Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 39, No. 6, June, 1994

Death by Water by Ashley Curtis

The man was lying flat on the rough sand, his head on a rolled-up sweatshirt just where the dirty grass started to grow. When the wind blew, the grass tickled his face, and he grimaced in his half sleep. Next to his head a little yellow box with a black dial at the top emitted static that was covered over by the noise the river made. It was the third night he had spent like this; the first two had gone perfectly. He turned over and looked at his watch. It was a quarter past three. In another hour he should begin to hear it. He turned back over and tried to sleep again.

He must have succeeded because the high-pitched blips scared him, shaking him awake. He sat up abruptly, rubbed his eyes, and reached for the yellow box. The beeps were getting louder quickly; he turned the dial, and they became softer but soon rose again in pitch and volume. He turned the dial again and stood up.

There was no moon, but he could still see the pale sand at his feet and the white eddies in the water. He looked upriver, trying to pick out the dull shape that was approaching him. He didn’t see it until it washed by right in front of him, then pushed into the sand a few yards farther down. He turned the dial all the way off and tossed the little box onto the rumpled sweatshirt.

He watched as the human form was jolted farther and farther onto the sand. After several high eddies had given it a push, it was securely lodged there; the normal flow of the river ran over the feet and ankles, sometimes reaching up to the knees. A tiny bright red light flashed on and off, illuminating the ghostly face — hot red, then pale nothing, coloring the bottoms of the nostrils and the lips, leaving the eye sockets in a deep, dark mist. The man bent over and untied a yellow box, the twin of his own, that was strapped around the chest of the body at his feet. He turned its dial; the flashing light went off, replaced by a weak static sound; then that went silent, too.

He looked at his watch; it was four fifteen. Once again it had worked perfectly. He carried the sweatshirt and the two boxes over the embankment and across the narrow field back to his car. He dropped them through the open window onto the back seat. Then he went back for the mannequin.

Coco Witgold, née Chadraz, spilled out of the chaise longue and stretched herself out languorously on the soft, pale blue carpet.

“Oh God!” she moaned. “That was... mmmm.”

Harry watched impassively from an easy chair two yards away, smoking a cigarette. He wore a white, heavy terry cloth bathrobe with a golden hem. The cigarette was a Sobrani. Two empty bottles of Veuve Clicquot stood on the round mahogany table next to him; the champagne flutes lay beside each other near a dark stain in the rug. He shook his head and smiled, revealing twin rows of bright teeth with matching gold caps on the top incisors.

“Time for something else,” he said in a mocking voice. “We’ve had enough of that.”

He laughed a sudden, sharp, curt little laugh.

“I was thinking,” he went on, as he studied her studied pout, watched her sit up and look regretfully at the spilled champagne, “we ought to get out of this bedroom and see a few of the sights around here.”

He bent forward and picked up a brightly colored brochure on the floor.

“After all, Switzerland is more than chocolate and champagne and room service. We could have had all that on a honeymoon back in New York. Eh?”

Coco had stood up and let her silk chemise fall down her body, covering her to a little past the waist. She walked over to the window and leaned provocatively on the sill, gazing out at the fountain in the hotel park without seeming to take it in.

“There’s this funicular here, the Schrotthorn, takes you up to a revolving restaurant at three thousand meters.” He shook his head. “That’s ten thousand feet — you’d probably get altitude sickness. Tourists probably puking all over the damned place. Pleasant restaurant!”

He laughed his short, sharp laugh again.

“Then there’s this cave thing full of crystals—”

“I hate caves,” Coco said uninterestedly. She turned to face him, shook her thick, long, auburn hair, and shivered; then she walked over to the closet where she started pulling out bras, panties, stockings till she found a set that suited her.

“A bus ride up to the Tussen Pass,” Harry murmured. “Probably get nice and carsick on those hairpin turns — Christ, is this a tourist resort or a torture chamber? Or look at this — Mariluise Bridge! ‘Built in the eighteenth century of local limestone, made famous by Mariluise Frei, the nineteenth century Swiss novelist, who jumped to her death from it in 1865. She has been followed by countless suicides since. Mariluise Beach, farther down the Orne River, is an attraction for the macabre tourist; this is the spot where the bodies inevitably wash up.’ Jesus Christ! What a delectable vacation spot! But I suppose we could always go visit Victor—”

“Don’t mention that name in front of me, Harry!” She turned on him from the bathroom door, her eyes shiny and hot. “That goddamned moneymonger, thinks he can run my life. I spit on my little brother!”

