Desolation Flats

by Andrew Hunt

  The interior of Cowley’s office came into view, and the sight of Pace Newbold seated near a familiar art deco desk made my stomach sink. In my mind, I feared the worst, convinced I was about to be reprimanded. Sitting down, I found Cowley grim faced, elbows on the desk, the fingertips of his hands meeting, as if he’d just finished praying when I walked in. I tugged my khaki pleats upward, dropped into the chair, and kicked my right lower leg over my left knee.

  “Hello again, Arthur,” said Cowley. “I trust you’re well.”

  “Hello, sir. Never better, as a matter of fact.”

  His face lit up with a smile, and the crow’s-feet on either side of his eyes crinkled. “I’m pleased to hear.”

  After closing the door, Buddy crossed the room and sat down on the other side of Cowley’s desk. The chief of police tilted his head in Buddy’s direction, and waited for his subordinate to get comfortable. I caught Pace’s gaze, but he looked away, and I scanned the room, speculating in silence as to what on earth I was doing here.

  “Feel free to break the news, Charles,” Cowley said.

  “What news?” asked Pace.

  “You’re both off the Underhill case,” said Buddy. “The feds are running it now.”

  “I got off the telephone with your brother a short time ago,” said Cowley, staring at me. “He gave us direct orders to halt all investigations having to do with Clive’s disappearance and Nigel’s murder. That means both of you will have to stop what you’re doing, and move on to other cases.”

  “Was there a reason given?” I asked.

  “Your brother didn’t say, but the Bureau is being territorial with this one,” said Buddy. “And with a big shot like Clive Underhill, the feds are going to jump into this thing right away. There’s a lot at stake here.”

  Buddy paused as if debating in his mind whether to say what he was about to say. Then he said it. “Rumors abound. There’s talk of an abduction, and I’ve even heard that J. Edgar Hoover has taken a personal interest in the case, and that he secretly flew in last night to oversee the investigation. Apparently, he’s a hands-on kind of fellow.”

  Cowley chimed in: “I promised your brother you’d both surrender all of your investigation notes, and that you’d fully cooperate with the Bureau men.”

  Cowley eyed Buddy, his way of handing it back to his subordinate. “If either of you harbor any funny notions about continuing your investigations, you’ll be fired for interfering with the Federal Kidnaping Act of 1932. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. I’m glad you gentlemen comprehend the gravity of this matter,” said Cowley. “Please don’t test it. I’d hate to lose you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Cowley gave a single nod. “Dismissed.”

  Pace and I stood up and filed silently out of the room. I pulled the door closed. We passed through the anteroom, walked out into the corridor, down to the lobby, and I gave him an opportunity to stop and get a drink from a nearby porcelain water fountain. He got his fill, straightened, and wiped droplets off his chin. His angry, furrowed-brow glance and narrowing eyes seemed to ask: What do you want?

  “Doesn’t it strike you as odd,” I said, “that they plucked us right off this case, rather than—”

  “You know what strikes me as odd?” Pace asked, cutting me off. “That you’re such a goddamned pest, Oveson. You’re unrelenting.”

  “What about that stiff they found up Emigration Canyon the other night?” I asked.

  Pace looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “Are you talking about the stupid bastard that overdosed on smack?”

  “Well, that’s just it,” I said. “I think it was a homicide made to look like an O.D. He’s Vaughn Perry, son of Newton Perry, Führer of the Platinum Legion. There’s an active chapter of it here in Utah. I’m certain the younger Perry’s death is linked to all of this, but I can’t be sure how.”

  “Christ, you’ve lost your marbles, Oveson,” said Pace. “I saw the coroner’s report. The fucking fool shot up pure-grade heroin, and now he’s lying in the morgue. If you ask me, I’d say natural selection is doing its job. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to quit listening to you and actually go do my job.”

