Desert Run

by Betty Webb

  Before I could ask another question, he hung up, leaving me frowning at the phone. I sat there for a while, trying to figure out why he no longer seemed interested in the solution to his family’s murders, and reached one possible conclusion. He was growing worried over what I might find out. Remembering his biceps and his strong golf swing, I couldn’t help but wonder where he’d been when someone pushed me into the canal. But he’d never given me the chance to ask.

  I was still going through my notes on the Ernst case when the office door opened and Jimmy came in, looking as red-eyed as I did. Instead of sitting down, he placed a fat file folder on my desk, and said, “We need to talk.”

  “You and Esther make an offer on the Scottsdale Fashion Square condo?”

  “It’s not about the condo.” He frowned so deeply that even the tribal tattoo on his forehead pulled down.

  A frisson of alarm crept down my back. “Jimmy, there’s nothing wrong with Esther or Rebecca, is there?”

  He reassured me. For a moment. “They’re fine. This is about the check you wanted me to run on Warren. I was too busy to get right to it when you asked, and I’m sorrier about that than you’ll ever know. But after what happened to you yesterday, I ran him through every data base I could. It’s not like the information about him was buried deep. In fact, if we lived in L.A. or were more entertainment-oriented, we’d both probably know what I’m about to tell you.”

  Annoyed, I pushed the folder away. “A Tinseltown scandal. Big deal.”

  The folder came sliding back. “Considering that you were almost killed, I think it is.”

  It was time to say what I’d lately begun to suspect. “Jimmy, are you jealous of me and Warren?”

  He snorted with disgust. “I won’t dignify that question with an answer. Go ahead and read those printouts. Or are you afraid to find out the nasty truth behind your precious golden boy?”

  Okay, so there was some little secret Warren had kept from me; he had already hinted as much. But who didn’t have secrets, these days? Granted, Hollywood lives didn’t exactly reflect the Middle American experience, but neither did mine. Deciding that I might as well pacify my partner and make our last few days together at Desert Investigations as peaceful as possible, I picked up the folder and shoved it into my carry-all. “It’s pretty thick, so I’ll go over it tonight. I don’t have time now.”

  He snorted with disgust. “You think it’s thick, that’s nothing. To give you the full flavor of what your Mr. Warren Quinn’s been up to, I would have had to download twenty years of the Los Angeles Times, not to mention the Hollywood Inquirer. But in case you don’t find the time to go over that file tonight, I’ll sum up the essentials right here and now. What do you want me to start with? The porno movies he made or his girlfriend’s unsolved murder?”

  For a moment I was speechless, but with great effort, I managed to recover. “Which came first?” The chicken or the egg? I attempted a laugh but failed. I did well to keep my voice steady.

  Jimmy was merciless. “Porno first, then I’ll get to the girlfriend, Crystal Chandler, although they kind of run together since she was in a couple of his movies. You’ll love the titles. Stuff like Here Comes Crystal. And Crystal’s…Well, you get the idea. He made something like thirty of the damned things, about half of them starring her, using tricks he learned from his dear old dad. I’ll tell you more about Daddy in a minute. All was going great for Warren-the-Pornographer until one night fifteen years ago, when Crystal was found strangled in one of the bedrooms during a party at his house. LAPD took him in for questioning but they didn’t have enough to make a case.”

  I felt sick. “What’s this about Warren’s father? You said he learned his ‘tricks’ from him?”

  “Tony DiMeola, known as the…”

  “The Porn King.” Even I had heard of him. DiMeola frequently appeared on cable talk shows, rhapsodizing self-righteously about the First Amendment. Thomas Jefferson, were he still alive, would puke. “Oh, my God.”

  “I don’t think He has anything to do with this.”

  “But…but Warren’s last name is Quinn!”

  “Now it is. You’ll read in the printouts I gave you that after his girlfriend died, Warren went into detox—he had a big time heroin habit—and when he came out, he took his mother’s maiden name. They’re big on that out there in Tinsel Town, the name-changing stuff. Remember Barbara Hershey? In the seventies, she changed her name to Barbara Seagull. Anyway, everybody in Hollywood knows who Warren started out as, but here in the hinterlands all we know is ‘Oscar-winning-Warren Quinn.’ The porno issue, or that poor girl’s death, never comes up.”