She slammed the door, and he laughed. Then he stood up, looked at his watch, and walked across the room to the telephone.

Andrea Huber sat, bored, at the ticket booth of the Banzlaui Glacier Gorge. She was running both the entrance and the small snack bar today, which wasn’t very hard since there had only been three visitors. On a cloudy day in May she hadn’t expected many more, and she thumbed through her Bravo magazine for the tenth time. Milking cows was actually more interesting than this, she thought, and she regretted having taken on the tourist job.

The gorge, though, was an impressive sight. Carved out of the rock by millions of years of violently falling glacier water, it was full of incredible rock formations, and the water that thundered through it, with a force and violence that were not for the squeamish, never failed to impress her with its power — a power she felt to be amoral if not sinister. Fifty years ago her great-grandfather had blown a passage through the rock and built a walkway through the gorge, a suspended boardwalk a few meters above the turbulence and noise. He had fenced the passage in securely and opened it up to tourists, and in high summer hundreds of them walked through every day, emerging onto solid ground three hundred meters up the mountainside. There Andrea’s cousin had installed a turnstile that connected with a counter in the ticket booth. Andrea could check that everyone was safely out of the gorge by comparing the number on the counter with the number of people who had paid admission. And today there was something funny going on, for while three people had gone in, it looked as if only two had left.

It was five o’clock, time to close up shop. But somebody apparently was lingering in the gorge. Andrea waited, lazily, ten minutes; then, throwing down her magazine and grumbling, she pulled on her wind-breaker and left the ticket booth through the door that fed directly into the tunnel.

She sighed and started through the passage in the cold, moist rock. Dim light bulbs lit the way occasionally, and as she walked the incredible roaring of the gorge grew louder and wilder, chilling her as it always did. She tried to remember the three people who had visited today: the rich couple who’d come up in a taxi, the man with his golden teeth and the woman in that outfit, dress with matching jacket, that she’d recognized from Vogue: the Liza Itzenhagen thing she knew cost well over three thousand francs. She’d had long auburn hair and big golden rings in her ears. She must have been rich and stupid to wear such a thing through the Banzlaui Glacier Gorge. But the point was that Andrea had seen them leave — had seen them climb into the taxi that had driven them up from the valley and then waited for them in the parking lot. So the straggler had to be the man in the trenchcoat, short and stocky, foreign, who had eyed her with such evident appreciation as he’d bought the ticket. He was Italian or Yugoslavian, she thought; not very good looking, with too much dark hair on his cramped little face — a man who looked strong, like a little bull. He had arrived on foot and gone in almost an hour ago; it was unusual for anyone to stay so long. So probably he’d just slipped past her unnoticed, and the counter wasn’t functioning.

She walked slowly through the darkest part of the passage, past the dim light bulbs, shivering in the damp. Then the tiny tunnel curved, and she could see out into daylight, to the wide wooden balcony that looked over the most massive and frightening fall in the whole place, a cataract that shot thick bursts of heavy foam straight down into a writhing pool where the water was sucked into a vicious maelstrom and then disappeared under the rock. It actually disappeared, she knew — sucked into a chute under the earth — and only emerged, with equal fury, two kilometers farther on, where it shot into and muddied up the Wildenbach.

Andrea hated this part of the passage. She hated the way the water hit so hard, so loud, and then was sucked deep down, forced deep into the underground, into black nothingness. She knew it was so powerful that there would be no fighting it if one fell in, and she felt that the double metal railing that stood between her and such a fate was still not strong enough; the gaps in it still scared her, and as it only came up to her waist, it seemed possible that she could somehow lose her balance and topple over it. She heard the sound of a pebble falling behind her and turned quickly, startled; and as she turned she slipped, and grabbed onto the railing to hold herself up. But the railing was wet and slippery, and her hand slid down it just as her feet lost their hold on the rock and she fell hard into the fence, landing on her side on the wet ground. She felt suddenly, crazily afraid — all alone and yet not alone at all — and the knowledge that she was a sinner overwhelmed her, that she deserved whatever punishment God might intend for all the awful, selfish thoughts she’d had about her poor hardworking parents; the things that she had done with certain men; her horrible ambitions; and the terrible, unmentionable, constant thoughts she had and never could get rid of...

