Desert Run

by Betty Webb

  Not wanting to get involved in the altercation, I darted foward, held out my hand to Warren, and said, “Key.”

  He didn’t look at me, just fished out the key card from his pocket and handed it over. Leaving Warren to play referee, I made it back to my Jeep in time to see Mark Schank arrive driving the Golden Hawk. At first I gave him the benefit of the doubt, that his smile was merely companionable, but his next words revealed that his facial muscles were controlled by his salesman’s mind. “You interested in selling that ’45 Jeep? I like what you’ve done to it.”

  His wasn’t the first offer I’d had for the Jeep, but it was flattering to hear such complimentary words about my baby from a professional. “Most of the restoration work was done before I bought it from a Jeep tour outfit. They’re the ones who put in the Dauntless V-6 engine and T-90 transmission, but I added the ‘74 Chevy Saginaw power steering. And the Pima petroglyph paint job, of course.” Seeing the expression on his face, I said, “Well, I didn’t do the work myself, but I…”

  He gave me a knowing smile. “Of course not, but you have friends in the business.” He patted the Jeep’s hood and walked around her slowly. “You made some good choices, especially with those chrome wheels, Remington Mud Brute tires, the leather bucket seats. Talk about adding up-market class to a classic! Yeah, these old Jeeps, they bring back a lot of memories for some folks. By the way, Dad called and told me you and Warren stopped by his house last night. He sounded upset.”

  “We didn’t mean to upset him. We only…”

  He waved my apology away. “How much do you want for her?”

  “Her?” It took me a moment to figure out what he meant, then I remembered that when men liked a boat or a car, they referred to it as a “her.” “Oh, my Jeep. Sorry. It’s not for sale.”

  His saleman’s smile returned. “That’s what they all say. At first.”

  Why did I think he wasn’t talking about the Jeep? Maybe I should have been offended by the way his eyes were now checking out my own personal transmission, but I wasn’t. Sometimes a woman likes to be considered a hot property. “Perhaps. But I’m a woman who means what she says.”

  “Oh, really?” He lovingly caressed the Jeep’s hood and looked deep into my eyes. “Thanks for the warning.” Then his eyes shifted to the Golden Hawk and his whole demeanor changed. “Ah, I think Warren’s decided to buy her so I’d better get over there.”

  As he walked off, I suppressed a smile. Mark might like to flirt but not at the expense of screwing a sale. I gave him a wave, jumped into my Jeep, and headed for Warren’s room at the Best Western.

  ***

  By the time Desert Investigations closed its door for the day, I had finished a quick read-through of Escape Across the Desert but learned little more than I already knew. Yes, the authorities suspected Ernst of ordering the torture-killing of Werner Dreschler at Camp Papago, but the six other Germans convicted for the crime had never implicated him, not even on the eve of their executions. Why? Did they fear what Das Kapitan might do to their families when he returned to Germany? And yes, two of the escapees—Gunter Hoenig and Josef Braun—were never apprehended, giving rise to various urban myths. According to some, Gunter and Josef reached Nazi sympathizers in Mexico who smuggled them back to Germany. According to others, they went underground with the aid of Phoenix’s German-American Bund and were still living in the Phoenix area, plotting the return of their glorious Reich. Myself, I thought it more probable that their bones moldered in the desert.

  Nowhere in the book was the Germans’ escape connected to the Bollinger murders. In fact, the Bollingers weren’t mentioned anywhere. I reviewed the comments Fay tossed off during our last meeting. Regarding Ernst: “There’s a lot I can tell you about the old bastard that didn’t make it into the book because of libel law.” About the Bollingers: “None of what I found out about the Bollingers survived the editing process. My publisher’s attorney blue-pencilled everything.”

  Now I realized the import of her statements. She had originally written about the Bollinger murders in her book, which meant she did believe they were connected. Before she could share her information with me, someone killed her.

  A writer’s voice can live long after death, however, as I learned early that evening as I sat in the living room of Captain Kryzinski’s Scottsdale house. Half-filled shipping cartons lined the bare walls.

  “Aren’t you jumping the gun a little?” I could hardly stand to think of my life without him. When you’re an orphan, your friends become your family.

