Desert Run

by Betty Webb

  “Yeah, Didsbury. Tell your husband that he either talks to me or to the INS.” And after that, the Apache Junction Police Department, but I figured raising the spectre of the INS with the Mantz family would be scary enough. For all I knew about immigration law, the entire family was living in the U.S. illegally.

  Within seconds, Gunter Hoenig’s son came to the phone. To his credit, he didn’t bother pretending ignorance. “Okay, so you figured out Dad wasn’t killed in Canada. Big fucking deal. What’ll it take to make you go away?”

  “The truth.”

  I could almost hear him shrug. “Which truth are you interested in? That Dad lived in the U.S. illegally since 1944? Or that he was afraid old Das Kapitan would frame him for the Bollinger murders?”

  Either. Both. “Where is he?”

  A pause. “At Stately Pines Cemetery. He died last summer.”

  “And your mother?”

  “She’s dead, too. Died of a broken heart right after Dad.”

  Before he could lie to me again, I said, “Then your father’s death certificate will be on file with the state under his assumed name of Gerhardt Mantz. But why don’t you spare me the trip downtown?” Actually, I wouldn’t have to make the trip. If Gunter Hoenig had been issued a death certificate anywhere in Arizona, either under his real name or his alias of Gerhardt Mantz, Jimmy would download a copy for me before the day was out.

  “I’m not about to ‘spare’ you anything, Miss Jones.”

  I decided to try one more question on him. “Did your father ever talk about some sort of secret, a secret that was ‘like gold’?”

  “Gold? I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “If you would just try…”

  He cut me off. In a voice dripping venom, he said, “Try, my ass. You know what you can do with yourself?”

  “I doubt that you’ll give me any suggestions I haven’t heard before. Why don’t you just tell me the truth for a change?”

  “You wish.” After barking some obscenities divided equally between German and English, he slammed down the phone.

  I had hit a dead end as far as Gunter’s son was concerned, but if Gunter himself was still alive and living under yet another false identity, Jimmy would find him. But what of the other German POW, Gunter’s friend Josef Braun? Had he, like Gunter, blended into the American scene? And if so, who had helped him? Then I remembered the numerous Japanese soldiers found hiding out in Philippine caves decades after the end of World War II. They had been astounded when told that the war was over and they could go home.

  Could I have been too hasty in fingering Gunter as Erik Ernst’s killer?

  ***

  An hour later I was walking through the musty corridors of Shady Rest Care Home, on my way to see Chess Bollinger. One more scenario for the Bollinger/Ernst murders had occurred to me and if anyone had the answer, it would be Chess. I just hoped I could get some sense out of him for a change. My hopes were high, because Alzheimer’s patients were usually at their best early in the day, before the “sundowning” effect kicked in.

  To my disappointment, both Chess’ wife and daughter were in his room. Judith Bollinger, still wearing her unsettling smile, sat in a corner chair, knitting something ugly. MaryEllen sat on the edge of her father’s bed, holding his hand and weeping. Her black eye had almost faded away, but I wondered how long it would be before her boyfriend freshened it up with another one.

  Chess’ eyes were closed. He could have either been sleeping or dead. “How is he?” I asked MaryEllen.

  She smiled. “Better.”

  A small laugh from the corner. “You call taking a dump in your pants better?”

  Hitting Judith would have landed me back in anger management therapy, so I forced myself to remain calm. “Mrs. Bollinger, I’d like to talk to him again if I may.”

  Judith had no objections, not that I expected any. She probably wouldn’t mind if I attached electrodes to her husband’s testicles.

  MaryEllen was another matter. “I don’t want him bothered. He’s been so peaceful this morning.” She lifted his hand to her lips, kissed it, and watched with delight as his eyelids fluttered open.

  “Baby.” Chess’ voice was whispery but clear.

  “Oh, Daddy!” She leaned over him and gave him a kiss on his forehead. “You recognize me!”

  Chess frowned. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  Before MaryEllen could answer, Judith piped up, “Because you have Alzheimer’s. Can’t recognize nobody half the time.”

