Desert Run (28 page)

“You say ‘When the murders went down.' What about afterwards? Did they keep up their friendship?”

He stabbed his cigarette out in the ashtray. “You catch on quick, don't ya, missy? No, they didn't. Harry told me that after Chess' trial, they never talked to each other again. Ashamed, maybe.”

The shiver came back for another round. Had Chess and his friend
both
killed the Bollingers, but only one had been careless enough to leave bloody footprints? It occurred to me that the famous alibi served a double function. Not only did it help acquit Chess of the murder of his family, but it provided cover for Sammy Maurice as well. “Is Maurice still alive?”

“Only the good die young. Last I heard, Sammy was livin' the high life out in Sun City.”

***

The next day was Friday, supposedly Jimmy's last day at Desert Investigations, but instead, he gave me a reprieve, citing his extra workload and asking if he could stay on for a few more days to finish up. Somehow I managed to keep from jumping up and clapping my hands, and confined myself to a simple “By all means, if you don't mind it eating into that R&R time you'd planned before starting at Southwest MicroSystems.”

He pulled a face. “I've been thinking about it, and there's no chance I can enjoy the time off knowing that I left you with unfinished work.”

After placing a call to Sammy Maurice and making sure he'd be home later that morning, I left the office with a song in my heart.

The song lasted until I reached the film set on the edge of the Cross Cut Canal. After everything that had happened, Warren was finally getting around to shooting the scene where the Germans exited their escape tunnel, prepared to float to Mexico. Although I wasn't yet ready to talk to Warren about his past and get his version of Crystal Chandler's murder, I did want to find out how Lindsey was doing after her overdose. As I made my way through the crowd of extras, I could tell that Warren hadn't been sleeping well. His blond hair looked dull and the deep shadows around his eyes almost mimicked my own bruises.

When I asked about Lindsey, he sounded abrupt. “The doctor's probably going to release her tomorrow, as soon as she gets a psych eval and referral.”

Psych eval. Then the doctor suspected the overdose was a suicide attempt, too. “They can't force her to stay if she doesn't want to, can they?”

“No, but I can. I told her she can come back to work as soon as she sees a therapist, not before. I also told her that the therapy had better be long-term, too, if she wants to remain with Living History Productions.”

His coldness unsettled me. While I was no fan of Lindsey's, the prospect that he might fire her troubled me and I said so.

He looked back at the canal, where the water was now running slower than it had been a few days earlier. “It's for her own good. She's had, well, issues for a long time now, and I can't allow them to halt production.“

Of course. Ultimately, everything in Hollywood was all about money, and nothing—not fires, floods, earthquakes or suicide attempts—would be allowed to interfere with the bottom line. From what little reading I'd done on documentaries, their budgets were even more strained than on the larger, star-studded productions. I wondered if the same held true for pornography. Probably not. A few people, a few sex toys, a bed, and some low-grade camera equipment were all any director needed, making the profit margin on sleaze sky high.

I decided to ask the question that had been bugging me for weeks. “She was in love with you, wasn't she?”

He looked away from the canal to me, then back to the canal again. “What does that have to do with anything?”

That coldness again. “It could have everything to do with her suicide attempt. If she felt she was being thrown over for me…”

“My thing with Lindsey ended years ago, even before I married Angel. Now I'm sorry, Lena, but I have a scene to direct.”

With that none too subtle brush-off, he began rounding up the extras and placing them around the pseudo tunnel exit. I watched for a while longer, hoping the action would stop long enough for me to ask a few more questions, but after an hour passed I went back to my Jeep. As I started to leave, I saw Mark Schank drive up in the Studebaker Golden Hawk.

Schank leaned out the window and waved me down.“Heard you had some trouble down here the other day.”

“Just an accident.” Uncomfortable, I changed the subject. “I see you're still driving the Hawk. Warren hasn't made up his mind, yet?”

He smiled his phony salesman's smile. “We're getting there. But I don't have any appointments this afternoon, and I thought I'd watch the action. I'm really into film, especially work like Warren's. He's such a genius.” But his eyes remained calculating as they caressed my Jeep.

