As soon as I left Reverend Sammy’s house, I checked the messages on my cell and heard Warren apologizing for being so curt that morning. Then he added, “Let’s have dinner tonight. Call me or just come by. On second thought, come by. I want to see your beautiful face.”
I needed to do something first, so on my way back to Scottsdale, I stopped in at Schank Classic Cars, figuring that Mark Schank would probably have made it to work by now. My guess was right. He was in the showroom polishing a chrome strip on an elderly Rolls Royce Silver Shadow when I walked in. I got straight to the point. “Say, Mark. Maybe you can help me with something. I’m looking for a picture of a ’39 Oldsmobile convertible.”
His salesman’s smile, which he’d plastered in place when he first saw me advancing across the showroom floor, broadened and his eyes narrowed in calculation. “I see Warren’s love of the classics is contagious. Well, the ’39 Olds is a superb model, truly superb, and you’ll look wonderful driving it up Scottsdale Road with that blond hair of yours blowing in the wind. Although I don’t have that model here on the lot at this very moment, with my contacts, I can have one here next week. It’s…”
My next words erased his smile. “I don’t want to buy one, Mark, just see what one looks like.”
I’ll give him this. The smile returned almost immediately, although a little stiff around the edges. “I have pictures of several in a catalog in my office. But I can assure you that the moment you lay eyes on that little sweetheart, you’ll fall in love like Warren did with the Golden Hawk. As I’m certain you already know, the ’39 Olds came in a convertible model, which is perfect for Arizona’s beautiful climate. And if you wish, we can retrofit it with air conditioning.”
Which the car would need when “Arizona’s beautiful climate” heated up to a hundred and twenty degrees and the sun turned into a blowtorch. “I’ll bear that in mind. Now can I see that picture, please?”
Still extolling the charms of classic cars and the ’39 Olds in particular, Mark Schank led me down a hallway filled with photographs of antique cars into an office, where to my surprise, I saw Gilbert Schank ensconced behind a massive desk. Still in his wheelchair, still sucking oxygen through a tube. And still the car salesman, because his phony smile mirrored his son’s. Although Gilbert had shrunk alarmingly since his vigorous years on television, I could still see the strong physical resemblance between him and Mark. Both were little taller than jockeys and both had the same thin faces and beaky noses. “Miss Jones. How nice to…see you…again.”
“And you, too, Mr. Schank. How are you feeling?” Mark had told me his father almost never left the house, but here he was, as big as life. Or what was left of it.
A grimace. “I’ll live…unfortunately. Just came down…to keep my…hand in. Always try to…at least once…a month. You here…to buy a car? By the way…you look…like hell. What…happened?”
I forced a laugh. “I fell into the canal.”
“Dumb thing…to do.”
“So I noticed.”
Perhaps sensing that I was growing uncomfortable discussing my messy physical condition, Mark explained the purpose of my visit. His father frowned in concentration. “A ’39 Olds? How…strange. Someone had…where did I hear…?” He scratched his head with a trembly hand.
“Edward Bollinger had a cream-colored ’39 Olds,” I volunteered. “It disappeared the night of the murders.”
His frown went away. “Yes, now I…remember. The authorities…looked all over…for it. Such a…shame, a beautiful…car like that.”
“Yes, a shame.” But not as big a shame as the smashed-in heads of the Bollinger family.
As I struggled over what to say next, Mark plopped a heavy three-ring binder down on the desk and leafed through it. “Here it is. This one’s owned by…” He stopped, not wanting to give up the seller’s name. “Well, it’s owned by a businessman back east. He’s eager to sell, and at a bargain price, too.” The figure he quoted didn’t sound like a bargain to me.
When I studied the picture, I couldn’t understand the car’s expense. Yes, the Oldsmobile was sexy in a homely, Humphrey Bogart sort of way. It was a gleaming deep purple, and had a long hood and a deeply sloping trunk, but the headlights looked like a myopic bugs’ eyes, and the grill was as tall and pinched as an Edsel’s. I was willing to bet that the car’s narrow, split windshield had caused many an accident, too. I closed the binder. “Nice, I guess.”
For a brief moment Mark’s genial manner slipped. “Nice?! You guess?!” Then he recovered himself. “Ah, well, chacun à son gout, to each his own taste, and all that. Tell you what. You don’t really look like an Olds person, but I have a nice little Camaro out on the lot, a ’72 painted exactly the same deep green as your eyes. And it has airbrushed red flames shooting along the body! That one’s a convertible, too. You’d be surprised at the price.”
I doubted I’d be surprised at all. “Thanks, but I’m not in the market.”
His face grew sly. “Oh, a beautiful woman’s always in the market for a new car. Let me tell you about the Camaro. It’s…”
“Mark, the lady…says she’s…not in…the market.” Oxygen hissed.
At his father’s admonition, Mark halted the sales pitch and returned the binder to its shelf. “Right. Well, I hope I’ve been of help, Miss Jones.”
I had one more question. “Is the Olds rare?”
