by Betty Webb
Gilbert Shank.
I shouted out to Mark. “Tell me if I’m wrong, Mark, but here’s how I think the Bollinger killings went down. After he’d had his own Christmas dinner, your dad made his way down to the Bollinger place for a little àpres-meal joyride. He’d always been successful before, so why not now? But this time, something was different. Edward Bollinger was waiting by the car with his shotgun, mean as only a drunk can be.”
Silence from the cave mouth. He was listening. It was so quiet, I could hear birds calling outside, the tiny scurryings of a gecko on the rock wall near me.
Encouraged, I continued with my tale. “I remember seeing Gilbert, your dad, on those stupid television commercials you hated so much, and although he wasn’t a big man, I imagine he was pretty spry as a teenager. Stronger than Edward, too, since Edward had worn himself out physically by heavy smoking and drinking. So it wasn’t too hard for your father to wrestle the gun away from Edward. I doubt if he meant to blow Edward’s head off, though. That part of it was an accident. Right, Mark?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” But his protest rang hollow, convincing me that my theory was right. Time passes away, but truth never does.
Enough light filtered from the outside to the second chamber that I could see Josef lying beside me, mute witness to this end story. Reassured by his presence, I touched the cracked leather of his boot. Mark was alone out there with his rage and fear, but I had the company of someone Frank Oberle had described as “a good boy.” A gentle boy. The kind of boy who had trained the rabbits around Camp Papago to eat from his hand. Had he been comforted in his lonely tomb when the geckos made nests in his bones?
Suddenly I heard a noise outside and lifted my gun, concerned that Mark might try to rush me. But he was merely shifting position. Good. Maybe he was getting a cramp.
I gave Josef’s boot a final pat and like a modern-day Scheherazade, continued spinning my tale. “Meanwhile, back at the ranch, right, Mark? Edward Bollinger is dead, and by now, Gilbert’s adrenaline is making him crazy. He wants nothing more than to get away without being seen, because he knows if he’s caught, he’ll be shipped off to whatever hellhole passed for a juvenile detention center in those days. But shotguns make a lot of noise, enough that Joyce Bollinger hears it all the way back in the house. Maybe she thinks her drunken oaf of a husband had fallen and accidently shot himself, so she goes out to investigate. Good mother that she is, she keeps the children inside. Maybe she takes a flashlight because the countryside’s pretty dark. At first she doesn’t see her murdered husband, just a friend of her son’s holding a shotgun. Too bad for her and too bad for the Bollinger children that she recognizes little jockey-sized Gilbert with his beaky nose.”
I’d created the scene so well that I could smell Joyce Bollinger’s fear. Or was it Mark’s? Rank. Acid. The stench overpowered the musk of the cave, the scent of wildflowers outside, the mint of my ChapStick.
“Joyce has no way of knowing that the shotgun is now empty, so when Gilbert orders her into the kitchen, she complies. Maybe she thinks she can calm him down—mothers can be good at that—and maybe she almost does. From everything I’ve heard about her, Mark, she was an extraordinary woman. She certainly made an impression on…” No, best not to mix Gunter up in this. Except for that botched murder attempt against Ernst back in Connecticut, Gunter had harmed no one.
“It doesn’t work out that way, though. Gilbert is too far gone. Yet this is where his smarts kick into play. With what would eventually become his silver-tongued salesman’s pitch, the same one he’d use to sell thousands of cars, he convinces Joyce that all he wants is to get away, but to do that, he needs to tie the family up so they can’t get to the phone before he’s put miles between him and the farmhouse. How am I doing, Mark?”
Nothing. But I knew he was listening.
“Gilbert finds some rope, farms are lousy with them, and ties up Joyce first. He probably wonders briefly where Chess is, but then again, kids always tell each other the damnedest things. Maybe he knows Chess is out with Sammy, terrorizing the town. Anyway, after tying up Joyce, he ties up the children: twelve-year-old Jenny, ten-year-old Robbie, eight-year-old Scotty. Maybe he thinks about not killing them. Maybe, for a minute, he thinks about hopping in the car and driving like hell for Mexico before they untie themselves and call the authorities. Or he could just give himself up. Killing that family really wasn’t necessary, was it? Your father was only fifteen at the time, and if he’d confined the killing to Edward alone, there was a fifty-fifty chance he’d draw a lenient judge, someone soft-hearted enough to put him away for only a few years. When he was released, his life would still be in front of him. Too bad for everyone involved that your father turned out to be as murderous as he was hot-headed.”
