Desolation Flats

by Andrew Hunt

  I didn’t even bother showering or shaving that morning. I stumbled into my clothes and buttoned and snapped and buckled my way to being dressed. In the bathroom, I splashed water on my face, brushed my teeth, and managed to maneuver a shot of Mennen talcum powder to each armpit. Clara was in the doorway, blinking at me quizzically.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “The answer came to me,” I said, excitedly. “I needed to sleep on it.”

  “What answer?”

  I went over to her, leaned in, and kissed her on the lips. I noticed I’d startled her as I pulled away.

  “Myron,” I said.

  I rushed down the hall, slipped on my fedora and suit coat, and went out the door, leaving a baffled Clara behind. I decided I’d explain it to her later. The clock was ticking, and this case wasn’t going to solve itself.

  * * *

  Eager as I was to see Myron, I took a slight detour to stop at Roscoe’s place and feed his cats. His cats seemed perfectly content, even though the skittish Captain Jack hid when he saw me. My task completed, I said my farewells, locked up the house, got in my car, and drove south. Before long, I slowed and parked in front of a tree-shrouded bungalow on a residential street in the vicinity of 900 East and 900 South and killed the engine. It was early: quarter past seven. But this could not wait. Or so I told myself as I jogged up the cement walkway and took every other step up to the porch. I knocked at the front door. Myron’s wife, Hannah, opened the door. An outgoing, wiry woman with curly black hair, sparkling eyes, and a smile that could light the darkest room, she pushed the screen door outward.

  “Hello, Art,” she said, genuinely surprised. “Aren’t you the early bird?”

  “Hi, Hannah,” I said. “Good to see you again. I hope I didn’t wake you up.”

  “Oh no, not at all. We’re up and at ’em at the crack of dawn. Please…”

  She opened the screen door and gestured for me to come in.

  I walked past her into an entrance hall full of wood paneling and plenty of natural light. She closed the door behind her. The house smelled of delicious aromas, as if an elaborate breakfast were being prepared in the kitchen.

  “Arthur!”

  “Mama Adler!”

  Myron’s elderly mother waddled toward me. A short woman, under five feet tall, she wore her unruly hair in a partial bun incapable of containing her explosion of salt-and-pepper frizz. Unlike Hannah, who wore something light and cottony and floral, the elderly matron preferred Old World dresses, long and dark, with sleeves down to the wrists, the kind of thing a lady might wear to Ellis Island thirty or forty years ago. She raised her hands and gripped mine and gave them a good shake, leaning in for a kiss. I bowed and gave her a light kiss on the cheek, and she pulled back with a smile that could warm even the coldest of hearts.

  “Arthur, it has been a long time!”

  “Yes, it has, hasn’t it, Mama?”

  “You will join us,” she said. “Breakfast is in the dining room.”

  “Well, I’m sort of in a hurry,” I said.

  “You are in too much of a hurry to have breakfast? What is the world coming to? You can’t just stop by and leave. You hardly come around anymore. Did I do something to upset you, Arthur?”

  “Mama,” said Hannah, shaking her head in disapproval. “Go easy on Art.”

  She was still hanging on to my hands, and she gave them another shake, for good measure. “Pfft! This is my number-two son!”

  “Well, that’s awfully kind of you to say, Mama Adler.”

  “It is true. Oh, and by the way, thank you for helping Myron with the family genealogy. Each day, I learn something new about my ancestors.”

  “I can’t tell you how happy that makes me feel, Mama Adler.”

  “What are you doing here?” asked Myron, emerging from the dining room, eating a piece of toast. “My car got fixed. I don’t need a ride anymore. Remember?”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “It’s about something else.”

  “Tell him over breakfast,” said Mama Adler, releasing my hands. “Have you ever tried shakshuka? Come, I will make you a plate, Arthur.”

  “I might have to take a rain check, Mama,” I said.

  She shook her head, mouth open. “What is this rain check?”

  Myron said something in another language. I think it was Hebrew. Mama responded in the same language. Myron looked at me, eyes half shut and sighing.

  “You have to tell her what other day you plan on coming,” he said.

  “And you must bring your pretty wife,” said Mama Adler. “What is her name?”

  “Clara.”