  When he flicked his eyes toward her, I saw anger. Then he looked at his daughter again and his expression softened. “Your eye. Did I…?”

  MaryEllen shook her head. “No, Daddy. I, um, I ran into a door.”

  Judith laughed again. “A door named Clay. You’d like him, Chess. He’s cut from the same cloth as you.”

  MaryEllen stood up, and for a moment, I believed she’d do what I wanted to do. Instead, she burst into tears and ran from the room.

  Judith sniffed. “Girls these days.”

  I ignored her and stepped closer to the bed. “Mr. Bollinger, my name’s Lena Jones and I’m a private investigator. I’d like to ask you a few questions.” From the hallway, I could hear MaryEllen’s sobs.

  Chess’ eyes clouded. “Private invest…? What’d I do now?”

  Plenty, I wanted to tell him. Take a look at your life’s legacies. One takes glee in your suffering, while the other cries in the hall. Out of a pity he didn’t deserve, I didn’t say it. “Mr. Bollinger, I want to prove that you didn’t kill your family.”

  “Not me! Not meeeee!” His voice began to rise, then stopped in mid-howl as he closed his eyes and began to drift off. I was losing him.

  Maybe I could bring him back. From what little I knew about Alzheimer’s, most patients could remember what happened a half-century ago better than they could remember what they had for breakfast, so I gave his shoulder a shake. “Chess, wake up! I want to talk about your father’s car! Did you ever go joyriding in it?”

  When he opened his eyes again they were clear. A mischievous smile played at the corner of his mouth. “Joyriding? Oh, yeah. But I always get caught and Daddy beats me.” His voice sounded high, adolescent, and I noticed that he spoke in the present tense, as if he were still fifteen years old. In his mind, I guess he still was.

  So Chess had gone joyriding in Edward Bollinger’s car. That didn’t surprise me. At the time, he’d been a more-or-less normal teenaged boy, and teenagers have always been fascinated by cars. “Chess, did you…” I stopped, remembering to keep my questions in the present tense. “Do you have anyone with you when you take the car?”

  A smile. “You betcha. I got a lot of friends, all wanting rides in Daddy’s snazzy car.”

  I nodded in encouragement. “What are your friends’ names?”

  “Tommy. He’s really my uncle but he’s more like my friend. And Sammy. Oh, lotsa guys. I was always real popular, not just ’cause Daddy had that Olds.”

  We were getting where I wanted to go. Chess had been a lonely boy, and lonely boys were always vulnerable to overtures of friendship. “How can you be popular, Chess? You live way out of town on that farm.” Near where three escaped German POWs had been hiding in an arroyo.

  He stuck out his lower lip like a thwarted child. “I go to school, don’t I? I take that big school bus like everybody else on our road, like all my friends.”

  “You never had a friend in your life.” Judith again, throwing her poison into the mix.

  Chess raised himself up on a scrawny elbow and stared at her. His eyes were clearer than I’d yet seen them, and I realized our sweet trip down Memory Lane had ended. “Wait ’til I get my hands on you, bitch. I’ll make you sorry you ever drew breath.” The vicious expression on his face told me all I needed to know about the kind of man he had once been.

  But Judith knew he wasn’t that man any longer, that she was now perfectly safe. “You ain’t gettin’ your hands on me ev
er again.”

  I tried to deflect the coming brawl between a grudge-carrying woman and her bedridden batterer. “Chess, try to remember. Did you have any friends with German accents?”

  But I no longer existed for him. His focus was now on his wife. “I’ll kill you, bitch, I will! I’ll…”

  Judith laughed and laughed, until her high cackles finally drove me from the room.

  Once in the hallway, I looked for MaryEllen, but she was gone, the ongoing war between her parents proving too much for her. Frustrated, I headed for my Jeep, determined to return the next day in hopes that I would find Chess by himself and that he would be semi-rational again. When I entered the parking lot, I found MaryEllen sitting on the curb, too distraught to drive. A young couple emerging from a pickup truck ignored her; I guessed they were used to seeing tears at the Shady Rest Care Home. In fact, they didn’t look any too cheery themselves. Which family member they were visiting? A grandmother? A mother? Or even worse, a child?

