by Paul W Papa
“Can I help you?” the man asked.
“Possibly,” Mayer said. “I was hoping to speak with Vera Krupp.”
“Mrs. Krupp is not available right now. She’s . . .”
“May I help you?” another voice came from behind. It belonged to a dusty blonde dish in calf-length pants and a light blue gingham blouse. Horn-rimmed glasses rested on her petite nose and a scarf was wrapped smartly around her neck. She held a stenographer’s pad tight against her chest.
“I’ll take it from here, Buster,” she said. “You may go.”
The man nodded and left.
“How may I help you, Mister . . .?” She let the word trail off.
“Mayer. P. M. Mayer. I was hoping to speak with Vera Krupp. I’m guessing you are not her.”
The woman stood her ground, acting as a slender, but sturdy wall between Mayer and the house. She was polite, but firm. “I’m Peg Westburg, Mrs. Krupp’s personal secretary. What is this in regard to, Mr. Mayer?”
“Oh, I think you know the answer to that question.”
“Mrs. Krupp has already spoken to the authorities. She has said all she has to say. You may please leave.”
“And what about her housekeeper?”
“Excuse me?”
“Her housekeeper. The one that Hawthorne and Pierce also use. Has she said all she has to say?”
If Peg Westburg was flustered by the comment, she didn’t show it. “I’m sure she has as well,” she said.
“So the sheriff’s deputies spoke with her?”
“Perhaps you should take that up with the sheriff, Mr. Mayer.”
But before Mayer could answer, a tall horse supporting a brown-haired, hazel-eyed rider clopped around from the back of the house.
Six
“TAKE WHAT UP with the sheriff?” the woman on the horse asked. She was dressed in the same white Western-style shirt and hat Mayer had seen earlier. Only now he could see her features. They were round and smooth, with pillow cheeks and a feminine chin. Her lips were the exact shape lips ought to be and her hazel eyes kind. Movie star looks. Fitting, because that’s what Vera Krupp once was—a movie star, in Germany anyway. And while that life was now many years in her past, she still seemed to carry the spark that had, at one time, made her a starlet.
“Vera Krupp?” Mayer asked.
“I explained to Mr. Mayer that you were unavailable,” her secretary offered, probably wanting to show she was, indeed, fulfilling her duties as gatekeeper.
“It’s all right,” Vera said with a light German accent as she slipped easily from the saddle. Her mount was a tall chestnut stallion with dark socks and a distinct white patch on its muzzle, a measure of rope looped over the saddle’s horn.
Vera was much smaller off the horse, but still a respectable height. Somewhere around five foot five, Mayer guessed, a woman who shined as much in her Western garb as she did in glad rags and pearls. She flipped the reins over the saddle and glided over to Mayer. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Mayer,” she said extending her hand. “How may I help you?”
Mayer took the offering. Her grip was surprisingly firm, not the delicate thing Mayer had expected. The hand was soft though calloused. This wasn’t the grip of a movie star, but of a rancher, a woman who worked with her hands for a living. Mayer was impressed.
It was also the hand of a deputy sheriff, another thing Mayer hadn’t expected. Pinned to her shirt over her left breast was a six-point gold star, each point softened by a small circle. The badge carried the imprint of the Boulder Dam, surrounding which were the words. “Vera Krupp Special Deputy Sheriff, Clark Co. Nevada.” Accompanying the badge, a chrome-plated six-shooter with a pearl handle hung from a holster on her right hip, much too high to be of any use. It seemed to Mayer that the pistol was more for show than function. In fact, he wondered if it was even loaded. Krupp’s current choice of duds also caught Mayer’s attention. In his opinion, white hardly seemed the color one would wear on a working ranch. It made him wonder for whom the show was meant.
“I was hoping to speak with you about the unfortunate incident across the way there,” Mayer said.
“If you mean the death of R. J. Hawthorne,” Vera offered, “I wouldn’t call it unfortunate.”
“Then you don’t find sorrow in his demise?”
