A Cold Case

By Thomas Griffin

It is a story about time and memory. The protagonist pieces together meaning from the evidence he encounters over a thirty-year time span: the first-person narrative that moves back and forth between the last years of the Cold War and the present. The novel explores overlapping milieus in Frankfurt whose uneasy coexistence sometimes erupts into violence: competing elements in the German underworld, the personalities and bureaucracies of German policing, American military personnel and military police, German and American academics. The reader shares the immediate experience of the American investigator, a former officer of the American Military Police who was once stationed in Frankfurt. The reader shares his reflections, as well, as the older man’s accumulated experience becomes a lens through which he views his younger self. The dramatic and violent events of the first investigation, interspersed with the calm and reflective atmosphere of the second search, create the novel’s particular rhythm.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Feb 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9798886932003

Thomas Griffin

Thomas Griffin is a freelance writer with a background in cultural studies. He earned a university degree in history with emphasis on modern Europe. He had teaching appointments at American and European universities and also worked as a college administrator. Presently, he spends his time as a novelist, essayist, and consultant in New York and Berlin.

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About the Author

Thomas Griffin is a freelance writer with a background in cultural studies. He earned a university degree in history with emphasis on modern Europe. He had teaching appointments at American and European universities and also worked as a college administrator. Presently, he spends his time as a novelist, essayist, and consultant in New York and Berlin.

Copyright Information ©

Thomas Griffin 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Griffin, Thomas

A Cold Case

ISBN 9798886931990 (Paperback)

ISBN 9798886932003 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022921192

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

40 Wall Street, 33rd Floor, Suite 3302

New York, NY 10005

USA

[e-mail]

[phone]

Acknowledgment

I want to express my gratitude for the sustained advice and feedback of Gwen Hohendahl, Daniel Knowalow, and Kizer Walker. Their generous input has been critical for this work.

Chapter 1

The moment I saw the letter on my desk, I had an uneasy feeling. There was something about the envelope I didn’t like. Peggy Hall, my secretary, must have put it there. She did this when she was not certain what to do with a letter, although I had instructed her to open all incoming mail and sort it according to its importance. The letter was addressed to Frank Harris, Private Investigator, but the sender had used my old address, which meant that he or she was unfamiliar with the fact that Fulton & Harris had moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan several years ago. Someone at the downtown post office had crossed out the old address and added the new one. It was an airmail envelope, the address written by hand, the handwriting clearly not American, most likely a woman.

I turned the letter around to find the name of the sender. The name was Anke Mueller. The person lived in Munich. The name didn’t ring a bell, but that did not mean much because Mueller is a very common name in Germany. I should know because I spent three years in Germany as a soldier, more precisely as a sergeant of the military police at the Air Base in Frankfurt. Years I remember fondly. I was in my twenties having a great time in a hot place, moving back and forth between the American Base and the German town.

These were the 1970s, the later years of the Cold War, though we didn’t know that at the time. The American army was still very much needed and therefore respected. For a young man with my background, it was a privileged life. You got a lot more for your buck than in New York, which I found out when I returned to the States in 1978 to join the detective agency Fulton & Miller. The other option would have been police work, but I preferred the less restricted environment of the private investigator. Fulton approached me when my time in Frankfurt was up. He was an old friend of my father, who was a sergeant in the police department of Watkins Glen in upstate New York. It was a good offer, which I accepted right away because I definitely didn’t mean to return to Watkins Glen where I had spent my childhood and youth. It’s a very pretty place at the south end of Seneca Lake, but there are not many opportunities for a young man in a town that size.

When I opened the letter, I realized that it was written in German. This was an unwelcome discovery. Forty years ago, this would not have been a problem, but now I had trouble figuring out its purpose. My German was rusty, I had not used it much since my return to the States in 1978. Still, after skimming the two pages I realized that it had to do with an old case, a case from the late 1980s that we had done for the defense attorney of a young man who had been accused of being involved in drug trafficking in Frankfurt. His name was Michael Schwarz. Although we were convinced of his innocence and I testified at his trial, he was convicted and given a 30-year sentence because they found half a kilo of heroin in his car when he left the American Base in Frankfurt. I had felt sorry for him.

What I could make out stumbling through the letter for the first time was that the sender, Anke Mueller, was his daughter. She was determined to clear her father’s name, who had died in prison a year ago. She asked me to reopen the old case because I had testified for the defense that her father was innocent. There were details I did not immediately understand, I would have to get a dictionary to make sense of them.

