Crime by Ferdinand von Schirach Page A

been there, he could also have killed her. I explained to Schmied why Boheim had lied, then said, “Sleeping with a student isn’t, finally, a crime.”
    “Yes, but it’s not very attractive, either.”
    “Thank God that’s not the issue,” I said. “Infidelity is no longer punishable under the law.” Schmied himself had had an affair with a female district attorney some years ago, as everyone knew around the Moabit courthouse. “I can’t see a single reason why Boheim would have wanted to kill his lover,” I said.
    “Nor do I, yet. But you know motives don’t count that much with me,” said Schmied. “He really did lie his head off under questioning.”
    “That makes him suspicious, I grant you, but it doesn’t prove anything. Besides which, his first statement at the hearing is probably unusable.”
    “Oh?”
    “The police had already analyzed the phone records by then. They knew he’d had long conversations with the victim. They knew from the nearest cell-phone tower that his car was in the neighborhood of the hotel. They knew he had reserved the room in which the girl was killed. The police should therefore have interrogated him formally as the accused, but they only questioned him under the guise of a witness and only cautioned him as such.”
    Schmied thumbed through the transcript of the interrogation. “You’re right,” he said finally, and pushed the files away. He disliked such little games by the police; they never really got anybody anywhere.
    “Besides which, the weapon involved, the lamp the student was killed with, showed no fingerprints,” I said. The trace evidence had revealed only her DNA.
    “That is correct. But the sperm in the girl’s hair came from your client.”
    “Oh come on, Mr. Schmied, that’s just crazy. He ejaculates on the girl and then pulls on his gloves to bash her head in? Boheim’s not a moron.”
    Schmied’s eyebrows shot up.
    “And all the other traces, the ones that were lifted off water glasses, door handles, window handles, and so on, are perfectly explicable by the fact that he stayed in the hotel—they imply no guilt.”
    We argued for almost an hour. At the end, Schmied said, “On condition that your client lays out his relationship to the deceased in detail at the hearing, I will agree that the arrest warrant may be withdrawn tomorrow morning.”
    He stood up and held out his hand to say good-bye. As I was standing in the doorway, he said, “But Boheim will surrender his passport, pay a high amount in bail, and check in with the police twice a week. Agreed?”
    Of course I agreed.
    ·    ·    ·

    When I left the room, Schmied was pleased that the affair would now die down. He had never really believed Boheim to be the perpetrator. Percy Boheim gave no appearance of being a raving madman who would crush the head of a student with a rain of blows. But, Schmied was also thinking, who knows his fellow human being? Which was why, for him, motive was very seldom the deciding factor.
    Two hours later, just as he was locking the door to his office on his way home, his phone rang. Schmied cursed, went back, picked up the receiver, and let himself down into his chair again. It was the Homicide Division’s leading investigator on the case. When Schmied hung up six minutes later, he looked at the clock. Then he pulled his old fountain pen out of his jacket, wrote a brief summary of the conversation, and inserted it as the first page on top of the file, switched off the light, and remained sitting for some time in the darkness. He now knew that Percy Boheim was the killer.
    The next day, Schmied asked me to come to his office again. He looked almost sad as he pushed the pictures at me across his desk. The photos clearly showed Boheim behind his car window. “There’s a high-resolution camera positioned at the exit from the hotel garage,” he said. “Your client was filmed leaving that garage. I received the pictures this morning—the Homicide