Death of a Second Wife

by Maria Hudgins

  “They aren’t gold,” Lettie said. They’re silver.”

  “Wait a minute!” Rounding on Kronenberg with a vicious glare, Juergen said, “You said gold! Is it silver or gold?”

  Kronenberg explained to Juergen, and then to all of us said, “I must ask you not to leave the premises until we sort this out. I have your passports and I will return them to you shortly but, for your own protection, I will have men watching the house, twenty-four-seven, as you Americans say.”

  “For our protection?” This came from Brian.

  “Dotsy has told us about a glider making frequent passes over the house,” Kronenberg said. “We have reason to believe a man named Anton Spektor, the owner of the glider, is involved in an international smuggling operation and if so, he probably knows the gold is in the bunker and he may have been looking for a chance to go in and get it. Now that we’ve taken down the crime scene tape, he’s likely to make the attempt.”

  “This is making no sense to me,” Patrick said.

  Kronenberg turned to Marco and nodded.

  “Interpol is working on it. Switzerland’s Central Bureau, a part of Interpol, is able to contact law enforcement in South Africa and any other countries that may be affected. Detective Kronenberg and I have called and told them everything we know. They, and the Swiss customs agents in Geneva, are talking to each other right now. We believe the gold, disguised as silver, was brought here by air from South Africa and cleared customs in Geneva early this month. The customs officials will have records, and Swiss law enforcement will be able to sort this out. I am sure.”

  Thirty

  Awkward! I never dreamed Marco and Chet would occupy the same room at the same time, but here we were and with orders from the police to stay on the premises. Marco could have left, but he showed no inclination to do so. He and Chet shook hands and made the proper noises when I introduced them. Seeing both men together, I could only think how very handsome Marco was and how much I enjoyed his presence. Chet toddled off to his room and the young ones took to the porch. Lettie, Marco, Babs, and I sat in the living room, dissecting theories about how this could have happened.

  Marco suggested one or more of the smugglers, knowing somehow that their missing gold was in the bunker, dropped by in the early morning hours. Gisele and Stephanie, hearing noises, rushed outside and encountered the smugglers in the act of breaking in.

  “Wouldn’t the smugglers have brought their own weapons?” I asked. “The gun they used was already in the bunker.”

  Babs said she didn’t think two women would have dashed out like that. They’d have roused one or more of the men in the house. “And where’s the connection between these guys and the bunker? You’ve told us about the connection between the smugglers and MWU, owned by the Merz family, but how did gold that was supposed to go to MWU in Zurich, end up in the bunker here?”

  That was the smartest thing I’d ever heard Babs Toomey say. How did it end up here? “Let’s not forget the notes Stephanie left on the phone pad early that evening,” I said.

  Babs winced, probably because those notes contained the Cook County Vital Records number—the start of all her troubles.

  “Her note had a reference to Johannesburg and to gold and silver. Stephanie knew what was going on. That’s probably why she was killed.”

  Lettie, meanwhile, had been fiddling with her phone. “No wonder I missed that call . . . I have the wrong time zone. Hey, Marco, do cell phones automatically change time zones when you do?”

  “Some do and some do not.” He took her phone and pressed a few things. “You have the correct time.”

  “The gun, people, the gun!” Babs leaned forward until she nearly fell out of her chair. “These murders must have been done by someone who knew what was in the bunker.”

  My three companions went on for some time, playing armchair detective, but I was lost in thoughts about Lettie and her phone—and time zones.

  * * * * *

  Kronenberg barged in shortly after dinner. Once again, we gathered in the living room.

  “Anton Spektor and his partners are in our custody. We caught them at the Geneva airport.” Kronenberg could scarcely keep the grin off his face. “In a spectacularly stupid move, they tried to clear security in the very airport where they’d been the main topic of conversation all afternoon.” He held up his palm as if reading from it. “Ah, yes. Anton Spektor. Have you enjoyed your stay in Switzerland? Anton Spektor! Guards!”

  We all indulged in a refreshing laugh.