  Pace stormed up the stairs to the detective bureau. I gave him a head start before I ambled up to the morgue on the third floor, where my old friend Tom Livsey sat at his desk filling out paperwork. His thinning hair had gone prematurely silver, and his long, Lincoln-esque face exuded honesty. When I arrived at his cramped office, he was eating an apple cinnamon sweet roll and drinking a glass of milk. He brushed off his right hand before shaking mine.

  “How’s every little thing, Tom?”

  “Can’t complain, Art. You?”

  “I have my good days and my bad.”

  “Don’t we all? What can I do you for?”

  “Vaughn Perry. What can you tell me?”

  He inhaled deeply through his nose and considered his response. “He overdosed. Body found on Tuesday in a house up Emigration Canyon.”

  “Mind if I have a look?”

  “No, not at all.”

  Tom finished off his roll, then got up and led me next door to the vast lab room where everything echoed, bleach fumes stung the eyes and nose, and sterilized tables reflected lights above. We went over to the rows of refrigerator drawers on the walls, and Tom pulled one of them—number eight—open, folding back the sheet on the occupant.

  Vaughn Perry’s appearance had turned waxy since I saw him last. Discoloration had set in. When I found him in his bed, he looked so alive that I thought he might open his eyes at any moment. Now he was deeply immersed in death, with sagging skin, no more facial definition, and lips beginning to curl, creating a strange smile.

  “Why the interest?”

  I looked at Tom. “I’d rather not say.”

  He smiled as he pulled the linen sheet back up over the dead man and walked the drawer closed. “Playing your cards close to your chest, huh?”

  “On this one, yeah,” I said. “In the words of the late, great Calvin Coolidge: ‘I have noticed that nothing I never said ever did me any harm.’”

  Livsey laughed as he fastened the refrigerator drawer shut. He gave me a friendly pat on the shoulder and started back toward his office. I followed him out the door of the lab and pulled it closed behind me.

  “That’s what I like about you, Art,” he said, standing in the doorway. “Always the careful one.”

  Twenty-four

  “Were you going to tell me?”

  Myron lowered his pen and peered over his shoulder at me, blinking a couple of times, as if waiting for me to say something else. DeVoy was talking softly on the telephone, having a conversation with a police detective in Ogden about a missing woman. Crossing the room to sit down at my desk, I opted for silence, leaving the ball in his court.

  “Tell you what?”

  “About the beating you took?”

  He shifted his focus back to his paperwork. “It’s none of your business.”

  “Why didn’t you press charges?”

  “Also none of your business.”

  “So you let the anti-Semites win? Is that it?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “These men beat you within an inch of your life, and they’re out there walking free.”

  “There are other ways of fighting back.”

  “Oh yeah? How?”

  Now he turned his swivel chair toward me.

  “By working harder. Doing a better job than everybody else,” he said. “They’re gone. I’m here. That’s good enough for me.”

  “They ought to be in prison.”

  “Good luck putting them there.”

  “I could use your help, Myron.”

  “Count me out.”

  “Why? Don’t you want to see them behind bars?”

  “It didn’t happen to you. Why are you so up in arms?”

/>   “They can’t get away with it,” I said. “They have to face the consequences.”

  “Did you ever hear of something called the Nuremberg Race Laws?”

  “No.”

  “They were passed in Germany, to strip Jews of their citizenship and rights,” he said. “The Nazis are cracking down on my people, stealing their property, herding them into open-air prisons. Bad things are going on over there.”

  “What’s your point?” I asked, tucking the photographs away in the envelope.

  “The men that beat me up were fired. Over there, they’d be promoted for it. That’s the difference. I have no plans to rock a boat that doesn’t need rocking. It’s easy to stick your neck out when it’s never been on the chopping block.”

  I shook my head. “Suit yourself. These thugs will probably just go do it again—harm some someone else, based on the color of their skin or their religious beliefs.”

  “Detective Oveson?”

  I turned around. The voice belonged to a young blond fellow, mid to late twenties, standing in the doorway. He came immaculately dressed in a pinstripe suit with a matching vest, and his red-and-yellow silk tie brought out the blue in his coat.