  There was no point in listening to any more. For now. “Jimmy, print out everything. I don’t care if it’s as long as the frigging unabridged Encyclopedia Britannica. I’ll read it all tonight.” Instead of having dinner with Warren.

  He walked over to his computer and hit a few keys. For the next half-hour, the laser printer hummed and clicked as page after page hissed along the rollers. To kill time, I drank a Tab, then another, and another. By the time the printout was finished, caffeine jangled through my bloodstream. I snatched the papers up and announced I was leaving.

  Jimmy looked up at the clock. It was only two, but I was too sore at heart—and in body—to put in a full day. “Lena, don’t you want to talk first? That information I gave…”

  I headed him off at the pass. “I need to take a couple of aspirin and lie down.” Then read the rest of the printout and cry myself to sleep.

  He started to say something else, then thought better of it. “You do that. I’ll be here if you need me.”

  Yeah, for a couple more days. Then you’re leaving and taking half the company with you. I swore never to allow myself to need someone again. Or if I did, to make certain I had an attorney draw up an iron-clad non-competition contract.

  After calling Warren and putting off our dinner date until the next evening, I left for the day. As I climbed the stairs to my apartment, Jimmy’s printout felt like it weighed a ton. My idea of getting to bed early never panned out, and by the time midnight rolled around, I was still reading. But I’d also begun to feel less alarmed by Warren’s past. The Warren I knew was a far cry from the Warren who had joined his father in the porno industry, dated the help, and threw one party too many. As for the murder, Jimmy’s summation may have been colored by personal animosity. LAPD appeared to believe Warren’s story that he was in a different bedroom with a different porn actress when Crystal Chandler was strangled. They had set their sights on Rock Steady, the dead woman’s ex-boyfriend and sometime co-star. For lack of concrete proof, the case against Rock had stalled, and so the Crystal Chandler murder was eventually consigned to the Open-Unsolved Files, right along with the Black Dahlia case.

  From one point of view, the murder investigation had been good for Warren. As an article in the Hollywood Tattler phrased it on the eve of last year’s Oscar ceremony, “After Ms. Chandler’s murder, Warren Quinn—nee Warren DiMeola—took a sobering look at his life in more ways than one. He didn’t like what he saw so he checked himself into the Betty Ford Clinic for a six-week run. When he finally emerged, he dropped his father’s name—they are still estranged—and began making movies that mattered, such as Native Peoples, Foreign Chains. Vegas has given even odds that the ex-porn director will walk away from tomorrow night’s ceremony a winner.”

  In other words, all’s well that ends well and everything’s right with the world.

  Except for Crystal Chandler.

  ***

  The morning sun shone cheerily into the windows of Desert Investigations, but it did little to lighten my mood. What little sleep I had managed to get was haunted with dreams of death. I hadn’t decided yet what to do about my new knowledge: give Warren the benefit of the doubt, as I wanted to do, or break it off. We were supposed to have dinner tonight, but I was tempted to call and cancel again, saying that I was still too bruised from my ride down the Cross Cut Canal. It wou
ldn’t even be a lie. If anything, I was sorer today than yesterday.

  As I picked up the phone to call Warren, Jimmy cleared his throat to catch my attention. I put the phone down.

  “Lena, did you, ah…?”

  “Yes. I read the printout. Every last word.”

  “I’m worried about you.”

  “I’m worried about you, too.” Truth be told, Jimmy looked almost as rough this morning as I had yesterday. His hair was disheveled, he wore a clean but badly wrinkled Metallica T-shirt, faded khakis, and scuffed Nikes without socks.

  I jumped at the chance to move the spotlight away from my own troubles. “Hey, big guy? Did you dress in the dark or something?”

  “Or something.”