She heard another pebble fall, and then another. But if someone was there, where could he be hiding...

The water on the ground began to soak through her clothes, but she couldn’t get up, she couldn’t move; she turned her face down to the ground; she felt that something horrible was about to happen to her...

It was about two in the morning when the receptionist at the Sauvage called the police. Bruno Mohr, who was on duty, listened dully to the story, then threw his jacket on and stepped outside. He got into the car and backed onto the empty street. He drove three blocks without seeing a single light on in a house. Then he reached the main road where a couple of shop windows were lit up; and then, of course, the lobby windows of the Grand Hotel Sauvage.

He pulled up in front of the rotunda, twisted off the ignition, closed the door softly, and took the steps. The night air was warm, and the mountains rising up to the stars all around him made him feel strong. He was thirty-three years old and in good shape from his workouts with the soccer club, and he enjoyed feeling his well-trained muscles work together smoothly as he loped up the steps of Ringgenberg’s fanciest hotel.

Through the window of the front door he saw Raoul, whom he knew vaguely, sitting rigidly at the reception desk while another man, short and dark, his tie and hair in disarray, paced back and forth on the deep red carpet. Bruno pushed the door open gently. The crazy-looking man rushed up to him and began pleading with him in fluent German with a strong American accent.

“I need to see my sister. I need to see my sister! She called me three hours ago — she’s in trouble — she needs my help. Will you tell this fool to give me her goddamned room number?”

Raoul rolled his eyes at Bruno and spoke quietly and slowly in the local dialect.

“He says that Mrs. Witgold in 414 is his sister and she needs his help. I’m not going to let him barge in on her and her husband in the middle of the night unless you tell me to, Bruno. For obvious reasons.”

“She could be dying, even now. This is absurd! She’s my sister! I got a desperate phone call from her. She’s freshly married to a man who’s — who’s — evil, and I’m scared to death for her, and if you don’t let me up, I’m going to scream through the goddamned halls of this whole damned hotel and wake all of your clients up, you little — spaniel, you twit! Do you hear me, man?”

Bruno had the man identify himself, which he did, squirming, by means of a driver’s license and a business card. He was a divorce lawyer, Victor Chadraz, who lived and worked in Bern.

“It’s not our policy to disturb guests in the hotel without overwhelming cause, Mr. Chadraz,” Bruno stated calmly. “No one has heard or seen anything out of place, and your sister will surely be willing to see you tomorrow morning—”

“You don’t understand,” Victor insisted. “She may not be alive tomorrow morning!” He was screaming, his face twisted in fury — then suddenly he darted towards the stairs, and before Bruno or Raoul could react, he was around the corner, heading up for the fourth floor. Bruno sprinted up after him, but the little man was fast, and he pulled pictures off the walls and tossed them backwards and they almost tripped up Bruno, and he had to slow down, and then a large plant lay across the red carpeted stair, and a broken alabaster statue of a naked woman — and by the time Bruno reached the fourth floor Victor was a good twenty meters ahead of him, ramming his shoulder into the door of 414, to little effect; and then he tried the door handle, and it opened. At the other end of the hall an old woman appeared in a fuzzy purple nightgown, her mouth wide open, but Bruno had no time to deal with guests; he stormed into the open room, ready to pull the crazy man off whomever he might be attacking there.

But Victor was attacking nobody. The lights were all on in the room, which was not a room but a suite; the big bed was perfectly made up, its shiny silver quilt tucked eloquently into the corners of the mattress; two used champagne glasses stood next to each other on a windowsill; the bathroom door was open, the fan blowing senselessly. But nobody was there. Bruno ran quickly into the next room, a small sitting room, and then the next, another bedroom, with a matching bed similarly made up. The lights were on in all the rooms, but they were undisturbed. He returned and saw Victor standing at the bed in the first room, reading a sheet of paper. His face was pale and his hands were shaking; he dropped the note back onto the bed and fell into a chair. Bruno picked it up; it was a short, typewritten paragraph followed by a flamboyant signature.

And then the signature, something Bruno could not make out.

Victor was sitting forward now, his forehead sweating, wringing his hands.

