08 The House That Jack Built by Ed McBain

Author:Ed McBain
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Mystery, Thriller
ISBN: 0736621776
Publisher: Sphere
Published: 1988-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

“Gottfried Brechtmann was a brewer in Munich,” Warren said. “He married Elise Meuhler, daughter of a local banker, and had two children by her—Anna and Jacob. Jacob’s the one who interests us. He’s the one who came to America.”

“When?”

“Turn of the century—1901, to be exact. Came here with his wife, Charlotte—alleged to be a great beauty and something of a man-eater. Started the American branch of the Brechtmann Brewing Company.”

“Here in Calusa?”

“No, no. Brooklyn, New York. That was the first one. There are nine of them now, including the one here. I’ll get into that later, Matthew. Let’s concentrate on the family right now.”

“Okay.”

“In the year 1905, Jacob and Charlotte came to Calusa for a winter vacation. They both fell in love with the place and built a house here the following year, when their son Franz was born. The house is still here, Matthew, on Fatback Key.”

“I’ve been there.”

“It must be a beauty.”

“It is.”

“Okay, this is now 1906. The Brechtmanns move into their new house and Jacob begins construction on a second brewery. Here in Calusa. Twenty-seven years later, there are four breweries and Brechtmann is the twelfth-largest brewer in America. At a swank party in Palm Beach, handsome young Franz meets an eighteen-year-old beauty newly arrived from Nazi Germany. Her name is Sophie Witte...are you following me, Matthew?”

“I’m following.”

“Okay, we are now down to Franz Brechtmann marrying Sophie Witte.”

“When was that?”

“Nineteen thirty-three.”

“And when was Elise born?”

“February of ’52. Sophie was thirty-seven years old.”

“Little late for childbearing.”

“Indeed. But she gave birth to a beautiful little girl nonetheless. So beautiful, in fact, that her proud father promptly named her after his grandmother, and then a few years later brought out a new beer with a label bearing a reasonable facsimile of his then two-year-old darling. Does the name Golden Girl mean anything to you? How about the slogan ‘The Beautiful Beer’? You’ve got it, Matthew. This is the beer that catapulted Brechtmann from number twelve into one of the biggest breweries in America. It’s a shame old Jake wasn’t alive when his granddaughter was born. He’d have been proud of her beer-selling potential.”

“Fill me in on the company,” Matthew said.

According to Warren, the Brechtmann Brewing Company now owned breweries in nine states. The original Brooklyn brewery packaged five million bottles and nine million cans of beer a day. The Calusa brewery—smallest of all the Brechtmann breweries, although it sat on two hundred and fifty acres of land off the Tamiami Trail—itself shipped close to two million barrels a year. In addition, the company brewed non-beer beverages, and it owned yeast plants, malting plants, metal-container plants, and several agricultural facilities where it grew and processed the corn and barley essential to the brewing of beer.

Again according to Warren, the company’s gross sales for the last fiscal year were five and a half billion dollars, a 7.6 percent increase over the year before. Its net income was $364 million, a gain of $42 million over the previous year. Over the past eight

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