Desert Run

by Betty Webb

  ***

  Ian Mantz lived in Arrowhead Ranch, which wasn’t an actual ranch at all, merely an upscale subdivision on the west side of Phoenix. It was an easy commute to his Glendale office, although a colorless one, with strip malls and subdivisions lining the entire route. In the dusk, though, with a gaudy Arizona sunset spreading its rosy light over the valley, the faux Mediterranean buildings almost fit the landscape. After getting lost in a maze of curved streets, we found Ian’s house at the end of a cul de sac, framed by identical twin palms almost dwarfing the two-story stucco-and-glass structure.

  “Nice.” But there was no enthusiasm in Jimmy’s voice. I’d been around him long enough to know that he much preferred his reservation trailer to the nicest suburban dwelling. Then I remembered he’d spent weeks house-hunting in subdivisions even more banal than this. Why does love make people crazy?

  “I guess.” I preferred my little walk-up apartment, too. “Well, let’s do it.” We exited my Jeep (Jimmy had left his truck back at Desert Investigations) and walked up to a massive mahogany door that looked like it had been built for giants. Before returning to the office, Jimmy had driven back to the rez to change into something more appropriate—clothes that matched—and I’d donned the caramel-colored pants suit I’d bought at a designer’s resale shop. But I still felt shabby compared to the elegant woman who opened the door.

  “Willkommen!” A brunette with almond eyes and honey-colored skin, Huong Mantz’s accent was more Vietnamese than German. A wartime marriage? While the lines around her eyes and mouth proved that she was no longer young, her svelte model’s figure only added to the elegance of her white linen dress.

  Ian stood behind her, smiling proudly. He was flanked by four young women, three of them so alike in their dark-eyed brunette beauty that they could have been triplets, offset by one slightly older blond who had inherited her father’s blue eyes. Racing along the entryway, a Schnauzer yapping at their heels, were several of Ian Mantz’s grandchildren, ranging from brunettes to redheads to blonds: the American pot was melting nicely in the Mantz household. The din was such that I wanted to turn around and flee. Only my duty to Rada Tesema, as well as the delicious aromas wafting from the kitchen, kept me there.

  As Huong led Jimmy and me into their elegant two-story living room, I admired the Mantz’s good taste, a mixture of East and West. The oyster-colored silk sofas and chairs were subtle enough not to detract from the vivid rugs or the tall red laquer curio cabinet decorated with brilliant dragons highlighted by ivory insets and gold leaf. Contrasting with all this Asian splendor were some of the worst oil paintings I had ever seen: a gaudy rendering of the Grand Canyon looking like a Sherwin-Williams factory had exploded in it, and several hapless portraits of desert wildlife that displayed an abysmal lack of anatomical accuracy.

  Ian didn’t notice my astonishment. “First we’ll have dinner, then some friendly conversation. And then…” Ian smiled at his wife and daughters. They smiled back. “And then we have something to give you.”

  Dinner was as good as it smelled, a mixture of East and West, with a choice of sauerbraten or lemon grass chicken as main dishes, and everyone including the children ate with gusto. By the time we were finished, there wasn’t enough left on the plates to give to the Schnauzer. After a dessert of Sachertorte, Huong herded her grandchildren into the family room to watch sit-coms while the rest of us filed back to the living room.

  “You probably wonder why the girls didn’t bring their husbands,” Ian said, as we settled ourselves.

  The four “girls,” who ranged somewhere between twenty and thirty, smiled in unison. “Grosvati, which is what we called Granddad, was the big family secret—even from us—for the first years of our lives,” explained Ilsa, the blonde. “Dad didn’t tell us the truth about him until we were old enough to keep our mouths shut. When we married, we didn’t even tell our husbands. Especially Silke. Her husband’s a cop. Really old school, too.”

  Silke pulled a sour face. “I’m nuts about the guy, but his legalistic ass is as tight as a crab’s.”

  “Silke!” Huong’s hands fluttered to her face.

  “Sorry for the language, Mom, but Bill would have turned us all in for harboring a fugitive and you know it.”