Not wanting to hear another sales pitch, I made my farewells and headed for Sun City, a famous retirement community which existed economically between proletarian Sundown Sam's RV Park and Tommy Bollinger's snooty The Greening. Sun City was located on the far northwest side of Phoenix, about twenty crow-fly miles from Scottsdale. Easy-care houses and condos sat amid “lawns” of gravel dyed the color of grass, and the nearby shops stocked everything the active retiree could want: overpriced sports wear and large-print books.

The community was also much more comprehensive than either Sundown Sam's or The Greening. Anyone who lived here never had to leave. For entertainment, its SunDome hosted a variety of touring shows, ranging from the Bolshoi Ballet to Wayne Newton. The various clinics and hospitals which ringed the development specialized in the ailments of the aging, but if their expertise wasn't enough, an abundance of funeral parlors, crematoria, and cemeteries waited to welcome you with open arms. All in all, if you had to get old before you died, Sun City was the place to do it.

As I pulled the Jeep up in front of Sammy Maurice's house, the front door opened and a stooped prune of a man tottered out.

“How much you want for that Jeep?” he bawled across his green-dyed gravel. The old car thief still had an eye for mechanical beauty.

I climbed out of the Jeep and walked up the drive. “She's not for sale, Mr. Maurice.”

His rheumy eyes looked wistful behind his thick horn rims. “Too bad. I'd love to flash that little beauty around town. And call me Reverend Sammy, like my friends do. Only my enemies call me Mr. Maurice.”

“
Reverend,
did you say?”

His smile revealed a mouth full of dentures. “For the past thirty years. Retired now, if a pastor can ever be said to be retired. I can still deliver the odd sermon when called upon.” He opened the door and led me into a dark living room so overstuffed with chairs it was almost impossible to maneuver. “Take a seat, any seat, plenty of choices, right?”

Cautiously I inched my way into a pink floral chair, which turned out not to be as comfortable as it looked. It was so hard it could have been embalmed.

He plopped down across from me on a gold-and-brown plaid sofa and put his feet up on a red leather ottoman. As my eyes became accustomed to the dim light, I realized that none of the furniture in the room matched, neither in color nor style. Like so many other pack rats, he had probably collected the various pieces over the years and it had never once occurred to him to discard the old in favor of the new. I also figured he had to be single, or at least widowed. No woman would put up with this gaudy mess.

“Like I said on the phone, I wanted to talk to you about your involvement in the Chess Bollinger trial.”

He still smiled, the very picture of a man with nothing to hide, but I knew from previous experience that most murderers looked that way. “I'll admit I was intrigued when you called earlier. But before we get started on the Bollingers, how about some iced tea? Or Diet Coke? Nelda can get you some orange juice, if that's what you prefer.”

Nelda? Maybe I'd been wrong about his marital state. “Tea will be fine.”

He turned his head and bawled again. “Yo, Nelda! Make that two teas!”

A thin voice called back, “Yeah, yeah. Keep your pants on.”

Sammy grinned at me. “No respect, no respect at all. But what can you expect from an old con like her?”

Before I could ask what he meant, a tiny woman carrying a loaded tray emerged from the kitchen. Her clothing was as mismatched as her house. Bright red stretch pants clashed with a lavender print blouse, and far too many rhinestones adorned her wrinkled hands and neck. Her makeup would have looked more appropriate on a Vegas showgirl. “Raspberry tea with a dash of mint,” she announced. “Fresh made, none of that powdered chemical crap.”

“Language, Nelda,” Reverend Sammy chided.

“Up yours, sweetie.” Nelda put the tray down on the coffee table and sank down on the sofa beside her husband. Then she snuggled up to him like they were both teenagers. I had the feeling that if I weren't in the room, she'd nibble his ear.

I took a sip. Delicious. Like Nelda said, none of that chemical crap. After complementing the brewer, I said, “Reverend Sammy, wouldn't you prefer this conversation to take place in private?”