  In other words, his condition wasn’t up for discussion. Fine. I sipped my third cup of coffee in silence as his fingers flew along his keyboard. I had almost drained the cup when he said, “There!” The printer began spitting out pages.

  I put up my hands in a cease and desist gesture. “Please. No more about Warren, Jimmy. I have all the information I need. And then some.”

  Jimmy ignored my plea and grabbed the printout from the printer. “Erik Ernst’s finances. That’s the other thing you wanted me to look into before I…” He lowered his eyes.

  He’d started to say, “…before I leave Desert Investigations for Southwest MicroSystems.” Then he’d thought better of it. I pretended I hadn’t noticed and gave him a bright smile. “Just sum up the info for me, okay? I’ve done all the reading I care to for a while.”

  He cleared his throat again. “Ernst was flat broke. No savings, no IRAs, no investments of any kind. The insurance policy he carried at Sea Solutions lapsed years ago, so he didn’t even have that. His house is paid off, but he had a big property tax bill looming and no money to pay it. Frankly, the only thing keeping the guy afloat was his monthly Social Security and a piddly little pension from Sea Solutions. No stocks, no bonds, which isn’t that unusual with that generation. He was really in rough shape, Lena. I’m telling you, I sure wouldn’t want to be ninety and try to live on his income, especially if I had to keep shelling out a couple of thou per month to have a practical nurse to get me from my bed to my wheelchair.”

  I frowned. Although the woman I’d talked to in Connecticut said that Ernst had been a big spender with little put aside, what Jimmy described sounded just this side of penury. “Why did he have to pay for home care? I thought the state paid when you have a disability.”

  “The state helps if you’re indigent, not driving a big, fat Mercedes. Yeah, the state lets you keep your house if it’s your primary residence, but your income has to be even lower than Ernst’s to qualify for state aid. As little as he had, the combination of Ernst’s pension and his Social Security check put him over the limit, so he had to pay for home care all on his own. That’s another thing that drove his bank account into the basement.”

  I thought about that for a minute. “As broke as you say he was, he obviously had the means. And if things got really bad, he could sell the house.”

  “But he wouldn’t be in his home, then, remember. And as soon as he cashed out, the state would snatch their property taxes, and it’s a pretty hefty bill. He’d also have to pay taxes on the net he realized from the sale unless he bought another house that cost even more than his old one—which he wouldn’t and couldn’t. It’s my guess, if things continued on the way they were with him, he’d probably have lost his house over the tax bill anyway and then wound up in some low-rent, state-sponsored nursing home. Have you seen those places?”

  As a matter of fact, I had. Shady Rest, where Chess Bollinger was babbling out the end of his days. Try as I might, I couldn’t envision the vain Das Kapitan allowing himself to be moved to a place like that.

  “How about reverse mortgages? Anything like that in his files?” Reverse mortgages had become increasingly popular with elderly home owners. The bank drew up a contract, advanced them a sizeable amount every month toward their home—which they then lived on while remaining in their homes—and when they died, the bank took the house.

  Jimmy shrugged. “He could have taken one out, I guess, and it might have been a good solution for him. But I found nothing like that in his records.”

  Then I remembered something else. “Wait a minute. You say Ernst was paying Loving Care almost two thousand a month for Rada Tesema’s services. If he was so broke, where’d he get that money?”

  “He didn’t start out broke, Lena.”

  With that, Jimmy handed me a thick print-out of Ernst’s savings and checking account activities. Ernst had arrived in Arizona with a fairly healthy balance in his savings account, but over the years it had slowly dwindled. His checking account actually showed a negative balance. A couple of months ago, he had written several NSF checks, two of them to Loving Care. As I studied the bank records more closely, I saw something odd. Maybe Ernst had started off paying two thousand a month to Loving Care, but later the bill had dropped by half. Then I remembered that Tesema told me he’d begun visiting Ernst only three times a week, compared to his earlier everyday schedule.

  And I remembered something else: MaryEllen Bollinger telling me that Ernst had answered, the door right away during her wee hours visit. Since it was impossible for a legless elderly man to transfer himself from bed to wheelchair that quickly, it meant he’d been sleeping in his wheelchair.

