A Touch of Truthby Bertil Falk |
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| conclusion |
My lovely neighbor was hooked. “What an incredible story,” she said.
“You’ve not heard the most incredible parts yet,” I told her. “What happened now was that Roland Franzén asked me to come over.”
* * *
We had not seen each other since for a long while. Now Roland sat by his desk, leaning back in an adjustable chair. It was as if he never had retired into the shades of the pension system. He seemed to be in high spirits.”
“How are you?” he said.
“Everything was fine until I saw you,” I replied and he smiled a broad smile. “So you’re back at it again?” I continued.
“Temporarily. Short of people in summertime”, he replied and got straight down to brass tacks. “Some time ago, you reported to us that a woman wanted to pay you for committing a murder.”
“True, true.”
Roland Franzén dipped into a file. “According to the report, she sprayed something into your eyes when you turned down her offer.”
“It’s embarrassing but she could get away. I was totally blinded and my eyes were burning and smarting and stinging. It was horrible. When I called the police, she was of course gone. She had a flying start. I heard it.”
Roland handed me a photograph. A woman, no make up. Her eyes half-closed, a thin nose. Fair hair.
“Do you recognize her?”
I examined the picture.
“Was it she?” he asked.
“Not at all,” I said. “I’ve never seen this one before. The woman who came over to me was good-looking. Dark hair, burning red lips, big and broad nose. Mascara here and there. You know.”
“That’s what I thought,” Roland Franzén said. “The photograph shows the wife of the victim. We don’t suspect her. But I had to ask you. One never knows.”
“Why do you think that there is a connection between the woman who tried to buy me and the murder you’re investigating?”
“A small detail in the past of the victim and a big detail in your report.”
“You say that?”
“Your visitor wanted you to kill someone who had abused her when she was a small girl.”
“That’s right.”
“There are rumors that the murdered man assaulted small girls when he was a young man.”
I whistled. “A possible connection,” I said.
“Obviously,” Roland Franzén agreed. “But it can be misleading.”
* * *
“It was through the International Criminal Police Organization, best known as Interpol, Roland Franzén picked up the scent. A parcel, which in fact was an air bubble, almost hermetically sealed, wrapped up in plastic. It had been washed ashore on an island in the Caribbean Sea. It contained clothes, Swedish registration plates and a gun. And above all: the car key to the Stormsjö family’s car. From there it did not take long time to prove that the gun was the one used when Östen Stormsjö was shot. There was no end of fingerprints and DNA.
“That’s it,” Roland Franzén said to Greta Lindberg. “I would guess that the murderer by now is somewhere in Paraguay or so, convinced that he has gotten rid of all the evidences. But he made a big mistake by wrapping the parcel so tightly that it became like an air-filled buoy.”
Greta Lindberg sat on the edge of the desk and looked fixedly at her former chief. “That was quick work. How come they contacted us that fast?”
“The perpetrator had forgotten to rip off the name of the place of purchase inside the coat. The name and address was there.”
“How thoughtless.”
“The perpetrator was sure that his parcel would go to the bottom or become shark food.”
“But you don’t know who the murderer is?”
“No idea,” he said. “Or rather it must have been a man, unless it was a woman using male clothes, perhaps a Swede, perhaps a foreigner. But I think it was a male Swede, who never before has done anything like this, but who nevertheless knows these things as well as you and I do.”
“It could be a person who has been reported as missing.”
“It can also be a person whom nobody would miss, if not...”
Roland Franzén got to his feet.
“If what?”
“It might be a connection between the woman who wanted our friend the missionary to kill a man because he had raped her when she was a girl.”
“But he turned it down.”
“Of course he did. He is no PI. His landlord is. Yes, but this may still point to a solution of the problem.”
“Now I can’t follow you.”
“Think carefully! She turned to what she thought was a PI.”
“Yes, that’s for sure. She... oh, now I see what you mean. I think you’re on the right track.”
“After that conversation, Roland asked me to come over. He looked very satisfied when I sat down by his desk. I realized that he had come up with something.