  He proceeded to rub salt in my wounds. “When I make up my mind, Lena, I make up my mind. I’ll be gone in a week. My brother’s already leased a duplex for me in Brooklyn and I’m going to ship these on ahead.” His eyes were sunken, probably in shock from Fay’s death. His gray-shot brown hair was as rumpled as his clothes, and his shoes could have used a good shining.

  There was no point in begging him not to desert me, so I didn’t try. “Better buy some winter clothes. Anyway, the envelope you said Fay left for me. Where is it?”

  “In the evidence room, of course.” Seeing the expression on my face, he tried a smile but it looked more like a grimace. “Sorry. My attempt at a joke. Like I said, I copied everything for you, right down to the scraps.” He reached under the seat cushion he was sitting on and pulled out a thick manila envelope.

  Now I’d be up half the night. Then again, remembering the nightmares that so frequently visited me, the prospect didn’t look that bad.

  I didn’t want to grab information and run, so I sat and talked with him for a while, learning more about his decision to leave Arizona. When he was through, I felt like leaving, too. But unlike him, I had nowhere to go.

  “Scottsdale isn’t the same place it was when I came out from Brooklyn,” he said. “The area north of the station used to be dirt roads and horses. Now it’s nothing but subdivisions and traffic jams. Course, I’m part of the problem, all of us who’ve moved out here from points east are. But if I’m going to live in a big city, at least give me one with some energy. Not this collection of suburbs. Place has turned into L.A.”

  Energy? I’d only been to New York City—and Brooklyn—once, but I didn’t remember energy, just a whole lot of concrete. I told him so.

  “At least it isn’t concrete heated all to hell! Kid, I grew up in Brooklyn, and it’s the devil I know. C’mere.” He motioned me to the sliding glass doors that led to his patio. “See that?”

  Looking over his back yard fence, over the rooftops of the new subdivision that arced around him, I could see the McDowell Mountains to the north, tinted orange and purple by the sun peeking through the storm clouds that had gathered on the horizon. To the east were the Superstitions, wearing a mantel of scarlet. “It’s gorgeous. Tell me how you can leave all this.”

  He thrust a pair of binoculars at me. “Now look again.”

  I did, and even from this distance could see the tract homes creeping up the base of the mountains, and in several instances, into the very foothills themselves. Gone were the great expanses of wildflowers and cactus; in their place ticky-tacky houses carpeted their former grandeur. It was almost obscene. I tried to put the best face on things. “Oh, well. You can only see them with your binocs.”

  “I know they’re there, and that makes all the difference.”

  “Yeah.” I knew, too. And it did make all the difference.

  ***

  By the time I arrived at my apartment, the storm, in the way of all bad things, had blown in from California. The wind was frigid and sideways rain hammered my windows. Since Warren had said nothing about getting together tonight—he was probably busy battening down the hatches at Papago Park—I curled up on the sofa and began reading the material Fay had left me, which included notes and several expunged pages of her book’s original manuscript. After a quick glance, it was easy to see why her publisher’s attorney refused to approve the Bollinger material. Despite the police investigation that had cleared the Ger
mans, Fay wrote that she believed they killed the family, ordered to do so by Ernst, commenting that Ernst had always been careful about getting his own hands dirty.

  One expunged passage read, “After the war, several of Ernst’s crew made comments that the U-boat captain asked for volunteers to ‘bring justice to a traitor,’ and when volunteers were not forthcoming, he drafted them. One crew member, who refused to allow his name to be used, said, ‘To be a traitor calls for death, of course, but a swift death. Kapitan Ernst took joy in Werner Dreschler’s sufferings and ordered that they continue over several hours. I know. I listened outside as long as I could. By the end of that awful night at Camp Papago, I—along with the other men—was praying for poor Werner to hurry up and die. Then, just before dawn, when it was obvious that Werner could not last much longer, Kapitan had him hanged…but very, very slowly. But nothing ever happened to Kapitan, not even when we made it back to Germany. People were still too afraid of him to bring charges, so while the other Nazis hanged, Kapitan went free.”

  More than one hundred cigarette burns; countless stab wounds, none of them deep enough to inflict a mortal wound. Then a slow hanging.