Did I remember the old case? Of course, I did. I was sent to Frankfurt to find the proof for Schwarz’s innocence, and ultimately I failed. I vividly remember the day in court when the prosecutor tore my testimony apart, pointing to the gaps in my narrative. Schwarz claimed that the drugs were deliberately put in his car to incriminate him, but I could not positively prove that he was set up, although I had plenty of circumstantial evidence showing that he was clean. At the time, he was an instructor with a PhD, hired by the University of Maryland to teach English literature for members of the American Army in Germany.

I put the letter down, it was an unwelcome reminder of an old case that had gone wrong. For a moment, I was even tempted to throw the letter in the trash, claiming, if need be, that it never reached me because of the wrong address. But then I thought of my obligation to help the daughter to clear her father’s name. I decided that I had to look into the case. I was determined this time to find the proof of his innocence. I would send Tom Lambert, my assistant, to Frankfurt to reopen the investigation. He would bring the energy of a younger man to the job that I no longer possessed. At 65, after almost forty years of service in the field, I was looking forward to retirement, leaving the firm to Tom. Unfortunately, however, he didn’t have the money to buy me out.

It took me a while to recover the old file, since it had been moved to a storage facility when we moved to our present location four years ago. I was not even sure whether the file would still be in existence, but Peggy found it and placed it on my desk the following morning. The thick folder was covered with dust and exuded the strange smell of archives. After taking care of some urgent business, I sat down in my office to study the old case. The file was not in good shape, the numerous documents were not properly organized. It appeared that someone had taken them out and later gathered the pieces without regard for the chronological sequence. It took me a while to reconstruct the timeline of my old investigation.

Looking at the individual pieces of paper, the reports, interviews, photos, and letters, brought back memories of people and places I had forgotten. There were records of crucial meetings that I barely remembered. It had been my task to reconstruct the life of Michael Schwarz in Frankfurt to demonstrate that he had no connections to organized drug trafficking first suspected by the local German police and then linked to the American Base. Actually, it had been the Frankfurt police that profiled Schwarz because he was an American who lived in Frankfurt but had easy access to the military base, in short, the ideal link between the German and the American side. But it was the American military police that provided the evidence for Schwarz’s involvement.

I looked at a copy of the German police report that I managed to ascertain, describing Schwarz as a suspicious figure on whom the American military police should keep an eye. The intent had been clear. The criminal activities spreading through Frankfurt during the 1980s should be traced back to foreign agents, a standard move for police departments under public pressure, not only in Germany. It took me more than an hour to restore the proper order of the documents by spreading them across my desk and carefully looking at each piece. My memory was flooded with details, many of them significant for the outcome of the investigation. Scrutinizing the documents thirty years after the trial, not all of them made sense, in some instances I was unable to figure out their relevance for the case. It also became clear that my initial decision to send Tom Lambert to Frankfurt would not be the best solution. He would get lost in details without a chance to figure out where the old investigation went wrong, why I was unable to prove Schwarz’s innocence. I would have to go back myself.

This was not an easy decision, not only because I no longer had the energy I had once brought to the case, but it was also a part of my former life that I had left behind. In 1988, returning to Germany promised to be an invigorating step, going back to a place where I had spent a number of exciting years as a member of the military police in Frankfurt. The actual experience turned out to be rather different. During the ten years of my absence things had changed, most of the old crowd on the base had left, even many of my German friends had moved away. The fact that I came as a private detective to investigate a crime supposedly committed on the Base, did not improve the situation. I was seen as an unwelcome intruder who wanted to stir things up unnecessarily. When I returned to New York two weeks later, I had a bad taste in my mouth. Did I really want to revisit this experience now, a generation later? What were the chances of clearing Michael Schwarz’s name? Why would it matter in the first place?

I reread Anke Mueller’s letter, looking up words I did not understand, even words where I was fairly sure I got them right. She had been unaware that her father had been imprisoned. Growing up, she was told that he had abandoned his family. As she found out recently, he had written to her mother again and again that he was wrongfully convicted of a crime he didn’t commit. The harsh drug laws of the time made it almost impossible to get early release. No doubt, the daughter was supremely committed to the task and had convinced herself to believe that I would find the truth. Why? Because I had testified at her father’s trial for the defense. I was touched when I read her emotional request to return to the old case. I would have to call her to inform her of my decision and my conditions. Possibly the whole project would collapse the moment she learned what a New York PI charges.