Despite his frail physical condition, Gilbert Schank managed to offer a joke. “It certainly…is now.”
“I mean, was it rare in 1944, when the Bollingers were murdered.”
He shook his head. “Oh, no. Not…rare. But…snazzy.”
As his son had pointed out, chacun à son gout. With nothing else to ask, I said good-by to Mark’s father and received a shaky hand-wave in return. I watched as the old man picked up a paper from the desk and held it so close to his face that it almost touched his beaky nose. He squinted at it for a moment, then a spasm of pain crossed his features. He grunted, closed his eyes and let the paper drop.
Leaving Mark to tend to his father, I headed for the exit.
But not before wondering how I would age.
***
By the time I made it to the Papago Park set, filming was finished on the canal bank and the crew had reassembled near the reconstructed prison camp. But for all Warren’s apologies on my cell, he was still cranky. While I watched from the shade of a mesquite, he snapped at a cameraman, telling the man to get a move on before the sun got too high in the sky. “I need shadows! So see if you can get that Ariflex in position sometime before noon!”
Putting off our discussion yet again, I backed away and drove to Desert Investigations, where I found Jimmy so intent on work that he barely grunted a greeting when I came in. By now, my earlier good mood had vanished, so I called Warren’s cell and left a message that something had come up and I couldn’t have dinner tonight. I promised to call him first thing in the morning, then hung up. Jimmy and I worked in silence for the rest of the day.
When five o’clock came, Jimmy headed toward his truck and I went upstairs to see if a Leave It to Beaver marathon might improve my mood. At least the characters on the TVLand reruns were happy.
***
On Saturday, I was still in a funk, so I decided not to go down to the office just to watch Jimmy type. Instead, I nuked a Sausage ’N Egg Hot Pocket, turned on CNN, and sat back to see who else in the world was having a bad day. The Midwest, apparently. A serial killer was working his way through Kansas and Nebraska, and in Minnesota, two state senators were arrested after throwing punches at a Wal-Mart opening. I then switched to the FOX news channel, only to find the talking head du jour extolling the virtues of the latest Hollywood water diet. I tried TVLand again, but the Beav wasn’t on, just some rerun of a ’50s Western. Since I wasn’t in the mood for singing cowboys, I switched the TV off and roamed the apartment aimlessly for a few minutes, trying to figure out what to do with myself.
I needed to relax, but had no idea how to accomplish that. I could read more of Gunter Hoenig’s journals, but they would probably just stress me further. Or I could read a book. After glancing through my bookshelves, I realized I had read them all, some of them twice. For a few minutes I thought about going over to the Scottsdale Library, this time just for fun, but decided against it. I’d just wind up gravitating to the Criminal Justice section like I usually did, and that definitely wouldn’t be relaxing.
Maybe I should call someone, just to chat. Warren, perhaps. But thinking about the conversation I needed to have with him made me more tense than ever, so I dismissed that possibility. I could always call my foster father and find out if enough money had been raised yet to bring Rada Tesema’s family to the U.S., but I figured I already knew the answer. If the Rev had been successful, he would have informed me. Besides, on Saturdays he always switched off his phone to work on his sermons, and only made call-backs in case of emergencies. Frustrated, I opened up my address book and went through the list of girlfriends I’d accumulated over the years, but soon realized that all were living lives almost as complicated as mine. Finally realizing that I didn’t know anyone who could provide me with mindless conversation, I broke down and hit Captain Kryzinski’s number on my speed dial.
“Yeah?” He sounded much the same as always. Gruff, abrupt. It meant nothing.
“How goes the packing?”
After an uncomfortable silence, he said, “Lena, I shipped everything out three days ago. Don’t you remember me telling you I leave for New York tomorrow?”
Hearts, being attached to a human being’s upper left quadrant by a network of tendons and muscle, aren’t supposed to fall, but I’d swear mine did. “Tomorrow?” I barely recognized my own voice.
A sigh. “Yeah, tomorrow. My plane leaves at 8:30 a.m.”
There was so much I wanted to say, but all I could do was ask, “Do you have a ride?”
“Cab’s gonna be here at seven sharp.”
“Cancel it. I’ll take you to the airport. It’s the least I can do.”
“You sure? You weren’t all that, ah, supportive about my decision the last time we talked.”
“I’m sure.”
“See ya then, kid. But if you don’t show…” With that undefined threat hanging in the air, he hung up.
I sat there, thinking about how much I’d miss him, both personally and professionally. Then I shrugged, went into the bedroom, picked up Gunter Hoenig’s journals, and carried them back into the living room. Who needed to relax?
For the next few hours, I sat on the sofa reading and re-reading various journal entries, still puzzled by Gunter’s ongoing guilt over Joyce Bollinger’s death. If his writings were accurate, he had tried to save her, so how could he consider her death his fault? His constant references to her pale blue eyes made me almost believe that he had half-fallen in love with her, which was a ridiculous theory, given the condition she would have been in at the time. But Gunter had been a young man. He had spent most of his war years stuffed into the hull of a submarine with nothing but other men for company, only to eventually wind up in a prison camp surrounded yet again by nothing but men. Joyce Bollinger was quite possibly the first woman he’d seen in years, and from what I’d heard, she had been extraordinarily beautiful, maybe even beautiful enough to impress a young man so deeply that he never forgot her or her children.