  The work of a sadist, not a soldier.

  ***

  Shaking the horrific image out of my mind, I continued leafing through the pages until I came across the clipping from a Connecticut newspaper, dated July 5, 1978, detailing the boating accident that took Ernst’s legs.

  BRIDGEPORT——A two-boat collision in Long Island Sound cost a Darien man his legs yesterday. Erik Ernst, a nautical engineer with Sea Solutions, Inc., was taking his dinghy out to his sailboat when a Chris Craft traveling at an excessive rate of speed collided with him. Ernst was rescued by witnesses on a nearby cabin cruiser who dove into the water and pulled him out.

  “It looked like the Chris Craft steered straight for him,” said Doris Steinhart, who was celebrating Independence Day with friends aboard the cabin cruiser. A registered nurse at Bridgeport General Hospital, Steinhart attended to the victim’s wounds until Air-Evac arrived. “There was plenty of room on either side, and yet the Chris Craft never took evasive action, just kept aiming right at the dinghy.”

  The powerboat that rammed the victim was later found abandoned near Milford; it had been reported stolen earlier in the day. At press time, police had no leads as to the identity of the person who stole the Chris Craft or the person who rammed Ernst. A police source says the boat was wiped clean of fingerprints.

  “We have no suspects, but we are continuing our investigations,” said Sgt. Gianni Aliessio, of the Bridgeport police.

  Due to the severity of his injuries, both of Ernst’s legs had to be amputated above the knee. He is now recovering in a Bridgeport hospital.

  An article a month later stated that the police were no further along on their investigation. It added that Ernst was continuing to improve while undergoing rehab. Information at the bottom of the article, however, made me sit up straight.

  “There is no basis for the rumors that Mr. Ernst had received several threatening letters just before the incident on Long Island Sound,” said Sgt. Gianni Aliessio, of the Bridgeport police. “This appears to be an unfortunate accident, pure and simple.”

  The accident was doubly tragic for Ernst. Less than a month before the accident, Ernst had received national attention for his award-winning design of the STL-42, a racing craft now being manufactured by Sea Solutions. The New York Times Sunday Magazine ran a feature article about him, labeling him, “one of the finest racing designers of the past thirty years.”

  “Ernst is a brilliant man and we are looking forward to having him return as soon as he is able,” said Mace Grisham, CEO of Sea Solutions.

  At the bottom of the article, Fay had scribbled GUNTER HOENIG? JOSEF BRAUN? I remembered that they were the two Camp Papago POWs who had never been captured. Did Fay suspect them of attempting to kill their former kapitan? As I mulled over this possibility, two items in the story stood out. In June, Ernst had made the New York Times, and shortly afterwards he had began receiving threatening letters. Then he was almost killed. Did the same person who tried to kill Ernst on Long Island Sound in 1978 succeed years later in Scottsdale? Or was the murder a mere coincidence?

  Like all decent detectives, I hated coincidences.

  With mounting excitement, I leafed through the other material. Many of Fay’s notes looked like they’d been made on the run, but with some squinting, I was able to decipher the handwriting, if not necessarily her reporter’s vowel-dropping, pseudo-shorthand.

  JBol: C li to cops, thre.

  Judith Bollinger said Chess lied when he wasn’t at the murder scene?

  And later on, MEBol: Hats hm.

  MaryEllen Bollinger hates him—her father? Or MaryEllen Bolinger said Judith Bollinger hates Chess? My bet was on the latter interpretation. Judith’s strange smile, that nursing home she’d chosen for her husband…She didn’t fit my idea of a loving wife.

  One of the more intriguing—and indecipherable—notes had to do with DepCal, which I took to be Deputy Harry Caulfield. After DepCal followed the letters CasNos/ccTrail/C/budSysNK/Van.

  That was no clearer to me than Egyptian hieroglyphics. Neither was Ols/kdSAuG?CFG.

  CFG. A person’s name?

  Another series of letters stumped me. Gemuetlichkeit. Next to it was a phone number with a west valley exchange.

