Desolation Flats

by Andrew Hunt

  Twenty-seven

  Looking back, it probably wasn’t the brightest idea to interrupt Frank’s golf game with J. Edgar Hoover to announce my intention to investigate a missing persons report with close ties to the Clive Underhill case. Had I been weighing my options in a more rational manner, I would have taken an entirely different approach, like searching for Booker on the quiet. But I chose the confrontational route because I wanted my brother to know that I was not going to bow to his intimidation, as I had done so many times in the past.

  When DeVoy and I returned to Public Safety, I found Buddy Hawkins sitting on my chair in the Missing Persons Bureau, with Myron pretending not to notice anything. Buddy didn’t say a word as he got up and walked past me. He didn’t have to. He just tipped his head slightly, indicating I should follow him, and led the way down the stairs to the ground floor.

  Past the big and somber oil paintings we strode, as typewriters rattled and telephones rang in the background. Chief Cowley sat leaning back in his chair, fingers knitted, staring morosely at me. I noticed his frown, a rarity for him, which I took to be a bad sign. I sat down on one of the guest chairs, and Buddy found his seat on the other side of Cowley’s sprawling art deco desk.

  I feared he was going to fire me right away. He didn’t. Funny thing is, I always underestimated my political clout around Public Safety. Being the son of Willard Oveson, martyred police inspector extraordinaire, came with its own unique set of perks. Foremost among them was that you could get away with murder, and a wide array of lesser felonies, and not face any consequences. But I was about to commit the worst sin of all in the world of law enforcement: taking a stand. Strong principles can quickly turn into strychnine in this line of work. And with Clara unemployed and not likely to find teaching work anytime soon, I had to make some fast decisions about how far out on the chopping block I was willing to stick my neck.

  Before uttering a word, Cowley drew a shaky breath. “Your brother, Frank, telephoned here a short time ago to discuss a matter of utmost urgency. He said that you interrupted his game of golf with the director of the FBI, and that you were belligerent and told him you would not halt your investigation of Clive Underhill’s disappearance, despite my dire warnings that you would be—”

  “I said nothing of the sort,” I protested. “I informed my brother that—”

  “Let him finish,” said Buddy.

  Cowley nodded and shifted his weight in his chair. “Like I was saying, Special Agent Frank Oveson insists that you outright refused to stop your work on the Clive Underhill case, which is in direct contravention of the Lindbergh Law.”

  “Sir, you need to hear my side of the story,” I said. “I never told Frank I was planning to keep working on the Underhill case. I was merely paying him a courtesy call to let him know that a bellhop named Winston Booker who worked at the Hotel Utah has gone missing, and his parents dropped by Public Safety this morning to ask me to find him. I wanted Frank—er, uh, Special Agent Oveson—to know that there might be some overlap between my case and his. That’s all.”

  “Well, in that case, I think there may be a perfectly simple solution to this problem,” said Buddy. “Delay your investigation into Mr. Booker’s disappearance until the FBI has wrapped up its work on the Underhill case.”

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “Why?” asked Buddy.

  “Because he deserves the same treatment as any other missing person,” I said. “When a person goes missing, I don’t delay my investigation for any reason.”

  “That’s a noble principle in theory,” said Cowley. “But there are certain political realities that have to be taken into consideration.”

  “With all due respect, sir,” I said, “the only reality at stake here is that a man is missing and his family is frightened.”

  “I think you’ll find that I’m a reasonable man, Arthur, which is why I’ve chosen to make you an offer,” said Cowley. “Hold off on looking into Mr. Booker’s disappearance until such time as the FBI has completed its investigation of the Underhill case.”

  “Or?” I asked.

  “You’ll be demoted to Traffic Bureau, which means this time tomorrow you’ll be ticketing jaywalkers and pulling slugs out of parking meters with pliers.”

  “Last time I was in here, you promised to fire me for interfering with the Underhill investigation,” I said. “Do you think it’s wise to make threats you have no intention of following through on?”