  Whoever thought women couldn’t keep a secret had never met the Mantz women. With a conspiratorial smile toward Ilsa, Silke resumed her story. “After Grosvati’s funeral a few years back, Dad called a family conference and told the guys everything. They were pissed—sorry again, Mom—but since it no longer mattered, they decided not to let the cat out of the bag. I guess they decided it was preferable to live with a big bunch of liars than see us dragged off to jail. Still, they wanted to be left out of this little gathering, so they’re all over at Ilsa’s house, drinking beer and playing cards.”

  Ian waved his daughter into silence. “So now you know the big family secret, Ms. Jones. Are you going to turn us in? Or repeat anything we’ve told you?”

  I imagined my smile was as wry as his as I answered his question with another of my own. “You’re not hiding any more illegal aliens, are you?”

  He raised his hand in the Boy Scout’s salute. “No Islamic terrorists, no IRA thugs, no undocumented yard workers from south of the border.”

  “Then your secret’s safe with me.” But I’d learned little more than I already knew when I left Ian’s office, so why had he invited me to dinner? To illustrate what a nicely blended American family Gunter Hoenig had established? If dinner hadn’t been so delicious I would have felt downright crabby.

  As Jimmy and I stood up to leave, a look passed between them all. Then, after receiving a silent chorus of nods, Ian gestured for us to wait and left the room. When he returned, he carried three fat cardboard boxes from Kinko’s. “This is for you. It’ll tell you everything you need to know about my father. But promise me you won’t turn it over to the press or the police.”

  I considered his request and answered with a half-truth. “O.K. I promise.” If there was anything in the box that would help free Rada Tesema, I’d break my word in a heartbeat. But the Mantzes weren’t dumb. Anything more incriminating than the information they had already given me would probably be long gone.

  Ian placed the Kinko’s boxes in my hands. “For you, then. The journals of Gunter Hoenig.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Another late night. Before Jimmy and I left the Mantz household, Ian explained that Silke, the only fluent German-speaker in the family, had years earlier translated Gunter’s journals into English and given each daughter a copy. Mine were copies of copies, blurred and faded, but as complete as those that would one day be handed down to his grandchildren. Still, I planned to keep a sharp eye out for any interruptions in the narrative flow that might indicate a page had been removed.

  Back home in my apartment, I propped myself up in my Lone Ranger bed and began reading. Like many journalers, Gunter turned out to be a pack rat, saving any printed snippet that captured his attention, so the first box I picked up not only contained journal entries dating from the Sixties, but a host of newspaper clippings ranging from comic strips to news items. Overwhelmed, I put that box aside and picked up another, and was happy to see on top an entry dated August 28, 1945, soon after Gunter Hoenig’s marriage to Eva Schmidt, the girl who saved his life. As I read, I realized that by then, the escaped POW had already assumed the identity of Gerhardt Mantz, a cousin of the Schmidt family who had immigrated from Germany before America entered the war. The real Gerhardt Mantz had moved to Alaska to look for gold in the bush, then disappeared. Despite a search by officials and a few relatives, he was never found and was given up for dead. It was Eva’s father who told Gunter to take this long-lost cousin’s name.

  To my disappointment, the journal said little about Camp Papago or Gunter’s few months on the run. However, it did detail his fear of being discovered and hanged as a spy. After the Reich surrendered and the war with Germany ended, his tone lightened and for a few entrie
s he wrote hopefully about emerging from hiding. But with the beginning of the Nuremberg Trials and the revelations of Nazi atrocities in the concentration camps, he changed his mind. A one-line entry dated December 4, 1945, said:

  I am ashamed to be German.

  A few pages later, next to Gunter’s own handwriting, he had saved a clipping of an Associated Press article dated Dec. 17, 1945. It detailed some of the items entered into evidence at the Nuremberg Trials. One of them was a lampshade made of tattooed human skin.

  Gunter’s note, scratched in the margin, said, Germany has become a land of ghosts.

  He never mentioned his homeland again.

  The next few years contained entries about work, making new friends, his happiness at becoming a naturalized American citizen—albeit under an assumed name—and his sorrow that he and Eva could not seem to have children. Then I came across an entry dated, July 14, 1946.

