by Betty Webb
He laughed. “Maybe I should come out to Arizona, see the sights.”
When I told him we didn’t have many cattle truck pile-ups anymore, what with the widened freeways and all, he sounded almost disappointed. “Oh, well. Guess I’ll have to keep watching Jeopardy for my fun. Anyway, back when Ernst had his ‘accident,’ we were all pretty sure it was an attempted homicide, but we couldn’t put a case together. When we interviewed his neighbors and co-workers, we found out the guy wasn’t exactly the King of the Prom, especially among the Jewish engineers, you dig?”
I told him I dug.
At that point, my office door opened and Jimmy walked in. I was surprised to see him, thinking he’d be out looking for houses or furniture on a Saturday, but he waved away my questioning glance and settled himself in front of the computer. I turned my attention back to Captain Aliessio.
“Beats me how Ernst made it over here after the war, but I guess the Navy figured it could use his expertise, which they did,” he was saying. “You know, like the rocket people used Von Braun. Nice, huh? All those Nazis getting fat off the American dime? Anyhoo, during our investigation, we turned up a few interesting items in Ernst’s apartment.”
Aliessio was enjoying this, stretching out the conversation as long as possible. I decided to hurry him along. “Anonymous letters, perhaps?”
He whistled. “As a matter of fact, yes. Six. All singing the same song. Whoever wrote them was convinced Ernst killed some Arizona family named Bollinger back in the Forties. We checked and found out that the surviving Bollinger son went to trial for the killings. Correct me if I’m wrong, but when the jury let him off, the prevailing belief was still that he’d done it. How’m I doing so far?”
“You’re doing fine, Captain.”
“Your guys get letters, too?”
“After the trial, the sheriff’s office received quite a few. I’ve placed a call to one of the deputies who worked on the case to see if he heard about anything else.”
We were both silent for a moment, listening to the crackle of the telephone connection between Connecticut and Arizona. The sound of fate following Ernst across the continent?
Aliessio broke the silence. “Regardless of what we let the press think, we never believed it was some stoner kid taking a joyride in a stolen boat. When we asked around the marinas, we did get a couple of leads, but they never went anywhere. One woman said she saw a stranger eyeing a nearby Cigarette Top Gun, but when he saw her watching him, he walked away.”
“Did she give a description?”
“Only that he was thin, looked sun-burned, and was on the up side of fifty.”
The up side of fifty. I caught myself holding my breath and forced myself to exhale slowly. “You said you had a couple of leads. What was the other one?”
“Some rich kid sunning herself on the deck of her daddy’s big old Hatteras-T-DD. Rough life for the privileged, eh? Anyway, she said some guy walking past asked her where the head was. Only he called it ‘the gentleman’s room,’ which she found pretty funny.”
He was going to make me ask. “Description?”
“Old and skinny. And…”
Lord deliver me from bored, retired cops. Maybe Aliessio should move to Harry Caulfield’s Apache Junction trailer park for a little action. “And?”
The satisfaction in his voice oozed through the hissy line. “She said he spoke with a German accent.”
I slammed my hand down on the desk so hard Jimmy looked around to see what was happening. “You okay?” he mouthed.
I waved him back to his computer. “She was sure the accent was German, not Swiss or something else?”
“Oh, yeah, she was sure. Seems Daddy had business interests in Berlin and sometimes took his family along with.”
Life having a finite chance for coincidence, I guessed that whoever had written the sheriff’s office after the Bollinger trial had to be the same person who’d written the Bridgeport police. I told Aliessio so.
He agreed. “Sure makes you think, doesn’t it?”
“Sure does.”
He cleared his throat. “That kid, the one they put on trial out there. What happened to him?”
When I told him, Aliessio grunted. “Before I let something like that happen to me, I’ll eat my gun.”
I remembered Chess Bollinger’s vacant eyes, his wife’s malignant smile, the dingy nursing home where Lysol couldn’t quite disguise the smell of decomposing flesh. If I kept going the way I was going, who would be around to care for me?
“I’m with you there,” I said.
