Desolation Flats

by Andrew Hunt

  “Any man that’d get sore at you for carrying around a bag is not the kind of fella you’d want to spend time with. Free advice, which you can take or leave.”

  “You’re right,” she said, with a brief smile. “Thank you.”

  “Was it seeing that fellow back at the restaurant that brought it on?”

  “Maybe. Partly. But it was more than that. I find this place unbearable.”

  “Well, here, let me take you back…”

  She gripped my arm to prevent me from rising to my feet.

  “Not this place here, specifically. I mean Utah, in general. Please. Sit with me here a little longer.”

  I sat down beside her.

  “You make me feel better,” she said. “You have a soothing effect on me.”

  “I’m glad I have that effect on somebody.”

  “I’m sure you’ve got plenty of it to go around.”

  “You overestimate me,” I said.

  “You’re everything I imagined a real American to be,” she said.

  “I can’t tell if that’s a compliment. But thank you.”

  “Oh, it’s meant as such. You’re authentic. You’re self-deprecating without being excessively so. You’re like a cowboy. Has anybody ever told you that?”

  “Until now, no,” I said. “Maybe I’ll go round up some little dogies.”

  She laughed and touched my arm. It felt nice, her doing that.

  “What is a dogie anyway?” she asked. “Is it another name for a dog?”

  “No, a dogie is a stray calf. Sometimes cowboys will shout…” I gave a loud finger whistle and hollered: “‘Git along little dogies!’”

  “Impressive! That’s quite a set of lungs you possess.”

  “Maybe I missed my calling in life. I shoulda been a dogie rounder upper.”

  “I’m sure you’d be exceptional at it,” she said, giggling like a grade-school girl.

  I smiled warmly at her. “So what is it about this place that you find so unbearable?”

  “It’s been so tense here since I arrived Saturday night. Even before the airplane touched down, I had this awful premonition something bad was going to happen. Now that Clive is gone, I spend every waking minute anxious. Nigel’s death threw everybody into a downward spiral, and we’re supposed to keep it a secret from his family back home until Clive’s whereabouts are known. Albert and Peter quarrel constantly. Julian is despondent, hardly saying a word. If Clive’s not found soon, I’m afraid they’re going to…”

  She stopped. Shut her mouth. Rocked gently in the moonlight.

  ‘They?” I asked.

  The only response I got came from armies of chirping crickets.

  “Is there something you’re not telling me?” I finally asked.

  “Please don’t ask me to say any more.”

  “The only way I’m going to find him is if you level with me,” I said. “I need you to tell me everything you know.”

  “I am leveling with you. I’m worried about him, that’s all. He’s my best friend. Ours is a unique bond.”

  “Oh yeah? How so?”

  “Clive prefers the intimacy of men over women.”

  Her words made my eyes widen. “You mean he’s…”

  I couldn’t bring myself to say homosexual.

  “I let him have his lovers. He lets me have mine. We cherish each other’s company. We travel together, we go to the opera and museums and sightseeing. Is that too unconventional for your police detective’s mind?”

  “If it works for the two of you, who’s to say it’s wrong?”

  She gave me a long and meaningful look, and I stared back, without looking away, or even blinking.

  “I feel like I can tell you anything,” she said.

  And she did. For the next hour or so, she filled me in on all of the details of her life. She grew up in a town called Alderley Edge in the county of Cheshire. She hailed from a well-to-do family. Her father made a fortune in shrewd real estate investments, and held on to his money during the depths of hard times. She attended private schools and did her undergraduate studies at Newnham College of Cambridge University. She met Clive while they were both university students. Peter Insley, who roomed with Clive at Oxford, introduced them to each other. They instantly fell in love, but they did so, in Dot’s words, “in a non-sexual way.” She talked so much about herself—about her ambitions to become a journalist, her travels around the world, her earlier trips to America (she’d previously visited New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles), and her constant worrying about Clive’s love of fast driving.

  She asked questions, hoping I’d reciprocate. In the past, I’d seldom confided in anybody. I wasn’t used to it. Early in her mild interrogation, I furnished short answers, reluctant to divulge personal information. Before long, I found myself opening up, sharing tales about growing up in a homestead full of competitive brothers and having a lawman father that commuted by train early each morning north to Salt Lake City. I recounted highlights from my Mormon mission to Los Angeles in 1919, and explained my decision to become a policeman after years of trying to avoid the profession. I refrained from telling her about my father’s murder, a defining event of my life. I decided I didn’t want her feeling sorry for me. Maybe that was an excuse, a rationalization, to avoid engaging with her about something still so raw, twenty-four years later. In the middle of telling her about my life in the present, I let out a big yawn. I couldn’t help it. It was involuntary. Even a longtime insomniac like me sometimes fell vulnerable to the strong pull of drowsiness.

  “How terrible of me,” she said. “Keeping you up so late. I’m sorry. Perhaps you should take me back to the hotel now.”

  “Don’t apologize,” I said. “I’m a night owl. I’d probably be awake at this hour anyway. By the way, you still haven’t told me…”

  “Please don’t ask me about Clive anymore. OK?”

