Desert Run

by Betty Webb

  “Usual…reason. Money. Edward…had money. Hated Chess and…disinherited him. With rest of…family…dead…Thomas…got it…all.”

  ***

  The last glimmer of light had faded as, with radio blasting, Warren and I headed west along Cave Creek Road toward the Horny Toad. My stomach grumbled, but I was too excited to pay it too much attention. Could Thomas Bollinger possibly still be alive and in decent enough health to do what had been done to Kapitan Ernst? Also, I wondered why MaryEllen hadn’t mentioned her uncle. Possibly I could find out tomorrow when I had lunch with Fay Harris. She might have written something about Thomas that didn’t make it into her book due to fears of a lawsuit. In the meantime, I turned the car radio down, fished my cell phone out of my carry-all, and punched in Jimmy’s number again.

  When he answered, he sounded annoyed. “Lena, I have company.”

  “Who’s there? Esther?”

  “Yes, Esther and Rebecca. I’m fixing barbeque. The picnic table’s all set up and everything.”

  I could see them now, Jimmy’s soon-to-be-family, sitting under the reservation sky, listening to night birds and coyotes. He’d better enjoy that wild ambience now, because when Esther was finished with him, he would be char-broiling burgers for fussy suburbanites. For now, though, he was still my partner. “I don’t need this tonight, Jimmy, but I’d appreciate it if first thing in the morning you’d look up Thomas Bollinger, Edward Bollinger’s younger brother, and find out whatever you can. I want to know what happened to him after the murders, what kind of money he came into, and most importantly, if he’s still alive.” A vision of Chess Bollinger flashed into my mind. “And, uh, if he still has all his faculties.”

  “Tomorrow. Fine.” The tension was gone from his voice. “See you then.” Without waiting for me to say good-by, he hung up.

  Warren gave me a sideways glace. “You’re efficient.”

  I stuffed the phone back into my carry-all. “You have to be in my business.”

  “Mine, too.” He turned the radio back up in the middle of the Del Vikings’ “Come Go With Me,” one of my Golden Oldies favorites.

  I settled back against the Golden Hawk’s seat, trying to put Tesema’s woes and Jimmy’s defection out of my mind. The night was peaceful and I was with the man I loved. What more could I want?

  Then an announcer interrupted the Del Viking’s harmonies.

  “Breaking news from the KGLD newsroom. Popular Scottsdale journalist Fay Harris was found shot to death this evening in her apartment building parking lot. Harris, who has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of illegal immigrant deaths in the desert, was also the author of Escape Across the Desert, now being filmed by Oscar-winning director Warren Quinn. Harris’ neighbors say they heard shots…”

  Suddenly the night didn’t seem so peaceful.

  Chapter Thirteen

  December 26, 1944

  Gunter Hoenig hadn’t slept all night. Wrapped in a blanket they had stolen from the farmhouse, he lay huddled against Josef in an arroyo several miles east, fighting the nightmare images that visited every time he closed his eyes. The man by the barn, the woman and children in the farmhouse! Even now the dying woman pleaded with him to help her. Oh, if he only had moved faster and stayed the tire iron before Das Kapitan brought it down on her. But, no, he had remained standing for that one fatal second, unwilling to believe what was about to happen.

  He shut his eyes more tightly and turned his face into Josef’s warm back, but more memories rushed in. The wounded American sailors gunned down as they swam away from their burning ship, the boatload of peaceful Jews Kapitan had so gleefully torpedoed.

  As if roused by Gunter’s thoughts, Kapitan stumbled up from his rocky bed on the other side of Josef and moved further down the arroyo. Soon he disappeared into a thicket of weeds, but his nearby presence was heralded by the faint grunts of a man answering Nature’s call.

  Taking this opportunity—the first since they left the farmhouse—Gunter shook Josef. “Wake up! We must leave this place!” he whispered. He placed his hand across Josef’s mouth so that his friend could not cry out.

  Josef awoke. After nodding understanding, he pushed Gunter’s hand away. “Are the Americans near?”