He waved his hand. “My wife knows all about my past, as I know about hers. We met in a halfway house in the Sixties.”

Nelda twinkled at me. “Yeah. He was on parole for car theft, me for bank robbery.”

So he hadn't been kidding when he'd called her an “old con.” “I, uh, take it you're both, ah, reformed?”

He smiled. “Now we steal souls for Jesus.”

The state of my own soul being somewhat iffy at the moment, I stayed on message. “How much do you remember about the Bollinger case?”

“Everything. It was the second most defining moment of my life.”

“Second?”

“Setting up my prison ministry was the first.”

Nelda elbowed him. “That means I come in third, you old bastard.” She didn't seem all that upset at not winning the race. If life was a race.

He kissed her hand. “A very close third.” Then to me, “What exactly do you want to know?”

“I want to know if your testimony in court was truthful, if Chess Bollinger really was with you when his family was murdered.”

He nodded. “I've told a lot of lies in my life, but none about the Bollinger murders. Chess was with me all that day and all that night. And, no, he didn't kill his family.”

“Uh, all that night?”

Nelda giggled. “She thinks you're queer, Sammy.”

I experienced my second blush of the week. What was it about old people that made me feel like such a kid? “No, no, not at all. But…but what
were
you guys doing all night? That was never made clear in the newspaper articles I read, and I still haven't been able to get my hands on the court transcripts. I doubt if you two were up all night playing cards or Monopoly.”

Reverend Sammy's smile matched his wife's. Dentures gleamed. “No, we weren't. We were doing what we so frequently did those days. Vandalizing public property.”

Vandalizing. Where had I run across a mention of vandalism lately? Then I remembered. Harry Caulfield had told me there'd been some instances of vandalism on Christmas Day, 1944.

“Do you mean to tell me that you and Chess were the kids who wrecked Scottsdale High School?”

All these years later, he still managed a guilty look. “I'm afraid so. After spending the day getting drunk on some liquor that I sneaked out of my parents' house, we walked to the school at around, oh, six in the evening—it was already pretty dark—and spent a while going through the classrooms, tearing up books, writing on walls, that kind of thing. Then we set fire to a couple of trash cans and split. But we still weren't done. From the school, we moved on to a barber shop and trashed that. Neither of us had any idea that while we were acting like fools, Chess' whole family was being murdered.”

He gave a trembling sigh. “Look, I was a dumb kid. In my confused mind, I believed things would be worse for Chess if the cops found out what we'd done that night, so I helped him hide up in our attic and I kept my mouth shut. Chess believed the same thing, too, and begged me not to tell, not even after the cops caught him and charged him with murder. But when the trial started up, I realized I had to tell the truth or they might hang him! It took me a week or two to get my nerve up, and that's when I stepped forward. But I'd waited too late. Nobody, other than that blessed jury, ever believed me. They brought in a not guilty verdict, but Chess was still branded for life as a murderer who'd escaped justice.”

I thought back over Chess' deeply troubled life, the run-ins with the law, the prison sentences, the violence against women. I tried to imagine what it must feel like to be fifteen years old, to learn that your family was dead and that you were the suspect. You didn't have time to grieve, just time to hide. Then, after days in your friend's attic, you feel the handcuffs snap around your wrists. The only way to bear it would be to go numb, to refuse to allow any emotion to take hold. The problem was, such a solution came at a stiff price. If you continue to deny your own feelings, you'll wind up always denying the feelings of others.

Such as your wife's. Your child's.

Or the feelings of any other poor wretch you come across.

Chapter Twenty-Four

As soon as I left Reverend Sammy's house, I checked the messages on my cell and heard Warren apologizing for being so curt that morning. Then he added, “Let's have dinner tonight. Call me or just come by. On second thought, come by. I want to see your beautiful face.”