On that note, we ended the call, and after asking Jimmy why he wasn’t out house-hunting and receiving a none-of-your-business look, I went back to work. Harry Caulfield still wasn’t answering his phone, so I left another message. But as soon as I hung up, the phone rang again. I looked at the caller I.D. and was pleased to see that Harry Caulfield had returned my call. He’d probably been in the shower.
But I was wrong. The man on the phone identified himself as Detective Manuel Villapando with the Apache Junction Police Department. His voice was cool, with absolutely no inflection. A bad sign. “You just left a message on Harry Caulfield’s answering machine. Would you mind telling me what you were calling him about?”
I’d been around long enough to recognize a police investigation in progress. “Why do you want to know? Has something happened to Harry?”
“Were you close?”
Were. All my happiness at having Warren back in town dissipated. “Mr. Caulfield is helping me with an investigation.”
“And that was?”
“Please. Tell me what’s happened.”
“Mr. Caulfield was found dead in his residence this morning. He appears to have died some time last night.”
If Harry was dead, why could I still see him with his eyepatch and pirate smile, his trailer with its life-affirming sign, If The Double-wide’s A-rockin’, Don’t Come A-knockin’? Now two people involved in the Ernst investigation were dead—first Fay, now Harry. Reminding myself that professionals don’t cry, I cleared my throat. “I take it his death wasn’t natural.” Cops didn’t sound as cautious as Villapando when someone keeled over from a heart attack.
Villapando side-stepped my question. “Ms. Jones, are you going to be at your office for the next few hours? I’d like to send someone over to…”
Forget that. I owed Harry. “Detective Villapando, are you at Harry’s trailer now?”
His voice turned cautious. “Yes.”
“I’m on my way.” I slammed the phone down, and after a brief explanation to Jimmy, ran out the door.
***
I arrived at the mobile home park at the same time as Harry’s friend, Frank Oberle. The trailer was taped off, but that hadn’t kept a large crowd from forming.
“Jesus, Jesus,” Oberle muttered as he hauled himself stiffly from his battered Ford Contour. The grocery sacks sitting in the passenger’s seat were testament that he’d been out shopping. When he saw me, his face flushed with rage. “You! This is all your fault!”
He teetered forward, his knobby finger stabbing toward me. “Why’d you have to get him involved in all this shit again? You see what’s happened, huh, don’t you?”
I shielded my face from that accusatory finger. “Mr. Oberle, I didn’t mean…”
To my relief, the door to Harry’s trailer opened and a dark face peered out. “I take it you’re Ms. Jones.” The man spotted Oberle, who was about to wrench open the Jeep’s door to get at me. “Don’t get physical with her, Frank, or I’ll have to take you in.”
I noticed that I was “Ms. Jones,” but Oberle was “Frank.” They knew each other. Well, Apache Junction was still a relatively small town. “Are you Detective Villapando?”
“The same. You can come in for a minute as long as you don’t touch anything.” Then, to Oberle, “You wait outside. You don’t need to see this. I’ll come out and explain things as soon as I’ve finished with Ms. Jones here. In the mea
ntime, why don’t you go put your groceries away before they spoil. I’ll catch up with you later.”
Fortunately, Oberle did as Villapando suggested, so I hopped out of the Jeep and followed the detective into the trailer. The sea of crime scene techs parted, leaving me an unobstructed view of the mess on the floor. At first, the scene before me made no sense. Harry lay on his stomach, surrounded by what appeared to be blood-spattered snow. After a closer look, I realized the “snow” was feathers, probably the remnants of a ghetto silencer, which was nothing more than a pillow draped over a gun to baffle sound. Gang-bangers and mobsters sometimes used this method because it was cheap and more or less effective.
Villapando’s voice brought me back. “What kind of weapon do you carry, Ms. Jones?”
When I opened my carry-all and showed him the .38, he didn’t ask me to take it out. No surprise there. Judging by the amount of blood and feathers in the room, the murder weapon was probably something more along the lines of a 9-mm, like the gun that took Fay down.
Villapando gave me a severe look. “I checked you out.”
“Of course you did.”
He gestured around the room with a brown hand. “You have any ideas on this?”
