Desert Run

by Betty Webb

  The drawl vanished. “Every woman’s the type when she’s in love.”

  I pictured Eddy Joe leaning his massive bulk back in his office chair, gnawing at the stem of the corncob pipe he never smoked, but always carried to foster his disingenuous good ol’ boy image. Then a vision of Warren superimposed itself. Warren, running from his trailer with his shirt askew. But his boisterous daughters had done that, hadn’t they? Then I remembered that I had only seen his ex-wife at the trailer door; not his children. Silently cursing my own suspicions, I said to Hughey, “I hope y’all’s wrong.”

  He laughed heartily and, after promising to let me know as soon as he found out anything, hung up.

  I was wondering what to do next when the phone rang. Jimmy picked up. “Desert Investigations.” He listened for a moment, then called over to me, “It’s Bollinger.”

  “Which one?”

  He hit the hold button. “Thomas. He sure doesn’t sound eighty.”

  When I heard Thomas Bollinger’s voice, I had to agree with Jimmy’s assessment. I could have been talking to a thirty-year-old. His voice had an elastic tenor, much like Frank Oberle’s. But unlike Oberle’s Everyman twang, Bollinger’s voice sounded like money.

  “I hear you want to talk to me about the Bollinger murders.” Not his brother’s murder, his niece’s and nephews’ and sister-in-law’s murders, just “the Bollinger murders.” He was distancing himself.

  I groveled a little. Rich people like that. “Yes, sir, Mr. Bollinger. If you could spare the time.”

  “Call me Tommy. Mr. Bollinger makes me sound too old. I can’t spare a damned minute, but if you hustle out here to The Greening, you can follow me around while I humiliate my friends.”

  “Ah…” What the hell was he talking about?

  He gave a little laugh. “I’m playing golf with some Army buddies. We’re between the third and fourth holes but if you leave now, you can probably catch up to me around the seventh. The old farts can’t move very fast.”

  I knew little about golf, the game being too slow for me, so I had him give me explicit instructions on how to find the seventh hole, then the eighth and ninth, in case I ran into traffic. He expanded my comfort zone by telling me he was wearing a bright orange and green golf shirt, yellow plaid pants, and turquoise visor. Eeeewww.

  “If you don’t make it here in time, you’ll miss me for a week, because then I’m headed down to Mazatlan to check on some property.”

  “I’m leaving now.” Giving him a hasty good-by, I slammed down the phone, grabbed my carry-all, and ran out the door.

  ***

  Like Sundown Sam’s in Apache Junction, The Greening catered to retirees, but there the resemblance ended. Instead of trailers and RVs, half-million-dollar homes cozied up to a spectacular eighteen-hole golf course crowned by a clubhouse that looked like it had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright on speed. Redwood, stone, glass and salmon-colored steel girders angled sharply up from the desert, all but screaming “Look at me! Look at me!” The cars in the lot weren’t battered old pickups, but shiny new Mercedes, Lexuses and Jaguars. These folks might be on the sundown side of sixty, but they still got a kick out of impressing the neighbors.

  After parking the Jeep next to a vintage Rolls Silver Shadow, I jogged down the cart track that ran through Golf at The Greening, keeping my eye out for a man dressed like a particularly tawdry rainbow. As I humped over a hill I spotted my quarry in the distance alighting from a golf cart and glowing against the acres of emerald that surrounded him. The men who got out after him were as badly dressed as he. I figured golfers wore such gaudy clothes so the EMTs could find them more easily after their heart attacks.

  “Lena Jones, I presume?” Bollinger said, as I jogged up to the group. “I’m Tommy Bollinger. Welcome to the weekly meeting of the Desert Dishonorables. You run all the way from the clubhouse?” He looked like a runner himself, tall, lean, appearing no more than sixty. Only the deep furrows from his nose to his mouth and the snowy hair peeking out from under his visor betrayed his real age.

  I agreed that I had hoofed the entire distance, thinking I’d be making points. I was wrong.

  “Then stand downwind from us, please.” His grin didn’t travel to his flinty eyes but allowed me to see that his teeth were his own; slightly crooked, stained by years of coffee.