  “One of his companions, by the way, was wearing a most unusual pair of shoes. Red leather shoes with strange patches sewn in odd places.” Kronenberg looked at me and nodded.

  Marco, sitting next to me on the sofa, gave me a hug and kissed me on the forehead.

  “Go, Mom!” Patrick and Brian yelled this, or something like it, simultaneously.

  “Now for the bad part,” Kronenberg said, his tone suddenly serious. “Spektor and his cronies have alibis for the night of the murders. They all spent the night at a hotel in Geneva and they stayed in the bar until after two, drinking and talking so loudly the bartender says he will never forget them. Security cameras have them on tape, wobbling to their rooms at approximately the same time the murders here were taking place.”

  Chet spoke up. “Are you saying we’re back to square one?”

  “I’m saying that, unless they had allies here, in LaMotte, the smugglers did not kill Stephanie and Gisele.”

  “While I’m basking in the glow of your congratulations,” I said, “let me ruin it by asking if you’ve double-checked the time on Stephanie’s phone. She had a Blackberry, and on those phones you can manually change the time.”

  The room went dead quiet.

  “Explain, that, please,” Kronenberg said, his hands flying out as if to silence the group that needed no silencing.

  “We’ve been assuming all along that Stephanie and Gisele were killed after eleven-thirty, because that’s what her phone says was the time she made her last call. The problem all along has been explaining who could have done it or how they could have done it, between eleven-thirty and the time the snow started. But what if they were killed before eleven-thirty? What if the time on Stephanie’s phone was wrong?”

  Inadvertently, I had just convicted Juergen Merz. We all heard him “talking” to Stephanie at eleven-thirty. They were talking about wine, supposedly, and Juergen had even mouthed Stephanie while he was “on the phone.” If she was already dead, he was talking to no one. I hadn’t heard his phone ring. He’d pulled it out of his pocket and we’d all assumed it was on vibrate, with the ring tone silenced.

  All these thoughts rushed through my head and, I suppose, every head in the room, in less time than it takes to explain it.

  Juergen jumped to his feet. “Das ist verrückt! Ich will nicht hier sitzen . . .”

  Kronenberg, too, fell back on his native German, attempting to calm Juergen and make him sit down. Marco’s hand found mine and our fingers laced. Seifert appeared from somewhere behind me and stepped around the sofa, his gaze darting from Juergen to Kronenberg, his hands poised to grab.

  Juergen turned to me, his face purple with anger and fear, and pronounced a long, scathing condemnation of me in German. I was grateful not to know what he said.

  We all sat, afraid to move, long after Kronenberg and Seifert ushered Juergen out of the room. When Kronenberg did return, he issued his orders to us in measured English. “We are going to the station in LaMotte. The guard we have already placed will remain overnight, so there’s no need to be afraid. We’ve removed the gold from the bunker and the smugglers are in custody. But who knows if we have got them all?

  “Herr Merz will be helping us with our inquiries for a while. He is not under arrest. Yet. Before we go, does anyone else have something to tell me? Anything at all that will help us wrap this up so you good people can go home?”

  “Yea!” Lettie yelled, then slapped her hand over her mouth.

&nb
sp; * * * * *

  “He’s lawyered up,” Brian announced early the next day. “Odile’s hotline is burning up the wires this morning.”

  We all sat on the porch, as if the air in the living room had become stale. A minute earlier, Babs had popped out and announced that Chet had found her a job as bookkeeper at a John Deere dealership near where she lived. For the first time in weeks, we were turning our eyes toward home. Erin announced the arrival of a new baby giraffe at her zoo. “One hundred pounds and six feet long. Mother and baby are doing well,” she said. The sun was shining and the coffee was good.

  I heard Marco’s voice. After spending the night at his hotel in town, he had apparently found his own way back to Chateau Merz. I fetched him a chair from a closet inside and unfolded it for him. He kissed me on the lips in full view of my sons and ex-husband. It felt comfortable.