“It isn’t true,” he said. “It’s phony. Coco would never write a thing like that. It’s him.” Bruno waited for enlightenment. But he was pretty sure already what the next few hours would bring. A watch down at the beach, the bored but nervous waiting — and then, just as you were thinking of something else, just when you thought it was taking too long and nothing would be coming at all... the empty body rolling in. The Ringgenberg police had been lobbying for years to take that damned bridge and its history off the tourist brochures, take the damned plaque off of the bridge. But every time the burghers, economically astute, turned them down, realizing at some level that the gory story of Mariluise Frei — and its string of pathetic successors — helped them rake in the tourist dollars they needed to stay afloat.

“It’s him, I’m sure of it. He’s killed her. It’s a cover. Oh Jesus, what a monster, not to have waited even a goddamned week...”

He put his face in his hands and began to sob. Bruno moved over to the telephone, cradled it in his hand, and dialed.

Exactly one week later, Max Fremont received one of the strangest phone calls in his long, strange life. He was sitting in the rocking chair on the screened porch, looking out on a Hansor midafternoon — the occasional car rolling by, the leaves unfolding, wet and fresh, on the great maple trees — finding it odd that what would have seemed so boring to him in his youth was such a tonic to him now. He almost didn’t answer the phone, reminding himself that he no longer had the obligation to look on every call as a matter of life and death — but the thought that his wife was out on Quimby Mountain looking for fiddleheads and that something might have happened to her dragged him to his feet and had him there on the eleventh ring.

“Max, this is Jordy. Jordy Fields, you remember, from the D.A.”

Jordy Fields, the prosecutor who had often taken on his cases, whom he had once been fairly close to in a ridiculous sort of way. But he hadn’t seen or heard from him for years, not since he had retired to Vermont.

“Hello, Jordy.”

His voice betrayed no surprise.

“This is going to sound awfully strange, Max, but I’m calling from Switzerland.”

“Holiday?”

“No.”

Fremont waited. He wasn’t sure he was too happy about this intrusion from the past.

“Listen, Max,” Jordy said. “A good friend of mine, Victor Chadraz, is in big trouble over here. I flew over to help him out.”

There was another pause. Fremont still said nothing.

“He’s charged with murdering his sister. I don’t believe he did, but the case is pretty bad against him. My problem is, I’ve been here four days, and I don’t see any way to help him out. I’m stymied, frankly.”

“And?” Fremont asked dryly.

“Well, you’ve always been good at things that stymie other people, Max. So I’m going to make an outrageous proposal. I know you’re retired and all, but Victor will pay to fly you over here and pay you handsomely for each day you’re here. I want you to come and help me out of this.”

“Help him,” Fremont corrected. He looked out the kitchen window at a blue jay perched on the branch of a dogwood tree, held his hand over the mouthpiece, and let out a long sigh. Then he said, “You’d better tell me what’s going on.”

Jordy coughed into the phone.

“All right,” he started. “Victor works in Bern — a lawyer. Moved there recently. His sister’s just married this creep. They’re immensely wealthy—”

“They’re the Chadrazes?” Fremont interrupted.

“You got it. Anyway, Victor’s sure he married her for nothing but the money. She fell for him in a big way, and he decided to exploit his luck, right? So. For some unexplained reason, they decide to honeymoon in Switzerland, even though they’ve had a big fight with Victor — but they went to this mountain town, a couple of hours away. Didn’t contact him or anything. You with me? So. On a Wednesday night, late, Victor gets a phone call from his sister. She’s crying, she’s in trouble, she needs his help. He hops in his car, drives through the night, wakes up the hotel, almost gets thrown out by a cop, and finally gets into her room. She’s gone; there’s a suicide note, fairly generic, on her bed.”

“Her husband?” Fremont muttered.

“That’s the thing. Guy named Harry Witgold. He’s not there, but it turns out he’s been in Luzern, a couple of hours away, at a party — sort of a late stag thing — thrown by a couple of business friends who work in Switzerland. He was at a nightclub all night long, with tons of people — ironclad alibi. Not only that, he arrived there in a taxi — an hour-and-a-half drive, but of course he’s not worried about money. Not only that, but the taxi ride started at this place he went with Coco — that’s his wife, Victor’s sister — some tourist spot, waterfall or something — Glacier Gorge. The taxi took them to the glacier gorge and then back to the hotel, but only she gets out at the hotel. She kisses him, and he drives on to Luzern. So he’s covered for absolutely the whole time.”