“Should I?” Vera asked casually. She walked over to the fence and wrapped the reins around the top post. “Tell me, Mr. Mayer, do you ride?”
“Horses?” he asked.
“What else?” Vera countered.
Though he’d grown up in the West, Las Vegas specifically, Mayer had never been on a horse—that is, if you didn’t count the coin-operated kind outside the Safeway on Second Street.
“Sure,” he lied. “Why do you ask?”
Vera turned to her secretary. “Peg, have Buster bring Jasmine around the front. Mr. Mayer and I are going for a little ride.”
“Yes, Mrs. Krupp.”
Mayer thought about all the times he’d been warned of the consequences of straying from the truth. He was about to suffer one of those now.
“I’m not really dressed the part,” Mayer said, holding his suit coat open.
“I guess you aren’t at that,” Vera said. “Perhaps another time.” She unstrapped the reins and headed toward the house, her horse in tow. Peg walked with her.
He hadn’t fooled her. But he did need to speak with her.
“I still have questions,” Mayer said. “Like how your name got on a suicide note?”
That stopped Vera Krupp in her tracks. She handed the reins to her secretary and motioned for her to continue on ahead, then she turned to Mayer. “Walk with me,” she said.
Mayer did as told.
“This is a working ranch, Mr. Mayer,” Vera continued. “Did you know that?”
“I did not,” Mayer admitted.
She opened the gate to a log fence and motioned for Mayer to enter. She chuckled when Mayer placed his hand out, preferring she go first. “We don’t stand on ceremony here, Mr. Mayer.”
Mayer nodded, then walked in. After he entered, Vera closed the gate behind them, hooking the wire loop over the top of a shorter post, making it impossible for animals void of opposable thumbs to free themselves.
“I purchased the ranch from Chester Lauck. I’m told he was a radio personality.”
“He was,” Mayer confirmed. “Lum and Abner, they were called. Ran the Jot ’em Down store on their show.”
Vera gave a cursory smile and kept walking. “He leased it for four years from William George who had plans for a chinchilla farm. At least that’s what I’m told. It was Mr. George who built the original home, the foreman’s house Buster lives in, and the shed for his chinchillas. He also expanded the orchard. Mr. Lauck eventually purchased the ranch from Mr. George and named it Bar Nothing Ranch,” she said, then added, “a name I quickly changed.”
They walked across what passed for a pasture, but was really just the desert, heading for a herd of cattle. Vera kept up her history lesson.
“It was Mr. Lauck who added the sandstone building that is now my home.”
“You and your husband, you mean.”
Vera stopped and looked purposefully at Mayer. “No,” she said. “I said it correctly.”
“So your husband doesn’t live here?”
It was an unnecessary jab, but Mayer took it all the same. Mayer knew quite a bit about Vera Krupp and her husband, Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach. He had become somewhat of an authority on all things German after his mother and father disappeared in Germany. Mayer’s parents were both experts in the paranormal and the occult. Something the United States government found handy when they started battling Hitler—a man obsessed with the occult. It was that work which likely cost the pair their lives and Mayer his childhood.
Vera’s husband was the son of Bertha Krupp, the heiress to the Krupp munitions dynasty. Alfried took over the business from his ailing father, Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, shortly after the
outbreak of the Second World War. In 1945, Hitler changed the inheritance law, essentially taking the business away from Alfried’s mother and giving it to her son. Mayer didn’t have a lot of rules, but one of them was definitely to never trust a man who double-crossed his own mother.
If providing a dictator bent on world domination with the weaponry to do so and double-crossing his own mother wasn’t enough, Alfried took every opportunity to make as much money off the war as he could. He used concentration camp slave labor, seized property in every country Hitler conquered, and sent people to the gas chamber if they didn’t play along. After the war, he was tried and convicted of war crimes at Nürnberg and sentenced to twelve years in prison, but it didn’t stick. The U.S. high commissioner, a man named John J. McCoy, granted Alfried amnesty in 1950 and restored all his holdings. The only caveat was that he isn’t allowed on American soil. That restriction didn’t hold for his wife.
