Requiem in Vienna: A Viennese Mystery (Viennese Mysteries) Page 7

  “And native talent?”

  “No end of that. Quite a lovely little soubrette and a perfect mezzo. Mahler, however, had plans to turn her into a coloratura.”

  “Were you present at the rehearsal where the unfortunate young woman died?” Gross asked.

  “No, thank God. That would have been more than my nerves could have taken. To see poor Mahler so close to injury, perhaps death!”

  “There was of course the death of Fräulein Kaspar, as well,” Werthen said, an edge to his voice.

  Anna von Mildenburg pulled herself out of her melodramatic swoon, and fixed him with a fish-cold stare.

  “Tragic, of course. But merely an unfortunate by-product.”

  “By-product?” Werthen said.

  “Of the attempt on Mahler’s life. That is why you are here, no? You surely cannot think that Kaspar was the intended victim. Who would care enough about the mousy little creature to send a fire curtain hurtling down on her?”

  “She was a promising talent, is that not so?” Gross said.

  “Promising, but not yet actualized. Besides, she was no threat to other singers. Mitzi had already left the company.”

  “That would be Mitzi Brauner?” Werthen said.

  She smiled appreciatively. “I see we have an opera fan present.”

  Werthen ignored this remark, staring instead directly into the singer’s face, herding her like a sheepdog back onto the track she perpetually desired to stray from.

  “Yes, Mitzi Brauner,” von Mildenburg continued. “She left for Aachen. Not a great house, but then her time was vorbei, past. She no longer had the looks to carry the soubrette roles. So the Kaspar girl had a clear field.”

  “And what about Fräulein Kaspar’s affair with Mahler?” Werthen asked. “Were there—”

  “Angry, jealous, and spurned lovers ready to scratch her eyes out?” she finished for him. Then she let out a low laugh. “Hardly. Though he has been here less than two years, Mahler has, I understand, made several conquests. But there were no bad feelings afterward with them, just as there are none with Mahler and me. You cannot put light in a bottle. We fellow artists recognize that.”

  “Nothing so base as jealousy afoot then.” Werthen said.

  “Be skeptical if it suits you,” she said, suddenly bristling.

  Now we are getting somewhere, Werthen thought.

  “Are artists above normal human emotions?” he pressed on.

  “How can I begin to explain to someone not involved in the arts?”

  “Oh, please, madam,” Gross interjected. “Werthen here is a published writer, in point of fact. His short stories have been highly lauded.”

  Werthen cut his eyes at Gross, but the criminologist was having too much fun to pay him any attention.

  “I had no idea,” she said, looking at Werthen.

  “Part of the reason Herr Mahler hired him. Because he understands the artistic temperament. He is one of you.”

  As usual, Gross liked to pile it on thick, but it amused Werthen to see how von Mildenburg changed her attitude.

  “You will understand then,” she said, shifting in her chair, and leaning toward Werthen as if to impart a secret. “You see there could not possibly be that sort of jealousy. I mean Mahler, he wants to possess a woman, but not in the physical way. He wants her soul, not her body. His conquests were of the spirit, not the flesh.”

  “You mean, you and he . . .”

  “Exactly. As if a sword were placed between us in the bed. There were thus no spurned lovers. There were no lovers at all.”

  FIVE

  Death forged a truce between Werthen and Gross.

  Detective Inspector Bernhard Drechsler, a razor-thin man, directed the foot traffic inside the small First District flat. Three beefy constables stood at ease by the door, waiting while Werthen and Gross got about their business. The largest of the three, a man with a nose so veined and scarlet as to suggest he had poured most of the annual wine harvest of Burgenland into his body, wore a bemused expression. His thick arms were folded across his chest like a challenge.

  Werthen was unsure what they were looking for, but Gross insisted they should investigate, and they had arrived at the scene just in time to forestall any initial police examination. A personal favor from Drechsler, whom Werthen had never before met. Sent to Czernowitz for a crash course in the spring, the Viennese inspector and Gross had formed a collegial relationship. Far from friendship, their connection was professional and highly competitive.