  As the couple disappeared inside, I went over to MaryEllen and sat down on the curb beside her. “I’m sorry. That must have been hard on you.”

  Her face was a tragic mask. “Daddy and I always got along great until she started in on him.”

  Right. Chess was a saint whose only problem was his wife. I’d heard such rationalizations before from the families of batterers, as well as the batterers themselves. “MaryEllen, as unpleasant as your mother is, have you ever considered that she might have a point?”

  “Are you crazy?” I heard an echo of Chess’ rage in her voice. “You heard her, didn’t you? My God! She was always pushing his buttons. It’s all her fault! Without her, Daddy would be…”

  “Without her, your Daddy wouldn’t be one bit different. Don’t forget that he beat his first wife. And that he beat you.”

  She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “No, he didn’t.”

  I decided to go for it. “Stop covering up for your father. He’s not worth it. I’ve seen his arrest record, and I read the report of the time he put you in the hospital. You were, what, nine years old? What in the world could a nine-year-old do to push a grown man’s buttons, to make him break two of her ribs? I know you love your father, and that’s admirable. But it’s not admirable to blame your mother for the kind of man your father allowed himself to become. He was a violent felon long before he met her.” I took a shot in the dark. “Just like your boyfriend was a violent felon before you met him.”

  She ducked her head, but not before I could see admission in her eyes. I hoped she was beginning to get it. Striving to make my point, I continued. “I had a rough childhood, too, MaryEllen, and I…” How much should I tell her when the details didn’t matter? “I shared a lot of your experiences and they left their marks on me. But I eventually learned not to let the pain of my past determine the course of my future. Sure, I have my scars, but you know what they say about scar tissue.”

  She looked up at me, then, her pale eyes challenging. “No, I don’t know. What do they say?”

  “That scar tissue is stronger than the tissue around it.” We weren’t talking about physical scars.

  Her smile wasn’t pretty. “My pain can make me strong, huh?”

  “Only if you learn from it. If you don’t, you’ll turn into your mother.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I didn’t want to go back to Desert Investigations just yet, because there was a chance I might run into Esther bringing Jimmy back from their furniture-shopping expedition. True, I could have gone straight upstairs to my apartment and looked through Gunter’s journals again, but I decided that since I was already on an ugly roll of unpleasantness, I might as well continue. After leaving Shady Rest, I drove to Papago Park to confront Warren about all manner of sordid things. Bad movies. Airport kisses. Dead girlfriends.

  The Studebaker Golden Hawk was in the parking lot, but I didn’t see Mark Schank anywhere. Did that mean Warren had purchased the car yesterday? I felt a brief pang. When he went back to L.A., I’d never see it again. I walked past the crowd of onlookers and slipped under the tape barrier. When I finally found Warren, deep in conference with some techs, his expensive aftershave was mingling with sweat and sage. They say scent is the strongest of the senses, possessing the capability to even reach out to the dying with its evocation of pleasurable past experiences. Which was probably true, because as angry as I was after observing the scene with Lindsey at the airport, smelling Warren made me want to touch him.

  But I refrained. “I saw you at Sky Harbor with Lindsey.”

  He gave me a puzzled look, not a guilty one. “What were you doing there?”

  “Saying good-bye to a friend.”

  “Oh. So was I.” After a long silence, he ordered an adjustment on a lighting umbrella, then told everyone else to take a break.

  “Twenty minutes after we started?” one of the techs asked.

  “You having trouble with your hearing, Gene? Take a break or get off the set.”

  The tech stared at him with his mouth open for a second, then wandered over to the caterer’s truck for more coffee, but not before I heard him mumble, “Same old shit, different shitter.”

  Warren, who must have heard the comment, ignored it. “I guess we need to talk.”

  He had no idea how much we needed to talk. I still hadn’t broached the subject of his messy early life, nor the subject of Crystal Chandler’s murder. Compared to that, the clinch with Lindsey at the airport was minor indeed. I followed him away from the crew and to the small clearing where several folding chairs had been set up. If Warren wanted privacy, he’d made a bad choice, because the morning breeze was blowing in from the west, which meant that our conversation could quite possibly be heard by the usual crowd of onlookers downwind. Not that it mattered. If Warren had been foolish enough to kiss Lindsey at the airport in front of God and everybody, I didn’t care if he made a further fool of himself in public.

