Desert Run (12 page)

I approached her desk and cleared my throat. “I'm here to see Chess Bollinger.”

She didn't bother to raise her dirty, black-rooted blond hair, just kept slathering on the gaudy polish. “Go on back.”

“Back where?”

“Where the patients are.” Still no meeting of the eyes.

Her rudeness, as well as the funky smells, annoyed me, so I leaned over her desk and spoke to the top of her head. “Health Department been by to inspect your kitchen lately?”

Brown eyes finally gazed insolently into mine. “Last month. We passed.” For emphasis, she cracked her gum.

If the Health Department had passed this place, Shady Rest's management had probably been tipped off ahead of time that they were coming and so hurriedly cleaned up. Or maybe money had passed hands. “How wonderful for you. But I haven't been here before and I have no idea ‘where the patients are' is or what Mr. Bollinger looks like, so if you could give me some directions to his room I'd sure appreciate it. And if you don't, I just might dump that ugly nail polish on your ugly, unwashed head.”

I had her attention now. “You don't have to get nasty.”

“Nice didn't work. Where's Mr. Bollinger?”

With a put-upon sigh, she opened a drawer and took out a chart. “Bollinger, Bollinger, Bollinger. Yeah. Here it is. He's in room 1173A.” She put the chart back in the drawer and started polishing her nails again.

“How do I find 1173A?”

Polish, polish. Then, as I reached for the bottle of sparkly goo, she quickly drew it back and vented another sigh. “Take the first left down that hall, then the first right, then another left at the ‘T.' Second room down, on the left. Somebody let you out of your cage too early or something?”

I didn't bother to reply, but as I walked down the dimly lit corridor, I wondered if the receptionist's disinterest in the home's residents was echoed by the rest of the staff, if there was any. I hadn't seen a nurse yet, just elderly residents in dirty dressing gowns tottering along behind their walkers, and a few even less lucky souls who sat slumped in tarnished wheelchairs. To my dismay, I saw a puddle of urine under the wheelchair of one elderly woman who was parked along the corridor wall, but when I called out, no one rushed to clean either it or the woman.

By the time I found room 1173A, my mood was as glum as the surroundings. The door was open so I walked in. No paintings or drawings decorated the room's walls, no cards or photographs from loved ones sat on the tiny table separating the beds. It was as anonymous as Motel 6 but much less lush. There were two men in the room, one in a bed near the window, the other—who appeared to be much smaller than his roommate—in the bed closest to the door. Both lay amid yellowed sheets, hovering somewhere between sleep and insensibility. This didn't seem to bother the stringy, middle-aged woman sitting in a chair next to the smaller of the two men.

“Are you Mrs. Bollinger?”

She gave me a broad, unsettling smile. “Sure am. Judith. Don't like Judy. If you come to see Chess, you're outta luck. He don't know who he is today.” She bore no resemblance to her daughter. Unlike MaryEllen's perfect face, this woman's features were so irregular they could have belonged to two different people. One side of her jaw was higher than the other, and her flat, wide nose tilted unevenly to one side, overshadowing a thin, blurry mouth. She'd taken a few hits in her time.

“That's too bad. I'd hoped to talk to him.”

“Chess never did much talkin' even before he got sick.” Still that unsettling smile.

What was there to smile about? If that had been my husband lying there in this filthy place, I would be howling with grief. Then I reminded myself that family dynamics could be misleading, and maybe Judith-not-Judy Bollinger couldn't afford better than Shady Rest. Anyway, who was I to judge how a wife should act toward a husband who from what I'd heard had been less than ideal.

Keeping my voice as neutral as possible, I introduced myself and gave her my card. “Maybe you could help. I'm working on a case that may involve the murder of Mr. Bollinger's family back in 1944.”

Incredibly, she laughed. “I sure don't know nothing about that! And Chess, he ain't gonna be able to tell you anything, either. His brain's nothin' but mush. Like I was telling you, he don't know who he is on a good day and today sure ain't one of those.”

Mush.
Or, as MaryEllen had more charitably described his condition, Alzheimer's. “That's okay, Judith. I'll visit with you, then.” There was no other chair in the room, so I went back into the hall, found one, and carried it back, carefully wiping the seat before I sat down across from her. “Did your husband ever talk to you about his family?”

“Only to say he didn't kill 'em.”

While Judith Bollinger appeared to hold little affection for her husband—and considering his many domestic assault arrests, why should she—that didn't mean she would be willing to air the family's dirty laundry. “Do you believe him?”

Her face reflected total disinterest in her husband's past. “Can't say. Who knows what Chess might a done when he was a kid. He sure wasn't no saint.”