Vera sat on the edge of a watering trough as several small brown calves with white heads and stomachs ran over to her, acting more like dogs than cattle. Her face lit up as they approached. “These are my calves,” she said proudly, wrapping her arms around one of their necks. “I’ve crossed white-faced Herefords with Brahmas to create a breed more suited to the desert environment.”
“Fascinating,” Mayer said, just as the shadow of a bird crossed over him. It was a large shadow, much larger than any bird should be able to make. He resisted the temptation to duck, then looked up to the sky.
A hawk was circling. Mayer thought it a red-tailed hawk, but couldn’t really tell. He remembered the bird from a field trip in Mr. Tyndall’s biology class, how it floated on the air for hours at a time. It made him wonder what it would be like to be a hawk. With no real predators to speak of, the bird could catch the wind, like a surfer a wave, wings spread outward, lazily following the current as it pleased. Not a care in the world.
In reality, it was the only bird he remembered from the class, so every time he saw a creature soaring high above, floating on the air, its wings stretched wide, he simply assumed it was a red-tailed hawk. Who was going to correct him?
This particular hawk, assuming it was one, seemed to be especially interested in what was happening directly below—the very area where he and Vera currently stood. Its circles were tight and specific, and it was either looking at them, or honing in on prey. And just as it circled around yet again, Mayer swore he could see two bright red dots where the bird’s eyes should be. He pulled his cheaters down and squinted in the sun, just as the bird turned and flew away.
“Let’s not let’s pretend, Mr. Mayer. Why don’t you tell me why you’re really here?”
Mayer turned his attention back to Vera, then tapped his own chest above his left suit pocket.
Vera looked down at her badge. “Oh that,” she said. “Had some trouble here on the ranch one time. Takes too long for the sheriff to get here, so I asked Butch to deputize me. He obliged.”
The Butch Vera spoke of was W. E. “Butch” Leypoldt, who took over the position of Sheriff from Glen Jones, the founder of the Sheriff’s Posse, the Aero Squadron, and protector of the most famous sex factory in Las Vegas—Roxie’s Resort. That was, until the FBI raided the place and Greenspun exposed Jones’ connections to the establishment, causing him to lose the office he’d held for twelve years, coming in dead last of the five candidates that ran for sheriff that year.
“Your housekeeper,” Mayer said, “she also worked for Hawthorne?”
Vera focused her hazel eyes on Mayer, taking an account of the man. “I’d bet you already know the answer to that question, Mr. Mayer, but since you seem to need a confirmation, yes, she did.”
“For a man you didn’t particularly care for? Even hated?”
“Hate is a very strong word, Mr. Mayer. I didn’t hate R. J. Hawthorne. I just didn’t care for the business he was in or his plans for the land.”
“Yet it’s perfectly all right for you to run a business here.”
Vera grew stern. “This ranch has occupied this soil in one form or another since 1834, when it was a way station to those traveling along the Spanish Trail. We have not desecrated the land around us and have left the area mostly as it was originally. In fact, the buildings which made up that early campsite still exist to this day, more than a hundred years later. And as far as my housekeeper goes, who am I to deprive her of work? She must come out here anyway. It’s convenient for both of us.”
“I guess it is at that,” Mayer added. “Do you mind if I speak with her?”
“I’m afraid she’s not here today.”
“When will she be here?”
“Tomorrow, but she’s already spoken to the sheriff. I doubt she’ll have anything different to tell you, Mr. Mayer.”
“All the same. I’d like to try.”
Vera stood. “You haven’t asked the question you really came here for, have you?”
“I guess I haven’t at that,” Mayer admitted.
“Well, go ahead then.”
“What would make a man who considered you an impediment to his progress, a man you met in court on more than one occasion, give you his share of the project just before committing suicide?”
“I’m sure I don’t know.”
“Awful convenient isn’t it?”
“What is it you want to hear, Mr. Mayer? That Mr. Hawthorne and I had an illicit affair? That I allowed him into my boudoir so I could beguile him into signing over his portion and then rid myself of him by encouraging suicide? I assure you, Mr. Mayer, I am not eine Hexe?”
