“Any time, Max. Take care.”
He sat back, pleased. It was enough, he thought — if not for a conviction, at least to bring the man in and work on him. He looked at the card on the phone table: Inspektor Richard Sigrist. He would call Inspektor Sigrist, fill him in. Then he would call Jordy, invite him and Victor to a late dinner at the Sauvage.
The phone rang again.
“Max, Jordy. That was a tough one — tried it on all kinds of people. Finally found a mountain climber who could tell me. It’s a thing they use for skiing, to find people buried in avalanches. Combination receiver and transmitter — sends a little signal — everybody carries one, and if one of the party gets buried, they can find him under the snow.”
Fremont mulled this over.
“Why’d you want to know?” Jordy asked.
“Witgold returned one to a sports store this afternoon.” He paused. “Why don’t you come over, Jordy — I’ve got a few things to tell you. I’d like to go home tomorrow, too, if you can arrange it.”
He could almost hear Jordy smile.
“Be right over, Max. And listen... thanks a lot.”
Fremont laughed. He poured himself another glass of Sirius Bordeaux and then sat down again. They were in the lobby of the Sauvage, a beautiful room full of ancient overstuffed chairs and antique chests, old oak tables and oil paintings of someone’s ancestors. The windows stretched almost from ceiling to floor; looking one way you could see the stunning reach of the Banzlaui Glacier, falling between peaks carved out of the deepening evening sky; in the other direction lay the elegant arch of Mariluise Bridge and the flat farmland of the valley floor.
“Victor should be here at nine,” Jordy said. “We have a table at nine fifteen.” He reached for some cashews from a bowl on a small round table. “He’s a very happy man.”
He walked over and stood at one of the windows, looking out towards the bridge.
“So!” He turned around. “Let’s have it.”
Fremont sipped his wine and looked absently at the old, dirty paintings of armored, mustached noblemen.
“I guess what tempted me to come at all was the taxi,” he finally said. “It was a beautiful alibi, but so unnatural. Who’s going to go visit the Glacier Gorge and plan to take the same damned taxi, without even getting out at his hotel, straight on to a party in a nightclub two hours away? It was one of the least plausible stories I’ve ever heard. And yet it was true — any number of witnesses could testify to it. It covered Witgold perfectly, but that only made it all the more suspicious.
“So, I thought, there must be something up. I came, and the next absurdity I noticed was the dress. Who wears a two thousand dollar dress to a glacier gorge? Nobody, dammit. And yet apparently she did.
“How could these things tie together? I only had the vague idea that they were fake. But as I talked to the women who had seen Coco Chadraz that day, I was struck by how they clung to that dress, how it seemed to be her one distinguishing characteristic, how much it had overwhelmed them. And then the girl, what was her name, at the gorge—”
“Andrea.”
“Yes. She mentioned something very strange. She’d had some sort of fit that day, after she’d noticed that the turnstiles had registered numbers that couldn’t have been right. Three people had entered the gorge; only two had left. She’d seen Witgold and Coco leave but hadn’t noticed the third man, so she went in to look for him.
“Three people went in — two came out. If you take that at face value, which no one seems to have, it would imply that someone fell into the gorge. And if the man fell into the gorge, we have two suicides on the same day. The odds are pretty heavy against something like that. More likely, she just didn’t see him leave.”
Jordy shook his head.
“I don’t understand,” he said lamely.
Fremont chuckled.
“There didn’t seem to be any way around it,” he said. “Coco Chadraz never left the Glacier Gorge.”
“What? But everybody saw her!”
Fremont shook his head.
“Everybody thought they saw her,” he replied. “But what they saw was just what they expected to see — a shapely woman with wild hair in a two thousand dollar dress. They didn’t figure there’d be two of them around.”
“What?” Jordy repeated.
Fremont shrugged.
“It’s easy. Witgold married Coco for the money. She fell in love with him — he saw his opportunity. He appeared to leave his real woman — one Maria Fine — for her. But if he can get rid of Coco, he can go back to Maria a rich man. Maria likes the idea. They plot together. Her figure and face are similar enough to Coco’s. If they can dress her up in a way only Coco would dress, and top her off with violent auburn hair, and then she avoids looking straight at anyone — she’s Coco.”
“So Witgold takes Coco to the Glacier Gorge,” Jordy mumbled, a cashew in his mouth, “after cajoling her into wearing the dress. He throws her in, leaves the gorge, meets Maria hidden in the woods, and walks back to the taxi with her. Brilliant. Only a few flaws.”
Fremont raised an eyebrow.
“Like, Coco Chadraz fell into the Orne river from Mariluise Bridge. She didn’t wash up at the bottom of the gorge.”
Fremont smiled.
“Water only flows in one direction,” he said. “And that’s where she went, too. Where do you think the water from the glacier gorge ends up? If you’d read that splashy brochure, you’d know. It goes two kilometers underground, then merges with something called the Wildenbach, which flows into the Orne. But even without the brochure it should be clear. Where else could it go? The Orne’s the only river in the valley.”
“Pretty risky.”
“I don’t think so. He must have tried it out, dumped something into the gorge. Found that it ended up at the beach. Probably found out when, how long the trip would take, and timed his excursion accordingly.”
“But when did he do all this?”
Fremont shrugged.
“Sometime at night. He didn’t have to go into the tourist route — he could have thrown his dummy in from the top of the cliff.”
He paused.
“And that was why he had the Barryvox,” he said. “I doubt that Harry Witgold has done much skiing recently. What else is he doing renting those things they use to find people buried in the snow?”
“It’s nice,” Jordy admitted. “But what’s your proof?”
“On two separate days, one after the other, the exact same dress was charged to Witgold’s credit card. Then, a day after he and Coco arrived in Switzerland, Maria Fine came in — her flight charged, stupidly, to the same card. She flew back home the morning Coco Chadraz washed up on the beach.”
“Circumstantial,” Jordy muttered.
“Enough to get him to confess.”
“But the will!” Jordy suddenly objected. “Why didn’t he wait until she’d changed it over to him?”
“First, to throw suspicion on Victor, who had a nice motive now. It was Maria, by the way, who called him on the phone that night, in a hysterical voice that he believed was Coco’s. And second, because it didn’t make much difference — he already had most of her money invested in his name.”
“And the typewriter?”
“I’d guess that note was written a long time ago, in the States, when Witgold was in Victor’s apartment once. Maybe about the time they were all having that big fight.”
Jordy nodded. He had no more to object — it seemed so easy, now it had all been explained.
“He was careless,” Fremont said. “He thought it was such a brilliant plan that he didn’t have to worry about the little things. If he hadn’t charged the dresses, or the plane ticket, he probably would have got away with it.”
He shook his head slowly.