  “Suit yourself. I won’t. May I ask about someone else?”

  “Who?”

  “Do you know a man named Vaughn Perry?”

  “I know of him. He’s an old Oxford pal of Clive’s. He came over from America. This was years ago, in the twenties. I know he’s from around here. I’ve never met him. Why do you ask?”

  “He was seen speaking to Clive last week, at the Old Mill Club. It’s a dine-and-dance establishment down in Cottonwood Heights.”

  “I thought we weren’t going to discuss Clive.”

  “I found Perry dead this afternoon—well, yesterday afternoon—in his little shotgun shack up in Emigration Canyon.”

  “My God,” she whispered.

  “It was set up to look like a heroin overdose,” I said. “I’ve got my doubts.”

  “Are you saying he was murdered?”

  “Looks that way to me.”

  “My God,” she repeated. “Who could have done such a thing?”

  “That’s what I aim to figure out.”

  “Could it have anything to do with…”

  Her lips formed the word “Clive,” but sound failed to come out of her mouth.

  “I suspect so. Think about it. Friends at Oxford. One goes missing. One is dead. There’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “They were both friends with Rudy Heinrich,” I said. “Clive went through his fascist phase, and Vaughn Perry’s father is the head of the Platinum Shirts, our own homegrown version of the Nazis, along with the German American Bund. I’m convinced that all of this adds up to more than mere happenstance.”

  “Are you suggesting Rudy Heinrich had a hand in any of this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’d be shocked if he did,” she said. “He’s a gentle soul. I’m certain he’d never harm anybody, at least not intentionally.”

  I knuckle-rubbed my burning eyes. “It’s getting late. I guess we should go.”

  “True. Nothing is going to be solved at this ungodly hour.”

  All at once, Dot shot up to her feet and extended her hand t
o help me up to mine. I gripped it and I rose from the ground, standing straight, face-to-face with her. The urge to kiss her hit me, and I could detect a similar impulse in her. My heart was in pain from all of the backflips it was doing. If I leaned forward four inches, our lips would’ve met, making her the only woman other than Clara that I’d ever kissed in my life. Those few seconds when I could’ve done it lasted an eternity.

  The kiss didn’t happen. I held back, not out of fear of being caught by Clara or rejected by Dot. My own nagging insecurities about my lovemaking skills had nothing to do with it, either. Nor were lofty religious concerns a factor. I imagined that Heavenly Father faced a host of more pressing matters than whether Art Oveson committed adultery with a beautiful Englishwoman in a remote roadside ditch west of Salt Lake City, Utah.

  No, none of those variables came into play. Near enough to Dot Bliss to feel her warmth and inhale her scent, I steeled myself with the reminder that I’d have to look at my reflection in the mirror the next day, and if I made love to her, I’d have to live with what I’d done. I wasn’t a cheater. Or that’s what I told myself. Had I fallen for an elaborate self-deception, designed to make me feel high and mighty? I don’t think so. Self-congratulation was the last thing going through my mind right then.

  Perhaps it all boiled down to me being too scared to make a pass at the woman. I’d never been put in this spot before, being the seduced, or the seducer. All my adult life, I’d gone out of my way not to be in that position.

  Whatever my reason for not kissing her, I stewed over my decision on the way back to the Hotel Utah, second-guessing myself the entire drive.

  Crossing into the city limits, I noticed Dot had dozed off, her chest rising and falling with each breath. The glowing hands on the dashboard clock put the time around 3:00 A.M. as I neared the white tower bathed in colored spotlights. Right then, I remembered that I’d stood up Leni Riefenstahl, that aggressive Nazi documentary filmmaker. I wondered if she’d waited around for me after midnight and got sore at me for not showing up. Like Dot Bliss, the aggressive Riefenstahl did not strike me as the kind of woman that would ever have problems finding a man. That filthy note she wrote amounted to a form of female frankness the likes of which I’d never witnessed. Now it made me chuckle when I thought about it. Late at night, the strangest things could make me break into laughter.

  I parked by the curb in front of the Hotel Utah. Dot woke up the instant the car stopped. Some people do that. She sat up straight, rubbed her eyes, and looked around to get reoriented. She adjusted her hat a little, smoothed her dress, and collected her purse from the center of the seat. Now alert and ready to go, she stared at me hopefully with wide eyes.

  “Would you care to come up?” she asked. “I promise I won’t bite.”

  “Thanks, but I have to get to work in the morning.”

  “Certainly.” She suddenly reached over and caressed my cheek. “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “You’re an oasis in the desert.”

  She lowered her diminutive hand, and I shot her a warm grin. In a rapid flash of movement, she reached for the handle, got out of the car, closed the door, and darted off in the direction of the Hotel Utah’s revolving doors, all of this before I even had a chance to offer to walk her to the elevators.

  That fast, Dot Bliss was gone.

  Twenty-two

  I tiptoed through the dark, closing the bedroom door behind me. I unbuttoned my shirt and removed it. I unbuckled my belt, opened my trousers, and let them drop to the floor. I pried off each shoe with the tip of the opposite foot and stepped out of them. I knew I wasn’t going to get much sleep this morning—maybe two hours, tops. When I lowered my hind end slowly onto the edge of the bed, the springs creaked and Clara’s heavy breathing ceased. She stirred and I feared the worst.