  “I have been already to the police station this morning and I have the latest news,” he said. We gave him our full attention. “Juergen’s lawyer had to drive in from Zurich and he did not get here until this morning. Of course, he told Juergen to say nothing until they had time to plan out their defense, but earlier in the evening, Juergen was rambling on and saying plenty. They also called in Zoltan. Someone drove up the mountain to his little hut and picked him up. When Zoltan realized how much trouble his employer was in, he forgot loyalty and started talking to save himself. Naturally, he did not want to be charged as an accessory.”

  Odile brought Marco a cup of coffee, which he accepted with a smile.

  “Tell us!” Lettie bounced in her deck chair and tapped her little feet.

  “Where should I begin?”

  “At the beginning.”

  Marco set his coffee on the porch rail and leaned back, folding his arms across his chest. “Here is what we now believe happened. Some of the details are probably wrong but, in time, it will all work itself out. Juergen knew about the smuggled gold. He hated it. These men had ruined his family’s largest business and they had picked on the Merz family because it was being run by an old man who was no longer able to play their game. They drove the company into bankruptcy and took control. That is when old man Merz called Juergen in from the Himalayas or wherever he was at the time, and told him to take over. Juergen tried, but failed. He was unable to prevent the smuggling so he decided to turn them in to the authorities. But first he needed hard evidence, so he stole three gold bars, covered with silver, after the shipment had passed through customs and hid them in the bunker here.”

  “Who says he was planning to turn them in?” Brian asked. “How do they know he didn’t plan to keep it for himself?”

  “Three gold bars are not worth enough for Juergen to put himself at risk. The Merz family is still rich, you know. But it may be that Juergen’s real plan was to use the bars for blackmail. If so, he was playing a very dangerous game. I cannot imagine he would win. They would have killed him. We can only hope these things will be revealed in the trial that is sure to come.

  “Sometime shortly before the murders, Stephanie discovered the gold hidden in a box in a back room of the bunker, took them out and hid them in a new spot—inside a silver punch bowl where she thought they would be safe.”

  In my mind’s eye I saw the boxes of supplies lined up along the wall in the bunker’s back hall. I looked at Lettie and found her already looking at me, nodding.

  Marco continued. “Juergen found out that Stephanie knew, and he tried to explain it to her. To get her on his side. But Stephanie was not cooperating. She threatened to hand over the gold to the police immediately, and that would have gotten him killed. Gotten both of them killed, in fact, and quickly, before either of them could testify about the smuggling operation.” Marco looked at me and added, in a sort of parenthesis, “I am making some of this up, of course. I do not really know what he had in mind, but I have been in this business for a long time and I know how these things usually work.

  “Juergen’s plan was to kill Stephanie in order to save himself. He lured her to the bunker that evening and shot her with a gun that was always kept in the bunker. Then, to make it look like suicide, he wrapped the gun in Stephanie’s hand and fired again, through the open door. He had no idea Gisele was in the meadow outside. But, as luck would have it, she was, and the second bullet hit her squarely in the chest. Juergen picked up a shell casing so it would look as if the gun had not been fully loaded to begin with and had been fired only once.”

  “He should have picked up the casing from the second bullet,” I said.

  “He probably had no reason to think it made any difference which one he picked up. He probably did not realize the clip held bullets from two different boxes.”

  “Now you’ve really got me confused!” Erin said.

  Marco grinned and went on. “After he picked up the extra shell casing, he grabbed her mobile phone and set the time forward an hour or so, then called his own number. He had all this planned out ahead of time. He probably planned to spend the night with Gisele so as to give himself an alibi for the whole night, but bedtime rolls around and he cannot find her! He panics. He runs all over the house looking for her and, when he cannot find her, he turns on the house security cameras, knowing that one of the cameras is directed down the hall toward his own bedroom. Kronenberg told me this morning that this part had always bothered him. The security cameras were not often turned on to record. Why that night, of all nights? And was it not convenient that the camera on the top floor hall could see straight into Juergen’s room and that he left his door open all night?”

