When the Devil's Idle (13 page)

“
No,
I’m retired.”

“
What
did you do before you retired?”

“
I was
a beautician.”

Strange, a
beautician who didn’t dye her hair or bother with makeup, whose
whole persona seemed frozen in time. He decided to probe
further.

“
What
was the name of the salon?”

“
Electra. It was on Solomos Street.”

“
Do
you remember the exact address?”

“
It’s
gone now. It went out of business last winter. The building’s been
empty for months.”

He underlined the
name, thinking he’d have the police in Athens follow up. “Let’s
talk about your job here. How did you get along with the family?
Not the ones who hired you, but their guests, the
Bechtels.”

“
I got
along good. Mrs. Gerta, she wanted to learn how to cook Greek
sweets and I showed her how to make
baklava
and
kataifi,
other things she didn’t know. The children were
very well behaved and polite. And they always paid me on time.
Overtime, too, if I worked late.”

A serious woman,
her gaze was steady, her voice unwavering.

“
No
offense, Kyria, but aren’t you a little old to be working as a
maid?”

Her smile was
sad. “I am a poor woman, Chief Officer. What choice do I
have?”

“
What
about Mr. Bechtel’s father? How did you get along with
him?”

He was watching
her closely. It was the key question and they both knew
it.

“
We
were not friendly.” Raising her head, she gazed at him for a moment
before continuing. “He was an old-fashioned man, used to getting
his own way, and not very patient. But he didn’t ask for much, only
a cold beer in the afternoon and to keep his newspaper where he
could find it. His daughter-in-law, she was the one who took care
of him.”

The old man was
her
problem, she was saying, not
mine.

What she said was
consistent with what Gerta Bechtel had told him. Due to the
language barrier, Maria Georgiou’s contact with the victim had been
limited.

“
And
his son?”

“
Mr.
Gunther? The same. Mrs. Gerta was the one in charge. My job was to
help her. They might be different from us, those people, but not in
that. For them, too, the house belongs to the woman.”

Patronas
scribbled down what she said. “And the children?”

“
Little Walter, we were together sometimes in the garden. The
girl, Hannelore, no.”

“
Did
you ever see anyone suspicious hanging around?”

“
No.
The house is isolated. No one goes there.”

She spoke no more
than necessary and always in the same steady voice.

“
What
about the entrance? The door in the stone wall, is it kept locked?”
He’d meant to go back to the subject of the door and who had the
keys to it with the Bechtels, but had forgotten. He made a note to
discuss it with them again.

“
The
gardener is supposed to lock up after he’s done watering, but
sometimes he forgets and it stays open all night. Or the little boy
leaves it open after he puts his bicycle in. The old man liked to
stay in the garden, and I guess they believed no one would bother
them as long as he was there. But he was deaf. You could walk right
past him, and he wouldn’t hear.”

“
So it
wasn’t your job to secure the outside door?”

“
When
I was there at night, I’d see to it, but usually I just cooked
dinner for them and left it on the stove. I didn’t like to stay on
in their house after I finished my job.”

“
Who
has keys to the door?”

“
The
one in the wall? I do, and the gardener. Also the family kept extra
keys around the house, one on a nail by the outside entrance for
Walter to use—a big skeleton key like in the old days. Little
Walter would take it down, use it when he left with his bicycle,
and slide it back under the door.” She demonstrated, sliding her
hand along the floor.

“
How
many extra keys?”

“
Five,
maybe more. You’ll have to check with Mrs. Gerta. Anyway, you
didn’t need a key to get into the garden. Most of the time, the
gate was open.”

On his list,
Patronas drew a line through the word, ‘key.’ He’d keep after them,
but it wouldn’t be the focus of his investigation.

Arthritic, the
housekeeper’s fingers were thick and reddened with work, her palms
heavily callused. She rubbed the swollen joints as she talked, one
hand going back and forth over the other.

Patronas’ mother
had made a similar gesture, and he wondered if her hands pained her
the way his mother’s had.

“
What
about the cat, the stray the grandfather befriended?”

“
I
told Mrs. Bechtel I didn’t like cats, that they were dirty, and she
told me not to worry, that she’d take care of it, feed it, and make
sure it had water. She was very upset when it died. Walter, too. I
stayed in the house. I didn’t want to see.” She shuddered,
remembering. “The gardener got a shovel and buried it in the
garden. A crow tried to peck at it after, but he chased it
away.”

“
You
don’t know who killed it?”

She shrugged.
“Kids in the village, maybe. Who knows?”

Unable to think
of anything else to ask her, Patronas got up from his chair. “Thank
you for your cooperation. We will verify everything you said and
get back to you if we have any further questions.”

“
Of
course,” she said, bridling a little. “I am an honest woman. You
will find everything is as I said it was. I have nothing to
hide.”

A
fter leaving the rooming house, Patronas and Evangelos
Demos worked their way through the rest of Chora, fanning out
separately and going from door to door. There weren’t more than
eight or nine streets. Patronas drew a grid and checked off each
one as he completed his interviews. He and Evangelos Demos had
agreed to meet at the car when they finished, then drive back to
Skala to meet Tembelos and the priest.

Morning, most of
the residents were still at home, drinking coffee on their terraces
or eating breakfast inside. In spite of their wealth, most were
dressed casually, men and women alike. Similar to the Bechtels,
they wore jeans and t-shirts, espadrilles or leather flip-flops. A
few had children running around, overseen by bored-looking women
from the Philippines. For the most part, they welcomed Patronas and
were eager to share what they knew. They had all heard about the
murder and wanted whoever had done it apprehended.

