Desert Run

by Betty Webb

  Warren didn’t notice my discomfort. “Angel flew in this morning…” The little girls laughed so hard he had to start again. “Angel flew in by airplane this morning and was kind enough to stop by the set.”

  The twins cheered.

  He blew them a kiss and continued. “She’s starting a fashion line with some Scottsdale designer, and to make a long story short, I told her all about you, Lena. She’s dying to pump you for information.”

  What information could a famous movie star possibly need from me? “I’ll be glad to answer, if I can. But I need to warn you that I don’t know anything about fashion.” Probably an unnecessary warning, because anyone could tell that just by looking at me. Clean jeans were my idea of dress-up.

  But Angelique’s smile looked genuine. “Last week I inked a deal on an upcoming NBC crime drama where I play a private investigator who’s set up business with an escaped convict. When I called Warren yesterday to tell him the twins and I were on the way out here, he said you know everything there is to know about being a PI. I was hoping you could give me tips that might help bring some reality to the role.”

  Reality, indeed. The idea of a private investigator setting up shop with an escaped convict was about as realistic as sitting down to dinner with your movie star ex-wife, your twin daughters, and the woman you were currently dating. People certainly did business differently in Hollywood. “For starters, an escaped convict would have trouble getting a private investigator’s license.”

  “That’s what I told the writers, too, but the project has already been green-lighted as written and my partner’s already been cast, so we’re stuck with it, which is another reason I want to at least get the other details right. Do you carry a gun?”

  “Uh…” I fiddled with my napkin.

  Warren beamed. “She sure does! She’s got this big .57 Magnum stashed in her carry-all right now.”

  Although he had said it loudly enough for everyone in the main dining room to hear, I doubted if anyone reacted. After all, this was Arizona and chances were good that at least half the women in the restaurant were packing. Angelique seemed alarmed, but the little girls looked thrilled and I could already guess what they’d ask Santa for Christmas. In the interests of accuracy, I set the record straight. “I think Warren means a .357 Magnum. My own gun’s a revolver, a snub-nosed Colt .38.”

  Warren looked disappointed. “But you’ve used it, right?”

  Yes, I had, but I preferred not to dwell on that aspect of my career. I smiled at Angelique. “In my business, the whole point of carrying a gun is not having to use it. What kind of weapon are they giving you for your sit-com?” I took a sip of water.

  “A .50 caliber Desert Eagle.”

  When I choked, Warren gave me a concerned look. “You okay, Lena?”

  There was no point in telling him that a woman toting a .50 caliber Desert Eagle had recently tried to shoot me, and my memories of that monstrous automatic were not rosy. I took another sip of water. “The Desert Eagle is a nice weapon, but perhaps a little expensive for the average PI. Despite all the PR, we don’t make a lot. Remember those old Sam Spade movies? The poor guy could hardly pay his rent.” I didn’t mention my own looming financial difficulties.

  She frowned. “There’s nothing we can do about the gun, either, because it ties into the name of the show—Desert Eagle. My character’s name is Tiffany Eagle, and she’s half-Cherokee. The show’s set in Santa Fe, which is where the desert part comes in.”

  Dare I tell her that if there were a Cherokee woman to be found in Santa Fe, she would probably have moved there from either Oklahoma or North Carolina? And that a half-Cherokee would probably not have Angelique’s ivory skin, platinum hair and azure eyes? “Perhaps you’d like me to look at that script?” I knew there was little chance she would take me up on my offer.

  She reached down and opened the suitcase-sized Nuovedive handbag nestled next to her Tommy Choos. “What a coincidence. I just happened to bring a copy.”

  I shot Warren a dirty look. While he manufactured an air of injured innocence, Angelique passed the script across the table. I took it and stashed it next to my non-glamorous revolver in my cheap canvas carry-all.

  “Any chance you could have it finished by tomorrow, Lena? The girls and I are returning to L.A. on an early flight, and I’d like to take it back with me. Shooting starts next week, and I told the writers I’d probably have a few suggestions.”

  Warren wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  Silencing a groan, I gave Angel a nod. She beamed back at me. So did the girls. I wondered if they were as smart as their mother.

