Death of a Second Wife (A Dotsy Lamb Travel Mystery) (30 page)

“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 sid
e. 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 had to crack the ice off it before they could see what it was. But they did not worry about i
t 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 i
mpact 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 ti
me 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 Stephani
e’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.

Kronenberg said, “If you would like me to make flight arrangements for all of you, I will be h
appy to do so. You’ve all been put through hell. I can explain this to the airlines and get you on the earliest flight possible. They always have a certain number of seats set aside for hardship cases. I assume you will all want to fly from Geneva?”

“Oh, no!” Lettie cried, taking a step backward. “Not me! I can’t leave from Geneva . . . that is, I don’t
want
to leave just yet. I want to go to Florence with Marco and Dotsy. Spend a few days seeing things I didn’t get to see the last time we were there.”

Th
is, of course, came as a complete surprise to Marco and me. We hadn’t invited her, and frankly, we wanted to be alone.

“You can’t leave from Geneva? Why not?” Babs asked.

“Because they told me not to ever come back.”

“Aha! The airport fiasco! I forgot all
about that.” Patrick laughed.

I remembered that evening when Lettie arrived at Chateau Merz. I went to the kitchen to make coffee and when I returned, everyone had been laughing at some story Lettie had told. Something about an airport adventure. “I forgot to ask you about that, Lettie.” I said. “What happened at the airport?”

Lettie blushed, looking around at Babs, Erin, and Patrick, all of whom were laughing. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, glancing quickly toward Detective Kronenberg.

“Whateve
r it is, Lettie, it will go no farther than this room,” Kronenberg said. “I promise.”

“You know how uptight everyone is these days about airport security,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong. We’re all uptight for good reason. I have no problem with all the new
security measures, and I completely agree that when you’re standing in the line waiting to go through the metal detector you should not make jokes.”

“Uh-oh,” I whispered under my breath.

“The woman standing in front of me said that her feet were killing her because they had confiscated her gel insoles in Washington, and I . . . well, I suppose I was trying to sound like the young people do today. I hate to sound like I’m behind the times, you know. So I said, ‘bummer!’ The security guards were French, I think.”

“And?”

“They thought I said ‘Bomber’ and they evacuated the whole terminal!”

About the Author

Maria Hudgins, a former high school science teacher, lives in Hampton, Virginia, with her two Bichons, Holly and Hamilton. Her previous novels in the Dotsy Lamb Travel Mystery series are:
Death of an Obnoxious Tourist, Death of a Lovable Geek,
and
Death on the Aegean Queen.