I needed to do something first, so on my way back to Scottsdale, I stopped in at Schank Classic Cars, figuring that Mark Schank would probably have made it to work by now. My guess was right. He was in the showroom polishing a chrome strip on an elderly Rolls Royce Silver Shadow when I walked in. I got straight to the point. “Say, Mark. Maybe you can help me with something. I'm looking for a picture of a '39 Oldsmobile convertible.”

His salesman's smile, which he'd plastered in place when he first saw me advancing across the showroom floor, broadened and his eyes narrowed in calculation. “I see Warren's love of the classics is contagious. Well, the '39 Olds is a superb model, truly superb, and you'll look wonderful driving it up Scottsdale Road with that blond hair of yours blowing in the wind. Although I don't have that model here on the lot at this very moment, with my contacts, I can have one here next week. It's…”

My next words erased his smile. “I don't want to buy one, Mark, just see what one looks like.”

I'll give him this. The smile returned almost immediately, although a little stiff around the edges. “I have pictures of several in a catalog in my office. But I can assure you that the moment you lay eyes on that little sweetheart, you'll fall in love like Warren did with the Golden Hawk. As I'm certain you already know, the '39 Olds came in a convertible model, which is perfect for Arizona's beautiful climate. And if you wish, we can retrofit it with air conditioning.”

Which the car would need when “Arizona's beautiful climate” heated up to a hundred and twenty degrees and the sun turned into a blowtorch. “I'll bear that in mind. Now can I see that picture, please?”

Still extolling the charms of classic cars and the '39 Olds in particular, Mark Schank led me down a hallway filled with photographs of antique cars into an office, where to my surprise, I saw Gilbert Schank ensconced behind a massive desk. Still in his wheelchair, still sucking oxygen through a tube. And still the car salesman, because his phony smile mirrored his son's. Although Gilbert had shrunk alarmingly since his vigorous years on television, I could still see the strong physical resemblance between him and Mark. Both were little taller than jockeys and both had the same thin faces and beaky noses. “Miss Jones. How nice to…see you…again.”

“And you, too, Mr. Schank. How are you feeling?” Mark had told me his father almost never left the house, but here he was, as big as life. Or what was left of it.

A grimace. “I'll live…unfortunately. Just came down…to keep my…hand in. Always try to…at least once…a month. You here…to buy a car? By the way…you look…like hell. What…happened?”

I forced a laugh. “I fell into the canal.”

“Dumb thing…to do.”

“So I noticed.”

Perhaps sensing that I was growing uncomfortable discussing my messy physical condition, Mark explained the purpose of my visit. His father frowned in concentration. “A '39 Olds? How…strange. Someone had…where did I hear…?” He scratched his head with a trembly hand.

“Edward Bollinger had a cream-colored '39 Olds,” I volunteered. “It disappeared the night of the murders.”

His frown went away. “Yes, now I…remember. The authorities…looked all over…for it. Such a…shame, a beautiful…car like that.”

“Yes, a shame.” But not as big a shame as the smashed-in heads of the Bollinger family.

As I struggled over what to say next, Mark plopped a heavy three-ring binder down on the desk and leafed through it. “Here it is. This one's owned by…” He stopped, not wanting to give up the seller's name. “Well, it's owned by a businessman back east. He's eager to sell, and at a bargain price, too.” The figure he quoted didn't sound like a bargain to me.

When I studied the picture, I couldn't understand the car's expense. Yes, the Oldsmobile was sexy in a homely, Humphrey Bogart sort of way. It was a gleaming deep purple, and had a long hood and a deeply sloping trunk, but the headlights looked like a myopic bugs' eyes, and the grill was as tall and pinched as an Edsel's. I was willing to bet that the car's narrow, split windshield had caused many an accident, too. I closed the binder. “Nice, I guess.”

For a brief moment Mark's genial manner slipped. “Nice?! You guess?!” Then he recovered himself. “Ah, well,
chacun à son gout
, to each his own taste, and all that. Tell you what. You don't really look like an Olds person, but I have a nice little Camaro out on the lot, a '72 painted exactly the same deep green as your eyes. And it has airbrushed red flames shooting along the body! That one's a convertible, too. You'd be surprised at the price.”

