Desert Run

by Betty Webb

  And if I hadn’t managed to grab the bottom rung of that rusted ladder, I’d be dead, too. I wondered who Warren would have mourned for most, me or Lindsey. Not being known for my tact, I said so.

  He paled. “How can you say that? You know how I feel about you. Damn it, Lena, I fell in love with you the second you strode into that conference room and started telling me how you could make my film set more secure. You were so self-sufficient, so in control, so beautiful. That’s a combination no man in his right mind could ignore.” He tried for a smile. “And then I saw your 1945 Jeep.”

  I’d been impressed by him, too, but to paraphrase a popular Hollywood movie, handsome is as handsome does. “I’m not a big believer in love at first sight. Lust, maybe, but not love.”

  He surprised me again. He leaned forward and caressed my cheek. “Poor Lena. To live with so little trust.”

  Since the explanation for that would have taken several hours, I remained silent.

  He tried a smile. “I’m not saying I don’t feel lust for you, because you know I do. And it’s about time we did something about that instead of just drooling at each other like we have been. But lust is the very least of it. I want you to come back to Los Angeles with me, to…”

  It was my turn to stop him. “Before you go any further with this, Warren, you need to know that I ran a check on you. I know all about Here Comes Crystal and the rest of the porno crap. And I know that for a while, you were the lead suspect in the murderer of your girlfriend Crystal Chandler.”

  His mouth dropped. “You ran a check on me? When?”

  “I asked Jimmy to do it the day after I almost drowned in the canal.”

  “But the next morning, when we were having breakfast, I explained…”

  “Yeah, you said you dropped the coffee.”

  He stared at me, more than a hint of outrage in his eyes. “You saw the burns on my leg.”

  “Easy enough to fake. Remember, I saw them the next day, when you would have had time to dump any cup of coffee on yourself. Warren, I’m a detective. An ex-cop. You can’t expect me to not to be suspicious.”

  “Of everyone?”

  “Yes.”

  “What would be my motive for killing you?”

  “I haven’t figured that out yet.”

  Any self-respecting man would have gotten up and walked away then, but he didn’t. He just sat there studying me as the breeze chased a tumbleweed across the set. I would have felt better if he’d gotten angry again, but he only looked hurt. Finally he sighed and spread his hands in defeat. “I don’t know what else I can say. Just that I…” He closed his eyes for a second, then opened them again. They were the exact same color as the sky. “Just that I love you.”

  There was the “L” word again. He sure knew how to get to me. But I kept the conversation on track. “Tell me about Crystal Chandler.” I knew I was tempting him to walk away, but I didn’t care. If he did, I wouldn’t have to make a decision about him or worry about moving to L.A. to work on some television show. I could just stay here in Scottsdale and watch Desert Investigations go bankrupt.

  “You already know what there is to know. Crystal was strangled to death at my house, and her killer was never caught.”

  “That’s right. And you had an air-tight alibi.”

  He looked off at one of the buttes, where a dust devil was swirling up the slope. A hiker was trying to scurry out of its way. “You could say so, since I was in bed with three other women at the time.”

  “Three?”

  When his eyes met mine again, they showed no emotion. “Yeah, it’s an old story. Young man makes good, young man goes bad in the adult film industry, young man gets clean and sober and repents of his evil ways. You weren’t raised in Hollywood so you don’t know how it is. There’s so much pressure to succeed, but no rule book on how to do it. So I did what a lot of Hollywood brats do and took the easy route by following in my father’s footsteps. He’d done well, so why couldn’t I? Hell, Dad even helped me get started in the business. He got the finances together for my first project and loaned me a couple of his actors. Crystal was one of them. When the movie was a hit, he was proud of me, Lena! I can’t stress enough how different it is out there. So different that it didn’t occur to me—to him—that there was a huge price to be paid. Anyway, I was incapable of thinking anything through to its logical conclusion in those days. Too many chemicals. What his excuse is, I’ll never know. But I’ve turned away from all that. I’ve paid the price and made peace with myself and the things I’ve done. I hope you can accept that.”

  I noticed he didn’t come right out and deny killing Crystal Chandler, so I asked. “Did you murder her?”