  As I shuffled around so that the wind faced me, his friends, all of them around his own age, snickered. Now that they were upwind from me, I caught an olfactory symphony of Bijan, Armani and Nino Cerruti. Money. Lots of it.

  Bollinger’s caddy—a young blond hunk which he surely didn’t need, given the golf cart—handed him a driver. Everyone stood back while Bollinger ducked his head, gave his fanny a few shakes, and took a big swing. To my amazement, the ball sailed straight and true for almost two hundred yards. I took a closer look at him. Stringbean though he might be, his biceps shamed the caddy’s.

  “Clean living,” he explained. “Nothing but hot sex, red meat and bourbon.”

  As his companions teed off one by one, the last of them hooking into a stand of cottonwoods to a chorus of catcalls, the look of satisfaction on Bollinger’s face was a joy to see. None of his cronies evidenced half his strength.

  Bollinger turned to the caddy. “Ned, you drive these old bastards over to the next hole. The girl and I will walk.”

  Girl. I tried not to take offense as Ned loaded the Desert Dishonorables into the golf cart and drove them away, leaving me hurrying to catch up with Bollinger, who was already striding toward the next hole. “Mr. Boll…ah, Tommy, I wanted to ask you…”

  He waved a liver-spotted hand. “I read the papers. I know who you are and why you’re here. You want to know if my nephew killed my brother and his family. And if he didn’t, did I?”

  His bluntness took me aback. “I…”

  “Chess and I are both sinners from way back, but neither of us is a killer. Except me. In wartime.”

  “I’m sure you’d say…”

  “Yeah, of course I’d say so. Judging by the intelligence in your eyes, you’ve already checked me out and think you know all about my past. We’ll see about that. Sure, when I was younger I was as hot-headed as Chess, but before you get your female dander up, let me assure you that unlike my nephew, I never hit a woman. Not that some women can’t give as good as they get.” Over his shoulder he gave me a hard-eyed stare that gave me chills even though the day was warm. “Bet you can kick some serious ass.”

  “I’ve kicked a few in my time. Where were you when your brother and his family were murdered?”

  He stopped so abruptly that I almost collided with him. “And you’re still kicking.”

  The other Desert Dishonorables had disappeared around a saguaro-stippled knoll, leaving Bollinger and me at the bottom of a shallow valley created by three brush-covered intersecting slopes. From this vantage point, I could see no one. Worse, no one could see me. It was then that I realized Bollinger had failed to return the driver to his golf bag. My chill intensified. That swing of his…

  He tapped the head of the driver against his brogan, then flipped it in mid-air, catching it on the way down, one of Tiger Woods’ favorite tricks. “I said, ‘And you’re still kicking.’ You don’t want to respond?”

  “Why respond to the obvious?”

  With no expression on his face, he bent down and took a practice swing. The driver came within an inch of my face. When I didn’t flinch, he bared his stained teeth at me. “I could have used you at Monte Cassino. You know anything about that?”

  I thought hard. “Northern Italy. During World War II the Germans dug in at the monastery above the town. There were heavy Allied fatalities.”

  He nodded. “Bunch of my buddies were killed there. Brave and stupid. Like you, maybe.” He took another practice swing.

  I could feel the air split as the driver swept past my face, but at that moment I would rather have died than move. Maybe I was stupid.

  Bollinger flipped his driver up
in the air again, caught it, and for the first time, gave me a smile that traveled all the way to his eyes. It transformed his face, and I could see that when he’d been young, he’d probably been a heartbreaker. “Honey,” he said, “if I wasn’t queer as a three-dollar bill I could really go for you.”

  ***

  “Things were different back then,” Bollinger said, as we headed for the eighth hole, where we could see the other Desert Dishonorables teeing off. “If you were queer, you lost your medals, got a dishonorable discharge, no ifs, ands, or buts. Furthermore, you were lucky if you didn’t wind up in the stockade for the duration. It didn’t matter how much blood you shed for your country, you were out. No G.I. Bill, no medical, no nothing. That’s the dark side of the Greatest Generation no one ever talks about.”

  I motioned toward the others. “Does that mean…?”