  “Where were you?”

  I glanced over my shoulder. “Out.”

  “Obviously. Where?”

  “I was talking to somebody.”

  “Who?”

  “Dorothy Bliss,” I said. “She’s Clive Underhill’s fiancée.”

  “Bliss? Is that her real last name?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I assume so. Why?”

  “It sounds like a pseudonym cooked up by a prostitute.”

  I sighed at the sting of her comment. “I think it’s her real name.”

  “What were you two discussing for so long?”

  “Clive’s disappearance,” I said. “I think she wanted somebody that she felt comfortable talking to.”

  “You were that person?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m glad she felt comfortable with my husband.”

  I ignored her comment. I fell back on the bed. My head sank into the pillow’s downy softness. Already I could hear the trill of the first birds at dawn performing their sweet morning song. I didn’t bother getting under the covers. I would be awake soon enough. I closed my eyes, but Clara was only getting started. I felt her sitting up in bed. The bedside lamp chain clicked. A glow penetrated my eyelids. I blinked them open and looked up at Clara, hunched and staring down at me.

  “What?”

  “Were you seeing her?”

  I pressed my fingertips firmly into my itchy eyes. “Of course I saw her,” I said, opening my eyes again. “That’s where I was tonight.”

  “No. I mean, were you seeing her?”

  “You mean … Was I … Did I…”

  “Yes.”

  “How can you ask me a thing like that?”

  She furrowed her brow. “When was the last time you touched me?”

  “I touch you all the time,” I said. “Only you always pull away, and make it clear you don’t want to be touched.”

  I sat up in bed, so our faces were level with each other. This conversation was significant enough to warrant sitting up.

  “If you’re asking, did I make love to her, I think you know the answer.”

  “Is it so terrible for me for to want to hear you say it?”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  She buried her face in her hands. I thought she was going to start crying. She didn’t. She simply breathed heavily.

  “I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”

  I reached over and touched her shoulder. She moved it away from my hand. The rejection felt like a spear piercing me. I let my hand drop to the bedspread.

  “I have a bad feeling,” she said. “It’s all going to come undone.”

  “What is?”

  “Everything. All we have.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “I’m sure it’s irrational.”

  “If you feel it, it doesn’t matter if it’s irrational or not.”

  She lifted her face out of her hands and turned her forlorn eyes on me.

  “You’re in trouble,” she said. “I know it.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You helped Roscoe get away,” she said. “It doesn’t matter that he came here armed. Nobody’s going to believe he’d ever harm you.”

  “I did what I thought was right.…”

  “Would you quit saying that?” Clara startled me with the force of her voice. “I don’t care if you thought you were right. People think things are right all the time that turn out to be wrong. A man’s judgment can be cloudy. Just because you think something’s right doesn’t make it so!”

  “What possible reason would Roscoe have for murdering Nigel? It makes no sense. He got the money he was owed and then he left. If he murdered Nigel, do you really think he’d go home and sleep it off?”

  “You’re not looking at it from all the angles, Art. You’re so convinced of his innocence that you’re blinded to anything that might go against your version of events.”

  “Like what, for instance?”

  “I don’t know. The police obviously had enough evidence to arrest him. There must’ve been eyewitnesses who saw him do something suspicious. You have to start seeing things more clea
rly. Quit letting your loyalty get in the way. It can drive you to extremes, like thinking that the police and the house detective at the Hotel Utah and whatever witnesses they were able to find are colluding together in some sort of conspiracy to frame Roscoe. Talk about delusional! Why would they want to frame this man for a crime he didn’t commit? Because they all hate his guts? Because they’re so eager to bust somebody, anybody, that it might as well be him? Oh, I know! It’s because he’s a rogue, unwilling to play by the rules. Or how about all of the above?”

  “OK, OK. Point taken. You can stop.”

  She lowered her voice: “Or maybe the answer is sitting right under your nose.”

  I didn’t respond to her comment. That was all the prodding she needed.

  “How much do you actually know about his past?”

  “I know all I need to know.”

  “That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say?”

  “I’m too tired to argue with you. I need some sleep.”

  My eyelids turned heavy, and exhaustion swept over me like waves of warm water. I slumped limply into bed, closed my eyes, and knitted my fingers together over my chest. Drifting off to slumber, a vision of my father appeared in my mind’s eye. I yearned to ask him for his help. Countless times, I’d prayed to him, hoping he would give me a sign from above, yet I’d never felt his presence. Sometimes, I silently wondered whether he was anywhere other than lifeless and under the ground, decomposing in a pine box.

  Such questions faded into sleep, at least for a sublime moment.

  Then the alarm clock rang. I wanted to pick it up and throw it out the window. I reached over and shut it off.

  So much for sleep.

  I opened my eyes, and the sign I had prayed for appeared in my mind, as lucid as any thought I’ve ever had. I got out of bed and turned on my bedside lamp to help me find my clothes. Clara stirred and opened her heavy eyes.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Go back to sleep,” I said.