“Why is he being blackmailed?” Martin mused to no one in particular.
“He’s got a whole pile of skeletons in his closet,” I said. “And you don’t screw around with people like that. So hobblety-hobblety-ho, let’s go.”
Martin didn’t move. “But who knows about the skeletons in his closet?”
Here again you can see how complicated these college-educated types make life. When confronted with a case full of money, what on earth does a normal person care who is blackmailing who? No one gives a fuck; the main thing is you get to get your hands on the dough. But not Martin.
Martin was taking his own sweet time thinking things through.
“Why did Eilig need to have killed you, actually?” he asked.
“Because I stole his car and knew that there was a body in it,” I replied.
“But how did he know that you were the thief?”
“He must have seen me breaking into the car.”
“What could he have seen?” asked Martin the Meticulous, who had never yet just believed the blatantly obvious.
I thought about it. Eilig could have seen only a thin, inconspicuous guy in dark clothes with a cap on driving away in his car. No one followed me as I drove the car to the rendezvous point. No one was standing in the parking lot when I handed the car off. Eilig had no way at all of knowing who I was. Therefore, he was not the one who killed me. But who was it then? And why was Eilig being blackmailed? I asked Martin this as well, since he had infected me with his brooding, and as a result I totally forgot about the danger we were in.
“Why he was being blackmailed is easy,” Martin said. “Because of the body in the trunk.”
“Makes sense,” I said.
“The only question is: by whom?”
The answer hit us at the same time: I had gotten a job from someone to steal the SLR. That someone intended to sell the car in Eastern Europe and had almost certainly discovered the body in the trunk first. His contact in the East…At that moment everything became clear to me: his contact was a tall, thin, good-looking, dark-haired guy who I’d seen for the first time on the day I died, then in Olli’s shop, and most recently at the Institute for Forensic Medicine. All the threads in this case converged into the fat hands of one man:
“Olli.” I thought it to myself, but Martin yelled out the name loud and clear.
“That’s right,” said a completely calm voice that I immediately recognized as Olli’s, from barely five meters away. “And that’s why the money belongs to me and I will thank you to get your manicured hands off it right now.”
Martin and I stood there as though flash-frozen. We hadn’t heard Olli coming; he had just suddenly emerged from the semiruined building. Maybe he’d been hanging around there the whole time. I don’t know; I hadn’t noticed him.
“Uh-oh…” Martin said as he too recognized the obese car smuggler. The activity in his brain was sending out sparks.
“Of course,” Martin said. “You had no need to find out whose SLR it was; you had already hired someone to steal a unique car.”
Olli nodded.
“And when the car was delivered to you with a body in the trunk, the situation was just begging for blackmail,” Martin said.
Olli nodded again. “I’d have been stupid not to ask for some cash on the side.”
“But why did Pascha Lerchenberg have to die?” Martin asked.
Olli stopped short. “How do you get to him?”
“He’s the one who stole the SLR,” Martin said, as though it was the most natural thing in the world that Martin knew that.
Olli’s eyes narrowed between the jiggling fat above and below them into even thinner slits.
“You’re the guy who knew that I had your girlfriend’s BMW,” Olli said.
Martin nodded.
“And now you know that Pascha stole the SLR,” Olli said.
“I already knew that before I stopped by your lot,” Martin said, correcting him.
“And where do you know all of this from?” Olli asked.
Martin wrestled with himself. Should he tell him that he had contact with my immortal soul? He decided to tell the truth because he couldn’t think of a suitable lie. That is pretty much the most dim-witted reason for telling the truth, but my own creativity was totally hamstrung by this special situation, so I couldn’t blame him.
Olli reacted as expected. In an already-quivering voice he asked, “Is that really true? Like Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore in Ghost?”
Martin nodded.
And then the tears started flowing from Olli’s eyes again, his double chin jiggled, and the entire man started losing it.
This was presumably our last chance!
“Take off,” I urged Martin. “Fast, while he’s still distracted.”
Martin didn’t want to. He wanted answers—all of them. He was acting as calmly and rationally as he does in his autopsy room, examining a body for as long as it takes to definitively find the cause of the death. He was welcome to do that normally, of course, but here his doggedness was inappropriate and imperiling his life. I begged and pleaded, for naught. He seemed unable to perceive me at all, he was so focused on solving the various deaths and blackmailings.
“You could have blackmailed Dr. Eilig without killing Pascha,” Martin suggested.
“I did not murder that little shit,” Olli sniffled, blowing his nose. He was pulling himself together. We missed our chance.
In view of this new information, Martin thought briefly but single-mindedly about the case, and then came to a realization: “Then Semira’s brother killed Pascha?”
Olli grew pale as the wall. “You know her name?”
“Of course,” Martin said. “Semira’s brother actually came to the Institute to have her body transported back home. He had her papers with him.”
“Semiiira,” Olli wailed, and started weeping again.
Martin stared at him in disbelief, but then we both simultaneously remembered what Semira’s neighbor had told us. She mentioned a man who came to visit Semira. A fat man with fat cars. Olli!
“You were Semira’s pimp,” Martin said.
Olli shook his head. “Agent,” he mumbled.
“Did Semira’s brother know how his sister was earning her money?” Martin asked.
“Of course not,” Olli cried. “He would have killed her. And then me right afterward.”
“How did her brother find out Semira was dead?” Martin asked.
Olli dropped back onto a ledge on the wall, drained and limp. “I obviously took a picture of the body in the trunk because I couldn’t let Eilig get away with it,” he began. “But Sjubek discovered the photo.”
“And?” Martin asked.
“And, what? He obviously wanted revenge, to kill the guy who killed his sister,” Olli said as though he kept having to explain to a child that you spread jam on your bread, not on your hands.
“And you of course didn’t want Sjubek to kill Dr. Eilig,” Martin said smugly.
Fortunately Olli didn’t have a feel for such nuances at the moment, otherwise he’d probably have felt provoked. “Of course not,” Olli said. “I wanted to blackmail the guy, right? And dead people don’t pay. Make sense?”
Martin nodded. I could feel that Martin was starting to seriously doubt his own mental health. Here he was standing in an industrial wasteland across from a rotund car smuggler who was explaining to him how much sense it makes to prevent a murder—not for humanitarian reasons but to blackmail the potential murder victim. Martin was wondering who here was normal and who was nuts.
“I still don’t understand why Pascha had to die,” Martin said after he thought his way back to me.
“Sjubek was out of his mind. He had to avenge his sister’s death, and he needed a scapegoat.”