  “Are you goading me, Arthur?” asked Cowley, with a hint of anger in his voice.

  “No,” I said. “Just trying to do my job.”

  “Is this about some sort of silly rivalry between you and your brother?” Buddy asked. “Because if so, I can tell you right now it’s not worth—”

  “Pardon me,” I said, rising from my chair. “I need to find out what happened to Winston Booker.”

  “You’ve got a bright future here,” said Cowley. “Don’t throw it away.”

  On my way to the door, I paused to respond to my superiors.

  “I like a bright future as much any man,” I said. “But there’s a limit to what I’m willing to pay for it.”

  “Before you go getting all high and mighty and start flushing your career down the toilet,” said Buddy, “you ought to ask yourself if it’s worth it.”

  I nodded. “Thank you for the advice.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” asked Cowley.

  I shot him a quizzical look.

  “Your badge, please.”

  I approached his desk, opened my wallet, and unclipped the shiny shield that had come to symbolize my professional life for the past eight years. It felt scary and disorienting to lay it down on his desk and leave. But what choice did they give me? At this stage in my life, if they weren’t going to let me do my job right, then I was not going to do it at all.

  * * *

  The entire time I loaded my belongings into a cardboard box, my stomach churned something fierce. DeVoy blinked morosely in my direction, watching my every move, while Myron kept his back turned to me

  To say I had mixed feelings about taking a stand I knew would get me fired was the understatement of the century. Eight years I’d given to this job. Eight years I’d shown up here faithfully every weekday morning at eight thirty, ready to put in at least eight hours—often more—of rigorous work. Eight years I’d listened to the hubbub in the corridors and the steady din from the downstairs lobby, which would occasionally erupt into out-and-out pandemonium. This had been the longest-running job I’d ever had. Despite my occasional grumblings, I loved the work I did. I felt like I was making a difference for the better, and I often found that the results of my work were tangible and, occasionally, even satisfying. While I always dreaded the prospect of finding a missing person dead, or not finding one at all, the experience of reuniting a lost loved one with his or her family, and seeing the looks of relief on the faces of kin, was gratifying, to say the least.

  Was I really ready to give it all up? Was I prepared—as Buddy put it—to flush it down the toilet, simply because I refused to compromise? Somewhere in the back of my mind, I could hear Willard Oveson’s voice echoing, as only a father’s can: Pick and choose, carefully, the hills you wish to die on.

  I considered such matters as I put on my hat, lifted the box off my desk, and headed to the door. I took a long last look.

  “So long,” said DeVoy, sadly. “Sorry it has to end this way.”

  I mustered a smile. “Don’t worry. I’ll see you around, I’m sure.”

  I cleared my throat. Myron stopped writing whatever it was he was writing and looked over at me.

  “Good-bye, Myron.”

  His stone face did not change one iota. He gave a slight nod and resumed work.

  I stepped into the corridor to encounter a small crowd of detectives, all in dark hats and suits and ties. I recognized most of them as friends and acquaintances from the Morals and Homicide squads, the two biggest bureaus on the
second floor. I sensed the collective gloom that filled the hall—a forest of somber stares and clenched jaws, lit by the yellowish light from above.

  One by one, voices sounded as I walked past, some overlapping. A hand or two reached out and patted my shoulder or squeezed my bicep.

  I responded to each with a smile and a nod. Pace Newbold joined me at the stairs. He looked sharp in a dark green suit and brown fedora. His red tie was loose, and I could see the splotches of sweat on his shirt. Typical of Pace, he did not bother to ask if he could escort me down the marble steps. He assumed it would be fine. Halfway down the first flight, with the crowd of men now out of earshot if you spoke low, he leaned in and let me have it.

  “The hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “What does it look like?” I asked. “I quit my job.”

  “You must be chump of the year, Oveson,” he said. “Throwing away a perfectly good job over a missing Negro.”

