Jutta Profijt - Morgue Drawer Four

“The guy is more Catholic than the Pope,” Martin said.

Stupid saying, never liked it. Plus, I didn’t understand why Martin was making such a pregnant pause right now, of all times. Sometimes it’s pretty annoying that I never went to college.

“Um, what are you trying to tell me?” I asked, slightly irritated.

“Il Papa,” Martin said. “That’s Italian. It means ‘the Pope.’”

“You’re not trying to tell me that the Pope was there?” I asked.

“No. But Dr. Eilig was.”

“And?” I said. I could certainly understand Martin getting into a tizzy about this guy drawing his whole profession into question, but we were right in the middle of a murder investigation, and we had much better things to do than ponder the latest lunacies that some wingnut had brought up two weeks ago at the convention center.

“Dr. Christian Eilig, or ‘Dr. Christian’ for short, is more Catholic than the Pope, as they say; he lives in a nice area out past Bergisch Gladbach in the hills east of Cologne, but as anyone who reads the local papers here knows, he has an apartment in town from which he has a view of Cologne Cathedral. And, he collects cars.”

“Matchbox?” I asked Martin.

“No, real ones,” Martin replied. “When asked about this vice, he says, ‘Everyone has to have a vice, otherwise we’d all be saints, not people.’”

Hmm.

“In addition, he’s married.”

I’d have liked to nod pensively, but that wasn’t possible, obviously, so I said hmm again.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Martin asked.

“I think so,” I said. “How do we find out if the Pope had an SLR?” I asked.

“The newspaper,” Martin said. “If the Pope is driving an SLR, they’ll know about it.”

He took out his cell phone, dialed a number he knew by heart, and then gave his name and mentioned “coroner’s office.”

“No, we haven’t got any interesting bodies right now, at least not on my end,” he said apparently in response to a question. “This time I’ve actually got a non-business-related question, if that’s all right. I’ve found myself in a silly bet with someone, and I’m hoping you can confirm that I won.”

He listened for a moment and then laughed. “All right, does Dr. Eilig, a.k.a. Dr. Christian, own a Mercedes SLR?”

Martin’s face grew long. “No? Are you sure?” The corners of his mouth that had sunk down in disappointment suddenly shot up.

“Are you sure? Wow, I’m so relieved.”

He laughed again, promised to keep sending official press releases to the e-mail address he already had, and hung up.

“That guy is a freelancer over at the Cologne Advertiser , and he owes me various favors,” Martin explained with a very satisfied expression on his face. I was amazed because I hadn’t at all expected Martin to keep an account like that. Once again I’d been completely wrong about him, and once again he’d surprised me. I was going to have to start getting used to the idea that people can be complex and interesting even outside the environment I’d been hanging out in the past few years. It’s actually kind of exciting to see the world this way. Even women here weren’t just bed bunnies but human beings, with intellect and personality. OK, I wasn’t quite that far yet, but hanging around with Martin had started to open my mind up to all kinds of new possibilities.

“Eilig did have an SLR, but it hasn’t been seen for about ten days. After a reporter had asked him about it three days ago, he said he’d gotten an excellent offer for the car from a prospective buyer abroad, and he sold it to him.”

“Well now all my warning lights are flashing,” I said.

“Exactly,” Martin said, his voice squeaking with excitement. “We got him.” He said it aloud. And he said it again: “We got the bastard.”

We drove to Eilig’s address in Cologne, which Martin had elicited from another reporter so no one would notice his sudden interest in the man. His apartment was one of six in the building, each seventy square meters according to the poster in front advertising the two empty units. These were condos, actually, but that didn’t surprise us. If the arrangement of the doorbells and nameplates matched the arrangement of the apartments, then Eilig’s apartment was on the second floor on the right. Martin positioned the car in front of the entry while I orbited the building and got a marvelous view through the gigantic wall of glass into the living room where Eilig was sitting in a deep leather armchair staring into space. Strictly speaking he was staring at the flat-screen TV hanging on the wall in his line of sight, but the TV was turned off, and I didn’t think that Eilig was staring at the dark glossy rectangle.

In his left hand he was holding a glass with three melting ice cubes in it. Either the guy was missing his car with a longing that really made you feel sorry for him, or else he had another problem. I was already inclined toward the latter analysis, even before seeing him like this. But if you watched the call girl you hired to brighten your mood die in agony, and then you decided you needed to spirit her body away without anyone noticing, and to do that you had to abuse the coolest fucking car in the world, only to have someone steal your rocket ship complete with the body in the trunk, then I’m thinking you’ve got a pretty good reason to feel melancholic. But then if on top of that you also needed to murder the car thief to keep even his dying words from publicly disclosing the corpse in the trunk, then from my perspective that would be reason enough to be staring into space with a drink in your hand. Eilig apparently thought so, too. He didn’t stir.

I reported my observations to Martin, and he was pleased Eilig was home. He was less interested in everything else.

I whooshed back to the living room window and stopped in horror. The chair was empty. After a moment’s terror I saw Eilig standing over by the bookcase. He was just hanging up the phone. He turned around, picked up an attaché case from next to the armchair, and walked out of the living room.

I raced back to Martin and updated him on my surveillance just as the red warning light started blinking at the entrance to the ramp leading down to the underground garage. A Jag with tinted windows exited. We couldn’t tell who the driver was, but we both automatically assumed Eilig was sitting in the car, and we followed him. In the trash can. Fortunately traffic was heavy, and we were hitting all red lights instead of green, so our little pedal car was actually able to keep up in the car “chase.”

Eilig wasn’t concentrating on his driving, which may have been due to any number of causes, not the least of which was indubitably a certain blood alcohol level, if you recall the glass with the ice cubes. As we followed him we enjoyed some excited speculation. Where was he driving to? And why? At first we thought he was driving to his local parliamentary office since he had an attaché case with him, but he wasn’t driving in the right direction for that. Then he started getting closer to the neighborhood where Semira had lived, but that didn’t make any sense. Ultimately he just kept heading eastward, toward Cologne’s medieval old town and the Rhine, which runs north-south through the middle of Cologne.

Martin was in high spirits like a kid on Christmas Eve. He was driving frenetically, blathering on about all kinds of nonsense without stopping to take a breath and sniffling about seventeen times. But he didn’t have a runny nose. Just nerves. It was driving me crazy. I hate it when people sniffle. I know, my manners weren’t always the best, either, but I always kept my nose clean—that is a minimum standard of civilization that I retained throughout my whole life. I asked Martin to stop. He said, “Yes, of course,” and then he sniffled again. He didn’t even notice. I suppressed my disgust and left him alone so I wouldn’t make him even more nervous. After all, he had to keep track of the Jag, keep an eye on the road, watch out for traffic, and stop at red lights, even if the Jag darted through a yellow. But we always caught up with him again at the next light; that’s the benefit I guess to a totally uncoordinated traffic light system.