  Gunter shook his head. “We must go back to Camp Papago and tell the authorities what we have seen. Those people in the farmhouse…”

  Tears sprang to Josef’s eyes and his voice trembled. “Such a tragedy. The children…” He swallowed, swept his tangles of auburn hair out of his face, and began again. “Kapitan was so grieved to find those poor people dead. While you were bundling food into the blankets, we prayed together for their souls. Oh, how his heart broke! But for us to return to Camp Papago now, what good would that do? God has already gathered those poor people to his bosom and our surrender will not change that. We must remain faithful to Kapitan’s plan.”

  Kaptian prayed for their souls? Ach, such hypocrisy! Why had Josef…? Too late Gunter remembered that Josef had been in the other room gathering blankets and not seen Kapitan kill the woman. Three years younger than himself and reassigned to U-237 a mere month before capture, Josef had been spared the killing of the American sailors, the Jews, and the worst of Ernst’s violence toward his own crew. In Josef’s eyes, Kapitan was the flower of the Fatherland, the savior who would lead them to Mexico.

  Gunter forgave his friend’s naivete. Josef was only eighteen, too young to be a submariner, too young to be a father to the baby now growing in his even younger wife’s belly. Too young to know the world. And too young to be left to the nonexistent mercies of Das Kapitan.

  With great sadness, Gunter whispered, “If you will not go with me, Josef, then I will stay with you.”

  He lay back down beside his friend, hoping that he had made the right decision.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Fay Harris’ body lay propped against the open door of her Nissan, her dead eyes looking into the night. Powder burns stippled the edge of the star-shaped hole in her forehead. Not the ugliest crime scene I’d attended, but ugly enough that I was glad I’d talked Warren into dropping me off at my Jeep and going home to his motel.

  With a warning shout, Captain Kryzinski walked toward me. “Lena, get back! This has nothing to do with you.”

  “Yes, it does. We were supposed to have lunch tomorrow.”

  “Somebody just canceled your date.” Whenever Kryzinski was upset, he attempted to hide it with gallows humor. It never worked. His compassion always leaked out in one way or another. Maybe his relationship with Fay had ended years earlier, but he still cared for her and it showed.

  I tried to steady my own voice. Fay and I had known each other for a long time, and her murder hit me hard. “Fay was going to tell me about some of the interviews she didn’t use for the book.”

  “What book?” No wonder he’d been a lousy detective. Every thought he had was always plastered all over his face. He knew damned well what book.

  My anger and guilt steadied me. “Quit screwing with me. She was as convinced as I am that the Bollinger murders are tied to Ernst’s.”

  Kryzinski scowled back. “The same perp? That would be something to see, some octogenarian perpetrating a drive-by. Think he was playing gangsta rap in his Flivver when he popped her one? Leave the murder investigations to the police, Lena. You’re way off base here.” Then his voice caught. “Oh, Jesus, poor Fay. We…we’ve had our differences over the years, but she was one of the best. Always played it straight.”

  Popped her one. The phrase gave him away but he was too upset to notice. Drive-bys were usually sprays, and it looked to me that Harris had only been shot once. “What caliber?”

  He flicked a look back at the body, saw what I could see, and gave up the games. “Probably a nine millimeter, but we’ll have to wait for the ballistics report. There’s some stippling, so the perp was up close and personal.”

  “You think she knew him?”

  He cleared his throat. “We prob
ably shouldn’t be so certain it’s a ‘him.’”

  An image of MaryEllen Bollinger flashed through my mind, then back out again. What reason would she have had to kill Fay? She would have been more interested to have the reporter on her side, digging for the truth about the Bollinger family tragedy. Then I recalled something else. “When I talked to Fay earlier, she was on her way to interview the mayor about some sexual harassment claim.” It wouldn’t be the first time a reporter had been murdered just before breaking a big story.

  A pained smile. “We know about that, and the accuser’s already recanted. It turned out to be nothing more than an attempted financial shake-down. The mayor’s so pissed she filed charges. If you ask me who killed Fay, which you haven’t, I’d say it was coyotes.”

