Down and Dirty (Mercy Watts Mysteries Book 9) Read online

  That day Maryland Plaza was hopping and we had zero hope of parking in front on a Saturday afternoon. We ended up by the library. Sadly, there was plenty of parking there. I questioned again whether Mom was up for it and her response was to pull two hats out of her enormous purse. I got a floppy oversized beret and she got a kind of fuzzy winter fedora.

  “What’s this for?” I asked.

  “Yours is to cover that hair. It’s hurting my eyes. And mine is a guard against being recognized.” Mom pulled her hat down low and made sure the collar covered her face as much as possible.

  “You really look great, Mom. Nobody can tell,” I said.

  “I can and the hot chocolate is bound to make the left side of my face go completely numb.”

  “It still does that?”

  “My speech therapist is working on it, but I know it’s permanent.”

  I took her hand. “We don’t have to go.”

  She gave me a squeeze. “It’s fine. If I’m with you no one will think I’m you and ask me questions about DBD or Kansas or anything.”

  “How often does that happen?” I asked.

  “Not so much since the stroke.”

  “Is that because you don’t go out?”

  “Pretty much.” Mom texted Dad and said she was going to take a nap at my apartment.

  “Dad will go for that?” I asked.

  “Dana will talk to him until he does.” Mom grinned at me and her smile wasn’t quite so lop-sided. Maybe being bad helped.

  “What does that mean?”

  “She likes to talk.”

  “More than Dad?”

  “She puts your father to shame. Half the time I don’t know how we got on a topic. We start out on hiring the new detective and end up on squid ink pasta. Anyway, she has Tommy cornered in the office. I figure I’ve got a good two hours.”

  Spidermonkey offered Mom his arm. “Is she any good?”

  “I don’t really care. She keeps him occupied. This is the first break I’ve had. After Claire comes back, I might hire her to come over and just visit.” She took my arm and she was a little unsteady but determined to have rogue hot chocolate and I swore them both to secrecy.

  We found a table in a corner and we ordered three drinking chocolates and an assortment of macaroons. Heavenly and I was assured there wouldn’t be a surprise pepper floating around in there or powdered mango or a shot of some rare liquor. Everything Aaron concocted for me was stellar, orgasmically good, but sometimes a girl just wants what’s expected. I don’t need crab in a donut. I really don’t.

  “Why are you calling this Aaron’s competition?” I asked after letting the chocolate seep through my veins and force out Catherine’s misery.

  “He’s having a hot chocolate bar in the new bakery,” said Spidermonkey.

  “How do you know that?” asked Mom.

  He gave us a grin and said, “I make it my business to know and I like Aaron.”

  “You’ve met Aaron?” I asked.

  “I’ve been to Kronos. Anyone who’s anyone has.”

  Mom raised her cup. “To being anyone.”

  We clinked and sipped.

  “Are you fortified and ready to hear my information?” asked Spidermonkey.

  Mom’s eyes twinkled. “I am. What have you got? I bet it’s not as good as what I found.”

  Spidermonkey extended his hand. “I’ll bet you a second drinking chocolate and the last raspberry macaroon.”

  They shook hands and Mom said, “Just so you know. I was going to eat that anyway.”

  “Fair enough.” Spidermonkey leaned forward as if someone else among the clientele cared about what happened to strangers in WWII. “Mr. Masson called. It’s confirmed. The Sorkines went to Venice. He’s positive.”

  Mr. Masson was the former manager of the Sorkines’ apartment building. The mysterious apartment intrigued him during his entire career and he was the one who let Chuck and I in. We found a scrap of paper with what looked like train times on it under a tea cup in the Sorkines’ apartment. The only other clue was a telegram from an ‘A’ saying that he’d arrived in Rome. We assumed the A stood for Abel, Stella and Nicky’s tour guide. If they believed he was in Rome, Italy made sense. Mr. Masson said he was going to figure out those train times, but I was flabbergasted that he actually did it.

  “It must’ve taken forever to figure out train schedules from 1938,” said Mom.

