Desert Run (8 page)

He stared out the trailer's tiny window for a moment, but I knew he was really looking sixty years back. “Okay, the kid liked to fight. He even went after his father once and broke the bastard's nose. I never blamed him for that. Edward Bollinger drank
real
heavy—today he'd be called an alcoholic—and he was pretty fast with his fists when he got drunk. So every time something bad happened around the place, he beat the snot out of Chess just on principle. You ask me, it's no wonder the kid went bad. And he did go bad, make no mistake about that. Turned out more vicious than his daddy.”

A sordid tale, but not unusual. I wondered aloud what had happened to Chess after he'd dropped off the
Scottsdale Journal'
s radar.

“No clue,” Harry said, his voice deepening with regret. “Maybe I should have kept tabs on him, but I didn't. Too depressing.”

Harry still believed someone other than Chess killed the Bollingers. I wondered if he was simply in deep denial, a condition which sometimes happened to detectives when they got too close to a case. Against all proof to the contrary, they'd become convinced that a suspect was innocent, and would start ignoring proof to the contrary. Sometimes their denial got them killed.

Unaware of my line of thinking, Harry continued. “I'm not saying that at some point Chess might not have beat somebody 'til they died and then didn't get caught, but I'm telling you he didn't murder his family. Certainly not his mother or sister. That little girl…Chess was crazy about her. You shoulda heard him carry on when I drove him out to her grave.”

Yeah. Deep denial. “That was a kind thing to do.”

He shrugged. “The family was already buried when we caught up with him, and I felt it was kind of a shame that he never got to say goodbye. So, yeah, I drove him out to the cemetery. The kid totally fell apart.” He paused, then added, “Not that a bucket of tears prove anything.”

At least Harry realized that some of the worst murderers were the biggest criers at their victims' funerals. “If Chess didn't kill his family, who do you think did? One of the Germans?”

Harry started to answer, but Frank Oberle, who all this while had been sitting quietly if impatiently, jumped in. “Not the Germans! Say what you will about them boys, they wasn't dumb enough to get themselves mixed up in that kind of trouble. As soon as they crawled out of that tunnel, they put as much distance as possible between themselves and Camp Papago. 'Sides, none of them, other than Ernst, was a stone cold killer. When I found out we was both going to be in the same place at the same time again, I just about chucked up my Raisin Bran. Why, I almost backed outta the movie! Thank God I was able to control myself, 'cause that check the film folks is givin' me will buy an awful lot of Twilight Specials down at Denny's.”

After sixty years, Oberle still hated Ernst. How many people who'd been around Camp Papago in those days felt the same way about him? As soon as the question surfaced, I remembered how Ernst had died: just like the Bollingers—gagged and beaten to death in his kitchen. Could he have been killed by someone who had loved them and all these years had nursed thoughts of revenge? I floated my unlikely theory to Harry. A retired deputy, he would have seen his share of revenge killings over the years.

Harry rubbed his bad leg for a moment, then leaned back in the recliner. “The psychology's wrong. From what Frank here has told me about Ernst—and he never shuts up about him—Ernst always ordered other people to do his dirty work, like he did with that new prisoner, Werner Dreschler.”

The
Scottsdale Journal
article had gone into great length about the Dreschler torture killing, but I was surprised that Harry had heard about it. “You knew about Dreschler?”

“Everybody in Arizona knew about the Werner Dreschler case. Prison camps, Nazis, torture and murder? If it happened today, it'd be a prime time TV movie before Dreschler was buried. If you ask me…”

Oberle interrupted again. “Yeah, talk about your entertainment value. Speaking of, I was surprised when I found out that the Dreschler thing wasn't going to be part of the documentary, 'specially since there was a whole chapter about it in that reporter's book. Say, come to think of it, you're working for that director guy, too. Did you ever ask him why he isn't doing something on poor old Werner?”

I shook my head. “I just found out about him, but I'll ask Warren next time I see him.”

“A waste of time, if you ask me,” Harry said. “The Germans saw him as a spy, and they did what service people always do to spies. Just a little more so.” Then, turning to Oberle, he said, “You know, old son, I'm beginning to come around to your way of thinking. Maybe Ernst did order those two crewmen of his to kill the Bollingers. It sure sounds like him.”

Oberle shook his head furiously. “But not like
them
! I knew both Gunter and Josef, and they was real good guys, even if they was German. Especially Josef. That big kid had all them rabbits around camp eatin' outta his hand! Nah, Josef wouldn't hurt a fly. And his buddy Gunter, all that ol' boy wanted to do was draw pictures. I never could figure out how either of them wound up on a U-boat. They shoulda been home raisin' chickens or something.”