  Coyotes, the two-legged kind, the men who for a fee smuggled Mexican illegals into the U.S. These days, the coyotes’ favorite trick was to herd the illegals into small houses and hold them for ransom until their families back in Mexico paid up. If the families didn’t, well, dead illegals with execution-style bullet wounds were cropping up all over Arizona these days. Fay had included this nasty turn of events in her Pulitzer-nominated series, and word was out that the coyotes were none too pleased. Surely she wouldn’t have let one of them get close enough to…to do what he did.

  When I said so to Kryzinski, he blinked his eyes rapidly for a few seconds, then he made a big show of pretending the tungsten glare of the parking lot lights bothered him. “Maybe her source killed her. That coyote information sure sounded like she’d talked to someone on the inside. Maybe whoever leaked was covering his tracks.”

  “A coyote Deep Throat? Then why would he wait until after the articles were printed?”

  “Who knows how coyotes think? Now, you’ll have to excuse me but I need to get back to work, to make sure…to make sure she’s treated right.” He turned and walked away, but not before I saw the tears in his eyes.

  I took one final look at Fay’s body then returned to my Jeep, which I’d parked down the street from the apartment complex. But I didn’t drive away immediately. For a while, I sat frozen in position, worrying about my own culpability. If I hadn’t asked Fay to help me with the Ernst case, would she still be alive?

  ***

  I didn’t sleep much that night. Every time I started to drift off, I’d see Fay’s face, and guilt jolted me back into wakefulness. By the time morning rolled around, I was exhausted. When I finally made it downstairs to Desert Investigations, I found Jimmy sitting at his desk reading the Scottsdale Journal. Once again, Fay had made the front page, over the fold.

  “She was a friend of yours, wasn’t she? Want to talk about it?”

  “No.” I’ve never been big on sharing my sorrows. “Just give me whatever you’ve managed to dig up on the Ernst or Bollinger cases.” Crying wouldn’t bring Fay back to life, but at least I could find out who killed her.

  “Are you sure you…?”

  “Jimmy, just get me the damned information!”

  He put the Journal down and handed me a big stack of computer printouts. “Here. After I heard about Fay, I came in early and ran this off. You wanted me to find out what I could about Thomas Bollinger? Well, I did, and he’s still alive, or at least he was last month when he was ticketed for speeding on SR-60.”

  The printout was heavy in my hand. “Are you serious? The guy has to be in his eighties.”

  “Check out the car.”

  I scanned the first page. Bollinger’s ride was a 2006 Lotus Esprit V8 Twin Turbo. No wonder he was speeding. Further examination of the printout showed me that Bollinger was a long way from being as cash-strapped as much of Arizona’s elderly population. He enjoyed a credit rating Donald Trump could only dream about. After inheriting his older brother’s estate, he formed T-Bol Enterprises, a company which developed golf resorts all around the country. T-Bol’s best-known Arizona project was The Greening, an upscale retirement golf community near Gold Canyon Ranch, about thirty miles east of Scottsdale.

  Unlike Gilbert Schank, who’d turned his autoplex over to his son, Bollinger appeared still very much in charge of his company. He had also apparently inherited his older brother’s propensity for using his fists. In 1955 he’d been arrested for assault outside a Phoenix bar, but the charges had been dropped after it became clear that the other two men attacked him first. The same sort of thing occurred in 1963, but after that case was also resolved in his favor, he managed to stay out of trouble. Unless you counted the impressive array of speeding tickets he’d accumulated over the years. Yet despite his need for speed, Bollinger had only racked up one recorded car accident in his long driving career; and the other driver—a sixteen-year-old girl—was determined to be at fault. In addition to Bollinger’s personal information, Jimmy had also downloaded several pages detailing his business dealings, the various charities he was active in, and the community service awards he’d received.

  No more bar fights showed up, but it was obvious that the man had a temper. And his inheritance after Edward Bollinger’s death bothered me. I told Jimmy so.

  Jimmy’s face remained impassive. “Skip ahead to page twelve.”

  Page twelve informed me that in 1943, Corporal Thomas Bollinger was shot in the arm while clearing out a machine gun nest near Salerno, Italy. His wound must have been minor, because three days later, he charged into a bombed-out school, killed a German sniper with his bayonet, and was shot again on the way out while carrying another wounded soldier to safety. He received a Silver Star to go along with his Purple Heart. But not long afterwards, something happened that rendered these courageous acts irrelevant. In early 1944, he was given a dishonorable discharge, stripped of his medals, and shipped back to the U.S.

