“Max, this is Jordy. Jordy Fields, you remember, from the D.A.”
Jordy Fields, the prosecutor who had often taken on his cases, whom he had once been fairly close to in a ridiculous sort of way. But he hadn’t seen or heard from him for years, not since he had retired to Vermont.
“Hello, Jordy.”
His voice betrayed no surprise.
“This is going to sound awfully strange, Max, but I’m calling from Switzerland.”
“Holiday?”
“No.”
Fremont waited. He wasn’t sure he was too happy about this intrusion from the past.
“Listen, Max,” Jordy said. “A good friend of mine, Victor Chadraz, is in big trouble over here. I flew over to help him out.”
There was another pause. Fremont still said nothing.
“He’s charged with murdering his sister. I don’t believe he did, but the case is pretty bad against him. My problem is, I’ve been here four days, and I don’t see any way to help him out. I’m stymied, frankly.”
“And?” Fremont asked dryly.
“Well, you’ve always been good at things that stymie other people, Max. So I’m going to make an outrageous proposal. I know you’re retired and all, but Victor will pay to fly you over here and pay you handsomely for each day you’re here. I want you to come and help me out of this.”
“Help him,” Fremont corrected. He looked out the kitchen window at a blue jay perched on the branch of a dogwood tree, held his hand over the mouthpiece, and let out a long sigh. Then he said, “You’d better tell me what’s going on.”
Jordy coughed into the phone.
“All right,” he started. “Victor works in Bern — a lawyer. Moved there recently. His sister’s just married this creep. They’re immensely wealthy—”
“They’re the Chadrazes?” Fremont interrupted.
“You got it. Anyway, Victor’s sure he married her for nothing but the money. She fell for him in a big way, and he decided to exploit his luck, right? So. For some unexplained reason, they decide to honeymoon in Switzerland, even though they’ve had a big fight with Victor — but they went to this mountain town, a couple of hours away. Didn’t contact him or anything. You with me? So. On a Wednesday night, late, Victor gets a phone call from his sister. She’s crying, she’s in trouble, she needs his help. He hops in his car, drives through the night, wakes up the hotel, almost gets thrown out by a cop, and finally gets into her room. She’s gone; there’s a suicide note, fairly generic, on her bed.”
“Her husband?” Fremont muttered.
“That’s the thing. Guy named Harry Witgold. He’s not there, but it turns out he’s been in Luzern, a couple of hours away, at a party — sort of a late stag thing — thrown by a couple of business friends who work in Switzerland. He was at a nightclub all night long, with tons of people — ironclad alibi. Not only that, he arrived there in a taxi — an hour-and-a-half drive, but of course he’s not worried about money. Not only that, but the taxi ride started at this place he went with Coco — that’s his wife, Victor’s sister — some tourist spot, waterfall or something — Glacier Gorge. The taxi took them to the glacier gorge and then back to the hotel, but only she gets out at the hotel. She kisses him, and he drives on to Luzern. So he’s covered for absolutely the whole time.”
“And her?”
“Well, she washed up early Thursday morning at a beach. Seems she jumped off this bridge that’s famous for its suicides. But here’s the thing. Victor was adamant from the start that it was some kind of trick, that she never would have done this, that it was Harry. And she did look pretty damned beat up. They did an autopsy, of course — cause of death wasn’t drowning, was a knock on the head with a large object, probably a rock. And it’s impossible to jump off this bridge and land on a rock because the water’s much too deep anywhere you can jump. So Victor was right. She was murdered. Only it looks like it was he who murdered her.”
“Why him?”
“A couple of things. First of all, no one else knew her except her husband, and he couldn’t have done it. She’d had this big fight with Victor, of course, about the marriage, and especially because he’d warned her about changing her will. She resented that, and said, maybe to spite him, that she was going to change it anyway. So he wrote her a letter, which Harry Witgold conveniently has in his possession, warning her against doing any such thing, talking about the waste of the family money and so on. Well, she hadn’t changed it when she died. And it turns out — Victor says he didn’t know this — that she’d left everything to him. There’s motive for you, huh? About to change her will and disinherit him? And he’s had some financial trouble recently, which he was so naive as to admit — some bum investments. Nothing to worry such as you or me, but still, something.”
“It’s starting to look grim,” Fremont commented.
“Exactly. And then there’s this. The suicide note was typed on Victor’s typewriter. And he was supposedly the first to find it, so it’s possible that he didn’t find it, but that he brought it with him when he barged into her room on Wednesday night. The signature’s hers, but he might have got that somehow on a blank piece of paper, then typed the note on top of it. And finally, there’s no record of a call out from her room on Wednesday night. So it looks like he’s making up the story of the desperate phone call, too.”
“Any more?” Fremont asked.
“Not really.”
“But Victor was adamant from the start that it wasn’t suicide?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Are you sure?”
“Quite sure.”
“Why would he say that if he’d killed her? Wasn’t the whole point to make it look like a suicide?”
“That would seem to be the hitch, of course. But the cops don’t buy it. They think Victor realized, belatedly, that the autopsy would find out what it did, so he dropped his original plan and switched over to accusing Harry. And there’s not much you can say to disprove that.”
“But you believe your friend?”
“I’ve seen a lot, Max, you know? I don’t think this guy’s guilty, if you know what I mean.”
Fremont didn’t answer. Later that afternoon he called the travel agent in Stilton; the next day he packed a small bag and got on the bus that went from White River Junction to Logan airport, more or less direct; and that night, sitting in the departure lounge waiting for the plane, he opened a small Tupperware bowl and slowly ate a meal of fiddlesticks and lamb. He didn’t want to feel as if he was enjoying this, messing around with murder once again, so he told himself that it was only the prospect of the long ride on the jumbo jet that was exciting him.
Fremont put up at the Sauvage, in a modest room one floor below the suite that Harry Witgold was still staying in. He slept all afternoon on the day of his arrival, ate a modest meal with Jordy, then talked with a woman named Marianne Neiger. She had been at the reception desk on that Wednesday afternoon and had seen the taxi pull up outside, seen the kiss, seen Coco Chadraz walking up the steps, her head bowed down, in that Liza Itzenhagen outfit that she had both envied and resented. She found it curious that Fremont, a man, should be so interested in her thoughts about the dress: how much it must have cost, how appropriate it was on a woman built like Ms. Chadraz, and so on and so forth — as well as what she might or might not have done better with her wild, impassioned hair. Marianne would never have worn it like Coco did. She would have tamed it, maybe even straightened it, and worn it with dignity, bunned up or maybe in a French braid. It was better, even sexier, she maintained, to carry oneself dignified in public, not like you’d just got out of bed.