Mark called me names that would make a sailor blush. Good. Anger causes people to make mistakes.
“For a while I wondered why Gilbert didn’t give himself up at that point, until I remembered how he felt about cars. Even back then he was obsessed with them. If he gave himself up, he’d have to return the car, and he refused to do that. After all, he’d killed a man over it. By the way, Mark, where is the damned thing?”
Mark didn’t answer, but remembering Gilbert Schank’s protective Navajo housekeeper, the long shared history between the Schanks and the Tsosies, I could guess. “I’ll bet Edward Bollinger’s Oldsmobile is hidden somewhere up on the Navajo Reservation. Did your dad ever take you up there for a spin?”
Bull’s eye! He let fly a few more curses, then subsided to groans, the better to lull me into sympathy.
“Hey, Mark. I’ll bet that shoulder hurts. Why don’t you throw the gun down the slope and let me out of here so I can call Air-Evac for you? I wouldn’t want to see you get an infection. Or get dizzy and fall off the trail. You could bang yourself up pretty bad on that slope.”
Recognizing that his pity-ploy had failed, he began cursing again. The man was nothing if not consistent.
The longer I talked, the more blood he would lose, so I soldiered on. “After Gilbert finishes tying up Joyce Bollinger and her children, he runs out to the car and gets the tire iron. Then he comes back to the kitchen and…Well, we both know what he did.” I paused and took a deep breath to steady myself. “Afterwards, he’s so upset he forgets to be careful, so he leaves his bloody footprints all over the kitchen, footprints so small that they eventually clear those big German POWs of the murder.
“But there is a German in at the death, isn’t there? Kapitan Erik Ernst is hiding outside in the bushes and he gets a good look at your dad, probably when your dad opens the kitchen door and the light shines across his face. I’ll come back to Ernst in a minute, because he’s what started this whole thing up again. That night, after killing the Bollingers, your dad realizes he’s in a world of trouble. In a panic, he drives off. He doesn’t go straight home but drives around and around until he can clear his mind. Somebody sees him, but it’s so dark out that they just take it for granted that it’s Chess joyriding in his father’s car again. Eventually, Gilbert decides to go home and tell his father what he’s done. Is that the way it worked, Mark?”
“You tell me, Miss Know It All.”
At least he’d cleaned up his language. “I don’t know how strong the relationship was between Gilbert and his own father, but from what happened afterwards it’s clear that your grandfather did everything necessary to cover your father’s tracks. He burned your dad’s bloody clothing, didn’t he?”
Mark was so quiet I could hear a hawk call in the sky outside, hear the wind rushing through the valley. Wherever Josef Braun now was, could he hear it too?
Before I continued, I touched Josef’s boot again. I hoped he had sailed on the wind, all the way across the Atlantic to Germany and that little Bavarian farm where he’d left his pregnant wife. I hoped he’d seen his baby before drifting away to that place where we all eventually end up.
I shifted my position to make myself more com
fortable. How much longer would this take? Just as I began to resettle myself, Mark used the slight rustlings I made to fire off another round, but he came no closer than before. At this rate, he would empty his clip before he fainted from loss of blood.
Cheered by this thought, I continued. “Your grandfather did more than just burn your dad’s clothing, didn’t he? He talked one of his Navajo farm hands into driving the Olds along back roads all the way up to the Navajo Reservation. Later, when Chess was fingered for the murders, I’ll bet your family breathed a sigh of relief. It never crossed their minds to tell the truth just to keep an innocent kid out of prison.”
Mark finally spoke. “You’re so smart.” From his tone, it wasn’t a compliment.
“Smarter than you, since I’m not the one out there bleeding in the hot sun. Attract any bees, yet? I hear the Africanized variety has been spotted out here in the Wilderness.”