  “A Herculean effort, but Mr. Masson considers finding out what happened to them a kind of duty. He owes it to them and all the others like them.”

  “Well, that’s pretty good,” I said. “Can you top it, Mom?”

  “I’m not done,” said Spidermonkey with a tone that said it wasn’t good news.

  “You said he confirmed it. How exactly did he do that?”

  Once Mr. Masson found trains that corresponded to those times he went the extra mile. He enlisted the help of an Italian friend and they went through the Venetian papers. Il Gazzettino wasn’t archived online and they had to dig through editions manually at the headquarters in Venice. It took days of searching, but it paid off.

  “Take a look at this.” Spidermonkey pulled up something on his phone. I was afraid to look but I did, Mom and I together, our foreheads touching.

  “I don’t see it,” said Mom. “My eyes aren’t doing so well today.”

  I expanded the image. “Here it is.”

  There in faded black and white was a name, Raymond-Raoul Sorkine. I could make out a few words like ospedale and canale. It wasn’t good whatever it was.

  “What does it say?” I asked.

  “In short, Mr. Raymond-Raoul Sorkine was shot in the abdomen on the Rialto Bridge. He fell into the canal and was taken to the hospital,” said Spidermonkey.

  Where he later died.

  “And?”

  “That’s it,” he said. “They couldn’t find another word about him.”

  “What about the hospital records?” asked Mom.

  “They didn’t get that far. They needed to return to France, but Monsieur Masson says he will go back.”

  I rolled my cup in my hands. “They were there.”

  “And someone knew it,” said Mom.

  “He died,” I said. “Gunshot to the abdomen and canal water. Talk about infection.”

  “You never know.”

  I know.

  I didn’t know why I cared so much about these people, these strangers, from so long ago, but I woke up at night wondering and praying I was wrong. They didn’t die. They were the lucky ones. The ones that got away. Now I knew they didn’t. At least, the father didn’t and it hurt more than I thought it would.

  “Anything else?” I asked almost hoping my phone would ring now. Catherine’s troubles were pedestrian compared to the Sorkines.

  “A little something, but I can hold that for later,” said Spidermonkey.

  “Let’s hear it now,” said Mom. “Turning away won’t change it.”

  “For what it’s worth, it’s good news. Dr. Bloom’s friend got in touch and she found something on Gerhard Müller,” he said. “Well, it may be something.”

  It took me a second. Gerhard Müller wasn’t a name that I’d given an ounce of thought to. “Peiper’s assistant? Is he the same person as the boy Father Gröber said beat him in the House Prison?” I asked.

  “She thinks it’s likely.”

  Mom pulled a little flowered notebook out of her purse. “Go on.”

  Dr. Karina Bock was a historian specializing in Nazi political prisoners among other things. She was fascinated by the priest’s story of being beaten by Peiper and a fifteen-year-old boy for information about another prisoner she believed to be Stella Bled Lawrence. That the name Gerhard Müller was on official orders naming him a civilian and an assistant to Peiper was very unusual and she’d been searching for that name ever since. Father Gröber thought Peiper and Müller might be father and son, but Peiper never had any children that she knew of, so she started looking at Peipe
r’s background and family. The Peipers were a well-off Berlin family that sent their children to excellent schools and traveled extensively. Karina got in touch with the last surviving family member, Claudia Heutel, a university student in Stuttgart and distant cousin to Peiper. She said the family had a bonfire in the fifties of anything related to the Nazi regime and the family was completely ashamed to have been in the party. Her mother refused to help Karina in her research, but Claudia had a different view. She thought the family had to own what happened so she smuggled out a collection of letters that the family had saved. They were prewar, mostly written in the 1920s, and a complete correspondence between Peiper’s mother and her sister, Claudia’s ancestor.

  Karina would’ve considered them a bunch of nothing if not for one small, seemingly insignificant detail. The Peipers took a trip to Scotland in late 1923 to visit friends. In one of the letters, Magda Peiper wrote that they had met a lovely German family by the name of Müller. The father was working at a brewery as a sort of consultant.

  Ding. Ding. Ding.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “The father was Gerhard Müller.”

