Crime (7 page)

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I was waiting for you.”

“How did you know I was here?” She was asking herself how much he actually knew.

“I followed you.”

“You followed me? Are you nuts? Why did you do that?”

“You have somebody else. I know it.” Abbas had tears in his eyes and was clutching her arm.

“Don’t make yourself ridiculous.” She pulled free and ran across the square, feeling like she was in a movie.

He ran two steps behind her and seized hold of her again.

“Stefanie, what did you do in the hotel?”

She had to pull herself together. Think clearly, she told herself. “I applied for a job; they pay better than the beer garden.” It was the best she could think of.

Abbas, naturally, did not believe her. They had a loud fight on the square. She was embarrassed. Abbas yelled; she pulled him away. At some point, he calmed down. They drove back to the apartment. Abbas sat at the kitchen table, drinking tea, saying nothing.

Boheim had been meeting Stefanie for two months now. She had set aside her shyness. They got on well together, too well perhaps. Stefanie had told him that her boyfriend had followed her two weeks before. Boheim was uneasy; he knew he would have to end the arrangement. That was the dumb thing in such relationships. A jealous boyfriend spelled problems.

He arrived late today; the meeting had gone on forever. He switched on the car phone and dialed her number. It was good to hear her voice. He said he would be there in a moment. She was pleased and told him she was already naked.

He hung up as he drove into the hotel garage. He would tell her it was over. Best that it be right away, today. Boheim was not a man to procrastinate.

·    ·    ·

The file lay open on the desk. For now, there were only two folders in the customary red cardboard binders for criminal files, but this number would increase. The file displeased Assistant District Attorney Schmied. He closed his eyes and leaned back. Only eight months till I retire, he thought. For the last twelve years, Schmied had been the head of the Capital Crimes Section in the district attorney’s office in Berlin. And now he’d had enough. His father came from Breslau; Schmied considered himself to be a Prussian through and through. He didn’t hate the criminals he pursued; it was simply his duty. He didn’t want another big case; he would have preferred a few straightforward murders, dramas that played themselves out within families, cases that resolved themselves speedily. But he prayed there would not be anything requiring a lot of reports he’d have to take to the DA.

Schmied was looking at the request for a warrant against Boheim. He still hadn’t signed it. It’ll set off the whole frenzy with the press, he thought. The tabloids were already full of the naked student in the ritziest hotel. He could pretty much imagine what would happen if Percy Boheim, chairman and principal shareholder of Boheim Industries, were arrested. All hell would break loose and the spokesman for the DA’s office would be getting new orders by the day for what he had to say.

Schmied sighed and thought back to the note his new colleague had briefed him with. The new colleague was a good man, still a little overzealous, but that would temper itself with time. The note summarized the files in an orderly fashion.

Stefanie Becker had been found dead at 3:26 p.m. Her head had been beaten in with numerous blows of extreme force. The murder weapon was a cast-iron lamp stand, part of the standard furnishings of the room. “Blunt-force trauma,” in the language of medical examiners.

Percy Boheim had been the last caller to the victim’s cell phone. The day after the body was discovered, two officers of the Homicide Division had visited him in his Berlin office. “Only a couple of routine questions,” they’d said. Boheim had asked a company lawyer to join him at the meeting. The police report indicated that aside from this, he had evinced no reaction. They had shown him a photo of the deceased and he had denied knowing the girl. The phone call he explained by saying he had misdialed, and the location of his cell phone by the fact that he’d driven past the hotel. The policemen wrote up his statement right there in the office; he read it through and signed it.

At this point, it was already clear that the conversation had lasted almost a minute, far too long to be a wrong number. Nonetheless, the police had not pointed this out to Boheim. Not yet. They had also not yet revealed that his number was stored in the deceased’s phone memory. Boheim had made himself suspicious.

The next day, the analysis of the trace evidence came in: Sperm had been found in the hair and on the breasts of the deceased. The DNA had not been on file in the data bank. Boheim had been asked to give a sample of his saliva voluntarily. His DNA was analyzed immediately—it matched the sperm. That, in a nutshell, was the report.