I called her the following morning to establish direct contact for a project where a personal relationship would be key to its success. Anke Mueller was surprisingly calm when she realized who was calling. The conversation was carried out mostly in English, since my German was much too rusty to discuss her letter in her native language. This made the conversation somewhat awkward because her grasp of spoken English was limited. She asked me whether I knew French. She had spent several years in Paris and was quite fluent, but that did not improve our situation, since my knowledge of French is limited to a few words. She was eager to see me in Frankfurt as soon as possible.

To my surprise, she agreed to my terms, which meant that she had to be a person of considerable financial means. But she didn’t tell me much about her own circumstances. I asked her about her mother. Whether she would support the search. She told me that her mother, who no longer lived in Frankfurt, was not in good health and therefore not as much help as I might expect. There was something evasive in her reply, but I couldn’t find out why the mother might not be available. After all, she had been very close to Michael Schwarz in 1988 when he was arrested, moved to the United States, and tried. The arrest suddenly and brutally upended their relationship and left her alone with a small child. She had been very upset and possibly even frightened by the events and not very eager to talk to me when Schwarz hired me, and I came to Frankfurt. Still, I visited her several times at her apartment looking for additional information that would help me prove her boyfriend’s innocence. These visits turned out to be much more challenging than I expected. When I asked Anke Mueller whether her mother had ever visited her father in prison in the US, there was no clear answer. This struck me as relevant.

We agreed that I would book a flight for the following week, giving me enough time to prepare for the trip. I needed time to get a complete copy of the file and set up several tentative meetings. For this, I had to find my old contacts. Anke Mueller, it seemed, found it difficult to fully grasp the relevance of the length of time that had passed since the trial. In her mind, the events were fresh and extremely meaningful. Her father’s fate was a heavy and painful burden that had to be removed. And I had been singled out to help her with this tremendous task. For the first time, I fully realized that in her story I was the hero who had gone out of his way to help her father when others abandoned him. As I remembered, her mother among them.

After the fifteen-minute telephone conversation, I sat down in my old and worn-out armchair, strangely exhausted, breathing more deeply than I had expected. Of course, I was not upset. There was no reason for me to be worried, but I had been emotionally more involved in the conversation than I expected. I wasn’t sure why. I had talked to the little girl in the apartment who had become a woman in her early thirties. I remembered her sitting on her mother’s lap, sometimes interrupting our conversations with her own questions about Daddy.

Peggy booked the flight the next day. I had asked her to keep the return flight open because it was impossible to predict how much time it would take to resolve the case if it could be resolved at all. In my conversation with Anke Mueller, I had been candid in my assessment, stating clearly that I could not guarantee success, which she had accepted as obvious. As she asserted, my frankness did not undermine her determination. I had to cancel several appointments and asked Tom Lambert to take over a few of my ongoing investigations. There was no reason to be concerned about my private life. My wife had left me many years ago and my son and his family lived in California.

My apartment, now at walking distance from my office, had become a lonely place. I did my own cooking because I hated to dine in a restaurant all by myself. And I spent more time in front of the TV than I like to admit. Holding a glass of beer in my hand and watching football or a good show kept me going. When I started out at Fulton & Miller more than three decades ago, I was full of enthusiasm and energy. I enjoyed the work and quickly moved up in the firm. Ten years later, I replaced Miller, who took early retirement and moved to Florida. We expanded the firm by hiring men and women with either a police or military background. These were our most successful years. We did a lot of work for expensive Manhattan law firms. What came next is more difficult to describe. My marriage broke up, a slow process closely related to my unusual work hours, which made it difficult to pay attention to the details of family life. My wife Sally, whom I had met in New York City after my return to the States, left me and filed for divorce. This shook me more deeply than I expected.

Although I worked harder than ever to get over the loss, I found it difficult to see the deeper meaning of my work. I needed stimulants to get things done. As a result, I became more isolated and relied even more on pills and alcohol. I kept going but there was a slow, hardly noticeable decline, especially after Fulton retired. People left us because there was not enough work. Finally, it was just Tom Lambert and me. We moved to a smaller office in the neighborhood of Columbia University. I have always liked this neighborhood better than the glitz of Midtown. It’s more relaxed and comfortable, and there is still enough work to keep both Tom and me busy. As I mentioned, my first thought was to send Tom. He is a generation younger, in better shape and really eager to pick up a challenging case. Still, after giving the matter more thought, I decided that he would need too much time to familiarize himself with Frankfurt and its culture.