  “Too coincidental,” Babs said.

  “Gisele had a boyfriend named Milo. Milo has admitted to the police that he and Gisele fought that day. He found out that Juergen was trying to seduce her. Gisele’s head must have been turned by the thought of all that money. Milo is poor. Juergen is rich. He came up here that afternoon and they fought. He called her a whore. Then he went to town, to the Black Sheep Bar and got drunk. The police put him in jail for the night to sober up.”

  “We still have one big problem,” I said. “We have no explanation for how my jacket button wound up just outside the bunker door. I swear I didn’t go up there that night, and I’m certain the button didn’t go missing until later. It wasn’t off my jacket, anyway. It was the extra button that came with the jacket when I bought it.”

  “I was getting to that. Juergen needed a back-up plan. In case he forgot something or the forensic people were able to determine it was not suicide but murder, he needed someone else they could pin it on. And that person, Dotsy, was you.” Marco’s eyes beamed sympathy at mine. “He could have taken the button from your room any time you were not there. He probably dropped it in a likely spot outside the bunker that night, knowing that the police would find it but, unless they suspected murder, they would not think it was important. He did not know it would snow that night. The button was covered with several inches of snow and he had could not find it without a good deal of searching. With the crime scene tape all around the bunker entrance that was impossible.

  “This is where Zoltan comes in. The police brought him in last night and questioned him. At first he would not say anything, but when they convinced him that his employer was headed for a conviction for a double murder, he decided to save his own skin. He told them he got a call from Juergen the day he was driving to Zurich to visit his father in the hospital. The snow had mostly melted by this time, and Juergen did not think the police were watching the bunker as closely as they did at first. By this time, the police had decided Chet was the killer and Juergen did not want anything to confuse the issue. Since they thought Chet was the one, he wanted everything to point to Chet. So he told Zoltan to find the button and get rid of it.”

  I glanced at Chet. Sitting forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees, his mouth quivered in an unsuccessful effort to hide a grin.

  “But before Zoltan could pick it up, Kronenberg and Seifert ran out and grabbed him. Seifert found the button later and h
ad to crack the ice off it before they could see what it was. But they did not worry about it too much until their case against Chet fell apart.”

  “Thanks to Dotsy,” Chet said.

  “Thanks to Dotsy,” Marco repeated. “Then they did think about the button and about how and when it came to be there. They decided it could only have fallen there on the night of the murder and probably as a result of a fight between Dotsy and Stephanie. Dotsy, remember, was the logical one to suspect to begin with. Stephanie had stolen her husband.”

  “Oh, this is just too bad!” Lettie said. “It’s making me sick to my stomach.”

  I said, “Gisele. She was just an innocent bystander?’

  “Collateral damage, they call it,” Brian said, his voice heavy with irony.

  I recalled that morning and how Juergen had hovered over Gisele’s body. His keening whine had been sincere. He hadn’t known until that moment that he had killed her, too. Had he had feelings for her, or was she simply his employee and his alibi? The full impact hit me suddenly, like a fist. How evil! How cold! He had meant to use Gisele for his own purpose and instead he had killed her.

  Thirty-One

  Kronenberg came, bearing our passports. “I know this has been hard on all of you, and I apologize for the time you have had to spend away from your jobs and families. It couldn’t be helped.”

  I had already called my school and told them not to expect me before next Monday. It gave me a couple of days to spend in Florence with Marco. Chet had arranged for Stephanie’s body to be cremated, but hadn’t decided whether to carry her ashes back to Virginia or put them in the Merz family’s space in a Zurich cemetery. He knew he’d have to come back to Switzerland, probably a number of times, until the inheritance was worked out. Given the fact that if Juergen was found guilty of killing his sister, it might have ramifications for his own inheritance, Chet might end up filthy rich. But, as Brian pointed out, Juergen didn’t kill his father. The rule says you can’t benefit from a death you caused. At lunch that day, we had bandied this about but had come to no conclusion. We all agreed that I’d never see my pink cashmere sweater again.