The yellow folder with the autopsy photographs was, as always, distasteful to Schmied. He went through it only briefly: pitiless images against a blue background, the sight of them bearable only if deliberately contemplated for a very long time.

Schmied thought of the many hours he’d spent in autopsy. Everything happened quietly there, just the sound of scalpels and saws, the voices of the doctors murmuring their shorthand into dictating machines as they handled the bodies with respect. Jokes around the autopsy table happened only in thrillers. The one thing he would never get used to was the smell, that typical odor of decay—almost every pathologist felt the same way. Nor was it possible to smear some Vicks under your nose, as certain trace evidence could only be deduced from the smell of the corpse. As a young prosecutor, Schmied had been sickened when the blood was ladled out of the bodies and weighed or when the organs were placed back in the body after the postmortem. Later he had come to understand that there was a specific art in sewing the corpse back up after autopsy firmly enough to prevent it from leaking, and he had realized that medical examiners had serious conversations about it. It was a parallel universe, just as his was. Schmied and the chief medical examiner were friends, they were almost the same age, and they never discussed their professional lives in private.

ADA Schmied sighed a second time, then signed the order of arrest and took it to the examining magistrate. Only two hours later, the judge issued the warrant, and six hours later, Boheim was arrested in his apartment. Simultaneously, searches were initiated in the couple’s various apartments, offices, and houses in Düsseldorf, Munich, Berlin, and Sylt. The police had organized it well.

Three lawyers appeared for the arraignment, looking like alien beings in the examining magistrate’s little office. They were civil lawyers, highly paid specialists in corporate takeovers and international arbitration. None of them had appeared before a judge; the last time they’d been engaged with criminal law was when they were studying for their law degrees. They didn’t know what motions they should file, and one of them said threateningly that he might have to bring politics into this. The judge remained calm nonetheless.

Melanie Boheim sat on the wooden bench outside the door to the hearing room. No one had told her she couldn’t see her husband—the arraignment was not open to the public. On the advice of his lawyers, Boheim said nothing when the warrant was read. The lawyers had come with a blank check and certification from the bank that he was good for up to fifty million euros. The examining magistrate was angered by the figure; it reeked of the class system. He refused bail—“We’re not in America here”—and asked the lawyers if they wished to apply for a formal review of the remand in custody.

ADA Schmied had said almost nothing during the hearing. This was going to be a fight, and he thought he could hear the starting bell.

·    ·    ·

Percy Boheim was impressive. The day after his arrest, I went to find him in the house of detention where he was being held, after having been asked by the chief counsel of his firm to take over the defense. Boheim sat behind the table in the visitor’s cell as if it were his office, and greeted me warmly. We talked about the government’s failed tax policies and the future of the car industry. He behaved as though we were at a stand-up reception and not preparing for a jury trial. When we got around to the actual matter at hand, he said immediately that he had lied to the police when they had questioned him, in the hopes of protecting his wife and saving his marriage. To all my other questions, his answers were precise, focused, and devoid of hesitation.

Of course he had known Stefanie Becker. She had been his lover; he had got to know her via an ad in one of the Berlin papers. He had paid her for sex. She was a nice girl, a student. He had thought about offering her a place as a trainee in one of his companies once she’d graduated. He had never asked her why she was working as a prostitute, but he was certain he had been her only customer; she was shy and it was only over time that she thawed out. “It all sounds ugly now, but it was what it was,” he said. He’d liked her.

On the day it happened, he’d had a meeting that ran until 1:20 and had reached the hotel somewhere around 1:45. Stefanie was waiting; they’d had sex. After that, he’d showered and then left immediately, because he wanted to have some time alone to prepare for his next appointment. Stefanie had stayed in the room in order to take a bath before she set off, and she had told him she didn’t want to be out of there until 3:30. He had tucked five hundred euros in her purse, which was their standard arrangement.