He’d been
expecting grandeur, but found instead artful imitations of Greek
village life: clay water jugs and primitive furniture, hand-loomed
tapestries and rugs. One house even had an old spinning wheel on
display, a spotlight shining on it as if it were a work of art in a
museum. Patronas had studied it with amusement, wondering how much
the owners had paid, thinking the further away people got from
their peasant origins, the more they celebrated them. How little
they actually knew of that life, the hardship and the struggle.
Again, he thought of his mother’s hands.

He laboriously
interviewed more than thirty people in a variety of
tongues.

Before they’d
started, Evangelos Demos had suggested Patronas use the translation
application on his phone and shown him how to use it. Painful
advice, given who it was coming from, but Patronas had tried it out
and found it useful. Most of the residents spoke passable English.
He’d only needed it with the Russians.

The majority of
the people admitted that while they might recognize the Bechtels on
sight, they did not know them well. They were unwilling to
speculate about what went on in their house. There’d been no
incidents with the children, and they could think of no reasons
anyone would bear them a grudge.

“
How
about strangers hanging around?” Patronas asked one elderly British
man.

“
Strangers disembark from the cruise ships all summer, Chief
Officer, and come swarming through the streets of Chora. It’s quite
unsettling. I’ll be sitting outside and look up and see some
Chinese woman in a hat, peering over the wall at me.” He gave a
snigger of laughter. “I’m not a native. Truth is, I wouldn’t know a
stranger if I met one. As Casca said to Cassius in Julius Caesar,
‘It’s all Greek to me.’ ”

Patronas did not
find the man nearly as entertaining as he thought he was. “So you
never saw anyone suspicious?”

The Englishman
paused for a moment. “I might have. It’s hard to say. Personally, I
loathe tattoos and think those who possess them must be criminals.
Only jailbirds sported them in my time. However, my grandchildren
inform me that such things are all the rage now, the height of
fashion. I fear I am out of date, Chief Officer, a throwback to an
earlier, and if I may say so, more genteel era. I don’t trust my
judgment with respect to people anymore. Nor should
you.”

“
So no
one suspicious?”

“
None
that I am aware of.”

A French woman
with a high-pitched voice claimed she’d seen Maria Georgiou coming
away from the house on the night in question. However, her
description was highly inaccurate, as eye witness accounts often
were. For one thing, she considered the housekeeper to be a gypsy,
‘une gitane
,’ or possibly a Moroccan,
‘une habitante du
Maroc’
and said she had
‘les cheveux gris
,’ gray hair,
when her hair was white. Although the French woman was a pretty
thing, stylish and petite, her voice began to grate on Patronas,
the going back and forth between French and English.

Couldn’t she have
learned the word for maid, at least?
Domestique,
be
damned.

Still, pencil in
hand, he dutifully transcribed what she said and entered it in his
notebook. Useless, every word of it.

Many people had
seen the children, Walter and Hannelore, in the square or waiting
for the bus on the road. Their parents, too, on occasion. Yet, no
one could recall ever seeing the victim in Chora.

They recoiled
when he told them about the cat. One woman—a matronly
Greek-American with bleached hair—commented that torturing animals
was what serial killers did. It was their defining characteristic,
the only thing they all had in common. According to her, “As
children such people wet the bed, set fires, and hurt animals.” He
must be vigilant, she warned, in case such an individual was now on
Patmos.

All in all, quite
tedious.

Evangelos hadn’t
fared much better. “It’s worse than I imagined,” he told Patronas
when they met up later by the car. “Only fifteen Greeks in the
whole village and most of them only work here during the day. Even
if they were born in Chora, they can’t afford to live there
anymore. I ended up speaking English nearly the whole
time.”

“
You
learn anything?”

“
Everyone I spoke to said that while they’d probably recognize
Gunther and Gerta Bechtel, they had never had what amounted to a
conversation with either one of them. As far as they knew, the
victim, Walter Bechtel, didn’t exist.”

Patronas nodded.
He’d heard much the same. “What about the kids?”

“
Same
thing. They said they knew the girl on sight, Walter, too, but
that’s it. They never talked to them.”

“
How
about Hannelore’s friend, Hilda? Did you speak to her or her
family?”

“
Yes.
Nothing there.”

Patronas made a
note. They were ciphers, the Bechtels. It was almost as if they
avoided people. Again, he wondered why.

He opened the
door of the car and got in. A day lost and they’d come up empty
handed. As the proverb went,
They spoke only of winds and
water
.

The police
cruiser arrived later that day and Giorgos Tembelos and Papa
Michalis disembarked, the priest inching down the ramp like a
tortoise.

“
I
think the identity of the old man is the key,” Papa Michalis
announced when they’d all gathered in a taverna to review the case.
“I analyzed it and that is my conclusion. It simply cannot be
anything else. It has elements of an Agatha Christie story, one of
her locked-room mysteries like
And Then There Was None.
Nobody else had access;
ergo
, one of the people inside the
estate, a family member or a servant, must be the guilty
party.”

“
Anyone could have gained access,” Patronas pointed out. “The
Bechtels were careless. They didn’t keep the door locked and there
were keys lying around everywhere.”

“
No
matter. It’s got to be one of them. We can interview other people
forever, but it will eventually come back to them. Them and them
alone.”

“
I
think Father is right,” Tembelos said. “The identity of the victim
is the important thing here. There was nothing about him in any of
the European databases I checked. I called our counterparts in
Germany and asked them to run him through their system, but I doubt
they’ll find anything. It’s like he never existed. We need to
establish who he was. Could be he changed his name.”