  Yesterday, Gross had apprised the inspector of the Mahler affair, but Drechsler quite appropriately indicated that until there was a crime, there could be no investigation. The death of Fräulein Kaspar had been put down to accident. Gross, of course, had known this. He had approached Drechsler not assuming the police would take part in the case. Instead, he wanted a conduit to the inside; if any other opera-related incidents were to take place, Gross wanted to know of them.

  The death of Friedrich Gunther was such an incident. Gunther, a member of the Vienna Philharmonic, was also part of the Hofoper orchestra, third violinist.

  Discovered by his cleaning lady at nine this morning, Gunther was hanging by his neck from a tasseled length of chartreuse green curtain cord attached to the brass chandelier in his sitting room. Under the body was a faux Jacobean dining chair, tipped on its side. Werthen and Gross had arrived while the body was still suspended; Werthen caught sight of the swollen, reddish blue face and came close to being ill.

  Gross, however, was fascinated by the dangling body, approaching it from all angles, closely examining the carpeting underfoot with a strong, handheld magnifier plucked from out of his ever-present crime-scene bag. He muttered to himself, examined the carpet more closely, and then glanced quickly at the largest of the constables, his arms still crossed in front of him.

  “I assume you wear a size forty-seven boot, Officer.”

  It was not a question.

  The constable nodded his head, suspicion now replacing bemusement.

  “And that you have also violated the most basic of crime-scene principles. Do not trample the evidence.” Gross’s voice raised in volume.

  “Didn’t know it was a crime to kill yourself . . . sir.” Insolence gleamed in the constable’s eye.

  “That’ll do, Schmidt,” Drechsler cautioned. Then to Gross: “They were summoned from the local police station. I arrived in time to stop them cutting the man down.”

  “We thought the chandelier would come falling down any minute,” Constable Schmidt said by way of self-defense.

  Gross appraised the condition of the chandelier. “If it withstood the initial drop, then it will hold.” He glanced from the chair to the boots of the victim, dangling in front of him. “Did you touch anything? Rearrange anything? The chair, for instance.”

  Schmidt shook his head. The other constables stood mute beside him.

  “Officers?” Gross indicated the other two.

  “No, sir,” they chimed in unison.

  While Gross produced a tape measure and chalk from his crime-scene bag, Werthen took in the ambience of the room.

  Gunther had obviously been a bachelor. The size of the flat and its appointments would have told him that if the cleaning lady, still sobbing in the kitchen, had not already done so. No wife, for example, would have tolerated the cheap reproduction furniture with which Gunther had littered his flat. Through a small archway to the left was a dining area. Darkly painted chairs in medieval design were clustered around a dining table that was at least two shades lighter and of Renaissance design. The chair Gunther had used to stand on before hanging himself was from the dining area. In the sitting room a solitary and massive armchair of execrable taste was placed quite near the middle of the room, a marquetry table at its side. On the walls hung prints of fine artworks: Vermeer, Hals, Brueghel. Gunther’s taste veered toward the Dutch and Flemish schools; toward the trappings of culture, but with no coherence, no taste. Werthen did not need to go to the sma
ll back bedroom in order to know that there would most likely be a single bed and cavernous wardrobe, both in the heavy Alt Deutsch style. Or perhaps more of the faux Jacobean.

  Gross still busied himself beneath Gunther’s body. Now he was photographing the scene from several different angles, a spark of flash illuminating the room from time to time.

  What little other light there was came from two gas lamps on the sitting room wall. The chandelier was a gesture, merely. Nonfunctioning. Werthen marveled that it could actually hold the weight of the dead violinist, though Gunther was a slight man. He went to the only window in the sitting room; it let out onto a light shaft. Gunther’s address was noble enough, the Herrengasse. However, the cramped apartment was at the back of the building, which had once been a city palace for the Lobkowitz family. Perhaps then it housed domestics, but with the conversion of the old palais in the last decade, it had become a freestanding apartment.

