The Strangler's Waltz

by Richard Lord

  After running through the raw facts of the latest murder, the four policemen tried to fit it into some context. The district commander asked if Dörfner and Stebbel were sure that all three murders were the acts of one man.

  Stebbel sat up in his chair to answer. “Not 100 percent sure, sir. We can’t really be that sure until we have the culprit arrested and squeeze a confession out of him.” Dörfner nodded vigorously in support of his partner.

  “But there are very strong indications that this is the work of a single culprit. There are so many similarities, not the least of which is the fact that all three victims were clearly strangled by a very powerful man.” Dörfner again nodded with his whole upper body.

  The district commander was in no way mollified by this testament. He looked over at Rautz, who made a meaningless gesture, backed up by a few negligible words. Schollenberg then addressed all three of his subordinates.

  “It seems this monster has fallen into a pattern. He seems to like killing young women out on the streets alone late in the evening.”

  Dörfner shifted uneasily. Stebbel responded.

  “There is definitely a pattern here, especially if it is a single perpetrator. We can’t speak about his motive yet, but I would venture to guess that he does get some kind of perverse satisfaction out of killing these women.”

  “All of which suggests that the bastard will strike again. Very soon again maybe. He chooses these women at random and kills them for the same reason those crazy mountain climbers scale some mountain: because they’re there.”

  Dörfner now saw it as his turn to speak. “That does seem very possible, sir.”

  “Splendid, just splendid. Have any of you seem the front page of the Neue Freie Presse today?” He turned to each man in turn, but each one merely shook his head. Stebbel and Dörfner had seen it, of course, but they pretended ignorance; they didn’t want to deprive Schollenberg of his indignation.

  “Well, not to worry, I have a copy right here.” He reached to a stunted table next to his desk and snatched up the daily. He stared down at the headline for a few moments, as if filling up with bile, then looked up and recited the headline in full histrionic. “DOES VIENNA NOW HAVE HER OWN JACK THE RIPPER?” He threw the paper back down on the desk. “And the rest of the article doesn’t get any more soothing.”

  Rautz decided it was his turn to contribute something. “Sir, you know how the press is. They love to sensationalize everything. They have no respect at all for basic decency. They actually prefer melodrama to accurate reporting. I wouldn’t worry too much about what they write.”

  “Oh, you wouldn’t? But I certainly would. And I think you should start learning to worry about such things, Rautz. Because a lot of people in this city believe all the rubbish these papers print. And that can make life very uncomfortable for me, Rautz. And when my life gets uncomfortable …” He stared at the senior inspector, who finished the sentence for him.

  “Our lives become uncomfortable.”

  “Indeed.” He then turned away sharply from Rautz, as if disgusted by his very presence. His next words were addressed to the two junior inspectors.

  “I want you to solve this case. As quickly as possible. Use all the resources in your division that you need. Have other inspectors assist you in the investigations. Tell them to drop any minor things they’re doing at the moment and get involved with this. From this morning on, this case has top priority. We can even get some people seconded from other towns if that is needed.” He then turned back towards Rautz and spoke with an undertone of intimidation. “Though I would hope that it’s not.”

  He tapped both fists menacingly on the desk, then picked up that morning’s newspaper again. “One thing we cannot have here, that we will not have here, is another Jack the Ripper spree. We cannot have dozens of women murdered here like they did in London.”

  Stebbel hesitated politely before correcting the district commander’s wild exaggeration. “Sir, I think the number was much lower. Under ten murders by the Ripper, if I remember correctly.”

  “Oh, so maybe only eight or nine? What a relief. We can certainly afford to have eight, nine … ten young ladies murdered on our streets.” He took a breath, embarrassed by his own poor spew of irony. “How long did it take them to catch the Ripper anyway?”

  Dörfner looked at his partner, before turning to Schollenberg and answering. “Jack the Ripper was … never caught, sir. The murders remain unsolved to this day.”

  “Ach, du lieber Himmel. So that bastard might still be out there.” He snorted down an angry breath. “But that was London, this is Vienna. They’re all Freemasons and freethinkers over there. Here, we still hold fast to our traditional values, we practice old-time virtues. And we are going to find our strangler. And we will find him very soon and put an end to all this.

  “I have faith in the skills of you three men, and I want you to use those skills excessively to catch this criminal. Catch him very soon, before he strikes again.” He then took another deep breath, this one drained of much of that anger. “Have I made myself very clear, gentleman?”

  “Oh, very clear, Herr Commander,” Rautz said. “Very clear indeed.” The two juniors nodded in agreement.

  “Good. Then the next time I see any one of you in this office, I expect it to be when I congratulate you on solving the case. Or at least when you give me a report of significant progress.”

  “Jawohl, Herr Commander.”

  Schollenberg then gave a mechanical nod, which told the three subordinates that they were excused. They all rose and left his office in decorous haste.

  As Stebbel and Dörfner strode down the corridor, Dörfner gave his well-honed contemptuous snort. Then, referring to the District Commander, he said, “I wonder if that guy ever gets out of his seat anytime during working hours. He really should, you know – just to air out his ass a little.”