  A bitter laugh. “The women I was with that night—one of them was Lindsey—say I didn’t. The cops say the same thing.”

  Now it was my turn to study the dust devil. It had caught up with the hiker, who with cries of disgust was batting sand away from his face. I knew just how he felt. “You know, Warren, I read a big batch of material about that night, and no one named Lindsey Reynolds was ever mentioned.”

  “Her name was May Morning then.”

  “That…that’s an odd name. Even for an actress.”

  “Not for an adult film actress.”

  After that revelation, all I could say was, “Oh.”

  Life is so damned complicated. We all want to do the right thing and love the right people, but it never seems to work out for some of us. Instead, we wobble along like drunken monkeys, bouncing from one mistake to the other. After a childhood filled with beatings and rapes, I’d struggled to make a decent life for myself and had—I thought—succeeded. But I couldn’t seem to shake my attraction to troubled men. Now I’d found the great-granddaddy of them all. As I looked at Warren, sitting there looking so irresistible in the Arizona sunlight, I realized that he still hadn’t answered my question.

  “Warren, did you kill Crystal Chandler?”

  He was silent for a moment, watching the dust devil as it dissipated into little more than a dirty wind. Just as I was about to ask my question again, he faced me. There were lines of pain around his mouth but what looked to be truth in his eyes.

  “Did I kill Crystal? Honey, I’ve been asking myself that question for years. You see, I can’t remember.”

  ***

  When I pulled the Jeep into the parking lot at Desert Investigations, I could see Esther’s car and the ruffled edge of some Persian Pink thing peeking out of a Neiman Marcus bag in the back seat, so I bypassed the office and went straight upstairs to my apartment. I didn’t feel like talking to anyone anyway.

  Warren and I had left things unfinished. After he’d aired what seemed like enough dirty laundry for a hundred Hollywood bios, I’d told him I needed time to think. He said he understood. But he was wrong. The real reason I couldn’t make a commitment to him or anyone was that I wasn’t ready to share my nightmares.

  Hoping to ease my skittery mind, I put on an old vinyl of Tampa Red and listened to his bottleneck guitar while I nuked some ramen for lunch. But the scratchy sound of the vinyl got on my nerves after a while, so I turned the stereo off, lay down on the floor, and started doing crunches. After working myself into cramps, I took a long shower, then sprawled naked across my non-Persian Pink Lone Ranger and Tonto bedspread and tried not to think about Warren.

  Nature abhors a vacuum, so within minutes I was thinking about another troublesome subject: the Erik Ernst case. After trying unsuccessfully to block that from my mind, I gave up and started reviewing what I knew. Out of sheer mental exhaustion, I decided to skip the details and just list the major events in chronological order.

  On Christmas Eve, 1944, Erik Ernst, Gunter Hoenig, Josef Braun, and twenty-five other Germans POWs escape from Camp Papago. Christmas night, the Bollinger family is murdered. Some forty years later, someone rams Erik Ernst’s dinghy with a speedboat. He loses both legs and his attacker is never caught. More than two decades after that, he is murdered. Days later, a
reporter who wrote the book about the Camp Papago escape is found shot to death. Next to die is a deputy who worked the Bollinger case.

  Could it be any more obvious that the Ernst murder was tied to the Bollingers?

  Yet despite my efforts, Scottsdale PD still believed that the Ernst killing was unconnected to the Bollingers’ deaths. It was possible they might change their minds after ballistics tests on the bullets harvested from Fay Harris and Harry Caulfield were completed, but I didn’t think so. Even if the bullets matched, and I was certain they would, the prosecuting attorney would be able to dream up a scenario—however unlikely—that separated these two murders from the bludgeoning death of Erik Ernst.

  One thing I knew for certain: Rada Tesema was no murderer. While he might be desperate to bring his wife and children to America, I refused to believe he was foolish enough to jeopardize his precious green card in order to steal a few pawnable trinkets, let alone evil enough to kill a helpless old man. The very fact that Tesema continued to care for Ernst after the money ran out was proof that he was driven more by compassion than malice.