  Musicians earned little enough, Werthen knew. The job was a sinecure—at least it had been before Mahler’s reign of terror at the Court Opera and Philharmonic—but such security came at a high price. Herr Gunther clearly had made barely enough for a single man to subside on; whether by design or necessity, his violin had also become his wife. A sad sort of life, Werthen thought. Devoted to art, yes. But then to come home from the lofty world of music to such a depressing environment. Once again, Werthen marveled that a sense of beauty was not something that was generalized to all aspects of one’s life. That is, he was amazed that a man such as Gunther who, one assumed, had been filled with the beauty inherent in music, could still live in such unaesthetic surroundings. Or, like much of Vienna, perhaps Herr Gunther had spent his free time in his favorite coffeehouse and not in the restricted confines of his unwelcoming apartment.

  Werthen’s ruminations were cut short by a snort from Gross.

  “Suicide. Utter nonsense.”

  Drechsler also perked up at this comment.

  “Well, I admit that the lack of any suicide note looks suspicious. But what makes you say so without even examining the body?”

  To which comment Gross simply righted the dining chair, placing it under the dangling feet of Gunther. The tips of the dead man’s boots were suspended two inches above the chair seat.

  “I’ll be damned,” Drechsler said. “Cut him down.” He motioned to the constables who now finished the work they had earlier begun.

  They laid the body gently onto the floor, and Gross leaned down to make a quick examination. Drechsler, his hawklike face marred by a rather unattractive overbite, squatted next to him.

  The inspector assumed control now, slipping a forefinger under the front of the noose. The skin underneath was neither bruised nor rope-burned. He worked around to the back of the man’s head, feeling for broken vertebrae with his eyes closed. He shook his head.

  “Amateur,” Gross spluttered, as if it was the worst offense he could imagine. “As if he didn’t care enough to even try to deceive us.”

  Werthen assumed Gross was not referring to the dead man but rather to some unknown assailant.

  “Perhaps he had no idea you would be investigating, Dr. Gross.” Drechsler said this, so Werthen thought, with no little degree of irony.

  “Had your constables had their way,” Gross replied with equanimity, “this may very well have passed muster as a suicide. Or perhaps he was relying on the elevated suicide rate of Vienna to cover the true crime.”

  “He?” Werthen said. Of course he knew what Gross meant. But it was as if he was denied the power of deduction when the master criminalist was in attendance.

  “Find me the woman who could have hoisted Herr Gunther up there and I shall be happy to arrest her.”

  “Arresting, I believe, still comes under my purview,” Drechsler said, suddenly taking offense.

  “A manner of speaking only,” Gross allowed.

  This seemed to mollify Drechsler, who continued his examination. “The absence of ligature marks on the neck is also consistent with the obvious interpretation,” Drechsler added.

  The words were out before Werthen could stop them: “What interpretation?” Which comment allowed Gross and Drechsler to share commiserating looks.

  This was really too much. On his own, he was quick to grasp all implications. However, the very presence of Gross seemed to unman him, to sap him of all intellectual initiative. Werthen was quick to cover up his question. “I mean, I assume you hypothesize that Herr Gunther was killed and then hung up here to make it look like suicide.”

  “Bravo, Werthen,” Gross said. “That is precisely what we believe. Though I note that your mouth still works more quickly than your mind.”

  Which brought a low chuckle from Constable Schmidt, silenced immediately by a glare from Drechsler.

  Werthen needed badly to rehabilitate himself. Though forensic pathology was not his strong suit, he ventured on.

  “The aspect of the man’s face would, however, suggest death by strangulation, would it not?”

  Gross, still leaning over the body, now looked to Drechsler for permission, and moved the noose to reveal bruising on each side of the neck.

  “As you say, Werthen, death by strangulation. The blood spots on the cheeks from burst ocular capillaries, as well as the cyanotic, engorged aspect of the face itself all indicate that. Manual strangulation. You can see the clear outline of fingers here and here.” He pressed his thumb into the small triangle formed by the junction of the dead man’s collarbones. “And a ruptured larynx, if I am not mistaken. We will know more with the full autopsy.”