  ***

  After Warren walked me to the top of the stairs at my apartment, he gave me a kiss that chased away my irritation and woke up my dormant hormones. Then he stroked the hair away from my flushed face. “You know the real reason I invited Angel and the girls to have dinner with us?”

  “Free editing services. Which reminds me. If I’m going to read that script, I’d better get started.” I backed away from him before things got too hot. I wasn’t ready yet.

  But he closed the distance between us and caressed my cheek with the back of his hand. “That was part of it. But I also wanted you to see how well Angel and I get along.”

  I brushed his hand away and began unlocking my door. “And that matters because…?”

  “You can tell a lot about a man from the way he gets along with his ex-wife.”

  “And that matters because…?” I knew I sounded like a broken record, but given the state I was in, there was little I could do about it.

  He turned me to face him and before I could protest, gave me another hot kiss. It could have lasted thirty seconds or thirty minutes, time got away from me. When we finally came up for air, he answered my question with one of his own. “Why do you think, Lena?”

  ***

  I took a cold shower, wrapped myself in a robe, and propped myself up in bed to read Angel’s script. Other than a few technical problems, such as blue-eyed Indians and revolvers that ejected bullets, the script wasn’t too bad. Weirdly enough, I could almost see the high-cheeked Angelique Grey in the role of Tiffany Eagle, although I imagined her with full body makeup, dyed black hair and brown contact lenses. I finished the script around three, and after penciling some final comments on the back, I laid it on my night stand, turned off the light, and tried to sleep.

  It didn’t work. I kept thinking about the dinner with Warren, Angel, Star and Moon. With such an unusual post-marital relationship, how could everyone seem so relaxed? Granted, Angel was an actress and could probably put on a convincing act of bliss while being strapped into the electric chair. But her children were, as they say in Hollywood, civilians. And the uncomplicated happiness in the girls’ eyes appeared genuine.

  An Oscar-winning film director. A movie star. Twin girls. A laughably inept script.

  What the hell was I getting myself into?

  Chapter Ten

  Around eight the next morning I dropped off the marked-up script at the front desk of the Sheraton, where Angel was staying. On my way back to the office, I stopped by the Scottsdale Journal in hopes that my timing would be better than yesterday’s. To my disappointment, Fay Harris was on her way out the door.

  “Sorry, Lena, but today’s a mess. I need to get back down to City Hall and talk to the mayor. The aide she fired last month just filed suit for sexual harassment.”

  I raised my eyebrows. The city’s politics tended to be no more corrupt than the average city of its size, but sexual harassment in the mayor’s office was a new wrinkle. The vision of the prim grandmother—for some reason most of Scottsdale’s recent mayors had been women—copping a feel from some hunky young aide tickled me. “This aide, does he have any proof? Or is it a ‘he said, she said’ thing.”

  Fay chuckled. “More like a ‘she said, she said.’ If you want to know the juicy details, read the Journal tomorrow.”

  As she trotted toward the Journal’s parking lot, I
followed. “I’ll do that. But do you think you have time to talk to me then, maybe meet me for lunch? You promised to tell me something about your suspicions that Erik Ernst was connected to the Bollingers. Off the record, of course.”

  Since the front seat of her Nissan looked every bit as cluttered as it had yesterday, I guessed that she used the car as an on-the-go extension of her office filing cabinet. “Yeah, There’s a lot I can tell you about the old bastard that didn’t make it into my book.” She took a Kleenex out of her purse and wiped away bird droppings from the Nissan’s window. “Something about the Bollinger case doesn’t make sense to me, so I drew a diagram of the area surrounding their farm, and that started me looking at other crimes in the area during the same time period. There were some real surprises, too, so I wrote them up. I wanted to put all my discoveries into the book, but the publisher’s attorney blue-pencilled everything. Same with some of the interviews, because he said some of the quotes bordered on libel. For instance, a source told that me Edward Bollinger had been bragging that…”

  She flicked a look at her watch. “Oh, hell, gotta get down to City Hall before the mayor lawyers up.” Before she drove off, she stuck her head out of the window and made a date to meet me at a nearby restaurant. “Noon tomorrow, at First Watch.”