Ah, how different men must have been in those days.
As I went through the journals this time, instead of trying to keep them in some semblance of order I set aside the entries relating directly to the Ernst case, making a series of neat piles on my new cactus wood coffee table.
1945:
I will always remember those pale eyes, their pleas to me.
1950:
But I guess I will never see Josef again. Like me, he probably abandoned Das Kapitan.
1978:
Kapitan still lives. This can not be allowed.
I stared at the pages, thinking. Then I got up and paced for a while. Something…
When I sat back down and went through the pages I’d selected again, an idea that had only been half-formed finally coalesced.
Could Gunter Hoenig still be alive?
Was it possible that he hadn’t, after all, died in that Canadian car crash?
I snatched up the phone again and called Jimmy’s direct line. “Look, I know you’re trying to finish up loose ends, but could you please do me a favor?”
A sigh. “What is it now?”
“I want you to follow up on that Canadian car crash which supposedly killed Gunter and his wife.”
“Supposedly?”
“Trust me. Something’s not copacetic there.” As soon as he agreed, I hung up before he could change his mind.
Things were becoming clearer. If Gunter Hoenig was still alive, he would be in his eighties, but as I had already seen with Tommy Bollinger, old didn’t necessarily mean helpless. Still, if Gunter had killed Ernst, why would he feel the need to kill Fay Harris? And Harry Caulfield? I thought about it for a while, then came up with an answer. Fay, who had hoarded all her unused notes from Escape Across the Desert, might have reached the same conclusion I’d just reached—that Gunter was alive and living in the Phoenix area. If so, she would have recognized that she was sitting on a story which might rival the Pulitzer-nominated piece she’d written on human trafficking. As for Harry, even into his eighties he maintained a cop’s mind and heart. If he had begun to suspect that Gunter was still around and might have murdered Das Kapitan, he would contact the authorities. Unless someone stopped him.
Granted, in his journals Gunter came across as a gentle man, especially given his romantic writings about his golden-haired wife, his joy in his son and grandchildren, and his cute-but-awful drawings of animals. But when driven to extremes, even gentle men could do cruel things. If Gunter had driven the speed boat which almost killed Erik Ernst, what else might he have done?
I looked at the journal pages some more, shifting them from one pile to another. As I was transferring all of Gunter’s drawings to the same stack, my attention was caught by one in particular—the clumsy line drawing I’d puzzled over days earlier without success. Deciding to solve this one mystery, at least, I studied it carefully. On the top left of the page were two animals of indeterminate species, possibly a jackrabbit and a frog. Below the frog were two stick figures. To their right was some spindly object which I was almost certain was a tree.
The amateurism of these figures was nothing compared to the big mess in the center of the page, a series of wobbly but concentric circles. A nest of snakes? I started to laugh at such an outrageous guess, then remembered that in breeding season, some snakes do slither into a dark lair together and form a tightly packed lump called a “snake ball.” But if Gunter had drawn such a thing, why hadn’t he bothered to give them little dots for eyes like he had for all his other animals? I turned the drawing upside down, then sideways. Deciding the lines probably weren’t snakes after all and that I was wasting my time, I went ahead and placed the drawing on top of the others.
By now, I’d been sitting in one position too long, and my canal-bruised muscles were stiff. To get my circulation going, I decided to rearrange my new furniture. I moved the cactus wood sofa to a spot underneath the living room window, but when I sat down on it again, I could no longer see out. Duh. So I shoved the sofa against the opposite wall, where it merely looked stupid. Frustrated, I tried angling it kitty-corner so that it faced the window and my television, but that looked even dumber. After an hour of furniture pushing and dragging, I gave up and returned everything to its original position.
All that furniture hauling wasn’t exercise enough to relax my muscles, so I went out for a slow, careful run. After logging only five miles, I limped back home and moved the furniture around some more. Is this what owning furniture does to you? Turns you into an idiot?
Disgusted with myself, I took a quick shower, dressed in a less grungy T-shirt and jeans, and drove over to the nearby multiplex to see the latest Clint Eastwood movie. It turned out to be a poor choice, with a body count almost as high as that in the Erik Ernst case.
I should have opted for the Disney.
But on the way home, an idea occurred to me, and I sped up, almost catching the attention of a bored motorcycle cop lurking in the parking lot of the Olive Garden Restaurant. I slowed down, but only until I was out of his sight. Then I put pedal to the metal and raced all the way to my apartment.
Reeking of popcorn and JuJu Beans, I ran up the stairs, unlocked the locks, and rushed to the coffee table, where I’d left Gunter’s journals separated into various stacks.
I stared at the top drawing again.
Not snakes.
A topographical map.