Daddy's Gone a Hunting

92

At one o’clock Friday afternoon, Frank Ramsey and Nathan Klein were at the doorstep of Lottie Schmidt’s home. They had not warned her that they were coming because they did not want to put her on guard. Neither did they want to find her sitting with a lawyer when they arrived.

When she opened the door, Lottie’s face froze into angry disapproval, but beyond that Frank noticed the look of fear that crept into her eyes. “Come in,” she said, her voice sounding dull and weary. She held up her hand to show that she was holding a cell phone. “I’m on the phone with my daughter. I’ll tell her that I’ll call her back.”

She led them back to the dining room, where the photo albums and pictures she had shown them on Wednesday were still on the table. Without being invited, the marshals sat down in the same seats where they had previously been.

Lottie did not try to continue the conversation with her daughter in privacy. She spoke into the cell phone. “Gretchen, those fire marshals you met at the wake are here to talk to me again. I’ll call you back later.”

“Put on the speaker and I’ll talk to them! I’ll tell them what I think of them for harassing you!” Ramsey and Klein could both hear Gretchen angrily shouting as Lottie broke the connection and turned off her phone. She sat down opposite them and folded her hands on the table. ‘Well, what now?” she asked.

“Mrs. Schmidt, in this day and age, I’m afraid that almost any story can be quickly checked,” Frank Ramsey said in a conversational tone. He paused. “Including yours. The facts are that your husband did grow up on the von Mueller estate. But he was not a member of the family, nor was he an heir to any fortune. His father was a gardener there, as were his grandfather and great-grandfather. Augustus von Mueller was indeed an aristocrat, but he was an only child and he had five children, all of them girls.”

Frank opened the photo album and pointed to one of the pictures that Lottie had already shown to them. “It is indeed your husband in this picture with the von Mueller girls. As a child he played with them. Any facial resemblance is purely coincidental because all of the children were blue-eyed blondes. And it’s a real stretch to try to point out a family resemblance between your husband and Field Marshal Augustus von Mueller.”

Ramsey paused, then continued: “The entire von Mueller family was arrested and did indeed disappear after Hitler came to power. The castle and the property were confiscated by the Nazis. The servants who took care of the grounds were allowed to leave. Your husband’s father died of a heart attack around that time. Your husband was raised by his own mother, not by some kindly nurse who adopted him. Whatever valuables were recovered after the war were claimed by a distant cousin of the von Muellers and were eventually turned over to him.”

Lottie Schmidt’s expression did not change as she listened.

“Mrs. Schmidt, if your husband had good taste and autocratic manners, it was because as a child he observed them, not because they were in his blood,” Klein said. “Don’t you think it’s time to tell us where Gus got the money to buy that house for Gretchen?”

“I want to call my lawyer,” Lottie Schmidt said.

Both marshals got up to leave. When they were almost at the front door, she called out to them. “No. Wait. Come back. What’s the use? I’ll tell you what I know.”