Remembering Chess Bollinger's long rap sheet, I figured Judith must have known what she was getting into when she married him, but I refrained from pointing that out. What little remained of the original structure of her face made me suspect that she'd never been a pretty woman, so who knew how lonely she'd been at the time or how desperate?

“Judith, did Chess continue to deny his involvement when he got, ah, sick? Sometimes people like to get things off their chest when they're diagnosed with a serious illness.”

“Nope. Only the same old same old, that he didn't do it.”

We'd been talking about Chess as if he weren't in the room, but a sound from the bed reminded me that he was still very much there. “Ah…ah…Jen…Jen…”

Judith looked over at him, her smile gone. “That's Jenny, his little sister. He's always callin' for her. Don't know why. You'd think he'd say my name. Or MaryEllen's. But no, it's Jen, Jen, nothin' but Jen. Kinda make me wonder, ya know?”

I didn't answer. As far as I was concerned, that particular piece of dirty laundry could stay in the family hamper. In the silence that followed, I studied the ruin that remained of Chess Bollinger. The shrunken old felon had the caved-in look of the near-terminal, with cheekbones jutting out so sharply from his cadaverous face that it was a wonder they didn't pierce his skin. His eyes, milky with cataracts, stared at the ceiling without really seeing it. If it weren't for the rhythmic rise and fall of the sheet covering his chest, anyone passing by might think the old man already dead.

But I was encouraged by his brief words. “Judith, is it all right if I ask your husband a few questions?”

For a moment she looked like she'd say no, but then she gave a little wave of acquiescence. “Ask whatever but don't get your hopes up. He ain't made sense in years.”

When I leaned over him, a musty odor, as if he hadn't been bathed in days, rose to meet me. More for his wife's sake than his, I tried not to show my disgust even though I doubted if he could tell whether he was in a nursing home or on Mars. “Mr. Bollinger? Chess? I'm Lena Jones, a private detective who's investigating the murder of a Kapitan Erik Ernst, one of those escaped POWs from old Camp Papago. I'm also looking at the murder of your family because I think the Germans might be connected. Do you know anything you never told the police?”

A hitch in his breathing. A blink, then his eyes seemed to focus on my face. “Jen. Jenny Jenny Jen.”

“Yes, Mr. Bollinger. Your sister Jenny died that night, along with your brothers Rob and Scott. And your parents.”

His hand, no more substantial than a dried collection of sticks, fluttered toward mine. “Jen.”

Judith gave me a frown. “Maybe he can see your hair. Jenny was blond, like you. But in her face she looked like Mary Ellen. I got her picture back at the house. Ain't leavin' it here. People steal things.”

I took Chess Bollinger's hand and gave it a slight squeeze. “Yes, Chess, it's Jen. Do you know who hurt me?” In the background, I heard his wife gasp at my lie. Well, private detectives seldom get confused with George Washington.

“Jenny Jen?” His voice was no louder than leaves on pavement. “Daddy hurt.”

Was he saying that his daddy was hurt? Or that his own daddy had hurt his family, tied them to the kitchen chairs, beaten them to death, then went outside and blew off his own head with the shotgun? Such personal family massacres had happened many times before, even in Scottsdale, but even allowing for the less sophisticated state of forensics during the Forties, how could such an appalling scenario have passed the detectives by? I squeezed Bollinger's hand again. “Did Daddy kill me?”

When his eyes closed I thought I'd lost him. Then they opened again. “Spilt milk. The gas said it. Mama cried.”

The gas said it?

Judith tsked-tsked. “Told ya. That's word salad. The Alzheimer's, it makes them put words together that don't belong, 'specially late in the day like this when they get tired. Sundowning, the doctor calls it, because these Alzheimer's people, their minds is gone by sundown.”

I ignored her. “Chess, what exactly did the gas say?”

“Ran ran ran ran ran.”

“The gas ran?”

“Me. I ran. After the gas said.”

“You ran because the gas said something?”

“It told on me.”

“Told
what
on you, Chess?”

He didn't answer. Perhaps it was only my hopeful imagination, but I thought he was trying his best to answer my questions. As with stroke victims, though, there was a big gulf between intent and performance. Gas talking, Chess running. They might have been connected to that bloody day in 1944, but they could also be pieces of disparate memory jumbled together by the ravages of his disease. I decided to start again, from the beginning.

“Chess, it's Jen. Your sister. Who killed me?”

