Brenner and God by Wolf Haas Read Free Book Online

honest, he even criticized the police for wasting their time with him instead of going after the kidnappers, but he wasn’t exactly helping matters, either, with his stubborn insistence that the interrogation get its show on the road and fast. Because when a person has a guilty conscience, most of the time he just makes everything worse. So, out of a guilty conscience—and sheer man-versus-man—Herr Simon gave the longest speech of his life.
    “You’ve asked me three times now whether I locked the car, and I’ve told you three times, yes, locked. And before you fritter away any more time, I’ll go ahead and say it a fourth time: the car was locked! Not open! Closed! I learned in the police academy, too, that
Verhör
comes from
verhören
, but …”
    I should explain briefly what all that with the
verhören
was about. Because, old interrogation trick—act like you
mishear
, or
verhören
, the first time. So if somebody says the car was locked, then five minutes later in the interrogation, or
Verhör
, you act like he said it wasn’t locked. Inside police joke:
Verhör
comes from
verhören
. So Herr Simon was offended, of course, that Peinhaupt came at him with that old stunt. He couldn’t have known what Peinhaupt had gonethrough yesterday, or else maybe he wouldn’t have given such a long speech just now.
    “And now you can ask me five more times,” he—I need to quickly add here—shouted, “whether I noticed anyone following me, and I’ll tell you five more times, nobody followed me. And you can ask me ten more times why I didn’t gas up the night before, and I’ll tell you ten more times, I don’t know, it was an oversight, there were no bad intentions, just like there are no bad intentions on your end, trotting out pointless questions here for all of eternity, instead of searching for the child. No, you just can’t do any better.”
    “And the car was locked?” Peinhaupt asked blankly and shot him a stupid look, like a man might look at a woman after saying to her for the third time:
and you’re completely sure that we’re better off going to my place instead of yours
. Even though she’s already told him twice,
leave me alone, you jackass
.
    Herr Simon wasn’t honestly sure himself whether the car—before he locked and unlocked it a thousand times—had been locked in the first place. But, locked or unlocked, that makes about as much of a difference to a criminal as a bullet entertaining the question of which SPF sunscreen you’ve got on as it bores its way into your forehead.
    “Leave me alone, you jackass,” he answered Peinhaupt.
    Because he knew perfectly well that for Peinhaupt it wasn’t about whether the car was locked. That much he still remembered from his own police days, how you’d make a big deal out of something insignificant for hours, and then slip in the crucial question completely off the cuff. Not unlike death, which, more often than not, will pick you up for skincancer on account of an old sunburn, and so you see once again how sunscreen’s more important than ducking bullets your whole life.
    Now, what was it that Peinhaupt was going to casually ask the suspicious chauffeur? How well he knew Knoll, of course. But there was no way of posing the question of the pro-life boss himself without making everything immediately obvious. How often Herr Simon had seen Knoll. Whether he’d ever spoken with him. What he made of the threats that Knoll had issued against the Frau Doctor.
    “Why didn’t you just ask me that from the beginning?” Herr Simon yelled. I have to say, I hardly recognize him like this. It’s my suspicion that the pills were now to blame for his sudden aggression. “Why have you been screwing around here this whole time with whether I saw someone in the rearview mirror or whether the car was locked?”
    “Or why you didn’t call us right away.”
    “Or why I didn’t call you right away. Maybe I was in shock, or maybe—”
    “Maybe you were in