Desert Run (20 page)

After the Beav solved his sleep-over problem (Mom called the neighbor and discovered it had all been a misunderstanding), I switched the channel to PBS. Although I'd told Jimmy I hadn't planned to watch
Native Peoples, Foreign Chains
I watched anyway, marveling at Warren's delicacy when asking indelicate questions. No wonder he and Lindsey fought all the time. In fact, they battled so often that I was amazed he kept her on the payroll.

When the credits rolled on
Native Peoples, Foreign Chains
, I read them carefully and discovered that Lindsey worked as assistant director on that film, too. Then I remembered that Warren told me that she'd been with him ever since he started Living History Productions more than ten years earlier. Why didn't she move off on her own? By now, she should have been able to get a job as a director, not merely continue along in the same rut, playing second fiddle to a very big fiddle. Perhaps, they had once been romantically involved, but so what? Where was the drive Hollywood was so famous for, the ambition? Maybe Lindsey couldn't bear to leave. While Warren no longer appeared romantically interested in her, Lindsey's “stay away from him” comment hinted that she still carried a torch for him.

As I readied myself for bed, it occurred to me that it was time to do something to repair my own fractured life. Therapy had broken it apart but so far hadn't bothered to put it back together again. So many people I loved were leaving me. Warren would go back to L.A., too, once he finished
Escape Across the Desert,
and I would be left alone, drifting, with my usual defenses stripped away. Where was the hard Lena, the old Lena who never lay awake staring at the ceiling? The Lena who was never lonely because she knew better than to care about anyone in the first place?

Now I had opened my heart only to find everyone vacating it.

And all the new furniture in the world couldn't change that.

Chapter Nineteen

Bad news should always be delivered in person. After calling Beth Osmon the first thing in the morning to make sure she was in, I drove to the northern limits of Scottsdale as fast as rush hour traffic would let me. I found her near the horse barn on her forty-acre spread, still tidying up her property after the storm we'd had Wednesday night. The expression on her face told me she'd prepared herself for the worst.

“He's a phony, isn't he?”

Without a word, I handed her the folder that contained, among other things, the faxed copy of Alea and Jack Sherwood/Rinn's wedding announcement. She took it with gloved hands and glanced at the first page. Then she looked up. “The shithead.”

“The Alabama PI who collected this called him a skunk.”

She snorted. “They're more polite down there.” For all Beth's bravado, I could see lines of pain around her eyes. She wasn't a bad-looking woman. Although in her mid-forties, she'd managed to keep the damage of years of sun and trail-riding to a minimum, and her lean, hard figure would shame many a twenty-year-old. The gray streak that contrasted with her shoulder-length brunette hair only added to its beauty. Why couldn't a woman like this find an honest man?

“If you want, Beth, I can take care of this myself.”

“You'll shoot him for me?” A smile broke through the sadness.

Relieved, I smiled in return. She would be fine. “Sorry, shooting shitheads is against the law. What I meant was that I can confront Mr. Rinn myself, show him what we've discovered, then tell him to hop a plane back to Alabama. There's no point in having you do the dirty work. You've been through enough.”

She didn't answer right away, merely swallowed a couple of times while she looked toward the corral where three Appaloosa yearlings were playing. Two had the standard white-blanketed rumps, but one was a dark bay with snowflake spots. When she saw me looking at them, she said, “The first Native American horse breed. And regardless of those little Morgans back east, probably the finest breed this country has ever developed.”

I let her continue on, knowing that she was merely putting off the moment of heartbreak. As she talked, the musky scent of horse drifted to us—a scent I had always found preferable to that of gasoline. The yearlings capered in the paddock, while in the barn, several other horses called to them. Only a few feet away, a coyote with engorged mammaries loped home to her den, oblivious to the family of Gambrel's quail that scurried to safety in a cholla patch. If you didn't look at the subdivision surrounding Beth's ranch, you'd think this was Paradise.

“The Nez Percé Indians bred them, you know.” Her voice was still firm.

“The Appaloosas?”

When I looked back at her, I saw that her eyes were still dry. “They're some of the fastest, toughest horses ever bred. The only reason the U.S. Cavalry was able to catch the Nez Percé during the Indian Wars was because Chief Joseph thought his people had already crossed the border into Canada. Their horses had always been able to outrun the Cavalry's remounts.”

I knew the story but let her tell it. She needed to.

“Chief Joseph was wrong. His people were still in the U.S. After killing most of the Nez Percé, the Cavalry slaughtered their Appaloosas, too, hoping to make the breed extinct so no Indian would ever be able to escape the Cavalry again. But a few got away.” She stretched her arm in a wide gesture, taking in the corral and barns. “These are their direct descendants. And they're as tough as their ancestors.”