He had used the elevator next to the suite to go down directly to the underground garage; it would have taken him a minute, two at most, to get to his car. He had left the hotel at around 2:30 and driven to the zoological garden, Berlin’s biggest park, and taken a walk for the better part of an hour, thinking intermittently about his relationship with Stefanie and deciding that he had to end it. He’d left his cell phone switched off; he hadn’t wanted to be disturbed.

At four o’clock, he’d been at a meeting on the Kurfürstendamm with four other men. Between 2:30 and 4:00, he had met no one, nor had he had any phone conversations. And no one had passed him when he left the hotel.

Defendants and defense lawyers have a curious relationship. A lawyer doesn’t always want to know what actually happened. This also has its roots in our code of criminal procedure: If defense counsel knows that his client has killed someone in Berlin, he may not ask for “defense witnesses” to take the stand who would say that the man had been in Munich that day. It’s a tightrope walk. In other cases, the lawyer absolutely has to know the truth. Knowledge of the actual circumstances may be the tiny advantage that can protect his client from a guilty verdict. Whether the lawyer thinks his client is innocent is irrelevant. His task is to defend the accused, no more, no less.

If Boheim’s explanation was correct—that is, that he’d left the room at 2:30 and the cleaning lady had found the girl’s body at 3:26, then there was a little under an hour to deal with. It was enough. In the space of sixty minutes, the real perpetrator could have entered the room, killed the girl, and disappeared before the cleaning lady entered. There was no proof of what Boheim had told me. If he had kept silent during his first interview, it would have been easier. His lies had made the situation worse, and there was absolutely no trace of another attacker. Admittedly, I did think it unlikely that a jury would end up convicting him in a major trial. But I doubted that any judge would vacate his arrest warrant right now—a suspicion clung.

Forty-eight hours later, the examining magistrate called me to arrange a time for the formal review of Boheim’s remand in custody. We settled on the next day. I could have the file picked up by a courier; the DA’s office had approved its release.

The file contained new inquiries. Everyone in the victim’s cell-phone address book had been questioned. A girlfriend, in whom Stefanie Becker had confided, explained to the police why she had turned to prostitution.

But what was much more interesting was that the police had located Abbas in the meantime. He had a record—break-ins and drug dealing and, two years previously, an offense involving grievous bodily harm, a fight outside a discotheque. The police had questioned Abbas. He said he had followed Stefanie to the hotel once, out of jealousy, but she’d been able to explain what she was doing there. The interrogation went on for many pages, and the detectives’ suspicions were clear in every line. But finally when it came down to it, they had a motive but no proof.

Late in the afternoon, I paid a visit to ADA Schmied in his office. As always, he welcomed me in both a friendly and a professional way. He didn’t feel good about Abbas, either. Jealousy was always a powerful motive. Abbas could not be excluded as the alternative killer. He knew the hotel, she was his girlfriend, and she had slept with another man. If he had been there, he could also have killed her. I explained to Schmied why Boheim had lied, then said, “Sleeping with a student isn’t, finally, a crime.”

“Yes, but it’s not very attractive, either.”

“Thank God that’s not the issue,” I said. “Infidelity is no longer punishable under the law.” Schmied himself had had an affair with a female district attorney some years ago, as everyone knew around the Moabit courthouse. “I can’t see a single reason why Boheim would have wanted to kill his lover,” I said.

“Nor do I, yet. But you know motives don’t count that much with me,” said Schmied. “He really did lie his head off under questioning.”

“That makes him suspicious, I grant you, but it doesn’t prove anything. Besides which, his first statement at the hearing is probably unusable.”

“Oh?”

“The police had already analyzed the phone records by then. They knew he’d had long conversations with the victim. They knew from the nearest cell-phone tower that his car was in the neighborhood of the hotel. They knew he had reserved the room in which the girl was killed. The police should therefore have interrogated him formally as the accused, but they only questioned him under the guise of a witness and only cautioned him as such.”