  It was a date she wouldn’t keep.

  ***

  When I made it back to Desert Investigations, Esther was sitting on Jimmy’s lap, blowing into his ear. They immediately sprang apart, Esther with a guiltier look on her face than the situation called for. Maybe she felt bad about luring my partner away. I hoped so.

  I dumped my carry-all on the desk. “You guys find a house yet?”

  Recovering from her embarrassment, Esther threw me a blinding smile. “We’re in negotiations for one.” She named a subdivision in central Scottsdale known for its Wisconsin-green lawns and rigorous rules. “It isn’t large, only two bedrooms and one bath. The yard’s pretty small, too, but it’s a start. If we make a big enough down payment, the realtor says we could close in three weeks.”

  Had her teeth been whitened? How different Esther now looked from the terrified woman who had escaped from one of Arizona’s most notorious polygamy compounds. I wondered if her daughter Rebecca, whom I had later smuggled out of the same compound, would grow up looking so sleek. But, she was a fresh-faced teenager, not Hollywood royalty. Not that there was anything wrong with that.

  I feigned enthusiasm. “Two bedrooms and a yard! Maybe we can all get together for lunch some time.” When I was a kid, Reverend Giblin used to take me and his other foster children camping in the area, which used to be at the northern boundary of Scottsdale. This was before the bulldozers ripped out the native fauna and replaced the cactus and mesquite with Bermuda grass. Try as I might, I couldn’t see Jimmy living up there amid the yuppies and retirees. “Hey, Jimmy. You looking forward to joining the great American middle class?”

  He wouldn’t meet my eyes, and I noticed that the tribal tattoo on his forehead had darkened, which it tended to do when he blushed. “I guess.”

  I found his own seeming lack of enthusiasm interesting. Jimmy might live in a trailer in the middle of the nearby reservation, but it was a nice trailer with the entire reservation as his back yard. Then again, maybe leaving his prayer lodge behind was what made him sound so subdued. Chances weren’t good that his new homeowner’s association would allow him to build one in his backyard.

  “Boy, a new house in three weeks! Bye-bye reservation, eh? And you start your job at Southwest MicroSystems when?” I sounded so chipper I hated myself.

  “That’s in three weeks, too.” I could barely hear him. “But I wanted to take some time off before I start, to regroup.”

  “A new house and a new job! Fantastic!” Please, someone stop me. “You going to get your tattoo removed, too?” I was kidding but the bereft look on his face told me I’d inadvertently hit the mark. Esther planned to give Jimmy the same kind of make-over she gave her customers in the cosmetics aisle. How long would it take, I wondered, before she talked him out of attending tribal pow-wows? For a brief moment I was tempted to ask her why she didn’t marry a man who was already white and save herself the trouble.

  But a late-arriving wave of common sense kept my mouth shut.

  ***

  After Jimmy and Esther left for lunch, I went to the cupboard and picked up a container of ramen, splashed in some hot water from the tap, then gobbled it down. For health’s sake, I ate an apple. Not exactly a gourmet meal, perhaps, but it did the trick.

  Belly full, I shoved the ramen container out of the way and placed a call to Reverend Giblin. I was gratified to hear that the prison ministry group from his church had already started visiting Tesema and, at his request, had put together a package of clothing and other items to send to his family back in Ethiopia. “We’ll make sure his family is cared for and that he doesn’t feel abandoned,” the Rev finished. “The rest is up to you.”

  With that load off my shoulders, I called Captain Kryzinski at Scottsdale North, who—if his pattern held—would be working through lunch. Old dogs not known for learning new tricks, he picked right up.

  After sharing a few pleasantries, we began to discuss the case. “C’mon, Lena. Don’t tell me you still believe Tesema’s innocent.” From the slurping noise he then made, I figured he was eating his usual lunch of Whopper, super-sized fries, and chocolate shake. A health nut he wasn’t.

  “Tesema didn’t do it, Captain. Trust me. Ernst had more enemies than the mayor has scandals.”