  She tugged her earlobe. “What?”

  “Clara,” I said louder.

  “Saturday you come,” she said. “You and Clara try my shakshuka then. OK?”

  I nodded haltingly. “I’ll check with the missus. I think that can be arranged.”

  I faced Myron and leaned in close to him. “There somewhere we can talk?”

  “Front porch,” he said, blowing crumbs, thanks to a mouthful of toast.

  “See you Saturday morning, Arthur,” said Mama Adler, with a little wave. “You and Clara and the rest of your family!”

  “So long, Mama Adler,” I said, reaching over and giving her shoulder a gentle squeeze. “It’s great to see you again.”

  Myron opened the front and screen doors and headed outside. I went with him. He closed both doors, and we stood in the breezy morning at not quite half past seven, with the towering trees casting long shadows. He pulled up a wooden porch chair for me and sat down on another. Out on the street, a fancy blue Lincoln Zephyr drove past, so clean and waxed that I could see the trees and houses reflected in its door.

  “What’s so important that it couldn’t wait another hour?”

  “Remember our trip to the Hotel Utah on Monday morning?” I asked.

  “How could I forget? It was less than forty-eight hours ago.”

  “Something was going on between you and Dooley Metzger. What was it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “C’mon, Myron. Play it straight with me.”

  “I’m sure it’s all in Metzger’s personnel file.”

  “I’d like very much to see that file,” I said.

  “It’s in the records room. Knock yourself out.”

  I nodded, silently plotting out my next move. “You used to work there.”

  “That’s where I got my start,” he said. “What of it?”

  “Do you happen to know who’s working down there this morning?” I asked.

  “Kearney Hoagland,” said Myron. “Decent enough fellow.”

  “Yeah, I know him.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I want to see Metzger’s personnel file, preferably without anyone knowing about it. If there was some other way I could get my hands on it—”

  “Why all the secrecy?”

  “I’ve got this nagging feeling that Metzger is somehow tied to Clive Underhill’s disappearance,” I said. “Maybe he even had something to do with the murder of Nigel Underhill. I suspect his file will be enlightening.”

  “You’re supposed to review files in the room, unless you sign them out with the attendant on duty.”

  “I think this situation warrants a slight bending of the rules.”

  “It seems like you’ve been doing a lot of that lately,” he said.

  “I’d rather not involve the desk officer on duty.”

  “But you’re fine with involving me?”

  “I don’t know where else to turn.”

  He waited a long moment to reply.

  “All right,” he said, finally standing up. “Let’s get this over with.”

  Twenty-three

  Myron fumbled for his keys in the dim light of the basement. Down here, with a cold draft whistling through the length of the hall, I briefly forgot it was summer outside. A fleeting case of the shivers even hit me. Myron unlocked and opened th
e door, reached inside, and pressed a light switch. I followed him in. Light fixtures sprouting out of the ceiling bathed the room with a blinding glow, illuminating rows of tall filing cabinets. A long counter, staffed during business hours, kept visitors confined to a waiting area furnished with a couple of battered chairs.

  “It’ll probably be in the personnel files,” he said. “Which are on the west wall. Better make it snappy. You don’t have much time. Sometimes he opens up early.”

  “I don’t know my way around here. Would you mind finding it for me?”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah. You used to work down here. You know the lay of the land. It’s all terra incognita for me, I’m afraid.”

  Myron’s cheeks puffed out and he blew air. “I’ll regret this later, I’m sure.”

  I gripped his shoulder and gave him an affectionate squeeze. “Attaboy! I knew I could count on you.”

  He rounded a corner, heading down between rows of filing cabinets. He was gone for a couple of minutes, and from where I was standing, I could hear the metallic opening and slamming of file drawers. He returned with a green hanging folder containing a cream-colored dossier and passed me the file.

  “What you’re looking for is in that file,” he said. “I hope after this, you’ll leave me out of this tangled mess.”

  Before he was even finished uttering his sentence, he was following me out the door and locking it up behind us.

  Upstairs at my desk, I took my hat off, set it down, and opened the file—labeled PERSONNEL–M–METZGER, DESMOND V.—and began skimming. The first several pages detailed the milestones of his employment with the Salt Lake City Police Department.