  “Yes?”

  “Wallace Fitch, Federal Bureau of Investigation. I’d like to have some of your time, if I may.”

  “Of course.”

  “Would you follow me, please?”

  “Sure.”

  Even though my head was still back in my troubling conversation with Myron, I followed the G-man out of the office, trotting down the stairs, to a basement interrogation room. He closed the door behind us, and we took our seats on opposite sides of the table. The man was thorough. He kept me in there for about two hours, asking question after question. I walked him through everything, going all the way back to Saturday, when I saved Clive Underhill’s life from the fiery wreckage of his vehicle. During the course of the long session, I made repeated efforts to try to pry information out of him about what the feds planned to do. He was not particularly forthcoming, although he did let it slip out that a small army of agents was combing the Canyons of the Escalante at that very moment, searching for Underhill. He was courteous to a fault, even allowing me to go to the restroom halfway through our powwow.

  It was nearing the lunch hour when I returned to the Bureau of Missing Persons. The office was empty. I noticed those gruesome photos of Myron in the hospital were gone. I opened a filing drawer full of dossiers containing unsolved cases. I fished out a stack of seven or eight and went to work. An oscillating fan on a nearby table whirred back and forth, blowing warm fresh air coming in through the open windows. I opened the file on top. A familiar green sheet greeted me, and my eyes dropped down to the main stats.

  MISSING/UNIDENTIFIED PERSON REPORT

  LAST NAME: FOSTER

  FIRST NAME: GWENDOLYN

  DATE OF BIRTH: 5/14/1893

  ADDRESS: 1879 South 900 East, Salt Lake City

  DATE OF DISAPPEARANCE: Monday, 2/10/1936

  AGE AT TIME OF DISAPPEARANCE: 42

  I examined her picture. The family had furnished a sepia-toned snapshot with creases and stains. I picked it up to get a better look at her sunken eyes, pug nose, slight overbite, and flowing, curly black hair. February 10, 1936. Almost two and a half years ago, I thought. Where have you gone? Why haven’t we found you yet? What’s the point of looking anymore?

  I returned her picture to her file, closed it, and set it atop the formidable stack before me. Each cream-colored dossier represented someone who’d disappeared, probably never to be found. I went through one after the other, and their pictures blended together in my mind. Leafing through those files, I thought of Melvin Thompson, the mechanic who went missing en route to the cigar store three years ago, and a wave of despair swept over me. How could it be—in this modern industrial day and age of airplanes and telephones, automobiles and electricity—that a man or a woman could vanish into thin air, never to be seen or heard from again? God only knew. I sure didn’t.

  Sometime around one o’clock, Myron returned, followed minutes later by DeVoy. Before long, the latter put one of his operas on the phonograph and kept the volume turned low, so as not to incur the wrath of our neighbors in the Homicide or Morals squads down the hall. I couldn’t concentrate with that racket, and with him blabbering incessantly. It soon dawned on me that he was talking to me.

  “I’m particularly partial to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, although I’m not too pleased with the maestro’s decision to exclude Liebestod from Act 3. Oh well. Who am I to grouse? In my humble opinion, Stokowski makes up for that shortcoming with a sublime version of Liebesnacht in the second act. The ‘Love Music’ never sounded so absolutely magical. Riveting, absolutely riveting.”

  DeVoy finally quieted down long enough to look over at me. “What do you think of him?”

  His words rattled me out of my sweaty trance. “Who?”

  “Wagner,” he said. “Weren’t you listening?”

  “Yeah, I was listening,” I said, closing the dossier. “I just wasn’t sure if you meant Wagner or the Leopold guy, that’s all.”

  “Maestro Stokowski?” he asked, with an edge of contempt. “I’m sure he’d take exception to being called the Leopold guy.”

  “I haven’t listened to much Wagner, I’m afraid,” I said.

  “No shock there,” said DeVoy, loosening his crooked bow tie.