For one thing, he doesn’t speak or understand German. He spent his years as a Marine in South Korea and Japan. I understand that he is able to make himself understood in Korean if need be, which doesn’t help in Frankfurt. There would have been so much that I would have had to explain, even after he had carefully studied the file. I mean the kind of local people he would meet, their relationship to the American Air Base, the political situation at the time of the case, not to mention the atmosphere during my years with the military police in the seventies. There was so much historical baggage, layers of big and small events and their many links to different people, most of them forgotten by now.

No, I could not delegate the case to Tom, as much as I would have liked that. It would be extremely difficult for him to reopen a closed case thirty years later. I concluded that I was the only one who had a chance, although not a good one, because most of the people involved in the case would no longer be available for questioning. They were either dispersed or dead. Of course, one of them would be Anke Mueller’s mother, Michael Schwarz’s former girlfriend, who, as I was told, had moved away from Frankfurt. I would have to speak to her. She might still be in touch with old friends and acquaintances, although even that was not very likely. Thirty years is a very long time. How many friends from those days was I still connected with? I could count them on one hand.

In 1988, the case began with an unexpected phone call. A young defense lawyer was desperately looking for a private investigator who could go to Frankfurt to figure out how his client, a young academic who taught for the US forces in Frankfurt, ended up being charged with drug trafficking. He needed someone who could speak German and had some understanding of the interaction between the American Base and the natives, including the German police, which were involved in the case as well. Fulton, my boss encouraged him to come to our office with his notes and the documents he had put together for his defense. When the lawyer showed up an hour later, it became clear that he was completely out of his depth. He was young and inexperienced, without a clue how to get the evidence that could rescue his client. New York City was pretty much the only place he knew well.

We agreed to take the case and I was asked to follow up because of my years in Frankfurt with the military police. Together with the lawyer, I set up a meeting with his client in jail in New York because he had been unable to come up with the bail money. He was considered a flight risk, which meant that bail had been set very high. The lawyer’s file gave me the basic facts but not their circumstances, which in this case were crucial for a successful defense. I asked Michael Schwarz to tell me his story, not only the events leading to his arrest but also his life in Frankfurt as an instructor of English literature for the Army. He had been a graduate student at Penn State working on his dissertation on Romantic poetry, which took more time than he had expected. When he ran out of funding, he accepted a deal with the University of Maryland to teach for the US Forces abroad.

For one thing, the pay was much better than that of a teaching assistant, and he would have time to finish his dissertation. He ended up in Frankfurt, since he knew some German because of his parents, who had emigrated to the US in the 1930s. In Frankfurt, he never learned to write in German, but he became quite good at speaking German, which helped him to find a decent apartment in the city and friends outside the base. Two years later, he extended his contract because he was unable to find an academic position at an American university, although he had completed his dissertation. But there was another reason as well. He had come to like Frankfurt; he enjoyed its unique mixture of provincial and cosmopolitan elements. He relished going to the theater and the opera.

Moreover, he had found a German girlfriend by the name of Elisabeth Mueller, with whom he had a daughter. Although they were not married, it was a stable relationship and he felt that he could not afford to return to the States without the promise of a secure position. As Schwarz explained to me, he was content with his life. Going back to the States was still his long-term goal but not an immediate plan. Yet it was precisely the in between, living with one foot in Germany and with the other as American employed by the Army that got him in trouble. As an instructor working for the Army, he enjoyed a number of privileges that brought him to the Base, among them shopping at the Army commissary and getting cheap gas for his car, a large older Mercedes.

One day, when he had filled his tank and bought groceries, which were also much cheaper on the base, he was stopped at the gate. This was quite out of the ordinary, it had never happened before. His car was searched, and the military police found a half kilo of cocaine in his trunk. He was immediately arrested and charged. Schwarz was unable to understand what was happening to him. He had no idea how the cocaine got there. His protests were ignored because the material evidence was overwhelming. The military police assumed that he was part of a professional gang that was smugglings drugs into Germany. A tip had come from the German police in Frankfurt: There was a major operation moving cocaine from South America to Europe using Frankfurt Airport as a turnstile. According to the tip, a young American was supposed to be the link between the gang and its German distributors.

The prosecutor had offered Michael Schwarz a milder sentence in return for cooperation and a guilty plea, but Schwarz had adamantly resisted this move, although his young lawyer had advised him to accept the offer. In my conversation with him, Schwarz emphatically claimed his innocence. The problem, however, was that he could not explain to me how the cocaine ended up in the trunk of his car. Someone must have put it there to implicate him. He felt victimized but could not tell me why someone would do this to him. As he explained to me in a low voice, he was just an instructor in English literature with a small circle of American and German friends. He had never heard of any drug trafficking operation and had never been approached. But he had not been able to convince the prosecutor of this.