  I flipped pages, past minutiae about fitness exams and promotions and squad transfers and performance ratings. I came to a 1912 photograph of the Salt Lake City Police Department—six rows deep—with my father in front, and Metzger three back on the far right. I continued until I reached a form on faded onionskin paper. INTERNAL INVESTIGATION, read block lettering at the top, and it was dated Tuesday, November 1, 1921. Below that, the report read:

  Detectives Wade Carlson & Robert Duncombe investigated suspect D.V. “Dooley” Metzger pertaining to allegations of his involvement in starting a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Assisting them was a Klan informant who goes by the initials M.W.S. Metzger is believed to be a Klaliff (or vice president) of Salt Lake City Klavern, and editor-in-chief and contributor to the group’s local newspaper, The Tower Watchers. Dets. Carlson & Duncombe questioned Metzger to determine if above allegations had any basis in fact. During the meeting, Metzger was forthcoming. He admitted his involvement in the secret outfit, and took pride in his role as a leader and an inspirer of his fellow man. He joined over fears of other races, namely Negroes and Mexicans, and what he called “religious undesirables”—particularly Catholics and Jews—living in our midst in ever greater numbers. When asked if he regretted his decision to join the group, Metzger responded: “Why should I?”

  The initial investigation report went on for three more pages, mostly detailing the efforts of the two investigators, Carlson and Duncombe, to persuade Metzger to resign his membership from the Ku Klux Klan. Ever the true believer, Metzger refused. He sounded like an ideologue wedded to his own twisted notions of right and wrong.

  I skimmed the remainder of the report—full of stilted police writing and typos—and reached a small stash of clippings from the Klan newspaper The Tower Watcher. The police identified columnist “Desmond Victory” as really being Dooley Metzger. Metzger admitted he wrote for the paper under a pseudonym, and with his real first name being Desmond and middle name Victor, it wasn’t hard to figure out he was Desmond Victory. Most of his pieces were invective-filled diatribes directed against Jews and Negroes and bankers and “city slickers.” In one column, he warned the feds were planning to confiscate everybody’s firearms and planned to turn people into “slaves, like the damned forced laborers of yore.” Reading it, taking it all in, I wondered if this five-and-dime demagogue was the same man I knew as the house detective at the Hotel Utah.

  I moved on to a series of police reports—filed between the mid-1920s and early 1930s—that had been flagged for investigation by Carlson and Duncombe. The common thread linking the cases together is that they all involved suspects who’d died in police custody. In each case, the arresting officers were Patrolmen Grady Hedgepeth and Earl Starkey, and the supervisor who signed off on all of the reports as justifiable homicides—committed in the line of self-defense—was none other than Sergeant Dooley Metzger. I flipped and skimmed the opening lines to each report.

  WED, MAY 6, 1925: Negro motorist Quentin Coleman, age 45, pulled over for broken taillight. Shot while resisting arrest.

  TUE, DEC 13, 1927: Miguel Lopez, Mexican, age n.a., stopped for unknown reasons. Shot while attempting to steal Officer Hedgepeth’s firearm.

  SAT, APR 28, 1928: Roberto Morales, Mexican, age 38, arrested for vagrancy. Shot while fleeing arrest.

  MON, FEB 18, 1929: Isaac Cohen, Jew, 32, arrested for speeding. Got out of car and attempted to strangle Officer Starkey. Shot in self-defense.

  TUE, NOV 26, 1929: Arturo Diaz, Mexican, 27, arrested for possession of marijuana. Shot while reaching for a knife to stab Officer Hedgepeth.

  Each report told essentially the same story: a colored person or a Mexican or a Jew, pulled over for some routine violation, ended up in the morgue, riddled with bullets, because they somehow resisted arrest. The details chilled me. Some reports included pictures of the deceased. The one that got to me the most was from the scene of an arson fire, where a man named Juan Martinez and his family of seven—a wife and six children—were burned to death in their west side home. The first men on the scene were Hedgepeth and Starkey. Once again, Sergeant Metzger signed off on the report. The fire inspector said someone had broken into the house and poured gasoline all over the main floor and started a fire with a wooden match. Martinez’s crime, apparently, was that he owned a successful dry goods store on Redwood Road.