  But if not Tesema, who? Gunter Hoenig, wherever he might be?

  I was tempted to go through Gunter’s journals yet again, but stopped myself, deciding that I needed to strike out in an entirely new direction. It might be worthwhile to compare Fay Harris’ notes on the Bollinger murders to Chess Bollinger’s ramblings, so I peeled myself off the bedspread, smoothed the wrinkles out of the Lone Ranger’s face, and found the fat manila envelope Fay had prepared for me before she died. Since her notes were more organized than Gunter’s journals, it didn’t take me long to find the pages I was looking for.

  While I was able to decipher Fay’s puzzling shorthand on most of the pages, two notes still challenged me.

  CasNos/ccTrail/C/budSysNK/Van.

  I pulled out a notepad and began working on a possible translation. CasNos. Casa Nostra? Had Fay found hints of organized crime in both murders? Or had she meant Case Notes? Then there was a slash, followed by ccTrail, possibly a hasty misspelling meaning copies of Chess’ trial transcript. Or if no misspelling, how about…copies in trailer? The trailer in question might be Harry Caulfield’s, who had once worked on the Bollinger case. C/budSysNK/Van. On other pages, I’d noticed that Fay used C for various words; sometimes copy, sometimes Chess. And Sys? Could that be system? Or says? After squinting my eyes at the line for a while, I wrote down Case notes. Copies in trailer. Chess’ buddy says…meaning Chess’ buddy, Sammy Maurice.

  I was almost there.

  NK/Van. If my reasoning was correct, that would be Not Kill, Vandalizing. Sammy Maurice confirmed that he and Chess were out Christmas night laying waste to Scottsdale High School, not to Chess’ family. Somehow Fay had found that out, possibly from a conversation with Harry Caulfield, who might have kept case notes on the Bollinger case in his trailer. Tomorrow I’d call Reverend Sammy and ask him if he’d ever talked to Fay, but I was pretty sure I now knew what the answer would be: a definite yes. With a thrill of satisfaction, I realized that the deciphered sentence now read Case notes. Copies in trailer. Chess’ buddy says not kill. Vandalizing.

  Tomorrow I’d call Detective Villapando again and find out if the search of Harry Caulfield’s trailer turned up any material related to the Bollinger killings. Maybe the murderer hadn’t found them.

  Confidence rising, I tackled the next line. Ols/kdSAuG?CFG.

  Ols/. The only thing that leapt immediately to mind was Olds, as in ’39 Oldsmobile. Edward Bollinger’s had disappeared forever the night of the killings. KdSAuG. I wondered if the first part in this series meant kid. Possibly. In 1944, two kids were involved in the case, Chess and Sammy. SauG. Sig Sauer, as in the popular firearm? At the time Fay made her notes, no firearm of any kind had been involved in the crimes. Oops. Wrong. Edward, the first of the Bollingers to die, had been killed by his own shotgun. But not a Sig Sauer.

  After studying the rest of the series for almost an hour and trying out various combinations, I gave up. Tomorrow I’d get on the phone and find myself a code-breaker. For now, I put aside Fay’s notes and picked up the case folder I retrieved from my office early this morning. As I leafed through my own notes, I came across yet another puzzle.

  Spilt milk. The gas said it. Those were the worlds Chess had mumbled during my first visit with him. At the time, I’d dismissed them as word salad ramblings of the typical Alzheimer’s patient, but what if I’d been wrong? As my later visit proved, Chess sometimes had moments of lucidity. What if he’d been describing something that actually happened? During the same conversation—if you could call an interview with Chess an actual conversation—he also claimed that his Daddy had killed him. Since Chess was still alive, in a manner of speaking, that part was obviously wrong. But what about the rest?

  The gas said it. Gas: sometimes inert, sometimes active. Gas: to talk, to yak, to gab. Gas: without it, cars won’t run. Spilt milk? Spilt gas? During WWII, spilling gas would be a major infraction, and Chess’ abusive father might think it worth a beating. Still, gas couldn’t talk, so how was it possible that “the gas said it”?