  Stebbel shrugged. “You should ask him the next time we drop in. I’m sure he’ll be touched by your concern for his well-being.”

  “Yeah, that’s just I’ll do. Right after I win top prize in the state lottery.”

  Chapter 20

  Barely an hour later, six young policeman had gathered in the larger interview room with Dörfner and Stebbel. Dörfner was giving them a brief rundown of the case, underscoring everything they needed to know to become a part of the expanded investigation team. Stebbel stood off to the side, from time to time being called upon to back up his colleague when Dörfner turned for confirmation.

  He was finishing up his spiel when a knock came on the door and Inspector Stegmeier shuffled in. He gave a short, deferential bow and took his place next to Stebbel.

  Neither Stebbel nor Dörfner were happy to see him there. It was Senior Inspector Rautz’s idea that he should join their team. As Stegmeier had years more experience than either Dörfner or Stebbel, it strongly suggested that Rautz was rapidly losing confidence in those two to solve this case. The unknown strangler seemed to be causing even more havoc in their police division than on the streets of Vienna.

  But later that same day, fate smiled on Stebbel and Dörfner. Coming back from lunch, Stegmeier miscalculated his exit from the paternoster and landed badly. His right ankle went one way, the rest of his leg the other. Rushed down to the infirmary by four muscular policemen, he writhed in agony, swearing revenge on the paternoster the whole trip. That damn thing, which he had never gotten along with, had finally broken his leg.

  It wasn’t quite that bad. The infirmary doctor declared the ankle severely sprained and said Stegmeier should keep off it for at least a week.

  Stegmeier himself decided to play it cautious and got the doctor to declare him medically excused for ten days. This, of course, meant that he wouldn’t be around to pester Stebbel and Dörfner. And Rautz didn’t think to appoint a replacement for the injured inspector – much to their relief.

  The following day, it became clear that the six young officers chosen for the expanded investigation team added
nothing to the investigation. Dörfner and Stebbel started assigning them errands that would keep them away from their own operations. This investigation was proving difficult enough on its own; they had no desire to have a pack of assistants who mainly served the purpose of getting in their way.

  One positive change that came from the stepped-up campaign to nab the strangler: Stebbel and Dörfner were moved to a bigger office down the corridor, closer to Inspector Rautz’s own office. Not only was this office much bigger, with a wider window, but it also came equipped with a telephone. This meant that the inspectors could make and receive calls without rushing to another office. (And there were only two other telephones in that corridor: one in Rautz’s office, one at the reception.)

  The packing, heavy lifting and assorting of the move was carried out mainly by the six new assistants. It took less than two hours from start to resettlement, and at the end of the move, the two inspectors were finally grateful to Rautz and Schollenberg for having assigned the young officers to help in the investigation. Progress of sorts was being made.

  * * *

  The funeral mass for Gertrud Prestel was a far different affair from that of Anneliese von Klettenburg. This time, for instance, there was no crowd-control detail, as there was no crowd. Inspectors Stebbel and Dörfner were able to slip inside the church and had no trouble finding an empty pew from where they could take in the whole ceremony.

  The mass was held at the victim’s parish church in the Meidling district. The church was small and malodorous, the ceremony depressingly simple. There were no eulogies, no Mozart, no ostentatious floral arrays. The priest, looking as worn-out as his church, gave a short sermon, which focused on the unbounded mercy of God, Who is willing to forgive and redeem us no matter how vile our transgressions. The obvious reference to Frau Prestel’s trade was not lost on most of the two dozen attendees (which included four elderly parishioners who turned up for every notable event at the church, no matter what the occasion).

  As it had become common knowledge what Gertrud Prestel did for a living, the priest was forbidden by the Vienna Church hierarchy to accompany the body to the cemetery and perform graveside rites.

  The two inspectors did attend the burial. Part of the reason was sympathy for the deceased: they didn’t want to see a simple woman who had been victimized by a cruel husband, a factory supervisor, a rigidly hierarchical society and, finally, a cold-hearted killer receive one final indignity. That didn’t think it right that there should be so few mourners there to watch her body lowered into the grave.

  But more important: they wanted to see if anyone turned up for the burial who had not been in the church. No one like that did turn up. And there were no faces at Frau Prestel’s funeral that they could remember from the von Klettenburg funeral. If there were any important clues to be gleaned from the ceremony in Meidling and the burial that followed, the two inspectors missed every single one of them.

  Chapter 21

  Three days after the crisis meeting with the District Commander, Stebbel was at his desk, sifting through some reports, when Dörfner strode in. He clapped his hands to get his partner’s attention as well as to signal that he had good news.

  “Herr Inspector – we just got a big breakthrough!”

  “We did?”

  “I just spoke with the Turk. The morning after the murder, I told him we needed special help. Well, he came through.”

  “Yes?”

  Dörfner nodded energetically. “He had his people doing some thorough investigations. And you know what he found out? This Frau Prestel didn’t actually have a pimp.”

  “She didn’t?”

  “Tja, she had one for a short time. But he ran into some trouble, the Turk wasn’t specific, and he had to leave Vienna. After that, she was working on her own. For maybe the last six months.” He clapped his hands again, as if he had just about wrapped up the case.

