whether he had been a guest at the Grand Excelsior.
I went to the desk and asked for Raymond DeLouise. They had no such guest. The response was too pat, I thought. But then, he wouldn't have used that name. How about Mina Bernstein? No. I left the desk disappointed. Then I turned around and made yet another try.
“I'm sorry, is there a Dov Peled?” I asked.
The reception clerk hesitated, and then said, “Minute!” and disappeared into the back office. She returned a minute later with another man, obviously senior staff.
“I am looking for Mr. Dov Peled. Can you give me his room number?” I repeated. The clerk's action told me I was getting close.
“I'm sorry,” said the man, with somewhat fraudulent solemnity. “We were notified this morning that Mr. Peled has died.”
“Died?” I repeated after him in disbelief. “What happened?”
“We don't know,” said the man. “The police just told us that he is in the city morgue. That's all we know.”
“Are Mina Bernstein or Ariel Peled registered? We were all to meet here,” I asked, adding feigned shock to the real thing.
He looked at the woman next to him. She shook her head. “No, I'm sorry sir, we have no such guests,” the man replied.
I thanked them, turned around without another word, and went to my car.
I had my answer. Yes, he had been a guest at the hotel under his old Israeli name, but had he been the one to use the pay phone at the hotel to call Mina in Israel? And if so, why use the pay phone?
I juggled the various plausible answers around in my mind. Whoever had called didn't want the call to be traced to him or her or else was already afraid that any telephone associated with him or her was being monitored.
If it was DeLouise/Peled who had called, who or what was he afraid of? No answers. Not yet, anyway. But given his probable horizontal position in the city morgue, his concerns had been justified.
A visit to the morgue confirmed that Popescu/Peled/DeLouise wasn't going anywhere. I had to find Mina and Ariel; they were my only viable leads to DeLouise's money. Where were they? Munich could be just their point of entry to Europe. They could have taken another flight to Timbuktu in the sub-Saharan desert or driven to Finland. And come to think of it, why was I using the plural form: they? Why should I assume that Mina and Ariel had met in Europe?
I didn't know where to start, although I had a hunch they weren't far away. I decided to stay in Munich for a serious looksee. I suspected that Mina and Ariel must have been here and had left their mark. Did they have anything to do with DeLouise's death? Or were they potential victims?
Lovejoy left me no information about whether he had contacted the German police. It was too late to call him, so I decided to go to the local precinct and find out what I could. If DeLouise died of natural causes then the police would not be involved. But I had to find out what they knew. I asked the man at the desk if I might speak to the officer in command. My basic workable German, even if not fluent, could help. A few moments later, I was shown to a small office.
“Good afternoon,” I said as I entered, in the friendliest tone I could muster and politely showing my ID. “My name is Dan Gordon, and, as you can see, I'm with the U.S. Department of Justice. I have an interest in Mr. Dov Peled, who I understand is in the Munich city morgue. Is there a police investigation into the cause of his death? Could I help you out with anything?”
The officer looked at me with ice-cold eyes, as if I had just vomited on his best suit, and said in excellent English, “I am sorry, sir, this is a German criminal investigation. If your government has a relevant and parallel criminal investigation, I am sure it can find out more through INTERPOL when I send my report to my superiors.” The sarcasm virtually seeped through his pores.
Hell, I thought, he was right. You wouldn't get a different answer from an American police detective investigating a homicide in Cleveland or Miami. But national sovereignty or not, I had to know Raymond DeLouise's movements and activities after he had left the United States. Besides, the officer confirmed that there was a criminal investigation. I left the police station and returned to the Grand Excelsior.
A mild-looking, middle-aged man dressed in a ridiculous uniform, too much pomp and circumstance, stood behind the cashier's counter. I told him that I'd come to settle Dov Peled's hotel bill. I sensed he was not about to object.
“By all means, sir, by all means,” he said quickly, and rattled the keyboard to get the printout.
The printer started spewing out a surprising number of pages. The clerk stapled them and handed me the lot.
“Twenty-one thousand, six hundred thirty-two marks and seventy pfennig, please,” he announced coolly.
I put the packet in my briefcase and said casually, “Thank you, I'll forward it to the family's attorney for his review,” and walked away without waiting to see his astonished look.
The bastard probably thought I was about to pay this hefty tab. That's all I needed: give the bean counters in Washington yet another reason to climb all over me.
On my way out I calculated the dollar equivalent. It came to roughly fourteen thousand dollars. I tried to figure out how long he'd had to stay there to amass that charge, given the hotel's top mark rate. Quite a tab for a short stay. It would be interesting to see the details when I reviewed the bill.
Back in my hotel I started working on my loot. On the top left corner of the invoice appeared his name: Herr Dov Peled. No address. Citizenship: Israeli. Date of check-in: September 20,1990. He had taken the Bavarian Suite at a rate of one thousand German marks per day. Payment method: cash. Manager's note: “Herr Peled is a VIP who has patronized our hotel in the past. He insists on his privacy. Do not discuss this guest with anyone inquiring about him.”
The invoice listed charge items for minibar use, restaurants at the hotel, dry cleaning service, and more than one hundred phone calls. I pulled out my laptop, keyed in my user name and password, and went directly into the investigative telephone database. People usually have a pattern of calling. If you analyze it you can discover amazing facts. Identify all the numbers called, then let the software pick up the pattern. It's simple but clever. I had designed the application myself on an existing software platform.
I started with the tedious work of typing in the numbers I'd first highlighted on the invoice. Some of them were local German numbers, but many were international. An hour later I had finished logging them all. I plugged into my room's telephone line and uploaded the data into my office computer in New York. I attached a note to Lan. “Please do a reverse lookup for these numbers.”
It was late, and I was tired. I shut off the laptop and lay down, satisfied that promising results awaited me the next day and that my investigation was progressing nicely. I fell asleep then and there, street clothes and all.
Next morning I went back to the Grand Excelsior, avoiding the reception area. I took the elevator to the third floor. A housekeeper was hard at work on the carpet.
“Excuse me,” I spoke in German over the hum of her vacuum cleaner, “Where is the Bavarian Suite?”
“It's on the seventh floor,” she replied in strongly accented southern German, and went calmly back to work.
I took the elevator to the seventh floor. Another housekeeper's service cart was in the hallway, and the door of the Bavarian Suite was open. I walked in. A young waiter was checking the minibar.
“Excuse me,” I said nonchalantly, “I think I must have left something in the room before I checked out.” He did not respond.
I looked around. The two-room suite was empty of any personal belongings and already made up. The police must have removed Raymond DeLouise's stuff. I opened the closets and went through the walnut chest-of- drawers, but I couldn't find anything unusual. Finally, I knelt beside the bed and looked under it. There I saw a small yellow Post-it. I grabbed it, put it in my pocket, and left the suite. The waiter never even looked at me.
In the elevator I checked the note. There was a handwritten telephone number without an area code and a name written in Hebrew: Hans Guttmacher, and a scribble that looked like 2: 00 P.M.
I returned to my own hotel room and called the hotel operator.