  I nodded. “If it’s not on Kraft Music Hall or Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge, I probably haven’t heard it.”

  “I’d say that makes you a philistine of the first order,” said DeVoy with a snort. “Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge. Lord, what is the world coming to? We live in an age of mindless conformity.”

  I rolled my eyes and sighed. Once again, DeVoy had managed to depress me. This was becoming an occupational hazard thanks to him.

  I put on my hat and my coat and wandered out into the heat of the afternoon, carrying a spiral notebook with information I’d jotted after going through those files. I decided I was going to update all of these files after spending so many days away from them. I spent a few hours going from door to door, talking to the friends and loved ones and relatives of missing persons. I asked if they’d heard anything, if they had any news for me. I scribbled notes as fast as I could. My right hand developed a writing cramp. Their words, like the faces of the missing, began to blend together in my head.

  Midafternoon rolled around, and I stuck my spiral notebook in the glove compartment, and drove over to the nearby Crystal Palace Market at 100 South and 300 East to buy groceries. I stocked up on the essentials: flour, eggs, milk, bread, apples, oranges, a jar of peanuts, and—just to liven things up a little—a box of candy. I feared it would melt during the drive, but I bought it anyway. I walked out of the store carrying a big brown bag full of groceries, which I loaded onto the passenger-side floor of my sweltering auto, and then I made my way over to visit an old friend.

  Gail Thompson still lived at the Shubrick Apartments, 72 West 400 South, the same place she’d lived when her husband, Melvin, had disappeared back in 1935. I rang the buzzer below her metal wall mailbox in the entrance hall, and she appeared at the top of the staircase a moment later. Her face lit up with a smile when she saw me.

  “Come on up, Art!”

  “Thanks, Gail.”

  Inside of her cramped, hot place, she expressed her gratitude for the groceries—she was almost on the verge of tears when she accepted them in her open arms—and told me how much she appreciated the box of chocolates in particular, which, thankfully, had melted only a little on the ride over here.

  She took me to meet her new parrot, named Ray (her previous one had died), and reintroduced me to her cockatiels and zebra finches, and pointed to two new additions in a cage dangling above her radio, a pair of budgies, one blue-and-white, the other green-and-yellow. Moments later, we were sitting out on the front stoop. She was smoking and I was drinking a glass of ice water
, which, at one point, I pressed against my sweating brow to cool off. I noticed, while I was sitting on the hard concrete step, that Gail had aged quite a bit since I’d seen her last. The wrinkles cut deeper into her narrow face, and her hair was rapidly whitening. She preferred to hang her head, bending her neck, thus making her appear even older.

  “It’s been three years and almost four months since Mel—” She bit her lower lip, and then took a drag off her cigarette. “It used to be that whenever I’d hear someone walking out in the hallway in the building, I’d turn down the radio and run to the front door,” she said, blowing smoke. “But it’d never be him. That’s the thing, it was never him.”

  I drank my water and listened.

  After a long pause, she continued: “When April eighteenth rolled around this year, I told myself I wasn’t going to keep listening for him anymore. I still have the birds. They’re like my kids, really. They keep me in line. Mel and I never had any interest in having children. There are times when I regret the choices we made, but that’s my bed, and I’ve got to sleep in it. I’m too old now to do anything about it.” She reached down and stubbed out her cigarette in a clay pot full of sand sitting on one of the steps. “Speaking of which, do you have any new pictures of your little ones?”

  “I sure do,” I said, pulling out my wallet.

  I passed it to her and she looked at the school snapshots with envious eyes.

  “They grow up so fast,” I said.

  “They certainly do. My goodness, is this Sarah Jane?”

  “Yeah. She’s fifteen now, believe it or not.”

  “She’s beautiful. Looks like her mother.”

  I smiled. “Thank you. She carries the weight of the world on her shoulders.”

  “She’s like her father that way.” Gail flipped to the next pictures. “Look at the three of them. They’re adorable. How old is Emily now?”