  “And how is this such good news?”

  “Come on, give a smile, it won’t hurt you. No, this strengthens my theory: the killer is a pimp. He tried to get Frau von Klettenburg and this Prestel girl to join his stable. When they refused, he killed them. Or – alternative theory – he was angry that these two freelancers were poaching on his territory. He thought that they were selling their wares in an area that only his whores were allowed to work. He was protecting his interests.”

  “And Maria Kolenska?”

  “He wanted her to leave the Turk and join his stable. She turned him down, so he killed her.”

  “The Turk? You mean Hochner.”

  “Ja, ja, of course; Hochner.”

  “Of course, there’s another explanation.” Dörfner raised his eyebrows to a near skeptical height; he was pretty much sold on his own two explanations.

  “What do pimps do?” Stebbel asker rhetorically.

  “They tell their whores where to go, how to keep customers satisfied and … then they collect their money.”

  “They also protect the girls. Of course, for them, it’s more like protecting their investment. So if neither the first nor the third victim had a pimp to look after them, the killer had easy targets. Maybe that’s why he went for them.”

  “And our second victim?”

  Stebbel didn’t skip a beat. “Maria was unlucky. Her pimp was off somewhere else and the killer found her all alone. Let’s face it, lucky and unlucky is often the difference between being alive and being dead.”

  “But if it’s all luck, if it’s all random, then we’re simply … back there spinning around, not knowing which direction to go.”

  Stebbel shrugged. Actually, his whole body signaled irritation.

  “Steb, let me finish laying out my strategy here. We start hauling in the city’s pimps. We take them into the sweat box and give them a serious going over. The killer may break, right there, or at least give us enough tell-tale signs that we can pin him as the main suspect and go from there.”

  Stebbel picked up a file lying on his desk. “Herr Colleague, I just discovered that there are upwards of 15,000 streetwalkers in this city. And those are just the ladies who have taken the trouble to register. So how many pimps are out there?”

  “Each pimp has a stable, Herr Colleague. They’re not one-to-one.”

  “But it’s also not a thousand prostitutes to each pimp. We would have to grab … hundreds of pimps to question, and then …”

  He trailed off and the look of resignation on his face told Dörfner he should postpone any further discussion of his strategy. In the uneasy silence, Stebbel started sorting the papers on his desk into several piles, as Dörfner rubbed the back of his head with a flattened palm.

  Dörfner headed back to his own desk and slumped into his chair. He took a deep sigh that he didn’t want Stebbel to either see or hear. But the senior could feel it; that’s how charged the air was. Stebbel knew he had to break the tension.

  “But that was good work … finding out about Frau Prestel and her lack of a pimp. It is a step forward.”

  “But a very small step, right?”

  “At this point, any step at least means that we’re moving somewhere. And not just spinning.”

  Dörfner again rubbed the back of his head with his open palm. Both inspectors were all too tired of this repeated spinning; as Stebbel had said once, it was giving him mental motion sickness.

  Chapter 22

  Doktor Sigmund Freud was taking his regular mid-afternoon stroll in the bantam park not far off the Ringstasse. He had just extracted a cigar out of the linen pouch he used for his portable smokes and lit it. As a plume of grey smoke lifted from the cigar, someone approached from his right flank.

  “Doktor Freud! What a pleasant surprise!”

  Freud turned to see Inspector Stebbel. He smiled.

  “Ah yes, the good inspector. You know, I am too often misquoted as saying ‘there are no accidents in life’, but here I would dare say that this “chance encounter’ is no accident.”

  “No, not really. We did some
surveillance and found that you always take a pause from your work and come here to enjoy a cigar at 2:45. I’m told you could set your watch by the time you appear at the park entrance.”

  “I must learn to vary my routine then. I wouldn’t want any of my enemies to start trailing me.” He again smiled broadly. “Speaking of cigars, would you like one yourself?” He held out his pouch.

  “I shouldn’t.”

  “Not allowed to smoke while on duty?”

  “Actually, it’s because I have a respiratory problem. But one light smoke won’t kill me, I don’t think. Especially as I take it for fellowship.”

  “So, then. For fellowship.”

  Stebbel extracted a cigar and Freud offered him a flaming match to light it. As Stebbel took his first soft puff, Freud brought the match near to his chin and meticulously blew out the flame, as if performing a solemn ritual, then placed the match into a brass box where he consigned all such matches which had served their purpose.

  “So, Inspector, as you also probably know, I can only devote a short time to these afternoon breaks, so we should get right down to business. I suspect you’ve come here on police business?”

  “Mainly. First of all, I’d like to apologize for my colleague’s behavior during the interview at police headquarters. Herr Dörfner is not really a master of tact and when he gets impassioned about a case, he … sometimes acts brashly and speaks without thinking what he’s saying.”

  “Not to worry, Inspector; I was not too offended. Compared to what a number of my critics and enemies have written or said about me, I found your colleague’s statements quite mild stuff really.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. I was afraid you might chase me away just because I stayed quiet while Inspector Dörfner insulted you.” He paused to allow Freud to give a never-mind laugh. “And so, on to the other business.”

  “Please.”