The Killing of Emma Gross (22 page)

He thought about this, rubbing the stubble on his jutting chin. He pulled a small beer from the tap and set it down in front of me.

'Now,' he said, 'what do you want?'

'I'm looking for a woman who works here. She's called Trudi.'

'This Trudi have a last name?'

'Does she need one? How many Trudis do you have?'

'I just don't want any trouble from a dumb bull like you.' He leaned on the bar. His baggy linen shirt did little to conceal the web of green tattoos covering his taut triceps or his thick chest.

'The only way we're going to have any trouble here is if you keep talking to me that way.'

The barman lit himself a cigarette. 'She'll be getting changed about now.' He moved down the bar and left me with my beer.

I sipped it. It tasted sour.

A girl wandered over to the bar. She had long blonde hair under her spiked helmet and her moustache was full and thick and black.

'Hey Bern, you got a pad for me?' she said to the barman.

He handed her an order pad and nodded at me. 'Guy here wants to talk to you.'

The girl looked me up and down, shook her head and grimaced. 'I don't think so, Bern.' She laughed. 'You'd better give him his money back.'

Bern touched her arm as she went to walk away. 'He's a bull.'

She looked again. I let her look while I took in a few details of my own in the back bar mirror. Someone, and my money was on Bern, had taped two glossy photographic prints to the mirror. One was of our dear departed Kaiser Wilhelm II, the other of our glorious president, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg.

'You been in the wars, soldier?' the girl said, suddenly up close.

I took a deep breath but my sinuses were still too swollen to make out what scent she wore, if any. I looked her up and down. Not even any jewellery, though she had a mole on one hip and a small red scar to the left of her belly button.

'How does the moustache stay on?' I said.

'What do you mean?' she said, fondling it. 'This is all natural. It's my hair that's fake.'

'Nice.' I glanced at her blonde crotch, a reflex action.

'Thanks. I get that a lot.'

'Not sure about the helmet though.'

'Look, I need to get along and earn my tips, so do you want to come to the point?'

Her eyes were blue, not brown. This would be a cinch. I took a quick sip of beer.

'You knew Emma Gross?' I said.

She folded her arms, a move that emphasised what little cleavage she had. 'Why now?'

'What?'

'I said, why now? Why are you here bringing this up now? Emma's death was months ago, more than a year, even.'

Her pale skin was colouring up beautifully. Maybe this wouldn't be such a cinch after all. I was turning soft, remember.

'We've reopened the case. We don't think we got the right guy last time.'

'Oh yeah, who's we? Cause that detective I spoke with last year, he wasn't worth shit.'

'And who was that?'

'What, you think I've got nothing better to do than sit around remembering detectives' names?'

'Why don't you just relax and tell me what you know, and this'll all go a lot smoother.'

'Are you threatening me now?'

'No, I – '

'Bern, did you hear that, this guy's threatening me.'

Bern rubbed a hand over the stubble on his head. I put my palms down on the sticky surface of the bar.

'Look, Trudi, no one's threatening anyone,' I said.

'You got someone for the murder already. Why would you want to go hunting for someone else?'

'Did Emma have a boyfriend?'

'Oh man...'

'Yes or no.'

'No.' Something in her face told me there was more.

'But?'

'But what?'

'She didn't have a boyfriend but there was...someone, right? A girlfriend?'

'Christ on the cross, Herr Detective, not all prostitutes are dykes, you know.'

'So tell me. She had someone, but not a boyfriend?'

Applause from the tables drowned out her words. The woman on stage twirled on her heels as the band syncopated its tune all to hell. Trudi moved closer. One of her pink nipples brushed my jacket sleeve but I put that down as a mistake.

'There was some guy,' she said, raising her voice, 'some suitor she had regular. I never knew his name, though God knows I tried to find out. But she wouldn't say. Then it all went...different somehow. I don't know. We didn't talk for a long time.'

'But you worked the same hotel. The Adler? Worked the same streets around the station, right?'

Trudi went over to Bern, who was keeping his distance. She took his cigarette from between his lips and jammed it into her own mouth and smoked off a good deal of it in a couple of puffs. Hell of a trick, though hardly surprising given her former calling.

She came back with the cigarette burning in her fingers. 'Yes,' she said, through the smoke leaking from her rouged lips.

'So you saw her around even though you stopped talking so regularly?'

'Uh-huh.' She took another drag. The cigarette was down to the end now.

'About how long before she died did she stop talking to you?'

'I don't know. Couple of months. Sometime after Christmas. We'd had a nice Christmas together. Worked all through but on the 24
^th
, the evening, when we gave each other presents. It was nice, you know? Something to remind us of home?' She smiled, gazing into the distance, seeing beyond the confines of the cellar bar in its faceless city street. 'It wasn't like she stopped talking to me, if you get me. She withdrew all round, didn't really talk to anyone so much. I don't know what it was, but it wasn't long after she started with this regular suitor. I think that was something to do with it.'

'Two months isn't that long a time to go without regular contact,' I said.

Her eyes flashed lamp light at me. 'It is when you've been so...it's a hell of a long time in streetwalker years, bull.'

'Were you two lovers, Trudi?'

She dropped the smoking stub and ground it out under her heels. Funny, I hadn't noticed she'd been wearing shoes earlier.

'Okay, it doesn't matter. This regular guy, you never saw him?'

'I might have done, but I wouldn't know. Never one for taking it easy, our Emma. There was never any one guy I noticed her with more than any other.' She locked eyes with me. 'They all get to look the same, after a while.'