  He cut ahead of me, right in my path, and turned toward me, forcing me to halt on the step above him.

  “Get out of my way,” I said, glaring at him, raising the box higher against my chest. “I really don’t feel like getting into it with you right now, Pace.”

  “Why bother?” he asked. “It won’t make a goddamned bit of difference, you quitting like this.”

  I outflanked Pace, zooming to his right—my left—to get around him to continue to the first floor. He spun around and trotted down the steps, keeping up with me as I went. We rounded a corner and descended the next flight.

  “Good old-fashioned jealousy! Bet that’s what it is,” said Pace. “You can’t stand that your brother is now running the show. Well, get used to it, Oveson. It’s nothing personal. The FBI always hands the preliminary shit work over to local law enforcement. By the time we have the case damn near cracked, they step in and take all the credit.”

  “I said leave me alone, Pace.”

  “Or what? You gonna deck me?”

  Reaching the bottom of the stairs, with the ornate lobby ceiling looming high above me, I glanced at Pace. In his own grating way, he was trying to talk me out of leaving. Despite deep doubts I harbored about what I was doing, at this point, I felt that it was a matter of pride that I follow through with my decision to quit. Clearly, Pace hoped that poking me would provoke an angry response—and maybe even prompt me to reconsider. But I felt too shaken and morose to challenge him. I just stood there looking at him, clinging to that box, and I flashed him a bittersweet grin.

  “So long, Pace.”

  Twenty-eight

  I stalled going home as long as I could. Tempting as it was to go looking for Winston Booker, losing my job left me more disoriented than I thought it would. I drove around in a daze. I kept second-guessing myself, wondering if I’d done the right thing. My heart was racing, and I broke out in a cold sweat while I was circling downtown blocks. I ended up spending an hour nursing a banana split at a corner table in Keeley’s Ice Cream parlor on Main. Cold gusts of air conditioner wind against my perspiration-soaked forehead soothed me. I managed to kill another ninety minutes at the library, thumbing through various atlases and the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature and old historical picture books about the Civil War. I dreaded telling Clara about my decision. Finally, I walked over to the Victory Theater to see The Adventures of Robin Hood, splashed across the huge screen in glorious Technicolor. The fact that its star, Errol Flynn, was also supposed to play Clive Underhill in an upcoming Warner Bros. biopic, was not lost on me as I sat in the balcony, nervously shoveling popcorn into my mouth. The picture ended around 5:00 P.M., and I knew I could not delay the inevitable any longer.

  Turning onto my block, I cringed at the sight of countless autos, parked on both sides of the street and in my driveway. It was so crowded I had to park a ways away. Coming up the front walkway, I could hear a cacophony of voices flowing out of open windows, and I feared the worst. I entered my house to find it packed. Two of my three brothers and their wives had shown up, along with several of their children. So did Bishop Garth Shumway, long-faced and bespectacled, in a maroon-colored cardigan and baggy khakis. Clara’s mother and father found a spot to stand in the living room, not far from her sister Joyce and brother-in-law Mac. My former partner from my days in the Morals Squad, Thayne Carlquist, even put in an appearance, shaking my hand as I walked through the front door.

  “Hello, Thayne,” I said, scanning the crowd. “How’s every little thing?”

  Before he could answer me, Clara hooked me by the elbow, pulling me past the throng of familiar people and a chorus of “hellos” and “how are yous.” We ended up in the quiet kitchen, where she moved up close to me, and I could plainly see the film of sweat on her face and neck and chest.

  “What’s going on here?” I asked.

  “Is it true?” she asked, her lower lip quivering.

  “We need to talk.”

  “Answer my question.”

  “Alone. Without all of these people here.”

  “Is it true?”

  “Look, dear, I can explain, but I’d prefer—”

  “Don’t look dear me!”

  I lifted my hands, palms facing down. “Shhhh. Keep it down, will you?”

  “How could you do it? And without asking me?”