I let that scary image hang in the air for a moment, then continued. “Anyway, I promised I’d get back to Erik Ernst and his role in the Schank family saga. Sixty years have passed, your father has made a bundle from selling classic cars, and you’re not doing badly, either. Your life is about to get even better, because your father is in failing health, and you’re about to inherit everything. Ah, life is good. But then Warren Quinn decides to make a documentary about the German escape from Camp Papago, and guess who he decides to use as his chief talking head? Eric Ernst, the one man alive who can place your father at the scene of the Bollinger killings. That sure came as a nasty shock to your dad, didn’t it, Mark?”
“What the fuck do you think?” His bitterness told me my solution to both the Bollinger and Ernst murders was right on the money.
“You’re not really interested in film, are you? You only pretended to be a film buff so you’d have another excuse to keep turning up on Warren’s set to keep an eye on things. The Golden Hawk just gave you another excuse, an even better one, because it enabled you to talk to Warren on a regular basis.”
“The sonofabitch doesn’t know shit about cars. He just thinks he does.”
Maybe. But Warren knew a hell of a lot about people. Which brought me to my next question. “How long have you known about your father’s crimes?”
Silence.
“Then I’ll guess. When I saw you and your father together at your office, I noticed the strong resemblance between the two of you. Give or take forty years, you two could be twins. I’m betting that the first day of shooting, you didn’t know a thing about the Bollinger killings, that you just ambled over to the set thinking you could sell something nice to the rich Hollywood director. That’s when Ernst saw you, saw the stunning resemblance between you and the blood-spattered boy he’d seen sneaking away from the Bollinger farmhouse sixty years earlier. He’d probably seen you two together on your commercials, but since you were always filmed head-on, he couldn’t see your profiles. And you were both always mounted on horses…”
“I was on that damned jackass!” Mark howled.
“Yeah, that must have been humiliating. Anyway, since you were both always on some sort of equine, he couldn’t see your heights. Or lack thereof. But after Ernst saw you in the flesh, three-dimensional, as it were, he put two and two together and came up with blackmail. That would have been, what, six or seven weeks ago?” When Ernst realized he had to do something about his financial situation or wind up in a state-run nursing home. “Say, Mark, when Ernst showed up that first time at Schank’s Classic Cars, how did your father take it?”
He controlled his pain and rage long enough to answer. “Better than you’d think. He just told Ernst to get out of his office, that he had nothing to lose anymore, that he’d probably be dead from emphysema in a few months anyway.”
I started to nod, then remembered he couldn’t see me, hidden as I was behind my sheltering rock wall. “But you had plenty to lose, didn’t you?”
“Damn straight! Ernst said he’d go to the cops if Dad didn’t pay up, and that meant a pack of high-priced attorneys bleeding us dry while they angled for continuance after continuance. By the time the system was through with Dad, there’d be nothing left for me to inherit. I’ve worked too damn hard to let that happen!”
And co-starred in too many bad commercials. “Tragic, all that lovely money, going, going, gone. Um, before you killed Ernst, did you at least try to reason with him?”
“I never meant to kill him. I went over to his house late that night when I knew his caretaker would be gone, and tried to make him see things our way. I even offered him some money, although not as much as he wanted. I talked myself blue in the face, but the old sonofabitch refused to listen.”
Just as I thought. But there was something else I’d never been able to figure out about that night’s scenario. “You’re relatively young and strong, so why did you duct tape Ernst to his wheelchair? Or did you think that would make him more reasonable?”
“Give me a break. I only did it because the mean bastard kept ramming me with it! He even bloodied my shins! So, yeah, I found some duct tape in one of the kitchen drawers and taped him down so he couldn’t do me any more damage. But once I got him all taped up, he just went crazy on me. You wouldn’t believe the mouth on that old Nazi.”
Oh, yes I would. Everyone who’d known Ernst remarked on it. Still, for a moment I felt a brief twinge of compassion for Das Kapitan. Old, sick, broke and alone, dying the same kind of death he’d dealt to Joyce Bollinger so many years back. Then, remembering her dying agony, my compassion faded. “So you bashed his brains in like your father did the Bollingers. And like Gilbert, you let someone else take the blame. Only this time, the patsy wasn’t a delinquent teenage boy, but a hard-working Ethiopian immigrant.”