“Why,” he said straight out, “did she come to you and asked you to kill a man?”
“I’ve already told you,” I said. “Because she took me for my landlord.”
“Yes, yes,” he replied impatiently. “That’s not my question.”
“What’s your question then?”
“Why a PI?”
“Maybe she had a notion that PI’s do anything for money.”
“Exactly!”
“She had probably read too many hardboiled mysteries.”
“Something like that, yes.”
“But even though the PI heroes of Hammett, Chandler and Spillane on the surface are tough guys and seemingly immoral, they’re at heart honest people with principles. They’re not ordinary murderers.”
“Whatever ordinary assassins are, but true. Now, we can’t demand that ordinary readers understand that, can we? A manuscript is not finished when it’s printed and distributed. Tens of thousands of readers continue writing the book in their minds. Perhaps they don’t write a continuation of the story they’ve read, but in every line they read, they put their own understanding about what’s going on and they do it from their own experiences and their own values, which differ from the writer’s. I think that this woman imagined that if you want to hire a murderer, then you go to a PI, a disreputable private eye.”
“You call my landlord a disreputable PI?”
Roland Franzén’s smile was friendly. “Is he not a member of some kind of organization for private investigators?” he asked.
“They have a small... well, club is not the word... there are no fast rules or so... They are a few people who meet now and then.”
“How many?”
“Five or six. You know, this profession is unusual, at least in Sweden.”
“We’ve made a small investigation. Earlier today we found that there is someone, whose name is Torsten Brunsten. Do you know him?”
I looked at Roland and I probably looked surprised. “Certainly not. Do you mean that this Torsten...”
“I haven’t said that, but there’s reason to suspect him.”
“Very well.”
“Since you turned down the woman who tried to hire you, she probably turned to some other PI.”
“This Torsten Brunsten?”
“Perhaps, perhaps not. And as far as we know he was a member of some group that met once or twice every year. But he’s missing. As a matter of fact, he’s missing. And he has not disappeared just like that...” Roland Franzén snapped his fingers. “His disappearance was a gradual one. As if planned. In spite of that, he seems to have been swimming around here in Malmö like a fish in his pond.”
“Where is he now?”
“We’ll break into his place.”
“How do you know where he’s living... if he has disappeared?”
“The coat.”
“The coat?”
“We’ve got his coat. The name of the seller was inside the coat and the seller knew who bought the coat. And we know for sure that the coat has a connection with the murderer. Torsten Brunsten always bought his clothes from an old schoolmate here in Malmö. Who happened to know where Torsten lives! Want to come with me?”
* * *
I sipped at my coffee.
“Torsten Brunsten was not in his small place,” I told my lovely neighbor. “But there was a newspaper dated July 5. Everything was neat and clean.”
* * *
“He’s not been here since July 5, it seems,” I said. “Didn’t you say that the murder took place on July 9?”
“That was an assumption based on circumstantial evidence,” Roland answered. “Just think. The murder takes place on July 5. The murderer tears away July 6, 7 and 8. On the wall calendar we have July 9. If the body is found before July 9, it will be understood that the death shooting took place earlier, but if the corpse is discovered after July 9, the investigators are led to believe that it happened on July 9. Torsten Brunsten, if he it was, took a chance that it would take more than a few days before the body was found.”
“When was the murder discovered?”
“On July 17, Mrs. Stormsjö went to the cottage and found her husband, who was in a state of decomposition. The heat wave had taken its toll.”
“Whoops!” I said. “If she wanted to get rid of her husband, she could have hired a murderer and told him that she would not get to the cottage until July 17. And she could have gone there and killed him herself.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Roland Franzén said and tapped my shoulder. “Don’t you think that we’ve thought of that, but she has an airtight alibi, which you actually strengthened when I showed you her photo. And our conclusion is that the woman who came to you is someone other than the wife. And as far as the wife is concerned, what would her motive be? Their married life seems to have been very good.”