He began to speak but only wet grunts came out, and a thin trail of saliva leaked from his gaping mouth. Using the corner of the bed sheet, I wiped him dry as his wife sat motionless beside me, that discomfiting smile back on her face. Chess remained silent for the next few minutes, then started the word salad all over again. “Gas. Christmas killed me and Mama cried.”

Christmas. His family was killed on Christmas Day. Something happened with the gas that upset his mother.

He wasn't through. “Daddy hate hate Daddy hate hate hate the gas hit Mama when she cried.”

Judith Bollinger spoke up again. “You ain't getting nothin' more. Once he starts that gas stuff he's over for the day.”

Maybe. But I was intrigued by his linking “Daddy” and “hate.” Not to mention “hit.”

Trying once more, I said in his ear, “You hated Daddy, Chess?”

“Oooooh, hated!” He twisted his head toward me and for a brief moment, less than a second, the eyes that met mine were clear. “Poor Jenny Jen. All my fault.”

“What was your fault, Chess? Did you kill Daddy?”

Suddenly his hand gripped mine with the strength of a much younger man. Using me for leverage, he pulled himself up and let loose a banshee wail. “Not me not me not me not meeeeeeeeeeeee!”

Chapter Twelve

As I drove away from the misery of Shady Rest, I realized I either had to get drunk or see Warren again. Since I didn't drink, Warren won. There was a chance he was still at the set, but the light was fading and already ribbons of purple, pink, and orange streaked the sky. If I didn't catch him there, I could probably find him at the Chinese buffet near the Best Western where the film crew usually ate dinner. But I'd timed my arrival well. Warren was still in Papago Park, standing beside a cameraman, listening to Frank Oberle—who sounded pretty rough at this point—describe the aftermath of the POWs' escape. Oberle was sitting next to the reconstructed bathhouse that hid the Germans' tunnel. To his right, a bank of lights glared through a mesquite tree, casting eerie shadows across the ground in front of him. Lit like this, Papago Park looked more like a setting for a Wes Craven horror flick than a World War II documentary.

“We didn't find the tunnel 'til several days after the Germans flew the coop,” Oberle croaked, trying hard to ignore the boom mike hovering over his head. “They'd hid the entrance between this here bathhouse and a coal bin, then camouflaged it with dirt and weeds so you couldn't tell it from the rest of the ground. Same with the tunnel's exit over there by the Cross Cut Canal. Smart sonsabitches, they was. Hell. I'm done, Warren. It's been fun and all that, but my voice is shot.”

“Cut!” Warren showed no annoyance as the old guard spit on the ground and limped out of camera range. He turned to me with a smile, but it disappeared quickly. “What's wrong?”

I remembered Rada Tesema's desperation, the stench of Shady Rest, and Chess Bollinger's screams. The looming loss of Jimmy and Kryzinski. “Just a hard day at the office.”

Oblivious to everyone's stares, he put his arms around me and held me close. It felt so right. “What can I do to make you feel better?”

Now there was a leading question. “I'm fine, really,” I said into his chest.

“You always are.” When he released me and drew back, his face was filled with concern. “I have an idea. Why don't we take a ride in the Golden Hawk and have dinner in some place far away from all this? How about that place you were telling the cameraman about, the Horny Toad, in Cave Creek? Or was it Carefree?”

Burgers at the Horny Toad sounded great, but even better was the idea of being out on the open road with Warren. The neighboring villages of Cave Creek/Carefree lay about twenty-five miles north of Papago Park, the perfect distance for an evening drive. I looked toward the halogen-lit parking lot and saw the Golden Hawk parked next to Warren's leased Land Rover. “You already bought it?”

He grinned. “Not yet. But watch this.” He called over to Mark Schank, who was talking film with Lindsey. “Hey, Mark, you mind if I take the Golden Hawk out for a spin?”

Schank's smile dwarfed his thin face. It was the opposite of Lindsey's glare. “Anywhere you want, but bring it back in one piece or you've bought it.”

Warren gave me a squeeze. “Told you. Mark's desperate to sell the thing to someone from the film community. He sees us as his next big market.”

Shank gave a dry laugh. “Oh, I've sold to the film community before. And writers. Clive Cussler bought two of my cars.”

The idea of going for a spin in the Golden Hawk lightened my mood. Modern cars, which in my opinion all looked alike, bore me, which is why I drive a '45 Jeep. Show me something with a bit of style and I get all gushy. “Are you still thinking about the '57?” The '57, a tail-finned version of the Golden Hawk, was owned by a rival dealer at the same autoplex as Schank Classic Cars. “I think that one's prettier.” I preferred the '57's two-tone fawn-and-doeskin color scheme to the '56's gold-and-white.

