Max told him.
Once Dr. Heissen began talking, there was no stopping him. Yes, of course he remembered Walther Gassner. The man had barged in without an appointment and had insisted on seeing him. He had refused to give his name. He had used the pretext that he wanted to discuss the problems of a friend.
“Of course, that alerted me instantly,” Dr. Heissen confided to Mox. “It is a classic syndrome of people unwilling or afraid to face their problems.”
“What was the problem?” Max asked.
“He said his friend was schizophrenic and homicidal, and would probably kill someone unless he could be stopped. He asked if there was some kind of treatment that could help. He said he could not bear to have his friend locked away in an insane asylum.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him that first, of course, I would have to examine his friend, that some types of mental illness could be helped with modern drugs and other psychiatric and therapeutic treatments, and that other types were incurable. I also mentioned that in a case such as he described, treatment might be necessary for an extended period of time.”
“What happened then?” Max asked.
“Nothing. That was really all. I never saw the man again. I would like to have helped him. He was very distraught. His coming to me was obviously a cry for help. It is similar to a killer who writes on the wall of his victim’s apartment, ‘Stop me before I kill again!’”
There was one thing still puzzling Max. “Doctor, you said he wouldn’t give you his name, and yet he gave you a check and signed it.”
Dr. Heissen explained, “He had forgotten to bring any money with him. He was very upset about that. In the end he had to write the check. That’s how I happened to learn his name. Is there anything else you need to know, sir?”
“No.”
Something was disturbing Max, a loose thread dangling tantalizingly out of reach. It would come to him—meanwhile, he had finished with the computers. The rest was up to him now.
When Max returned to Zurich the following morning, he found a teletype on his desk from Interpol. It contained a list of customers who had purchased the batch of raw stock used to make the snuff murder film.
There were eight names on the list.
Among them was Roffe and Sons.
Chief Inspector Schmied was listening to Detective Max Hornung make his report. There was no doubt about it. The lucky little detective had stumbled onto another big case.
“It’s one of five people,” Max was saying. “They all have a motive and they had the opportunity. They were all in Zurich for a board meeting the day the elevator crashed. Any one of them could have been in Sardinia at the time of the Jeep accident.”
Chief Inspector Schmied frowned. “You said there were five suspects. Aside from Elizabeth Roffe, there are only four members of the board. Who’s your other suspect?”
Max blinked and said patiently, “The man who was in Chamonix with Sam Roffe, when he was murdered. Rhys Williams.”
CHAPTER 45
Mrs. Rhys Williams.
Elizabeth could not believe it. The whole thing had an air of unreality. It was something out of a blissful girlhood dream. Elizabeth remembered how she had written in her exercise book, over and over, Mrs. Rhys Williams, Mrs. Rhys Williams. She glanced down now at the wedding ring on her finger.
Rhys said, “What are you grinning about?” He was seated in an easy chair across from her in the luxurious Boeing 707-320. They wre thirty-five thousand feet somewhere above the Atlantic ocean, dining on Iranian caviar and drinking chilled Don Perignon, and it was such a cliche of La Dolce Vita that Elizabeth had to laugh aloud.
Rhys smiled. “Something I said?”
Elizabeth shook her head. She looked at him and marveled at how attractive he was. Her husband. “I’m just happy.”
He would never know how happy. How could she tell him how much this marriage meant to her? He would not understand, because to Rhys it was not a marriage, it was a business proposition. But she loved Rhys. It seemed to Elizabeth that she had always loved him. She wanted to spend the rest of her life with him, have his children, belong to him, have him belong to her. Elizabeth looked over at Rhys again and thought wryly, But first I have to solve one small problem. I have to find a way to make him fall in love with me.