He needed evidence to prove his innocence, and I was expected to find it in Frankfurt. I told him that I needed more information to succeed. I needed the names and circumstances of his friends. I needed details about his position. Who was his supervisor? Who were his students? Where did he meet them? There was the tip from the German police. Someone must have set him up. Did he ever have problems with the German police in Frankfurt? He promised to make a list.

After listening to his story, I explained to Schwarz that I planned to contact his girlfriend first to see whether she had more information. There was a moment of embarrassed silence. As it turned out, Elisabeth Mueller had not been in touch with Schwarz as much as he had expected. Increasingly he got the feeling that she cared less about his fate than he cared about her precarious situation in Frankfurt. They had lived mostly on his salary. The young lawyer confirmed Schwarz’s reply. He had not been able to get much support from her. She did not respond to his letters in time and did not always return his phone calls.

Nonetheless, I was determined to look her up in Frankfurt as soon as I arrived. There was clearly something wrong, and I had to find out why she was less than forthcoming in her support for the father of her child. I asked Schwarz for a picture of her. He took a small photo out of his breast pocket. It showed the face of a young woman in her twenties with gray deep-set eyes and short blonde hair. The face was narrow, no smile, but attractive, a bit fragile. Definitely not my type. I returned the picture to Schwarz who was eager to have it back. He looked at it with an expression of tenderness and concern.

On the way back to my office, I explained to the lawyer that I wasn’t sure at all about the outcome of the case. We had to prove that the material evidence, the cocaine in the car, did not mean that Schwarz was involved in drug trafficking. The lawyer agreed. He felt that the effort was a waste of time and money, but his client insisted he was innocent. He was ready to go along with the plan, although he personally, as he explained to me, didn’t believe in Schwarz’s innocence. This is where we differed. I believed that Schwarz had told us the truth. I would have been unable to give a reason for my opinion, it was more a hunch, a response to the person of Michael Schwarz. There was something utterly wrong with the idea of connecting him with drug trafficking. He looked to me like the quintessential impractical academic, not someone who joins a gang of smugglers. I had the sense that he had become the fall guy for something he didn’t understand. When I shared my assessment with my boss, he just smiled. Be careful, he added, first impressions can deceive. One of the basic rules of our profession. His warning did not change my mind. It had become my task to prove Michael Schwarz’s innocence.

A few days later, I arrived in Frankfurt. It was a grey, rainy morning after an overcrowded flight with several young families with babies. I didn’t get a lot of rest. But I was eager to get back to the town where I had spent important years of my life, mostly good years. The airport was as crowded as ever, in fact more so. It took me more than half an hour to get to the exit; from there I walked to the train station. It took me another hour to get to Frankfurt’s central railway station and find a hotel room within my budget in the neighborhood. Not a very good part of town, as I recalled from my days with the military police, but it was convenient and the right location for my search. This was the area where the professional drug dealers would set up shop and distribute the stuff to their clients, who would then offer the drugs to their street customers.

Of course, it was mostly the task of the local police to keep an eye on the criminal activities in the area around the station but given the strong presence of American soldiers in Frankfurt, our police also patrolled the area. More than once my unit had been called to assist when the German police had caught one of our soldiers involved in a fight or a drug deal. Sometimes the cooperation worked well, but I also remembered cases when we clashed because we had opposite interests. We wanted to make sure that our guys did not end up in a German prison, they suspected that our soldiers were bringing drugs from abroad and wanted to question them. Personally, I was more interested in cooperation since part of my private life got me very close to the local scene.

I dated German girls and during my last year, I had a steady relationship with a young police officer. We first met under very unpleasant circumstances when her party and my party had a sharp disagreement about a cache of heroin they had discovered in an American car, but we quickly got over this hurdle and became close friends. Because of her, I almost decided to stay in Frankfurt, but that’s another story. In any case, I had a better understanding of the German perspective.

I had decided to get in touch with Elisabeth Mueller first. I tried to call her from my hotel room, but she didn’t answer the phone and there was no way to leave a message. I would try again later. You must remember: This was 1988. There were no cell phones and there was no internet, all we had were landlines and fax. I needed breakfast because I had refused to eat what they offered on the plane. But it was too late for the breakfast room of the hotel. Instead, I left the hotel looking for a coffee shop I remembered in the neighborhood. It was still there, not the most attractive place I could think of, but the food was good.

There was a new owner, a young Turk, who was eager to please his customers. I ordered