“And her?”

“Well, she washed up early Thursday morning at a beach. Seems she jumped off this bridge that’s famous for its suicides. But here’s the thing. Victor was adamant from the start that it was some kind of trick, that she never would have done this, that it was Harry. And she did look pretty damned beat up. They did an autopsy, of course — cause of death wasn’t drowning, was a knock on the head with a large object, probably a rock. And it’s impossible to jump off this bridge and land on a rock because the water’s much too deep anywhere you can jump. So Victor was right. She was murdered. Only it looks like it was he who murdered her.”

“Why him?”

“A couple of things. First of all, no one else knew her except her husband, and he couldn’t have done it. She’d had this big fight with Victor, of course, about the marriage, and especially because he’d warned her about changing her will. She resented that, and said, maybe to spite him, that she was going to change it anyway. So he wrote her a letter, which Harry Witgold conveniently has in his possession, warning her against doing any such thing, talking about the waste of the family money and so on. Well, she hadn’t changed it when she died. And it turns out — Victor says he didn’t know this — that she’d left everything to him. There’s motive for you, huh? About to change her will and disinherit him? And he’s had some financial trouble recently, which he was so naive as to admit — some bum investments. Nothing to worry such as you or me, but still, something.”

“It’s starting to look grim,” Fremont commented.

“Exactly. And then there’s this. The suicide note was typed on Victor’s typewriter. And he was supposedly the first to find it, so it’s possible that he didn’t find it, but that he brought it with him when he barged into her room on Wednesday night. The signature’s hers, but he might have got that somehow on a blank piece of paper, then typed the note on top of it. And finally, there’s no record of a call out from her room on Wednesday night. So it looks like he’s making up the story of the desperate phone call, too.”

“Any more?” Fremont asked.

“Not really.”

“But Victor was adamant from the start that it wasn’t suicide?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“Are you sure?”

“Quite sure.”

“Why would he say that if he’d killed her? Wasn’t the whole point to make it look like a suicide?”

“That would seem to be the hitch, of course. But the cops don’t buy it. They think Victor realized, belatedly, that the autopsy would find out what it did, so he dropped his original plan and switched over to accusing Harry. And there’s not much you can say to disprove that.”

“But you believe your friend?”

“I’ve seen a lot, Max, you know? I don’t think this guy’s guilty, if you know what I mean.”

Fremont didn’t answer. Later that afternoon he called the travel agent in Stilton; the next day he packed a small bag and got on the bus that went from White River Junction to Logan airport, more or less direct; and that night, sitting in the departure lounge waiting for the plane, he opened a small Tupperware bowl and slowly ate a meal of fiddlesticks and lamb. He didn’t want to feel as if he was enjoying this, messing around with murder once again, so he told himself that it was only the prospect of the long ride on the jumbo jet that was exciting him.

Fremont put up at the Sauvage, in a modest room one floor below the suite that Harry Witgold was still staying in. He slept all afternoon on the day of his arrival, ate a modest meal with Jordy, then talked with a woman named Marianne Neiger. She had been at the reception desk on that Wednesday afternoon and had seen the taxi pull up outside, seen the kiss, seen Coco Chadraz walking up the steps, her head bowed down, in that Liza Itzenhagen outfit that she had both envied and resented. She found it curious that Fremont, a man, should be so interested in her thoughts about the dress: how much it must have cost, how appropriate it was on a woman built like Ms. Chadraz, and so on and so forth — as well as what she might or might not have done better with her wild, impassioned hair. Marianne would never have worn it like Coco did. She would have tamed it, maybe even straightened it, and worn it with dignity, bunned up or maybe in a French braid. It was better, even sexier, she maintained, to carry oneself dignified in public, not like you’d just got out of bed.

Jordy saw Fremont up to his room, then hovered at the door.

“Goodnight, Jordy,” Fremont said.

Jordy still hovered. “What was all that about?” he finally asked.

Fremont chuckled.

“I don’t know yet, Jordy. Christ, I just arrived. I’m an old man — let me get some sleep.”

“Okay, okay. Goodnight, chief.”

The next morning they visited Andrea Huber. Jordy drove them up to the Glacier Gorge with a man named Hans to translate, since Andrea knew no English. The dirt road twisted wildly though a dark forest, then emerged into another, higher valley, where brownish cows with massive udders grazed on pleasant meadows.

