Desert Run (30 page)

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 ever 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 amount 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.”

And if I hadn't managed to grab the bottom rung of that rusted ladder, I'd be dead, too. I wondered who Warren would have mourned for most, me or Lindsey. Not being known for my tact, I said so.

He paled. “How can you say that? You know how I feel about you. Damn it, Lena, I fell in love with you the second you strode into that conference room and started telling me how you could make my film set more secure. You were so self-sufficient, so in control, so beautiful. That's a combination no man in his right mind could ignore.” He tried for a smile. “And then I saw your 1945 Jeep.”

I'd been impressed by him, too, but to paraphrase a popular Hollywood movie, handsome is as handsome does. “I'm not a big believer in love at first sight. Lust, maybe, but not love.”

He surprised me again. He leaned forward and caressed my cheek. “Poor Lena. To live with so little trust.”

Since the explanation for that would have taken several hours, I remained silent.

He tried a smile. “I'm not saying I don't feel lust for you, because you know I do. And it's about time we did something about that instead of just drooling at each other like we have been. But lust is the very least of it. I want you to come back to Los Angeles with me, to…”

It was my turn to stop him. “Before you go any further with this, Warren, you need to know that I ran a check on you. I know all about
Here Comes Crystal
and the rest of the porno crap. And I know that for a while, you were the lead suspect in the murderer of your girlfriend Crystal Chandler.”

His mouth dropped. “You ran a check on
me
? When?”

“I asked Jimmy to do it the day after I almost drowned in the canal.”

“But the next morning, when we were having breakfast, I explained…”

“Yeah, you said you dropped the coffee.”

He stared at me, more than a hint of outrage in his eyes. “You saw the burns on my leg.”

“Easy enough to fake. Remember, I saw them the next day, when you would have had time to dump any cup of coffee on yourself. Warren, I'm a detective. An ex-cop. You can't expect me to not to be suspicious.”

“Of
everyone
?”

“Yes.”

“What would be my motive for killing you?”

“I haven't figured that out yet.”

Any self-respecting man would have gotten up and walked away then, but he didn't. He just sat there studying me as the breeze chased a tumbleweed across the set. I would have felt better if he'd gotten angry again, but he only looked hurt. Finally he sighed and spread his hands in defeat. “I don't know what else I can say. Just that I…” He closed his eyes for a second, then opened them again. They were the exact same color as the sky. “Just that I love you.”

There was the “L” word again. He sure knew how to get to me. But I kept the conversation on track. “Tell me about Crystal Chandler.” I knew I was tempting him to walk away, but I didn't care. If he did, I wouldn't have to make a decision about him or worry about moving to L.A. to work on some television show. I could just stay here in Scottsdale and watch Desert Investigations go bankrupt.

“You already know what there is to know. Crystal was strangled to death at my house, and her killer was never caught.”

“That's right. And you had an air-tight alibi.”

He looked off at one of the buttes, where a dust devil was swirling up the slope. A hiker was trying to scurry out of its way. “You could say so, since I was in bed with three other women at the time.”

“
Three?
”

When his eyes met mine again, they showed no emotion. “Yeah, it's an old story. Young man makes good, young man goes bad in the adult film industry, young man gets clean and sober and repents of his evil ways. You weren't raised in Hollywood so you don't know how it is. There's so much pressure to succeed, but no rule book on how to do it. So I did what a lot of Hollywood brats do and took the easy route by following in my father's footsteps. He'd done well, so why couldn't I? Hell, Dad even helped me get started in the business. He got the finances together for my first project and loaned me a couple of his actors. Crystal was one of them. When the movie was a hit, he was
proud
of me, Lena! I can't stress enough how different it is out there. So different that it didn't occur to me—to him—that there was a huge price to be paid. Anyway, I was incapable of thinking anything through to its logical conclusion in those days. Too many chemicals. What his excuse is, I'll never know. But I've turned away from all that. I've paid the price and made peace with myself and the things I've done. I hope you can accept that.”

I noticed he didn't come right out and deny killing Crystal Chandler, so I asked. “Did you murder her?”

A bitter laugh. “The women I was with that night—one of them was Lindsey—say I didn't. The cops say the same thing.”

Now it was my turn to study the dust devil. It had caught up with the hiker, who with cries of disgust was batting sand away from his face. I knew just how he felt. “You know, Warren, I read a big batch of material about that night, and no one named Lindsey Reynolds was ever mentioned.”

“Her name was May Morning then.”

“That…that's an odd name. Even for an actress.”

“Not for an adult film actress.”

After that revelation, all I could say was, “Oh.”

Life is so damned complicated. We all want to do the right thing and love the right people, but it never seems to work out for some of us. Instead, we wobble along like drunken monkeys, bouncing from one mistake to the other. After a childhood filled with beatings and rapes, I'd struggled to make a decent life for myself and had—I thought—succeeded. But I couldn't seem to shake my attraction to troubled men. Now I'd found the great-granddaddy of them all. As I looked at Warren, sitting there looking so irresistible in the Arizona sunlight, I realized that he still hadn't answered my question.

“Warren, did you kill Crystal Chandler?”

He was silent for a moment, watching the dust devil as it dissipated into little more than a dirty wind. Just as I was about to ask my question again, he faced me. There were lines of pain around his mouth but what looked to be truth in his eyes.

“Did I kill Crystal? Honey, I've been asking myself that question for years. You see, I can't remember.”

***

When I pulled the Jeep into the parking lot at Desert Investigations, I could see Esther's car and the ruffled edge of some Persian Pink thing peeking out of a Neiman Marcus bag in the back seat, so I bypassed the office and went straight upstairs to my apartment. I didn't feel like talking to anyone anyway.

Warren and I had left things unfinished. After he'd aired what seemed like enough dirty laundry for a hundred Hollywood bios, I'd told him I needed time to think. He said he understood. But he was wrong. The real reason I couldn't make a commitment to him or anyone was that I wasn't ready to share my nightmares.