  Pitiful.

  “Jimmy, didn’t you just say that Ernst wrote a couple of bad checks to Loving Care?”

  He nodded.

  “And they just kept sending Tesema over?”

  “Doesn’t seem likely, does it?”

  No, it didn’t. The next call I placed was to Loving Care. Myra, the young woman who answered, sounded young and inexperienced, so I took a chance. “Maybe you can help me. I’m, um, Lena Ernst, Mr. Erik Ernst’s niece, and I’m trying to clear up his estate. I see that he owes you some money?”

  Myra asked me to excuse her while she checked the records and put me on hold. By the time she came back on the line, I was listening to the third Neil Diamond song in a row and was ready to tear my hair out. “Oh, yes. Our records indicate that Mr. Ernst wrote…ah, that he owes us for two months’ services. And as you know, we did, ah, have to terminate his contract last month. For, ah, late payment and all.”

  Because he kept writing bad checks. I pretended outrage. “You mean you just cut my poor old uncle loose to fend for himself? A ninety-year-old double amputee?”

  Now Myra sounded frightened, but instead of calling her supervisor as a more experienced employee would do, she attempted to explain. “No, no, we didn’t do that. I’d just started here when we had to cut him, and I remember his service representative telling him what his options were, how he could start getting aid from the state.”

  “Is this a phone conversation you’re describing?”

  “Don’t I wish. Dial-A-Ride brought him in. He threw a big tantrum right here in the office. Everyone heard it. He called Mrs. Griffith—that’s his service representative—all kinds of names, and screamed at her that he was captain of something and captains don’t take charity, that they pay their own way.”

  “So he didn’t want the state to help.”

  “No. Mrs. Griffith was really upset, and after he left, I heard her talking to another rep about maybe calling Adult Protective Services to have them go see if he was in the first stages of dementia and no longer mentally able to see to his own welfare. In the end, they decided not to.”

  “Why was that?”

  She lowered her voice. “You won’t tell anybody I said this, will you?”

  “My lips are sealed.”

  “Mrs. Griffith decided that Mr. Ernst was just stubborn and mean, not senile.”

  Which anyone who knew Ernst could have told her. “One more question, Myra, and then I’ll let you go. If Loving Care terminated its service contract with Mr. Er…, er, with my uncle, how come his home care worker was still going out there?”


  “No he wasn’t.”

  “He wasn’t?”

  “His care provider was, let’s see, oh, yes. Mr. Tesema. A nice man, a really nice man. Our clients just love him. Anyway, Mrs. Griffith had Mr. Tesema terminate his visits back in early March. And then she gave him another client.”

  March. Yet in mid-April Tesema was still regularly showing up at Ernst’s house. I thanked Myra and ended the call.

  I hung up to find Jimmy watching me. “I heard most of that. Tesema was going over there out of the goodness of his heart, wasn’t he?”

  “That’s what it looks like.” Which brought another interesting wrinkle into the case. Loving Care would have fired Tesema if they’d known he continued to visit Ernst off the clock. Like all businesses, the home care agency needed to make a buck, and you can’t do that by giving your services away. But what if…? As soon as the thought entered my head, I shook it out. No matter how angry Ernst got at Tesema, he wouldn’t rat him out to Loving Care, which would be cutting off his nose to spite his face. Then I realized that Ernst had a track record of doing exactly that. The night of the murder he and Tesema had fought over the Star of David necklace, and he’d hurled racial insults at the very man upon whose good graces he was dependent. And there was this: Ernst’s “secret,” a “secret like gold.” Maybe he had been holding Tesema’s kindness over his head, threatening to tell Loving Care all about their situation if the already-exhausted Ethiopian didn’t increase his number of visits. Maybe Ernst even threatened to tell the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service that Tesema had been cheating his employer.

  Another visit to the Fourth Avenue Jail was in order.

  As an afterthought, I asked Jimmy one more question. “Did Ernst leave a will?”

  “Not that I could find. Looks like he died intestate.”