I told him everything, with the exception of my visit to Ian Mantz/Hoenig and the existence of Gunter Hoenig’s journals. Maybe I would part with that information later, maybe not. For now, there was no point in dragging the Mantz family secret into this. “There were a couple of things I needed to get more information on from Harry, that’s why I kept calling,” I finished up.
“Such as?” Villapando stared at me like a scorpion eyeing a centipede.
“Such as the anonymous notes accusing Ernst of murder, which supposedly turned up not long after Chess Bollinger’s trial. I wanted to ask Harry if the notes were still around, and if so, could he arrange for me to take a look at them.”
“To compare them to the notes in Connecticut? We can help you with that.”
I doubted it. Villapando would probably keep any information he discovered to himself. Unlike Captain Kryzinski, he owed me nothing. Then again, I didn’t owe Villapando anything, either.
Which he knew. “So you think whoever killed the reporter is the same person who killed Caulfield?”
“Probably. Your ballistics people can confirm it.”
He gave me a wry smile. “Probably.”
Time to lay my cards on the table, although I knew it would net me nothing. “Detective Villapando, I’ve shared with you. Now share with me.”
He didn’t answer right away, and when he did, he confirmed my suspicions about the lack of cooperation I was likely to receive from the sheriff’s office. “There’s not much I can tell you at this point. Pending autopsy, I’d say Mr. Caulfield was killed sometime late last night, but no one heard anything other than a couple of backfires, which they’re now certain were gunshots. No one saw anyone arrive or leave. No one knows if Mr. Caulfield had enemies.”
Or maybe the residents of the trailer court didn’t feel like talking to the police. One thing this case had taught me was that for all their seeming frailty, the elderly can be as wicked as the rest of us.
Since I had nothing more to add, Villapando dismissed me. As I turned to go, he added, “You’re not planning to leave town, are you?”
“I seldom do.” Especially now that I would soon be the only employee at Desert Investigations.
As I reached my Jeep, Frank Oberle came back, this time on foot. “You!” The finger came up again.
Not wanting to get my eye poked out, I peeled out of there as fast as I could.
***
“Did you forget something?” Warren, crackling over a bad cell phone connection.
I’ve always hated people who talk on their cell phones while speeding along the freeway, but I was so eager to blot the scene at Harry’s trailer out of my mind that when mine rang, I’d answered immediately. Something else to feel guilty about.
“Forget what?”
“It’s one-forty-five. You were supposed to meet me at the set for lunch at one.” He sounded furious.
The semi next to me blared its air horn at a dogging Infiniti, nearly making me jump out of my skin. “Sorry. I…I got caught up in something.” Phone pressed to ear, I edged over to the exit ramp, Warren nagging at me all the while. The light was with me, and after hanging a right, I pulled to a stop in a Dairy Queen parking lot. The aroma of overcooked chili dogs wafted from the building, merging with the odor of automobile emissions. As it usually did when I was upset, my stomach rumbled.
Warren continued to rant. “Where are you? I hear traffic.”
“I’m at a Dairy Queen outside of Apache Junction, off I-60.” I flashed back on what I’d seen in Harry’s trailer. So much for putting it out of my mind. “For your information, Harry Caulfield’s been murdered. I was at the crime scene, talking to the cops.”
“Caulfield? Isn’t that the guy…?”
“Frank Oberle’s friend. The guy with the eyepatch. You met him the day he came out to the set to keep Frank company.”
A silence. Then, “Lena, I don’t think you should be involved in that case any more. In fact, I want you to pull out.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard what I said. Quit the Ernst case. Now.” He sounded less like a prospective lover than a Hollywood director used to being obeyed. The tiger showing its true stripes?
I spoke carefully, not wanting to provide a spectacle for the gaggle of teenagers lined up at the Dairy Queen window. “Did you just give me an order?”
“Of course I did. You either give up that case or I’ll…”
“Or you’ll what?” I could hear my teeth grind as cars rushed past. No one tells Lena Jones what to do. No one.