“I didn’t plan to kill Ernst!”
Sure, it was just one of those unfortunate accidents. “What’d you kill him with? The cops never found the murder weapon.”
A mumble.
“I can’t hear you.”
“A hammer, that’s what. It was in the same drawer as the duct tape.”
“Where is it now?”
“In the Cross Cut Canal.”
I’d probably floated right past the murder weapon when Lindsey shoved me in. “Okay, I’ll concede that you didn’t plan to kill Ernst. But you did plan the killings of Fay. And Harry.”
“You can probably guess why.” Every moment he sounded more and more like a sulky child.
“Sure I can, but I’d rather hear you tell it.” And I’d rather keep him bleeding in the hot sun. Once he fainted, this mess would be over. I could crawl out of the cave, phone for help, and start the wheels of justice turning. I would also do something for Josef, whose presence had given me so much comfort. I reached out and touched his boot again. “It won’t be long, Josef,” I said quietly. “Soon we’ll both be out of here.”
Mark’s voice drifted into the cave. “That damned reporter was going to include a chapter on the Bollinger killings in that book of hers, the one Warren’s using as the basis for his stupid documentary. I guess she fancied herself some sort of detective, because she came up with a plat map that showed who was living where back then. And there were the Schanks, less than a mile from the Bollinger farm. Hell, Dad even rode the same school bus as that worthless Chess! Anyway, she found all this out and showed up at the dealership when Dad was there, demanding to talk to him. He took her into the office, she told him she was writing a book on the escape and was going to include a chapter on the Bollingers, and that she knew he…” He stopped for a moment to catch his breath. Good. He was weakening. Or pretending again.
“Any minute now, Josef,” I whispered.
A gust of wind came up, almost carrying away Mark’s next words. “Dad told the reporter that if she attempted to tie him to the Bollinger murders, he’d sue her and her publisher until they were all piss-poor penniless. It didn’t scare her, but it sure as hell scared her editor, and he made her drop that chapter from the book. At the time, I knew nothing about any of it.
I didn’t find out until Ernst showed up at the dealership. Then, after Ernst, uh, died, the reporter started nosing around again, so I protected my father.”
And protected your inheritance at the same time. “How about Harry Caulfield? Why did he have to die?”
“Same…same reason.” This time the wind didn’t carry away his words. With a grunt, he leaned his chin on one of the rocks at the cave mouth, and his voice echoed around both rooms like a ghost’s. “The Ernst thing got Harry so stirred up that one day he called my dad and asked if his old house had been close to the Bollinger farm.”
Mark rightly took my silence for a sign to continue. “Harry told Dad he was going to get the Bollinger case reopened. Jesus, once a detective, always a detective.”
And this detective’s patience was running thin. “Oh, for God’s sake, Mark. You make it sound like none of this was your or your dad’s fault, that if people had minded their own business, everything would be fine.”
I’d had it with him. I was tired of his self-righteousness, tired of his tenacity. He was like a spider glued to his web. He wasn’t going to fall off the trail, not even if he bled out. If anything, he’d probably slump unconscious into the cave opening, and I’d have to kick his body away before I could get out.
I decided to bring the standoff to a close. But not before I gave Mark a piece of my mind, the better to help empty his firearm. “It would never have been fine because you’re a conscienceless jackass. And so is your kid-killing father!”
The slur so incensed him that he fired off another few rounds, but not enough to empty his semiautomatic. Regardless, it was time to take the offensive.
No problem there. “Hey, Mark! Bullet coming through.”
I inched my head around the rock and snapped off a round, taking care to aim slightly above his head. He responded exactly as I wished, by panicking. In his haste to back away from the cave’s entrance, he dropped his semiautomatic in panic and collapsed onto the narrow trail with a shriek. Before he had time to recover, I dove through the second chamber’s opening and exploded out of the cave. I found him on his hands and knees, cringing against the cliff wall.