Andrea liked Fremont, even in translation, better than she had the detective who had questioned her before. She felt his interest in her was genuine; he really seemed to be listening and understanding when she told him about the short Italian man who’d gone into the gorge that afternoon but whom she hadn’t seen leave, and the disagreement between the counters; and how she’d felt so frightened going through the gorge that day, and how she fell down on the wet ground and almost had a fit. He even asked to see where she’d heard the noise that scared her when she fell. The police had barely been interested in her story after they’d shown her the picture of that other man and she’d said no, that wasn’t him. And Fremont seemed impressed that she had recognized the dress that the woman was wearing and could name the designer and even knew the price.

They drove back to the valley without saying much, then pulled up at a shabby pink apartment building that looked out of place in Ringgenberg. Berndt Lornhart, the taxi driver, was wearing slippers and a tattered bathrobe when he came to the door. A television blared somewhere inside. He volunteered that it was his day off. He volunteered, next, that he was sick of being bothered by millions of people about what he was sure was just another suicide. The woman in the car had not been happy; he could tell by the way she held herself that something wasn’t right: her head down the whole time, like she was crying. But he’d told that to the police and to the other lawyer and he wanted to know how long he was going to be bothered with something that he had nothing to do with. He couldn’t say much about the dress — it was green, with some kind of pattern. Nice? He shrugged his shoulders. The high, complaining screech of a young child rose louder and louder, competing with the racket from the television. Berndt excused himself. Fremont, Jordy, and Hans got back into the car.

“So?” Jordy asked as they returned to Fremont’s room. “What’s the lowdown?”

“I don’t work miracles, Jordy,” Fremont said.

“But you’re onto something,” Jordy insisted. “I can tell. Something about the dress. But what? So she was wearing an expensive dress. So what?”

“Maybe you’re right,” Fremont said. “Maybe it is so what.”

“But you have an idea.”

“Jordy,” Fremont said, letting just a hint of irritation seep into his voice, “let’s just say this. It’s strange to wear a two thousand dollar dress into a glacier gorge. Okay? You could have figured that yourself. That’s where I’m stuck. I’m going to make a phone call, and we’ll see what comes of it. And now I need to rest.”

“You don’t want to see the body? The PM report? The dress that you’re so interested in? Don’t you want to talk to someone — talk to Victor, for Christ’ sake?”

Fremont sat down on his bed and picked up a tourist brochure from his night table. He held it out for Jordy.

“Take this, Jordy. Go home and study it. If I’m right, the answer to the case is right in here. Got it? Now go — I need to be alone.”

Jordy took the pamphlet, glanced at it, and crumpled it into his back pocket.

“Yeah, sure,” he grumbled. “Gotcha, chief.”

Mumbling to himself, he headed toward the door.

“Just call me when you need me, Max.”

“Will do.”

The door closed. Fremont shrugged off his jacket and lay down on the bed. Then he sat up and reached out for the telephone.

Evening was coming on, casting a pinkish glow on the steep cliffs and mountains that lorded it over the little town of Ringgenberg. Fremont sat at his window, looking down across the street at the boutique, the bank, the sports store opposite. He expected the phone call from New York any minute now, and he was almost certain that he knew what the reply would be. It was an easy little piece of investigation for Lois, since Liza Itzenhagen surely didn’t sell too many of those dresses and an anomaly like the one he was looking for would easily show up. And Lois — who was Lieutenant Heller now, if he remembered right — was clearly happy to lend him a hand after all he’d done for her on the force.

He perked up on seeing Harry Witgold cross the street. He was carrying a white plastic bag in his right hand; he walked briskly, a foppish brown hat on his head, wearing a casual but expensive suit that gave him the air of a rich dude in a Western. He looked left and right, then stepped through the automatic door of the sports store.

Fremont moved his chair so he could see the entrance to the store more easily, then waited, leaning on the windowsill. Five minutes later Witgold left the store, crossed the street, and entered the hotel. His hands were empty.

It was almost six thirty, closing time in Switzerland. Fremont looked ruefully at the telephone, then rose from his post. He threw on his jacket and went out into the hall, locking the door behind him. He walked down the red carpeted stairs, past the empty niche where a statue once had stood, out through the lobby, and across the street. The glass doors of the sports store opened automatically; the clerk’s face sank as she saw him coming in so close to closing time. He asked if she spoke English and saw her displeasure grow even greater, so when she replied in the affirmative he said, “I just have a very quick question. I’m looking for a friend of mine — I think he came in here. Tall, brown suit, wide hat—”

“He left a few minutes ago,” she said curtly.

