Desert Run by Betty Webb Page B

stereotype of addled seniors shuffling around with nothing on their minds but their cats and Social Security checks was a deeply flawed one.
    â€œMr. Oberle, what exactly did you mean when you called Ernst pure evil?” Remembering the documentaries I’d seen about the Nazi death camps, I had other candidates for the title.
    His answer echoed my own thoughts. “As some of them politicians say today, I musta mis-spoke myself. Hitler was sure no saint and neither was Eichmann or Dr. Mengele with his creepy human experiments. But if Das Kapitan woulda had the same power, he’d a pulled the same shit, pardon my French. I had me a cousin in the Navy, stationed back East, and he kept an eye on Ernst for me. After the war and we shipped ol’ Ernst back to the pit of Hell he’d come from, he started cozying up to the U.S. officials, tryin’ to get some work. Couple a years later, they brought him over here to help the Navy with some submarine stuff. That didn’t work out all too well, ’cause the way I heard it, he started treating them Navy engineers like he treated his U-boat crew. Us Americans don’t go for that.
    â€œAnyway, the Navy gave old Ernst his walking papers, but by then he was a U.S. citizen, so they couldn’t forcibly ship his Nazi ass back to Deuschland Über Alles. He got hired by one of those fancy-dancy yacht-designing firms in Connecticut, and sure as shootin’, history started repeatin’ itself. Ernst bullied everybody so bad they was going to let him go when he had his little boating ‘accident.’” Oberle gave a satisfied snort. “That’s when the sonofabitch decided to move here, to leave his co-workers at the boatyard safely behind.”
    Harry winced as he crossed his arthritic leg. “Still a weird thing for an old sea dog to do, if you ask me. Move to the desert. Why not back to Germany?”
    Oberle had a quick answer. “Because Ernst was mean, and meanness don’t necessarily translate to brave. He wasn’t exactly the Man of the Hour in Germany, remember. He got too many of his crew killed, and I’m bettin’ there was plenty a grudges there. And then he blew it in Connecticut. So if both those places was gettin’ too hot for him, why not Arizona? We treated them Germans pretty good while they was Uncle Sam’s guests and a lot of them came back for visits. A couple a them even moved out here. Besides, I hear those Deuschland winters are real bearcats, especially when you’re missing your legs. Cold hurts a stump something awful. I should know.” Here he shocked me by rolling up his pants leg, revealing an artificial leg attached a couple of inches below the knee. “If there was any justice in this crappy world…”
    â€œMore tea?” Before I could answer, Harry stood up, grabbed our half-full glasses and limped into the kitchen with them. I followed, effectively ending Oberle’s tirade.
    â€œSorry about that,” Harry said, filling the glasses to the brim. “Frank lost two brothers in the war, both Navy, and I think in his mind Ernst himself torpedoed them out of the water. The only reason Frank didn’t join the Navy himself was because of some inner ear thing he has, makes him seasick as hell. That’s how he wound up in the Army. They transferred him to Camp Papago after he was wounded in North Africa.”
    There were all kinds of wounds. The ones you could see, and the ones inside. Frank Oberle truly hated Erik Ernst. And knew where he lived.
    Once Harry and I resettled ourselves, I asked him if there was anything more he could tell me about the Bollinger murders that never made the papers.
    He shifted around in the recliner, trying to find a more comfortable position. “I always believed we should have followed up on reports of thefts out there in the sticks around that time, but once the sheriff fingered Chess…” His unpatched eye