  “Hell, yeah. Flaming fruits each and every one, all of us dishonorably discharged from the service, hence our name. This is the only place they can be themselves, talk about what they want to talk about without worrying about the consequences. The silence, that was one of the hardest things about being a fruit in the Army—oops, gay is the PC term, pardon my un-PC mouth—being gay in the Army. Bullets and bombs flying all around you, but regardless of what was going down, you had to pretend you weren’t who you were. When someone you loved was killed…That’s how they found out about me, you know. My friend Roger, he…Well, he was hit at Salerno. He was lying there in my arms, his guts over my lap, and I was screaming how much I loved him…The lieutenant, some green fool from Iowa, wrote me up. The rest’s history. Bad history.

  “Jesus, being over there at that time, under those circumstances, it was the loneliest feeling in the world. Sometimes you believed you were the only person who felt the way you did. Lots of men couldn’t take it and ate their guns. But these guys, the Desert Dishonorables, they’re the best of the best. They shone through, they survived, but they still have to watch what they say and who they’re seen with, for their family’s sake. Me, I never married and I’m already richer than shit, so I no longer give a rat’s ass. I came out forty years ago, right after I made my first million, and I haven’t looked back since.”

  “Forty years ago, that would be…”

  “Long after my brother and his family were dead and buried.”

  “Did Edward know you were gay?”

  “Honey, why do you think I wasn’t invited for Christmas dinner?”

  I remembered the Scottsdale Journal article I’d read, the “family member” who discovered the bodies late Christmas night. That would have been Thomas. “But you went by anyway.”

  “I’d called Joyce, Edward’s wife, and told her I was going to drop off some presents for the kids at eight o’clock.”

  “I don’t understand. He wouldn’t let you eat with them, but you were still allowed…”

  “No, not allowed. It was a big secret. Joyce was going to meet me behind the barn after her precious husband had drunk himself into a stupor, which he usually had by nine o’clock. That way she could smuggle the presents into the house with Edward being none the wiser. He was a sonofabitch. He didn’t just cheat on her, he beat her.” He shook his head in puzzlement. “A woman like Joyce, she could have—should have—done better. But she loved Edward. Jesus, you should have seen her. Gorgeous, simply gorgeous, with blazing red hair and blue-gray eyes as pale as a lake on a cloudy day. Anyway, I got held up and didn’t get out to their place until almost eleven. By then…”

  He stopped, looked at me closely, and switched gears. “Come to think of it, Joyce was almost as beautiful as you.”

  I gave him a cynical smile. “A friend of mine, a Pima Indian, once told me to never trust a man with too many horses. That was his way of saying ‘Never trust a rich man.’”

  His smile was as cynical as my own. “Not even film-makers?”

  Damn. Bollinger was good. What else did he know about me?

  We had approached the Desert Dishonorables closely enough that I could hear their flirtations—I now realized that’s what it was—with the hunky caddy. Far behind them, to the west, I could see a storm front moving in from California and the breeze had already turned cold. I needed to get this interview back on track before the weather changed and sent Tommy Bollinger and his friends back to the comforts of the club house. “You say your sister-in-law was supposed to meet you behind the barn. Did you discover Edward’s body first?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t see him at all. It was pitch black out there and I probably wouldn’t have seen a battleship sitting in the yard. When I realized Joyce hadn’t waited around out there for me—no woman in her sane mind would—I headed for the house.”

  “Knowing how your brother felt about you?”

  His eyes clouded with memory. “Hardly. In case he was still sober, I snuck around to the kitchen window and looked in. That’s when I saw what had been done to them. Her. The kids. I…I guess she kept them up, waiting for their uncle and their presents. For a while, I thought that Edward had gone nuts and killed them himself. That’s the kind of thing you wouldn’t put past him, violent as he was. But…” He swallowed hard.

  I said what needed to be said. “You inherited from your brother.”

  “Little more than a pittance, believe me. But I parlayed it into—what did you call it—really big money. You think I killed him for that?”

  “It’s been done.”