  “Well, to be honest, I was planning on discussing it with you tonight, but—”

  “After the fact, you mean,” she said. “Do you realize we barely have enough money to pay our mortgage and survive for the next two months?”

  I pointed to the swinging kitchen door, now closed. “What on earth are all of those people doing out there?”

  “Half of them are here to try and talk you out of your damn fool decision,” she said. “I guess the rest have come to enlighten you about other ways of making ends meet. But whatever their reasons for being here, I think they all pretty much agree you’re being reckless.”

  “Who told you I quit my job?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Buddy Hawkins,” she said. “He was kind enough to call me this afternoon, and share the news that apparently you thought I didn’t need to know.”

  “Hear me out,” I said. “I’ve got a good reason for quitting my job.”

  “Oh? Better than the well-being of your own family?”

  “I can’t do this. How are we supposed to have a conversation with half of the state of Utah in our house?”

  “You’re endangering our family with your impulsiveness,” she said.

  “Dad. Mom.”

  We both looked over at Hyrum and Emily, standing in the wide-open back door, both with fearful expressions.

  “Is everything going to be OK?” asked Hyrum.

  “Are they going to take us away from you?” asked Emily.

  I crossed the kitchen and squatted near my children, placing a hand on the shoulder of each. “Everything’s going to be all right,” I said. “I’m just going to find another job, and the Ovesons of Sherman Avenue are going to be just fine.”

  As I finished my sentence, the crowd came funneling through the swinging door. The room filled up fast. Before I knew it, I had suggestions for employment coming at me from all directions.

  “Listen, Art, I can get you on with the Provo Police,” said my brother Grant. “You’d have to start as a uniformed patrolman, but you’ll work your way up to the detective room in no time.”

  Clara’s father, Bruce Snow, stepped in and pulled me in the opposite direction. “Arthur, I know the fellow who runs the management training program at Henager’s Business College. Classes are starting this week, believe it or not. Now, I’d be happy to have a word with him and ask if he would—”

  “If you’re going to go to college, why not try the Electric College?” interrupted Bishop Shumway. “That’s where my eldest, Arliss, went. The campus is downtown, in the Keith Building. Arliss got a keen job up in Ogden, wiring all the new homes for a big construction project now under way. The kid
is making money hand over fist.”

  “I beg your pardon.” Frank Oveson’s booming voice came from behind us. He seemed more relaxed without a tie and vest on. He glowered at me as he moved uncomfortably close.

  “Out back,” he said. “Now.”

  I nodded. We squeezed out the back door, onto the porch, crossing the grass for some privacy. I took a few seconds to cherish the quiet, the gentle breeze, the overcast skies, and the light birdsong filling the air. Once again, Frank leaned in close to me, probably hoping his burly physique would intimidate his kid brother. If anything, his strong-arm approach merely strengthened my resolve, persuading me that I’d done the right thing.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I quit my job,” I said. “What’s it to you?”

  “What kind of stunt are you trying to pull here?”

  “It’s not a ‘stunt,’ as you put it,” I said. “I’m tired of a lot of things—of going at this investigation with one hand tied behind my back, of the lack of cooperation between squads, of the FBI waltzing into what’s for them terra incognita and laying down all of these arbitrary rules, and finally banning us from the case altogether. I’m tired of not being listened to. You didn’t hear a word I said about Booker, and you don’t care that Metzger was a Klansman and a Nazi, or that Estelle McKenna—the only eyewitness who claims she saw Roscoe assault Nigel—was a phony. She doesn’t even exist. But the worst thing is that you called my work and ratted me out.”

  “I didn’t rat you out,” Frank said. “I advised Cowley not to discipline you. I see I was wrong.”

  I nodded. “I guess so.”

  “When did you get to be so pigheaded? Look, I just got off the phone with Cowley. He says if you ask for your job back, it’s yours. No apology necessary.”

  “What do I have to apologize for?” I asked. “Doing my job?”