  Today Gerhardt Mantz is a father! This morning, my beloved Eva gave me a beautiful son. We have named him Ian. The doctors say Eva will have no more babies, so we will wrap our Ian in a blanket of love large enough to cover ten. If only my good friend Josef, along with his wife and child, were all here to toast the future with schnapps. We would sing until dawn.

  But I guess I will never see Josef again. Like me, he probably abandoned Das Kapitan. I pray he made it back to Germany to be with his own true love. But wherever he is, may the good God be with him.

  Ernst did not appear again in Gunter’s journal until June 12, 1978. In an entry at the bottom of the page, he wrote:

  Kapitan still lives. This can not be allowed. I remember Joyce Bollinger’s eyes pleading with me, my failure…

  I flipped to the next page only to find out that the sentence remained incomplete. Had someone removed the page? The next few pages were not only out of order, but were interspersed with more newspaper clippings that didn’t seem to have anything to do with anything, other than to display Gunter’s own wide interests. I leafed through them in increasing frustration until I struck pay dirt about three-quarters of the way through, where—stuck to the back of a recipe for Sachertorte—I found a Darien, Connecticut, newspaper clipping dated May 12, 1978. It had a photograph of Erik Ernst receiving an award for his design of the STL-42 racing sloop. Did someone send this to Gunter, or did he discover it on his own?

  If memory served, Ernst had his boating accident in June of 1978. I resolved to check my case notes the next morning. Just a few pages away from the newspaper clipping was another journal entry. This one had me shaking my head in amazement.

  September 5, 1988

  Too late I have learned you can not save someone from himself. I have tried to help Joyce Bollinger’s one surviving child. I believed that since there have been miracles in my own life—my beloved Eva is the greatest among them—so why could there not be miracles in his?

  But my efforts have been in vain. The troubled boy I tried so hard to help has grown into a bad man. He was cruel to his first wife, and now he is cruel to his second, and even his little girl.

  It is time for me to turn away from him.

  Joyce Bollinger, I have failed to save your son, just as I failed to save you. May you and the good God forgive me.

  A few more entries, all out of chronological order, showed that for almost three decades, whenever Chess Bollinger screwed up, Gunter had picked up the pieces. Hiding behind fictitious names, Gunter bailed Chess out of jail again and again and in some cases even paid his fines.

  Then the journals ran out of steam. From the drama of Chess’ messed-up life, they shifted to family matters. One entry bragged about Gunter’s new son (no date, but I figured it had to be in the Sixties), one rhapsodized about his wife (She grows more beautiful each day!), and one mentioned Ian’s new wife: Huong is amost as beautiful as my Eva, but in a different way! Bored nearly to tears, I read about Gunter’s granddaughters (God has blessed me!), and the advent of two great-grandchildren who—according to Gunter—were the most beautiful and brilliant children to ever grace the earth. Tolstoy said that happy families were all alike, but he left out the part about them also being boring. Now Gunter’s familial happiness was putting me to sleep.

  Disappointed, I tried the last box and, to my delight, saw that these pages were more organized. Going straight to the last entry, I found one dated September 14, 1999, a brief paragraph about a trip he and Eva planned to take to Edmonton, Canada, to visit her sister, who was in failing health.

  A man may pass, but his family endures, Gunter wrote in that last entry. His words proved prophetic.

  The next page—obviously added as a eulogy by someone other than Gunter—was a copy of a short clipping from the Calgary Sun, dated September 26, 1999.

  RED DEER, ALBERTA——Thirty-two cars were involved in a chain reaction accident late last night just south of Didsbury when a truck carrying farm equipment jackknifed trying to avoid a disabled vehicle. As of press time, eight people were confirmed dead, including an elderly couple from Phoenix, Arizona. The names of the victims are being withheld pending notification of their families.

