killing Stephanie, but it gives Juergen no motive for killing either of them.” I paused to give everyone time to sort that out. “I’m not sure I’ve mentioned this before, but the night of the murders, Juergen was searching frantically for Gisele. Running upstairs and down. He came into our room and asked if we’d seen her, and I know he went next door, too.”

  Babs nodded her assent.

  I said, “I’d swear on a stack of Bibles the man who barged into my room had no thought of killing Gisele!”

  “Come on, Mom! A guy barges into your room about midnight, wants to know where somebody is. You don’t know where she is. He looks at you like he’s about to panic. What’s the difference in how he looks if he’s thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m afraid something horrible has happened to her!’?” Brian made a face of wide-eyed terror. “Or if he’s thinking, ‘Oh my God, when I find that bitch I’m going to kill her!’ ” He made the same face again.

  * * * * *

  Kronenberg summoned me back to the van. He had taken to calling the house phone when he wanted any of us because whoever answered would either be the person he wanted or would be able to tell him where that person was. He kept all our cell phone numbers in his note pad but seldom dialed them.

  I caught Patrick as he walked by the phone and confiscated his jacket in lieu of returning to my bedroom for my own. Nearly sixty-five degrees outside, I hardly needed anything more than my cotton shirt.

  Forgetting to knock on the van door, I walked in and caught Kronenberg playing a card game on his computer and Officer Seifert flipping rubber bands at a two-way radio. They snapped to and tried to look busy.

  Thumbing through a few note pages, Kronenberg said, “You told me Herr Merz picked you up in the golf cart when your taxi cab brought you and your luggage up from LaMotte. Yes?” I nodded and he went on. “Did you see anyone on your ride to the house?”

  “I saw Gisele. In fact, Juergen stopped the cart and let her hop on the back. She rode to the house with us. I remember it clearly, because I didn’t know about the bunker yet and when we came over the hill”—I pointed west but, in this case, only at the rear wall o
f the van—“it seemed to me Gisele had popped up out of nowhere. It was really quite shocking.”

  Kronenberg stared straight into my eyes. I heard Seifert’s pen scratching. Kronenberg said, “Had Gisele been inside the bunker?”

  “I assume so. I didn’t actually see her walk out the door, but it was like—one second the meadow was empty and the next second, there she was. I remember she was carrying a coil of rope over her shoulder. I remember thinking how very attractive she was.”

  “How did Herr Merz and Gisele act toward each other? Did they seem . . . friendly? Formal? How?”

  “Friendly. Rather flirty, even.” I wished I could take that last part back. It was an assumption on my part and it might mislead him.

  “Flirty,” he repeated. “Tell me about that.”

  “I shouldn’t have said that. I only meant they were teasing each other. About whether Gisele was overworked. Nothing more than that.”

  “Did you see anyone else?”

  “No.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Tell me about Francois Bolduc.”

  “Who?”

  “Francois Bolduc,” Kronenberg repeated, pronouncing each syllable distinctly.

  “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

  “Has your son Brian ever mentioned a Francois Bolduc? Think carefully, Mrs. Lamb.”

  “I don’t think so. No. That’s an unusual name. It sounds French, doesn’t it? I’m sure I’d remember it.”

  Kronenberg glanced pointedly at Seifert. “Thank you, Mrs. Lamb. You may go.”

  * * * * *

  “Brian, who is Francois Bolduc?” I barged into the bathroom where my son was shaving.

  “What?” His razor hand froze.

  “Kronenberg asked me if I’d ever heard that name. Asked me if I’d ever heard you use that name.”

  “Shit! I knew it!” He threw his razor into the basin and grabbed a towel. Wiping the foam from his face, he turned from the mirror to me. “Bolduc is the guy I was talking to in the bar that night when I ran into Dad.”

  “Your spy.”

  “I promised him I’d keep his name out of anything that came up, but Kronenberg had me by the balls. Either I had to tell him who I was talking to in the bar, or he’d assume I wasn’t even in the bar. There goes my alibi. There goes Dad’s alibi, too.”

  “You told Kronenberg about the meeting so you could help your father establish an alibi.”

  “And because you told me to. Remember?”

  “You did the right thing. Now the problem becomes: How do you make Francois Bolduc tell Kronenberg the truth?”

  “And how do you propose I do that?”

  “Tell him this has nothing to do with corporate raiding or whatever you call it. Tell him it has to do with murder. Tell him the truth is in no way a reflection on him. It doesn’t matter why you two met at the bar. Only that you met at the bar. Tell him his alternative is to risk having to testify under oath, in court.”

  Twenty-One

  “Have you talked to Juergen?” Babs Toomey stood at the threshold of my bedroom, a double armload of clean, folded laundry reaching to her chin. This reminded me I was fast running out of clean clothes myself. I mentally scanned the various floors of Chateau Merz for a recollection of a laundry room and decided it would probably be on the bottom floor near the pool.

  Juergen had returned an hour ago, located Chet, and immediately steered him up the stairs to the top floor. The door to Chet’s room had been closed ever since. The quick glimpse I got when I met Juergen at the kitchen door showed me an exhausted man. He plainly did not intend to talk to any of us until he had talked to Chet. That made me think the current conference behind closed doors had to do with money. Specifically, with his father’s will.

  “No, I haven’t. He and Chet are still in Chet’s bedroom.”