  I turned pages, eventually getting past the flagged reports of suspects shot in cold blood by Hedgepeth and Starkey. I reached a document (dated Monday, October 10, 1932) that indicated, in a mercifully succinct manner, that things did not end well for the informant working with Carlson and Duncombe:

  Informant M.W.S.—who we can now reveal to be Morton W. Seegmiller—was found dead two days ago in the front seat of his automobile out by the Burmester Road, south of the Great Salt Lake, the apparent victim of multiple gunshot wounds. His body will be returned to Salt Lake City for burial in the city cemetery. Without his testimony, detectives will not pursue charges against Metzger, although it is the recommendation of these two investigators that Metzger by terminated from his employment at the Salt Lake City Police Department, posthaste.

  A discovery I made near the bottom of the file gave me an unexpected jolt. The reason Metzger lost his job on the force back in ’33 was because he—along with Patrolmen Hedgepeth and Starkey—assaulted a fellow police officer that used to work in the records division. The victim’s name: Myron Adler. They forced him at gunpoint into a car, drove him to an isolated spot outside of the city, and proceeded to beat him so severely he spent three weeks in the hospital recovering. I cringed at the sight of eight-by-ten photos of an unconscious Myron Adler lying in a hospital bed, bruised and swollen beyond recognition, looking almost dead.

  The three policemen would’ve gotten away with their crimes had it not been for the courage of two uniformed traffic cops, Gene Stubbs and Louis Fereday, who overheard Hedgepeth and Starkey discussing the beating at a popular police diner, the Chit-Chat Luncheonette. Stubbs and Fereday signed a statement that sealed the fate of the assailants, who were promptly fired from the SLCPD. This opened the door for legal action and jail time.

  I reached for the city directory, opened it to the residential listings, and flipped pages, licking my finger along the way. My first stop was the M’s. There were a few Metzgers, but
no Desmond, Victor, or Dooley. I turned to the H’s. No sign of Hedgepeth in the phone book. I turned to the S’s and ran my finger down to the surname “Starkey.” There were three of them: Bertram, Lee, and William. No Earl. I closed the directory and slid it aside.

  Why hadn’t I heard of this case? And why hadn’t it caused a public uproar?

  I soon found the reason. Myron refused to press charges. Not one of the men served a day behind bars. According to an internal report, the department paid Myron an undisclosed sum of money to not mention the incident to the press. The brass at Public Safety covered up the beatings. No big mystery as to why. The Salt Lake City Police Department was already plagued by a scandal involving anti-vice officers found to be taking bribes and kickbacks. An avalanche of bad publicity ensued, triggering a wave of mass firings early in the decade. The higher-ups in the force desperately wanted to avoid another public outcry. Flash forward five years: Now Metzger was house detective at the Hotel Utah. Who knows what became of Hedgepeth and Starkey?

  “Art.”

  The voice startled me out of my deep concentration. I swiveled around in my chair. The doorway framed Buddy Hawkins, hat pulled low. I could tell by his clenched jaw he was in a hard and determined way. He moved a few feet into the squad room, nodded at Myron, who stopped typing long enough to glance up at him, and repeated the gesture to DeVoy, presently hunched over his own stack of work. I was so lost in the file that I’d almost fooled myself into thinking I was the only man in Public Safety. I hadn’t even noticed DeVoy arriving at work. He usually greeted me with a dour hello and some sort of grim commentary about his various maladies.

  My attention shifted back to Buddy, now standing in the center of the office.

  “Yes sir?”

  “Cowley wants to you see you. Now.”

  “Yes sir,” I repeated.

  He left the squad room. I stood up and followed him, sticking to his heels. Myron and DeVoy stared at me as I headed out into the corridor. Buddy’s request made my nervous. My mind raced: Why would Cowley possibly want to see me? Was I in some sort of trouble? I pursued Buddy down marble steps, across the lobby, down the central corridor where high-level police officials had their offices. Towering oil paintings of past police chiefs, dating back to the 1850s, adorned the walls. In the anteroom of Cowley’s office, his secretary was typing what I guessed was probably another one of the chief’s detailed interoffice memos. She glanced up at me as I walked by, and averted her eyes as I looked at her. Did she know something I didn’t?