“Or…or…” He paused, as if aware of what was about to happen. “Baby, I…”
Baby? The guilt and stress of the past few days rose up, and I snapped, “Cut the Hollywood crap, Warren. My name’s Lena, not Baby. And if you want to continue this ridiculous conversation, you’ll have to call me later.” Like in twenty years.
Ending the call, I stashed the cell back in my carry-all. Then I shut the Jeep off and joined the teenagers in line. Maybe a chili dog would erase the memory of Harry Caulfield’s bloody trailer.
***
Later that afternoon I was sitting on my cactus wood sofa, nursing my guilt and flipping back and forth in Gunter’s journals when a phone call rolled over from Desert Investigations. Jimmy had obviously left for the day. I picked it up and heard Beth Osmon’s voice.
“Jack came by this morning and told me he has to fly back to Mississippi on business.” She sounded pretty cheery for a woman suffering from a broken heart. “He offered me the opportunity to invest in a Tupelo shopping mall, so of course I wrote him a check.”
Of course? Jack Sherwood/Rinn was a scam artist who specialized in lonely rich women. I’d given her proof of that only the day before. “Beth, um, you’ll probably not see your money again. Remember what I told…”
“It was just a couple hundred thou. Here’s the deal, Lena. Since he’s given me a phony name and asked for money for a phony project, he’s now committed a crime and can be prosecuted. Right?”
The situation was more complicated than that. Since she’d given him the check in Arizona, prosecution should begin here, but since he was on his way back to Alabama, jurisdiction could turn into a snake’s nest. Not to mention the fact that the courts were backlogged already. However, I told her to go ahead and file a complaint with Scottsdale PD.
“That’s not enough. I want to confront him.”
Even though she couldn’t see me, I shook my head. “That’s never a good idea. We don’t know how violent he is. Remember, he’s probably been using false names all over the place, and simply because no one has lodged an official complaint against him doesn’t mean he hasn’t physically assaulted someone.”
“Which is why I want you to be with me.”
I
stifled a groan. Did she think Sherwood/Rinn would be stupid enough to return to Arizona now that he had her money? “He won’t be coming back, Beth. He’s probably…”
She cut me off. “Of course he won’t. That’s why I went down to Scottsdale North yesterday afternoon and swore out a complaint. The police chief’s a friend of mine, so he’s expediting it. But I don’t want to see Jack merely prosecuted, I want satisfaction! Let’s fly out to Alabama and confront him there. In his home, in front of his wife. If she knows what he’s been doing, I want to prosecute her, too. For conspiracy. I want to see them all rot in prison.”
This woman scorned had enough fury for a bushel of them, and while I admired her spunk, I was less thrilled by the scenario she’d laid out. From what Eddy Joe had told me, Hamilton, Alabama, was a small town located more than ninety miles northwest of citified Birmingham, and as usual in small towns, Sherwood/Rinn would have deep roots there and a wide circle of friends. What good could such a confrontation do, other than give Beth a chance to vent? Remembering that the couple also had four children, I also wasn’t crazy about bringing Mrs. Sherwood/Rinn into the mix. What would happen to them if Mommy and Daddy both went to prison? If no relatives were available to take them in, they would wind up in foster homes. Given what I knew about some foster homes, I would rather see Alea Sherwood/Rinn go free, even if she was her husband’s partner in crime. Of course, I wasn’t about to tell Beth that.
“It’s really not…”
“I’ll triple what I’m paying you. Plus pay all expenses.”
I sat up straight. With Jimmy soon leaving for Southwest MicroSystems, Desert Investigations would be strapped for cash. “Uh…”
“Make that quadruple.”
If I held out a little longer, would she go quintuple? I decided not to chance it. “When do you want to fly out?”
“Tomorrow.”
Sunday? Oh, what the hell. There was little more I could do on the Ernst investigation until Monday, and Southern towns were supposed to be quiet on Sundays, what with everyone either in church or barbequing. Besides, it would do me good to get out of town and help me through the increasing load of guilt I was carrying over Fay’s—and now Harry’s—deaths. “Sounds good to me,” I told her. “I’ll make the airline reservations and notify Eddy Joe Hughey in case he’s free and wants to drive to Hamilton with us.”