  Suppressing a scream of frustration, I tossed the case folder aside and sat there staring at the walls, trying to empty my overloaded mind so that sane thoughts could make their way in. But my brain wouldn’t cooperate and threw nothing more than scrambled words and initials back at me. Hoping that another shower might help—I’d been known to solve crimes while standing under a shower—I went back into the bathroom, but a half hour later emerged from the shower stall feeling more confused than ever. Something was blocking me.

  Halfway through dressing, I figured out what the block was.

  Unfinished business.

  And it had nothing to do with the Erik Ernst case.

  ***

  The sun had dipped behind the Papago Buttes and the film crew was gone, leaving only a solitary guard patrolling the perimeter, so I headed for the Best Western. As I had hoped, the Golden Hawk was parked outside Warren’s motel room. It only took me seconds to get up enough nerve to knock on his door.

  “Lena, what…what brings you here?” Like me, Warren smelled of soap and freshly laundered clothes. “I thought you needed time to think.”

  “I think fast. May I come in?”

  He stood aside, then closed the motel door behind me. “I wasn’t sure I’d ever see you again. When I discussed my past with you, you backed off so fast I can still feel the burn.” His voice was wary, but mine would have been, too, given the circumstances.

  I took a seat in one of the club chairs by the window, putting my carry-all on the heavy oak card table next to the film’s shooting script. “I’ve been unfair to you.”

  Looking a little more hopeful, he sat down across from me. “Not necessarily. Merely careful. You’ve been through a lot in your life, and I don’t blame you for not being anxious to get involved with someone who carries around the kind of baggage I do.”

  “We all carry baggage. The only thing that matters is how well we distribute the weight.” I reached my hand across the table.

  He didn’t take it. Instead, he got up, came around the table, and drew me into his arms.

  ***

  “So. Did you buy the Golden Hawk?” The motel room smelled like sweaty sheets, and my head was nestled in that concave place between Warren’s shoulder and chest. We’d said so many heavy things to each other already that now it was time to simply relax and chat.

  He kissed me again, then drew away and smiled. “Sure did. Yesterday. When I walked into the showroom with my checkbook, Mark almost pissed himself. Now he’s tempting me with a ’48 Hudson. Sometimes I suspect he isn’t as interested in film as he says he is, that he just keeps showing up on the set to sell me cars.”

  I nuzzled his ear. “Oh, I don’t know about that. You’re pretty easy to tempt.”

  “Only by the right woman.”

  We sweated up the sheets some more until I fell asleep in his arms…

&
nbsp; …and was four years old again, riding through the night on a white bus, mere seconds before a bullet put an end to my memories.

  I heard singing, but the only thing I cared about was my mother’s promise. “Yes, I’ll shoot her! You just watch. I’ll shoot her right now!” She held me on her lap, and to my four-year-old eyes, the gun she pressed against my forehead looked like a cannon.

  “No, Mommy!” I cried. “Please don’t!”

  No one tried to stop her. They just sang louder, as if attempting to overwhelm her anguish with their voices. The tunes I recognized as hymns from that peaceful, far-off life lived among tall trees and green fields. But the words were different.

  Abraham loves me, this I know.

  All his writings tell me so.

  Little ones to him belong.

  We are weak, Abraham is strong.

  Mommy wasn’t singing and I couldn’t hear Daddy sing, either. He usually accompanied these strange hymns on his guitar, but for some reason he wasn’t with us. Then I remembered. A few days before, we’d left Daddy in the forest glade, along with a group of crying children.

  Now I was the only child left.

  “See, I’ll kill her now!” Mommy screamed.

  But she kicked me in the stomach first. I fell through the open door of the bus at the same time I heard the shot and pain stabbed my head. The concrete rushed up to meet me and my…

  …my own screams blended with my mother’s. Although one part of me lay bleeding on the Phoenix pavement, the other part of me remained wrapped in my mother’s protective arms.

  “Mommy!” I screamed.

  “My poor baby!”

  But it was a man’s voice, not my mother’s. I opened my eyes to find Warren holding me close, rocking me back and forth, just as my mother had oh so long ago. “My poor baby.”

  Still shivering, I buried my face in his chest. “Don’t call me baby. Please don’t.”