by Betty Webb
Regardless of Ernst’s lack of liquid assets, his estate would probably realize some money from the sale of his house. With no family or friends, he could have left the residue to a battered women’s shelter, a crisis nursery, an animal rescue organization, or even to Gemuetlichkeit. But he hadn’t, so the government would get it all. The self-centered man died as he lived, with no thought for anyone other than himself. While I was still thinking about Ernst’s financial mess, the phone rang. When I picked it up, I heard the voice I didn’t want to hear. Warren.
“Dinner’s off, Lena. Lindsey’s on her way to Scottsdale General Hospital and I’m headed there now.”
I tightened my grip on the handset. First Ernst, then Harry Caulfield, then Fay Harris. Then, almost, me. Now Lindsey. Oh, and Crystal Chandler. Standing right in the middle of this unlucky group was Warren. I took a deep breath to settle my thoughts, then asked what happened.
“Accidental overdose, probably. She’s done it before. I stopped by her room this morning to plan today’s location shots and found her on the floor. The EMTs just took her away. I…I think she’s going to be all right, but I need to be there for her.”
Like he’d been there for Crystal Chandler? “What kind of overdose?”
“We don’t know yet.”
The other day, before things had gone to hell in a handbasket, Warren had said something about Lindsey being fragile. Is this what he’d meant?
“Did you see a note?”
A long pause. Then, “No.”
He was lying. Lindsey had left a note, but he didn’t want me to know, so maybe it was a suicide attempt. But while Lindsey hadn’t been thrilled over my developing relationship with Warren, I would never have pegged her as the suicidal type. Given her hard-edged manner, I was more inclined to see Lindsey as a woman who might cause harm to others, never herself. Then again, what the hell did I know? “Do you want me to meet you at the hospital?”
“Thanks for asking, but considering everything, it’s probably not a good idea. I’ll call you when I find out more.” He hung up without so much as a good-by.
Suddenly exhausted, I leaned my head back against my chair and closed my eyes. Just when I believed I’d figured people out—Ernst, Warren, and even Lindsey—they pulled an about face on me.
Chapter Twenty-Three
When the corrections officers escorted Tesema into the visiting area, I could see that his bruises were healing nicely, but now that I wasn’t distracted by them, I realized he’d also dropped a lot of weight. From worry, no doubt. I didn’t blame him. His situation was no better than before. At least he could help me fill in a few blanks.
“Mr. Tesema, I found out that Kapitan Ernst was no longer on Loving Care’s client roster. Was he giving you money under the table? And if so, did he threaten to let the company know about it? Is that what the big fight was about, not your Star of David?” There was no point in being delicate. I had to start finding out the truth about everyone connected with the case. There had been too many lies, too many deaths.
He looked alarmed. “No, no! I would not accept such money. That is against the rules.”
Although I probably shouldn’t have, I believed him. “Then why did you continue working for him without getting paid?”
A flush spread over his dark skin. “I feel sorry for Das Kapitan.”
Sorry for that old Nazi? Then I remembered my own jumbled emotions when I’d discovered the extent of Ernst’s financial woes. You didn’t have to like someone to pity them. “How long did you work for him without getting paid?”
He squirmed in his seat, looked at the floor, the walls. Then he sighed. “Since Loving Care tell me to stop. Six, seven weeks. In beginning I argue with them, say he was helpless, sick. They tell me State of Arizona would help, gave me some forms to take to him on my last day. I show forms to Das Kapitan, but he just begin yelling. Say he go down to Loving Care and tell them what he think. But then he…”
Tesema hung his head.
“He what?”
“He cry.”
Oh, Jesus.
Tesema looked up. “When Das Kapitan stopped cry…When he could talk again, he told me he only needed me free for short time, that he would make big money soon, then he sign back up with Loving Care and everything go back the way it was.”
It sounded like castles in the air to me, because how could a jobless, legless ninety-year-old make “big money”? I knew that Warren paid Ernst a small amount for his participation in the documentary, as he had Fay Harris and Frank Oberle. But not enough to keep Ernst living in the manner in which he’d been accustomed. Besides, Living History Production’s checks would only continue as long as filming continued—two months. Not enough to make any real difference to Ernst’s dire situation. Since Das Kapitan wasn’t stupid, he must have been talking about another source.