  But all wasn’t lost. I also found a few names thankfully spelled out, phone numbers, many local, some in Connecticut, and a few long numerical sequences I recognized as an international exchange. Germany? Two of the local numbers, both west Phoenix exchanges, drew my attention: GEMUETLICHKEIT, (623) 555-7241, and Ian MANTZ. S, (623) 555-3820. The note after the Mantz number said, INTV RE HOENIG. Interview Ian Mantz regarding Gunter Hoenig, one of the escaped POWs? More German names followed, scribbled hastily, with phone numbers for each. But the only name circled in red was that of Ian Mantz.

  I flipped a few more pages, mostly photocopies of the same newspaper stories I had read about the Bollinger murders and the Camp Papago escapes. Nothing new there. I was about to put everything away when an envelope fell out from between the pages. It was addressed in block printing to Fay Harris at the Journal, and bore no return address.

  After reading the letter inside, I looked at the envelope more carefully. A Phoenix post mark, dated a year earlier, right after Escape Across the Desert had been released.

  Then I read the letter again.

  MISS HARRIS—ERIK ERNST MURDERED THE BOLLINGER FAMILY. DO NOT LET HIM GET AWAY WITH IT.

  There was no signature.

  ***

  I was drifting off to sleep to the sound of rain when the phone rang. The clock face told me it was 2:56 a.m.

  As woozy as I was, I recognized the voice immediately and realized that the call had been forwarded from Desert Investigations.

  “He’s after me and I can’t reach anyone. You’ve got to help!”

  “Who’s after you, MaryEllen?”

  “Clay! He’s going to kill me!”

  Clay, he of the fast fists. “Call 911. That’s what they’re there for.”

  “They’ll never find me. I’m in my car.”

  Through the phone, I could hear traffic noises. “Where?”

  “On Scottsdale Road, headed south from Camelback. I was going home from work and when I realized he was following me, I turned back toward the club. But they’re all locked up! Then I remembered that you’re close by.”

  Lucky me. Phone still pressed to my ear, I hauled myself out of bed. “Drive to my office immediately. I’ll meet you out front.” Fortunately, I still had my T-shirt on, so all I had to do was struggle into my jeans and Reeboks. Now hold on.” I swtiched to the other line, dialed 911, told them what was happening, said to send a car. When I switched back to MaryEllen, I was already halfway down the stairs, my snub-nosed .38 held barrel-up. This whole thing was probably a false alarm, but it always paid to be safe.

  Her c
ar rounded the corner through a sheet of rain as I, huddled under a waterproof jacket, reached the street. Sure enough, a late model Corvette painted Darth Vader black turned with her. If the Vette had been any closer, it would have been in her trunk. MaryEllen swerved to a halt in front of Desert Investigations and I ran around to the driver’s side, rain half-blinding me. “Keep your window rolled up,” I yelled through the glass, then turned to face the Corvette, which was now silhouetted by a lightning strike so close I could smell the ozone.

  Undeterred, a tall man with the over-muscled physique of a body-builder climbed out of the Corvette and splashed toward us. He had something in his hand, but in the rain I couldn’t see what it was. Where were the cops? “Stop there!” I yelled, my voice almost drowned out by a thunderclap.

  Clay’s baritone carried well. “Fuck off, bitch. This doesn’t concern you.”

  If I couldn’t see what was in his hand, he couldn’t see what was in mine. “Step back, Clay. I’ve got a gun and it’s aimed right at you.”

  He laughed. “As if, you stupid broad. Now clear out of my way. I need to teach that woman of mine a lesson.”

  With a great show, I cocked the .38’s hammer.

  “The fuck?” Wiping the rain out of his face, he took another step forward, although slower this time.

  “Want a bullet in the balls, stud?”

  That stopped him. Now I was close enough to see what he had in his hand: a knife so wickedly thin it could have been a scalpel. Was the lesson he had in mind for MaryEllen a disfigured face? I didn’t get a chance to ask him because a patrol car came around the corner and pulled up beside the Corvette. Two uniforms exited, both friends of mine.

  “Got some action going, Lena?” Vic Gonzales, Yaqui Indian/Hispanic, single, easy-going.

  “A man with a knife making threats.”

  “Ooooh. Big bad man with big bad knife.” Stan Jessup, two ex-wives, six kids, short temper.