I doubted I'd be surprised at all. “Thanks, but I'm not in the market.”

His face grew sly. “Oh, a beautiful woman's always in the market for a new car. Let me tell you about the Camaro. It's…”

“Mark, the lady…says she's…not in…the market.” Oxygen hissed.

At his father's admonition, Mark halted the sales pitch and returned the binder to its shelf. “Right. Well, I hope I've been of help, Miss Jones.”

I had one more question. “Is the Olds rare?”

Despite his frail physical condition, Gilbert Schank managed to offer a joke. “It certainly…is now.”

“I mean, was it rare in 1944, when the Bollingers were murdered.”

He shook his head. “Oh, no. Not…rare. But…snazzy.”

As his son had pointed out,
chacun à son gout
. With nothing else to ask, I said good-by to Mark's father and received a shaky hand-wave in return. I watched as the old man picked up a paper from the desk and held it so close to his face that it almost touched his beaky nose. He squinted at it for a moment, then a spasm of pain crossed his features. He grunted, closed his eyes and let the paper drop.

Leaving Mark to tend to his father, I headed for the exit.

But not before wondering how I would age.

***

By the time I made it to the Papago Park set, filming was finished on the canal bank and the crew had reassembled near the reconstructed prison camp. But for all Warren's apologies on my cell, he was still cranky. While I watched from the shade of a mesquite, he snapped at a cameraman, telling the man to get a move on before the sun got too high in the sky. “I need shadows! So see if you can get that Ariflex in position sometime before noon!”

Putting off our discussion yet again, I backed away and drove to Desert Investigations, where I found Jimmy so intent on work that he barely grunted a greeting when I came in. By now, my earlier good mood had vanished, so I called Warren's cell and left a message that something had come up and I couldn't have dinner tonight. I promised to call him first thing in the morning, then hung up. Jimmy and I worked in silence for the rest of the day.

When five o'clock came, Jimmy headed toward his truck and I went upstairs to see if a
Leave It to Beaver
marathon might improve my mood. At least the characters on the TVLand reruns were happy.

***

On Saturday, I was still in a funk, so I decided not to go down to the office just to watch Jimmy type. Instead, I nuked a Sausage 'N Egg Hot Pocket, turned on CNN, and sat back to see who else in the world was having a bad day. The Midwest, apparently. A serial killer was working his way through Kansas and Nebraska, and in Minnesota, two state senators were arrested after throwing punches at a Wal-Mart opening. I then switched to the FOX news channel, only to find the talking head du jour extolling the virtues of the latest Hollywood water diet. I tried TVLand again, but the Beav wasn't on, just some rerun of a '50s Western. Since I wasn't in the mood for singing cowboys, I switched the TV off and roamed the apartment aimlessly for a few minutes, trying to figure out what to do with myself.

I needed to relax, but had no idea how to accomplish that. I could read more of Gunter Hoenig's journals, but they would probably just stress me further. Or I could read a book. After glancing through my bookshelves, I realized I had read them all, some of them twice. For a few minutes I thought about going over to the Scottsdale Library, this time just for fun, but decided against it. I'd just wind up gravitating to the Criminal Justice section like I usually did, and that definitely wouldn't be relaxing.

Maybe I should call someone, just to chat. Warren, perhaps. But thinking about the conversation I needed to have with him made me more tense than ever, so I dismissed that possibility. I could always call my foster father and find out if enough money had been raised yet to bring Rada Tesema's family to the U.S., but I figured I already knew the answer. If the Rev had been successful, he would have informed me. Besides, on Saturdays he always switched off his phone to work on his sermons, and only made call-backs in case of emergencies. Frustrated, I opened up my address book and went through the list of girlfriends I'd accumulated over the years, but soon realized that all were living lives almost as complicated as mine. Finally realizing that I didn't know anyone who could provide me with mindless conversation, I broke down and hit Captain Kryzinski's number on my speed dial.

“Yeah?” He sounded much the same as always. Gruff, abrupt. It meant nothing.

