The autopsy proved beyond a doubt that the murdered man had been dead for many hours before the discovery of his body. The bullet which had struck him in the back had pierced the trachea and death had occurred within a few minutes. The only marks for identification of the body were the initials L. W. on his underwear. The evening paper printed an exact description of the man’s appearance and his clothing.
It was about ten o’clock next morning when Mrs. Klingmayer, a widow living in a quiet street at the opposite end of the city from Hietzing, returned from her morning marketing. It was only a few little bundles that she brought with her and she set about preparing her simple dinner. Her packages were wrapped in newspapers, which she carefully smoothed out and laid on the dresser.
Mrs. Klingmayer was the widow of a street-car conductor and the little pension which she received from the company, as well as the money she could earn for herself, did not permit of the indulgence in a daily newspaper. And yet the reading of the papers was the one luxury for which the simple woman longed. Her grocer, who was a friend of years, knew this and would wrap up her purchases in papers of recent date, knowing that she could then enjoy them in her few moments of leisure. To-day this leisure came unexpectedly early, for Mrs. Klingmayer had less work than usual to attend to.
Her little flat consisted of two rooms and a kitchen with a large closet opening out from it. She lived in the kitchen and rented the front rooms. Her tenants were a middle-aged man, inspector in a factory, who had the larger room; and a younger man who was bookkeeper in an importing house in the city. But this young man had not been at home for forty-eight hours, a fact, however, which did not greatly worry his landlady. The gentleman in question lived a rather dissipated life and it was not the first time that he had remained away from home over night. It is true that it was the first time that he had not been home for two successive nights. But as Mrs. Klingmayer thought, everything has to happen the first time sometime. “It’s not likely to be the last time,” the worthy woman thought.
At all events she was rather glad of it to-day, for she suffered from rheumatism and it was difficult for her to get about. The young man’s absence saved her the work of fixing up his room that morning and allowed her to get to her reading earlier than usual. When she had put the pot of soup on the fire, she sat down by the window, adjusted her big spectacles and began to read. To her great delight she discovered that the paper she held in her hand bore the date of the previous afternoon. In spite of the good intentions of her friend the grocer, it was not always that she could get a paper of so recent date, and she began to read with doubled anticipation of pleasure.
She did not waste time on the leading articles, for she understood little about politics. The serial stories were a great delight to her, or would have been, if she had ever been able to follow them consecutively. But her principal joy were the everyday happenings of varied interest which she found in the news columns. To-day she was so absorbed in the reading of them that the soup pot began to boil over and send out rivulets down onto the stove. Ordinarily this would have shocked Mrs. Klingmayer, for the neatness of her pots and pans was the one great care of her life. But now, strange to relate, she paid no attention to the soup, nor to the smell and the smoke that arose from the stove. She had just come upon a notice in the paper which took her entire attention. She read it through three times, and each time with growing excitement. This is what she read:
MURDER IN HIETZING
This morning at six o’clock the body of a man about 30 years
old was discovered in a lane in Hietzing. The man must have
been dead many hours. He had been shot from behind. The dead
man was tall and thin, with brown eyes, brown hair and moustache.
The letters L. W. were embroidered in his underwear. There was
nothing else discovered on him that could reveal his identity.
His watch and purse were not in his pockets: presumably they had
been taken by the murderer. A strange fact is that in one of
his pockets—a hidden pocket it is true—there was the sum of
300 guldens in bills.
This was the notice which made Mrs. Klingmayer neglect the soup pot.
Finally the old woman stood up very slowly, threw a glance at the stove and opened the window mechanically. Then she lifted the pots from the fire and set them on the outer edge of the range. And then she did something that ordinarily would have shocked her economical soul—she poured water on the fire to put it out.
When she saw that there was not a spark left in the stove, she went into her own little room and prepared to go out. Her excitement caused her to forget her rheumatism entirely. One more look around her little kitchen, then she locked it up and set out for the centre of the city.
She went to the office of the importing house where her tenant, Leopold Winkler, was employed as bookkeeper. The clerk at the door noticed the woman’s excitement and asked her kindly what the trouble was.
“I’d like to speak to Mr. Winkler,” she said eagerly.
“Mr. Winkler hasn’t come in yet,” answered the young man. “Is anything the matter? You look so white! Winkler will probably show up soon, he’s never very punctual. But it’s after eleven o’clock now and he’s never been as late as this before.”
“I don’t believe he’ll ever come again,” said the old woman, sinking down on a bench beside the door.
“Why, what do you mean?” asked the clerk. “Why shouldn’t he come again?”
“Is the head of the firm here?” asked Mrs. Klingmayer, wiping her forehead with her handkerchief. The clerk nodded and hurried away to tell his employer about the woman with the white face who came to ask for a man who, as she expressed it, “would never come there again.”
