Trixie Trulla Kills Big Dörte · Chapter 5
He placed a red rose outside Dörte’s front door.
Within eleven minutes, three photographs of it existed. After half an hour, Frau Knobloch knew that the man was a former pimp. By two o’clock, in Herr Pahlke’s account, he had risen to become a “king of the underworld”. By evening, he supposedly had contacts in Marseille, Palermo and Buxtehude.
His real name was Eugen Mertens. He had played the piano for forty years, most recently at a bar called The Blue Hour, which had stood in the city’s entertainment district without itself being particularly entertaining.
Dörte had sung there in her youth.
Not as “Dörte Söntgen”, as an early and inaccurate version of the rumour claimed. Her name had never been Söntgen. Nor had she been “La Dorata”, “Dora Fatal” or “Madame D”. She had performed under the stage name Dolly Dorée, although the second e was often missing from the posters because the printer of the day regarded French accents with political suspicion.
Eugen Mertens showed Inspector Martens a yellowed photograph. It depicted a slender young woman in a sequinned dress standing before a microphone. Her smile was bold, her gaze serious.
“She was good,” said Mertens. “Not great. But good.”
“Were you in contact?”
“Until the end.”
“When did you last see her?”
“A week ago yesterday.”
“What was it about?”
Mertens placed both hands on the head of his walking stick. “Old scores.”
Martens waited.
This too was one of her gifts. Most people endure silence less well than a direct question. They fill it at their own expense.
“Not that sort of score,” said Mertens. “No revenge. Actual accounts. Receipts. Building invoices.”
In the late 1980s, the owner of The Blue Hour, Viktor Voss, had begun buying houses. First in the entertainment district, then in better neighbourhoods. Mertens claimed that Voss had cut corners on renovations, manipulated invoices and painted over defects. Dörte had kept his books for a time.
“She kept copies,” said Mertens. “Dörte kept everything. Invoices, letters, menus, insults. Especially insults.”
“Why?”
“Because she believed everyone needed an archive to defend themselves against other people’s memories.”
“And what does that have to do with Frau Trullner’s house?”
Mertens looked at her. “The house once belonged to one of Voss’s companies.”
Thus the purchase price entered the plot for a second time. This time, however, not as an object of envy, but as a possible motive.
Shortly before her death, Dörte had evidently realised that documents from the 1990s might still possess considerable value. Not because paper is patient. But because concrete sometimes is not.
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