  A laugh. “You’ve heard about the latest, I take it. I’m not saying Ernst was in the running for the Humanitarian of the Year award, but there are too many things tying Tesema to the killing for us to ignore. His lies, his fingerprints…”

  “He lied because he was scared. And since he was over there all the time taking care of the old bastard, his fingerprints mean nothing unless you found them on the bloody club or whatever it was you think he beat Ernst to death with.”

  “No, we haven’t found the murder weapon yet, but….”

  “Of course you haven’t. The real murderer took it away with him.” Or her. I still wasn’t convinced MaryEllen Bollinger was one hundred percent innocent. She carried a grudge against the old man, and those bouncer friends of hers at The Skin Factory seemed loyal. I suspected that if she asked them to kill someone for her, they would comply in a heartbeat.

  “Be that as it may…”

  “I’m telling you, Tesema didn’t do it!” Frustrated, I changed the subject. “Has an attorney been assigned to him yet?”

  Kryzinski rattled off a name I knew about from an earlier case. Gary Bridger had let a perfectly innocent man be convicted for murder, and when his family then appealed to me to prove their son innocent, it had taken less than a week for me to find the evidence that overturned his conviction. “Oh, for Pete’s sake, Captain. Bridger’s the bottom of the heap. Literally. They say he finished dead last in his law school graduating class.”

  “Beggars can’t be choosers. You know how the legal system works.”

  Yeah, I did. And it creeped me out. “It’s a good thing the Rev’s church ladies are around to keep Tesemea’s spirits up.”

  For a moment, his silence was so deep that I thought I could hear him splash his fries into his ketchup. Then, “The Rev’s church ladies, did you say? Are you talking about Reverend Giblin?”

  “Of course. His group is already visiting him and sending care packages to his family. You know the Rev started that prison ministry last year because you helped grease the bureaucratic wheels.”

  “The Rev’s doing good work, no doubt about it. It’s just that Tesema’s rabbi is probably already helping him with that.”

  I stared at the phone. “Did you say rabbi?”

  “Sure, Tesema being Jewish and all. Then again, maybe he hasn’t been attending synagogue regularly. I’m Catholic but it’s been so long since I’ve been to Mass my priest probably wouldn’t r
ecognize me if I fell on him.”

  “Wait a minute. What makes you think Tesema is Jewish? He’s from Ethiopia. Aren’t they mainly, well, Christian?” I remembered the crosses on the wall of his apartment. “Or Muslim?”

  “And Jewish. Not all of them went to Israel during that airlift a few years ago. Some stayed, some came here. When my detectives were going through Ernst’s house, they found Tesema’s Star of David hidden in the coffee cannister, so they booked it into evidence. There’s no doubt it’s Tesema’s, what with that nice thumb print on the back.”

  “Whoa! What do you mean, his Star of David?”

  More munching, more slurps. “Lena, you ought to start your day by reading the newspapers, because that Star of David is mentioned in today’s front page Scottsdale Journal article, although we’re down below the fold now. Apparently the chain broke at some point while Tesema was over there doing his thing. It’s our guess that Ernst found it, and being more Nazi than American, got all shook up at the prospect of a Jew daring to touch a member of the glorious Master Race. Tesema said he called him a Jew schwarzer and refused to give the necklace back.”

  Jew schwarzer. Mrs. Hillman, Ernst’s next door neighbor, had believed Ernst yelled “You schwarzer” to Tesema, but she misheard. Why, oh why, had Tesema blabbed all this to the police? Hadn’t his attorney told him to keep his mouth shut? Then I remembered who his attorney was: Gary Bridger, boy wonder.

  Kryzinski was still talking. “The way we figure it, being called a Jew schwarzer set Tesema off. He brooded about the insult for a while and eventually realized that if he lost his caretaker’s job, his family back home would be in the deep brown stuff. So the night of the murder he jumped in his car and went over there, determined to try to smooth things over or at least get his Star of David back. We don’t think he planned to kill Ernst, but one thing probably led to another and…” He stopped for another slurp, then continued. “And, well, Tesema beat him to death. With a little luck, Bridger might be able to swing a deal for involuntary manslaughter.”