“Prettier, maybe, but it's an automatic, which I'm not crazy about. I like the '56, a three-speed stick with overdrive, very rare. There were only 786 of them made, so it's more collectible.”

More expensive, too, I bet.

As Warren and I climbed into the Golden Hawk (retrofitted with three-point safety harness), Schank asked, “Could you give me a lift back to the autoplex? I've been so caught up in the filming that I'm late, and I'm supposed to call Tokyo in a half-hour.”

Although the autoplex was less than a half-mile away in a straight line over Papago Park's rocky ground, Warren happily assented. I offered to sit in the rear seat, but Mark refused. “No problemo. In those days, they made two-doors a lot easier to maneuver in, especially for small-statured people like me, so I'll slip in the back. Getting out won't be a big deal.”

The night was warm and soft so Warren kept the windows down. As we cruised along Sixty-Fourth Street toward the autoplex, the scents of sage and gasoline combined in an odd potpourri. A true salesman, Mark chattered the entire way. “I hear your pretty detective friend is working for that Tesema fellow, Ernst's caretaker. That must be something.”

Warren uh-huhed.

“I wasn't that surprised to hear that Tesema'd been arrested. He seemed pleasant enough, but you know these immigrants.” Sensing that his comment might not be too politic, Mark switched to a safer topic. “My family's lived here since Arizona was a territory. They used to trade with the Pimas.”

“Is that so?” From the tone of his voice, I could tell Warren wasn't interested.

“Yeah. Beads for beans. Maybe the Pimas are best known for their cotton, but they raised great beans. The canals around here? Those were originally Pima irrigation canals. For their crops. Great farmers, those Pimas.”

“That's what I hear.”

I tried to hide my smile, but Warren saw it out of the corner of his eye and gave my knee a squeeze. A warm Arizona night, a beautiful car, a handsome man—what more could a woman want? All we needed now was to get rid of the yakky car salesman.

But Mark was oblivious to my impatience. “Yep, and they made good neighbors, too. Never caused any trouble. Don't know what the family would have done without them. For a while there, we Schanks ran cattle all the way from where we are now clear out to the Superstition Mountains. Course, these days, a lot of that is reservation property. You should have seen the old Schank ranch house, a big adobe built in the 1850s. It was really something. But we tore it down.”

Being more than slightly interested in historical preservation, I spoke up. “Are you telling me your family tore down an original Territorial adobe?”

Realizing he'd screwed up again, Mark backtracked. “Uh, it wasn't my decision. I was only a kid when that happened. My father said it was a mess and not worth restoring. But who knows? The old place must've seen plenty of history. Before he died, my great-grandfather said that Wyatt Earp once spent the night there. Geronimo and his band were supposed to have camped nearby, too. Not that I know for sure if any of that's true, you understand. One thing I'm certain of, even though it happened long before I was born. Two of those Germans from Camp Papago surrendered to my grandmother.”

Warren's response was as dramatic as mine. Just before the entrance to the autoplex, he pulled over to the curb and looked into the back seat. “Are you serious?”

Mark flushed. “Well, yeah. Maybe I should have mentioned it before, but my grandparents have both been dead for years now, and Dad, who was just a kid when it happened, he's in bad health these days and doesn't want anything to do with the documentary. He'll be pissed if he finds out I told you.”

I was thrilled by the possibility of a lone woman bringing the escaped Germans to heel. Shades of Ken Follet's
Eye of the Needle,
one of my favorite World War II thrillers. “Mark, was your grandmother out hunting when she ran into them?”

He gave us a shame-faced laugh. “Hardly. The story goes that she was hanging out the wash when they walked up to her and surrendered. Dad—who was over by the barn when it happened—said they looked like hell. Cold, wet, in rags and half-starved. Grandma took them into the kitchen, fed them some macaroni and cheese and warmed them up with hot chocolate. Dad recalls those German boys as being meek as lambs, but says that Grandpa was a lot less trusting than Grandma and kept his rifle trained on them.”

My mind raced. “Was Ernst one of the men?” Then I remembered he'd been captured by two field hands.

Schank shook his head. “Sorry. They were just two enlisted guys. The newspapers didn't even print their names. Now, let's forget I brought it up, OK?”

Warren ignored Mark's plea for secrecy. “I want to talk to your father. It'd be great to have someone on film who actually saw two of the Germans surrender.”