Mayer didn’t answer.
“I have no more idea why the man named me on that note than I do why he would commit suicide in the first place.”
She paused and a strange melancholy seemed to overtake her. She ran her fingers, absentmindedly, over the head and ears of the calf next to her. Mayer let her have the moment, wondering what the thought was and where it had taken her. After a bit, she came back and turned her attention to Mayer.
“Come back tomorrow, Mr. Mayer,” she said, as she moved to the gate. “If Bessa agrees, then you may speak with her.”
Mayer tipped his hat, thanked Vera, and took his cue to leave. As he made his way to his Hornet, he chanced one last glance up toward the sky. The hawk had returned.
Seven
WHEN MAYER GOT to the end of the dirt road, he pulled to the side, climbed out of his car, and glanced skyward. The hawk was still there, floating high above him. He thought for a moment that maybe it wasn’t a hawk after all. Perhaps it was a vulture and Mayer was dead but didn’t know it. Or maybe it was an eagle, or even an osprey. Though the birds weren’t common, they did at times make the area their home, and any of the three would be larger than a hawk. And while that might account for the size of the thing, it didn’t explain the glowing red eyes.
Mayer slipped back into his Hornet and pointed it toward town. When he got there, he headed north on highway 91, then took a right onto Fremont Street before heading to the coroner’s office. He asked to see the body of R. J. Hawthorne and was led to the morgue by a twenty-something assistant in a long white coat. It was an antiseptic place full of freezer-style doors that open to compartments that housed the dead, laid out on metal slabs, tags clinging to toes. It was not a place unknown to Mayer.
The assistant opened the door to Hawthorne’s little apartment and slid out the tray which bore his body.
“Crazy story this one,” the assistant said.
“Oh? How’s that?”
“Japser had the world by the tail. Then he goes and offs himself. For what?”
“You tell me?”
The assistant was taken aback. “How should I know?” he said. “If you ask me, it’s probably some dame. It’s always a dame.”
“That what you think?”
“Sure. Why wouldn’t it be?” he said with the conviction of a much older man.
“Could’ve been a bread shortage,” Mayer offered.
“Naw, this bird
had dough coming out his ears. My money’s on a dame. Want to see him?”
“If you don’t mind,” Mayer said.
“Get ready,” the assistant said. “This one’ll creep you out.”
He pulled the starch white sheet from Hawthorne’s head, revealing a distorted face frozen in fear—his eyes wide and his mouth agape.
“Can you imagine?” the assistant asked. “Dyin’ with your mug pasted like that?” he shivered visibly.
The assistant had a point. What would make a man bent on killing himself twist his face like that? He’d seen the aftereffects of several men, and some women, who’d offed themselves. But never once had he seen fear on their faces. Sadness, yes. Even a quiet resignation of their fate, but never fear. Not like this anyway. This was the face of a man seeing something he didn’t want to see, experiencing something he didn’t want to experience. Mayer was becoming more and more convinced that Pierce was right—Hawthorne didn’t kill himself.
After the assistant slid the body back into its cubby, Mayer thanked the man, slipped him two bits, then headed back to his Hornet. He made his way onto San Francisco Street, took a left onto Talbot, then a right onto Canosa. He pulled into the driveway of the shotgun house four doors down on the right and got out of his car.
He threw on his lid, brushed the desert dust off his suit, and bounced up the stairs, but before he could ring the bell, the door opened. On the other side of the screen was Theodosia Petulengro, an olive-skinned Romanian with thick, brown eyebrows resting above inkwell eyes and prominent lashes. She was dressed in a patterned, flowing circle skirt and a peasant blouse with short, ruffly sleeves that was pulled dangerously low—enough to show off a pair of ample breasts. A gold strand laced around her neck. Her black hair was covered with a bright red scarf; gold beads and medallions dripped from the top and rested upon her forehead. A streak of white hair peeked out from the left side.