“I don’t think she’s quite right in the head,” he volunteered. The head of the firm told him to bring the woman into the inner office.
“Who are you, my good woman?” he asked kindly, softened by the evident agitation of this poorly though neatly dressed woman.
“I am Mr. Winkler’s landlady,” she answered.
“Ah! and he wants you to tell me that he’s sick? I’m afraid I can’t believe all that this gentleman says. I hope he’s not asking your help to lie to me. Are you sure that his illness is anything else but a case of being up late?”
“I don’t think that he’ll ever be sick again—I didn’t come with any message from him, sir; please read this, sir.” And she handed him the newspaper, showing him the notice. While the gentleman was reading she added: “Mr. Winkler didn’t come home last night either.”
Winkler’s employer read the few lines, then laid the paper aside with a very serious face. “When did you see him last?” he asked of the woman.
“Day before yesterday in the morning. He went away about half-past eight as he usually does,” she replied. And then she added a question of her own: “Was he here day before yesterday?”
The merchant nodded and pressed an electric bell. Then he rose from his seat and pulled up a chair for his visitor. “Sit down here. This thing has frightened you and you are no longer young.” When the servant entered, the merchant told him to ask the head bookkeeper to come to the inner office.
When this official appeared, his employer inquired: “When did Winkler leave here day before yesterday?”
“At six o’clock, sir, as usual.”
“He was here all day without interruption?”
“Yes, sir, with the exception of the usual luncheon hour.”
“Did he have the handling of any money Monday?”
“No, sir.”
“Thank you, Mr. Pokorny,” said the merchant, handing his employee the evening paper and pointing to the notice which had so interested him.
Pokorny read it, his face, like his employer’s, growing more serious. “It looks almost as if it must be Winkler, sir,” he said, in a few moments.
“We will soon find that out. I should like to go to the police station myself with this woman; she is Winkler’s landlady—but I think it will be better for you to accompany her. They will ask questions about the man which you will be better able to answer than I.”
Pokorny bowed and left the room. Mrs. Klingmayer rose and was about to follow, when the merchant asked her to wait a moment and inquired whether Winkler owed her anything. “I am sorry that you should have had this shock and the annoyances and trouble which will come of it, but I don’t want you to be out of pocket by it.”
“No, he doesn’t owe me anything,” replied the honest old woman, shaking her head. A few big tears rolled down over her withered cheeks, possibly the only tears that were shed for the dead man under the elder-tree. But even this sympathetic soul could find nothing to say in his praise. She could feel pity for his dreadful death, but she could not assert that the world had lost anything by his going out of it. As if saddened by the impossibility of finding a single good word to say about the dead man, she left the office with drooping head and lagging step.
Pokorny helped her into the cab that was already waiting before the door. The office force had got wind of the fact that something unusual had occurred and were all at the windows to see them drive off. The three clerks who worked in the department to which Winkler belonged gathered together to talk the matter over. They were none of them particularly hit by it, but naturally they were interested in the discovery in Hietzing, and equally naturally, they tried to find a few good words to say about the man whose life had ended so suddenly.
The youngest of them, Fritz Bormann, said some kind words and was about to wax more enthusiastic, when Degenhart, the eldest clerk, cut in with the words: “Oh, don’t trouble yourself. Nobody ever liked Winkler here. He was not a good man—he was not even a good worker. This is the first time that he has a reasonable excuse for neglecting his duties.”
“Oh, come, see here! how can you talk about the poor man that way when he’s scarcely cold in death yet,” said Fritz indignantly.
Degenhart laughed harshly.
“Did I ever say anything else about him while he was warm and alive? Death is no reason for changing one’s opinion about a man who was good-for-nothing in life. And his death was a stroke of good luck that he scarcely deserved. He died without a moment’s pain, with a merry thought in his head, perhaps, while many another better man has to linger in torture for weeks. No, Bormann, the best I can say about Winkler is that his death makes one nonentity the less on earth.”
The older man turned to his desk again and the two younger clerks continued the conversation: “Degenhart appears to be a hard man,” said Fritz, “but he’s the best and kindest person I know, and he’s dead right in what he says. It was simply a case of conventional superstition. I never did like that Winkler.”
“No, you’re right,” said the other. “Neither did I and I don’t know why, for the matter of that. He seemed just like a thousand others. I never heard of anything particularly wrong that he did.”
“No, no more did I,” continued Bormann, “but I never heard of anything good about him either. And don’t you think that it’s worse for a man to seem to repel people by his very personality, rather than by any particular bad thing that he does?”
“Yes. I don’t know how to explain it, but that’s just how I feel about it. I had an instinctive feeling that there was something wrong about Winkler, the sort of a creepy, crawly feeling that a snake gives you.”
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