“Birgit thinks you shouldn’t just let the case slide, either,” I reminded him.
“Leave Birgit out of it.”
“You were the one who told her the story, not me,” I made clear.
“I have left work for the day,” Martin grumbled. He had since scarfed down his snot-paste sandwich.
“It’s a good thing you’re off work now because during working hours you can’t investigate anything very well,” I retorted.
“No hunting for dealers,” Martin persisted.
I thought for a moment.
“It occurred to me that Mehmet may be my murderer,” I said.
“Who is Mehmet?” Martin asked.
“The guy from the game hall I owed money to.”
“Mmm hmm.”
“A game hall is an extremely safe place,” I clarified.
“Mmm hmm.”
“And Mehmet is a really nice guy.”
Martin closed his eyes, rested his face in his hands, paused for a moment, and then switched the TV off. “All right. So where is this game hall?”
I guided him through traffic, steering him into the side streets where I’d always used to park, and I recommended he leave the car here. He had safety-related concerns.
“Nothing has ever happened to my ride around here,” I said.
“What kind of a car did you use to have?” he asked.
“A VW Scirocco R.”
Martin didn’t say anything, he just snorted slightly through his nose and did not seem very reassured. In the field of automobile valuations he was apparently seriously deficient. All the same, he parked under a streetlight without any further discussion, carefully locked up, and pulled up his duffle coat hood for the short walk. It was drizzling. I found it very disconcerting to see the rain but not feel it.
“Good evening,” Martin said to everyone and no one in particular, as well-mannered Germans do, when he entered the establishment.
About six pairs of eyes gawked at him in disbelief.
“Whatcha wanna play?” Mehmet asked, standing at the coffee machine as Martin walked up to him.
“I’ve got a question,” Martin said.
“The million-euro question?” Mehmet smirked. “Do you have an ‘ask the audience’ lifeline left?”
The boys at the pool table laughed; the gambling addicts on the slot machines were, as usual, so deeply lost in their games that they hadn’t caught any of this.
“Did you know Sascha Lerchenberg?” Martin asked after smiling at Mehmet’s joke.
“Who wants to know?”
“A friend,” Martin answered, and I thought that answer was right on; Mehmet gaped at the man in the little wool coat in disbelief. Then his face darkened.
“What do you mean ‘did you know’?” he asked.
“He’s dead.”
I had assumed Mehmet would now offer his condolences about my death and say what a nice guy I’d been, which is why at first I thought I’d misheard when Mehmet loudly spit out, “That bastard!”
I was speechless.
“Why do you say that?” Martin asked, and again I had to admire him. In situations where any normal person would just come in arms swinging, Martin was as cool as a deep-frozen fish stick.
“Because he owes me money,” Mehmet said.
“I’m certain he didn’t intentionally cause his own death just to leave you with a financial shortfall,” Martin said, choosing his words carefully, and I confirmed this with a loud yes.
“Intentional or not, man, what kind of shit are you trying to pull here?” Mehmet asked in a tone that I did not like at all. “Money is money, and gone is gone.”
“Had the news of his death not yet been brought to your attention?” Martin asked, and Mehmet hesitated for a moment before it clicked what we wanted to know from him.
“I hadn’t heard anything,” Mehmet replied.
“We believe him,” I told Martin.
“Why?” Martin asked me back, in his head.
“Because Mehmet stinks like an Middle Eastern whorehouse without running water, and I would definitely remember getting a whiff of him if he had been the one behind me on the bridge.”
Martin nodded.
“Who’ll be paying me the money now?” Mehmet asked.
The boys at the pool table had since interrupted their game and were eavesdropping on the conversation. I tried to draw this to Martin’s attention, but his head was full of other thoughts.
“I don’t know,” Martin said seriously. “Possibly his next of kin…”
“Do you think I’m going to write a sympathy card to his mama and explain how her son has illegal-gambling debts at my joint, and please could she have her bank wire the dough to my public assistance account?” Mehmet roared.
“No, of course not,” Martin said meekly.
Martin hadn’t considered this problem. In our circles you don’t issue criminal debentures at a fixed interest rate and with a processing fee, and most debts—since they were never officially made—you can collect on only from the actual debtor.
“Well, then…” he said.
“Let’s get going,” I suggested, looking around at the shooters, who weren’t playing anymore. Apparently Martin didn’t hear me.
“There is evidence that someone aided in Pascha’s death,” Martin said. “Would you have an idea who might have wished him dead?”
“Apart from me, you mean, Kewpie Face?” Mehmet asked.
“Martin!” I screamed. “Retreat!”
“Well, certainly, it might have been an accident after all,” Martin backpedaled. Apparently he was slowly getting that the topic of discussion here had been exhausted. “Thank you very much for your patience.”
Martin stepped to the side to avoid running into the two pool players and left the game hall.
“We can cross that off the list, too,” he said. “If this Mehmet has always struggled with cologne abuse, then we might have spared ourselves the trip.”
“Yeah, that’s true. But I just didn’t remember that at all,” I said, and that was the pure truth.
We went back to Martin’s car. Unfortunately a nasty surprise was waiting for us there in the form of the two pool players from Mehmet’s house of fortune, who were leaning casually on the trash can. I had actually forgotten that the game hall had a back exit. Shit! In Martin’s thoughts I saw the question arise how these guys knew that this was his car, and I kept the tip-off to myself that a guy with nicely parted hair but no hair gel, and in a duffle coat but no discernible gold jewelry, would be the one and only male suspect within a range of about two thousand meters of being the driver of this roofed-over geriatric walker. At the moment we had other problems, anyways.
The two muscle mountains didn’t say anything at first, calmly puffing on their smokes and acting like they hadn’t noticed Martin at all. Martin hesitated about four meters away from his car. Then he shrugged and went at it.
“Excuse me, but would you mind letting me get into my car?” he asked the first muscle mountain—for simplicity’s sake let’s just call him King, to be nice. King didn’t do anything.
“First we would need to clear something up,” the second guy mumbled, who we’ll call Kong.
“I think everything has been cleared up,” Martin said. “Pascha suffered a regretful accident and died from his injuries.”
He got that out in a really convincing way, although I hoped he had since stopped believing it was an accident and embraced with considerable certainty that I am not wholly and entirely dead.
“Debts don’t die as fast as people,” Kong mumbled softly in no direction in particular.
“Unfortunately, I am unable to assist you further in this delicate matter,” Martin said in a firm voice. I still had not decided if he really was slow on the uptake or was just hoping consistent denial would get him out of the situation unperturbed.