“Conscripted,” Harry broke in. “Toward the end of the war, the Germans were grabbing little kids off the street and sending them to fight.”

Oberle waved his hand. “Whatever. But neither of those boys would murder anybody, not even under orders from their slimy Kapitan. Pah! Talk about your worst of the worst. If there was any justice in the world, somebody woulda killed Ernst a long time ago.”

Harry gave his friend a pirate smile. “Did you try, Frank? I hear somebody nearly did him in when he was still living back East, too. Sure you didn't fly out there for a little vacation?”

Oberle snorted. “Me in Connecticut? Too cold. 'Sides, if that'd been me, Ernst would a been missing a head, not his legs. But what the hell. He was pure evil. It's nice to know that in the end he died slow. Hope he was conscious all the way to his last breath.”

So much for age mellowing a person. This case had already taught me that regardless of their age, people were people. Harry and Oberle were not at all unusual in that they were both still consumed by the same loves and hates as they had been sixty years earlier. Harry grieved for the Bollingers; Oberle for Werner Dreschler; Ernst's neighbor for the husband and uncles lost in World War II. The common stereotype of addled seniors shuffling around with nothing on their minds but their cats and Social Security checks was a deeply flawed one.

“Mr. Oberle, what exactly did you mean when you called Ernst pure evil?” Remembering the documentaries I'd seen about the Nazi death camps, I had other candidates for the title.

His answer echoed my own thoughts. “As some of them politicians say today, I musta mis-spoke myself. Hitler was sure no saint and neither was Eichmann or Dr. Mengele with his creepy human experiments. But if Das Kapitan woulda had the same power, he'd a pulled the same shit, pardon my French. I had me a cousin in the Navy, stationed back East, and he kept an eye on Ernst for me. After the war and we shipped ol' Ernst back to the pit of Hell he'd come from, he started cozying up to the U.S. officials, tryin' to get some work. Couple a years later, they brought him over here to help the Navy with some submarine stuff. That didn't work out all too well, 'cause the way I heard it, he started treating them Navy engineers like he treated his U-boat crew. Us Americans don't go for that.

“Anyway, the Navy gave old Ernst his walking papers, but by then he was a U.S. citizen, so they couldn't forcibly ship his Nazi ass back to Deuschland Über Alles. He got hired by one of those fancy-dancy yacht-designing firms in Connecticut, and sure as shootin', history started repeatin' itself. Ernst bullied everybody so bad they was going to let him go when he had his little boating ‘accident.'” Oberle gave a satisfied snort. “That's when the sonofabitch decided to move here, to leave his co-workers at the boatyard safely behind.”

Harry winced as he crossed his arthritic leg. “Still a weird thing for an old sea dog to do, if you ask me. Move to the desert. Why not back to Germany?”

Oberle had a quick answer. “Because Ernst was mean, and meanness don't necessarily translate to brave. He wasn't exactly the Man of the Hour in Germany, remember. He got too many of his crew killed, and I'm bettin' there was plenty a grudges there. And then he blew it in Connecticut. So if both those places was gettin' too hot for him, why not Arizona? We treated them Germans pretty good while they was Uncle Sam's guests and a lot of them came back for visits. A couple a them even moved out here. Besides, I hear those Deuschland winters are real bearcats, especially when you're missing your legs. Cold hurts a stump something awful. I should know.” Here he shocked me by rolling up his pants leg, revealing an artificial leg attached a couple of inches below the knee. “If there was any justice in this crappy world…”

“More tea?” Before I could answer, Harry stood up, grabbed our half-full glasses and limped into the kitchen with them. I followed, effectively ending Oberle's tirade.

“Sorry about that,” Harry said, filling the glasses to the brim. “Frank lost two brothers in the war, both Navy, and I think in his mind Ernst himself torpedoed them out of the water. The only reason Frank didn't join the Navy himself was because of some inner ear thing he has, makes him seasick as hell. That's how he wound up in the Army. They transferred him to Camp Papago after he was wounded in North Africa.”

There were all kinds of wounds. The ones you could see, and the ones inside. Frank Oberle truly hated Erik Ernst. And knew where he lived.

Once Harry and I resettled ourselves, I asked him if there was anything more he could tell me about the Bollinger murders that never made the papers.

