“What is that?” I gestured to the golden monolith.
“A symbol of journalistic freedom and the reason our magazine is in this building,” she said.
Ernestine’s black hair, pale skin, black pants, and loose white blouse blended seamlessly into the white walls and black furniture of her office, which was as crisp, immaculate, and monochrome as she was. Or vice versa. She must have been practically invisible whenever she sat behind her desk. Perhaps it was a survival technique against predators in the corporate jungle.
I suddenly felt very vulnerable and garishly colorful in my red scoop-neck shirt and blue jeans.
“The Berlin Wall used to be right in front of this building and when it was, all these windows were sealed with bricks and concrete so that no one could see life on the other side or try to escape to it,” she said. “Axel Springer was a newspaper publisher. He built that skyscraper so that everyone in the East, where I grew up, could see the wealth, freedom, and opportunity that the West offered. The GDR responded by building six apartment towers just to block people from seeing his building. It made me want to become a journalist.”
“Every day you look out that window, you must be reminded of your childhood.”
“It reinvigorates me and reinforces why I do what I do, a job that wasn’t possible before the wall fell,” she said. “So what’s your interest in Bruno Leupolz?”
“We think he was murdered,” Monk said.
“ ‘We’ meaning the two of you,” she said.
“For now,” Monk said.
“The police say he died of natural causes,” she said. “What makes you think that it’s something more sinister?”
“Why do I get the feeling that we’re being interviewed?” I said.
“You’re talking to a reporter,” Ernestine said. “I don’t talk to anybody unless I think there might be a story in it. Is there one here?”
“There’s the story Leupolz was working on for you,” Monk said.
“He wasn’t on assignment for us. He just liked to use our name,” she said. “It opened doors that would otherwise be slammed in his face.”
“You didn’t mind?” I asked.
She shrugged. “If he lucked into something hot, which was rare, he’d come to us with it first.”
“But you knew what he was working on,” Monk prodded.
Ernestine grimaced as if the knowledge was causing her physical pain. “He was investigating some psychiatrist who helps people with physical deformities.”
“Dr. Martin Rahner,” Monk said.
She nodded. “Bruno was convinced the guy was a fraud and a swindler.”
“You weren’t?” I asked.
“I didn’t care one way or the other,” she said. “He was just a psychiatrist, though if you believed Bruno, he wasn’t even that.”
“What do you mean?” Monk said.
“Bruno told me that the doctor’s credentials were false, that he’d lied about some degree or plagiarized some paper or something like that,” she said. “I didn’t pay much attention, to be honest.”
“Why not?” Monk said. “Doesn’t your magazine expose criminals?”
“We expose people in positions of authority who have abused their power for money or sex, preferably both,” she said. “A possibly fake psychiatrist who may be tricking people with webbed feet into telling him their troubles isn’t a story for our audience.”
“So why wouldn’t Leupolz let it go?” I asked. “Why did he go down to Lohr and keep investigating Dr. Rahner?”
“Bruno’s girlfriend was one of Dr. Rahner’s patients,” Ernestine said. “She dumped Bruno and invested every penny she had in the doctor’s resort, and then moved in there.”
I knew of only two people who lived at the resort full-time, and only one of them was a woman. Well, mostly a woman. I cringed at the thought at the same moment that Monk did, too.
Ernestine eyed us both. “So you heard about Katie’s problem.”
“You knew?” Monk said.
“I’m a reporter and I wanted to know why Bruno was so obsessed with this psychiatrist to the point that he would turn down paying assignments to pursue the man,” she said. “There was no story. It was entirely personal. He desperately wanted Dr. Rahner to be guilty of something so he could get Katie back, which was why I was so skeptical about Bruno’s latest angle.”
“Leupolz discovered something else about Dr. Rahner?” Monk asked.
“Bruno claimed that the doctor’s time-share resort was actually a huge financial scam, that the money Dr. Rahner convinced his patients and their families to invest in his real estate development business, presumably to build similar resorts elsewhere, was actually going into his own pocket. Bruno said that he’d discovered the doctor had gambled that money on higher-risk investments and lost, so he was now using the cash he’d connived from new investors to pay back the old ones.”
“A classic Ponzi scheme, using the money from the new suckers to mollify the old ones,” I said. “Would a shrink abusing the trust of his patients to get them to invest in a real estate scam be a story for you?”
“Only if there was a huge amount of money involved, so Bruno naturally said that there was, tens of millions of euros, including his ex-girlfriend’s meager life savings. But he’d say anything to get me to run a story on the psychiatrist. That’s why I insisted that Bruno
