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“Probably a mirror,” said Bauer. “Right above the vanity? This is where she put on makeup, brushed her hair.” Bauer waved to the items on the vanity—hairbrush, makeup, and hair products of various kinds. “You do that stuff in front of a mirror.”
“Okay, so a mirror was there.”
“But now it’s not. So where did the mirror go?”
Helldorff shrugged. “Who can say?”
“Maybe it got knocked over.” Bauer looked him in the eye. “Maybe it got knocked off the wall during a struggle. It fell off its perch.”
“Maybe she knocked into the vanity after she shot herself, and the mirror fell off the wall.”
“After she shot herself?” Bauer pointed to the blood spatter in the middle of the rectangle. “Then the blood would have spattered onto the mirror, not the wall behind it. That mirror was not on the wall when she was shot.”
“Okay, that’s right, that’s right.” Helldorff chewed on his lip. “But we don’t know when that mirror came down. It could have been down for a long time. Days, weeks. It could have nothing to do with what happened last night.”
“Sure, maybe.” Bauer gave him a wry smile.
“Look here.” Helldorff gestured to the top of the vanity. “The vanity is spotless. If a mirror falls, it crashes down on top. It breaks into pieces. We would see shards of glass everywhere.”
Bauer nodded. “Unless…”
Helldorff was ready to finish that sentence. “Unless it was cleaned up afterward. But how do we prove that?”
“Oh, Heidelberg.” Bauer sighed. “We are inspectors, are we not? So let us inspect. Come closer. Careful of her body.”
Helldorff got as close as he could, approaching the vanity from the opposite side to Bauer.
Bauer placed a hand delicately on the pink chair tucked into the vanity. He rolled it backward, exposing to Helldorff’s view for the first time the remainder of the interior side of the chair, including the seat.
A few shards of glass sparkled from the overhead light.
“They cleaned up the vanity,” said Helldorff. “But they missed the glass that caught in the fabric of the chair. It would be easy to miss.”
“And this wasn’t days or weeks ago. I doubt Fräulein Raubal would have tolerated sitting on broken glass while she did her hair and makeup.”
“Agreed.” Helldorff nodded. “It just happened. The mirror just recently came off the wall. And it was just recently cleaned up.”
Bauer put his hands on his hips. “And why clean it up, Hofbrau?”
Helldorff stepped back from the vanity, shook his head. “To hide any sign of struggle before the gun went off. But,” he added, raising a finger, “playing the other side of this…”
“Good, yes—play the other side. You should always do that.”
“If the victim was in a state of depression, on the verge of suicide, she could have knocked the mirror off the wall.”
“Okay, but then why clean it up? Why remove all the glass entirely from the room? Why do any of that, if there’s nothing to conceal?”
Bauer walked around the corpse and reached Helldorff. He put a hand on his shoulder. “And if you were going to kill yourself,” he added, “why shoot yourself in the chest? Why choose a slow, painful death over a quick, easy head shot?”
Helldorff nodded. “So you want to bring in the full forensic team?”
“The full team,” said Bauer. “If this was a suicide, then I’m the king of Spain.”
4
Food pantry
Kaufingerstraße