  I flipped through the rest of the printout but could find no details on Bollinger’s fall from military grace. Dropping the heavy stack of papers onto my desk, I said, “What did he do? Frag a lieutenant?”

  Jimmy looked regretful. “I was lucky to get what I did. Most of that came from some old guy’s memoirs on one of those World War II websites. The poster was the man Bollinger rescued at Salerno. His post was dated May 2002, and a month later, someone identifying himself as a son posted a message saying that his father died of a coronary. The site’s being kept up as a memorial.”

  For the next couple of hours I buried myself in paperwork so as not to dwell on Fay Harris’ murder and the part I might have played in it. But by noon I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I called Captain Kryzinski to see if there had been any developments. God help me, I was hoping her murder was a drive-by.

  Kryzinski gave me no comfort. “We canvassed the neighborhood and no one saw or heard a thing until the gunshot that brought them all running. And before you ask, no one saw a car driving off, either.” He sounded better this morning, although a little hoarse, as if he’d expunged his grief throughout the long night.

  “Have you gone through her apartment yet?”

  “Yeeeesss.” The way he dragged it out intrigued me.

  “And?”

  “Among other items of interest—information we’ll be following up on with certain city officials—we found a manila envelope with your name on it. Bunch of notes inside.”

  Thank you, Fay. “When can I pick it up?”

  “Now, Lena. You know better than that. We booked everything into evidence.”

  “But you made copies for me, right?”

  A sigh. “Yeah. I’m busy tonight, but you can drop by my house tomorrow after work and pick them up. I’d rather you do that than let everyone see you at the station again. Not that it matters now. The Chief has always suspected that I’ve been feeding you information.”

  Imagine that. After we agreed on a time for my visit, Kryzinski filled me in on Fay’s funeral arrangements. Because of the victim’s high profile in the community, the autopsy would take place later today. “Barring any unforeseen developments, the medical examiner will probably release the body tomorrow. I’ve already talked to the fami
ly. The service is tentatively scheduled for Saturday afternoon, at Munson’s Funeral Home, burial afterwards at Whispering Pines, on Hayden. You going?”

  “It’s the least I can do.”

  “No shit. She’d probably still be alive if it weren’t for you.” With that, he hung up.

  I sat there and felt like hell for a while. Then I pulled myself together and called T-Bol Enterprises. Within seconds, I was talking to Thomas Bollinger’s secretary. She informed me that she’d give him my message. Then she rang off almost as abruptly as Kryzinski had done.

  MaryEllen Bollinger wasn’t in, either. Her roommate informed me that she getting a Bindi treatment at Spa du Soleil.

  “Bindi?”

  “Some kind of Ayurvedic thing.”

  I decided not to ask what “Ayurvedic” was. “When do you expect her back?”

  “In a couple of hours. But she usually takes a nap after her treatment. It really zones her out.”

  “Ask her to please call me first.”

  “Sure, but that doesn’t mean she will.” Click.

  The Ernst investigation stalled for the moment, I placed a call to Eddy Joe Hughey in Alabama and asked him when he planned to drive over to Hamilton to see what he could find out about Jack Rinn, AKA Jack Sherwood.

  “I got the fax you sent me with his picture and Arizona driver’s license,” Eddy Joe said in his syrupy drawl. “My, my, he’s a good-lookin’ boy, ain’t he? Bet he’s a real heartbreaker with the ladies and all. Anyway, I’m hopin’ to hit Hamilton tomorrow. I think I know what’s goin’ on—I worked me a case like this a while back—but I want to make sure. The fact that he’s been tellin’ people out there that he hails from Mississippi kinda makes you think he’s tryin’ to cover his tracks, doesn’t it? In the meantime, make sure that client of yours doesn’t run off to Vegas with the polecat.”

  “She’s not the type.” Beth Osmon was a cool, careful businesswoman. Which is why she hired me.