I held myself still on my stool. 'You found her in room thirty-seven that night, right?'

She shook her head and sighed the last of the smoke from her lungs. 'Next morning. About six am.'

'How'd you know she was in there?'

'I had a suitor the same night. I saw her go upstairs. Didn't see her come down. In the morning I saw the key for thirty-seven was still missing from the pigeon hole and I went up to knock on the door. It was open and she was inside.'

'Did you see the suitor she went upstairs with?'

Trudi looked up from staring at the floor. 'No, damn it!' She leaned in and said, 'You think if I'd seen him I wouldn't have shouted it out loud to the world?' She gave a disgusted grunt and waved me away. 'But I told you all this before.'

'Me?'

'No, that other detective.'

'Dark hair, buck teeth?'

'That's right.'

'Name of Ritter? Inspector Michael Ritter?'

'Well, Inspector someone-or-other. Beyond that I don't remember. But the teeth, yeah, that sounds like him. He didn't seem all that interested so how'm I supposed to believe you'll be any different?'

'Trudi, if you know something – '

'Frieda,' she said. 'Frieda Brandt. Find her.'

Trudi lifted a drinks tray from behind the bar and moved off with her sights on the tables.

'Who is she?' I called.

'Emma came to me that night, the night she died. We had a talk. There was a lot going on. Find Frieda Brandt. If anyone can tell you more, she can.'

'Where do I find her?' I called.

'If I knew that I'd tell you,' she called back.

Bern had crept closer over the course of the conversation. Now, as I looked at him, he shrugged.

'Another beer?' He pointed at my glass.

'No, save it.' I pushed off the stool and got to my feet. 'Tastes like shit, anyway.'

'You're breaking my heart, bull. Maybe you want to try some other place next time.'

The girl on stage had finished her act. The band stopped playing. The drummer gave a circus roll and the girl whipped off her fake moustache to a smattering of applause. Many of the drinkers sported fake moustaches too. What some people would do for fun.

I headed for the curtain, in reality a large black-and-white imperial banner, the bigger brother of the one hanging above the door outside. So now I had another name but no idea of how the woman who owned it might be connected to the case. Of course, the best way of finding that out would be to find her. I had the feeling that would be easier said than done.

First thing you did when you wanted to find someone in Düsseldorf? You hit the residential records. Each precinct house kept records of who lived in its precinct; whenever anyone moved, he had to notify his local precinct before registering his new address with whichever precinct he'd moved to.

Two snags. First, not everyone bothered to register. Second, there was no central department to coordinate these records. If I wanted Frieda Brandt's address I'd have to visit each and every precinct until I found it.

Unless...

I took a bus to my precinct. If not for the sign above the door and the bars on the ground floor windows, the station house would have been impossible to distinguish from the five-storey apartment buildings either side of it. It had the same weathered, unwashed façade, the same number of high windows, the same three steps leading from the street to the door. As I walked up the steps, the place felt like home, albeit the kind of home you never wanted to go back to.

I pushed through the door into the waiting area. Two
Schupo
were wrestling a citizen to the ground beneath the information board. A couple of the posters had come loose and floated to the tiled floor. The citizen was babbling the way habitual drunks do. The smell of weeks-old booze-sweat hit me and I had to hold my breath as the
Schupo
hauled the man to his feet and to the cells in the basement.

I greeted the desk sergeant, a tall, dark-haired man with muttonchop whiskers who'd only worked on my shift a couple of times. He loomed from the front desk. The clock on the wall beside him told me it was twenty to one in the morning. Aside from the echoes of the drunk yelling on his way to the cells, the place was quiet enough to hear the clock ticking. The sergeant had been filling in a form. I handed him my ID.

'Captain's not about I suppose?'

The sergeant glanced at the clock and gave me a look.

'All right.' I held up my hands. 'Stupid question. I need to leave him a message, then. I'll go and take it to his office.'

The sergeant shrugged, emphasising the breadth of his shoulders. The electric lamp overhead made his oiled hair gleam.

'Kaufmann's running the squad tonight,' the sergeant said.

'Thanks.'

'He's out on a burglary though. Only just gone, so if you need to speak to him...'

'I should be okay, thanks.'

Andreas Kaufmann, a detective on the opposite shift to mine. I'd worked with him a couple of times. He was a competent man. Better, he'd be out for the next couple of hours, which gave me the time I needed. I walked past the desk to the stairwell, pushed through the door and went up the stairs. The first floor door led to what passed for my office, the detective squad room. I ignored that floor entirely and went up to the second. I entered the hallway. Silence. At the end of the hall was the captain's office. I headed for that and opened the door.

It wasn't locked. It was never locked, for one simple reason. It was the only room in the building with a telephone. It had to be kept open in case the night watch commander had to make a call.

The large desk looked small against the size of the office, which stretched across the building. There were two windows on opposite sides of the room, one looking out onto the street, the other looking over the courtyards of the apartment buildings on the block. Filing cabinets lined the wall behind the desk. The telephone sat on the desk blotter, its thick rat's tail cable running into the chipped plaster of the wall. Around the telephone were some trays for paperwork – all empty – a carriage clock and a desk calendar still showing Tues, 27
^th
May. There was also a small leather-bound address book by the telephone. I turned on the desk lamp and a moth started flitting around the light. I swiped at it and missed.

I opened the book. Each precinct number was listed under 'P'. Made sense.