  “Not by me. In my own way, I loved Joyce. I loved my niece and nephews, especially poor lame-brained Chess. The murders destroyed him. He was never the same afterwards, and went on to…Let me put it this way. No one who came in contact with Chess later in his life exactly blossomed, especially not his family. That good-looking daughter of his, God! An I.Q. of one forty-eight, he used to brag, yet all she’s doing with it is to shake her tits at some strip club. She refused my help when I told her I’d send her to whatever college would take her. Arizona State, Princeton or even Woo Woo University of Sedona, it was all the same to me just as long as she left the clubs. I’ll be honest with you. I could have killed Edward and happily danced on his grave because of the way he treated his family. But I would never have harmed Joyce or those kids.” His face fell into sadness.

  “Do you have an alibi?”

  “The man I was with Christmas Day 1944 died twenty years ago.”

  “Convenient.”

  “I didn’t think so at the time. As a matter of fact, I almost blew my brains out over it.”

  I didn’t know if he was talking about his lover’s death or the death of his family. But I was determined not to let him mislead me again. “Tommy, if you didn’t kill your brother and his family, who do you think did?”

  He didn’t bat an eye. “The Germans, of course.”

  ***

  It was only when I was halfway back to Scottsdale that I realized Bollinger had denied killing his family, but he had never denied killing Kapitan Ernst.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It always came back to the Germans.

  Had they murdered the Bollingers or were they merely serving as a convenient smoke screen for Ernst’s real killer? Whatever the answer, I realized I had gone as far on my current investigation as I could without learning more about the Bollinger family tragedy. As soon as I exited the Pima Freeway, I pulled over to the side of the road, fished my cell phone out of my carry-all, and called Warren’s cell, expecting to get his voice mail.

  Instead, he picked up. “What is it?” He sounded like he wanted to kill someone.

  Startled, I said, “I hate to bother you at work, but do you still have your copy of Escape Across the Desert?”

  “My what?” I heard voices in the background, a man and a woman. Lindsey, fighting with someone.

  “Fay’s book.”

  “Oh, God. Fay. I just can’t…Yeah, I still have it, but it’s all marked up. Why?”

  “Because there may be something in there that will get Rada Tesema out of jail.” I could
hear Lindsey yelling again, two men yelling back.

  “Stop that, you people!” Warren’s voice was still fierce, but at least now I knew it wasn’t directed at me. When he came back on the line, he it sounded like he was trying to control his anger. “Sorry. It’s just that what with the weather changing like it is, and Fay’s death, things are crazier than usual here. She was pretty popular. Ah, you were asking about the book. It’s back at the Best Western, on that card table by the window. I was reading it last night after I dropped you off, trying to get my mind off what had happened. Bad idea. It just made everything worse. Anyway, come by the set and I’ll give you the key card so you can pick it up yourself. Listen, back to Fay. Do the cops have any leads yet? Or was it just another drive-by?”

  For some reason I didn’t want to share my suspicions with him. “That’s what the cops say. ‘Just another drive-by.’”

  “Last time I saw Fay she told me…” He was interrupted by Lindsey shouting again in the background, only to be answered by an entire chorus of obscenities. “Oops. Gotta go. Looks like I’m needed for a little conflict resolution.” Without further ceremony, he hung up.

  I stuffed the phone back into my carry-all and turned west on McDowell Road, dodging traffic until the red buttes of Papago Park rose before me. The parking lot was packed, not only with trailers and the film crew’s cars, but with the cars of the ever-increasing horde of gawkers. I double-parked next to Warren’s Land Rover and ran over to the set, to find him pacing back and forth, running his hands through his hair. Backed by a hard wind, a scrap of paper fluttered around his ankles. He ignored it.

  “Caro, Lindsey didn’t mean it!” The desperation in his voice surprised me, because I’d never seen him anything but cool and controlled on the set.

  A heavily tattooed woman waving a mike spewed forth some intriguing suggestions about what Lindsey could do with herself, then finished up with the relatively bland, “Warren, you know she meant every fucking word. Make her apologize, to me and everyone else.”

  “I’ll see you in hell first,” Lindsey snarled. Although sleek as usual in black slacks and blouse, her eyes were puffy, as if she had slept badly.