Dead Man's Tale by Ellery Queen Read Free Book Online

say about her grandfather. Poor kid.
    When they tell us we can leave Oosterdijk—after the inquest or coroner’s jury or whatever they have here—we’re going to Lucerne, Switzerland, to look up Gertrude Ohlendorf.
    The idea of going to Switzerland fascinates me, and I feel kind of guilty about that. It isn’t merely Switzerland I want to see, either. It’s Milo Hacha. There’s a strange sort of magnetism even in the name for me now. I don’t know what it is. All Oosterdijk remembers him as a hero of the resistance. Almost all Oosterdijk. Because Mayor Hilversum, for one, tried to build up a case against Hacha. Then there was Old Joost.
    Did Joost kill twice to prevent anyone from finding Hacha’s trail? If so, why? It doesn’t make sense, because he quite eagerly told us Hacha wasn’t dead. Why us?
    There’s talk, according to the porter, that Katrina Joost is really Milo Hacha’s daughter. That figures. She sure looks Slavic enough. And the porter suggested, without coming out and naming any names, that I ought to be able to figure out who the mother was. He means Mrs. Hilversum, of course. Which could explain a thing or two.
    She wanted Katrina to have Milo Hacha’s legacy so she gave me the note? Then went out to see Old Joost—and got strangled for her trouble? Why? Because Old Joost didn’t want it known that Hacha wasn’t dead, and she found out somehow? But then why did he tell Steve and me?
    And, since Vrouw Hilversum gave us the tip about Joost, why did she have to go out and see him herself? To make sure he told us what she wanted him to? That Katrina was Hacha’s daughter?
    One thing I’m not is a detective. But I’ve got this gnawing curiosity about Milo Hacha.
    If only I could stop worrying about Steve. He seems ready to crack. He’s really scared.
    Maybe in Lucerne …

PART III
    INTERLUDE—VIERWALDSTAETTERSEE
    7
    Now he looked like a musician entirely.
    Watching him, Trudy Ohlendorf sighed. He was a robust man in his forties. He wore a white linen suit with padded shoulders. He had glossy black hair greying picturesquely at the temples and the suggestion of a bald spot on the crown of his head.
    The baton in his right hand looked very small and he waved it with, great vigour. He was directing the Grand Orchestre du Casino in the garden of the Lucerne Kursaal Casino.
    They were playing the Moldau music from Smetana’s My Fatherland . He had explained the score to Trudy with enthusiasm, for he was a Sudeten German from Czechoslovakia, and loved his native music. It was programme music, following the course of the Vltava River from its source in the dark Bohemian forest—rushing across the rock bed and through the black forestland, past hunters with their horns and peasants dancing to the roaring cataracts of the St. Johns Rapids and finally, majestically, wide and serene through Prague.
    But it wearied Trudy. The magic had gone out of it simply because Heinz Kemka, musician, looked like a musician. This, Trudy knew, was unreasonable of her. But she had always catered to her whims and quirks. Why bother to be reasonable?
    At first Heinz Kemka, musician, had looked to her like anything but a musician. When she had met him, almost a year before, on the Lucerne Lido she had taken him for a professional athlete. Professional athletes as such held no particular fascination for Trudy, but to discover him leading the orchestra with athletic vigour at the Kursaal … Their affair had lasted almost a year.
    It was ending now. It was ending because the mystery was solved. There should be in a man an aura of the unknown, Trudy thought, to hold a woman, to challenge her.
    Trudy had long suspected that she had allowed herself to have an affair with Heinz Kemka because he was an exiled Czech.… For that other exiled Czech had meant so much in her life. Milo Hacha. Just thinking his name made her breath come quickly. Milo