  I turned back to the window. They were rolling up the crime scene tape. Kronenberg stood on the little rise that obscured my view of the bunker door, directing the shutdown of on-site operations. A couple of men moved wooden blocks away from the van’s tires and maneuvered a big-wheeled vehicle into position to hook up and haul away the van. Odile told me she overheard the men talking and learned they weren’t actually leaving but moving to more comfortable accommodations in the LaMotte police station. With the snow now melted and all residents of the house thoroughly grilled, Kronenberg felt they could back off a bit, but he would never stop. Not until they arrested the killer. I watched the junior officer named Seifert moseying around the formerly taped-off area, pausing now and again to run a hand across the grass.

  “May I come in for a minute?”

  I jumped. I hadn’t realized Babs was still standing in the doorway. “Please. Have a seat.”

  She sat on Lettie’s bed, laying her bundle of clothes beside her. “It’s a bit late, I know, but I want to apologize for the way I behaved toward you the other day when . . . when Patrick and Erin told us about their little problem.”

  Little problem? I’d like to have taken issue with her characterization of Erin’s shadowy past as a “little problem,” but something told me to concentrate on the first part of that sentence. Babs was trying to apologize. “It was a stressful time for all of us.”

  “And it still is.” Babs’s gaze wandered to her stack of laundry and to the boot leather-stained white sock on top. She tucked it into the middle of the stack. “Oh, what’s a mother to do? You want to see your child happy, but you can’t write the script, can you?”

  “No.” I sat on the side of my own bed, facing her.

  “Patrick is such a wonderful boy. So good for Erin. They’re both intellectual types, they both love the outdoors, they love animals, and they . . . they have fun together.” Babs looked at me as if for confirmation, but I kept my face blank. “I’ve had time to think, the last few days. To think about it from Patrick’s viewpoint. And yours. And Chet’s. I realize now that calling off the wedding, or at least postponing it, was the right thing to do.”

  Postponing it? The wedding was not postponed. It was called off!

  “When we finally get to go home—if we ever get to go home—and Erin and Patrick sort out the legalities of their situation, they will still have the problem of trust to work through. Patrick, quite understandably, has issues with that right now. But I do hope it works out for them. I want that so much, but what’s a mother to do? You can’t write the script for them, can you?”

  “Indeed not.” My head spun with things I felt I shouldn’t say. That she obviously hadn’t dealt yet with the seriousness of the trust issue. That Patrick’s Catholicism was about more than Church rules. That Erin and Patrick might never marry and it might be for the best if they didn’t. The nasty taste of saccharine swirling around my mouth, I said, “They’re adults. We have to trust them to do the right thing.”

  “I’d better get going,” she said, reaching for her stack of clean clothes. “But I wish I knew what was going on upstairs,” she leaned forward and touched my knee with her hand, whispering. “Don’t you? I wonder if Juergen is telling Chet about the will. I wonder how much money they’re talking about.”

  Babs waited for me to hazard a guess at the net worth of the Merz family, but I just looked at her.

  “Millions, I’m sure,” she said.

  “I imagine so.”

  “And Juergen! That little daredevil! He’s never had to work, you know. Not until his father got too old to run things. I wonder if he misses his old life. Climbing Mt. Everest, racing motorcycles, setting world records—I found a scrapbook downstairs the other day. You would not believe some of the things he’s done!”

  “Setting world records? What world records?”

  “I’m not real sure. I didn’t read that closely,” Babs said, as if caught in the act of exaggerating. “But he’s tried everything—except marriage.”

  * * * * *

  I slipped on my new jacket, intending to go out and look at the meado
w now that the police had left, then noticed the bare metal shank dangling from the spot where a button should have been. I had no memory of having lost one, but past experience with this sort of button told me they tended to eat through the thread quickly. I knew I had an extra button somewhere but, for now, I put it back on its hanger and donned my black cardigan.

  Chet caught up with me on my way up the hill. As I watched him approach, it seemed to me I had never, in all our years together, seen quite that look on his face. I couldn’t read it. His lips tight, his eyes crinkling at the corners, it seemed half way between the face of a scared rabbit and the cat that ate the canary. Rather like the old joke about the man who fell out of an airplane, but he was wearing a parachute, but the parachute didn’t open—etc.

  We stopped and looked toward the bunker, identifiable only by the small keypad and the thin dark line that marked the edges of the door. The granite-grey paint on the door handle had worn down, exposing the shiny metal beneath. A large mud puddle remained where the door to the van had been.

  “Can we go in now?” Chet nodded toward the bunker. “Now that they’re gone?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Do you know the combination?”

  “Erin does,” I said, recalling the morning she had opened the door, seen Stephanie’s bloodied body, and fainted. “But I don’t. Ask Juergen.”

  “Walk with me?”

  We ambled across the meadow, picking our way around mushy spots. Chet slipped an arm over my shoulder. I moved away, using a sprinkle of new-looking goat droppings as an excuse for altering my path. “You and Juergen talked a long time. Is he all right?”

  “All right? I guess so,” he said, as if he hadn’t thought about it. “Seems old man Merz left money to Juergen and Stephanie, in nearly equal proportions, except the family home in Zurich goes to Juergen alone. The businesses and other holdings are now divided between them, fifty-one percent to Juergen, forty-nine percent to Stephanie.”