“Did Ernst tell you where the money would come from?”
“He said someone owed him.”
“Someone owed him money?”
He squirmed in his chair again, looking even more uncomfortable than he had before. “No. He said he knew secret. That the secret was like gold.”
There the phrase was again, a “secret like gold.” A crazy idea entered my head. After the escape, Ernst and the other two German submariners—crew mates Gunter Hoenig and Josef Braun—hid for several weeks in the Superstition Mountains, the supposed site of the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine. Could knowledge of the mine possibly have been what Ernst was hinting at? After some hard thinking, I discarded the theory. If Ernst had somehow found the mine, he wouldn’t have waited decades to claim his riches. His “secret like gold”—if it truly existed—had to be something else.
***
In every investigation, there comes a time when you realize that, because of your original lack of knowledge about the case, you didn’t ask the right questions. So you have to start all over again from the beginning. Re-interview the same witnesses and re-think the same material.
I hadn’t talked to Frank Oberle since Harry Caulfield’s murder, so as soon as I left the Fourth Street Jail, I fished my cell out of my carry-all and punched in his number. When he answered, the weakness in his voice shocked me. He no longer sounded like the vigorous man who had so enjoyed recounting his Camp Papago experiences for Warren’s camera. At first he refused to see me, but finally gave way and made an appointment to meet for dinner at a popular Apache Junction eatery.
“They got a nice senior discount there,” he explained.
Eager to mend fences, I said, “Oh, don’t worry about that. Dinner is on me.”
He snorted. “I’m not taking a damn thing from you, missy.”
Missy. Dinner promised to be an uncomfortable affair.
***
It was. When I arrived at the restaurant, I found Oberle waiting near the entrance for me, a chip the size of Arizona on his shoulder. “Don’t know why I’m doin’ this, missy. My friend Harry would still be alive if it wasn’t for you. By the way, what the hell happened to you?”
“Fell into the Cross Cut Canal.”
He smiled as if the prospect of my near-death experience delighted him.
The restaurant was crowded with seniors taking advantage of the discount. As the waitress led us, at Oberle’s request, toward a corner booth in the smoking section, I checked out the plates. “Senior” apparently meant microscopic portions; a few teaspoons of entree, a daub of mashed potatoes, a couple of broccoli florets, a tiny roll. It would have taken two orders to fill me up, not that I was eligible for the senior discount anyway. I was at least thirty years away from that happy day.
After we were seated and I’d coughed a few times as cigarette smoke swirled around me, I again recounted my reasons for wanting to meet with Oberle, ending with, “Perhaps Harry said something to you that might lead to whoever killed him. I’m almost certain his death had something to do with the Bollinger killings.”
Scowling, Oberle took a menu from the waitress. “Harry told ya everythin
g ya need to know.”
“If you don’t mind, I’d like you to go over it again. Such as…” I stopped as the waitress wrote down our orders—for Oberle the senior pot roast, for me a chef’s salad, not senior-size—then I continued. “Such as Harry’s theories on the Bollinger murders. From what I can remember, he was pretty certain Chess didn’t kill his family, that someone else did.”
“Yeah, Harry was always makin’ excuses for the little shit.”
“Why do you think he did?”
Oberle shrugged. “Who knows why anyone does anything? I’d bet my double-wide on Chess being the killer, regardless of what those idiots on the jury decided. That boy was never any good. Matter of fact, I wouldn’t put it past him to still be killin’ people. They say once murder gets in your blood it’s hard to let go, like that Bundy guy. He developed a real taste for it.”
“Ted Bundy was a serial killer, and that’s a whole different thing. Most murders are one-offs, like the Bollingers’.”
“One-offs, my ass. Total up the body count, missy. We got the Bollingers, we got that reporter girl, we got Harry. Do the math.” The dark gleam in his eye made me suspect he would dearly have loved to add me to the list.