  Drechsler stood now, flexing his back. “Motive,” he said. “A musician seems a harmless enough sort. Who would want to kill him?”

  “That, my dear inspector, is what we intend to discover.”

  Herr Regierungsrath Leitner was not overjoyed to see Werthen again.

  “I don’t see how the unfortunate death of Herr Gunther has anything to do with your investigations on Herr Mahler’s behalf.”

  “Humor us,” Gross said. “We are inordinately curious where violent death is concerned.”

  The addition of Gross to the investigation seemed to discomfit Leitner. The criminologist’s reputation preceded him; Leitner reddened at Gross’s comment, wringing his hands and attempting with little success to control an eye twitch.

  “Most irregular,” he muttered.

  They said nothing and finally Leitner rose from his desk in the opera offices, and led their way via a series of mazelike stairways to the main auditorium.

  As they approached the orchestra pit, Leitner pointed to a chair on the left side.

  “There. That was Herr Gunther’s position as third violinist. He sat in that very chair for the final performance of the season last night.”

  Without asking permission, Gross suddenly dropped down into the slightly depressed pit, sat on the chair in question, and peered at the stage.

  “I will need the curtain opened, if you don’t mind, Herr Regierungsrath Leitner.”

  When Leitner hesitated, Gross added, “A simple enough matter, no?” The criminologist grinned at Leitner with false bonhomie.

  “It will take a moment,” Leitner replied, leaving Werthen and Gross to summon a stagehand.

  “Examining the sight lines, Gross?” Werthen asked, now they were alone. “It would be better if you slouched down some in the chair. Gunther was a smaller man than you.”

  Gross was about to make a comment, but thought better of it. Instead, he took Werthen’s advice.

  “Yes,” he said, once the curtains were opened. “As I thought.” He sprang out of the chair and reached up to Werthen. “A hand, Werthen, if you please.”

  Werthen was surprised at the strength of his friend’s grip as he helped to tug Gross out of the orchestra pit.

  “I must thank our mutual friend Klimt,” the criminologist said, brushing at imaginary dust on his dark gray trousers. “He recommended a course of training with dumbbells, though I personally employ the In
dian club. It’s done wonders for my stamina and mobility. Time was I would never have dreamed of jumping down into that pit.”

  “Damn the exercise, Gross. Did you find what I assume you were looking for?”

  At which moment Leitner returned.

  “Satisfied, gentlemen?”

  “Inordinately,” Gross said.

  Leitner did not like the sound of this. “If there is any other assistance I can be . . .”

  But this was said with tepid indifference.

  “I assume you keep records of attendance by orchestra members. I mean, specifically, at rehearsals.”

  “Yes.” A measured nod of the head from Leitner.

  “Then, perhaps?” Gross swept his arm in invitation.

  Back in Leitner’s office they were shown an enormous ledger recording the schedules of each musician and singer. Gross stabbed the sheet with a large forefinger, following it down the page and through the dates of late May and June. He gave a large sigh.

  “Thank you, Herr Regierungsrath Leitner. You have been most helpful.”

  Leitner cast Werthen a pleading look to which Werthen merely raised his eyebrows, as if to say he was as much in the dark as the assistant director was. Partly true; just partly.

  Once outside, Werthen halted Gross with a hand to his arm.

  “I assume you were checking for Herr Gunther’s whereabouts on the days of other incidents.”

  “Yes, Werthen. Indeed I was. And he was present and accounted for in each circumstance.”

  Werthen shook his head. “And that proves . . . ?”

  “Very little, without the added information of his view.”

  “From Herr Gunther’s third violin chair, you mean?”

  “Correct again. Gunther would clearly have been a witness.”

  “As I thought,” Werthen said, and was pleased to see the anticipatory smirk forming on Gross’s face disappear.