“Oh damn.”

Fremont pretended to think for a moment.

“He brought something back, no? In a plastic bag? If it’s him, I mean — did he bring back some... uh... what the hell are they called...”

“Barryvox,” the woman said, annoyed. “Is that your friend?” Fremont nodded.

“Then he left a few moments ago. I’m sorry.”

Fremont thanked her and headed immediately out the door. He crossed the street and returned to his room, repeating the word in his head; he flipped quickly through his little dictionary, then closed it and phoned Jordy.

“I need you to find something out for me. There’s a German word I don’t know — it’s something you might buy or rent in a sports store. Barryvox, Barryfox, Darrybox, something like that. I don’t see it in the dictionary. Can you find it out for me?”

“I’ll do my best,” Jordy said.

The phone rang immediately as Fremont hung up. Lois chattered away for a discreet minute and then got down to business.

“The dress was easy,” she said. “It’s exactly like you guessed. You want the number?”

Fremont declined. Someone else could do the dirty work — he was retired, after all.

“The female wasn’t much harder,” Lois went on. “The flight was on the same card as the dresses. Her name’s Maria Fine. Your description fits, more or less.”

Fremont relaxed in the easy chair and nodded to himself.

“Thanks, Lois. I’ll make it up to you someday. You don’t mind if they call you up from here for the details?”

“Any time, Max. Take care.”

He sat back, pleased. It was enough, he thought — if not for a conviction, at least to bring the man in and work on him. He looked at the card on the phone table: Inspektor Richard Sigrist. He would call Inspektor Sigrist, fill him in. Then he would call Jordy, invite him and Victor to a late dinner at the Sauvage.

The phone rang again.

“Max, Jordy. That was a tough one — tried it on all kinds of people. Finally found a mountain climber who could tell me. It’s a thing they use for skiing, to find people buried in avalanches. Combination receiver and transmitter — sends a little signal — everybody carries one, and if one of the party gets buried, they can find him under the snow.”

Fremont mulled this over.

“Why’d you want to know?” Jordy asked.

“Witgold returned one to a sports store this afternoon.” He paused. “Why don’t you come over, Jordy — I’ve got a few things to tell you. I’d like to go home tomorrow, too, if you can arrange it.”

He could almost hear Jordy smile.

“Be right over, Max. And listen... thanks a lot.”

Fremont laughed. He poured himself another glass of Sirius Bordeaux and then sat down again. They were in the lobby of the Sauvage, a beautiful room full of ancient overstuffed chairs and antique chests, old oak tables and oil paintings of someone’s ancestors. The windows stretched almost from ceiling to floor; looking one way you could see the stunning reach of the Banzlaui Glacier, falling between peaks carved out of the deepening evening sky; in the other direction lay the elegant arch of Mariluise Bridge and the flat farmland of the valley floor.

“Victor should be here at nine,” Jordy said. “We have a table at nine fifteen.” He reached for some cashews from a bowl on a small round table. “He’s a very happy man.”

He walked over and stood at one of the windows, looking out towards the bridge.

“So!” He turned around. “Let’s have it.”

Fremont sipped his wine and looked absently at the old, dirty paintings of armored, mustached noblemen.

“I guess what tempted me to come at all was the taxi,” he finally said. “It was a beautiful alibi, but so unnatural. Who’s going to go visit the Glacier Gorge and plan to take the same damned taxi, without even getting out at his hotel, straight on to a party in a nightclub two hours away? It was one of the least plausible stories I’ve ever heard. And yet it was true — any number of witnesses could testify to it. It covered Witgold perfectly, but that only made it all the more suspicious.

“So, I thought, there must be something up. I came, and the next absurdity I noticed was the dress. Who wears a two thousand dollar dress to a glacier gorge? Nobody, dammit. And yet apparently she did.

“How could these things tie together? I only had the vague idea that they were fake. But as I talked to the women who had seen Coco Chadraz that day, I was struck by how they clung to that dress, how it seemed to be her one distinguishing characteristic, how much it had overwhelmed them. And then the girl, what was her name, at the gorge—”

“Andrea.”