  “Huh!” I sat back on my pillows and began to think. Why would a man of such advanced age as Gunter Hoenig—who must have easily been in his eighties—drive all the way to Canada? If his sister-in-law was ailing, why not simply fly? Then I remembered that earlier the same year, Gunter ran into Ernst at the German-American club. Had Ernst, seeing that his old crew member was alive and well, suspected Gunter had driven the boat that crashed into him and threatened to go to the police? Perhaps the visit to Canada wasn’t meant to be a mere visit. Perhaps it was a final hiding place, and as such, Gunter had wanted to haul along family mementos that he didn’t dare leave to the mercy of the U.S. Postal Service.

  It made sense. But a jackknifed truck destroyed all of Gunter Hoenig’s carefully laid plans.

  As I continued to search through the box, I found several loose items: a copy of the couple’s obit from the Arizona Republic and some “Humor in Uniform” columns from Reader’s Digest. Smiling, I leafed through Gunter’s amateurish drawings: submarines that looked more like Bratwurst than U-boats, improbably structured horses, cats, dogs, birds and even children—or maybe they were Christmas elves; it was hard to tell. Indeed, Gunter’s drawings were rough enough to verge on the abstract, and at times I could hardly tell if their subjects were animal, vegetable or mineral. Now I understood the reason for the clumsy oil paintings in Ian Mantz’s house; filial love was blind. I studied the drawings, wincing at Gunter’s attempt to capture nature with a less-than-talented eye. For a few minutes I tried to decipher one particularly wobbly piece, then finally gave up and looked at my clock. Two forty-six a.m. I was in for another red-eye morning.

  My prediction proved to be accurate, but Gunter Hoenig’s journal wasn’t the reason.

  ***

  Saturday dawned clear and crisp, but halfway through Fay Harris’ funeral, the skies clouded over again. Kryzinski stood stoically through the graveside service, even though his eyes grew more alarmingly hollow with every word the minister spoke. Fay’s co-workers at the Journal provided a chorus of sobs. Many of the journalists looked not only sorrowful but frightened, as if they were worried about the enemies they might make covering their own beats. Warren, who’d returned from L.A. on the red-eye, stood beside me. From the way his hands were shaking, I wondered briefly about his own relationship with Fay, then dismissed the thought. He’d liked and respected her, that was all. As for me, I was so overwhelmed by grief and guilt that I could only nod when Warren asked me to lunch with him on the set.

  When the service ended and I finally made it back to Desert Investigations, I tried to work, more convinced than ever that the Bollinger, Ernst and Fay Harris killings were all connected. Outside the office, the usual hordes of tourists strolled Main Street, but this time I’d taken the precaution of keeping the lights off. There was still enough light coming through the picture window to work in, but depressed, I just sat there for
a while staring off into space. Instead of trying to work, I should probably have taken Warren’s advice and followed him over to the set.

  Finally rousing myself from my guilt-induced stupor, I called Information and got the phone number for the Bridgeport, Connecticut, Police Department. Knowing that police forces everywhere were open on Saturday—a popular day for mayhem—I called and asked for Sgt. Carmine Aliessio. The receptionist informed me that Captain Aliessio had retired the previous year, but she helpfully put me through to his replacement. Captain Homer Swayze listened to my story, told me the files on the Ernst case were probably in storage somewhere “across town,” but that he’d call his pal Carmine to see if he was interested in talking to me. Figuring I’d reached a dead end, I gave him my phone number, said that Aliessio could call me collect, and hung up.

  To my surprise, Aliessio called me mere minutes later. He was as forthright as retired cops can be, no longer having to worry about bureaucratic red tape or manipulative defense attorneys. “So somebody finally nailed the bastard? Ha! Second time’s a charm.” His voice was hoarse but chipper, as if he’d been waiting a long time for someone to talk to. Through a connection so bad that it hissed, I thought I heard a TV in the background, tuned to a game show.

  “I take it you didn’t think the incident in 1983 was an accident.”

  A laugh. “You think right. The witnesses said the Chris Craft headed straight for him and never once tried to turn.”

  “I’m surprised you remember it so well after all these years.”

  “It’s hard to forget a double amputation on the water. Ever worked one?”

  I informed him that while some areas in Arizona had man-made lakes big enough for power boats, Scottsdale didn’t. “Messiest thing I ever worked on the job was a seven car pile-up with a loaded cattle truck.”