  “But he’d be way too old,” said Mom and she yawned, her left side drooping.

  Spidermonkey ordered more drinking chocolate.

  “But I didn’t win,” said Mom.

  “I’ll risk it.” He turned to me. “I bet you’ve already figured it out.”

  I chewed on my lip for a minute for effect but I had. “Helmut Peiper was on this trip?”

  “Yes. He was nineteen at the time.”

  “The elder Gerhard had a daughter?” I asked.

  “Of course,” said Mom. “I should’ve thought of that. Peiper got the daughter pregnant, but that’s odd, isn’t it?”

  “How do you mean?” Spidermonkey’s face was guarded. He knew where Mom was going.

  “It was 1925. The Müllers don’t sound poor or powerless.”

  “Solidly upper-middle class.”

  “Why didn’t Peiper marry her?” Mom asked. “That’s the normal thing. She wasn’t a servant girl he could easily walk away from.”

  “Jutta Müller was fourteen in 1923 and by the time her pregnancy was apparent the Peipers were back in Berlin,” said Spidermonkey.

  “But Peiper knew and he still didn’t marry her,” I said.

  “There’s no evidence that he did know.”

  Karina went to Edinburgh and spoke to the Müller family and Jutta’s baby was a well-guarded secret, only an elderly Great Aunt knew about it. She said the family regarded the incident as a rape. Jutta was sent to a hospital out in the country to have her baby and a farm family was paid to raise him until he was sent to a boarding school at the age of six. Jutta had no contact with the child and neither did anyone else in the family, but they did pay the bills.

  “But Jutta named him after her father,” I said.

  “She did. Karina found the financial records naming the child on the bills.”

  Karina traced Gerhard Müller through school records until the age of fourteen. He was enrolled in the extremely tough and somewhat infamous boarding school, Gordonstoun. Prince Charles went there and reportedly called it “Colditz in kilts.” Not exactly a compliment and I would’ve felt sorry for Gerhard if he hadn’t moved on to beating priests.

  “What happened after fourteen?” I asked.

  “That’s the mystery. According to school records, a ‘friend of the Müller family’ signed out Gerhard Müller in December 1937 and never brought him back,” said Spidermonkey.

  “Well,” said Mom. “Who signed him out?”

  “The signature is illegible and the school kept it very quiet.”

  “I guess they didn’t want it known that students were being kidnapped,” I said. “Did they do anything to recover him?”

  “Local police were called and the Müllers were told. No trace was found.”

  Mom accepted her second drinking chocolate, sipped it, and then said, “I doubt they tried very hard. Poor boy. No wonder he ended up where he ended up.”

  “So we think it was Peiper that took him?” I asked.

  Spidermonkey smiled. “It was a woman who signed him out. German and described by the staff as pretty but unacceptably mannish.”

  “Peiper had to be behind it,” I said. “I wonder how he found out about the kid.”

  “No doubt it ruined the boy’s life,” said Mom.

  We sat there sipping and letting that sink in. Twists of fate were everywhere. I’d had more than my fair share. If Peiper hadn’t found his son, the boy might’ve grown up fighting for the Allies. He might have been decent.

  “Enough of that,” said Spidermonkey. “Carolina, what’s your news? Please let it be more cheerful.”

  Mom flipped a few pages in her notebook. “I think so.” She handed the notebook to me. “My eyes are gone now. Sugar does it. Can you read that?”

  I scanned the page and slapped my forehead. “I’m an idiot. I can’t believe I missed that.”

  Mom kissed me on the cheek. “I’m glad I’m not totally useless.”

  “Nobody would ever think you’re useless.”

  “Don’t leave me in suspense,” said Spidermonkey.

  I kind of wanted to, just to bother my cyber sleuth, but I read it out anyway. Mom went through Stella’s book with a fine-toothed comb, seeing connections that I didn’t. She noted that on Stella and Nicky’s original honeymoon itinerary Greece wasn’t mentioned. But in a telegram sent to The Girls’ mother, Florence, Stella said that “Abel insists that we visit Greece.”