When I a week later went over to see Roland Franzén again, the answer from the fingerprint experts had arrived. They had secured prints in the home of my landlord’s disappeared colleague. Torsten Brunsten’s fingerprints tallied with the prints found in the parcel that had been found in the West Indies.
“We can now be practically sure that he’s the murderer,” Roland Franzén told me.
“But where is he?”
“God knows. Paraguay? Cuba? Mexico? Unfortunately, I’m very busy right now. What about lunch with me tomorrow?”
“Sure. Where?”
“How about one of the pavement cafés at the small square?”
“Fine by me.”
I could not sleep that night. I was thinking and all of a sudden I realized that there was a clue that had not been followed up. The next day was sunny. The heat was on. People were thinly dressed on the pedestrian precinct. Lightly clad young ladies, young men in string vests, older women in next to bikinis, older men in cut-off jeans. The buggy mafia was well represented in this kitchen midden of sun worshipers.
When I arrived at Lilla Torg all the open air cafés were crowded. Danish visitors mixed with German tourists and Polish guest workers. Black heads and blonde skulls put a chessboard stamp on life.
Roland Franzén had reserved a table and he popped up with a cruel smile on his lips.
“I’m afraid that matters have come to a deadlock,” he said.
“I have an idea,” I said and went for my tournedos.
“Out with it!”
Roland Franzén had not as yet touched his meatballs.
“Where did I tell you that the woman had run into her former rapist?” I asked.
“At a party!” he exclaimed. “Of course. The widow must know where it was. She was probably there with her husband. Through her we can find out... Good boy! We’ve practically found the woman who tried to hire you.”
It was then that I heard the creaky voice. To begin with I could not place it. Then it dawned on me. The voice was to the left of me and I slowly turned my head in that direction.
I did not recognize the woman, but her voice was unmistakable. It was exactly the same creaky voice. There she was talking to another woman. They had finished their lunch and were obviously in the process of leaving the outdoor café.
Roland had put aside his knife and fork and watched me closely. “What is it?” he said. “Do you recognize her?”
I shook my head and turned to him. “I don’t think I’ve seen her before,” I said.
“Interesting,” was his comment.
“Why then?”
“It’s just a little bit strange that you looked at her,” he said, picked up knife and fork and put a meatball into his mouth.
“Yes, it’s strange,” I said. “I recognize her voice. I won’t forget that voice in a hurry. It was not she, it was her voice that wanted me to kill the guy who was murdered in that summer cottage.”
Roland choked on the meatball. I had to slap him on his back. When in full possession of his senses again the two women had disappeared.
“You realize what this means?” Roland Franzén asked.
“Tell me!” I said.
“That woman is the murdered man’s widow.”
“You mean that...?”
“Of course. She’s an actress. Accustomed to make-up.”
I thought. Her unusually thick nose, had it not looked artificial?
Out of a haze I heard Roland Franzén’s voice, “It’s easy for an actress to change her appearance. It happens every night at the city theatre.”
She had used platform shoes to look taller. She had put a lot of red lipstick on her bloodless lips. She had put mother-of-pearl colors on her colorless eyelids. She had painted her eyebrows green. Her ponytail had been a wig.
“To me Linda Stormsjö was short in stature,” Roland said. “Colorless, dark dress.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “She loved her husband, didn’t she?”
“That’s for sure. It was not until that woman at the party singled him out as the pedophile from Strängnäs, that she realized that she was married to the man who had raped her when she was seven years old.”
* * *
My lovely neighbor gasped. “So that was the solution,” she exclaimed. “But how did you know all that about the murderer, how he did it and how he left the country?”
“It was impossible not to know. You see. A description of Torsten Brunsten was issued through Interpol. Not more than a week later, he was arrested on Martinique in the Caribbean. Martinique is a department of France, and he was extradited. He confessed and the whole story was all over the front pages of the Swedish tabloids. Well, that’s the story about how I was mistaken for a PI.”
My lovely neighbor clasped her brush and finished the painting. It is currently being exhibited at an art gallery in Stockholm.
Copyright © 2010 by Bertil Falk