“You left out Ernst.”
“Yeah, old Ernst. Who cares who killed that sonofabitch? I sure don’t. Talk about a creep. Ha! He coulda gave Chess lessons. Back at the camp Das Kapitan High and Mighty was always tellin’ everyone to go here, go there, actin’ like he was the guard and we was the prisoners. Whoever chopped his legs off with that boat did everybody a favor. I’m just sorry they didn’t get his friggin’ head.”
“They eventually did,” I said, remembering the mess in the wheelchair.
“Boo-hoo.” He flashed another smile.
Then I looked behind me and saw that his smile wasn’t to celebrate Ernst’s death. It was for the waitress, bearing our food.
As I’d hoped, Oberle loosened up as we ate. He restated everything Harry told me about the Bollinger investigation, every now and then adding a few new nuggets. Such as the fact that Harry told him Joyce Bollinger had been about to divorce her husband, an action rare in the Forties. “He said a family friend stated that Joyce knew Edward was cheatin’ on her, that he gave her, uh, that she got…this…this disease.” He dropped his voice and leaned over the table. “You understand what I’m talkin’ about?”
My mouth being full of iceberg lettuce, I simply nodded. Sexually transmitted diseases weren’t new, although they were more freely discussed in these free-wheeling times. It occurred to me that if Edward Bollinger played around on his wife enough to contract an STD, he had also widened the field of possible murder suspects. A jealous husband, or perhaps an infected and discarded girlfriend, providing she’d been strong enough to smash in his head. Then I reminded myself that Edward hadn’t been beaten to death; he’d died via shotgun. With the muscle man of the family out of the way and the rest of them tied up, a woman could have killed the others, although it wasn’t likely.
I washed the lettuce down with some tea and waved away the cigarette smoke that kept drifting toward me from the smoking seniors surrounding us. “Who was this family friend who told Harry about that?”
“Damned if I know.”
“He never said?”
“Nah. Person’s probably dead now, anyway.” He took another bite of his pot roast.
So much for the jealous revenge theory. The chances of finding out the identities of Edward Bollinger’s paramours more than fifty years after the fact were nil, so I tried again. “Did Harry have any more theories on the case? Maybe something so vague he wasn’t comfortable sharing it with me?”
A sad smile. “Oh, Harry had a buncha theories. He said that after them bodies was removed, he took Chess for a look-around and the kid told him there was a lot of stuff missing. Food, knives, pots, a coupla sleeping bags, plus some tools his dad kept out in the shed. And the car, of course, Edward’s fancy-dancy Olds convertible, the one that made him so popular with broads. You know, show a woman a shiny car and half the time she don’t bother to check out what kinda creep’s drivin’ it.”
Remembering the Golden Hawk Warren was thinking about buying and how much I’d been impressed by it, I felt my face redden.
Fortunately, Oberle didn’t notice my discomfiture. “That missing car’s what made people first think it mighta been the Nazis. Hell, they coulda drove that car all the way to Mexico.”
I corrected him without thinking. “You mean the Germans.” Gunter Hoenig certainly hadn’t been a Nazi. And from what I’d read in Gunter’s journals, Josef Braun hadn’t been a Nazi, either, just some scared, confused draftee trying to stay alive until the war ended.
Oberle responded to my attempt at political correctness with a sneer. “Whatever.” Then his face relaxed. “Oh, hell, you’re right. Gunter and Josef, they was good boys. Always polite, always did their work. You know about them Iron Crosses they made for extra money?”
I told him I’d read about the crosses in Fay Harris’ book.
“Well, Gunter, he was the artistic type and made lots of stuff. Besides them Iron Crosses, he was always cranking out necklaces with little birds on them—roadrunners, I think—dangling from some fishing line he’d traded for a few cigarettes. He even made one for my daughter. She’s still got it. It’s real pretty.”
Remembering the crude drawings in Gunter’s journals, I doubted it. Then again, “pretty” was in the eye of the beholder. Before Oberle could continue with more jewelry descriptions, as he seemed ready to do, I nudged him back to the subject at hand. “Harry told me he was convinced the Germans had nothing to do with the murders themselves. The thefts of a few household objects, maybe, but not the murders. You said he had lots of theories. Do you remember some of the others?”