“Yes. She mentioned something very strange. She’d had some sort of fit that day, after she’d noticed that the turnstiles had registered numbers that couldn’t have been right. Three people had entered the gorge; only two had left. She’d seen Witgold and Coco leave but hadn’t noticed the third man, so she went in to look for him.

“Three people went in — two came out. If you take that at face value, which no one seems to have, it would imply that someone fell into the gorge. And if the man fell into the gorge, we have two suicides on the same day. The odds are pretty heavy against something like that. More likely, she just didn’t see him leave.”

Jordy shook his head.

“I don’t understand,” he said lamely.

Fremont chuckled.

“There didn’t seem to be any way around it,” he said. “Coco Chadraz never left the Glacier Gorge.”

“What? But everybody saw her!”

Fremont shook his head.

“Everybody thought they saw her,” he replied. “But what they saw was just what they expected to see — a shapely woman with wild hair in a two thousand dollar dress. They didn’t figure there’d be two of them around.”

“What?” Jordy repeated.

Fremont shrugged.

“It’s easy. Witgold married Coco for the money. She fell in love with him — he saw his opportunity. He appeared to leave his real woman — one Maria Fine — for her. But if he can get rid of Coco, he can go back to Maria a rich man. Maria likes the idea. They plot together. Her figure and face are similar enough to Coco’s. If they can dress her up in a way only Coco would dress, and top her off with violent auburn hair, and then she avoids looking straight at anyone — she’s Coco.”

“So Witgold takes Coco to the Glacier Gorge,” Jordy mumbled, a cashew in his mouth, “after cajoling her into wearing the dress. He throws her in, leaves the gorge, meets Maria hidden in the woods, and walks back to the taxi with her. Brilliant. Only a few flaws.”

Fremont raised an eyebrow.

“Like, Coco Chadraz fell into the Orne river from Mariluise Bridge. She didn’t wash up at the bottom of the gorge.”

Fremont smiled.

“Water only flows in one direction,” he said. “And that’s where she went, too. Where do you think the water from the glacier gorge ends up? If you’d read that splashy brochure, you’d know. It goes two kilometers underground, then merges with something called the Wildenbach, which flows into the Orne. But even without the brochure it should be clear. Where else could it go? The Orne’s the only river in the valley.”

“Pretty risky.”

“I don’t think so. He must have tried it out, dumped something into the gorge. Found that it ended up at the beach. Probably found out when, how long the trip would take, and timed his excursion accordingly.”

“But when did he do all this?”

Fremont shrugged.

“Sometime at night. He didn’t have to go into the tourist route — he could have thrown his dummy in from the top of the cliff.”

He paused.

“And that was why he had the Barryvox,” he said. “I doubt that Harry Witgold has done much skiing recently. What else is he doing renting those things they use to find people buried in the snow?”

“It’s nice,” Jordy admitted. “But what’s your proof?”

“On two separate days, one after the other, the exact same dress was charged to Witgold’s credit card. Then, a day after he and Coco arrived in Switzerland, Maria Fine came in — her flight charged, stupidly, to the same card. She flew back home the morning Coco Chadraz washed up on the beach.”

“Circumstantial,” Jordy muttered.

“Enough to get him to confess.”

“But the will!” Jordy suddenly objected. “Why didn’t he wait until she’d changed it over to him?”

“First, to throw suspicion on Victor, who had a nice motive now. It was Maria, by the way, who called him on the phone that night, in a hysterical voice that he believed was Coco’s. And second, because it didn’t make much difference — he already had most of her money invested in his name.”

“And the typewriter?”

“I’d guess that note was written a long time ago, in the States, when Witgold was in Victor’s apartment once. Maybe about the time they were all having that big fight.”

Jordy nodded. He had no more to object — it seemed so easy, now it had all been explained.

“He was careless,” Fremont said. “He thought it was such a brilliant plan that he didn’t have to worry about the little things. If he hadn’t charged the dresses, or the plane ticket, he probably would have got away with it.”

He shook his head slowly.

“They always do something wrong. You know why? Because there are too many damned things. Too many things to think about. It’s a bad gamble, murder — very bad. The odds are awful.”

He looked out the window with silent, subdued eyes, as if he had uncovered the very secret of existence. Then he broke into a smile.

“That must be Victor,” he said. “Let’s go get a bite to eat.”