"At last, I can close this case," says worlds oldest police inspector
Vienna - Two-hundred and five year old Vienna police inspector Franz Horst can finally retire from the force, secure in the knowledge that the great composer Ludwig Von Beethoven died by lead poisoning and was not, as some had feared over the past one-hundred and seventy eight years, the victim of foul play. "You know how we Germans are," chuckled Horst as he walked briskly across an ornate marble floor toward a storage room with a large manila folder containing the Beethoven file. "We just can't rest until the work is done." After initially resisting offers of outside assistance, Horst, the primary investigator assigned to open-cases over one-hundred and fifty years old, finally relented and sent several strands of the great composer's hair and skull fragments to the United States Energy Department's Argonne National Laboratory. "I just thought it was time to give the family some closure," said Horst. "They deserved to know how their loved one died." Once the hairs and fragments were focused under an x-ray beam, scientists accumulated overwhelming evidence to determine conclusively that Beethoven died of lead poisoning.
Horst said that for years "the boys upstairs" thought that a rival composer knocked him off. "My boss said he figured Shubert had his wig laced with smallpox when he sent it out for re-powdering. He said Shubert always had a _ _ _ _-on for the guy. Anyway, I didn't see it his way. See, when we got to the Beethoven house, he was upstairs in bed with a barrel full of pencils beside him. His 'immortal beloved' told me he loved to snack on them -- that he'd snacked on them for years. She said when he was writing his compositions, he would often sharpen the pencils on his teeth. And he used to drink his wine out of a lead cup. I found an entry in her journal after he died describing in great detail her exasperation because he refused to accede to her requests that he clean out that [expletive deleted] cup. See how that German stubbornness can get you into trouble? Hmm?"
Putting on his lederhosen and overcoat, Horst grew wistful as he took a last look across the squad room. "I remember the night I ran Maria Von Trapp and all seven of her kids in for singing nude in public without a license. The Captain was furious when he had to come down and bailed them all out," he chuckled. He closed the door and headed toward the Internal Affairs Department where he planned to fill out his retirement papers. "Now at least I know that I've earned this pension," he said.