He shifted around in the recliner, trying to find a more comfortable position. “I always believed we should have followed up on reports of thefts out there in the sticks around that time, but once the sheriff fingered Chess…” His unpatched eye unfocused for a moment, tracking the years, the pain. “Some farmhouses were broken into, and there'd been a lot of vandalizing in town. And don't forget Edward Bollinger's convertible. The car went missing the day of the murders. Edward kept it out back in the barn so his precious cream puff wouldn't get rained on. In those days, half the people in town kept their keys in the ignition, which would have made it easy to steal, and I suppose Edward did, too. But maybe I'm wrong. Why kill a whole family just for a car?”

I knew enough about World War II to find something odd about Harry's story. “Wasn't an Oldsmobile convertible an unusual car for a farmer to be driving around in? Especially since the government instituted gas rationing during the war, except for farm and defense-related vehicles. I would have thought that Edward Bollinger would have that car up on cement blocks for the duration, not sitting there with a tank of gas.”

The pirate smile again. “Give the lady an A in American History! Sure, Edward had a pickup and a tractor, all the usual farm stuff, but he was a heavy drinker and skirt-chaser, too, so I imagine that convertible helped with the ladies. I'm betting he saved a little extra gas for it.”

“Was the car ever recovered?”

“Nope. My best guess is that it wound up in Mexico.”

“Even back then?” I knew that running stolen cars across the border was big business now, but in 1944?

Both men laughed, but Harry, the ex-cop, was the one who answered. “Pretty Miss Lena, thieves have been smuggling cars across the border ever since cars were invented. Mexicans like a nice, shiny ride as much as the rest of us. Who knows? Maybe as we speak that old convertible is sitting in some papacito's shed right now or is pulling taxi duty down in Nogales.”

Or rusting away in an Arizona arroyo.

Chapter Eight

7:10 p.m. December 25, 1944

Gunter Hoenig stood in the small farmhouse kitchen, momentarily paralyzed by the horror of the scene. The near-decapitated man by the barn had been bad enough, but this abattoir! In front of him were a woman and three children sitting in chairs, arms tied behind their backs, beaten so badly they hardly appeared human.

What kind of beast would do such a thing?

“Do not step in any blood,” Kapitan Ernst warned, while he shoveled food into a sack he had made from tied-up blankets. “We must leave no footprints.”

Gunter hardly heard him. Out of a pity he could no longer control, he stepped forward and touched the cheek of the youngest child, a boy of around eight. To his shock, the cheek was still warm. Praying to a god who had seemed absent these past few years, he dropped his hand to the boy's neck, feeling for the carotid artery. No, the poor child was dead.

Ignoring Ernst's shouted orders, Gunter avoided the pools of blood as he bent over the other bodies, hoping for signs of life. The other boy, around ten, was dead. The little girl, also. The woman, oh, she had once been so beautiful, with hair of flame.

“Mein Gott!
” A flutter underneath his fingers, softer than a butterfly's wing against a cloud, but the woman still lived.

Gunter looked around. Where did these people keep their telephone? His own situation—the escape from Camp Papago—no longer mattered. He would call the operator, and in his rough prison camp English, relate what had happened here. The operator would send help…

“Schweinehunt!”

A blow to the side of his head stunned him for a moment and he only just ducked in time to avoid another closed-fist slap from Kapitan Ernst, whose face was almost as red as the blood in the kitchen. “Pig dog! Quit mooning over that American whore and help us load supplies into these blankets!”

“But Kapitan, she breathes! We must summon a doctor immediately!” Ignoring an order for the first time since the beginning of the war, Gunter grabbed a dish towel from the sink and pressed it to the woman's head. If he could only stop the bleeding…

Another blow from Ernst, this time so strong that Gunter almost fell. “Idiot! She is not your concern.”

Josef, who had been weeping in the corner, finally found his voice. “Kapitan, Gunter is right. We have no quarrel with civilians. It is our duty to help these people, for decency's sake.”

Gunter did not think it was possible, but Kapitan's face grew even redder. “Your only duty is to follow me, you Mama's milksops! What do Bavarian farm boys know of war?” He picked up the bloodied tire iron lying on the floor. “Ah. We can use this! You, Josef, go into the bedroom and bring us many blankets! The nights here are too cold.”

Like an automaton, Josef—his eyes still glassy with shock—left the kitchen.

Ignoring Das Kapitan's orders, Gunter started in search of a telephone, but was brought up short by a whisper. He looked behind him to find that the woman had opened her eyes—they were such a pale blue that looking into them was like falling into the sky—and was trying to speak. His heart nearly torn in two from grief, he placed a gentle hand on her matted hair, leaned over and brought his ear to her ruined lips. “What, Frau?”

The woman's moan turned into a whisper.

“Tommy…why?”

Before Gunter could move to shield her, Das Kapitan brought the tire iron down and silenced her forever.