  “They didn’t go to Greece, did they?” asked Spidermonkey.

  “No,” I said. “Stella sent another telegram from Venice saying they were going to Vienna. They checked into the Hotel Blechhammer on the eve of the Kristallnacht and disappeared for two weeks before they turned up in Paris where they met Amelie and Paul.”

  “But…” said Mom with a smile that was huge and bright and smacked of the old her.

  “But?” asked Spidermonkey.

  “Stella went to Greece in 1940.”

  “Right after we believe she was tortured in the House Prison,” I said.

  Spidermonkey crossed his arms and leaned back. “I fail to see the significance. She went to Greece. So what?”

  “She fled to Greece,” said Mom. “She was injured. Father Gröber heard her screaming. She couldn’t make for the Allies.”

  “She probably would’ve been followed,” I said. “They really thought she was a spy.”

  “So she went to neutral territory. Greece. Thasos to be exact. That’s the island she mentioned in her telegram.”

  Spidermonkey smiled. “I see. She knew someone.”

  “Or Abel knew someone,” I said.

  “Somebody needs to go to Greece,” said Mom.

  Not you, woman.

  “We need to find out who Abel is,” I said.

  “I’d rather go to Greece.”

  “Mom, you can fly across the Atlantic when you’ve got your Warfarin under control.”

  “That could be never.” Mom’s clotting factors fluctuated wildly. I wanted her off the rat poison, but her docs didn’t agree.

  “We’ll get it figured out,” I said, looking down at Mom’s notebook. There was something there. I was missing something. It was on the tip of my brain. Abel. We had to find Abel. But we’d tried everything we could think of. Monsieur Masson and his friends had searched the deportation rolls in Germany, Austria, and France. Nothing. He was Stella and Nicky’s tour guide, but we couldn’t find a bill or a payment to him. Abel was real. He existed, but we couldn’t find so much as a picture.

  Mom put her head on my shoulder. “We better. I want to go places. Do things.”

  “You seem more tired than before,” I said. “Have you been sleeping at night?”

  “Like a rock.”

  Spidermonkey stood up. “I think we should—who on Earth is that?”

  Standing outside and peering in with his hands cupp
ed around his eyes was Jimmy Elbert.

  I groaned.

  “Is that the new one?” asked Mom, slurring terribly from the sugar.

  “Yeah, that’s him.” I stood up and pointed at my douchebag stalker. The second I did, Jimmy jumped back and, in a panic, ran straight into a couple of ladies laden with packages. Packages went flying and Jimmy dashed out of sight without helping the ladies like a half a dozen other people did.

  “I think I should look into him,” said Spidermonkey.

  “Don’t bother. Uncle Morty did. He’s okay,” I said.

  “Are you sure?” asked Mom, rubbing her cheek. “He probably broke your window.”

  “Yeah, he’s done this to a couple of actresses and then gets bored and moves on. It’s fine.”

  Spidermonkey wasn’t satisfied with that, but he just said, “Time to get you home.”

  “Not yet. Dana will have Tommy busy for a while,” said Mom.

  “But if you go home voluntarily, it will be easier to escape next time.” I helped Mom to her feet and Spidermonkey offered to drive us home, but I had unsavory things to do.

  “You don’t have to go to John today,” said Mom. “There’s no hurry.”

  “I want to rip off the Band-Aid.”

  “Don’t go to his work,” said Spidermonkey. “The man will have a meltdown in front of his colleagues.”

  “Not my problem,” I said. “Besides, it’s not like he’d want me to tell him at home.”

  “You could meet him somewhere,” said Mom.

  I told them I wasn’t pussyfooting around. John screwed up. It wasn’t up to me to make the big reveal easy on him. We said goodbye and I got an Uber to John’s La-Z-Boy store in Brentwood.

  It wasn’t far, and by the time I got there, I was ready to make his life hell and I didn’t care who heard me. But John Collier was already in hell and his flesh was sizzling.

  Chapter Twelve

  “I’M LOOKING FOR John Collier,” I said to the manager of La-Z-Boy, a huge guy who looked like he was once a power lifter.