“How goes the packing?”

After an uncomfortable silence, he said, “Lena, I shipped everything out three days ago. Don't you remember me telling you I leave for New York tomorrow?”

Hearts, being attached to a human being's upper left quadrant by a network of tendons and muscle, aren't supposed to fall, but I'd swear mine did. “Tomorrow?” I barely recognized my own voice.

A sigh. “Yeah, tomorrow. My plane leaves at 8:30 a.m.”

There was so much I wanted to say, but all I could do was ask, “Do you have a ride?”

“Cab's gonna be here at seven sharp.”

“Cancel it. I'll take you to the airport. It's the least I can do.”

“You sure? You weren't all that, ah,
supportive
about my decision the last time we talked.”

“I'm sure.”

“See ya then, kid. But if you don't show…” With that undefined threat hanging in the air, he hung up.

I sat there, thinking about how much I'd miss him, both personally and professionally. Then I shrugged, went into the bedroom, picked up Gunter Hoenig's journals, and carried them back into the living room. Who needed to relax?

For the next few hours, I sat on the sofa reading and re-reading various journal entries, still puzzled by Gunter's ongoing guilt over Joyce Bollinger's death. If his writings were accurate, he had tried to save her, so how could he consider her death his fault? His constant references to her pale blue eyes made me almost believe that he had half-fallen in love with her, which was a ridiculous theory, given the condition she would have been in at the time. But Gunter had been a young man. He had spent most of his war years stuffed into the hull of a submarine with nothing but other men for company, only to eventually wind up in a prison camp surrounded yet again by nothing but men. Joyce Bollinger was quite possibly the first woman he'd seen in years, and from what I'd heard, she had been extraordinarily beautiful, maybe even beautiful enough to impress a young man so deeply that he never forgot her or her children.

Ah, how different men must have been in those days.

As I went through the journals this time, instead of trying to keep them in some semblance of order I set aside the entries relating directly to the Ernst case, making a series of neat piles on my new cactus wood coffee table.

1945:

I will always remember those pale eyes, their pleas to me.

1950:

But I guess I will never see Josef again. Like me, he probably abandoned Das Kapitan.

1978:

Kapitan still lives. This can not be allowed.

I stared at the pages, thinking. Then I got up and paced for a while. Something…

When I sat back down and went through the pages I'd selected again, an idea that had only been half-formed finally coalesced.

Could Gunter Hoenig still be alive?

Was it possible that he hadn't, after all, died in that Canadian car crash?

I snatched up the phone again and called Jimmy's direct line. “Look, I know you're trying to finish up loose ends, but could you please do me a favor?”

A sigh. “What is it now?”

“I want you to follow up on that Canadian car crash which supposedly killed Gunter and his wife.”

“
Supposedly
?”

“Trust me. Something's not copacetic there.” As soon as he agreed, I hung up before he could change his mind.

Things were becoming clearer. If Gunter Hoenig was still alive, he would be in his eighties, but as I had already seen with Tommy Bollinger, old didn't necessarily mean helpless. Still, if Gunter had killed Ernst, why would he feel the need to kill Fay Harris? And Harry Caulfield? I thought about it for a while, then came up with an answer. Fay, who had hoarded all her unused notes from
Escape Across the Desert
, might have reached the same conclusion I'd just reached—that Gunter was alive and living in the Phoenix area. If so, she would have recognized that she was sitting on a story which might rival the Pulitzer-nominated piece she'd written on human trafficking. As for Harry, even into his eighties he maintained a cop's mind and heart. If he had begun to suspect that Gunter was still around and might have murdered Das Kapitan, he would contact the authorities. Unless someone stopped him.

Granted, in his journals Gunter came across as a gentle man, especially given his romantic writings about his golden-haired wife, his joy in his son and grandchildren, and his cute-but-awful drawings of animals. But when driven to extremes, even gentle men could do cruel things. If Gunter had driven the speed boat which almost killed Erik Ernst, what else might he have done?