“Hell, there was so many!” He used his dinner roll to mop up the rest of the pot roast sauce. After wiping his plate clean, he lit a cigarette, and added a few smoke rings to the miasma around us while I tried to stifle a cough. “Let’s see. Oh, yeah, the Olds. Harry thought someone mighta killed them for it. Chess sure could have. Somebody said they saw the little shit driving the car around town the day of the murder, but he got alibied out. Crazy, if you ask me, because how many beige 1939 Oldsmobile convertibles coulda been tooling around Scottsdale in those days, especially with the gas rationing? Wasn’t nobody driving anywhere they didn’t have to.”
Gas rationing was something an adult would worry about, not a teenager. “The boy who alibied Chess at the trial, who said Chess was hiding in his room when the family was being murdered, how believable was he?”
“Believable enough for the jury. But you know what I thought of them. Twelve Grade A idiots. That neighbor farmer who saw them alive earlier Christmas Day after Chess supposedly took off for his buddy’s house, he was old and half-blind. Couldn’t see across the road.”
According to Oberle, Chess had been acquitted due to the testimony of his best friend and a half-blind farmer. The farmer was undoubtedly dead, but I wondered if Chess’ friend was still alive and kicking. “Do you remember Chess’ friend’s name?”
He grinned and blew another smoke ring. “Matter of fact, I do, ’cause it’s the same as my wife’s brother. Maurice.”
I wondered how many Maurices there were in Arizona. “How about the last name?”
Oberle fairly crowed. “That is his last name! Maurice. Sammy Maurice. The little bastard had two first names! That’s enough right there to drive you to a life of crime, which just between you and me and the gatepost, Sammy Maurice led. He turned out almost as bad as his buddy Chess.”
A shiver ran up my spine. “What exactly did he do, this Sammy Maurice?”
“What didn’t he do, more like. Sammy started off his illustrious career with a few shoplifts, graduated to outright burglaries, then finished up with grand theft auto. Back when the murders went down, he and Chess was so tight they’d lie for each other without turning a hair, which is why as far as I was
concerned, Chess’ alibi didn’t hold water.”
“You say ‘When the murders went down.’ What about afterwards? Did they keep up their friendship?”
He stabbed his cigarette out in the ashtray. “You catch on quick, don’t ya, missy? No, they didn’t. Harry told me that after Chess’ trial, they never talked to each other again. Ashamed, maybe.”
The shiver came back for another round. Had Chess and his friend both killed the Bollingers, but only one had been careless enough to leave bloody footprints? It occurred to me that the famous alibi served a double function. Not only did it help acquit Chess of the murder of his family, but it provided cover for Sammy Maurice as well. “Is Maurice still alive?”
“Only the good die young. Last I heard, Sammy was livin’ the high life out in Sun City.”
***
The next day was Friday, supposedly Jimmy’s last day at Desert Investigations, but instead, he gave me a reprieve, citing his extra workload and asking if he could stay on for a few more days to finish up. Somehow I managed to keep from jumping up and clapping my hands, and confined myself to a simple “By all means, if you don’t mind it eating into that R&R time you’d planned before starting at Southwest MicroSystems.”
He pulled a face. “I’ve been thinking about it, and there’s no chance I can enjoy the time off knowing that I left you with unfinished work.”
After placing a call to Sammy Maurice and making sure he’d be home later that morning, I left the office with a song in my heart.
The song lasted until I reached the film set on the edge of the Cross Cut Canal. After everything that had happened, Warren was finally getting around to shooting the scene where the Germans exited their escape tunnel, prepared to float to Mexico. Although I wasn’t yet ready to talk to Warren about his past and get his version of Crystal Chandler’s murder, I did want to find out how Lindsey was doing after her overdose. As I made my way through the crowd of extras, I could tell that Warren hadn’t been sleeping well. His blond hair looked dull and the deep shadows around his eyes almost mimicked my own bruises.