“Sorry.” But Mark's face was a study in conflict, and I could see him weighing the chances of selling the Golden Hawk against his reluctance to provoke his father's ire. “It won't work. I wasn't exaggerating when I said that Dad's in bad health. He's suffering from emphysema and has to stay hooked up to an oxygen tank all the time. I run the business more or less by myself these days. Dad lives in Carefree and seldom leaves the house.”

Warren was merciless. “Hey, Lena, wasn't that '57 Hawk a sweet-looking car?”

I played along. “Gorgeous. Much sweeter than this ratty old '56. Newer, too.”

Another sigh emanated from the back seat. “OK. I'll talk to Dad.”

***

After dropping Mark off at the autoplex, where he promised to call his father before he called Japan, Warren and I headed for Cave Creek and the Horny Toad. The Hawk was the kind of car you cruised, not pushed, so although it could have easily kept up with high-speed traffic, Warren bypassed the Pima Freeway and its congestion, opting instead for Scottsdale Road. At some point, the Hawk's original radio had been overhauled and while remaining monaural, it brought in the local Golden Oldies station clearly. One saguaro cactus after another swept past us, disappearing into the lavender twilight, while a Fifties doo-wop group harmonized on “Earth Angel.” As the sun disappeared below the horizon, emitting a final burst of color, I snuggled close to Warren, breathing in male sweat and Acqua di Gio.

“I like this car.”

He squeezed my knee again. “So do I. I've already made up my mind to buy it, but I want Mark to dangle in the wind for a while, maybe get the price down.”

I rubbed my hand across the Golden Hawk's silvery dash. “Why don't they design cars like this anymore? It's so simple and sleek.”

“Because human beings aren't simple and sleek any more. Life is more complex, and we all have to split ourselves off in dozens of different pieces to deal with it. Our cars reflect that. And I'm no different. Back home, I usually drive the Mercedes because I wouldn't risk one of my classic babies on the L.A. freeways. But when I take one out for a drive along the Coast Highway, I think about the people who once drove it, the simpler time they lived in, their bedrock values. Today everything's so unfocused. There's no cohesive vision of what life is all about and where any of us is headed.” He paused, and his voice was uncharacteristically emotional when he continued. “To paraphrase Yeats' poem, ‘Things are falling apart, and the center's not holding.'”

To an extent, I agreed with him. Through the rosy lens of Time, the past always looked better, and it was in some ways, discounting a war here and there. As we drove up Scottsdale Road past the upscale strip malls that had replaced cholla and saguaro, I tried to envision what Scottsdale had looked like at the time the Germans escaped. The tiny town was surrounded by ranches and farms then, but the artists that eventually made Scottsdale famous had already started trickling in. The big resorts were going up, too, and both the El Chorro Lodge and the Jokake Inn had begun attracting high-rollers wanting to get away from the big city hustle. Frank Lloyd Wright had just established a rough camp north of town which years later would be known as Taliesin West.

There was a dark side to this rural simplicity, though. Racism of the Old West variety was rampant, and neither the Pima Indians nor the Mexican laborers who were building the city with their sweat and muscle were welcome in most of its establishments. As the war ground on, increasing numbers of Scottsdale High's graduates were being shipped to Europe and the Philippines. The mothers of those who never made it back were given the cold comfort of posting Gold Stars in their windows.

Suddenly the night seemed chilly and I wished I'd brought a jacket. “Maybe things were always falling apart, but without television commentators to sound the alarm, nobody knew.”

He looked over at me, an astonished look on his face. “That's a damned deep thought.”

“My stock in trade.” Snuggling closer to him, I decided to lighten the subject. “Your little plan worked well the other night, by the way. I was impressed that you still get along with your ex-wife. Why'd you get divorced, if you don't mind my asking.”

He raised his eyebrows again. “I thought you…Ah, something tells me you don't read
People
magazine. Or watch
Entertainment Tonight.
She left me for one of her co-stars.” He named a suspiciously brawny actor known mainly for his work in action movies. “They met on the set of ‘Komor the Magnificient.' She was playing Princess A'tali.”

“I take it he was Komor.”

“Right. At least old Komor is doing his best to be a good step-father. He's even enrolled the girls with his own martial arts instructor. I'll be afraid of them in a few years. Hell, I already am.”

“I'll bet you miss them.”

“Of course I do.” He was silent for a while, and I listened to the sound of the night wind whipping by. After a few minutes, he looked over. “Listen, Lena, I think it's time I told you more about myself, that I…” I never heard what Warren was going to say next about this messed-up world, because ahead of us loomed a sign,
this way to happy trails dude ranch
, and his attention shifted. “Hey, isn't that where your ex-boyfriend works?” There was relief in his voice, as if he was glad to change the subject.