So was Beth. Like the Appaloosas, she'd be all right.

Finally Beth spoke again. “Let's go up to the house. I want to read the rest of this and think for a while. Jack hasn't asked me for money, so no crime's been committed. Yet.” Her voice was clear, her eyes dry. “I may want to let this play out.”

A thrill of alarm crept up my spine. I was no fan of letting amateurs play detective. “Uh, Beth, that may not be a good…”

As we walked up the steep drive to her hilltop home, she waved my protest away. “I'm not talking about going after the shi…the skunk with my grandpa's long-barreled Colt or anything foolish like that. Writing my memoirs from prison doesn't appeal to me. But if I simply drop him, what will have been gained? No, I'm going to mull over my options.”

Judging from Beth's house alone, you'd never know she had enough money to buy the Arizona Diamondbacks during a pennant-winning season. In contrast to the glitzy, over-designed houses dotting the hills around her ranch, Beth's old Territorial adobe was the real thing. Built in the late eighteen hundreds by her copper-mining great-grandfather, the place could have used some patch-up, and the dry-rotted window sills probably all needed replacing. But the rambling wreck blended into the desert landscape with an easy integrity newer homes such as Gilbert Schank's phony adobe never would. It would stay here, too. Beth had no children. When we talked previously, she had told me that after her death, the ranch house, the surrounding land, and the Appaloosas would be passed intact to an organization that provided therapy for handicapped children.

When Beth opened the scarred wooden door to the house, the expression on her face told me that my news was beginning to hit her. But she refused to give in to it. She led me into a living room that looked like it had been furnished by her great-grandmother's hand-me-downs. Faded chintz sofas, unraveling Navajo rugs, scarred Victorian oak tables, and dozens of fading family photographs in tarnished silver frames created a motley but friendly clutter. Unlike Scottsdale's nouveau riche, Beth wasn't into appearances.

She took off her gloves and sat down on one of the ratty sofas to read. I sat across from her in another one, biding my time. When she finished, she closed the folder with a snap.

“Okay. How much do I owe you?”

When I told her, she walked over to her desk, making out the check on the spot. As she handed it to me, she said, “I might get back to you in a couple of days. Will you be in town?”

This startled me. Because of Desert Investigations, I almost never went anywhere and she knew it. “Of course. Where would I go?”

She smiled. “I thought you might be planning a trip to L.A.”

The blood rushed to my face. “What makes you think that?”

“One of the extras working on
Escape Across the Desert
is my maid's nephew. He's playing one of the Camp Papago guards.”

Then, when I turned to go, she added something that mystified me. “They say the cobbler's children have no shoes. Is the same thing true of private detectives?”

I was halfway to my Jeep before I figured out what she meant.

***

As soon as I walked through the door at Desert Investigations, I told Jimmy what I wanted him to do.

He looked appalled. “Run a check on Warren? For God's sake, Lena, why?”

“Let's say I want to play it safe.” He continued staring at me until I snapped, “If you don't want to do it, I'll hire someone who can!”

He let out his breath with a great sigh. “All right. All right. But I probably won't be able to do it today. I'm backed up here, what with the end of the week and all.”

“Monday's fine. Thanks, partner.” Jimmy would do what I wanted, so why did I feel depressed?

Not being in a reflective mood—I didn't want to think about anything, especially Fay Harris' death and my own possible culpability—I turned my attention to some paperwork I'd been putting off too long. I was only a tenth of the way through it when the phone rang. It was Ian Mantz, son of Gerhardt Mantz/Gunter Hoenig. “Ms. Jones, I'd like to apologize. I don't think we parted on a very good note yesterday.”

I'd as good as accused Mantz's dead father of driving the boat that amputated Ernst's legs, and to top it off, hinted that the son carried on the father's legacy by writing anonymous letters to the press. Yet he was the one who called to apologize. Something wasn't right. I shoved aside the billing and focused my attention on his voice. Words didn't always give liars away, but their tone usually did. “Don't worry about it, Dr. Mantz. I probably wasn't as delicate in my questioning as I could have been.”

“I want to make it up.” Ah, here it came, the hidden agenda, the real reason for his phone call. “I'd, uh, like to share something with you.”

Like what, Ebola?

He spoke into my silence. “Let's have lunch today. Then we can talk some more.”

“Sorry. I'm having some furniture delivered.”

“Then how about dinner? At my house. You could meet the family. All of us. We live within blocks of each other.”

While I was intrigued by the prospect of meeting Gunter Hoenig's grandchildren, I couldn't help but remember the dagger display cabinet in Ian's office. Maybe there were more at his house. Firearms, too. “How about someplace public?” I tried to make it sound like a joke.