  However, once we’d sat down, he kept his voice low. “Since you were at the airport, you probably saw everything that happened. With Lindsey.”

  “Of course I did. That’s one of the reasons I’m here, to get…” I started to say, “…to get everything straight, especially about you and your dead girlfriend.”

  But he raised his hand, stopping me in mid-sentence. “May I explain?”

  “Go right ahead.” The breeze ruffled his hair and it was all I do to keep from reaching out and smoothing it back down.

  “Lena, Lindsey kissed me. I didn’t kiss her.”

  Okay. So we would talk about Lindsey first. Then we’d get to Crystal Chandler and his possible involvement in her death. “She kissed you? Some distinction.”

  “It’s a big distinction. After what happened the other day, I told her to pack her bags and go back to L.A. That if she didn’t, I would…” He didn’t finish.

  “Would what?” Strangle her?

  A sharp sound nearby made me jump, but then I realized it was only the backfire of a semi on the road between the Papago Buttes. The breeze made it sound as if a gun had gone off right next to me. “Would what, Warren?”

  “Nothing.” He examined his shoes. They looked fine to me. Reeboks, like my own, and every bit as dirty. “What Lindsey did has nothing to do with us.”

  “What she did? Such as the big fat kiss?”

  “I wasn’t talking about the kiss. But as for the scene at the airport, like I told you, she grabbed me before I could do anything about it. Then, well, there was no point in making a difficult situation even worse. What could I have done, anyway? Slap her? Scream for help? The woman’s gone through enough without having to experience that kind of public humiliation.”

  It’s hard to talk while you’re gritting your teeth, but I somehow managed. “Why all this concern about Lindsey?”

  I could tell that Warren wanted to yell at me like he’d been doing all day to his crew, but somehow he managed to control himself. “Once I care for a woman, no matter what happens I always feel a certain amoun
t of loyalty toward her, even after the relationship ends. You saw how well Angel and I still get along, and it’s not only for the kids’ sake. You also know that Lindsey and I were involved for a while, but that’s ancient history. I guess maybe I should have gone into more detail. I started to, once, but chickened out.”

  Who knows? Maybe he had tried. But it made no difference now. I’d already found out everything I needed to know. “You have a lot of loyalties. Are you certain you have room for another one?”

  He nodded. “I sent Lindsey away for your sake, but I can’t say any more than that.”

  “Then this conversation’s over.” I stood up and turned toward the parking lot, but before I could take a step, he’d jumped out of his chair and cut me off. I stepped back, increasing the distance between us.

  He moved forward and put a hand on my arm. Not with unnecessary roughness, but firmly enough for me to know I wasn’t going anywhere. “I’m not going to let you walk off like this. Not until you’ve heard the truth.”

  I don’t like it when someone says they’re not going to let me do something, but since I was curious, I sat down again. “All of the truth, Warren? Or just some of it.”

  He looked around quickly, and seeing that no one was near, lowered his voice almost to a whisper. His next words came as a surprise. “Lindsey’s the one who pushed you into the canal.”

  For a moment I didn’t think I’d heard him right. “What!?”

  He placed his hand softly across my mouth. “Don’t tell the world, for God’s sake. Getting her out of town accomplished two things. It protected you and it kept her away from the police.”

  I pushed his hand away. “She almost killed me, so why are you trying to protect her?” I wanted the bitch stewing in an Arizona jail, not soaking up rays in Malibu.

  “You have to believe me when I tell you that Lindsey had no idea the canal was so dangerous. None of us did. And anyway, that morning she wasn’t quite herself. She’d noticed the way I look at you, and that night she stayed up crying, taking one too many Triazolams—that’s her drug of choice these days. After she pushed…after what happened to you, she went back to the motel and finished off the whole damn bottle. If the maid hadn’t gone in to clean the room, she’d be dead now.”