A dry chuckle. “I assure you that Huong, my wife, won't poison the sauerbraten, and my four daughters are very peaceable. Like their grandfather before them, they're volunteers at Hospice of the Valley. But to prove that my intentions are honorable, you can bring a friend if you wish.”

Gunter Hoenig, a U-boat gunnery mechanic, had been a Hospice volunteer? Life never ceases to amaze. “Just a second.” I covered the mouthpiece with my hand and glanced over at Jimmy. For the first time that morning I noticed his appearance. His purple Hawaiian shirt clashed with his olive chinos, and his black socks didn't look all that great with his scuffed white Nikes. While never exactly a fashion plate, my partner usually chose his outfits with care. I guess house-hunting could be rough on a person.

“You seeing Esther tonight?”

He shook his head, then turned away from me to fiddle with his keyboard.

“Then how about dinner?” I said to his back.

“Again?”

Before he could say no, I added, “With Gunter Hoenig's son and granddaughters.”

He turned around. “The German POW? One of the two who was never caught?”

“That's the one.”

His eyes, which had looked a little bleary, brightened. “Count me in.” Then he went back to his keyboard.

I uncovered the mouthpiece, told Ian that my partner would be coming with me, then took down directions to the Mantz house. Feeling more intrigued than ever on several fronts, I then hung up and went back to my billing.

My “new” fifty-year-old cactus furniture arrived shortly before noon, and for the next hour I fussed around, trying to figure out what should go where. In the end, I put one of the chairs next to the rack that held my collection of Delta blues vinyls, and the other chair across from the sofa so that I could look at the big oil painting I'd bought a year earlier from an Apache artist. Living room thus arrranged, I then straightened up the bedroom, pleased by the way the horse-head lamp looked next to my Lone Ranger and Tonto bedspread. Some people might think that the entire Fifties Southwestern theme veered into overkill, but the way I saw it, the furniture created the innocent childhood nest I'd never had. While I was still positioning the pillows (one sham had a picture of Silver, the other of Scout), and trying to decide whether I needed a Navajo blanket to hang over the blond wood headboard, I heard a knock at the door. Not being in the habit of inviting guests into my lair, I immediately stiffened. The last person who'd arrived at my apartment unannounced had tried to shoot me. Hoping it was just the Jehovah's Witnesses, I snatched up my .38 and called through the door, “Who is it?”

“Jimmy. I wanted to see your new furniture, but if you're busy…”

I put the .38 down on an end table and let him in.

He toured the apartment, his face so expressionless I couldn't tell if he liked it or not. Unaccountably nervous, I explained the effect I was trying for, then finished up with a lame, “Well, you know, sort of a kid's version of the Wild West. Kind of camp, I guess, but I like it.”

That brought a smile. “So do I. It's different.” The smile disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. “I'd better get back downstairs. By the way, Harry Caulfield returned your call. He said he was on the way out and won't be back until late tonight, but that you can reach him tomorrow morning.”

I felt a stab of disappointment, but guessed my questions about anonymous letters could keep until tomorrow. My decorating jones sated for the day, I locked up and walked back downstairs with Jimmy.

***

Ian Mantz lived in Arrowhead Ranch, which wasn't an actual ranch at all, merely an upscale subdivision on the west side of Phoenix. It was an easy commute to his Glendale office, although a colorless one, with strip malls and subdivisions lining the entire route. In the dusk, though, with a gaudy Arizona sunset spreading its rosy light over the valley, the faux Mediterranean buildings almost fit the landscape. After getting lost in a maze of curved streets, we found Ian's house at the end of a cul de sac, framed by identical twin palms almost dwarfing the two-story stucco-and-glass structure.

“Nice.” But there was no enthusiasm in Jimmy's voice. I'd been around him long enough to know that he much preferred his reservation trailer to the nicest suburban dwelling. Then I remembered he'd spent weeks house-hunting in subdivisions even more banal than this. Why does love make people crazy?

“I guess.” I preferred my little walk-up apartment, too. “Well, let's do it.” We exited my Jeep (Jimmy had left his truck back at Desert Investigations) and walked up to a massive mahogany door that looked like it had been built for giants. Before returning to the office, Jimmy had driven back to the rez to change into something more appropriate—clothes that matched—and I'd donned the caramel-colored pants suit I'd bought at a designer's resale shop. But I still felt shabby compared to the elegant woman who opened the door.

“
Willkommen
!” A brunette with almond eyes and honey-colored skin, Huong Mantz's accent was more Vietnamese than German. A wartime marriage? While the lines around her eyes and mouth proved that she was no longer young, her svelte model's figure only added to the elegance of her white linen dress.